“That’s what I like so much. The privacy.”
He turns his head to smile, as if at a sidekick. His lower lip bulges with snuff.
I know my limits. And he knows my name.
The first time I was ever arrested, it was by a man in a Santa Claus suit. He cursed me through his nylon beard, led me past carolers from a “special education” school and back inside Bloomingdale’s. I had two jars of marrons glacés in my parka pocket. It had been a reaction rather than an impulse, brought on by four hours of zombie mobs and holiday smarm. Or at least that’s what I told them in the security office, itself mobbed with a gamut of boosters, sullen pros to weeping Brearley girls, where I was fingerprinted by a placid fat man named Vito.
“Ask for Sergeant Faedo,” he counseled. “A close personal friend.”
They took us up to the Sixty-seventh Street precinct station in an unheated lead-gray bus with grates over the windows, and, after an hour or two, let most of us go. Dramaturgy. A Christmas pageant.
It was dark outside. Jolly cops drew on panatelas. They loaded their car trunks with hams and foil-boxed fifths for the trip across to Queens. I walked home, looking for a crèche to kick over.
The second time around was so frightening I’m amazed to remember it. I had been out here only a few months, was still made uneasy by all the empty space, still a serf in the Monitor wing, a sensory receptacle squirting itself with eyedrops, someone invisibly contorted, floating between the same very few points like a quiet whitebread lunatic. I was bound to walk into a wall, and I did.
It was what they have for winter here: wind stirring up dust and straw, a flat chill in the night. I was staying at a place called Motel Chateau, fifty-some yards off a popular north-south truck route. It was about 10 p.m., overcast. Losing at canfield, working my way to the bottom of a bag of malted milk balls, I noticed a girl moving back and forth in front of my window. She was talking to herself. She grinned at me, ran away, came knocking at my door ten minutes later.
“Got any weed?”
No. But she came in anyway. Snarled wet hair, purple bruise on her neck, long, grimy bedspread skirt, a tarry smell. She belonged on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, whapping a tambourine.
“We’re just a couple doors down there. Transmission seals is leaking. Wayne says he can fix it and I should go sleep in back. I says fuck you, farmboy. Didn’t come through all this so we could live like bugs, you know?” She leaned close to the wall mirror and picked at her face. “But I’m not tired. I mean, Wayne, he just don’t care…for somebody thinks all the time, and how we’re called to help these people find where they belong.” She lay back on the bed, feet dangling over the end, kicking slowly. “But I let my mind alone so I won’t be tired. Got to be a free bird before something happens.”
The burn marks on her arm didn’t scare me, but something did. And it wasn’t Wayne, either.
“Yo, beautiful people.”
A six-pack under each arm, a high cartoon voice. He was jokey and round and vague, the fatboy clerk in the waterbed store, whose every sale was a reminder of why he slept alone. He dropped successive pink-and-gray capsules into successive beers, whispering, “Bombs away.” The girl kept teasing him about his penguin arms and living on candy bars all the time and he kept sipping, pawing the hair away from his eyes.
“Make it far as the ocean, okay?” he said.
This irritated her — something heard over and over. She looked across at me and slipped her tongue side to side.
“Go on, go on,” Wayne said. “Long as we’re here.”
She bunched the skirt above her grub-white hips and rocked at the end of the bed.
“Reach that water.” Wayne snickered and nodded. “Reach the water and that’s all.”
“You shut up.” The girl bent her knees.
“Touch her. She wants you to.”
Wayne’s eyes were filmy but hard; he nodded some more. Scary enough; plain enough. I was going to get hurt if I didn’t follow instructions. The girl held out her hand, but she was staring in anger at the ceiling. I cupped her and she was cool, like a shucked oyster.
And then the door was splintered, the windows, by a blast of frantic men. The room whirled with cutting light and noise, Wayne begging them to shoot, the girl shrieking. A gun barrel struck me in the mouth.
They held me in a cell barely large enough to stand in, where slogans of defiance and revenge had been charcoaled on the walls. An FBI agent interviewed me in the morning. His method was laborious and his suit was shiny. Wayne Lopat and Lori Dee Carman were to be charged with aggravated murder, aggravated assault, rape, arson, armed robbery, and grand theft auto, all multiple counts. The agent had cheeseburgers brought in, but I wasn’t hungry. Well into evening, I repeated answers to irrelevant questions, sick with measuring how close I had been to some unspeakable mutilation. I walked around for hours after my release, watched a plain, metallic sunrise from the doorway of a fire-damaged laundromat, understanding there was no such thing as safety. Things went around, like debris in space, and avoidance was a matter of chance.
“You have any idea what my life would be,” says the man with the silver star, “if I had to enforce everything gets printed up?”
“Shorter,” I suggest.
He doesn’t smile for long. “So you let stuff be. You ain’t no beef thief. So a bunch of Japs is on the deed and for them I don’t give a flying fuck. But this out here is part of my area and I got to know what you’re doing in it.”
I’m blank, stopped, since at first I want to tell the truth and don’t know what it is. Won’t do. I need incoherence of an acceptable type. So I talk about renunciation and retreat, how particle physics had estranged me from God. I describe at length the inspiration of St. Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-five years atop a pillar of the desert, seeking His grace through abnegation in the sun.
The lawman squints, takes off his hat and looks inside as though crib notes are there.
He says, “I’m not inclined to question a man’s choice of worship,” shooting a gout of brown snuff juice well past me. “You can pray to the wind and the rocks and the creosote bushes, can’t nobody tell you no. Just don’t come lookin’ for me when you get in trouble and I won’t come lookin’ to give you any.”
I point with my knife at the pair of black snakes hanging from the awning pole and ask if he’ll stay for lunch. But already he’s swung up into the jeep, next to the pump-action twelve-gauge. He stares at me momentarily through the spotless windshield, the process of forgetting already begun, and wheels away in a long arc.
I’m not thinking of Roy Rogers this time, but of the saint on his desert platform. Maybe he tried to make himself a target up there. Maybe he was waiting for something to come from the heavens. Something like a meteor.
48
“NOT THAT I KNOW what it is,” Sonny told me this morning.
“But what you’re trying out here is bound to lead somewhere new.”
Before, where the earth now stands, say the First People, there were only Cyclone, Water, and Darkness.
I reminded Sonny that everything has already been tried. He smiled dismissively, kneeling to ream the generator’s feed line. Why disappoint him? He had brought snare wire and tobacco, sliced fruit Dawn had put through their dehydrator. He’d brought green operating scrubs from a uniform shop, billowy tops and pantaloons. No more jeans, no more heat rash. I thought to return his kindness by clearing away a little worry, by telling him I had a plan, a program.
1) To conserve moisture by day
2) To conserve warmth by night
Of course, he took this for mockery. I was looking at simplified life-forms and passing on the message: Accept, adapt. But Sonny wanted more.