Loitering: New and Collected Essays (8 page)

Communion

we worship

the salmon

because we

eat salmon

—Sherman Alexie

I prop open the hood of my truck, pull out the dipstick, burn the excess oil off in the fire, and skewer my salmon by interlacing four or five clumsy sutures through the skin. (Better prepared, I would’ve baked a few potatoes on the engine manifold. A woman in Montana told me I should always keep a can of black pepper in my tool kit, because in a pinch it’ll plug a radiator leak. When I asked her if there were any other spices I ought to store in the car, she said an onion in your glove box isn’t a bad idea for your
DUI
situations. Had I heeded her advice, my truck would’ve been pretty much as fully equipped as my kitchen.) Anyway, I get my unadorned filet sizzling over the fire and the skin instantly starts dripping gobbets of crackling fat on the coals. I set some coffee on my stove and crank the flame. I lean back against a log and look
at my watch, angling the face into the firelight. It’s a quarter to five.

The men in my family have undone themselves in some kind of grand westering impulse gone awry. We ran out of land and then went one step farther, west of the West. We’ve shot ourselves and jumped from bridges and lost our minds and aborted some of our babies and orphaned others, and now reproducing and carrying on the family name is down to me, and the truth is soul-wise I’m likely a bigger monster than either of my broken brothers or my father. As the extant capable male in my family I either perpetuate our name or wipe it off the earth forever. The hints about what I should do haven’t been so awfully subtle that even a mental clodhopper like myself can’t catch the drift. Nature in me has come up empty, and so be it. I figure it took thousands of years to make Irish and Italians of my grandparents; America undid that in a scant generation. We’ve come to nothing—so soon?

Shine On, Perishing Republic!

I’m not sure I want to be the dead end of it all but then again how would I really feel with my seed trailing after me, wanting things? The mythopoeia of my family now seems to say if we persist in any patronymic way that’s history and destiny and if we die off then in some loop-the-loop of logic that turns out to be history and destiny as well, ha ha.

It’s always been a fond Western dream, after all the blood and pavement and franchising, to undo the whole sorry business and begin again.

The first best seller in America was an epic poem by Michael Wigglesworth called
The Day of Doom
.

There’s a beginning.

What’s left to say?

I wish I had some children that were around going, “Daddy, Daddy,” so I could provide a wise impartial answer or at least pour a glass of milk for them. Who needs Pascal—“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then”—since even without a philosophical assist my uselessness appalls me.

The fog’s gone away like a ghost. I turn off my lantern. I pick my salmon off the dipstick and eat it with my fingers and watch to the south as a great confetti-ish flight of seagulls spins through the air; and behind me a sandhill crane with an ungainly pterodactyl
whomp
of its wings lifts above the estuary of a river whose name I don’t know; once aloft on its six-foot wings the crane
soars in a circle with unlabored grace, landing back in the alluvial mud exactly where it began.

Where am I, in what land, in whose time?

Right this moment in the matter of Here vs. There I guess I’d rather be in some warm kitchen with little pieces of dirty chicken on the linoleum and last night’s macaroni noodles underfoot and a pile of unwashed bobbies in the sink. And just exactly where are all the fine, tender, decent, steady, productive, forthright family men in the world right now, men toward whom, in infrequent but fairly rhythmic, practically menstrual fits of waking horror, I feel jealous? Not on this beach, that’s for sure. I guess my true Here will always be an Elsewhere. And so I’ve arrived in this strange place and it’s OK for now, it’s rich, it’s really queer, it’s made of the morning a kind of phantasmagoria, the stuff of dreams and fevers, and what was I really thinking anyway, that my phantom children, needing wisdom and milk, were supposed to be out here with me, pissing in the ocean too?

Catching Out

My father’s agoraphobia made leaving the house a spooky and ritualistic process, ruled by mysterious tempers, but with enough drugs it sometimes happened, and we were off, the whole family, on vacation! The drugs that loosened his nerves and made the big bad outside world navigable also made him a sloppy driver, weaving lackadaisically around the highway, and wherever we were going—California, Vancouver—would seem very far away. Invariably, our crappy car would catch fire on steep grades (my sister’s job was to douse the transmission hump with water when she saw the carpet fibers smoldering), plus with seven kids, all piled on top of each other, somebody was always carsick and ralphing in the backseat. We kept an old dented saucepan in the
car, called the Spit-Up Pan, which we passed around so my dad wouldn’t have to pull over every time a child needed to vomit.

Subsequently, I’ve never been much of a vacationer, and even now, when somebody starts talking about Hawaii or Cancun or St. Barts, I pray they won’t mention the color of the water and tell me about snorkeling. As a young man, I tried Europe, but the woman I was meeting, on our second day in Paris, said she needed time alone, and went off to Barcelona with somebody else. For three days I walked to the Hôtel de Ville for reasons that are too stupid to admit and read an omnibus edition of Dashiell Hammett. I’d never been lied to like that, and I took my pain to mean I lacked continental sophistication, and Paris sort of died inside me.

But!

I loved hopping freight trains. It was cheap, dirty, loud, picturesque, illegal, athletic, dangerous, and, best of all, it didn’t seem like a vacation. In fact, as far as I could tell, judging from personal experience, as well as things I’d heard, there was nothing in riding trains that even remotely resembled pleasure. It was hard work. You walked for miles on a crippling ballast of gravel, looking for an open boxcar, and slept on a cushion of cardboard, your feet forward, in the direction of travel, so that you wouldn’t break your neck in a derailment.
You drank water from old Clorox bottles. You pissed out the door. You ate canned sardines. The schedule was indifferent to your needs and the destinations were all pointless. The only souvenir I have from that time is a rusted railroad spike. There might have been some romance to it—there might have been some road signs and red neon, some dead ends and diners, some hash browns—but really I was just skylarking. All the skills necessary for hopping trains were the sort you master by the time you get out of grade school. It was all jungle-gym stuff, it was monkey bars and rings and ladders, and if you could climb and run, if you had reasonable balance, if you liked jumping and bouncing and falling, then you could ride freight trains.

The minute you entered a yard the bigness of the trains translated right into your bones. I know it sounds corny, but you got proxy thrills of power, wandering around in those corridors made from some of the world’s big machines. It was jarring to be in their midst, they were so gargantuan. Boxcars wide as whales, locomotives roaming up and down the yard with the single white eye of a Cyclops, grain hoppers overflowing with corn and wheat, gondolas piled with scrap metal and flatbeds loaded with raw logs or finished lumber, triple-deckers packed with import cars, empty deadheads and old rusting crummies shunted onto sidings. The dreamy
size of the trains made your sense of trespass keen—it felt fatal—and the noise of the yard was enough to knock you over. And yet for all the vagrant time I spent, I never had any real hassles. The guys who work the trains are among that peculiar class of impassioned men in America, men who love their work and, loving it, want to share, as though they were holding their job in trust and some fabled and crucial part of America were stored inside their days in office. They’re like firemen in that respect, without the tiresome noble sentiments. I’d wave collegially to the brakemen high up in the cupola of a caboose and talk easily to the men making up trains, men who in turn would pull a manifest from their pockets and point out a decent ride, an empty box or gon on the next train out.

Boxcars were the best rides, offering a room with a view and some protection from the rain or sun or snow, a leeward wall out of the wind, a dark corner to hide in when the snakes who walked the line came by, checking hydraulics. I’d jam a stick or discarded brake shoe in the door so it wouldn’t rattle shut and make a sepulchre of the box while I slept. Most nights, though, I stayed up late, sleepless, because of all the bouncing, and besides, I liked the clangor of crossing guards, candy-striped and flashing with warning lights, an idled car or two waiting in the dim red glow.

After a few days you were filthy, carrying a funeral around on your face. The dirt wasn’t unpleasant and mostly I remember feeling it was honorable—I translated it directly into miles, into small towns and states. I would pack along a pair of gloves, which kept my hands somewhat clean as I climbed over couplings and boosted myself into boxcars, but in the main I liked being dirty and feeling, on some level, strange and unwelcome. It sharpened my longing and called upon reserves of faith I didn’t know I possessed. The dirt was like an account, a measure of wealth, and so, as the days and miles went by, I felt as though I were becoming someone.

This Is Living

I was seven and had a leather purse full of silver dollars, both of which, the purse and the coins, I considered valuable. I wanted them stored in the bank. At the time, the bank had an imposing landmark status in my map of the world, in part because it shared the same red brick as the public school, the two most substantial buildings in our town. As a Catholic school kid I did a lot of fundraising in the form of selling candy bars, Christmas stamps and fruitcakes, and my favorite spot for doing business was outside the bank, on Friday afternoons, because that was payday. Working men came to deposit their checks and left the bank with a little cash for the weekend. Today, that ritual is nearly gone, its rhythms broken, except for people on welfare, who
still visit banks and pack into lines, waiting for tellers, the first of every month. But back then I’d set my box of candy on the sidewalk and greet customers, holding the door for them like a bellhop. Friends of mine with an entirely different outlook on life tried to sell their candy at the grocery store, but I figured that outside the supermarket people might lie or make excuses, claiming to be broke; but not here, not at the bank, for reasons that seemed obvious to me: this was the headquarters of money. Most of the men were feeling flush and optimistic, flush because they were getting paid and would soon have money in their pockets, optimistic because the workweek was over and they could forget what they had done for the money. On their way in I’d ask if they wanted to buy a candy bar and they’d dip a nod and smile and say with a jaunty promissory confidence that I should catch them on the way out. And I did. I sold candy bars like a fiend. Year after year, I won the plastic Virgin Marys and Crucifixes and laminated holy cards that were given away as gifts to the most enterprising sales-kids at school. I liked the whole arrangement. On those Friday afternoons and early evenings, I always dressed in my salt-and-pepper corduroy pants and saddle shoes and green cardigan, a school uniform that I believed made me as recognizable to the world as a priest in his soutane, and I remember
feeling righteous, an acolyte doing God’s work, or the Church’s. Money touched everyone in town, quaintly humanizing them, and I enjoyed standing outside the bank, at the center of civic life. This was my early education into the idea of money.