Day Out of Days (17 page)

Shitty little government A-frames spit out across the Sandhills. Not a human in sight. Just evidence: Ripe garbage piled high. Bullet holes in every window. Flapping black plastic. Three-quarter ply nailed across the doors like hurricane protection but there’s only an ocean of sand. Wailing. You can hear its constant moan. Yellow sunburned sandbox slides. Bright red plastic swings. No kids to speak of. Backyards way too far from the house. Prairie swallows them all up. Lakota church, “Open to Anyone,” it says, but no one’s here. Not a single sorry soul. And it’s the Sabbath too. Imagine that. Sunday abandoned. Just constant wind ripping across the tattered yards and buried fences. Constant endless prairie breath. Like it’s always been. Now and evermore. Unrelenting. Raw. And could care less about the state of the Union.

Today, I feel exactly like a dark mojado on a freeway overpass. Black pack on my back, staring out over the streaming traffic; cars pouring under my wide blistered feet.

I’m turning slowly in one place, looking for some sign; some familiar tree, some rock. I’m turning full circle but nothing speaks to me.

Today, I feel exactly like this short Sonoran man searching for some distant cousin he’s never met. They promised he’d be here with a job, cold cerveza, and tennis shoes. But he’s nowhere to be found. He’s nowhere around.

Under the blaring neon of the drunk-tank lockup he studied the cinder-block walls. There was nothing much else to do. Arms slack between knees. Knees folded up to accommodate the short length of the cot. A weird light green plastic burlap-sack-type of mattress propped under his head. Remarkable absence of graffiti, he thought to himself as he scanned the contours. Someone had attempted some desperate scrapings on the steel frame of the window but there were no letters; no words of any kind. Not even a lover’s name or a racial slur. No pictographs of genitalia even. Just random gashes into the steel. He wondered what type of sharp object could have been used since all personal possessions are confiscated long before they slam the door on you. Maybe a zipper. But how would anyone manage to get their crotch up that high to the window frame without being spotted through the thick glass by one of the zealous young officers in crew cuts. Whoever it was would have had to drop their jeans, he figured; stand on the rough ledge of the cot, pants in hand, and scrape away in fits and flurries, ducking frantically each time someone came patrolling down the corridor. Must have been a young man, he thought. Young, scared, and angry. Full of rage. He no longer had it in him, he realized. The fight. The hate. The energy. That was mainly it. Just exhaustion and dismay. He panned the walls, searching for some recognizable symbol of civilization. A crude five-pointed star fashioned with intersecting lines but not overtly Jewish. More like a token of
achievement a fourth-grade teacher might scribble in the margin of your notebook. Next to it, a tall number
15
gashed at an angle with the tail of the
5
trailing off into a tropical bird feather. Beautiful but unintended. Beauty seemed more and more like that these days. Accidental. Miraculous, maybe. He kept scanning: another tangle of slashes that he read anthropomorphically into a stick-figure man with an oversize head, wielding an ax. It could have easily been something depicted on the ancient cave walls of France. A giant stag crashing to earth. Fires in the vast blackness. Log drums through the endless woods.

•   •   •   •   •

•   •   •   •   •

Guy in the cell next door is shrieking like a beagle in heat. He deliberately bashed his head against the wall when they tossed him in there. Spotted blood all over the floor, like red cottage cheese. I saw it as they walked me past there, handcuffed. Officer grumbled he wasn’t cleaning it up. The mess. Idiot smashed his own damn head. Idiot could damn sure clean it up. Or sleep in it. Which was what he was doing.

Now these raw wall scrapings are starting to move all by themselves. Flicker and dance. I remember reading somewhere they burned Jean Genet’s manuscript of
Our Lady of the Flowers
when they discovered it hidden in his cell. He then proceeded to write the whole thing over again—on toilet paper.

•   •   •   •   •

I’m in the Elkhorn up to my knees. My yellow dog floats past, hunting crawdads; her black eyes flat and darting on top of her head, like some wild fat opossum. Managed to catch three green smallmouth so far in the same deep hole. I’ve stopped counting the snags I’ve had on mossy rock and sunken sycamore. At least no thorny thoughts so far. No haunted memories. Just red-winged-blackbird songs and honking geese. Around the river bend, toward the old bridge I can hear Mexican voices getting closer. Splashing, laughing. Men and boys. Jokes. Tales of chicas way back in some jungle village. Here they come, around the turn; men and sons, crashing right up the middle, casting wide nets in white spiraling fans, like they must have always done in their Caribbean homeland. Spanish shrieks through the thick Kentucky air. Birds and squirrels dash for cover. Silver fish and crawdads spill through mestizo fingers as this little tribe goes wading right past me, pressing upriver; roaring with their brotherhood.

How is it I got cast out here so far in this Kentucky wilderness? Was it horses or women? How did it come to pass that Mayan men are more a part of these snaking waters than my white flat feet touching bottom?

Dragging my dead gelding by tractor on a chain down to the deep ditch, crying like a baby. Thank God there’s no one on the farm right now. Just dogs, chickens, and cattle. Thank God for that. No one to see me like this, all grimaced up in grief; doubled over just about. The head of the horse bumping along over gravel and thick weeds; muscles of the neck flowing with every contour of land—flowing for the last time as they already begin to lock up. This great old gelding; son of Peppy San Badger, blood of King Ranch, carried me into the herd so many times; paralyzed cattle with his stare, rattled the bit in the ground. Now he’s going down in a black hole. Thank God there’s no one on the farm right now. Just dogs, chickens, cattle, and me.

Here I am again in the bright white glare of fluorescent tubes framing the cheap mirror of a two-banger motor home parked off Paseo de Peralta in the very town where my dad lies buried and my daughter was born. Here I am yet again in another movie, at my age, playing yet another military man, which I’m not and never will be but my father most certainly was and all his brothers and their father and grandfather and great-grandfather going back to the fall of Richmond and further back to Concord and Lexington and back some more to the Norman Invasion and pagans wearing calf skulls and Viking invasions and burials in longboats with dragon-headed prows. I don’t know how far back you want to carry this thing. What’s the point? Who are you hoping to find back there, anyhow? Some seer? Some diviner of destinies? And here they come again now, calling me on their walkie-talkies; banging politely on my metal door: ADs, Assistant ADs, assistants to the assistants of ADs. Making sure I’m ready. Suited up. Making sure I’m ready to be ready, just in case they’re ready. Any second now they might need me to step in front of the camera and portray this ongoing character in a decorated uniform with an aura of tired, grim determination in the face of hopeless odds. Where did I ever come up with an affinity for such a character, such a man? The arrogant jut of the jaw. The downcast scowl. And this terrible sense of impending doom? Was it from as far back as the steel seat of a
Jeep in the Mariana Islands sitting beside my mother in monsoon rain? Was it in the back of my father’s neck where he picked compulsively at his shrapnel scars? Or is it somewhere deep inside the terror of being lost in the Great Basin at night with no lights and you’ve run completely out of gas? No use fishing in the dark. Put your costume on. Walk out there and face the music. Hopefully, some mask will appear. Someone from long ago, I might recognize. Something that might just tap me on the shoulder and invite me out of here. Believe me, I wouldn’t hesitate.

He drives me out here to location. He won’t let
me
drive. It’s a matter of pride or union orders, I guess. I’m his guest, he says, and then he’s silent for miles. I don’t speak much Spanish so he stays silent. I can’t blame him. When I speak English he smiles and nods politely; relieved. I don’t know how much he understands. The miles click by. When I speak my stumbling Spanish a dark cloud crosses his face and a look of deep pity casts into his Indian eyes as though I were a “pobrecito”—one of the slab-sided dogs we go flying by; splashing mud on white sows and squealing gilts. We flash past stake trucks, broke down in the lava rocks, stacked high with sweet pine logs, flocks and flocks of swirling cowbirds like falling decks of cards. We head out into the pink Sierras in his beat to shit Oldsmobile, fenders flapping, and leave Mesquitillo’s bare dirt streets in the dust. The only car we pass is wheelless; jacked way up on wood Modelo crates. Naked two-year-olds peek out at us from behind fresh sheets, blowing in the high mountain air. The viejos here say they still remember Pancho Villa crashing through this very town on a plain bay horse; galloping toward a historical moment which he entirely staged for the American cameras. Clever bastard.

Early morning, the little Mayan man rakes the white sand in beautiful crosshatched strokes like a woven basket. He takes such great care with it you wonder what ancient sect of craftsmen passed this impulse down to him. He piles the seaweed and chunks of ragged plastic blown in from Cuba into neat little stacks then collects them all with a wooden wheelbarrow. His feet are wide and leathery like something from Diego Rivera.

Slowly, the tourists begin to emerge from their pink cabanas hauling rubber rafts and tall mixed drinks down to the surf. They set themselves up in distinct camps, depending on language and culture. Some drop their tops. Others stay buttoned up clear to the neck. One of them is peeling badly and her husband slathers heavy-duty sunblock all over her back. She winces at his every touch.

On the edge of the coconut palm grove a buxom Mexican woman lurks in the stripes of shade. She’s scanning the tourists with wild eyes, searching for any vulnerable single man. She reminds me of that fat woman from Fellini’s
Amarcord
who seduced all the young boys on the beach. What was her name? Serafina, maybe? She spots a ripe victim and approaches him quickly, almost tiptoeing through the crosshatch marks left by the little Mayan man. She asks the startled tourist, who is reading a Graham Greene novel, if he would like to go with her into the palm grove and get a deep massage. He shakes his head vehemently and rolls over on his belly, shocked at the interruption. One of the waiters from the resort spots the buxom woman and comes running at
her, frantically waving a white linen napkin. He chases her off, back into the slender palms, as though she were a pesky seabird. Their tracks have ripped a violent swath through the perfect basket-weave. The waiter apologetically returns to the man reading the Graham Greene novel just as his slinky girlfriend heads toward him in a glistening purple bikini, carrying the
New York Times
. Little puffs of sand punctuate her every step. The waiter backs off, bowing and scraping. The buxom woman is still lurking, watching it all from a distance.

Why would he ever think, on arriving at midnight through sand and dank luggage, morning might miraculously bring some bright new shining faces to the plank breakfast table from as far away as Omaha, say, or maybe Saskatchewan, Tonopah, Del Rio? Is he finally getting that desperate for company?

Must be all the white identical rental cars jammed up against the blowing palms; the crashing Caribbean repeating the same old song he’s just now beginning to recognize.

Why would he ever think he’d become truly engaged talking “issues” with strangers when all they ever do is divide and separate along lines that real fishermen come here to get away from anyway? He would most likely draw a dead blank on every one and create a deep dark paranoia over the pineapple and cantaloupe.

Anyhow, it’s clear they’re only here for the disposable photograph with some stunned world record Tarpon, a giant Jack or Permit. One of the bigger fellas obviously works for the Secret Service, although he thinks he’s anonymous. You can tell by his shaved neck, the automatic bulge in his Simms vest, and the puff in his concave chest.

The top-heavy wives hang behind on the beach, reading historical novels and spine-tingling Grisham under lime green umbrellas. They’ve left nothing behind.

Just lying here listening to my daughter smash mosquitoes in the next room; smacking her thigh. The waves are softer tonight; lapping almost. Wind has died down. Someone is playing repetitive Euro-disco nowhere music next door. All I can make out is the deadening bass line. My daughter’s mosquito smashing grows louder and more violent. Her torture is palpable. Her mother rolls over right beside me and yells out: “You can’t just slash away at mosquitoes! You have to be precise!” Her voice carries the authority of the Minnesota Boundary Waters. The smashing from my daughter’s room stops. Her candle goes out.