this, not a hair different in kindfromthose I grew up in as a child back in Arkansas, though in today's idiom (we fount some words) another flavor, were the tinderboxes America had made for itself.
That night before she left for work I took LaVerne out to dinner at PJ's, absolutely the best catfish and shrimp around. Sit down and they bring whatever PJ felt like cooking today, always catfish or shrimp in some incarnation: catfish fried, catfish stewed in court bouillon, shrimp Creole or etouffe, gumbo thick with okra, shrimp on shredded lettuce with remoulade. I never heard anyone complain.
'This is nice, Lew. Thanks. I needed it.'
I poured another glass of wine for me, something from the great state of California. Verne never drank when she was working. She had a glass of sweetened tea. It was big enough to raise tropicalfish in.
'You have that look in your eyes, I'm not going to see much of you for a while. That what this's all about?'
I shook my head. She ran fingers lightly down the sides of her water glass.
'How long have we been together, Lewis?'
I didn't know.
'Yeah. Me either. Maybe sometime we'll sit down and figure that out.' She reached across and picked up my wineglass, briefly drank. Replaced it. 'Be careful, Lew.'
Of course.
'And tell me I'll have you back again when it's over.'
I told her.
We finished our meal in silence. I took Verne home and spent that night, stoked with quarts of coffee and stale doughnuts from U-Stop, haunting the empty lot and trailer park alongside Mel Gold's neighborhood, watching people come and go inconsequentially.
Eight or nine that morning I was back at U-Stop for a serial refill. Store looked to be the nerve center of the community, like a stargate these people passed through on their way back into the world. They'd ease from the trailer park or houses behind, pull in here for gas, coffee and chatter at the back of the store, maybe a prefab sandwich or couple of doughnuts slimy with sugar, then reenter. Like decompression, for a diver. I did my best to blend in with the wall's beige paint and ignore the sharp looks from those joining me, in jeans and T's, in short- sleeve white shirts with ties and polyester slacks, all men, by the self-serve coffeepot. Should have brought a bucket and mop for disguise, then no one would be taking notice ofmeatall.
The store had a free bulletin board on the wall by the serve-yourself coffeemaker. It held the usual business cards for car repair, heating and cooling, home improvement, and the usual handwritten notices for apartments to let, entertainment centers, musical instruments, pets and sound systems for sale. One hand-lettered paper read:
FREEDOM. THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS.
First letters a kind of homespun Gothic, tall columns and buttresses all but dripping with blood.
I NDIVIDUAL RIGHTS. REMEMBER THOSE? OR A PIECE OF PAPER CALLED THE CONSTITUTION? BACK BEFORE THE GOVERNMENT DECIDED ITS NEEDS SUPERSEDED YOUR RIGHTS. GOVERNMENT DOESN'T EVEN EXIST-IT'S ONLY THE PEOPLE'S VOICE-SOMETHING ELSE IT SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN. IF YOUR AMONG THOSE WHO THINK IT'S IMPORTANT THE GOVERNMENT REMEMBERS THIS-SOMEONE WHO FEELS A CALL TO GO ON REMINDING IT – YOUR NOT ALONE.
I wrote die phone number down in my notebook, glancing up out of habit to record the time as well. 11:12 A.M.
Hour or so later, I watch the messenger climb out of his van and walk up the sidewalk to the mailboxes. He scans them, and moments later rings the bell outside Verne's door. I take the package inside, pour a large drink, setde down to read. Get up after a while to put on coffee and go on reading.
Ten at night, Jodie shows up at my door. She's thrown him out again but is mortally afraid he'll be back before the night's over-with a load on, as she says. Or with buddies. She's most afraid when his buddies come over. They sit there all night long drinking and after a while (Jodie's words again) their eyes glaze over, like they've gone somewhere else. Things have got a lot worse since he was laid off. And he's been bringing home new friends and drinking buddies that scare her more than the old ones did. He talks a lot these days about inalienable rights, the right to bear arms, what he calls the burden of freedom.
• • • • There's no easy explanation: that the world has changed around them, become something they no longer realize, for example. What they're trying to do, it seems to me, is to return to something diat never existed, some notion of the U.S. cobbled together out of received wisdom-from old movies, nouns that drop in capitals off the tongue, catchphrases, that call of solitude at the secret heart of every American, the simple demand to be left alone.
• • • • They're not heroes, though in another time, and this is part of what I findso fascinating, they might have been. They want to be heroes. They want to be heroes all alone, all by themselves, to and for themselves.
• • • • This is where the world makes sense to me, maybe the only place: looking out the window of this trailer. Out into America.
• • • • Six in the morning, just past dawn. I'm sitting outside with a firstcup of coffee watching herons glide on the breeze, hawks setde onto trees. I look about me-at these trailers with porches or rooms built on, the battered pickups and cheap old cars, at the juke joint just up the road. And realize that I love it all.
Putting the pages back into the envelope, I thought about Rabelais's dying words: Je m'en vay chercher un grand Peut-etre. I go looking for a Great Maybe.
That's what Ray Amano had done. And I had no idea how it turned out, what he found when he went looking, where he was. I'm remembering forward now, to a time many years later when, like Amano, I'd vanish into my own Great Maybe, book passage on my own drunkboat, walk off suddenly into Nighttown and come back with dark news.
8
You boys might not want to do that.' They were only a few years younger than I, but we'd come up so differently the gulf would be un-breachable. I remembered what I'd told Dana Esmay: that we existed in different worlds, that it wasn't like in movies, with secret passageways to get from there to here.
Maybe you couldn't get from there to here. Maybe Mother was right: their lives had nothing to do with the one we lived, and never would.
They were, the three of them, pretty much standard-issue Southern suburban white males, dressed in slacks and print shirts over white T-shirts. One, living on the edge, had grown his hair out and wore a small moustache. He seemed to be the leader.
'What the hell,' one of the others said, looking not at me but at the moustache bearer. His shirt was yellowish white with rust-colored stains baked into it on trips through his mother's electric dryer, so it looked a little like he was wearing a plate of spaghetti. 'Now some nigger thinks he's gonna tell us what to do?'
'What not to do,' I corrected him, as the third one shook his head in wonderment. What was this world coming to? He'd be the one the others shoved around, gave a hard time, made fun of.
'What is it, man,' Spaghetti said, 'you can't find enough trouble for yourself back in the projects, you gotta come out here where you know your kind aren't wanted looking for more?'
Moustache took in my black suit. 'Shit, and it ain't even Sunday. You one of them Muslims or something?'
I pointed to the things they carried. 'Guess I'm not the only kind you don't want.'
'It's a neighborhood thing. No business of yours.'
'Maybe I'm Jewish.'
Since he couldn't decide how to take that, he ignored it. 'Those people don't belong here.'
'Jews, you mean.'
'Shit, man, for two thousand years ain't no one ever wanted them. You think there's not a reason for that?'
