D. Garcia Brings the War
HIGHWAY. GET TO drinking. Driving to the cemetery I get to drinking, hard. I look over at the passenger seat, and to Berea: hitchhiker, maiden, at our mercy. She is car-window-framed by tumbling gray clouds that still haven’t decided if they’ll break or not. I look at blond Berea and ask if she’s heard of Petrarch. She asks back if he’s like Bruno Mars. I say, Hell, no, Berea, then take a pull off the bourbon bottle and tell her that Petrarch was this Italian dude who wrote over two hundred sonnets to a woman named Laura. Wrote them over the course of twenty-something years. He was pure, you know. As was she: Laura.
Well, that’s pretty great, Berea says, the Kentucky forest streaking by. Is this, like, a Mexican thing, D. Garcia? she asks.
I punch the gas as Pete butts in from the backseat, yapping that George Harrison and Eric Clapton each wrote songs expressing love to Clapton’s wife, nicknamed Layla. Berea says she knows about Layla — the song anyway — and then Pete corrects himself and notes that maybe it was Harrison’s wife, but either way, it’s romantic.
Jesus fuck, I say, we are not talking about a hippie rock star wife-swap, Pete. Like, Petrarch didn’t even know Laura, man. He saw her like once, ONCE, from afar, and her purity drove him to throttle this sort of absolute unknown romance pain love to the extreme. I mean, she was married, had kids — was off-market. But Petrarch kept on loving, he kept on loving the very idea of her — while respecting her enough not to pressure her. His poems like a highway, his love a pure pilgrimage, a mission, a conquest, a Cause, a. .
Laura! Laura! Laura! I howl. Bang the bottle on the dashboard, take a healthy pull and say, Hell, Pete, Petrarch sure as shit didn’t have to put anything on the radio, or make a pop-culture spectacle out of love.
Berea coos this ethic. She squeezes my shoulder, smiles and caresses the back of my neck. . but then turns back to fawn over Pete, too. In the rearview I see him roll his eyes at her, which prompts her to reach back between our seats and tickle him, which gets me crazy jealous — and to more of that bourbon. I swerve a little bit to scare her back up front. So then I’m drinking and thinking of Laura when Berea asks: Speaking of music, guys, do y’all have any Toby Wayne in the car? which almost makes me throw her farm-bred, hitchhike, downy white ass back onto the parkway, and which does make Pete respond, No way, Berea, because we totally hate that guy, and we hate pop-country crap in general, though. .
You won’t believe it, Pete continues, but D. Garcia’s buddy, the guy we’re staying with when we get to Nashville, wrote a song that megastar Toby Wayne recorded, at which point Berea freaks out and says, No way! twice, before asking, Which one? to which Pete responds, Jesus, I don’t know, ask D. Garcia! to which Berea replies, D. Garcia, which one, oh, man, which song, which song?
And she’s so beauteous and porcelain and maidenhead-clean when she begs. I plug another gluggeroo, then go ahead and answer, “Urban Cowgirl.”
Well. Berea starts bouncing on the gray bucket seat, up and down, jiggling and spouting, Oh, my god, that’s my favorite song of all time, ever, no way! No way! No Way! She begs me, Please, D. Garcia, you gotta take me to Nashville, I can’t believe you know “Urban Cowgirl”!
And jesus christ if we’re gonna be able to work this out. Stuck in this ride, her boobs bobbing like Cinemax, and Pete handing out Xanax, and I’m gonna pass y’all the bottle in a minute, but first uno mas for moi, and, No way, Berea, hell, no, we can’t put on a pop-country station, no matter how much you sing and swoon. And hello, Hydrocodone; What’s up, Weed?; and pass bottle, pass bottle, pass pass pass; snort snort glug snort pass pass snort. .
and those car cabin sloppy hours melt into the dark, smeary sky. . the same sky that pressed down during the torrential rains in the desert. . the slate-gray sky and the slop nobody told us about while we trained on trucks at Leonard Wood, or before deployment from Bragg all those years and miles ago. They gave us no briefing of rain, no training for the mucosal, thrushy slop, the slop that turned the void in on the gut of the land itself, and into something darker. Something thick and unrelenting in our clothes, in our boots, in the slathered folds of our oily skin, yes,
we now slip like that, like truck tires in slop sand, like tires burdened by forty-ton rigs, slugging for traction or meaning, for anything beyond the Cause. Oh the Cause, my god Laura how it trudges over love
until finally, we reach the forlorn little cemetery, in the woods at the end of some cracked country road. A mist slicks us as we trip out of the car. The wet wind shakes the web of naked tree branches that spurt driblets of spring buds like green acne. We are stumbling in Kentucky, sticky-moist and the bottle down to a thin finger of bourbon, having detoured a hell of a ways from Nashville on Berea’s behalf. Unknown Berea, our investment in pure. She is our belief that the miles and the years and the love in the books will be redeemed. That the songs and the flags will be replenished, if we can just move past ourselves, past our infidel past, and back to the Cause, and,
Berea says she doesn’t know where her mom’s grave is. She wanders the cemetery all wobble-legged drunk and ungrateful; So sue me, she says, you didn’t have to bring me here, Garcia. All I ever did was ask.
Pete gets his guitar out of the trunk, takes a piss on some chrysanthemums, props up against a gravestone and starts fingerpicking country blues.
The sharp wind whips Berea’s print dress up her thighs. She staggers by headstones and reads the names aloud. I call them back to her in slur until at last we locate her mother: a large slick gray block atop a grainy cement base.
My mom died too, I say.
My mom died, Berea says.
My mom died longer ago, I say.
This isn’t about your mom, Berea slurs. It’s not about YOU!
I slap her white-pink face. I don’t think I mean to; I haven’t slapped a maiden before. But I slap her and start to apologize, and then don’t. Can’t. Her blue eyes idle in momentary disbelief before she yanks the bottle from my hand and drains it, then stomps over and smashes it against some soul now known only as Taken from Us. I turn to Pete, who looks elsewhere while trying to pluck some stupid riff, and I yell, Fuck you, Pete, you recessive runt, you’ll never take a woman to protect. Berea storms into my face and says, No, D. Garcia, no. She grips my jaw with ultimate authority, No, Garcia, no — and a minute later thrusts into kissing me, sucking furious as the wind races. And she’s crazy, that young Berea, kissing the breath out of me with hot tongue, whispering gasps of, Fuck your mom. Suckles and bites and I respond, Your mom, Berea, and fuck your dad too; tugging at her golden curls and cursing her as she drops one hand and rips my zipper open in a fit, pulls me out and starts working me with her callused dish-wash long beauty fingers; lapping my lips, licking my tongue, my denim-clad hips pained with want, staggering in lust as the wind wags the spit bridge from our mouths; the open zipper teething my prick; as overhead, thick branches crack like deer rifles; as splinters plummet, as beneath our feet the black-green ground heaves and sinks and mushes.
And once more the Cause has confused us, has changed us has charged us straight into the sludge. And Berea drops down, down on the concrete ledge of the memorial to motherhood, her squat open-legged her cream knees a cradle as she fingers my belt loops and yanks down my jeans, first tasting me timidly and then sucking, ravenous, enraptured, pausing only to slobber and beseech, Please don’t shame me, don’t you shame me for this, D. Garcia. And I grip the headstone and say I will not and cannot, and then stare out into that collection of hyphenated used-to-be’s and start bumping her wispy blond head into her own last name. Little American flags and plastic flowers, American American, my dear god, American, I clasp that granite and shove and dip, my hamstrings taut as she consumes me in pink gully cheeks, her pet noises and gags and muffled moans. The guitar drops off; I glance over to watch Pete, who is now jacking off and sobbing and half crouched behind a tombstone, his grip hand rabid as the other rubs his thinning hair; he stares at me, at my clenched, pumping ass, and within seconds casts ejaculate across a statuette of the white Virgin herself. I then turn back again to worship the dull pink lips that stretch and slide over me before Berea slip-spits me out and, Yes, she cries out, nearer thy God!; she strokes and strokes with hands so slick so tight so wet, her hands like a bolt-action rifle doused in gun oil, her eyes staring up into mine and the wind slapping my faith into submission; and, Come, she demands, Come now, baby, god she yanks so hard so slippery so, Come come come, and Make it real; she slides and grips and Okay, I say, oh kay oh. . and my baptism erupts over herself and her dead mom.