And what you’re waiting for is three little eagles. That’s all. In the window of the slot machine. Forget the minor scores, the singles and doubles and triples, the cherries and the bars and the sevens. You’re going for the upper deck. You wait for three little red white and blue eagles to land side by side for you. Look where you are, they’ll say to me. It’s America.
Lucky Wynn and I stop speaking. He is suspended now, waiting, I think, for the eagles to line up in the window of a slot machine in his head. And I am, too. I keep pulling the handle and I am waiting for some of these voices to line up side by side — perhaps it will only take three of them — and they will say, Look where you are. And I will know. But inevitably, there is only one voice before me and a blank on either side.
This I do understand. Lucky knows as little as I do. He says he is American, but I think there are feelings in him that he is not recognizing. He is still waiting — yearning — to be this thing he thinks he already is, to learn these things he thinks he already knows.
A lost home. A vessel that carries you away to another place. A new name. Others around you whose voices you hear but that you do not truly understand. Nor do they truly understand you. I share this diaspora with Lucky Wynn. But even knowing this, I can think of nothing to do or to say to him, except lead him back to his place so that he can return to sleep. And, eventually, to return him to his life, the memory of all this erased, and his yearning will go on.
But, of course, there may be no need to erase the memories of any of my present visitors, since I will myself follow them back to this planet’s surface and will reveal the secret to everyone. In only a matter of hours now. Let them all remember.
And I do lead Lucky back to the deep shadows of his sleeping space and then I stand in the corridor and I listen to the breathing of all of my visitors as they sleep and wait. I need to push on to the next voice. There may yet be some sudden revelation. But I do not know how to choose and so I begin to pace up and down the corridor outside these doorways and I sing to myself. I need to do this anyway. I sing a wordless song inside me — and I mean by using this word sing something other than the thing meant by music on the planet below me, for this song is not translated into elements — words, perceivable sounds — that can exist in the shared physical space outside one’s internal landscape — these are primal tones rising and spinning inside me like the crepuscular spirals of dust and cloud and moisture on my home planet, a process that nightly comes with the setting of our beautiful blue star, the very elements of our world rising up to bid our star farewell, rising up in their yearning — yes, I now readily attribute this condition even to the inanimate substances of my own planet — they yearn to go with that star as it seems about to leave us all alone. This is the sensual theme of the song I sing, a song created in my own head, even as I sing it, existing only there in its true form, like no one else’s song, and I, too, yearn, I yearn to place this music into the head of a being other than myself, directly, untranslated, but my own wife Edna Bradshaw, whom I love with a great spiral of feeling inside me, my own wife cannot hear this kind of music, I cannot share it with her, and I know this is true of all the beings on this planet, it is how they live: If there is some deep sense of an essential thing inside them, an ontological music, beyond words, beyond sounds, it is impossible for them truly to share it with anyone else.
I have let my thoughts grow intrusive now. The music stops. I stop. I am before a sleeping space and so I choose this one. And soon we are in the speaking place. Sitting before me is the tiny, elderly form of Viola Stackhouse. And though she cannot place the things that are inside her directly inside me, we do speak as one, we shape these words as one. My husband Arthur buys Buicks. He always has. He says the Buick LeSabre was the one American car they never forgot how to build, even in the bad days of the late seventies and into the eighties, when the Japanese came and took over our car market because so many of the US makers seemed to forget how to do it right.
And you know, it’s always been an uncomfortable thing for me, his love of Buicks. All these years I’d rather be riding around in just about any kind of car except a Buick. But what could I say? There’s no way for a wife to even begin to explain a crazy thing like that to her husband. It was just a feeling. Whenever it’s come time to trade our car in — about every two or three years, Arthur loves to trade in a car with no more than forty thousand miles on it for a new one — when it’s come time, I’ve always tried to suggest this car or that instead. But it’s his thing, you know. It’s something he’s done all his life, always Buicks, which I guess he got from his father. When better automobiles are built, Buick will build them, Arthur has always said to me. And what could I say to that? “Please don’t, I’ve got this unexplainable aversion to every car you’ve ever bought”?
But sitting here now, I suddenly remember. Pretty clearly, though it’s been a long time. Is that a bad sign? Am I about to die or something? Or is it just senility? Whichever, there’s this one thing that comes back to me. A 1929 model Buick. My mama was going to leave my papa and she and her boyfriend and I, we all of us got in the boyfriend’s 1929 Buick roadster to drive to Reno for her to get the divorce. They lifted me into the rumble seat — I was, what, five years old, I guess — and we took off from in front of the Hotel Senator in Sacramento, where my mama and I were staying temporarily, and she wrapped me up in the chenille spread she got off the hotel bed. It was a morning in the middle of October and the weather was pretty nice. It wasn’t very cold out. I was swaddled up and I know I didn’t like her boyfriend, exactly, but I didn’t hate him, even though I knew what was going on here.
It was my mama I loved the most, she was with me all the time and I was aware even then that I didn’t see my papa very often, though I think that was from him trying to make money and not from running around with other women. Over the years, as an adult, when I thought about what happened between my mother and father, I always came to that conclusion. And Mama said this was okay, what was happening, and though of course I wanted things to be settled and normal, in the way any child wants her family to be, as long as I was with her and she was saying it was okay, I wasn’t as unhappy about the breakup as you might expect.