American Spirit: A Novel (27 page)

Matthew howls through a smile, “It was amazing! I feel like if Tim didn’t have us hooked up with this rig you’d be able to dive down there and get us a couch and television!”

Tic Tac, still calm and contemplative from being in his underwater world, states rather plainly, “Who the fuck throws a couch and TV in a stream? There’s no couches down there.” Modoch stays silent, and Tim is focused on setting up the lawn chairs and a portable table, but without even looking he manages to afford a bit of attention to simply backing up Tic Tac, like two parents who know enough to always present a united front.

“Matthew, you don’t throw furniture and shit into streams—imagine what this place would look like if everyone pulled shit like that.”

“No, yeah, obviously. I was just saying it’s amazing what he has—how he’s hidden stuff.”

“Here, give me a hand flipping the table over,” Tim says with a shake of the head the way a kind parent might shake their head in loving exasperation. Matthew grabs half, Tim grabs the other half, and they flip it over and into place, each arranging the four chairs around it.

Slough Creek is a desolate little northeast corner of kill-or-be-killed terrain, severe and broad. Matthew sits imagining the tents of late-season adventurers being stomped flat by grizzlies tired of tearing up thirty-pound stumps and logs for an ounce or two of grubs. The bones of an elk aren’t far from the bumper of the rig, bones picked clean by everything that moves in after a kill has satisfied and left drowsy the wolves or bear that brought it down. The brain moves slowly here but manages the thought:
Another beautiful place where you can feel lives gone and whatever small trace they’ve left behind.

The day fades down like a summer breakup song, goes from white-hot to burned and orange, to red, to a dark purple wound around a bright fang of a moon. When the day was still red and orange, Tic Tac made use of feathers from the dried jerky-shriveled pheasant neck. Spun, tied, and glued onto a small hook, fixed to monofilament fishing line, the fishing line fixed to the thicker, green floating-cord stuff,
no rod, no reel, just lines and dead bird remnants. The feathers were sprayed with a little silicon lubricant from the rig’s steel toolbox.

“This shit will stop the squeak in a door, get you high, and make this little fucker float better than a real bug—that’s some bang for the buck.” And with this, Tic Tac goes down to the bank again, lies right down at the edge of it, floats this tiny knot of dead bird downstream right near the bank, feeding the fishing line out from his hand first, then the bright green floating-cord stuff went right through the same two fingers, until the whole little tiny, precise assembly is eight or ten feet past his face at the edge of the stream. Hearty cutthroat trout swim along the surface and investigate the downed airship of what seems like coveted protein. Seeing no shadow at the bank or in the current, and sensing nothing awry with the offering, the trout poke their noses right up below the con job bug and suck it in. Tic Tac watches for a rise and take, and when he sees the fish suck it down, he quietly thrusts his hands down underwater, a fast punch at the earth to set the hook into the fish’s mouth, and then quickly starts wrapping the line back around his hand, retrieving what he laid out. He never makes a sound lying there, doesn’t even seem to breathe, he brings in three beautiful cutthroat trout, one right after the other, with the calm of an assassin far from home with a job to get done quickly and quietly.

Now in the part of the night that has turned from a bruise to all black and stars, the men eat trout cooked on the fire at their feet, served with rice microwaved in the rig looming at
their backs. Look one way and it’s otherworldly and untamed landscapes, almost lunar, black, filled with a thousand things one doesn’t know about themselves yet—certainly roamed by wolves and bears out there somewhere; look behind you and the rig hovers there, sharp, shiny, ugly, comforting, humming, and whirring; a reminder that there are factories full of ordinary people making giant metal boxes that aim to deliver tame comfort on the most severe, lonely, gorgeous terra firma. This is land that leaves you sitting next to your own ghost at the end of the day, a fire at your feet, and just beyond the light of what’s burning, animals real and imagined fearlessly feeding, fucking, farting, and howling hot breath into crisp air, living and dying.

After dinner, the night opens into a field of booze, beer, weed, and shoplifted snack foods. Tic Tac reads aloud from a weird little secondhand book of cowboy poetry. The genre seems to be the last American depository for Rocky Mountain men with names like Old Bill Bailey—sporting, spirited, vaguely racist dolts who pass their days shoving themselves inside of unsuspecting women or claiming Indian slaves to prank around with, all in a whiskey-fueled fiery boredom veiled as taking simple pleasures in a country that’s up for making sport of a situation, all in good cheer. And what’s even better about it is that it does all of this while being polite enough to unveil the legends in simple rhyme schemes that one can feel and predict even with a head full of beer, even after having the face and brain hovering over the vaporous maw of a paper sack soaked in aerosol lubricant and
stolen lighter fluid. Cowboy poetry is solid fireside entertainment, it turns out. This poetry is to be enjoyed on nights like this, far enough away from any intelligent society that might rightfully set people aflame for celebrating it, much less celebrating it with a sixty-foot-long Sierra Mountain Air luxury coach off in the shadows, while getting high on what your hop-on acquaintance shoplifted in town. Matthew sits back and lets the brain bask in the silly rhymes of low heroes denuding cultures and raping kind and plain wallflower women who never saw it coming. The heart feels heavy at turns, but the head dances with the idea that these men took the time to record their down days in funny rhyme and simple meter! The brain rallies that one’s worst moments put forth in elementary funny rhyme and simple meter may be the point of living; that these cowboy poets may have had it right all along, the rape and slave stuff aside.

“Why do people so often miss that point, you know?” Matthew asks.

“There isn’t a point to that shit, it’s just funny,” says Tic Tac. “That lady in the log cabin was just doing laundry and when she turned her back at the sink, he gave her the horn and that Indian had to stay outside feeding Bill’s horse. But the twist is, it turns out the Indian was smoking Bill’s tobacco and drinking his whiskey. He fucked Old Bill Bailey over since Bill got the lady! That’s funny as shit, that’s why I was laughing so fucking hard. There’s that part, what’s it say”—Tic Tac starts leafing fast through the tiny book—“Right here: ‘And my redskin friend had been doing to me
with a wink, what I had done all evening long to the fair miss scrubbing my laundry at her sink.’ That shit’s hilarious because usually the Indians are the ones getting screwed over in these things. This guy put a twist on it.”

“Right, yep, breaking form,” Tim offers with a pretty intense focus and speedy cadence for a guy who’s supposed to be done with cocaine.

Modoch sits silently, clearly not enjoying cowboy poetry night. Matthew sits quietly, the head racing and always ending up wondering if maybe Tic Tac’s right, that there is no point. The head ventures the theory that maybe we’re just here and gone and maybe if we aren’t ready to go, we leave our dirty little ghost roaming around with nothing to do but be seen by children and house cats. On the heart, a thousand little pieces of graffiti, all dead-end schoolboy doodles of Tatiana’s name; the head tries to remember perfectly the details of her biological container, especially her stomach and face, the stunning angles, and even the weird angles, the ones we see people from as the years pass.

Something hits Tim, lights him up like it’s 1998 again, and evidently it doesn’t matter that there’s no segue from what Tic Tac was saying. The way the men spring up and speak now is like the disjointed rant of rehab—random sharing, Tic Tac reading from his tiny book, Modoch in a vow of silence, Matthew playing the new arrival still fresh from the outside world. Slough Creek Campground feels like a psychiatric ward with fire and fish; a nuthouse with wolves and
bears and buffalo, all of it perched on top of some fiery bastard of a volcano that will take it all back one day just as easily as it created it; and it warns them of this with the mild sulfuric stink of nearby springs hot enough to cook a man, and the giant hisses and distant geysers erupting even without tourists gathered up to watch from a safe distance. Tim is up out of his chair, hot, ready to erupt.

“This world, am I right? I mean, here we are, in this park, one big plateau surrounded by mountains of ice, and the whole place sitting on top of a volcano that’s gonna go again one day and turn this place into one hot lava lake of dead do-gooders on vacation, but in the meantime it charms families and fishermen with its beauty and grace. This place is heaven but it’s the devil’s big fiery gut underneath it all that keeps it going, fuck yes. And I’m the same kind of thing working the same con and grift, but they’re trying to put me away for it, Chief—Sport! Sport. The world paints a bull’s-eye on Wall Street because it’s only the fighting, fucking, prospering, and starving they can see. The rest of it is hidden across the country in national parks, and in every Plain Jane and Joe Six-Pack work-a-day heart. Put on a fucking smock and punch the clock at Walmart and keep the rape and pillaging far enough away from your day-to-day grind and you’re a hero, but haul your ass onto a trading floor, whipped by good noseful of burn from a hooker who’s forcibly moved into your home to sexually degrade you, get in there and buy your buys and sell your sells, fill the day orders, fuck or be
fucked, bleed or be hung and bled out, and you’re the bad guy. Make a lot of people wealthy and they call you a criminal and say what you’re doing is illegal.”

“Yeah, but what you were doing is, actually, considered a fel…”

“A guy like me, just trying to do something good, swinging the scythe through the bullshit that’s gone to seed so he can find some green, make some money, sure, but leaving a lot of folks in his wake with more than they had in the first place. Sure, yes, fine, you move some junk at deep discount to make some Joe feel like a player in a free market that, hello, his country was built on. For that, they call you a criminal?”

“Yeah, but in your case, you…”

“Guys like me, Chief—fuck—SPORT… sports like me, Champ, we’re not doing anything that the average grocery store isn’t doing on any given day. Moving the milk that’s almost bad up to the front, move the fresh stuff to the back behind it; take the money you made selling the milk and use it to pay the butcher instead of the milk delivery tab because the milk can be paid in thirty days when you sell a hundred grand in fresh meat, which you know is going to sell because you heard the weather’s gonna break this weekend so folks can have friends over for a barbecue. Nothing wrong with it, but get a guy like me doing the same thing and people start yelling ‘Stop, thief!’ the second they think they should be richer.”

“Yeah, but, I mean, for the analogy to work, the grocer
would have to be so high he’s blind and wearing dildo boots that…”

Suddenly in a flash, Modoch is up from his chair by the fire in a huff, kicking up dust, stomping around. Tim’s chest sinks right back to where it was before the puff and holler. Tic Tac stops staring off into the dark looking for an enemy that isn’t there. Matthew stops cold and waits. Modoch’s robe of bison undulates and bucks as he bends down in one single move, grabbing things from a duffel at his feet, looking past the fire for a place this can happen. The bison robe is hanging half off in disarray from the hustle of getting up and getting ready for who knows what. Matthew’s head races trying to figure if it’s a fight or mutiny, or an angry retreat to the rig for sleep, or a tension that was here in the muscle memory of weeks, way before Matthew got here, finally coming to a head; what is it? Tim snaps to a sober head like a teenager getting with the program so his dad doesn’t fly off the handle and kill the weekend plans.

“Woops, okay, so, Matthew, we’ll be back. We have to go do our…”

“All members. Everyone, all four,” says Modoch/Crazy Daryl Acid, and he pulls the bison skin and head back into alignment so it fully covers him; so he’s 100 percent Modoch again. Matthew gets up out of his chair at the fire, is ready to follow them, but doesn’t know if he’s supposed to be grabbing anything for the trip. Tic Tac knifes up and puts on a headlamp, snapping into action, all business, as if his whole
night was just about waiting to be dispatched on a mission. Tim has popped over into the rig to grab some things. Matthew takes a stick out of the fire with a blackened end and realizes that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever grabbed when heading off to run some mystery errand in the middle of this remote corner of what feels like the last frontier in the lower forty-six or forty-eight or however many are below Alaska.

It’s hard to remember much of anything in the waft of the tarred, sticky black chunk that Tic Tac has been firing up all night. A pungent opiate cut to smaller pieces with the knife from the same Ziplock bag, the one he hid underwater and fetched like an amphetamine-tuned muskrat with a sixth and seventh sense that his fellow upright land mammals lack. The head argues that maybe it’s not the smartest thing to be following a man dressed like a bison into darkened dire woods—on a night that’s bled a thick, pitch-black blind over everything but millions of tiny stars. On the other hand, the entire Milky Way seems an arm’s reach away in a sky like this, so Matthew’s got that to wish upon if he ends up in a bind tonight.

Off into the woods, single file, Modoch’s big cape of fur and horns leading the odd procession. Tic Tac’s second in the lineup on the path—his headlamp bounces a beam of cold blue halogen, practically X-raying anything he happens to look toward. Tim is in line after Tic Tac and proceeds tentatively at best; Matthew is last in line, and if there’s anything bigger up ahead than a man in a buffalo costume, last would certainly be better than first or second. However, if the attack
comes from behind, Matthew will regret being last in line. Five or six minutes up the path and Modoch stops cold, which means that the single-file domino effect has everyone stopped cold. Tic Tac has his knife out and is ready for action, but then again he’s had his knife out and been ready to use it ever since the second or third hit of his underwater stash back at the campfire.