The shot sounded off before I’d even made the truck. I turned to see my toad with the rifle on his shoulder while behind him my uncle tossed Biscuit in the ditch.
We drove up the road and turned onto another that led to cotton-nowhere. There was a shack with cardboard on the windows and a line strung out with threadbare clothes. An old Studebaker sat by a pump, stuffed full of papers and bottles and gizmos gone bad. Dirty children peered from the door. A man in huaraches and mismatched socks stepped through the kids and spoke to my uncle in Spanish, my uncle replying in pidgin, interrupting his words here and there to spit while waving his hands like his man was a fool. At last he nodded the way we’d come, and the man nodded back. I heard the words muerto and perro and well number four. Then a woman appeared in an oversized tee with a peace sign of red, white, and blue. The man called out to her, then made into the cotton. “A dónde va?” said the woman, but the man only raised a hand.
The machinery of hub-bubs and what-nots had started up again, the truck paid out more road. I settled back to silence, never once considering how elemental fear is to the sacred. And Biscuit was there, and then she wasn’t. And the sky was blue, and the land was green.
Back home, my uncle gave me a Tootsie Pop, its wrapper with a kid in a headdress shooting an arrow from his bow. When I asked my uncle why he’d killed my dog, he snorted and scratched his nose. “Everthing runs on a leash,” he said. “Most especially dogs.”
“You don’t know anything about dogs.”
He tossed back a shot of red eye. “Oh yes I do,” he said.
On the farm now, Thomas the Tattooed Whiskey Man is the only guy I really know. In just a few weeks, I told him everything that had happened those days in Tahoe, about me and Avey, and Dinky and Super and Basil and Lucille, everything and the rest. At the part where I’d forgotten the day Biscuit died until I found myself trapped with a dog, a dead man, and a beautiful girl, all in the back of a madman’s truck, how my old toad and uncle had shot Biscuit dead without a blink of guilt then tried to buy me off with candy, he said, “And you wonder why I live here on this farm.”
We’d been swimming the river in our birthday suits when two of the boss’s kids ran off with our threads. They took every stitch, the bananas, and how so full of glee they were. I was about to end the story, lying on the pebbly beach, but mid-sentence Thomas cut me off. He could see how parched I was, he said, which I took to mean he’d decided to show me the still he kept out in the tamarisk, which he then did. We had mason jars to drink the corn, and the kids had left the pouch of smoke. I listened to the water back an angry crow.
“It’s quiet here,” Thomas said.
“So?”
“So I can hear the noise when it’s not.”
“That is special, I suppose.”
“If it weren’t for the quiet, Johnny, there wouldn’t be any noise.”
That’s what they call me here — Johnny. First day I arrived, I had to toil through the rigmarole of how funny it must sound, of how, sure, it was ridiculous and sad as a name could be, but yes, my name was John Henry Doe. They all liked that, and laughed for a beat, but when they tried to break me, I wouldn’t say, and couldn’t have if I wanted. I’d got too far stuck in my story. The Doe had cut away and John had grown legs. Now it was plain old Johnny.
“How much of this stuff you keep on hand?” I said to Thomas.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I heard you.” I finished rolling his smoke and stood up to leave for another dip, but Thomas held me back.
“All things,” he said, “shine brightest in the shadow of what they’re not.”
“Tell it to the river,” I said, and left.
SUPER HAD REACHED THE 50. WE HOVE ON OUT, and in it we were, the midst of cars, an actual line of actual cars, with actual people clutching and banging and shaking actual wheels. This road, too, had been wrecked, though not so badly as up the hill — maintenance crews had cleared the worst. A couple geriatrics in a late model Ford hunkered over the dash behind us, old gramps looking fragile as love, his kisser slack with focus. Horns honked, people screamed, a sheriff flapped his arms. Buildings appeared either side. Through the trees the lake with its little piers and boats swelled against the shore. We passed a shopping center with a supermarket and liquor store and hair salon, a row of commercial atrocities, Dayton’s Floors, Fruity’s Superior Nails. Farther down, a swampy meadow appeared and then more buildings yet — Douglas County Administrative Offices, the Sheriff and Justice Court. Some hokey chapel floated past, up on a hillock, the kind of hole where you slap on a tux before marriage to a song by Elvis.
We hove on. A golf course swam by, the polders flooded out, the lake out past it again. Then came the casinos, looming like teeth, Caesar’s here, Horizon there, and Bill’s and Harvey’s and Harrah’s. People were still rushing in and out with coin buckets for the slots. By their faces, they could’ve been on Dagobah and never known, some bright with fever, others in its wake so grim. That the world was breaking to pieces didn’t mean poodly lark.
But we hove on. Nevada became California. Past pizza joints and past motels we chugged and choked, past tourist traps and pharmacies and jewelers and boutiques, here a grocer, there a cleaner, here a seller of knives and guns. A McDonald’s sailed by, then a diner, then a bodega for cigarettes and gas. The world flowed away in a psychedelic stream of greens and greys, a volte-face of perception. We came to a stretch of cars like monsters drowned, submerged in water to their roofs. Steam drifted from them, exhaust through the water, on one a family — mommy and daddy and their whey-faced runts — heavy with hopelessness and wear. Later, three children cried in a boat, pushed by a man in slickers, the water to his thighs.
At the river, the bridge poured out like a floating road. Trucks in water wheels-high made giant wakes, their beds crammed with chattel and children and pets. Engines coughed and rain thrummed and ceased and thrummed again. Near the Long’s Drugs, the parking lot had flooded to the storefront itself. Government vehicles loaded with sandbags moved to and fro, but we didn’t stop, but hove on through. Finally a red and white billboard pointed the way to Barton Memorial Hospital. We turned down a road with a trailer park and tenements, and suddenly we were there.
The hospital reminded me of some resort-asylum for rich drunks and addicts. A porte-cochère with a river-rock facade and clear-pine trim presided over the roundabout. On either side the bureaucrats had planted boxy lawns studded with ornamental plums and jeffrey pines, and flowerbeds full of bark.
Super stepped from the truck and mumbled to his dog, then Basil hobbled out, sans Lucille.
“Now here’s a rumbling bellyful,” the old man said, raking at his beard. “Here’s lunatics and rage.”
Basil squinted. He ran a hand across his face and hawked out a loogie. He was beat to shit. “I still can’t tell,” he said, and his voice sounded worse than he looked, “if this guy’s the devil or a nine-to-five fool.” He stooped for the lighter he’d dropped. “I’m dying here.”
“Most times it’s the fool’s the prophet,” Super said, and tickled Basil’s chin.
“Show me the profit here, and I’ll cut off my right hand.” Basil was turning in a slow circle, now, his arms spread wide.
“Maybe,” Avey said, “you should wait for us to bring you a wheelchair.”
“Ha,” Basil said.
“They’ll bandage up your dogs,” I said. “They might even help you walk.”
Super dropped the tailgate and took up Dinky’s feet. A portly man with a goose down parka and pipe in his mouth glanced our way, a paper at his bald spot. It seemed he’d keep on, but then he fixed on our friend with the dolls. “Hope that’s not what I think it is,” he said, and stopped to light the pipe.