'Guess I ought to feel proud, then, since you wanted my people. Wanted us so bad you came all the way to where we lived and carried us off. Paid top dollar, too.'
'Yeah, and look where that went,' Spaghetti said.
'No offense,' Moustache added.
'Look. You boys have no reason to be here. None of you has met Mel Gold, or any of his family and friends, or knows anything about them.' All told, they weren't much worse than others their age, mimicking what they saw around them, filled with frustrations and undirected energies, lightning taking the shortest path to the ground. 'Why don't you all just go on back home?'
'What the fuck you think you are, these Jews's bodyguard?' From the look he shot the others, Moustache thought that was pretty funny.
'No. I'm your shadow,' I said. 'Big black thing that follows you around.'
He looked out across the acre or so of dark houses set in regular rows like vegetables in a plot, one of them almost certainly his, looking for reassurance, a reminder of why they'd come here, what this all meant. It wasn't supposed to go like this.
'You boys lay down your burdens and get started now, you can have everything back together inside the hour.'
Spaghetti took a measured step towards me. 'What you mean back together?'
'Well, I walked in from down there.' I pointed towards the stand of water oaks a couple of blocks off. 'And as I came by your truck-that blue Dodge back there is yours, right?-I couldn't help but notice as how someone's let the air out of all four tires.'
'Damn!'
'I agree. Terrible thing to do to a man. And so far from home, too.'
They looked at one another and started towards the truck.
'Boys… Now you won't be needing them, why don't you just go ahead and set those things down right there.'
After a moment they did.
I went over and looked. A can of bright yellow paint, some homemade stink bombs, and a sack of freshdogshit. About what you'd expect. Just like I'd expected the flyers, with that crooked Fs foot becoming the cross for a T, in the glove compartment of their truck.
They'd get the tires aired up quick enough, I knew, no problem. I'd also reached around behind the wheel well on the passenger side and cut the ground wire from the starter. It was going to take them a lot longer to findthat.
'Your problems not over, Mr. Gold. It's never that easy. But I don't think the boys will be back, at least. Not these boys.'
I hung up the phone and looked at the clock. 7:36. I'd Verne had come weaving through the door dead tired not long after I had, six or so, and now was asleep, half dressed still, in the back room.
I cracked a third beer and leafed again through the pages Lee Gardner sent me, scanning them superficially atfirst, like a true believer who's not looking for understanding, for rational connections between words, words and ideas, words and world, but for some subliminal crackle, a frisson of revelation. Soon enough, though, as before, I was drawn in.
Lonnie Johnson, 'the brown-breasted black warbler,' died this morning. He'd spent the last few days mostly in the narrow channel between wall and bed, but emerged periodically, at first anyway, to rub the back of his head and neck against walls, bedclothes, table legs and people legs to insist that I pet him. He had stopped eating, and began growing ever weaker, until finally he could barely raise his head. He lay there against the wall, and a far- away, resigned look came into his eye. He was waiting. Urine pooled around him. Last night I got a screwdriver fromthe cabinet and took the bed's supports apart, so that I could reach down and rub his head lightly. I hope that I'll remember always his gentleness, his sweetness. If another cat came to his bowl, Lonnie would back away and let the other eat, waiting quiedy.
I'd turned the TV on for company, a habit I'd taken to of late, God knows why, sound cranked low. Onscreen were four chimpanzees dressed in shiny tuxedos with red bow ties, their bandstand decorated with huge sequined musical notes and the name KONGO KINGS in blue wavelike letters. One chimp sat behind a toy drum set, another at a Schroeder-size keyboard, one held a plastic saxophone, one a banjo. Well trained, they went about their charade precisely, slamming at drum and cymbal, fingering banjo and sax, running hands up and down keys. They were even more or less on beat. Duke Ellington came out of the speaker.
This book, which I'm coming more and more to think of as American Solitude, can only end with me alone again, sitting here as at its beginning staring out at strutting blackbirds, a solitary squirrel, the occasional lizard rippling through sunlight. The feral kitten I wrote about back at the first, so many pages ago, became quite tame, in due time moved into the trailer with me, and grew to adulthood. There is a picture window here (which I must have mentioned at some point, though I can't remember) almost the exact size of the counter top where I work, a screen upon which the world projects itself. At night, wind catches in the trailer'sfissuresand faults, moaning in polyphony, sombre Gregorian chants. Alicia writes that she wishes things could be as they were before but knows they cannot. I recall Santayana's observing that he enjoyed writing about his life more than he did living it. Around me trees hunch their shoulders and duck their heads like bowlers; a branch scrapes at my window with the sound of a crow's cawing. In this book I will have tried to say many things; others I will not have intended but said anyway, in the simple course of ending one sentence and beginning anodier.
Out my own window, out LaVerne's, I watched as the day began, people moving from houses to cars, pacing down steps as though counting, stopping at corners to wait their turn, crossing. Mr. Jones did it in the Pinto with a work schedule.
We are all of us astonishing, portable worlds circling and spinning about one another, exchanging bits of matter from time to time like binary stars, our separate lights reaching out feeble and doomed through this darkness we can never understand: we are all diminutive fires.
Diminutivefires. From the Neruda poem I'd quoted to LaVerne back at the hospital. City lights. The diminutive fires of the planet.
I thought of Amano bunkered down there in his house trailer, a squatter, an intellectual passing in shitkicker land, and remembered Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire writing how he'd try having meals in his trailer and suddenly feel the crush of loneliness, how only when he'd moved his meal outside, away from society's trappings, would the loneliness go away.
Hour after hour, day after day, Amano sat looking out his desk-size window at trees filledwith birds and squirrels, at one high corner of an adjoining trailer maybe, or the butt end of another, thinking his thoughts of young Joan of Arc, men with no place in the world who nonetheless sense themselves supplanted, slowly dying men and those reborn, great maybes. Behind him a dirt road stretched back to the juke joint on its gravel lot, a borderland of sorts, an outpost, then on eventually to civilization, the city. Around and beneath the trailer he'd inherited from his parents lay lawn chairs with webbing rotted away, cinder blocks whose cavelike hollows housed a variety of small living things, the empty shell of a power lawn mower, two or three garden hoses so long coiled they could not be undone, a terra-cotta birdbath in pieces, hip boots, a galvanized washtub, parts of two outdoor grills.
Day after day he sat there, and in these pages tried to find a way out, to scramble back up the sides of various pits he'd dug for himself. Tried to turn what were essentially journal jottings, stray bits and pieces of his life, into something else, something with form, with substance: fiction, essays, a book. You could feel the need, the pressure of it, lurking and groaning just out of sight, feel even your body's response. But there was nodiing when you turned your light that way.
Then three-quarters of the way through, having left behind like a shed skin its labors to become a novel and been swept ever closer to the writer's own daily life, the manuscript changed. Ray Amano emerged fromhis climb onto the rim of a green plateau.
He had found his theme. I stood to get another beer and, glancing again towards the window, saw a face there looking in.
'Hosie?' I said from the patio moments later. The paving stones were irregular, kidney and egg shapes, rhomboids, someone's demented idea of a game board. 'What are you doing standing out here? Why didn't you come on in?'
His eyes turned to me, dull, distant. Slowly they changed.
