glove compartment. There was a revolver in there, a long-barreled thing, probably a.45, and I wondered how often he took target practice or in his mind fired from the speeding car, knocking off coyotes, redskins, small foreign automobiles. And now he was doubly screened behind stained windshield and sunglasses, bowed low in his cool church, and I knew this was why I was with him, to search out the final extreme, the bible as weapon, the lean hunt of the godfearing man for the child who confounded his elders. Clevenger drove with one hand.
'They ought to be drug out in the desert and horsewhipped. '
'They're not bothering anybody,' I said.
'That's government land they're on.'
'So what.'
'Hey boy, you got your back up, ain't you? Chip, chip, chip. I can't say I blame you. I did my best to get back last night but the wheelers were dealing and the dealers were wheeling. It was a right fine mess. Then there was this woman.'
'It's okay,' I said.
'Call me cap'n now.'
'It's okay, cap'n.'
'There was this woman. A pot of warm syrup. I hate like hell to have to be getting back. The goddamn punctured lung of America. But that's all right. We'll have us a pig-party. Hey, see that gulch over there?'
'I've never been to Texas.'
'Where we're going ain't exactly Texas. It ain't exactly no place. See that gulch we just passed? That's a piece of local history, that spot. I get put in a good frame of mind just thinking about what happened there. Of course some people wouldn't think it was so damn funny.'
'I'm listening,' I said.
'Now this girl was about twenty-one years old. A sweet little coed. Spends a night with a married man. Goes home the next day and tells her mama and daddy. Don't ask me why. Maybe just to rub their faces in it. They decide she needs a lesson. Whole family drives out into the desert, right out to that spot we just passed. All three of them plus the girl's pet dog. Papa tells the girl to dig a shallow grave. Mama gets down on her hands and knees and holds the dog by the collar. When the girl is all through digging, papa gives her a.22 caliber revolver and tells her to shoot the dog. A real touching family scene. Make a good calendar for some religious group to give away. The girl puts the weapon to her temple and kills herself. Now isn't that a heartwarming son of a bitch of a story? Restores my faith in just about everything.'
'This is the only country in the world that has funny violence,' I said.
'And what do you think the parents are charged with? Now what do you think? Go on now, take a crack at it.'
'Manslaughter?'
'Manslaughter, hell. Cruelty to animals. Intent to kill, maim or otherwise injure, or suffer to be killed, maimed or injured, or an accessory thereof, a damn dog. That beats my meat. That's the living dead end.'
He howled then, the consummate reb yell, a two-syllable sound that was hog call, battle cry, the bark of the saved soul at a prayer meeting. I didn't understand Clevenger. There were shades to him which dimmed what I kept expecting to find. Literature. Movies. We cut across the scaly land and it seemed to glide a tongue among the bones of mules and greed, and all signs pointed to national monuments, to Organ Pipe, Casa Grande, Saguaro, Chiricahua, Gila, White Sands, loving attempts to embalm the long riddle of the cliff-dwellers, and we moved into evening, crest of the setting sun at our rear window, the tender menace of our land, freetailed bats in flight above the whispering huts of mystics and every unwritten death singing in the hills. Literature. I told Clevenger about Incredible Shrinking Man, his great height and brawn, the energy of his presence.
'I ain't seen the man yet who bullets bounce off of.'
At some point in the night, sleepless, as I stood by a window overlooking a blue swimming pool, I remembered walking once past the Waldorf and St. Bartholomew's and the Seagram Building and then looking across the street to see a lovely girl in light green standing by the Mercedes-Benz showroom on Fifty-sixth Street. It was a summer evening, a Friday, and the city was beginning to empty. I crossed to the traffic island and paused a moment, watching her. She was waiting for someone. The violet twilight of Park Avenue slid across tall glass. Traffic slowed and the mild bleating of horns lifted a half note of longing into the heavy dusk. There was a sense of the tropics, of voluptuousness and plucked fruit, and also of the sea, a promise disclosing itself in tides of air salted by the rivers and bay, and of penthouse hammocks and huge green plants, a man and woman watching the city descend into the musical craters of its birth. And she stood by the window, not quite facing me, shapely and fair, all that elegant velocity bottled behind her, concealed torsion bars and disc brakes, the poise of fine machinery, and her body then, softly turning, seemed to melt into the rippling glass. That was all there was and it was everything.
'We'll be sucking hind tit if we don't get moving,' Clevenger said.
He was putting on his boots in the dark. He had slept only two hours after driving close to four hundred miles and it was still deep night when we set out again. He said he had not slept at all the previous night, needing only a hot towel and shave, the bite of a crusty cigar, to keep his senses on target. I turned on the portable radio and we listened to the Reverend Tom Thumb Goodloe, a country singer and preacher shouting out of El Paso. Clevenger began to smile.
'Adams I say. Aldrich I say. Andrews, Armstrong, Bancroft, Barton, Bennett, Box, Brown, Bryan. Give me Calder. Give me Carpenter and I'm all right. Give me Cartwright, Cassidy, Cole, Cooper, Curtis, Dale, Dixon. I want Elliot on my team. Fowler sounds like my kind of man. I want Benjamin Cromwell Franklin. I want Calvin Gage. I want Albert Gallatin. I want Gant, Gillespie, Gray, Green, Hale, Hamilton, Hawkins, Hunt, Ingram, Jackson, Jennings, Jones, Kenyon, King, Lambert, Lane, Lawrence. Lewis I say. Lightfoot I say. Lindsay and Logan. Love, Marshall, Martin. Maxwell I say. McClelland, McCoy, McKay, Mercer, Mitchell, Moore, Nabers, Nash, Orr, Pace, Parker, Patton, Phillips. I want to hear the right-sounding names like Powell, Proctor, Reed and Reese. I want to hear Rhodes, Robbins, Rockwell, Russell, Sanders, Scott, Slayton. I want to hear the old-time names like Smith, Stilwell, Taylor, Thompson, Tindale. I want the good people on my side. Trask, Turner, Tyler, Wade, Walker, White, Williams, Yancey, York, Young. They were all there, every last one of them, raising the lone star standard. And by God there was a Goodloe too. Robert Kemp Goodloe. And I was not a stranger in my own land.'
'What was that all about?' I said.
'He likes to read off some of the names they got scratched on one of the monuments over at the San Jacinto battleground cemetery. War with the Mexicans. Sam Houston. Army of the Republic of Texas. He likes to leave out all the foreign-sounding names.'
'Plain talk of the plain people. Only a youth but a youth with a song. Only a poor native son but a son with a hymn in his heart. Dirt farmer and banjo player but all Texas is my home and I am not a stranger unto it.'
'He's warming up now,' Clevenger said.
'If you can't pronounce a man's name, that man is a stranger; and if he don't look you in the eye, he runs with danger.'
'Nothing but hell, ain't he?'
'Soft white underbelly. Spread those words around and tell those good neighbors of yours to keep the ball rolling. Tell them you heard those words from out of the mouth of Tom Thumb Goodloe, the midnight evangelist, twenty-six years old and on his way to the glory road. Now what are those words? Those words are soft, white and underbelly. Spread them around, friends. We're too soft and too sweet and we got to bear down on all those people that blaspheme our Christian nation with their catcalling and their jibbering like an Islamic sect from out of the motion pictures. We got to blitz them, friends. We got to send our linebackers. Keeryst Jesus was not a stranger in his own land. He spoke the lingo. He ate the grub. He felt right at home. Now our fine engineer, Mr. Dale Mulholland, signals me it's time to do some singing and I ask each and every one of you out there to join along with me, right there in your beds or in your kitchens fixing a late snack or what all you're doing. Will you come to the bower? Those that know it raise their voices with me. Those that don't, should. But first we have to pause so's I can read this commercial message.'
I didn't know what was so funny but Clevenger was driving all over the road and punching the steering wheel in glee. I changed stations, a wave of exhaustion coming over me as I slipped down into the seat. Ten minutes later a Spanish-speaking disc jockey signed off in a blur of static and a few seconds after that another voice traveled across the long night.
'Fools, pretenders, pharisees and knaves. Beastly here with the final hour of 'Death Is Just Around the Corner.'
