He said, “Nah. I got nothing, really.”
* * *
The wings were turning red. I guess you’d call it red. It was a shade against dark blue that was mystical flamingo, very spaceylike, like living blood. Was the plane bleeding?
“You have a good time in Peru?” said I.
“Not really,” said John. “I got something to tell you. I haven’t had a ‘good time’ in a long time. There’s something between me and a good time since, I don’t know, since I was twenty-eight or like that. I’ve seen a lot, but you know I haven’t quite seen it. Like somebody’s seen it already. It wasn’t fresh. There were eyes that had used it up some.”
“Even high in Mérida?” said I.
“Even,” said John.
“Even Tibet, where you met your wife. By accident a beautiful American girl way up there?” said I.
“Even,” said John.
“Even Greenland?” said I.
John said, “Yes. Even Greenland. It’s fresh, but it’s not fresh. There are footsteps in the snow.”
“Maybe,” said I, “you think about in Mississippi when it snows, when you’re a kid. And you’re the first up and there’s been nobody in the snow, no footsteps.”
“Shut up,” said John.
“Look, are we getting into a fight here at the moment of death? We going to mix it up with the plane on fire?”
“Shut up! Shut up!” said John. Yelled John.
“What’s wrong?” said I.
He wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t budge at the controls. We might burn but we were going to hold level. We weren’t seeking the earth at all.
“What is it, John?” said I.
John said, “You son of a bitch, that was mine—that snow in Mississippi. Now it’s all shot to shit.”
The paper from his notepad was flying all over the cockpit, and I could see his hand flapping up and down with the pencil in it, angry.
“It was mine, mine, you rotten cocksucker! You see what I mean?”
The little pages hung up on the top, and you could see the big moon just past them.
“Eject! Save your ass!” said John.
But I said, “What about you, John?”
John said, “I’m staying. Just let me have that one, will you?”
“But you can’t,” said I.
But he did.
Celeste and I visit the burn on the blond sand under one of those black romantic worthless mountains five miles or so out from Miramar base.
I am a lieutenant commander in the reserve now. But to be frank, it shakes me a bit even to run a Skyhawk up to Malibu and back.
Celeste and I squat in the sand and say nothing as we look at the burn. They got all the metal away.
I don’t know what Celeste is saying or thinking, I am so absorbed myself and paralyzed.
I know I am looking at John’s damned triumph.
Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter
MY NAME IS NED MAXIMUS, BUT THEY CALL ME MAXIMUM NED.
Three years ago, when I was a drunk, a hitchhiker stabbed me in the eye with my own filet knife. I wear a patch on the right one now. It was a fake Indian named Billy Seven Fingers. He was having the shakes, and I was trying to get him to the bootleggers off the reservation in Neshoba County, Mississippi. He was white as me — whiter, really, because I have some Spanish.
He asked me for another cigarette, and I said no, that’s too many, and besides you’re a fake — you might be gouging the Feds with thirty-second-part maximum Indian blood, but you don’t fool me.
I had only got to the maximum part when he was on my face with the fish knife out of the pocket of the MG Midget.
There were three of us. Billy Seven Fingers was sitting on the lap of his enormous sick real Indian friend. They had been drinking Dr. Tichenors Antiseptic in Philadelphia, and I picked them up sick at five in the morning, working on my Johnnie Walker Black.
The big Indian made the car seem like a toy. Then we got out in the pines, and the last thing of any note I saw with my right eye was a Dalmatian dog run out near the road, and this was wonderful in rural Mississippi — practically a miracle — it was truth and beauty like John Keats has in that poem. And I wanted a dog to redeem my life, as drunks and terrible women do.
But they wouldn’t help me chase it. They were too sick.
So I went on, pretty dreadfully let down. It was the best thing offering lately.
I was among dwarves over in Alabama at the school, where almost everybody dies early. There is a poison in Tuscaloosa that draws souls toward the low middle. Hardly anybody has honest work. Queers full of backbiting and rumors set the tone. Nobody has ever missed a meal. Everybody has about exactly enough courage to jaywalk or cheat a wife or a friend with a quote from Nietzsche on his lips.
Thus it seemed when I was a drunk, raving with bad attitudes. I drank and smiled and tried to love, wanting some hero for a buddy: somebody who would attack the heart of the night with me. I had worn out all the parlor charity of my wife. She was doing the standard frigid lockout at home, enjoying my trouble and her cold rectitude. The drunkard lifts sobriety into a great public virtue in the smug and snakelike heart. It may be his major service. Thus it seemed when I was a drunk, raving with bad attitudes.
So there I was, on my knees in the pebble dust on the shoulder of the road, trying to get the pistol out of the trunk of my car.
An eye is a beautiful thing! I shouted.
An eye is a beautiful thing!
I was howling and stumbling.
You frauding ugly shit! I howled.
But they were out of the convertible and away. My fingers were full of blood, but it didn’t hurt that much. When I finally found the gun, I fired it everywhere and went out with a white heat of loud horror.
I remember wanting a drink terribly in the emergency room. I had the shakes. And then I was in another room and didn’t. My veins were warm with dope, the bandage on. But another thing — there was my own personal natural dope running in me. My head was very high and warm. I was exhilarated, in fact. I saw with penetrating clarity with my lone left eye.
It has been so ever since. Except the dead one has come alive and I can see the heart of the night with it. It throws a grim net sometimes, but I am lifted up.
Nowadays this is how it goes with me: ride, fly, penetrate, loiter.
I left Tuscaloosa — the hell with Tuscaloosa — on a Triumph motorcycle black and chrome. My hair was long, leather on my loins, bandanna of the forehead in place, standard dope-drifter gear, except for the bow and arrows strapped on the sissy bar.
No guns.
Guns are for cowards.
But the man who comes near my good eye will walk away a spewing porcupine.
The women of this town could beg and beg, but I would never make whoopee with any of them again.
Thus it seemed when I was a drunk.
I was thirty-eight and somewhat Spanish. I could make a stand in this chicken house no longer.
Now I talk white, Negro, some Elizabethan, some Apache. My dark eye pierces and writhes and brings up odd talk in me sometimes. Under the patch, it burns deep for language. I will write sometimes and my bones hurt. I believe heavily in destiny at such moments.
I went in a bar in Dallas before the great ride over the desert that I intended. I had not drunk for a week. I took some water and collected the past. I thought of my books, my children, and the fact that almost everybody sells used cars or dies early. I used to get so angry about this issue that I would drag policemen out of their cars. I fired an arrow through the window of my last wife’s, hurting nothing but the cozy locked glass and disturbing the sleep of grown children.