I always get this certain feeling – I don’t know where it’s coming from but it’s definitely that certain kind of a feeling … – for more than a couple of beers and a joint or two to party away the time when I’m on the road. So it is, with a sixer of Old Saint Nick’s Holiday Ale tallboys just chilling out in all their bold and malty glory with a hint of dark spice and 22-percent-alcohol content back there in the portable cooler and three Holy Moly joints waiting in all their buds of triple-veined rainbow-leaf beauty with only a seed or two at the most weaved nice and tight around a stem as big as a popsicle stick in the glove compartment, that I go this Christmas Eve straight into the State of Indiana, into a good, old-fashioned country Christmas in Se Haute, Indiana – to the six acres of family plot deep down there.
Look, I know I shouldn’t be on the road in this kind of weather, with these winds coming in on the howl from off the ice-packed lake back behind me, carrying a sweep of white-on-white flakes hitting the windshield of this retarded VW Rabbit of mine like I’m plowing dead center into a mad snowglobe. And I’m starting to thinking that maybe I should just sound the retreat, turn around and drive back to the ground floor inner sanctum of my apartmental space in the suburban rentals mall and fire up the first of the Holy Moly joints –gift wrapped in red and gold cigarette papers with pictures of psychedelic ribbons and bows, gingerbread men with their heads bit off, candy cane bongs, and Old Saint Nick himself, smoking on his bowl with a stoned grin on his face.
But I can still see it, high above the exhaust fumes rising out over the row of last-minute mall shopping traffic on what used to be a two-lane street that a massed solid body of metal and chrome and hard glass have pounded down during hours upon hours of rush hours into a makeshift highway of potholes and cracks that is always under a perpetual patchwork of construction zones as it cuts across the wax-fruited plains of shopping malls and the various family brands of housing developments, this billboard sign that emanates with a distinct pervasiveness overhead like it was painted in light, putting out a snowy scene of a log cabin decked out on the outside like how the Christmas tree inside would usually be done up, ornamented with bows and holly and wreathes and strands of silver tinsel and those old-fashioned kind of coloured teardrop light bulbs strung over and across the walls, with a chimney stack in the shape of a red-brick Santa Claus; and, in front of the log cabin, there are all these lawn sculptures that you see people display in their front yards like some sort of worshipful homage to the cult of cute – painted stone geese in the quaint costumes of Christmas angels, Ye Olde Englishe carolers, and Santa’s helpers elves.
So I say to myself, this must be some sign of Christmas Near Future coming down to me from the exhaust-fumed heavens, you know, that sees me outside in the snow of the deep woods surrounding the venerable family homestead in Se Haute, Indiana, while I’m smoking off one of those nice and fat Christmas joints, so full of glee and joy. Now that is the true holiday spirit: spacing out, wearing a carefree refreshed stoned grin on my face as I’m taking a 2 am winter constitutional over the lawnscape and through the woods, all freshened up with a spread of new snow and a night sky full of bright stars and clean air chilling above me.
So I stop by the apartment to stuff some clothes, my Swiss army knife, and my toothbrush into my travelling backpack, grab my beer cooler throw it all into the backseat of the VW Rabbit and drive over to the last liquor store before hitting the highway to pick up the six-pack special of the week – which is, naturally, Saint Nick’s Ale, that all-time favorite they brew especially for the holidays, all in those tallboy cans with the evergreen wreaths and the holly and the mistletoe decorating them for the full festive treatment – and hit the entrance ramp onto the interstate as I’m casually popping open one of these holiday brews here, as I’m setting myself on my own personal cruise control mode toward the Illinois-Indiana borderline.
And it’s clear sailing, at least, up until now, as I’m passing by these steel mills of Gacy Indiana (the rust-belt cradle of my birth) and these big hunks of flakes are beginning to smack into my windshield … not so heavy that I’m about ready to turn back yet; no, I’m even thinking that I’m going to drink a little holiday toast here with another festive tallboy of the Saint Nick’s Ale because I see all this new snow adding the just right touch to my sign of the ideal country Christmas, as I’m taking the entranceway that heads due south, on down the miles of four-lane interstate highway that cut across the entire state of Indiana, even as my windshield wipers are laboring to clear off the slop, I mean, the electrical system has always been the near-beer curse of this car … now, man, hold it, Jesus Christ, … not your usual patch of ice here.. it’s a … a … a … a … well, thanks be to Saint Nick’s Holiday Ale for keeping my reflexes loose enough to avoid what would have been one black hole of a skid there: so, who said drinking and driving don’t mix? Anyway, I’m okay, but that was too close of a call – if I’m going to be sliding around, I might as well slide into Vallee Indiana for awhile; I’m going to wait all this out at the Breakfast Hut of Pancakes at the center of town that’s open 24 hours, even on Christmas Eve, while I’m drinking the bottom out of a pitcher of black coffee, and scarfing down some slabs of eggs and meat and pancakes before I hit the road again.
So here I am now, coming off the highway, with this snow veering down on me now like it’s trying to crack open the windshield and spit right in my face … but I’m not exactly going in snowblind: I mean, I know the streets, alleys, back roads, parking lots of Vallee Indiana too well from my teenage days and even longer nights, from my drives around Vallee Indiana half-drunk between parties and on runs to pot dealers. But still, the shopping center mall plazas on the outskirts of town I’m passing – the smaller convenience storefronts and drive-through hamburger and Mexican fast-food restaurants and cheap gas stations farther in toward the courthouse square; and now these houses with their columns and gables and porches and designs like lace fringes on the roofs – are in this white-cold blur of fast snowfall as I and the VW Rabbit grind through the sludge on the main street, following the light that I can just make out from off those globes of streetlights on top of their cast-iron poles. But now I’m even losing that light, I mean, I’m totally in the whiteout zone and the windshield wipers are straining harder; though they are barely managing to brush away some chunks of snow and ice so that I can spot, up right ahead, the 24-hour Breakfast Hut of Pancakes itself. Beautiful: this weather may be an eyeful, but my sense of direction to this place is still as sharp as ever … even though this looks different from the late-night, early-morning hangout that I knew like a second home from my teenage visits: I’m thinking it’s like they must have installed heavenly lighting that they yanked off the ceiling of some empty church building, because the windows – and even the walls – are in a glow like the whole place got religion, giving out the kind of a heartwarming old-time Christmas look to the Breakfast Hut of Pancakes like you’re going over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house for oven-baked-fresh cinnamon apple pies and cubed-morsels of marshmallows floating on top of the steaming mugs of hot chocolate; or like staring at one of those old-time camping-on-the-fresh-banks-of-the-pure-blue-waters scenes with shimmering woodfires, ripples of smoke and pulsing lantern flames from inside canvas pitch tents on those panorama beer ads you can still find rolling along through the day and night on the walls of certain country back-road dive bars I know. The sight of this Christmas glow is practically cutting straight through this weather, as I’m putting the VW Rabbit into a low-gear crawl across the parking lot that doesn’t have any cars, but is piling up with drifts of snow and ice. Well, at least the four tallboys that are left in the portable cooler won’t go stale, yeah, they’ll stay nice and cold back there; and then, once I scarf down the eggs and meat and go out on the road again, out of Vallee Indiana, I’ll have one of those Holy Moly joints in the glove compartment waiting for the rest of the trip to Se Haute. I should be in good shape, so I’m getting out of the VW Rabbit, not forgetting the copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I can read for -- what?, the 15th time? – while I’m waiting out the storm, pushing myself straight through these nasty gusts of snow-wind slapping me right in the face and sticking me in the eye … but the 24-hour-lasting light out of the Hut of Pancakes sees me through the snow and draws me to its heavy glass doors. So I start to brushing the snow off my grunge flannel shirt, I look around the restaurant where the light sort of looks like that televisional holiday fireplace with the video Yule log on repeat glow, painting over everything in here to cast it in unreal time, memories of past years trying to live again at this hour. There’s hardly anybody in here, I see, maybe two or three regulars hunched over their coffee at the counter, and since they’re so quiet and still, I’m feeling like I’m the only one doing any breathing in here: I mean, those life-sized cardboard cutouts of Ye Olde Christmas Carolers in stovepipe hats and striped mufflers in a group by the door, with a hidden digital music source piping Christmas song after Christmas song behind them, seem more … let’s say, alive with the holiday season than the people at the counter, in this light. Well, I’m hoping at least some living and breathing waitress should be around here as I go to a booth next to a window with an open view of the parking lot.
Ah, so here’s my Christmas angel of the morning coming over to me right when I’m settling down in the booth. She has the look of too many years working the holiday shift in all-night restaurants for pay and a half, when Christmas carols are just another kind of synthetic muzak to your ears, when the high point of your Christmas this year is maybe bagging a bigger tip. She doesn’t have much of an expression on her spud-plump face; her eyes are flickering from the aftereffects of the main perk of her job, the bottomless cups of coffee; and the lipstick on her pout of a mouth is smeared like a drip of catsup. She is about to hand me a menu when I tell her I already know what I want … if they still have it: the Outlaw Trucker Breakfast Platter with its Triple Threat skillet of 3 eggs, 3 sausage links, 3 slabs of bacon, 3 buttermilk pancakes and, no doubt, I’ll take the hash browns on the side. But I didn’t expect her to all-of-a-sudden brighten up like that and smile to say, oh, the Outlaw Trucker Breakfast Platter is a good choice—the best deal in the house. I’m glad to know that many others have appreciated what the Outlaw Trucker Breakfast Platter can do for a body on brutal winter nights like now (though I doubt that most of them have ever savored firing up an after-dinner joint—especially when it’s a big, fat Holy Moly party joint – that puts that extra rush into the buzz of a bottomless coffee-bacon-egg-pancake meal). So now that we’ve bonded over the breakfast menu, she seems friendlier and she says in an eased-up voice that she probably doesn’t even have to ask me about the coffee. Not even – and leave that bottomless pitcher, could you? She smiles and nods, she hurries to the kitchen to place my order, she comes back to my table just as quickly with all the coffee I could want … at least for now, because with the weather like this, I’m pouring what I imagine will be the first of many bottomless cups into me, I mean, even as I’m wrapping my still-cold hands around this cup of coffee, I’m getting such a warm feeling just by touching the cup and smelling the brew that already it’s perking up my arms and giving a rise to my chest. I’m feeling lots better now: and I have to admit, from where I’m sitting, I’m actually sort of enjoying watching that always near-beer VW Rabbit of mine lose its boxy shape in the snow outside so that it’s actually looking good for something other than stalling on my way to work or refusing to start even in the middle of summer – that is, turning into a big white ice chest for those tallboy cans of Old Saint Nick’s Ale in the back seat as the snow is taking hold of Vallee, holding everything still and quiet just like that old silent night song; oh yeah, it’s another picture just fitting perfectly into the Christmas scene I’ve got on my mind for Se Haute tonight –… and I spot some individual moving in from out of the distance on the snowbound sidewalk, coming out of those gusts of snow kicking up across the parking lot, looking like some kind of a traveling salesman working to reach a sure sell down the street, I’m thinking, mainly because I see that you’re wearing, of all things, some kind of a businessman’s suit straight out of the 1950s that’s strictly off the Salvation Army rack, hanging oversized and loose on your body like it was a black rubber bag? Now why would some clown be out on business – and you could only be out on business, because you’ve got what looks like briefcase that you’re holding tight in your hand – in Christmas Eve blizzard conditions? I take a hit of coffee as I’m watching you go through this fast-motion trudge that’s plowing you right through the drifts, and now you’re stopping right next to my near-beer VW Rabbit out there and leaning your body against the rear of my car to steady yourself: you’re awfully bloated and heavy, with your body heaving and shivering like you’ll never find the breath you must be trying to catch … and I can see you aren’t about ready to let go of that briefcase of yours.
Now you’re slowly pushing yourself off my car and picking up your trudge of a walk again, heading toward the front of the restaurant. You’re coming inside, but I’m only watching you out of the corner of my eye as I hunch over my coffee like the regulars at the counter, because even if you have one of those faces that looks oddly familiar, I don’t want to place it: I want to be left to myself in peace and goodwill with my copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, my bottomless cup of coffee, and my Outlaw Trucker Breakfast Platter.
Well, that doesn’t work.
You’re hurrying over to my booth, all excited, like you just can’t wait to talk, while you’re chewing away at a wad of gum that bulges out that smile of yours. I’m getting ready to tell you right off, hey, who gave you an invitation? … yeah, you in your business clown suit, your beat-up black suitcoat with the moth hole on the chest where a yellow spot on a worn-out white dress shirt is showing through, the collar coming apart in strands of threads, the crooked black-and-silver striped tie. And there’s that funny business about your hat – the kind that always went with those 1950s suits. That style of men’s hats just plain bothers me. It reminds me too much of those Dick and Jane books: except these are the Catholic Dick and Jane I was exposed to back there in St. Sebastian Elementary School, a lot like the godless Dick and Janes, except in the Catholic version it’s Saint Dick and the Blessed Jane who are learning how to swallow the breaded body of Christ and who are shooting the breeze with the Virgin Mary at her statue next to a birdbath on the family backyard lawn; and with both their dad and their priest always thinking they know best – just because they wear that same style of men’s hats over their brains all day, I’d imagine. But … I have to say I am sort of curious about what kind of miracle clothe is in some relic of a suit from out of the fifties that would stay dry even through the heaviest snowstorm of the year; it’s very, very strange; there’s not even one melting snowdrop on it. But that still doesn’t mean I’m going to encourage this visit that you’re coming to pay me, like I’m even supposed to be recognizing you:
“Hey, what are you doing here?” you say, plopping yourself down in front of me, placing your briefcase extra carefully on your lap. “Good to see you, buddy. You here to visit? It’s good you came to see me. How you doing? Hey, look at you. You’re looking good, you’re a handsome-looking guy. I’ll bet you have a way with the women in the bars. We should go out for a couple of beers while you’re here. You came to visit so you could have a few beers with your. …”
I show him the flat of my hand. “Hold it,” I say. “Just let me … take a look at you.” I squint, I search into his blob of a face and I tell him, “Just like I thought, I don’t know you … so, leave already.”
“What are you talking about you don’t know me?” you say. “What are you talking about? Stop being foolish. You’re my buddy. We’re buddies. Let’s start with a pitcher.”
“Can we cut out the small talk, and just get on with it.”
“You’re being foolish,” you say. “You listening to me?”
“Yeah, yeah, I hear you … well, you sure picked a good night to be making business calls. Why don’t you just tell me straight up what you want to sell to me?” I point to his case. “It’s in there, isn’t it?”
You grin from the right side of your mouth like you’re in on some joke I supposedly just told you and you blink your eyes and you take your briefcase off your lap. Now this briefcase is in way better shape than that out-of-business suit you’re wearing; actually, it could be brand new, what with the way its locks and clasps are shining all silvery against the fine black polish leather surface. But now I’m seeing that you’ve got … what? … you’ve got it on a gold chain, one end locked around your right wrist and the other end on the handle. Man, that’s too weird, and I look around the restaurant to see if anybody else is watching this, because now I know I must be dealing with a real down-and-out freak here who may be into some form of kinky bondage for people who get off on leather briefcases. So now you’re putting the briefcase down flat on the table. You keep giving me that face-with-the-mouth-chewing-the-gum expression, like you’re expecting me to ask you about it, so I do, and you start into telling me: “This is a top secrets case. It’s a case they make specially for carrying top secrets. Not just any kind of a case. It’s a attach-ee case. See, they have to hire special people they call top secrets agents to carry those top secrets around with them all of the time. You listening to me? And if you’re going to be one of those secrets agents, you’re going to be needing something special to carry all those top secrets around with you. You can’t just be some bum if you’re going to be carrying around a case with all those top secrets in them, no, you have to be
a secret agent
man
, as that cowboy rifleman out of the staged Old West, who brandished the single-barreled, pump-lever-action-rapid-fire Winchester in the installments of the televisional programming of the 1950s that has boys wanting (in imitation of those advertisements they see repeatedly conveying exaggerated boyhood longing) a replica of this rifle at Christmas that shoots out the near-bullets of tiny-round metal pellets – and so showing, in the eyes of their friends, that they had outgrown toy cap guns for the more mature, implied deadliness of the rifle. Only, the
case. These secrets agents I’m talking about … they have to chain this attach-ee case to their wrists like I’m doing because it has so many top secrets in it, they can’t let go of it. You know what I’m saying? Even when they’re in a bar drinking those martinis they shake but they don’t stir, they got it chained to them. You probably never heard about the top secrets attach-ee case? Well, that’s their
name that could have been attached to the weapon itself. With such an imprint and with such a telling style to it that conveys by its very appearance how the man carries himself carrying it, the case does not need the added sting of a BB pellet to justify its existence as a design to force, for when it converts itself into its own weapon for firing out just a toy plastic bullet from a concealed, spring-loaded shooting chamber with a press of a recessed button on the side panel, that alone is enough to project an image tailored for the suave fight against the sinistrous challenges of a New West of worldly frontiers, beyond that range of televisional badlands where tribes of subhumanized savages and gangs of unshaven, trigger-itching gunmen would leer, squint, and sweat under the black-and-white sun as they faced the justice of a Winchester rifle. A mark of exemplary cunning is now needed to win over not only the shifty operatives of subversive foreign powers and the inspired masterminds of criminal consortiums, but also those women, as exotic and slim-lined as this lethal fashion accessory of the man. The secret agent man attaché case, then, is in the shape of childhood weaponry capturing the essence of this carrying kit of an ingenious arsenal that the man deploys on his missions. And as I open the present, I
take a pack of these smokes out of your top secret “attach-ee” case, or whatever it is, and put them right on the table, in front of me, to offer me one, I’m guessing. Now I haven’t smoked cigarettes in awhile, but I still remember starting up at the age of 14 or so with that
brand
I’d sneak from visiting relatives when they left packs like that out on the couch or the table or even if they weren’t looking while they were playing canasta and drinking screwballs. But that goes way back, and I haven’t seen that
product first reaches the market – with a similar succinct inflection to it as in the name of the first man in the Book of Genesis inside the family Bible with its pages so stuffed now with records and photographs of birth certificates and christenings and first holy communions (most notably, those of the twins, in honour of their exclusive birthright in the family) that the book has become more of a repository of familial rather than sacred history that demands implicitly to be read and studied, pedestaled in all its theonomous gravity on a white lace doily in immaculate white, next to the prayer cards and scapulars of the Virgin Mary laid out upon a spotless white lace and these painted-ceramic religious statues of her and her son and the attendant saints that appear as if poised to rapturously lift off the table and up through the sanctified light and onto heavenly clouds in imitation of the pictures of such like occurrences in the silver-frames next to them; and – suggests a definitive masculine simplicity in the design of its unornamented strict-white box package that is lettered with a standard black typeface in which the one-syllable proper noun is set with a blunt declaration; this name does not, however, roll off the tongue like the first vowel “A” in “Adam,” rather, it has a decisively clipped inflection that the first consonant “K” brings out in a pronunciation of the brand name, with the line of finer print beneath it on the package in the identical black typeface that is claiming how this filtered cigarette will deliver an exceptionally smooth taste, even though the actuality of the flavour conveys the bluntness of the name of the cigarette: a thickening tarry aftertaste in the
smoking in this booth. I wouldn’t think I’d have to tell you that the smoking
room
is over at the opposite side of the restaurant, so why are you offering me
these cigarettes
in
here, like those symmetrical grouped, sentimentally hallowed bibelots and curios of the faith that grandmother (it could only have been her who collected together this shrine, as her husband [our grandfather] does not appear in the least bit motivated into any such religious imaginings, seeing that, during our visit, he is found sitting, as usual, nearly in an abandoned slump into that ponderous velvet-blue-velour armchair of his in the back corner shadows of this always darkened living room, where the only light is that dabbing his still face from off the television set in the front of him), your objects of personal care and attachment atop these heavy set oak chest of drawers in your bedroom hold a like-minded fascination in our curiosity: a black moulded-plastic pocket comb with the word “esquire” etched in a clean gold script into the handle above the teeth; and a heavy-cut glass ashtray brimming with pennies, nickels, and dimes; that stark pack of cigarettes that carry a name similar to the name of the well-known alter ego of a comic book superhero; the neat square tin of pill-sized peppermint tabs that look like adult candy to us, along with a green packet of your on-the-ready
chewing gum, working away on it, as you’re thinking up your answer, I’d guess. Now you’re taking something else from what you’re callling your top attach-ee secrets case, and you slide one of the secrets I guess you’ve been protecting with your life over the table toward me like bartenders do in those old Westerns – and the top secret just stops here,
stilled,
right in front of my eyes. You nod down to it like you’re waiting for me to react to it. I need more coffee. Definitely. I’d best call over my waitress, who has reappeared across the room – even though I have not finished of what’s left in the bottomless
pitcher in your left hand and in your right hand, at the makeshift folding tabletop bar, staring
at me, still chewing away at that gum behind your goofball
clown face, that grin of yours in the center of the drinking men, at the sight of the table full of alcohol in their voluminous bottles that are crowded together so that their clustered bottlenecks are sticking up like a field of hollow glass bristles. Most seen is the straight-lined bottle of hard liquor with its inscriptive labeling that envisions the elegant comfort and the genteel joy of passing away carefree hours by applying fanciful seals of aristocratic-bred approval to the front, along with the squared off bottles that hold pints of fruit and mint schnapps. While each face of the drinking men can be clearly distinguished, as can the celebrated bride behind them in her full wedding dress billowing particularly white in the white of the black-and-white photograph as she smiles out to her entourage of bridesmaids, you alone have lost out on the focus of the camera that has, instead, given your grinning face the blurred impression that you are feeling no pain – even though, by your standing shoulder to shoulder with your twin (the groom), your features should be standing out that much more evidently in the inherent distinction of their telling sameness – at the moment you, already gripping the two full pitchers of beer, consider what kind of
shot or two … hell, some of those guys who practically live in there will end up buying you shots all night just so they can keep you glued to your seat while they’re relating their whole life story to you. In a bar, at least, I’d have a good excuse to keep listening to them; but I’m in here, slugging down the coffee, which tends to make me good and jumpy: it’s just not the same like when you’re doing beers and shots to kill
time, as if you are holding the ball in both your hands in a tactic of stalling to freeze the clock forever within each stirring and fateful game by merely possessing
papers
with their articles, as if they are playing to a predestinate script drafted in headline journalese for the sportswriters of The Gacy Tribune to simply lift and copy and then post above the stories and photographs of record: RIVALS SEE DOUBLE IN TWIN THREATS; BROTHERS HIT TWOS ALONE AND IN PAIRS, and, when the both of them scored double points and double assists in a single game, the prized (nearly inevitable) DOUBLE DOUBLE FOR THE DOUBLES. In these photographs, you are never seen with your
grin, I notice, has not left since you showed your face to entertain me. And you can do the grin and chew gum at the same time, which, I’ll have to admit, is a pretty
impressive
physical
accomplishment in the numbers that, like hairline borders around box scores, serve to essentially frame the photographs of the winning twins by placing any distorted illusion of a frivolous novelty act on the parquet into perspective; as even more than merely twin brothers, rather, as innate complements to themselves, they appeared to embody what a coach can seek only to idealize, to approximate when organizing groups of unrelated, disparate talents into teammates. They are within themselves the truly born team, all about the trim uniformity of their crewcut heads that emphasizes flat determination in the compelled expression of their lean cheekbones and their thinned lips and their steadied eyes that gives a face to the challenge of seizing control of a game (but really, no game to the natural ease of their play) with their preemptive confrontation of any potential opponent who may be studying them, strategizing about them, outside of this page. They could have been made for the two-handed set shot, the way that they are standing ready to take it; with the two hands pressing the ball on their fingertips and with the set position of knees slightly bent forward and both feet grounded to the parquet floor as their eyes look up (above all, this is your best shot – how, after dribbling the ball down the court and faking out a defender, you would stop to establish yourself in the precise solidity and exactitude of the two-handed set shot, and then thrust both your arms up for the release of the ball), they are the practiced exemplars of the deliberate form, as if they, and not the basket above their heads and the aim of the camera, have become the point of the two-handed
set to take out more of you what you’re calling this official paperwork that you’ve been probably carrying all around Vallee in your attach-ee top secrets case to
open it to find the collapsible telescopic sniper rifle that can be unfolded handily and assembled for action on the moment, the needle-thin dagger pen that writes in invisible ink, the miniature telephone that also deciphers coded words and signals … all the decisive finesse of an elite power in a suave and refined style of manhood not seen in Gacy. This is the correct secret agent man attaché case. This has the man’s authorization: not the signature of one of those programs that the other boys in the neighborhood must watch because their parents will not allow them into the actual (as actual as a documentary) movies, like that network television show with its ersatz man from
uncle? “How’s my favorite nephew? How’s my favorite nephew doing?”
“Your favorite …?”
“How’s my favorite nephew doing? Hey, let’s go out for a beer.”
“Look, how should I know?” I tell you. “I don’t have any idea how your favorite nephew is doing. How would I know this
guy … what’s his name? Ill ee-ah, something… … you know, that secrets agent man on TV with the Russian accent – now he’s got him a good crop of hair.”
“He needs a crewcut,” your twin says.
“No, on him, that kind of hair looks okay. He keeps it neat. It’s not like the hair you see on them Beatles guys these days. They used to have that mod cut that they keep neat, now those Beatles guys look like a bunch of bums. That secrets agent man keeps it
clean. I’m noticing that all this paper you keep handing out to me has this official feel to them – you know, with the small bumps in the texture of the heavy bond
guy has a way with the women. They call him suave.”
“Well, look at the hair he’s got on him. You have to have a good crop of hair to get the women.”
“But I hear that isn’t his real hair,” you say, with that nearly selfsame, off-center grin that you and your twin share, except for the twist to it on your face that always makes us laugh on its own. “He has a toup-ay on him.”
“You mean, a rug?”
“No, those kind of guys, they don’t wear no rug. They call them toup-ays. And you can tell he gets to wear one of the best, one of them Hollywood toup-ays.”
The secret agent man goes undercover sometimes, I think, so they must be talking about a part of the man’s disguise.
Your twin drinks from his can of beer. “This great secret agent man’s wearing him a hairpiece,” he says. “He’s probably got him one on his chest, too.”
As if in answer, you take a long drink yourself. “Not, can’t be, that’s his real chest hair,” you say, drinking down a swallow that empties the beer
right now, come to think of it. The Old Saint Nick’s Holiday Ale must be nice and frosty-cold back there in the ice chest, out
doors scenes. For with your drinking it through the year, I can even see the change in the seasons: here: an evergreen forest cast in a field of snowbanks and riverbeds, where water runs as clean as freshly minted ice, beneath the name of your brand of choice – a landscape you are duplicating, in a jumble of slants and angles, as you add to the pictorial on the coffeetable.) “They don’t make no toup-ays for your chest.”
“They,” your twin says, “can do anything for the movies.”
In the wrappings of the gift paper that I have been tossing aside as I was pulling out the secret agent man attaché case, I now find a slender, black-and-silver canister with the man’s secret agent name and number on it, as I have been seeing in those advertisements in the secret magazines that I am keeping that feature the women who are known through the name of this man.
“Now that you’ve got that do-it-yourself kit there and that talc of his, now you’re a real secrets agent man,” you say. “Now you’re just like him in the movie where his girlfriend gets that gold paint job on her.”
I look down at his secret agent man attaché case present. bleeding splattered on the little house walls and all over-across her face, smearing her face as she is crying blood hell – Now, your twin has opened one of his packages. And he starts into complaining about wrong sizes, again. I am not about to look over at your twin, although I can do nothing but hear him saying:
“So why did you get me this? You keep getting me the wrong … you keep getting it wrong.”
“It’s the they call it in church the red black stains on your soul and you dont tell the father or the nun to wipe them away you go down forever – put the fist to her face we heard the hitting wrong size?” she asks, and sighs.
“You can’t see that? That it’s the wrong size? Why do you keep doing this to me?”
“Settle down, will you?” she says (I am hearing her dismissive, slightly sarcastic tone, and I want nothing to do with what I feel that I am about to hear next). “We can exchange it …”
“… that’s what you’re always saying,” your twin starts shouting behind now on the wall in the bedroom no crying his name no and we are shaking not knowing what we can do because we cannot run away up into our sandhill it is too late in the. “Yeah, you’re gonna take it back. Like you always take it back, to exchange it and … you know what else you’re going to be doing
night and we cannot wipe out the red blood red paint paint pant pain like finger paint like the walls are made of white paper we dont know what to do
Grandmother (from mother’s side of the family) lifts her right hand and its wrist, bedecked with a chain bracelet of silver discs that look like mementoes of the ashtrays that we see during the family visits to her apartment, to place, with a light curl to her hand, on the lip of her mouth the filter of the cigarette that she holds between two fingers with their nails trimmed finely to a red point, and smokes deeply (she will leave marks of her rich, red lipstick on the brown filter of the cigarette, we know from her ashtrays during those visits) as she winces through the odorous tobacco cloud and says, in a pinched and faint voice, “oh, please don’t, not tonight.”
But your twin does go on: “You’re going back there so’s you can spend some more of money, that the reason you’re always getting me the wrong size, right?” He throws down the article of clothing to the floor to upset the woodlands scene on the can of beer at his feet. “That’s why you’re getting me the wrong size every goddamn Christmas.”
Mother starts to cry a little, as she says, “you’re spoiling quiet? i got to work the … can’t you be
a gun out of the secret agent man attaché case. I picture how the man shows the gun in the photograph from the poster on my bedroom wall. I hold it like two shifts at that goddamn mill all the time to feed everyone, you think this (as sister, brother, grandmother, mother, and you are reflecting quietly on the voice of your twin going shrill and hoarse in the rise of the shouting) by bringing my left forearm directly below my chest so I can brace my right elbow on the ridge of knuckles of my bowed left hand and fit my right trigger finger where it belongs as I position the smooth of the handle on the pistol in the grip of my hand on my right temple to stick the long-necked barrel up – all the while mimicking the self-poised expression of the face on the man, composed with the mouth and eyes steady in a stoic you could get off your fat ass once in awhile and go in there and keep him quiet so’s i can get elegance that knows its own mind, trained on its sure aims, at one with this weapon of choice beside his head to the point of always knowing, by instinct, even in the middle of any action, if the gun is
good and hammered, after I finish breakfast. That’s what I’ll do; hell, once I get outside of Vallee, instead of pulling open a tall boy, I’ll have to put the lights up on one of those rainbow bud joints I was saving for my Christmas walk around the woods at the Family Holiday Village in Se Haute. Speaking of breakfast, what did she do with it? I’ll have to call her over or go look for her … even if you want to talk to me about my car now. Right, these guys who can’t stop talking in bars, a lot of these Gacy guys, they always get around to talking about their cars …before, or after, they’re through talking about their dogs.
“That’s a good-looking car you got yourself out there,” you are saying. “That’s a good one: it’s a German, isn’t it? They make cars that are clean and they always work, you listening to me? Those Germans, I like them, they’re clean and they work hard. Give me a
German alpine band in lederhosen knee breeches and H-shaped suspenders embroidered with designs of froth-topped mugs and barrels, and stems of barley and leaves of hops, who are now, in sodden weariness, wandering off the bandstand in the hall after serenading the pure essence of the Munich formula for yet another night, you catch sight of the French
can’t make them no cars, not the way those Germans can. They got that kind of discipline you need to make a good car like that car you got for yourself out there. The Germans sure do. They always beat them, in all those wars they had. They had soldiers who knew how to follow their orders. You listening to me? They had better tanks … that’s why they make the best cars nowadays. You have to give credit where credit is due, to those Germans. They know how to work together, like a good
team at the opposite end of the beer hall from where you and your twin and your team are sitting; and so you break the time-stilling drift of this late-drinking night by shouting names at the French team, as if continuing the raucous horn beer calls from the oompah band: “Hey, it’s the froggots. First, the krauts kick you out of your country, and now we kick your froggy tails in our game in their country. Why don’t you go play leapfrog back to your pond, little froggots” (as you would similarly twist the word “Negro” when you smeared the boys who would stray into your high-school grounds in his neighborhood in Gacy); and as one of the Frenchmen with his bone-thin face, slickened black hair, and his pointed, narrow nose decides to stick out his tongue you in answer, the very manner of what to you is such a foreign, mocking feyness darkly inspires you to shove away from the heavy wooden table in a shout, ready to slap that fey expression off that pasty-ass face; then, to shout down your shouting in their own language, the French team rises as one toward you, and now the full beer hall is stirred awake again with the makings of the brawl, so that you have to push forward through the groups of wrothing men (like running through tackles on the Gacy high school football field) to reach out at that face with the tongue sticking out of it exactly, to you, like some frog tonguing in midair for a fly, and to flatten it back onto the lips of the face with the heel of your left hand … only to now see in a glance over your left shoulder that a squad of MPs, who have been waiting at the entrance of the train station on the watch for bored soldiers in transit with bellies full of the essence of the Munich formula and with stomachs for a fight, are rushing into the beer hall to break up the brawl; the MP that you see bearing down on you is one big and strong man—not that you can’t take him (just like you would take the baseball bat to the heads of those boys in your neighborhood); but as you swing your body away from the falling Frenchman, you see the MP settle any fight before it can begin with a quick tap of the black nightstick on a nerve point on the side of your skull to deliver a dash of pain that opens up the grin at a slant to your face, down there amid the heavily-booted shuffling racket of feet stomping over chunks of mug glass as they kick them across the foamy patches of spilt beer on this floor, where your ears are being blasted with the full-throated slur of curses and insults, the tangled voices of English and German
cars for the working man, that’s why he invented them for their auto-bonn. Yeah, that’s what I read, he drew up the plans by himself, ’cause he used to be an artist … or he told someone he wanted a car for the working man, and the Germans put it together for them, like they put together their tanks. They called them Beatles. Yeah, those VW Beatles. Man, they can make a car, those Germans. Then they wanted something even better, ’cause the German workingman’s family kept getting bigger and they needed them more
room
, and those VW Beatles, they didn’t have that much space in them for what the workingman needs. So they decided to make something that had sort of the same gas mileage that could carry the woman and all the children. They called it the VW
Beatle Bug Bus. In that awkward yet spirited way that children must join together to finish adult housework tasks – together, sweeping these carpets by pairing off to push around the vacuum cleaner, filling the bucket of soap and water and ammonia to wash down windows, hauling out the garbage that we had collected as we all hold on to our end of these trash bags – we apply ourselves fixedly to the chores you tell us you are supervising, so that now you are in the driver’s seat, waiting on us in your contoured-seat perch behind the windshield shaped out like a bay window, in your careless outfit that has you looking like a shabby clown who sleeps in his clothes, with the plaid sports cap that you keep on both indoors and outdoors all the time, the T-shirt that is always white with the front breast pocket, the powder-blue painter’s pants, and that white-sweat socks in open-toed sandals look of yours. You are saying, “okay, youse kids were punctual, you did all those chores, so I’m taking youse kids to
KIDSLAND
in the VW Beatle Bug Bus.” With that, we start piling into the mini-bus, jumping across the wide berth of seats and back open spaces as we fidget with our laughing because you keep on calling us “youse kids”: why are we this “youse” to you? instead of how your twin and our mother will call us “you kids”? And there you go again, saying it, clowning around with us again: “youse kids didn’t forget your coupons, did you? Because we’re not paying no full price for all those rides you’ll want to be taking.” So we show you the shopping bag full of the waxy chunks of coupons that we collect from off the sides of the half-pint cartons of whole milk that we take at school with our lunches, and from the half-gallon cartons of chocolate milk that we empty out into our glasses after school, to drink down in front of the television set at home. With that, with both of your hands set on the steering wheel that, in your VW Beatle Bug Bus, is positioned nearly straight up (unlike the slant of its angle from off the dashboard behind which your twin sits next to mother in the Ford Pinto family station wagon during our Sunday trips out of Gacy and into the country, when we are riding together in the wide backseat that your twin puts down sometimes so we can lay flat), you announce, “all right, I’m starting up that air-cooled engine we have us back there, so get ready and don’t act ornery, youse kids” (and we shout out our laughter now, at you calling us youse kids again). We pull shut the side panel door of the mini-bus that is like a cargo hatch on the monster troop-carrying airplanes in the daily war footage we see on the television set, and you turn the ignition key and start that air-cooled engine in back that you like to brag on to ppppuuuuuttttttering (not how the Ford Pinto family station wagon will wheeze as the engine kicks in with a muffled shaking under the hood … the engine that is in the front), and you tell us, “youse kids have to be conscientious now and make sure there aren’t no cars coming,” so we scramble down to the mini-bus rear window, all of us, eager to help with your driving, and we answer to you, “it’s all clear, we don’t see no cars coming.” You maneuver around the cream-coloured ball-knob on the gear shift stick and we back out of the driveway, ppppuuuuuttttttering onto the short street as narrow as an alleyway in front of the little house we live in, to head up toward the crest of the steep hill, going up past the sandhill we like to call our own, with its foliage of oak and maple woods at the cater-corner of the little house we live in, where we so enjoy
running up that sandhill
running and hiding into the cover
but cannot run hard enough now,
and now up past the modern statuesque Lake houses and older weathered cottages set on high across the surrounding ridge lines of sand hills and dunes, with tufts of slender-necked, sword-leafed beach grasses matting their slopes. At the top of the hill, we catch sight all of a sudden of one of those big city buses that rumble along the lakefront after picking up people at its stop … which sets us to thinking of ourselves as special passengers in this VW Beatle Bug Bus in which, instead of us having to sit so stiff and dimly polite like we do in the public bus, or hunched beneath the low roof and cramped into the flatbed space of the Ford Pinto family station wagon on Sundays, we can have the full run of the traveling space in here, saliently going from windows to windows that have their own shape to the ones that we see in the big city bus, as your VW Beatle Bug Bus follows Dunelake Drive into the surroundings of the lakeside park, with its terrains of hillocks covered in gatherings of oak-maple woods left to grow wild to the south, ranging along the background of landscaped meadowlands and glens of groomed lawns that have been parched tan and brown in spots throughout these estival hours of hot and steady sun, but now set off in contrast to the lightly fading yellow-white glow of the northern skyline over the stretch of beach shore and the sand dunes around the lake that we see through these windows and up into the patch of the open sun roof that we would, of course, never have for our own on a big city bus; and as the mini-bus rolls deeper into the park toward where mother likes to take us fishing with those bamboo polls that are even taller than we are and the metal boxes full of red-and-white bobbers and tangles of hooks and line in plastic, snap-top canisters, and the glass jars that we had scraped clean for our bologna and American cheese sandwiches and that mother had then washed out for storing the rice, the noodles, sugar and salt, or that she would give to us for the worms that we had hunted up in our yard early in the morning when they come to earth into the dew on the grass for us to bait the hooks that we lower into the waters to wait for the tug of a mysterious pull from down in the water that would bring up the flapping shiny-round sunfish, just so we can let them go sliding out of our hands off the side of the ornate arc of the artificial red Japanese bridge and faintly splash into the still waters of the lagoon that we are seeing at the turn of the drive, as the mini-bus goes past veering into the entranceway of that stately curve of road and driving up through its maple-oak setting as we have sometimes done on these rides, if we had wanted to stop for a picnic snack or for what you call “sodas” instead of pop when you say “I’ll buy the drinks for youse kids ’cause youse kids did your chores, I’ll get the sodas for youse kids” on the terrace of the stolidly columned, paneled marble civic hall that overlooks the widespread channel of water and the shaded islet of silty land that are bounded by the steep, banked slopes of sand dunes, all between our sun-fishing lagoon and the omnipresence of the summer Lake; like center stage for a play of dreams, the site of the building tends to play out in a memory for us of how you take a certain charge out of gathering together these sodas of yours up there like you are doing at the drink table in the wedding photograph that mother and your twin show us from the family album, so that we go to the window on that side, on the lookout for any fully white lace gowns and streaming flower pastel patterns and neatly figured, black-and-white suited personages in ceremony in the environs of the civic hall, as the mini-bus heads into a V in Dunelake Drive here that marks one way into the park and one way out, and now into the tip of this V that is filled by a little plaza on the edge of these woods that is devoted to the statue of Father Jacques, the Dunes pioneer priest who everyone in Gacy calls Father Jack, in his long roughhewn cassock, who seems pulled to step out of the Indian bark canoe by the thrust of the handheld crucifix on the rise up from his right arm like he is forever waving goodbye with his blessing that we see as teasing us to scurry to the rear window of your VW Beatle Bug Bus and we wave goodbye back to Father Jack as we used to do on those Sunday family trips when we were small kids (we figure that if we are still “youse kids” to you, then we can go ahead and act like a bunch of big kids happy to be thinking about nothing more than going for summer rides), as we are leaving the statue behind us on our way past these neighborhoods of streets and blocks of trimly-kept houses arranged in verdurous settlements along the lines of the Lakeside park, though the grassplots of lawn and hedge with their oscillating spray of sprinkler water have the depth of field here over the faintly diminished parcels of woodland trees and brush; and out toward the campus where, you never fail to tell us in passing, you (meaning, the twins, of course) played your high school ball (in the small gymnasium of those years of the deep wood polished floorboards that seemed to shine just for your clean-out-of the-shoebox red canvas sneakers [“…’cause they never wanted to buy us no new shoes, so if you played ball, you’d get you a pair of shoes like those brand-new Keds® shoes with all those colours on them that youse kids are always wearing ’cause your parents treat youse kids good …”] would have a place to squeak down thin as you follow the promise of the bouncing ball to the tune of the coaching metal whistles; and on the diamond they might as well have owned as the jewel of their trophy shelf, all the fans and the sportswriters say, giving them a certain rightness of placement in the timeless game on the acres of turf and dirt out back behind the gymnasium where they drive the long ball in an arching sweep over the outfield, and make timely contact with runners on base, [“… when I was a young man, when I had the good eye, youse kids would have been seeing me hitting for the cycle two, three days in a row …”] responding to their calls of encouragement to each other of “hey, pretty boy, pretty boy swing, swing pretty boy, pretty boy, swing”; and their hitting too all over that plain of frost-crusted turf, with the first cold snap of a late fall night on the edge of winter bringing out the sounds of the crack of helmet on bodypads [“… they’d get that look to them like they just smacked down by some bus or something and you’d be feeling like you was doing the driving, geeezzzz, they’d go down, I’m telling youse kids, like a sack of potatoes …”] and the voices in the bunches of scrambles, grabbing for the ball and for the yards of ground drawn out for them in lines of chalk-white paint across the reaches of the turf, from endzone to endzone, all under the banks of stadium lights set on high atop iron poles like framed grids of glass eyes), and we playact like we are being inpatient and thankless toward you, saying “oh, don’t tell us that one again, we’ve heard that one before …” because, as we are moving out on the open ride with the ppppuuuuutttttter of that special air-cooled engine back there in the mini-bus picking up into a whir of a hum, rolling along just above the normal flow of traffic as the still-tumid air of the passing day is gusting in through the sun roof where we can see streaks of clouds fraying in orange-yellow colours – and you say, “hey, youse kids look out the window real quick. Look out there, it’s the giant hot dog,” and we run to the other side of the mini-bus, and … hey, it is the giant mobile hot dog that we keep seeing in televisional commercials – yeah, there it is, right next to us, and you’re saying: “Look at that rolling hot dog. That’s a big hot dog. How’d youse kids like to eat a hot dog that big?” as we are waving at the red tube cab with a sausage bend to it, on a mustard-yellow platform like half of a hot dog bun with panoptic windows on the nose end rolling on tyres; and singing the insouciant jingle that is the soundtrack to the commercial, about how we wished we were the hot dog itself, and that gets us thinking of our mini-us looking like one of those spongy-yellow, ingot-shaped cream puff cakes wrapped in cellophane packets that mother puts into our school lunch boxes every Friday that taste so good with the half-pint of milk, and that we would break into morsels as our holy bread whenever we played at church (in our toy communion, the shell of lightsome cake and the sugar of its white stuffing dissolved more sweetly to the taste on the roof of our mouths than the real papery wafer we have to try to swallow on Sundays); but now, inspired by the giant mobile hot dog jingle, we really want to hear the highway song, and so we start to demanding: “Where’s that Wild Brother Goose? We want to hear about the Wild Brother Goose.” “Youse kids are being too precocious back there,” you tell us, but we won’t quit demanding for your rendition of the Wild Brother Goose song: “Come on, where’s the Wild Brother Goose?” over and over again. “What are youse kids talking about now?” you ask … but you know what we want to hear, because now you go into that jokey baritone you like to affect for us as you start singing:
I must go where that wild goose goes.
Wild goose, brother goose, which is best?
A wanderin’ fool or a heart at rest?
And we’re laughing and laughing like we’ve lost our breath and we’ll never find it again – where did you get that Wild Brother Goose song from? what’s a Wild Goose, Brother Goose? and which one is best anyway? But you never sing us anything more than those same words over and over again, like you’re on a stuck record:
I must go
Where that wild goose goes
Wild goose
Brother goose
Which is best?
and finally:
A wanderin’ fool or a heart at rest?
singing us off this highway and across this overpass onto this two-lane road that has us going past another lawn-trim residential district before we find ourselves passing this commercial strip of automobile parts stores and furniture showroom spaces and drive-in food restaurants to where we are now, into this shopping mall zone circling this heavily trafficked intersection, and so close to
KIDSLAND
itself, that we had better start bringing out our shopping bag full of the waxy chunks of coupons because we know you are about to remind us again to “get those coupons ready, so youse kids won’t be paying no full price that they’re gonna be wanting youse kids to be paying for those rides” as you pull the mini-bus in beneath a row of these broadly cast high columns of area light fixtures seen all around this district that are coming up at this hour to emerge with the drift of the day to foreshadow the near nightfall, casting a white gleam to the offbeat magical air around what will always be a mystery to us, of how
KIDSLAND
came to be on the grounds of this underdeveloped property of sabulous dirt and outgrowths of weedy trees between commercial strip zones next to where we are parking the mini-bus on this expanse of parking lot with the bulk of the cars and the trucks grouped tightly together and nearer to the doors of the glorified warehouse of a shopping mall, at a far distance from
KIDSLAND
that appears to us in this ramshackle imitation of that aureate magic kingdom that beams into our living room in animated, televisional colours every Sunday, only, scaled down to size just for us youse kids, with its castellated walls, embankments and turrets, and the spired mock watchtower at the center of the park that stands only to hold up the
KIDSLAND
sign of running lights pockmarked with dead bulbs. We join in the chant of the “Ole-EEE-Ole,” “Ole-EEE-Ole” oath as we run over to the ticket booth that looks like the huts of those bushy-hatted, coarsely mustachioed, chanting sentries who patrol the drawbridge of the castle of the cruel, wrinkled witch in that wizard movie we see over the holidays, and we exchange our bag of priceless coupons for these rolls of tickets that we wrap around our arms like streamers of ribbons, at the ready for when you will announce to us “all right, now, which rides are youse kids going on first?” We always go about choosing a different ride first – as tonight we will first go on the mini-motorized locomotive train puffing out its wispy false rings from its fake smokestack as it click-clack-click-clack-clack-clicks around the edges of the park, pulling along the mini-coal car, mini-boxcars, and mini-caboose that carry kid-sized passenger benches inside for us; and now to the mini-Ferris wheel revolving us through the evening sky in our hinged seats that tilt and swing back and forth as we ascend within this flashing framework of red/white/blue strobe light rods; and over to the mini-roller coaster that is twisting and curving all around this looping tangle of narrow gauge rails like a rattling tire chain; and now to ride this mini-merry-go-round on these caricatures of a menagerie of circus animals with their bulbous, lidless eyes and grinning, toothsome mouths distorted out even more by the chipped body paint of faded, dappled skin colours; and now into the mini-bumper cars where we’re encouraged to enjoy jamming and banging against each other instead of being scolded over roughhousing – because we always decide to end our visit to
KIDSLAND
on the mini-horses. Around and around they go, yoked to metal spars extending out from an axial steel pole, each
pony is dead,” one of the Jeffster’s favorite phrases, like when we’re smoking a bowl and watching the Cubs blow an easy lead … well, he’s a diehard White Sox fan, so he always says that about the Cubbies anyway. He must have picked it up, I’m thinking as he hands off the pipe and bowl to me, when he was a kid, at Christmas, and like all kids at Christmas, he gets it into his head that he wants a pony for Christmas, right? And how many times does that pony show up under the tree? So “the pony is dead” must say it all for the Jeffster. But, knowing the Jeffster like I do, maybe it isn’t about Christmas. There are those kegs they call pony kegs, those mini-kegs instead of your typical giant party keg? Maybe the Jeffster started saying it after he helped empty a pony keg or two or three at some party: yeah, you’d say, “the pony is dead.” Or else, remember, back in the day, they’d sell you those little bottles of beer that’d fit right in the palm of your hand? They called those ponies, too. I can just see the Jeffster killing a few of those ponies off, while he’s saying, “this pony is dead” and “that pony is dead.”
Because that’s what I’m thinking now, as you, Mr. Businessman, have me reading all your paperwork here, all these ads about yourself, I suppose you could call them. “This pony is dead,” and “that pony is dead” and “another pony, dead.” It’s a regular slaughter of
ponies forever reigned in by their controlled rounds, carrying loads of kids of all types, sizes, and temperaments through the hours of the summer. While the other rides become animated for us, the mini-horse ride truly lives: with their dusky and thickset skin that we like to pat now that their keeper has drawn them before us to a standstill, in the fitful snorts and brays through the bones of their jaws and teeth as they their keeper saddles us up, in how they wag their heads and twitch their ears now that are saddled up on them. Still, for whatever reason, we can’t help but wonder about what is going on behind their eyes, because, as the keeper takes the lead mini-horse by the reins and calls all of them out by their names of “Trigger,” “Silver,” “Mr. Ed” (named for those televisional animals we like to watch), and as the mini-horses start to walk their path and as we are swaying along on the top of them to the rhythm of their plodding animal gait, we only ever get to see a glimpse of their eyes from behind their blinders as their hooves dig the circular rut of dirt and straw deeper down under foot into the turf, as you, standing off to the sidelines, chew incessantly on your gum as you are watching us, with your eyes blinking and darting away then and now, now and then, to your VW Beatle Bug Bus. And while we are still having our fun, our feelings stay on the mini-horses themselves; it is sort of sad that they must remain tied down to Kidsland after we finish our ride on them and we are done for the night here – seeing that we have unraveled our ribbons of tickets, and our coupons are long gone. So as we are walking back to the mini-bus, we like to picture ourselves unhitching Trigger and Silver and Mr. Ed to climb back on them, to continue on with the mini-horse ride away from Kidsland, right up the road to the Snowee Crème stand less than a mile from here; but we are imagining this as we are also knowing that we must leave the mini-horses to their yoke of a circle if we are going to end our evening with a taste of the swirls of ridges on the Snowee Crème cones, as all of us pile back into the VW Beatle Bug Bus and look up for you to crank open what becomes to us at this hour a night roof with a sweeping range of stars fitting into the frame, for the last part of our ride this evening that drives away from the shopping malls and their parking lots and heads us farther down this main road where we are seeing, mounted on high, showing against the drifting of the horizon from estival daylight into eventide, the first clear sign of the Root Beer Hut, that is, this great sculpture of an idealized root beer mug, revolving smoothly in the air with its vitreous likeness of a blackish-brown liquid foaming up over the top of the mug to slide down the sides of its frost-tinged glass that is cast in substance to us in hard-moulded fiberglass, fluoresced up into the fading skyline by the white glowing that brims from all around the Root Beer Hut below it – this sharp-cornered white aluminum-paneled box of a hut and its outstretched white awning held up by a line of concrete poles that goes out over to where we are taking the VW Beatle Bug Bus, into the parking space that has next to the driver’s side window a menu board on the top of an iron rod with a metallic red push button box beneath the board that from your open window you reach out your hand for, to press your thumb down firmly into it to buzz for the girl who takes our order; and there she is now, swinging the front screen door of the Root Beer Hut open and stepping out to us, in that lean-quick walk of hers in the body of her canvas brown apron tied to the front of her yellow walking shorts and her cream-white, brown-pinstriped shirt and the baseball cap of a tan cloth she wears with her blonde ponytail drawn through the slit between the back rim of the cap and its adjustable strap, that jounces along in flits to the spring in her step as her smile is charming us, walks over to the driver’s side window of the VW Beatle Bug Bus, says hello to everyone, and asks us what we would like; and here you are now, bringing out the full face of your smiling grin, your tortoise-shell framed sunglasses, the bill of your checked-striped sports cap that you are always wearing, to the girl and asking her to point to the nametag on her shirt so that you can go on to say to her “is that your name there? Jenny? That’s a nice name, Jenny, that’s short for Jennifer, isn’t it?”, and she laughs as brightly as her smile and she answers in a mock-confidential whisper “yeah, I guess that’s supposed to be my name but don’t tell anyone else, because Jenny is really my real name”: and we see that you are really doing up your smiling grin now, as you turn to us to say “all right, youse kids, don’t tell on her, or else youse kids won’t be getting none of those root beers or Hut Dawgs that Jenny is going to be bringing youse kids,” and we all shout out in hilarity our promise together: “no, no, we’re not going to tell on her”; and so you tell her “see, these are good kids, because they do all their chores at home and they can keep a secret too, so we can go ahead and order from you now. What do youse kids want?”, asking even though we always order the same order at the Root Beer Hut, you know, two of the large papa size, a medium mama size, the small baby size (and, as she always does, the one sister who takes the baby size starts in to complaining about how “I’m not a baby size anymore”, and, as always, your answer to her is “now stop your misbehaving back there, if you don’t finish the baby size, we’ll get you another one, because we’re not going to be wasting any root beer if you won’t be drinking it all down”) … and, of course, our oldest sister always has to have her own special concoction that you always have to call a “Black Cow,” which sends us into making our moooooooooooooing sound as the carhops look baffled, as Jennifer (no … remember … she’s Jenny) does now, so that you have to explain to her about the scoop of vanilla ice cream lumped into the dark of the root beer that goes liquid-soft to dissolve in twisting strands of its own froth that appear like smears of white fingerpaint on a blackboard in its melding with the brew; and Jenny replies “you’re talking about a root beer float,” and you say, “yeah, Jenny, we want one of those Black Cows you got … and we’re also going to be wanting those Hut Dawgs of yours for everyone too,” all of which she scribbles into her notepad right down with her pen, tucks the order into a pocket on her apron, and says with her smile that is, to us, like a mite of a passing thought of what the sun brought to our day out, “all right, everyone, I’ll be back with your order before you can say ‘Black Cow’,” which cues us into doing our laughing moooooooing sound again as she walks with a double-quick step back away from the VW Beatle Bug Bus and toward the Root Beer Hut, where she is staying unseen for the moment as we start jittering around, pretending to show a clownish anticipation for our root beers and Hut Dawgs here in the back seat section of your VW Beatle Bug Bus, just so we can tease you into turning around to us and coming up with one of your quirks of a remark, as you are doing now, declaring “settle down back there youse kids … you’d better start appreciating what you’re about to receive … ‘how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child’ ”: and we laugh at you coming up with another one – just like the Wild Goose song – that seems to have its own kind of a ridiculous meaning to it, like the punch line to a mystery of a joke … but why are we even trying to figure that out now? when we are seeing our girl Jenny carrying herself and a thick leaden tray out of the screen door of the Root Beer Hut, busily swaying from the heft of the frame painted in a dulled yellow that has chipped scars because of its heavy use all around it and two big metal brackets bolted to the underside that are tipped on both hooked ends with red rubber caps that Jenny is using now to attach this mass of a tray onto the ledge of the rolled-down window next to your place in the VW Beatle Bug Bus, and to angle the tray with the red rubber-capped tips of the two bottom brackets so that they lean exactly against the side panel of the driver’s side door, so that we are now looking up at our papa and mama and baby sizes of root beer mugs grouped in their foam together on the red mesh plastic mat that covers the flat of the table of the tray – in our eyes, fulfilling then the wholesome prescience exhibited in the sign of the great mug still turning, turning on the roof of the Root Beer Hut above us – and, next to those effervescing root beer mugs, at the individually wrapped Hut Dawgs in a little silver stack that you start to take down as you say you are “doling out those Hut Dawgs to youse kids” (no, not just “give you your Hut Dawgs” like our parents say, no, not you); and we feel the softness of the warmth through the bumps and creases of the aluminum foil wrapper on our palm just for the moment as we are now having to put them aside, as we are noticing you reaching your right hand out to the tray to fit the crook in the knuckles of your fingers tightly into the narrow curve to the handle of the baby size root beer mug, tilting it off the tray with a nervously exaggerated caution, a touch of a quiver in your hand, all the while saying “don’t go spilling that root beer all over yourself and inside the Volkswagen bus in here,” as you bring it over to the youngest of us in the passenger seat, who accepts it as if she were handling a delicate cup of warm tea, not one of the notched and beveled mugs of hard-cut glasswork that hold such a feeling of inmost heft to them that our wrists give slightly in taking ours next from you, and we have to steady the mug by setting its glass chunk of a bottom weight on the heel of our palm as we start sipping first into the spongy soft bubbled cap of froth that tops the dark of the drink in such a way that we are blithely leaving these drippings of a marking over our upper lip so that they look like a phony foam mustache: see, even you are wearing it, which sets us off into laughing and teasing you about how you should try patting the root
beer
all over your head, because it looks like you’ve finally found the way to grow your hair roots back; and you answer “youse kids stop making fun of me or else the next time I’m going to drive youse kids to the funny farm and drop youse kids off there” – and that remark of yours brings to our mind that “funny farm song” we keep hearing on the radio, though we can only pick up bits of the lyrics that we are chattering out in our laughter: “the funny farm, the funny farm, they’re coming to take me away, where basket weavers weave all day, the funny farm, where life is gay … ” to which you tell us “youse kids must be the goofiest kids around,” as we are happily unwrapping the Hut Dawgs now, biting into them, munching to relish the crunch and nip of finely minced white onions and the sharp-hot spray in our mouths as small, slenderly bowed green peppers pop open in a burst and the bittersweet aftertaste from off the crescents of slivered tomatoes and the tang of the yellow mustard dabbed across the meat that crosses over our tongues as the tips of our teeth are breaking into the pinkish-red casing of the Hut Dawg itself that gives up its juices like a thinned, earthy soup that, together with the toasted-soft chew of the bun, we wash down nectarously with gulping swigs of the body and foam of the root beer from out of the heavy-set mugs (except for our oldest sister, who bites into her Hut Dawg, swallows, and dips a long-stemmed, white-plastic spoon into the murky sweet quick of her Black Cow drink to ladle out a portion of the vanilla ice cream already fluidly diluted by the root beer into stringy glop that slides down the bowl of the spoon she is sliding into her mouth); and now, placing our mugs carefully down on the floor of the VW Beatle Bug Bus right below our seats, we get to ask you for the red-plastic squeeze bottle with the word “ketchup” (or, is it “catsup”?) marked on its side in yellow letters that is positioned down into the rung of a metal holder at one end of the tray next to what would be its exact double if it were not in yellow with the word “mustard” printed on the side in letters that are of the same shade of red as the “ketchup” (no, it’s not “catsup”) plastic squeeze bottle you are now passing around to each of us, who imitate you in how you are flexing and twisting your wrist hard and fast and back and forth to shake the bottle in your right hand and suddenly stop to turn it upside down and aim its pinpointed nozzle over the top of the crisply french fried potatoes clumped up together in their shallow cardboard basket on our lap and squish the bottle in our grip, to press out the pasty red tomato garnish across these slabs of still-hot, salted potatoes, picking them out one by one to munch between bites of our Hut Dawgs and buns, taking big sips from the mugs of our root beers, and biting once more into the Hut Dawgs, picking out some more french fries to munch, sipping the root beer, biting into the Hut Dawgs: munching the fries, chewing the Hut Dawgs and fries together, and washing it all down through the rich foaming of the lush brew; and, as one of the cartoon characters on the kids’ programs we watch on television is always saying, “hot diggity dawg” are we savoring each taste of the celebratory succulence that serves as our final reward this day for every one of us doing our chores at home – not like the way you bury your Hut Dawg in your mouth in two gargantuan bites and now wads of fries into the rolling bulge of your cheeks and now swigging down your entire papa size mug of root
working man’s car that doesn’t work. Sure, it might have been the king (well, all right, the Führer) of the road in your time, but not now … sitting out there pathetically as it is being stupidly covered by snow, sporting that personal custom touch of a dent in the fender where I kicked it in when the damned oil-burning crate of garbage died on me in the middle of a see-the-bars-of-America road trip. And with an electrical system that couldn’t keep a flashlight burning for a month: I should just leave it for junk on the parking lot, and hike back to Se Haute – then you could admire the rotten lemon
at the bottom of the driveway, but each one is still here (as immobile and as chipped and tarnished as that statuesque memorabilia on your shelf in your bedroom), your matching sedan coupe design trophies to how you “jewed down that Jew car dealer” for this, your “2 for 1 Mercedes-Benz bargain basement deals”: one auto in beige and brown and the other auto in a yellowed tan shade that pale in comparison to the black on silver and silver on black superficies of automotive Teutonic design that you have always admired – mostly because these autos of yours, judging from the pockmarks of corrosion that we can still see just below the running board, have the look of spray paint that was slapped on them to hide smears of rust underneath; nevertheless, to you, looking over your 2 for 1 Mercedes-Benz bargain basement deal that we have gathered around, talking out of the side of your mouth as you chew gum intently, you are trying to convince your twin and mother to leave them parked on this big gravel U of a driveway we have out here for a little while longer, look, we have all kinds of space out here in the country; these 2 for 1 Mercedes-Benz bargain basement deal of yours is bound to turn out to be a solid investment – the price of regular gas isn’t about to drop soon, because the Republicans have it all set up so that the cost of diesel will stay down for the truckers, the Teamsters, the working man, and that these 2 for 1 Mercedes-Benz bargain basement deal you “got from that Jew” are the only passenger vehicles on the road here that those Germans craftily designed to run on diesel these days – of course, even you have to admit that your 2 for 1 Mercedes-Benz bargain basement deal could use some work: once you get the beige and brown auto to start, it is coughing up some sort of a black spurt of a plume out of the tailpipe, and when you take us and your twin out for a drive in the yellowed tan auto down the country roads, it all of a sudden comes out with these labored quivers and grindings; but you have these ideas for the future, for when everyone else will be sacrificing their weekend family rides while we are beating the price hikes by fueling up the 2 for 1 Mercedes-Benz bargain basement deal with the working man’s diesel on the cheap. But today, of course, you will tow them off the property, after your twin and mother complain that they are not going to have their lawnscape with its hedges of lilac bushes flowering purple and the root vegetable garden, all surrounded by those woods that they have let grow wild all around like a sanctuary of ancient forest, looking like some car graveyard lawn that you see in front of the hillbilly shack properties across the Interstate highway around Deersview, especially now that one of those 2 for 1 Mercedes-Benz bargain basement deals of yours is dripping some kind of black goo down into the driveway to form tarry clots of gravel. So you are spending these two days pulling the 2 for 1 Mercedes-Benz bargain basement deal out of here with this rented tow truck that you drive yourself, because you “don’t want to pay no garage to do the work,” and you are leaving a rut of a scar in the lawn as you veer off the gravel U of the driveway, as you shout out incessantly to us and to yourself that it was meant for our
Fatherland anymore … but they sure put one over me with their “German engineering made in the USA” televisional pitch. Yeah right: all they’re doing these days is churning out false VWs on the cheap from some backwoods labor camp of a factory somewhere in
Pennsylvania. You keep calling on our obliging bartender for another round of these certain words (like the small words she’ll say I should be using? instead of teasing her with something like “inwardly deepening automotive expressionistic angst”: she’ll say “Stop It!” and “why are you always trying to impress everyone with those big words of yours? All you’re doing is giving me a headache” and I’ll give out a mock sigh and I’ll tell her “okay, Erika Lynn, I’ll do anything for you; I’ll avoid the King James and stick with the Dick and Jane version”) that brings out their accent around these parts, like “dolar” for “dollar”, or like in the song “Mony Mony” I just played on the jukebox for “money” … and it’s beginning to sound like, for the rest of this trip, we’ll have to have
that four-letter word he comes up with; and I tell him, “no, that’s not right, man, that’s a made-up word if I ever heard one”, and that sets him off into that stoned cackling of his as he’s handing me the dictionary, daring me to look it up, and … all right, he’s got me again – and what else could it be but “an herb of magic powers, as in Homer’s Odyssey, that is given to Odysseus to protect him from Circe’s incantations” – so now that now he just has to use
“moly”
for
his best stash, his “holy moly” he’s calling it, just as a dig to remind me who will be King of Scrabble Bong and he claims, always
“Molly”, over and over again.
“You’ll have to excuse him,” I tell the bartender. “He’s practicing, because he plans to be living in your fine community soon.”
“They talk like Jimmy Stewart,” you say, “Like they have crackers in their mouths.” As you watch the bartender draw us another pitcher of that beer whose catch phrase – FreeFlowCleanFresh – and its Arcadian logo on the advertisements on the wall that evoke the naturally purified sources of springs and rivers flowing through the green hills of Pennsylvania, as we sit in here watching televisional sports, showing us a different look to the angles and sightlines in the action on the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball field from the familiar viewing of the Chicago Cubs broadcasts back home in our minds, as you keep talking during every beer commercial break in the game about how the boat has left the dock: you are a sick and tired, you’re sick, the boat has left the dock, and you’d like it if you could just stay here because nobody bothers you here, no, you don’t feel so nervous all the time here, as we drink in the cool of this insouciant hideaway and hoist these thick-glass pitchers of rich, full-bodied beer to refresh our steins in this personal late-morning wake of ours now that we are done with the viewing at the funeral home, just to relax ourselves and listen to you tell us about this picture you have in your mind, like some quaintly paradisiacal watercolour of the green hills of Pennsylvania, to convalesce away the rest of your life here, as we plot your entrance into the VA Greenhill Memorial Hospital: You’re saying that you could easily see yourself sleeping in late and finally resting your nerves in your very own private white room with the starched white curtains in the stately white hospital rest home on the side of its very own green hill of Pennsylvania, only awakening so you can meander straight down into town to sit for hours on end and do nothing in this cool and peaceful bar but talk with your fellow veterans about the good old days, and only leaving once in awhile to take a stroll over to the park benches on the greensward banks of the river so that you can watch your boats leaving their docks on the flow of the evening currents; because, we figure that even though you aren’t exactly a decorated war hero, you could still get in because, after all, you did sustain some kind of a wound in the your head while you were defending your country during the Korean conflict, which should be enough to get you into that great white hospital with its the white rooms of many white curtained windows up there on what would be your own green hill of Pennsylvania. So we’re figuring on working our strategy for your entry on this relative who’s attending the funeral who happens to be a commander of this local VFW Post who could pull some strings for you, for your own peaceful white room with starched white curtained window and a view for you of the rolling river through town. As we sit together at this bar and listen to what you keep referring to as your “options”, I find myself fingering the tarnished silver beams of this tarnished silver horseshoe nail cross that I bought from her to bear around my neck. Yes, it’s best that I physically get away from what has become physically her for awhile, put a good five hours straight of driving time between between Erika Lynn and Vyrgil Indiana, to rapturously drink
Erika Lynn
off my mind … as in, this full stein of this briskly ice-tasting draft beer that goes down in three big swallows so I can feel the welcoming inward of the soothing alcohol washing out her her-ness… but, no not now, I’m not there yet, this only makes me more sensitive to the touch of the density of the weight of the horseshoe nail crucifix that feels contrary to its size around my neck. I know now that I should have taken it off and left it behind in Se Haute Indiana, in my bedroom, right on top of those 2 Bibles that I have been reading over this passing summer, because the horseshoe nail crucifix is working this certain haptic charm on me, even as I sit here away from the rapture of Erika Lynn – the town that in and of itself could be the church, with the white actual church only a white out building of the whole that in and of itself could be the church,
and away from that model of a snow white dove church with the few houses and farm gathered devoutly around it located at the exact center of unincorporated Vyrgil Indiana where I have been visiting her over this passing summer that is, where a few houses and farms are gathered around it, near Se Haute Indiana. So how am I supposed to counter her tease? I mean, I’m wearing her like the horseshoe nail cross around my neck, here in the rhapsodic seclusion of this river town bar off in the green hills of Pennsylvania (as I see me convincing the rapturous—soon to be enraptured?—Erika Lynn to take her first alcoholic drink ever next to me, with that shine at the heart of her auburn eyes as light as the brightness in her brunette hair that complementing the polish of these wood-paneled surroundings, and this FlowFreeFreshPure beer we would be drinking together – she with her small glass and I with my pitcher and mug – would ease her arm and leg even closer in a touch, as she does beneath the kitchen table when I’m teasing her about those freshman cheerleader moves of hers) instead of all that coffee we are drinking off these days as we are talking about Their Lord Jesus Christ and reading from the copiously and intricately highlighted, annotated Bibles at the center of the kitchen table with the cast-iron percolator, the Delftware cups and saucers for the cream, the milk and the sugar; and the cookie jar with the blue and white windmills and canals of the countryside of romantic Holland during the scriptural coffee klatches, I think, as I rub the horseshoe nail crucifix some more, pour some more beer into my stein, and listen once more to you twins reminisce about growing up in Pennsylvania, where your family side originated from the coal mining Slovak community some miles outside this river town on a green hill of Pennsylvania near here. You repeat “oh youth” and again “oh youth” as you take a drink from your frosted stein of the hearty draft beer with the quality finish and the crisp head of foam, distracting me from my thoughts of
Erika Lynn, from thy deepest of sleeps. Gird up thy loins of denim and thy breastplate of cotton and arise from the shadow of the great tree so that I may greet thee. O, speaketh not of the sweat upon thy brow and upon thy body. Wouldst that thou might see thyself clothed as thou art for the hot days of summer yet walking thusly into the bitter nights of winter? Verily, thou wouldst shiver with the cold in the heat of the day.” So she’s out there, sitting cross-legged on her lawn, in the shade of the awned leaves branching out from her big, old oak tree, and she starts shouting at me “when are you going to start talking like normal people talk” and she starts to shaking her finger at me like she’s scolding a naughty boy … but I’m not exactly seeing her index finger there: it’s more like she’s giving me the middle finger of her right hand there, only she’s working it like that optical illusion trick where the wagging hand makes the pencil its holding look like it’s going all limp and rubbery, even while she’s flashing me that winning smile of hers because she sees that I’m not getting how some purely good and born-again Christian girl could be flipping me off like that – except, not hard up like everyone else would do it, but kind of soft and up and down. Must be some kind of a cute stunt she picked up at summer cheerleader camp from her girlfriends in the shower room, I’d imagine, that she’s using on me now to put one up on me in what seems like a never-ending game of tease and teaser we’re always playing on one another; I mean, there she goes celebrating herself again, look, no hands, just feet and legs to yank herself out of sitting cross-legged and to spring her up in a single movement of indurate vitality to land down barefoot into the overgrown lawn that is still a touch damp from the showers we had at dawn, so that little wads of lawn grass are sticking up between her toes like those bits of cotton balls that girls will tuck between their toes when they are painting their nails, as she walks to me, looking at me with the hint of a coy smirk on her face, not so much as this ideal of the living country girl as some kind of a born-again cheerleader who is aiming to lay her finishing tease on me by posing at the center of these plains of fields and fields of plains just outside of Se Haute Indiana in the unincorporated zone of Vyrgle Indiana that would just happen to be fated to serve as the perfect staging ground for the best knockout punchline ever in the world that has her performing her last prance before a select audience of enraptured fellowship that are all bound to enter some kind of a deus ex machine in ostendo sum that has always lain earthbound here on the fields of the plains and plains of the field to eventually rise to take up the victorious Erika Lynn and her worldwide audience to the long-promised nirvanic sanctuary above the skies even while it is acting to lower the curtain like a blood-wet blanket on this convoluted tragicomedy of infernal machinations that has been too continually playing itself out in this doomed world as portrayed in those dangerous pages of pulp entertainments that are being introduced into our stacks (with their satin ribbons as bookmarks and their gilt edged pages and the elastic spine for laying the book open so it rests entirely on the palm of the hand … and with that white-bound and gold-embossed Latinate version that looks to have never been read entirely as it is opened to show not even a single distinguishably notated [“I always have to mark up my Bible real careful like when I’m reading it ‘cause I’m always finding verses that sound like they are talking to me in whatever situation I’m in,” Seth says] and scrupulously highlighted page even though several sheets of paper and envelopes with the feel of fine and smooth quality stationery [“better be careful they don’t fall out if you’re reading it,” Seth says] and bunched-up packets of aged photos and snapshots with rippled frames appear to bookmark several of the pages of what are generally considered here to be errant passages of fantastical statements that are contradicting not only the canonical scriptures of the sacramentally well-worn but kept-up books of the True Word [“why would you want to use a Latin translation when you’ve got the perfectly good Greek that was translated strict from the Hebrew itself,” says Seth] and their authoritative concordances but are also caught up in such self-contradictions as having their central holy character dying three times in three different settings [“even old Lazarus couldn’t come up with a magic trick as good as that,” says Seth] and outright vulgarizations then like the metaphysical existence of some way station between heaven [“there’s only two places like the Scriptures says,” says Seth] and hell where dead souls must be waiting in queues to take their winning number of supplicating indulgences out from the mortal plane that will finally put them over the top [“I’m guessing you also pray for some of them to go to hell,” says Seth] and into a grand prize of a paradise [“that just isn’t Bible,” Seth says]) upon stacks of Bibles as if the self-charismatically induced apocalyptists have been taking dictation from the deified omnipresence itself as it narrates the predeterministical course it has triggered to set off a byzantine conflagration of a world war of world wars to end the world on the kitchen table with the aroma of the steam-fresh coffee from out of the full-metal percolator on the gas stove that blends with the cinerous smell of the ivy and vines designs etched into the tight roll of thin paper wrapped around the packed mentholated tobacco burning and smoldering down the twig-thin ladies’ cigarettes that I am cadging from out of her pack next to the nearly overflowing ashtray on the kitchen table as she is putting out her apocalyptically charged challenge to me now with her eyes meeting my eyes through the smoke that is gradually drifting and spiraling into her updo so that it seems blown out like the tangles and curls in the tousled beehive hairdos of those buxom housewives in their miniskirt lingerie and nothing much else who are seen opening their front door to traveling salesmen who seem to be inviting themselves in by beckoning with the hoses on their vacuum cleaners drawn on the kind of jokey napkins that I see as being laid out all along the top of the bar in Seth’s basement den of cocktails where the assorted collections of glasses designed for each drink recipe are set up on the napkins for the ceremony of the cocktails that are poured out from the silver polished shaker with what I would imagine is the same sacramental rectitude that Seth and his wife now read and cite the same Bible and their concordances on the kitchen table at her elbow as this smoke we are making together is wispily veiling her thinset face with its light strands of creases along the edges of her now blinking in the staring and staring in the blinking eyes and the tiny crinkles on the corners of her lips that are telling me “I know the way you are feeling about Erica Lynn” that I see as soft markings tattooed on her face by her history of party times measured out in cocktail hours and how long it takes to go through a couple of packs of cigarettes being one of those dolled-up party wives sitting in her place with what Seth would call “some of the other gals” on barstools with their red vinyl cushions hemmed with silver studs and showing more than a little leg in sheer hosiery that is crossed on the knee to move back and forth and forth and back again as one sharp-black high heel is dangled just off the nyloned toes to show the brown square patch of hose on the back of her foot as she is lifting her customized glass off the titillating napkins for the first of several mixed double nightcaps that Seth or some other husband pours from out of the silven shaker as she is saying “so do you want to be left behind without her? is that the way it’s going to be? are you going to stay here for God-knows-what kind of tribulations and suffering that they say is going to be visited on those who are going to be left behind? none of your ifs or ends or … but more as a countryside girl in the way she walks to me, in the look of her grey-toned eyes, in how she looks distinctly at one with the spread of the plains of the fields carrying their rows of corn with droplets from the morning rains still on their verdant blades of leaves out on the deeply held continuations of fields of plains that join themselves seamlessly to the faintly clouded skyward-blue horizon in the farthest reaches of distance or that stop short at the fringes of richly wooded densities marked inwardly with deepening green and brown foliaged shadows that appear here and there on the plains of the fields as if they were bouquets of forest tossed and scattered out on the plains of the fields surrounding her lawn and the simple flat-faced two-story house nearly butting the straight country roadway that serves as one of the streets of the sparsely settled unincorporated neighborhood of Vyrgle Indiana with, besides farming, its only industry being that unembellished white-on-white church at the central crossroad, with the other roadway street just a few feet away from the front of my car, parked on the narrow parcel of gravel lot bordering the lawn where she is walking, as I am watching her bare legs move in her short denim cutoffs to me, as I also happen to be seeing her at this same time taking the stairs down from her bedroom into the dining room area, with me sitting at the table and her dropping herself down into the chair, facing me as she puts on a sigh in mock petulant boredom with just enough of an edge to make me think that she’s actually readying herself to work in another round of teasing me, and says, “I wonder what I’m going to be doing with myself now?” and I reply “you’re going to keep me company” and she counters with her coy air “oh really, is that what I’m supposed to do? Well, is it okay with you if I just read to you? I’m too tired to do anything else”; and so she slides over the one Bible that always stays ready in its quietistic certitude for consultation on the old rugged kitchen table, positions it carefully before her, and covers her eyes with her left hand as she opens the book with her right, and starts to aimlessly turn through the wispy pages, to stop now to point her right index finger to the ceiling where she is starting to circle it above her head as if she is conjuring down some kind of a whimsical halo, and now stabs that finger onto a page of the Bible, splaying out the middle of her left hand into an arrow that she is peering through, and … she is reading from that Book of the Bible that I never hear cited either in chapter or in verse during our caffeinated deliberations into the guidance of faith or benign morality or that itchy cosmic trigger finger aiming to shoot the world into the finality of a grotesque orbit; and as I am now seeing in her reading depicting a picture of a countryside girl in a past-distant garden of an exotic land of budding fruits and flowers, with the settings her body likened to the eyes of a dove, to an orchard of pomegranates, to milk and honey under the tongue, to ointments of rich spices on the skin, to white fleece and a soft mane in her hair, and even to a silver palace with cedar woodwork as a house of love; and as I am now seeing in her reading (for what reason, I am not clear) how another book could be in this book, and I mean literally, as in the Bible being hollowed out exactly on the first page of this Book, so that the book I have in mind could be hidden on the shelf between other books on a library by being set between the covers of the Bible in a manner of ironic placement that is squarely fitting this notoriously ill-reputed tale of the 18th Century, unashamedly bowdlerized into an inauthentic mishmash of paperback editions (with covers and pages barely bound together) that are passed from hand to hand in public taverns and coffeehouses and underneath bookshelf counters and tables (or a desk in a Roman Catholic schoolroom, where abruptly the book is dropped so loudly that the sound it makes might as well be a jarring clatter that stings the ears, so that the nun teacher hears it too and quickly spots it laying there – half in the aisle, half under the desk – and so she starts walking a bit more than slowly up to the desk with this stern look of hers stretched over the cold chalk-white visage that provokes an embodied fear that the book slipped out of control so grossly that it may have been done with secreted purpose by what is normally an abjectly obedient and correct mindset that really wanted to be found out so that this agent of correction itself could stand in judgment before the desk, bend down to pick up the book in question, open it, page through it, eye it – and I’m thinking as I listen to Erika Lynn read, that this entity of control that curiously comes to mind is not about to extract a passage or scene out of this particular book that she could interpret as linking the entire contents to some type of interpretative quirk that views it as a sanctified marriage between God the bridegroom and the Church the bridesmaid, as the Church does for the Book Erika Lynn is reading to me so nicely, so primly, so that she must be teasing me again – and raise her head with the slapping metal ruler glaze on her eyes, in order to remark “so this is what we have been reading in class instead of our catechism” while she is dropping the book back onto the floor under the heel of her black shoe to grind it down into the tiles), into a sardonic continuation of this Bible story that has this girl, which still coloured with the robust spirits of the countryside within her, being introduced into the luxuriant tableau inside a private inner city of libertinage that undoes the burdens and restraints of heavy dresses and binding corsets to lay out the lustful body of sensual desires and that initiates her so choicely into a whirl of loosened pleasures, exciting her sweet-featured face so regular and wholesome, her shape so delicious, with the sublime flat of the belly that ends in a parting, a rift barely discernable that seeks to retire downward and find shelter between two sleekened thighs, to peek out from curls of chestnut hair that overspreads its front, clothed with the richest sable fur ever seen; and as I can now see such a countryside girl giving herself over to the essence of her nudity so that an artist might paint her in the raw of her deep beauty, or as a woman photographer might woo her into a sitting that pictures the breadth of her girlflesh through the lense: spreading herself out on bales of hay in the seclusion of a private barn, lounging nonchalantly on a battered old couch on the porch of some traditionally clean-framed whitewashed farmhouse, standing trimmed and buffed in a field of the plains as a prevailing sun brings out the sweat-moist sheen of her skin on the slickened paper of the magazine – all as the centerpiece of the annual pictorial of the Farmers Daughter issue of the magazine featuring this month this especial countryside girl whose standing appears way beyond the usual clean-cut country girl on the finish of these pages with their implied promise of lust in use (not the useless lust of fantasy dissipating) for all, regardless of looks or wealth or personality gradings by offering such a chimeric approximation of truth in beauty that seems so actualized even as it denies the signification of reality itself (take the marriage: the unpaid mortgage, the child rearing, the pathetic rounds of arguments, the suppressed contempt, the continual debts – the growing old in all of this give and take of the sexes – or perhaps overcoming all of this through a Christian idealization of eternalized wedlock I am wondering?); and as I am now seeing in the Hummingbird Press paperback that is grasped and bound-set in the middle of a rolled-up copy of this Farmers Daughter issue of this magazine I have in mind with a thick brown rubber band, all about this man among traveling salesmen working his turf out in the countryside, who is built to pick up women of lust door to door, like the Farmers Daughter with the full curves on her strapping body, the plushly stacked straying housewife, and the keen-figured, lightsome girl of this countryside with her backwoods passion like a doe in her rut, see, who give themselves up to following him together on his rounds, even the business has gone slow lately, and comes to the point where he is down to his last dollars and can no longer pay for hotel rooms and the only food he can rustle up is bologna sandwiches of just meat and bread and jugs of cheap wine: so this vagabond harem starts unraveling, the Farmers Daughter is mouthing off, saying that she is starting to think that this guy is playing all of them for suckers and that maybe they should be heading out on their own soon, and this is beginning to sound about right to the housewife and the countryside girl, so the traveling salesman had better do some quick thinking on his feet or lose this good thing he has going – now see, it’s all coming down to the climax of the Hummingbird Press paperback grasped and bound-set in the middle of a rolled-up copy of this Farmers Daughter issue of this magazine with a thick rubber band, in an abandoned church building they end up finding on this rain drenched night just as the women, soaking wet and mud soiled, are about to bring this thing to a head … but they are so tired from their walking and trudging that all they can do is dry out, eat the remaining now-soggy bologna sandwiches and drink off a jug of cheap wine, and fall back into the empty pews to sleep, which is not, of course, about ready to last too long in this particular book, see, because just as this housewife gets all in a fever to crawl up the legs of the traveling salesman, her lips fully pursed to kiss on the growth of his lump between his thighs, and just as she’s near to unzipping him, they start hearing this groaning of moans coming out deep from the shadows in the front of the abandoned church building, so, they pull themselves up out from their pulse of their action to sneak into a nearby door, step quietly behind the wall toward the joined voices, to another door that they crack open to, see, discover the Farmers Daughter and the countryside girl stripped down out of their wet clothes, and making sex between themselves butt naked on what used to be the altar of the church set on high overlooking the rows of pews … and, see, what’s funny here is that even with all of his experiences throughout the years of getting whatever sex he wants, this is the first time the traveling salesman has ever laid eyes on Sapphic ministrations of lust, and he is observing it, see, between two knockout down-home beauties he would have never pictured going at it together like this, which draws a spate of giggling from out of the mouth of the housewife that he has to hush by pressing down on her lips with the palm of his left hand as the middle finger of his right hand is pressing into her, see, as he is watching how the Farmers Daughter is straddling over the uplifted haunches of the countryside girl and now, see, puts the countryside girl tight into a clinch with her solid legs like a smooth-oiled vice, see, as she circles her hips and brings her groin down wet and firm, see, on the thatch of hair between her sleek countryside girl legs, see, even as, see, she is leaning her chest down over her, to touch together their breasts; and as I am now seeing her at this moment, in her motion (and in this opening space of moments moving perpetually forward where I imagine in the future I am always seeing her in the moment), going barefoot toward me on the lawn plot of this expansive cartilage, and as I am watching her walk through the humidity with both my seeing in the physical eyes and this seeing inward sight that must now reflect on itself, I wonder if she still necessarily enters into that mystical scheme of impending conflagration, those deterministic predictions of sanctified morbidity that her parents and their guests at the family kitchen table have adopted and in which they have accepted all the presumptions of a prescient timetable and if she should still be seen purely as a vessel of an unseen soul that exists only to await its discarnate ascension off the pathway of the flesh that is fated to dissipate anyway through the drag of aging that is even at this moment (moment by moment) is working imperceptibly to crinkle it and make it sag to finally undermine it into bone into dust that I must keep reminding myself is just as much a part of the bequeathal to humanity of the inevitable as is her girlhood, now that this panorama of plains and fields into fields and plains around her, this organicity of earth into sky seems to join the body of her being here as if she is subsuming the reaches of the countryside through the overhanging humidity in the air by drawing it in with a sharp little breath of a gasped whimper as the naked soles of her slender feet find the hot points of the gravel on the parking strip here like the searing coals of martyred desires and as the muscles accented in her neckbones and shoulder blades flex out in her flinching that runs through the flow in the carry of her sylphid beauty: lissome figure like a straying ray off the course of the sun, healthful shining, the blonde of her gleaming – and now that I am seeing what this is all coming down to, this last and winning tease that makes me want to laugh but I am too struck from seeing her breasts free of the clasp of a brassiere and upheld solely through the natural lift of their compact form alone in shape and size that fit to the balance of her supple body and jouncing slightly and easily beneath the sweat-moist cloth of her red sleeveless t-shirt as she finds her footing on the gravel and gingerly walks closer to me, as my fingertips go electric with some sort of sixth sense of carnal osmosis that has me feeling her up all over her there to barely trail my skin over the smoothed roundness and underneath to cup the girlflesh in bloom on my fingers as my thumbs play over the tiny erection in her nipples that I am seeing too … even as I now have to see her more and more out of my touch in her nearing me so that she is showing me only her breasts and her firm belly framed by the open window on the passenger side of my car, because in her leaning down to talk to me, she is playing this trick in our game of tease or being teased that blanks out my thoughts over this body of hers: what is hanging by a leather cord around her gracile neck, falling between the curvature of her breasts to outline itself right through the moistened cloth of her shirt – yeah, very amusing, Erika Lynn, the way you just happen to be wearing your
cross again. All these words. I know I can just wash them away soon. [PICK UP HERE]“The boat has left the dock,” you remind us yet again, drinking off what is left of your beer. The offhanded manner of your comical expressions of finality always makes me wonder if this is all just an act of bar talk to amuse me and your other drinking buddies as you’re putting on this sad-nervous look of yours like some broke down opera clown, as you sit here repeating these paeans to an athlete dying to be young, saying, “I’m sick … I’m sick … I’m an old man … oh youth”. But now all three of us are talking once again about how nothing in the world beats the atmosphere of a good bar: and they sure run a good bar in here, we agree, because that PureFreshFlowFree beer coming off the tap is going down smooth: so they must be keeping the coils under the bar clean – not like some of those overpriced bars that may look all designer fancy on the inside but their beer is flat because they don’t clean the coils, so that it might as well be some rundown dive with watered down beer for fifty cents a glass. It would be great, you say, to just sit in this kind of bar that keeps its coils clean all day, listening to the Pennsylvania workingman talk their talk in the soft slur of their accents.
“I’m a sick man,” you say. “Real sick, real tired
like you are always ready for bed, in your threadbare cotton bathrobe and your pajamas with the fading checkerboard design; a sour look on your dolorous face, you rise stiff-legged from the ragged, stuffed armchair as her pug mutts swarm around your ankles to yap up at you, as you shuffle on those worn down brown corduroy slippers of yours that are frayed at the seams of their soles over to the kitchen, to the sandwiched piles of dark rye bread and delicatessen lunchmeat that your mother (grandmother) has made up for you, to drag yourself back into the living room again with your lunch on a tray and lower yourself back stiffly into the armchair to watch the television set
over this bar (though not at all resembling the one in the corner of his exposed basement room, this bar here still reminds me of that abandoned cocktail bar downstairs that Seth originally had built for his get-mixed-drinks-togethers, that he would then have emptied entirely and thoroughly after he was Born Again of what I can imagine was a complete assortment – knowing the way that Seth quite literally goes by the Book – of whiskeys and scotches and bourbons; and syrup bottles, mixing utensils, and collections of glassware that I imagine took up all of the elaborate levels of shelves behind the curvature of the bar counter where he would hold court, as Seth himself will phrase it, as that “fast-talkin’ - slow walkin’ - good-lookin’ ’’ man, shows us a different look to the angles and sightlines in the action on the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball field from the familiar viewing of the Chicago Cubs broadcasts back home in our minds, as you keep talking during every beer commercial break in the game about how the boat has left the dock: you are a sick and tired, you’re sick, the boat has left the dock, and you’d like it if you were to remain here because nobody bothers you here, no, you don’t feel so nervous all the time here, as we drink in the cool of this insouciant hideaway and hoist these thick-glass pitchers of rich, full-bodied beer to refresh our steins – that is, our nooncap after the viewing at the funeral home this morning, an hour ago, just to relax ourselves and listen to you tell us about this picture you have in your mind, like some quaintly paradisiacal watercolour of the green hills of Pennsylvania, to convalesce the rest of your life here, as we scheme for your entry into the VA Hospital here: you are saying that you could easily do nothing all day but meander down from the VA Hospital and sit in this VFW Tap Room and then go outdoors to your favorite park bench on the greenwards of the park banks, and watch your boat leaving the dock on the smooth evening flow of the currents of the river for the rest of your life., because, while you are not exactly a decorated war hero, you had still sustained a wound of sorts in the armed forces during the Korean conflict that should be enough to get you into that big white rest home with its many white curtained windows in the white rooms up on the side of its own green hill of Pennsylvania here in town. Figuring in your strategy for your plan of entry, you both know that one relative attending the funeral is a commander of this local VFW Post who could pull some strings for you, for your own peaceful white room with a wispy white curtained window and a view for you of the rolling river through town. As we sit together at this bar and listen to what you call your “options”, I find myself fingering the beams of this tarnished silver horseshoe nail crucifix that I bought from her around my neck. No Erika Lynn is still there, I mean, I had to put 15 straight hours worth of road mileage between myself and the Congregation of the Literal Translation of the True Word of God all the way here to forget about her beauty and the end of the world … so I drink off my full stein of this briskly ice-tasting draft beer in three big swallows, to feel the welcoming inward of the soothing alcoholic rushing … but this only makes me more sensitive to the touch of the density of the weight of the horseshoe nail crucifix that feels contrary to its size around my neck. I know now that I should have taken it off and left it behind in Se Haute Indiana, in my bedroom, right on top of those 2 Bibles that I have been reading over this passing summer, because the horseshoe nail crucifix is working this certain haptic charm on me, even as I sit here away from Erika Lynn – she who lives just a few doors down from the little white-on-white church that I have been visiting over this passing summer that is located at the exact unincorporated center of Vyrgil, where a few houses and farms are gathered around it, near Se Haute Indiana. I seem to be drinking Erika Lynn on my mind in the rhapsodic seclusion of this river town bar off in the green hills of Pennsylvania, where I can actually see me convincing her to sip her perhaps first alcoholic drink ever alongside me (the shine at the heart of her auburn eyes as light as the brightness in her brunette hair would complement these wood-paneled surroundings, and this FreeFreshFlowPure. beer we would be drinking together – she with her small glass and I with my pitcher and mug – would ease her arm and leg even closer in a touch, as she will do beneath the kitchen table when I am teasing her about her freshman cheerleader moves at high school), instead of all that coffee we drink off as we are talking about Their Lord Jesus Christ and reading from the copiously and intricately highlighted, annotated Bibles (though not the Holy Roman Catholic Bible that I cite when I try to explain to them how I have already been baptized by the sprinkling of holy water on my infant brow – that book I have been searching through as I carefully remove the prayer cards and mementoes so I can replace them where I found the sacramental rites of passage inserted into the pages, as if to consecrate the event merely by pressing it between the record of God and man with God on earth) at the center of the kitchen table with the cast-iron percolator, the Delftware cups and saucers for the cream, the milk and the sugar; and the cookie jar with the blue and white windmills and canals of the countryside of romantic Holland during the scriptural coffee klatches, I think, as I rub the horseshoe nail crucifix some more, pour some more beer into my stein, and listen once more to you twins reminisce about growing up in Pennsylvania, where your family side originated from the coal mining Slovak community some miles outside this river town on a green hill of Pennsylvania near here. Now, you are rhapsodizing again, “oh youth, oh youth” as you take a drink from your frosted stein of the heartily amazing draft beer with the quality finish and the crisp head of foam, distracting me from my thoughts of Erika Lynn off in the distance in Vyrgil next to the little white-on-white church. “The boat has left the dock,” you remind us yet again, drinking off what is left of your beer. The offhanded manner of your comical expressions of finality often makes me wonder if this is all just an act of bar talk to amuse me and your other drinking buddies, with this sad nervous look of yours like a clown face with cracked makeup, as you sit here repeating these paeans to an athlete dying to be young, saying, “I’m sick … I’m sick … I’m an old man … oh youth”. But we start reminding ourselves once again that nothing beats the atmosphere of a good bar: and they sure run a good bar in here, we are saying to ourselves, because they must keep the coils clean – for a FreshFlowPureFree beer off the tap that goes down smooth ... look, you can have your over-priced bars with their designer furnishings and all on the inside, but if the beer is flat because they don’t clean the coils, it might as well be some crummy dive with watered down beer. It would be great, you say, to just sit in this kind of bar that keeps its coils clean all day, listening to the Pennsylvania workingman talk their talk Such talk lightheaded diversion for me, away from my summer of involved thinking, comparing the conflicting Bibles about the baptism of immersion versus sprinkling … so no wonder I now immerse myself in these pure brewed and refreshing inward baptism of Pennsylvania beer (but they are going fast, because you just drank off an entire pitcher by yourself). Nevertheless, we figure that this has to be our last round of these excellent pitchers and steins: “We’d better get out of here: because we don’t want to be spending no money on no parking tickets, what time you got there, pretty boy?” your twin asks. You look down closely at the watch face on your wrist, holding a caricature of a bulbous-headed man with a drooping face and blotchy protuberant nose, with big gloved hands at the end of the arms telling the time, that is, our Vice President of the United States Spiro Agnew watch that you are always wearing these days. So we pull ourselves off these stools and say goodbye to our affable tutor in the dialects of Pennsylvania folk with his gnarled smile behind the hand-worn, shellacked wood counter of the bar, and the three of us amble out of the VFW Tap Room that has shaded us for these past few hours away from the abiding heat of the sun that steams over the august range of the green hill of Pennsylvania country outside these heavy oaken doors that we are pushing open, to find our eyes (our vision enlivened by the sway of the smooth and clear-tasting Pennsylvania beer on our minds) slow to adjust to the glare of sunlight on water – the breadth of the riverness that sustains its shine in its roll beneath the weathered ironworks bridge that I would think probably never witnessed a baptism by immersion beneath it because the Slovak Catholic Church around here that will be burying your Uncle Robert tomorrow morning still adheres to the Roman Catholic Church sacrament of sprinkling holy water on the brow of the infant, so egregiously contrary to what I am being told in Vyrgle Indiana, that is, the immersion of the whole body into the water is the one and only one way to be baptized, look, that’s what it says in the One Word of God; and you can’t have Two or Three or Hundreds of Words of God, not between even The E-Z To Read Beginners Protestant Christian Bible (what I see as the Dick and Jane version of the King James Bible) with the Roman Catholic family bible, that is, the book ordaining the sprinkling of infant baptism; that is, the book with its purgatory through an Apocryphal reading that the Congregation of the Literal Translation of the True Word of God claims is satanic corruption of perpetrated on Roman Catholics … she actually says: “why would anyone want to be a Catholic?” this one caffeinated and talkative night, and with Erika Lynn sitting there right next to me, so that, in a kind of response, I slip one of Mary’s slender menthol cigarettes that have a floral and ivy motif etched in the filters from out of the feminized
pack on the
table without asking, as I would usually do
to distract me, where you left it waiting, presumably to offer me a smoke. No, now why should I go back to cigarette smoking again? when I have such a choice pipeline to the sweet leaf from my next door neighbor back in the burbs? I mean, that is how I
quit smoking pot for the first summer in God knows how long, and I am starting to feel it now; I mean, if Mary can still smoke her cigarettes (though she says that she prays each day for God to lift that
habit, finally, last year; I took a couple of days off work, stayed in my room near my stash, mostly, and whenever I felt the urge for
those 85 millimeter-long king sizes or 100 millimeter super extra long filters or the non-filter regulars and menthols I would smoke
off a bowl in the old bong. Sure, I got stoned out of my mind, but that’s not such a bad thing, when you’re trying to quit the cigarettes. And I tell you, if I had known that I would be listening to you for the rest of this night, I can see myself bringing in one of my rainbow bud joints and just firing it up – not even in the smoking area, but right here in this booth – and then maybe offering you a toke, which might
mellow
you
out to the main street to where we have left the car parked in front of an old-time cast leaden parking meter, with its arrowed disk marking a sense of the cost and finality of spent hours, half-and-quarter hours, then minutes beneath the bubble lens on the hourglass curvature in the heft of the clockwork head, set in stone in a posted row of identical parking meters along the sidewalk in front of the diner down the street advertising itself in the front window as the heaven of blueberry pancakes, the 5 & 10 store that looks like it will always have items on sale for a single nickel or dime each, the austere façade of the art deco furniture store with its ceramic emblem of a goddess kneeling in a forest glen as the top centerpiece of the storefront – all appearing in the indelible location of an hesternal continuum that conforms to its own era of rightness and civility, as you observe aloud to yourself so we can hear you that “this sure is such a peaceful All-American town”, as you squint up the slope of this main street here, still embedded to this day with the rutted tracings of bygone streetcar tracks; and into the sun, and so out toward the nacreous vision of Greenhill VA Hospital up there, with its white rooms behind starched white curtains that you see as waiting for you to call home, if you can just play your cards right like we have been telling you to do with that distant cousin of yours; and even now you are still looking up to it as we are climbing into the car, to drive from the center of town out along the embankments of the river park and across the red steel suspension bridge, heading out to the motel inn near the small shopping mall just on the outskirts of town, near to where the main entrance and exit ramp of the Keystone State highway that bisects the exact center of the entire state is located for this area, as we remind ourselves that we have to be careful here, because while we are paying for a room with double beds, we also asked for a cot to be brought in for the child in our party, so that you wouldn’t have to pay for a single room for yourself – so that now we have to always be on the lookout for the motel manager, because you twins can never be seen together while we are here, if we are going to work our special discount plan. Here’s the deal: you and your twin are going to stay dressed in similar outfits all the time that we are rooming here – same sports shirt, same T-shirt, sports jacket, slacks, shoes – so that if the motel manager does see you coming into the room, he’s just going to be thinking it’s your twin, who has already paid for a room with a cot. So first, we park in the courtyard square of the motor inn, as your twin reminds you again to wait in the car exactly for 15 minutes, according to plan, until the coast is clear for you to join us in the room … and with that suggestion, you start being nervous, suspicious-like, blinking your eyes as you pop several cubes of your chewing gum into your mouth. So now, we are going to nonchalantly get out of the car and amble, across the parking lot, and up the stairs like any other guest would do, unlocking the door and entering the room, where we wait out your 15 minutes – and, exactly – for your knock on the door. We open it, to find you looking back and forth over your shoulder, and down toward the main office desk building, as you are slipping inside our room and quickly shutting the door behind you. You check the face of your Spiro Agnew watch, saying “Okay he didn’t have no time to see me. That Jew down there didn’t see me coming in. I think we got away with it, without us having to pay him any more of our money.” You are breathing heavily, nearly panting, your brow and the top of your sweating head pallid and moistened. So we crank up the air conditioning even higher to help cool you down, really feeling the refreshing keen air on our faces after a few hours of drinking in the VFW Tap Room. “How we doing in here, buddy?” you say to me, as you walk into our spartan yet well-kept room with its white-stucco walls that display mass-produced workmanlike paintings of the woodland scenery of the green hills of Pennsylvania, the four-square beds with their finely tucked in red and blue striped covers, a simple table between the two beds that I would imagine contains yet another version of the Protestant Bible in its drawer, a desk that has two blank notepads placed under the wall mirror, and a television set bolted to a metal ledge protruding out of the wall across from the foot of the beds, showing the Cubs and Pirates game that we had on in the VFW Tap Room going into extra innings. I drop down into the cool of the air conditioning and onto one of the beds, as your twin says through his grin, “nice work there, pretty boy, we weren’t going to be paying for no extra room staying here.” You are still looking nervous, nodding your head, chewing away on your gum, saying “You don’t think that Jew down there saw us all together any time, do you? You know you got to watch out for those nosy Jews. That Jew nose on him – you always know what’s at the end of it.” “Well, he does run a nice and clean motel here, you have to say that for him,” I say. You say: “yeah, it’s good and cheap, but you know we’d be paying up his nose if we didn’t have that special discount plan we got us figured out. But we put one over that Jew, so we don’t have to think about him. But I don’t want to be talking about no Jew – what do you think of her, that Molly?” you ask, pronouncing the name “Mōle-ēē”instead of Mǒlly in the Pennsylvania accent that sounds like Jimmy Stewart with crackers in his mouth that you heard out of the bartender.
“Now, this Mōle-ēē woman, she’s one of your distant relatives?” I ask the both of you.
“She’s one of them,” you say. “She sure is a good-looking woman for her age,”
It’s pretty funny, the way I’m still seeing you hanging around her inside the padded hallways and cushioned parlors of this funeral home, with that stare-and-blink look going on in your eyes. That Mōle-ēē. From this assemblage of mourners (their calloused, deliberate bearing speaking in and of itself of old country Slavonic traditions – of their obsessive perseverance in work, of their orthodox religiosity, of their pernicious suspicions and biases, and, naturally, of their pronounced eccentricities – that was contained, then solidified, then transmogrified in this fuliginous New World of coal mine shafts beneath the green hills of Pennsylvania, as if by some phenomenon of anthropomorphic coalification) this Molly of yours stands all decked out (as you would put it) to you in her closely diaphanous pitch-black lace mourning dress, cut just low enough at the skirt to show some big yet curvaceous leg and below the neck to bare exactly enough of a buxom ridge to bring to mind the kind of stalwart, yet at the same time, convivial presence that you would need in a woman who tends to the kind of good old style Pennsylvania workingman’s bar where you could stay for hours after hours, just like the one she owns along with her husband – that exboxer husband of hers.
“That exboxer husband of hers, you don’t want to have to duke it out with him,” your twin is saying to you, like a self-amused voice of conscience. “You’d better stop thinking about that Molly, pretty boy. You don’t want to be messing around with no married woman at no funeral.”
“I like the way they pronounce it around here,” you say, taking a seat on the edge of your special discount plan cot. “Not bŏx-er, they say bōx-er”.
So here’s this live wire of an exboxer husband, I’m thinking, close here to dozing off, all decked out (as you would put it) for what should be the hushed solemnities in a punch-drunk mishmash of pastel-red SansabeltTM slacks and white canvas sneakers and a purple sports shirt with a cream-coloured suit jacket, fidgeting around in a far corner of the viewing room and craning his head over the gathering every two to three minutes as if he were dodging an uppercut, so that he can keep a chronically half swollen right eye on Molly and you: you in your dust black polyester-rayon-blend slacks and suit jacket and your lemon yellow shirt and dark yellow and red striped tie to go along with that yellow and red grid-striped sports cap that you are always wearing on your head indoors these days, standing next to Molly over the burnished open casket and just talking-talking-talking away with her – asking her how she’s doing, showing off your Spiro Agnew watch to her, telling her how much you like to hear her, singling out and repeating one or two of the few words that she has spoken to you in your Pennsylvania accent like Jimmy Stewart with crackers in his mouth, as if you are practicing how you will talk from the time you have found your place for good finally inside the neat and clean white rooms behind the white curtains of Greenhill VA Hospital – even as he who has been left speechless through eternity lies in state beneath you.
So here I am in my drifting away like this, thinking about your unintentionally surreal comedy skit at the viewing, and now about Erica Lynn herself – the Christian honeymoon bed where the sanctioned consummation of erotic wanting (Playboy centerfolds, pornographic paperback books, flip up calendars that show a woman barely dressed and when you lift the transparency the woman’s clothes come off) is through her body in a new day of marriage, and that I probably will never have that sanctified feeling. Now, it must be five in the morning in this room, I’m somewhat awake, and someone has just turned on the lights and I blink against it, and I’m hearing this rustling around me in the motel room, at an indeterminate distance, and I’m feeling not so much hung-over as just in this fog out of nowhere that has still not been broken by the sudden light: and now I’m hearing you saying “Where’s my hat, gotta have my hat.” And your twin says to you, “You can’t be wearing that hat inside the Slovak church, remember that.” Now I hear your twin saying, “Hey, buddy, you going to the Slovak church with us?” and I sort of moan sleepily and think to myself, you mean it’s this early, five in the morning? “What time is it,” I ask, and your twin says “Seven o’clock, you going with us? You can sleep in if you want, we’ll bring you back some rolls and some coffee if you want.” “Okay, yeah,” I say, out to that distant voice. “You guys go ahead.” “Don’t you want to go see the Slovak church?” you say. “No, no,” I say, “I’ll wait … I’ll get some more sleep and go out to the Slovak cemetery with you.” “Get some sleep buddy …” your twin says to me, finally, as I go under once again.
Your twin wakes me up and tells me “we have to get going.” Soon, we are all dressed for the funeral itself, with your twin saying, hurry up, we have to hit the road, we don’t want to miss the funeral. I wouldn’t have minded bringing along the Styrofoam ice box and packing it with ice and a few cans of beer and so we can drink off a couple on the road as a final toast to the deceased at the Slovak cemetery, before we go out there, but I’m feeling good enough for the service anyway.
So we head back to the funeral home now in town, where we join the other cars that are waiting in the parking lot. As the Slovak priest enters the front seat of the hearse in that white and gold chasuble that reminds me of the golden shine from holy iconic pictures, adamantine in that gold-trimmed pose, that you always see in Russian churches, you spot Molly walking out from the funeral home and out to the parking lot, gazing around as if she is looking for a ride to the ceremony. You put your head out the open window and shout, “Hey Molly (pronouncing it Mōle-ēē in your Pennsylvania accent like Jimmy Stewart with crackers in his mouth) you need a ride to the Slovak cemetery? We can make room for you in here.” She turns and starts walking toward us, as the exboxer husband runs up behind her, and pats her on the shoulder, motioning her to join him in their car, very quickly, and she obliges him.
We find our place now in processional line with the cars of the funeral train, and in this way we start out behind the lengthening blackness of the hearse that is taking the lead out of town, out along the river fairly gleaming with a sunlit tranquility in its faint flow this morning, to head south out on this two-lane highway road that carries us onto this route of undulating foothills that point us toward those distant ridges cast deep in forested shadows up ahead, sloped fields of grasslands in the open sun, outcroppings of cragged rock … and at the panoptic sight of the green hills of Pennsylvania, you say “This is Gōd’s country” in your Pennsylvania accent like Jimmy Stewart talking with crackers in his mouth. But we aren’t going up there just yet, we are staying instead in foothill country with the funeral train proceeding smoothly cadence over this mild rise in the highway as we wind our way onto an S curve and up ahead to what looks at this view to be a kind of small grassplot that has been fit snug into the fringes of a surrounding copse; and now I’m seeing some stone headstones together with metallic crucifixes like they are sprouting from the grassplot that is, naturally, the Slovak cemetery that you and your twin have been going on about; and as we here in the funeral train go up this paved inverted U-shaped driveway into the cemetery, you say again in your Pennsylvania accent like Jimmy Stewart talking with crackers in his mouth: “This is Gōd’s country”. And so again here we are summoning Him up, this time I guess as the God the Creator of Heaven and Earth made manifest in the transcendent verdancy in the green of the hills of Pennsylvania: in other words, Santa Christ, as Seth calls this misguided view of The Christ, as this God of Love and Acceptance and Eternal Peace even though Seth is always saying He says so Himself in the Scriptures that he is not some benevolent Santa Christ always arriving on Christmas Eve, a wrathful and even a jealous God who wants no other Gods before Him, keeping the book on all those who accept false man-made sanctimonious rituals and laws, instead of simply accepting Christ as their saviour, so that only Christians who have been born again in accepting Jesus Christ as their saviour will be lifted from the inevitability of the fast-approaching date of the millennium of the Apocalypse – that feels to be looming nearer every day now: what with the news about Israel and the Great Temple that they want to rebuild in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in Jerusalem; and the papacy expanding its influence to bring together the schisms of its past history into the ultimate One World Order of a Catholic Religion of false man-made pretense; and the Soviet Union poised as Gog and Magog on the borders of the Middle East; and the neutron bomb that can kill populations but leave their buildings standing intact like the inert ghosts of victims of a biblical plagues: all signs in the inevitable road toward the Apocalyptic Rapture, Seth says) up His name again as if made manifest in the transcendent verdancy in the green of the hills of Pennsylvania, and I sure could use a couple of beers, just now. We park our car along with the funeral train, and walk over to where the Slovak Church has started its ceremony for the dead beneath an awning over the gravesite; as the priest is saying the obscure Latinate prayers in that strange Slovakian tongue that feels as if it is coming from the insides of the (Planet Earth and its last days on earth, so to speak … with the approaching Apocalypse that I am seeing in my mind as if it were some modernized version of the medieval paintings of holy events, depicting Erika Lee and the entire town of Vyrgle Indiana, assumed into the clouds. I see that you are distrait as you are chewing your gum intently and glancing over at the other tombstones, these memorial signposts that are marking time before the resurrection and Day of Judgment which will occur I am told in Vyrgle Indiana (as we are told that the final days of Planet Earth are closing in through this modern book or the Apocalypse, currently No 1 on all the Best-Seller Lists, which in and of itself must signify something). Then you suddenly stroll away from the gravesite and bend down to look at one of the tombstones and into the yellowed and grass-stained thick frame glass square holders above the graves that contain the photos of men, taken when they were still young, set there for eternity with their grim and firmly set countenances. Taken as a whole, they could be the very face of the Slovak cemetery itself, framed in green foliage. I wonder, you keep looking at them as you chew your gum, what could you be seeing in their countenances?
“This is Gōd’s country,” you say. As they are burying your Uncle Mike and saying obscure prayers in that strange Slovakian tongue that sounds to me as if it were trying to convey something or other to me from out of the earth, I see that you are having a hard time paying attention, you are bending down over the tombstones and looking at them intently. I wonder: why would you be studying a tombstone? Then I see that you are looking at one that contains this photograph of the man who is buried there, photographed when he was young, where – photographs in their timeframe before the final days that they keep talking about in Vyrgle Indiana. These old markers from the generations past, memorial signposts marking the end of time of their time – but I do not see most of them rising on that day; they are staying in the empty ground with the Lord of the World as their final judgement – or dealt to the power of Satan -- they are saying in Vyrgle Indiana, because on earth they more than likely followed the tenets of a this Slovak-man-made religion, with its sacraments construed to ultimately replace the true instructions of the Word of God (as we are talking about the end of all time, this brooding deadline for the cataclysm of immaculate finality, that they are all reading from this book entitled Our Apocalypse Horizon. death and resurrection all the time in Vyrgle Indiana, in the context, though, these days, of tomorrow’s Apocalypse. Because we are all reading this book that is on the No 1 Best-Seller Lists that they see as indicating that we are near the end times. The final judgment they keep saying, after the Apocalypse tomorrow that will clean house of non-believers, as the true believers rise into the sky before the tribulations. Do you really want to be left HERE?” Seth stares fixedly at me. “It won’t matter what man-made religion you are when that day comes around,” he says. “But you have to accept Jesus Christ as your saviour.” He pauses for a moment to let the full affect sink in, yet again, as he is prone to do. And distinctly, emphatically self assured, he says to me: “Do you want to be one of those people who are left behind? I know I don’t want to take the chance that I will be left behind. Do you?”) made whole with the bodies again and cracking open their plot of earth of the green hills of Pennsylvania above them, breaking out from its now tenuous grip to rise skyward into the acceptance of the welcoming heavens.
on the dining table of the kitchen that hosts our fellowship with its percolating scent from the big metal percolator on the stove that is now brewing fresh coffee for our deepening bottomless mugs of coffee and with the pastry sweets and sugar-laced cookies on a tray and with the ashtray full of lady-like cigarette butts with their etchings of cinderous vines and flowers as the wife (a slender and evocative face whose wrinkled creases along the skin evokes the creases of time between the sinful evenings measured out in cocktail hours and lengths of smoking cigarettes as one of those dolled up party wives who swing their legs in sheer nylons and high heel shoes crossed at the knee back and forth and forth and back again as they hold out their cocktail glasses for the first of the mixed double cappers that their husband or another husband pour out from polished silver shakers with ceremonial precision strong mixed doubles into a cocktail glasses she holds up set up on jokey napkins with their traveling salesmen holding out the hoses of their vacuum cleaners to buxom housewives with their tosseled who answer at the door wearing mini-skirt lingerie and a brassiere piece that holds their knockers up of and of uncanny past elegance now dissipating showing the wrinkled creases of her aging in this smoke between us) of Seth looks me in the eye through the smoke we make together as they at the kitchen gathering take self-assured comfort in what to us is assuredly this Because we talk all the time about death and resurrection all the time in Vyrgle Indiana, in the context, though, these days, Because we are all reading this book that is on the No 1 Best-Seller Lists that they see as indicating that we are near the end times. The final judgment they keep saying, after their Apocalypse that will basically clean house of non-believers, rising into the sky, the true believers, before the tribulations. Do you really want to be left HERE?” Seth stares fixedly at me. “It won’t matter what man-made religion you are when that day comes around,” he says, self-assuredly. “But you have to accept Jesus Christ as your saviour.” He pauses for a moment to let the full affect sink in, yet again, as he is prone to do. And distinctly, emphatically self assured, he says to me: “Do you want to be one of those left behind? I know I don’t want to be left behind. Do you?” Where will we be then they keep saying, what will it all will look like with Jesus there and all to them there is that occurs to me in those pictures, but I’m not quite sure what it is. I look at them, and I keep thinking about Sandra Lee, and how my images of the temporal herself in her body at the instant is tied up with the ending of it all. This distant looking in the eyes of the faces, of being framed in the eternal, like the feeling I feel for her, as if I will never lose it. But I cannot be her kind of Christian, no, though I have told them that I accept Jesus into my heart and soul, I do not feel as if anything is in there, somewhere inside of me … not like a feel when I have a few beers on our roadtrip, not like I felt in the VA Tap room, where I came very close to erasing her memory within the alcohol. The photos look like the living without life, like the way they should be looking under ground – forever, the ideal copy, the fixed memory of time held in the frame. Why am I thinking specifically of her.)
The distant cousin approaches us with his wife and family to say hello and to tell the two of you that it’s good to see you again. He invites us over to his place for a few drinks and some food after the burial is complete. So with the funeral over, we follow his car into a suburban area of town, just outside, where the houses appear newly built, much newer than in town, with comfortable looking driveways and ranch style houses and suburban neatness and placidness, and all surrounded by wooded areas. So the distant cousin takes us inside and the wife smiles at him and goes into the kitchen. “Would you like a couple of beers?” she asks. You all must be thirsty after the funeral and going up to that hill and everything.”
You are the first one to speak up, “Oh yeah,” you are saying, “I sure could use a couple of beers after that funeral right now.”
So she brings us this FlowPureFreeFresh beer (that could have been tapped from the green hills of Pennsylvania themselves, like a spring-fed keg of nature) in cans with these even greener hills of Pennsylvania country designs on the front. And when we go out back to where the distant cousin has his barbecue stand and his patio, overlooking a lawnscape of deep green grass, nicely kept, that reaches out to the fringes of a patch of forest surrounding and shading the grassland it is as if we are walking onto one of the glens depicted on the painting on the can. As we sit in the lawn chairs on the lawn and you both are saying, rather emphatically, about what a nice place the distant cousin’s family has here, and you keep taking these long drinks from the can of beer.
“Would you like another beer?” his wife says, as she walks up to the distant cousin and puts her hand on his shoulder. “Sure, I’ll take another one,” you respond. “You got any of those tall cans?”
“Excuse me?” she says.
“Those tall cans,” you look over to me. “What do you call them,
buddy?”
I say: “They’re
waiting out there to carry me home, getting ever colder in the back seat of the VW Rabbit on the winter parking lot, those holiday
tall boys, that’s what you call them. I saw them at the VFW Tap Room, only, we were drinking draft, not from the can in there. You never drink from a can or bottle in a bar because it’ll cost you, and you don’t want to be paying no extra money when you can be drinking from the tap … unless that draft beer has gone stale, and now you have to buy the cans or the bottles, but you don’t want to be staying their too long anyway.”
Every one of us pauses, as if silently thinking on the solemn implications of what you just said. Now his wife interrupts the quietude: “I don’t know if we have that size … do we dear?”
“I’m thinking we don’t,” the distant cousin says. “Just the normal size cans.”
Your twin responds for you, quickly. “Oh that’s okay, we don’t want to put you out. These regular cans of beer are good enough. Thanks for your hospitality.”
You begin to reminisce with the distant cousin about growing up here, before you left for Gacy Indiana, when you must have been 10 years old, the both of you. You followed the commercial route from coal mines to the steel mills of Gacy, Indiana – as did many of the Slovaks in this area, because you could make more money there and buy more into the American abundance there.
“Those were the good days, that was when the working man could live like a king,” you say. “But now it’s bad in Gacy, them … negroids, and that negroid mayor they got running Gacy, it’s not a good situation anymore.”
“I haven’t been to Gacy in years,” says the distant cousin.
“You don’t want to go there,” you say, drinking your can of beer. “This is nice down here in Pennsylvania. You have a place where you can live here, not like Gacy.” And, oh brother, that gets you cranked up: you are sipping down your normal-sized can of beer and talking a mile a second, pausing just long enough as it takes to sip off your normal-sized can of beer: “Yeah, everything is dirty now. They used to keep it clean, even with the mills being there. They don’t keep anything up anymore. They’re just letting everything go. You can’t walk the streets, you start shaking and worrying that some negroid is going to hold you up.”
You get up to go inside to use the rest room. As you are going, your twin and the distant cousin start talking.
“So how long have you been one of the directors over there at the VA?”
“It’s been about five years now,” the distant cousin says. “We have a good group of veterans there.”
“I know, you’ve been keeping up the post in town, it’s looking pretty good, we really enjoyed that place.”
“Yes, and with the main VA Hospital right in town there, we are one of the most important Veterans Groups in the state of Pennsylvania. We have a great deal of responsibility to the community.”
“Well, you know, my brother and I, we’re veterans of the Korean conflict,” you say.
“I am, too,” says the distant cousin. “I was in Seoul, in a support role, though I did see some action.”
“We were in the basketball team,” you say. “We traveled all around the bases, playing teams from other countries, like France. Those officers would treat you good if you could play ball. My brother, he had the best shot in the Army, he had that nice two handed push shot. He’s not feeling too good these days, though.” Your twin leans forward and taps on his forehead, very lightly. “He got hit or something while he was serving his country overseas. And, you know, sometimes he talks crazy, but he’s a good guy.”
The distant cousin says. “Some of the veterans up there at the hospital have those kinds of wounds that they never really get over.”
“Is that right?” your twin says. “So they can never get well?”
You return from the back of the kitchen with a can of beer in your hand that you are sipping on as you walk back to your chaise lawn chair.
“I like that mod kitchen you have in there,” you say. “And look at all this space.”
The lawnscape sure has this immaculate cut to it, look at that, like some Pennsylvania suburb version of royal French gardens, spaced so even at the borders that every tree branch and twig out there looks manicured into an artifice of the idealized order of nature, cool and neat and fresh, living to play host to languorous summers of twilight barbeques and cocktail lawn parties. The forest in there is just so much different from the wild thick of the woods that we have let go at the bounds of the lawnscape of the house at Se Haute Indiana, with the lawn in ridges and outgrowths just on the edge of the deep forest, where I like to take walks deep inside, thinking of things …. of all kinds of things, because the forest is good for that. I like to lose my thoughts in the forest, as I do so now, with the taste of the Pure.Flow.Fresh. beer on my mouth.
“Excuse me, could I have another beer?” I ask.
“Sure, go ahead, help yourself.”
So I walk back into the “mod” kitchen. Everything is so neat and well-ordered in here, and very mod. It’s a regular mod world here. The whole house is mod. I start laughing to myself about the way you describe it. For some reason, I can’t stop laughing. I’d better settle down here, and take the beer out of the refrigerator, sip it, head back out to the lawn chairs.
In my chair, I hear you yammering away at another one of your agitated raves about how “Spiro Agnew” is this “great American,” who “tells it like it is” as you hold your right wrist up. “Look at this,” you say. “That’s a Spiro Agnew Watch. The Spiro Agnew Watch will be a collector’s item some day. And I’ve got his real signature on a letter he wrote to me back home, stored away. He’s gonna be the saviour of this country, because Spiro, I like him, he always tells it like it is. Because Spiro understands the working man in this country. That’s why I’m wearing this watch, because it’s time for Spiro in this country.”
Spiro the clown might also be telling us that it’s about time to cut you off, even though I’ve always felt that when you’re on a road trip, you can never have too much beer – especially this Fresh.Free.Flow.Pure. (and not all that shabby out of the can, I remind myself.) Pennsylvania brand – whoever you are.
The distant cousin just sips his can of this clear-tasting Pennsylvania beer, and looks away for a moment. “I haven’t made up my mind about Spiro Agnew,” the cousin finally says. “Sometimes I like what he says about law and order – this country could use more of that. But he has sort of a big mouth, and he starts using those ten-dollar words. What did he say the one time? ‘Nattering nabobs of ….’ ”
“They need some of his law and order in Gacy,” you say. “That Spiro Agnew knows what he’s talking about. He’d take care of those monkey apes.”
“What did you just call them?” the distant cousin says.
“A bunch of ape monkeys, is what I called them.”
Why would you be talking about brain-eating monkeys out of the blue? I’ve heard some nutty stuff out of you, but where did you come up with that all of a sudden (that is, from where did this emerge out of your brain that suffered the wound during your Korean conflict)?
It looks like the distant cousin is confused, too. He looks away from you, and from all of us, into the density of the perfect wilderness of forest on the fringes of his lawn. He sips his beer – actually, the same beer he has been sipping now since we arrived here, I just noticed. But, oblivious to his mood, you go on and on again about Spiro Agnew:
“He won’t take any stuff out of the Jews,” you say. “He’s like that Barry Goldwater was.”
And that is when I sense that you will not be finding your white room here in the green hills of Pennsylvania, just at this moment as the distant cousin turns to you, and says, matter of factly, “AuH2O is Jewish”
You sit there with that smile on your face, as if frozen in time. Your twin smiles too, as if to somehow draw away the comment you just made, or to indicate to the distant cousin that you are touched, as it were. He tries to make a joke about it. “You talk way too much sometimes, pretty boy,” he says to you, with an uncomfortable laugh.
“I wasn’t talking too much,” you tell him. “I’m just stating my opinion.”
It is now that I know your words are no good here; that your words this evening are not fitting with what you must say to get the lasting rest in the white room that you need. And at this moment, the night seems to hollow out. That’s the only way I can possibly describe it. Are you arguing now with our guest? It used to be good for the workingman in this country, until that Kennedy came in: that Jew lover, that brain-eating ape lover (sorry, I can’t get that phrase out of my mind: it’s like when I am talking with Erika Lynn and the other Christians at the coffee table about evolution), they ought to pin a medal on that Oswald for shooting the son-of-a-bitch; and that Johnson was the worse. I certainly could use a few more beers. Damn, I could use a few pitchers right
I am not feeling all that good about you. Maybe it is time to leave? The subject has somehow changed. The distant cousin has offered to leave to go bring us back some more beer, but you seem ready to keep on arguing the point … whatever it is. You say:
when are you going to take me for a ride in that nice looking Volkswagen you got out there?” Yeah, right, as if I’m ever going to take us
on the beaten path to our country bars, and first, as always, is this town tavern here in the foothills that has one of those old-time movie house machines (no aluminum-foil tray that puffs out a silver-wrinkled bubble over a hotplate or some zapped out packet from some microwave oven for this bar) with its safety glass cabinet lit bright inside by a heat lamp shining on a virtual popcornucopia of big, rich white kernels that the bartender now scoops out and pours into these deep walnut snack bowls hot and fresh (and no clots of stale starch that you find in the bartop snack bowls of too many places these days for this bar) and free, along with these bowls of salted in-the-shell peanuts from out of that aged wooden beer barrel next to the popcorn machine; but even before he can turn to drawing out our first round off the tap, you are taking your two-fisted approach into the free bar snacks, with your right hand digging into the popcorn bowl at your right elbow, putting piece after pieces in your mouth and chewing them down as your right cheek bulges out like you are working on a wad of chaw, even as your left hand is sliding over the bowl full of peanuts as thick as your thumb on your hand that starts cracking the pellets of flesh out of their shells and shaking them straight into your mouth, so that now you are switching between the popcorn and the peanut bowls, with your twin sitting there shoulder to shoulder with you, drinking down a deep swallow of beer as I just sit here savoring down my swallows of this Pure.Flow.Fresh beer; and I’m thinking haven’t I seen that girl before? that girl, standing over there against the wall? … oh yeah, she’s a Czech CheerMaid: the Southern California cheerleader bikini girl and the wholesome come-hither appeal of the Hofbrauhaus beer girl combined into one televisional beer girl cliché to sell imported suds that you can never get off the tap but that always tastes stale out of the bottle; so, she’s in her a lacy apron just short enough so you can see clearly the sheer bikini bottom and the long legs; she gazes away, frozen in place, into a vision I think of some kind of free-loving 1960s Scandinavian Valhalla of a wild California beach party, whose omnipresent blonde sun never sets on the eternal keg; and now it seems that, beneath her eyes, she had begun, ever so personally, to smile in my direction – and right there, aren’t her eyes moving just a fraction into mine? but I snap out it now as I’m hearing you telling me “hey buddy put on some music”, so with me still looking over the Czech CheerMaid, I go over to the jukebox and start to scrolling through the tunes, picking and choosing: yeah, definitely Hank Williams Jr. dueting with the legend of his father on “There’s a Tear in my Beer,” and here, just for me, we’ll go with the Rolling Stones and Honky Tonk Woman (maybe Mick can’t drink her off his mind, but he never took one of these backroad trips through the bar life of the green hills of Pennsylvania) ; now, here’s a good one, yeah, George Jones and Tammy Wynette singing their epic lament of house and home empty of love:
We bought that big two story houseAnd soon became the envy of the townWith all our work behind usWe’d finally settled downNow we live (yes we live) in a two story houseWhoa, what splendorBut there’s no love aboutI’ve got my storyAnd I’ve got mine, tooHow sad it is, we now live, in a two story house
And here’s that Roy Orbison “Pretty Woman” song they must have on the jukebox in every backwoods, backroad country bar on the … well, check this out and I do a kind of double-take to myself – I mean, isn’t this just too perfect – me finding the old family favorite in here, even as your twin and I are getting you going with the old family joke we play on you each year during our trips through the green hills of Pennsylvania: you know, about how we really must be getting back to Indiana soon, maybe as early as at daybreak tomorrow, and with you getting all irritable and fidgety, telling us, “I’m not ready to back there now; it’s so peaceful and restful here, why are we leaving so soon?”, because, you always forget the annual punch line: we’re not going back to the State of Indiana soon, but to Indiana, Pennsylvania – only now, it will be even better because now it’s going to be the old family drinking song … and listen, you’re already tuning up in that jokey baritone of yours …
I must go
Where that wild goose goes
Wild goose
Brother goose
Which is best?
… to the low-rolling golden oldie voice of Frankie Lane; and with this boozed-out grin on my face to welcome the return of the Brother Goose song into our lives, I stroll back to this good old-fashioned wood-shining bar, sit down on the barstool, and give the bartender that slightest of nods that is the universal sign known to bartenders world over, like some mysterious gesture of brotherhood between the insiders of a secret lodge, to show him it’s time for a refill – but he does more than just refresh my mug: he places it into the sudsy water of the sink below this bar, rinses it out, dries it with a bar towel, and, from the under-the-counter fridge, he takes out a new mug fresh-misted with frost and now he taps out the another round of this tasty brand of local brew – a beer that meets the palate with an uncanny metallic aftertaste that boldly calls to mind both the brand name itself and the nickname of the city that inspired it: Steel Tower Beer; so inspired by the beer, I drink down half a mug, and the taste flows into my mouth and through my mind as I’m finally drinking her off it, but now that I think of it, I’m back to thinking about Erika Lynn on this day – not yet above seventeen: her face pleasant and sweet-featured, her shape in the wholesome bloom of country girlhood, blessed with clear air shining clearly over the reaches of plains and fields that extend off into the distance toward outcroppings of forest and copse fronting the clear line of the horizon that all serve as a kind of pastoral backdrop of her walk toward me in this transcendent manifestation of suppressed lust that is envisioned now in her walking out to me, as if carrying herself to me out wholly out to me on this one day (is it Sunday, this day?) in the bloom of flesh that defies in my mind at least those insistent proscriptions against both useless lust and lust in use from out of those Protestant Bibles that lay in quietistic certitude upon a kitchen table in Vyrgle Indiana, where this house with its flat farmlands along with the rest of the incorporated town could in and of themselves be a settlement built around little white church at the crossroads, even thethoughts of lust in the book, but so round, so firm that they can carry themselves in scorn of a bra, as I think of the lasting sight of her through the abiding haze from this lasting sight of her on what I feel is an endless late July day in a prevailing sun that steams the flat of the farmlands in a prevailing haze of humidity, walking toward me as she runs through the humidity to my car as I arrive and I park as if she were still a child of a girl chasing after some outdoors toy that had bounced out of her grasp as she was playing outdoors, only today—and it will only be forever more as my thoughts have developed in my mind – Vanessa is in a t-shirt and denim shorts, and free of bra, as if to show me only on this day the nipples of her breasts pointing different ways that marked their pleasing separation so that I can almost feel my hand (as if by a sixth sense of carnal osmosis) touching her lightly there, trailing the tips of my fingers there beneath her breasts and over the inviting tract of the belly, which ends in her parting or rift barely seen, with curls of her chestnut hair pluming the beautiful front with a down soft to the touch in essence only of her as the group of us talk across the kitchen table over the aromatic perked-fresh coffee out here upon the plains of her home of Vyrgle Indiana (of the rapturous Christian destiny of coming world disorder in her coy and teasing manner … or how I love to tease her about her try outs for a junior varsity cheerleader role at high school, … —in knowing that I am wronging her in the straying of my thoughts that are divorcing the soul of her from the body of her—still, (forever more, in thought alone?) my hand touches her there if only in this carnal osmosis, the tips of my fingers tracing the roundness of her breasts and over the inviting tract of the belly, which ends in her parting or rift barely seen, with curls of her chestnut hair pluming the beautiful front with a down soft to the touch: I see her as subject for a photographer who I can see as her other, a photographer woman who would court her into sitting for her as the essential youth in beauty girl designed to beckon, as she is taken by the photo (as if defying apocalyptic punishments), spread out upon an inviting haystack or an old couch on the porch of a farmhouse for the magazine – yes, that magazine of the implied promise of lust in use for everyone, regardless of looks or wealth or personality functions – for the centerfold of the annual Farmer’s Daughters spread; or in essence, in that other book—haunting me even this very day at a funeral in the green hills of Pennsylvania, of the escapades of a man and his two women companions who he
talk with the bartender about how you like the way the Chicago Cubs are looking to contend this year because they have this talented infield shortstop they picked up cheap from some last place team and, finally, a better than decent third baseman out of the minors … and your twin interrupts you, saying “let’s drink up and get on the road” as he lifts himself off the barstool, and says, “It’s time to go see that Streeter,” so we go up and out into and along the winding green hills of Pennsylvania toward into the distance, traveling farther into the hills themselves on our first stop we always have to go see Streeter at his charmingly rundown bar, a ramshackle outbuilding on the side of the road: this barkeep of legend around these parts, that Streeter, this barkeep of legend around these parts, with that bulge of a rutilant nose on him, and your twin says, Streeter, tell us what you think about those women, the environs like a shack with the kitchen in the back and the cot back there too and he has a picture of himself on the wall, “you were a good-looking man, you had a way with the women, back in the old days,” we’re always telling him, and I am smiling to myself, and you are sitting there with your eyes blinking, as your twin says, Streeter, tell us about that one woman you had living with you, didn’t she want some more money from you, and Streeter, he relates the saga of this one woman he was married to: “Get outta here if you don’t like this bar.” And the old woman sitting at the bar across from us retorts with “you don’t know what you’re talking about Streeter, you don’t know nothing.”; and now driving the hills and climb and then back down into a valley to this huge ramshackle hotel out in the middle of nowhere there where people stay for hours in the little bar downstairs that huge hotel out in the middle of nowhere where the little bar downstairs, with this ridiculous codger who keeps talking to you about how he is really doctor, a wizened old guy showing us a chain he is so proud of just having made, a cheap silver medal chain and he shows that to you sort of smiling then he starts talking about how he did operations and he takes out this knife from out of the front pocket and says he could do an operation right now on you if you really wanted to right now even though he never uses anesthetic out to the bars with the rustic look to them where they are serving the big bowls of peanuts and popcorn you really like sitting here listening to the guys in the backroom breaking balls in a pool game into the hills looking down into the gulleys and the heights of the hills themselves as we go to the roadhouse and you want to play the jukebox at this one because it is large it seems to have this dancefloor out here, though it is early afternoon and nobody would be dancing
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