Day Out of Days (5 page)

All that time I’m referring to now. Careening around. Must’ve been working on something or other. Must’ve done some kind of job. That’s what it was. It dawns on me now. Down there in dusty Alpine waiting for a check. Guy’s name was Roberts Clay. Not a woman at all. They said I couldn’t miss him. Carried a big black hickory walking stick. And here it was three whole days and no show from this Mr. Clay. Down to my last good pair of SmartWool socks. Staggering through the watermelon trucks. Could a matchbox ever in this world hold my clothes?

It’s a weird shirt, this one. Makes me feel like a little boy again—too small and tight and pink. It’s a handmade shirt. My mother made it and that’s a sure tip-off to the kids in school that you haven’t got any money. I’m a little boy no longer but when I put this shirt on that feeling revisits me. It’s not the same shirt as back then. I’d never be able to get that one on. But this one has haunting similarities and casts the same spell over my upper torso. The chest feels vulnerable and bony. My neck sticks up like a chicken. The arms poke out. My entire being is up for grabs. I’m somewhere between six and nine. An older woman is clutching my hand. A linen handkerchief dangles from her wrist, tucked into her watch-band. The coastal breeze blows her black lace skirt around my shoulders. I’m sure it’s my grandmother. I recognize her Iroquois hands with the bulging veins. I have the same thumbs as her. We were born on the same day in the sign of Scorpio. She showed me once in the sky—how the tail reaches clear out across the entire Mojave. The deadly tail. Pigeons are flapping all around our heads, trying to land on our shoulders and arms. We’re feeding them corn out of paper cups. The Spanish fountain is trickling. Brass mission
bells chiming a mournful dirge. The war is certainly over, but where was it? Distant islands? Across the sea? I don’t know my father at all. I’ve maybe seen him twice. Both times he was in a khaki uniform and smelled like bay rum. People pet me on the head as they pass by, like I’m a little animal. I’m entirely under the spell of affection. My whole body tingles from it; voices, movement, laughter, the smell of Pacific salt. Everything touches me in this way; straight through the skin. I
am
an animal. At night I sleep with my eyes wide open. Nothing escapes me. Not one sound. Bugs hitting the screen. My grandmother shuffling to the sink for her glass of water. The spotted dog moaning at the back door, wanting to get in; making the sound of loneliness.

It’s a weird shirt—too small and tight. It sends me back to when I ran around in a completely different body and the unknown was much bigger.

I cut his face off meticulously. That’s all I have to say. Just doing my job. They told me they wanted the face as proof of the pudding. Trouble is it’s not the same as skinning a walleye or a yearling buck. The human being is different. More curves and twists. The musculature, connecting tissues of the epidermis—not the same at all. Plus, all I had at my disposal was a Victorinox stainless steel jack-knife with a four-inch blade. Sharp as a razor but nonetheless—had to force the idea of butchering out of my mind and just get on with the business at hand. There’s never any use complaining. You just have to go ahead and get the work done and get on with it. I decided the best method of preservation was to dust the inside of the face with baby powder and salt, then roll the paper-thin skin into a loose roll. I bound the whole thing up with blue rubber bands, like the kind they use for holding broccoli and carrots together. I have to admit, the procedure was pretty much experimental since I’d never had to tackle this kind of thing before. Used to be they’d take you at your word. Why would you lie? You didn’t take a target out, he’d come back to haunt you. That’s for sure. No doubt about it. But this particular outfit claimed they needed concrete proof. Concrete.

Let me start again. Let me just start by saying, I fully expect to get paid for a job well done. That should be well understood right
off the bat. Everyone does. No one goes blithely into something like this without expecting compensation—especially a job of this magnitude and scope. I mean, there have been others where you get half in advance and then the other half on delivery. And by “delivery” I don’t mean bringing in a man’s face, I mean just your good word that you left his head in a ditch by the side of the road or tossed it in a lake or something. And they’d for sure believe you. Why would you lie about something like that? Your reputation is on the line. And, back in the day, that’s all you had to go on—your good word and your reputation. But now—these days—look at these jokers. No ethics of any kind. Outrageous—For them to suddenly renege and back out, denying any connection—trying to completely divorce themselves from any knowledge—I mean—Let me just say, I never would have volunteered for an assignment of this kind if there hadn’t been a big score guaranteed on the back end. I mean, the skinning of a man’s face—Are you kidding? If verification is what they were after, what’s the matter with good, old-fashioned photography? The black-and-white Polaroid. I’m no Stieglitz but, hell, I can take a damn snapshot: “Before” and “After.” I mean, look, when we took that creep out of Chad back in ‘95, that’s all they needed back then. A plain old snapshot; “blip,” he’s sitting there stupid, staring into the lens with his arms bound back, obviously still in the land of the living and then—”blip,” his eyes go black and there’s a hole in the bridge of his nose big enough to jam a cigar—lights out. I got the fat paycheck on that one, believe you me. No questions asked. But this—It’s beyond embarrassing.

These are some of the indications of my current, scattered state. I’m looking at them point-blank.

My second great-grandfather, Lemuel P. Dodge, had his left ear blown off right here, in the battle of Pea Ridge, 1862. I have a picture of him, back home in my kitchen, sitting in profile, legs regally crossed at the knees, dressed in his Confederate uniform. A thick gauze bandage, bulging at the ear, lashed around his head. Both hands gently rest in his lap atop an ornately engraved sword and scabbard. His nose is a nose I recognize down through my father’s side. Uncles and cousins. His red beard and hair. His ice-blue eyes like some Christian martyr. (The tintypes of the day may have accentuated these features for the vanity of the sitter.) It’s the ghoulish white bandage that confuses the formality of the pose, as though honor and raw violence have no real business sitting side by side. “Six salvos of Federal artillery—eighteen rounds of rifled solid shot smashed broadside into the massed rebel columns.” Horses exploded. Riders cut in half. Blood of the body. Pride of the mind. The only sound right now in this ancient open field is a lone mockingbird sitting on top of a yellow round bale. His tail twitches with every change in the melody line.

Some things do come back: we stopped in San Juan Bautista and tried to call Luis Valdez from a pay phone (long before the days of cells). I barely knew him but this was his town and we were passing through so—A woman with a heavy accent answers, says he’s in Oaxaca but try later, he might be back later. She says this as though he’s just down at the Quik Stop buying cigarettes. Later? I say. What do you mean, back later? Oaxaca’s a long way off isn’t it? Oaxaca’s in Mexico, we’re in northern California. She hangs up as though I’m some kind of prankster. John now is talking nonstop and has been for the last two hours. Part of the reason I wanted to stop and make this call was just to get out of the car and away from his ranting, but here he is, still carrying on. Now it’s about Ansel Adams and his light meter techniques. As though I gave a shit. Just running off at the mouth about apertures and stops, regardless of the immediate situation; the fact that we’ve stopped the car now and we’re out in the light of day in this bright town and something new might be just around the corner. He just keeps right on yakking about Ansel Adams. I, myself, was never a huge Ansel
Adams fan if you want to know the truth. Too precious about the landscape for my taste. I mean I respect the landscape as much as the next guy, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not going down on my hands and knees to it. I’m more into faces—people; Robert Frank, Douglas Kent Hall, guys like that, but John, he can’t stop gushing. I think he’s on speed again is what I think. In fact I’m sure of it. Unmistakable behavior patterns: dry mouth, smacking his lips all the time, twitching his neck around as though trying to adjust something; hunching his shoulders up and scratching both forearms at the same time. These are dead giveaways, if you ask me. He promised me and Dennis he wouldn’t bring any of the shit along but I’m sure that’s what it is. What else could it be? He’s got a hidden stash somewhere in the Chevy. He’s done this before. No honor. Another telltale sign is the constant switching of subjects with little or no regard for what’s just come before or what might follow. As though he doesn’t even need a listener. Just willy-nilly random whacked-out associations, shifting blithely in midstream like we’re a couple of tourists walking through his inner landscape. Just as an example; now he’s talking about lying—that’s his subject for the moment: the Art of Lying, he calls it; the myriad forms of self-deception on the liar’s part. A liar who doesn’t even realize he’s lying as opposed to one who does. Ultimately, he says, there’s really no difference between the Intentional Liar and the Unintentional one since neither of them is capable of seeing the entire context in which their lying takes place. And then he says this: “They are blind to the repercussions of their fabrications.” He actually says that. I stop dead in my tracks and look into his twitching eyes. I have the urge to kick him in the ass but I don’t want to start this trip off on a sour note.

We stumble into a quaint little café, pretending to be ordinary polite citizens off on a little road trip; as though it’s the forties or something, back when whole families just piled into automobiles and rambled down the road for the sheer enjoyment of shifting scenery. We sit down at a table draped in a red plaid oilcloth with
salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of a rooster and hen. There’s a big plate-glass window looking out over the old Spanish plaza. Everything seems quiet and peaceful even though John picks up the salt and pepper shakers and starts humping the hen with the rooster. Before we can even order coffee Dennis starts up on something and I can suddenly see that he’s in on this speed thing with John. Same symptoms but slightly more subtle. He starts in on a dream he’s been having where there’s this big-ass guy in shorts swinging from the ceiling of an old courthouse by his knees and then crashing to the tiled floor and just lying there, pretending to be dead. Just deliberately crashing like that. I’m not used to men telling me about their dreams. There’s something suspect about that for some reason. Women, I don’t mind doing that, but men is a different story. So long as he doesn’t start interpreting this dream, bringing in astrology and runic symbols and trying to draw parallels to his waking state, I can go along with it. I manage to order bacon and eggs with chorizo sausage and corn tortillas on the side between the gaps in Dennis’s musings. Actually, the only reason I’m tolerating this dream-recall of his is because he once related to me the details of his father’s suicide and I keep waiting for another spellbinding tale to come out of him like that one but so far it’s not happening. His father owned a hardware store up in Oregon, and apparently, one night after closing hours, he managed to rig up an ingenious pulley device with nylon cord and fishing line fastened to the triggers of a Browning over and under, enabling him to place his forehead directly in front of the black barrels and pull both triggers at once. There was little left of his father’s face. Dennis was ten at the time and remembers the community up there shunning him as though he were suddenly akin to the insane. Now John pops up again in one of the long pauses of Dennis’s dream. He says he suddenly realizes why he’s always liked crime novels so much. I was unaware he had any passion for the genre at all. He says it’s because he’s always identified with the isolated nature of the detective as a central character. The outsider
looking in. He says that just before we entered this café here for instance, he had that same kind of feeling—that “outsider” feeling and his reaction was to immediately take on the persona of the Detective; turning his collar up, stuffing both hands deep in his pockets, keeping his eyes low to the ground while maintaining an acute awareness of the café’s interior. (I just assumed it was more goofy speed behavior.) Having adopted this new facade gave him confidence, he says, to enter the café and order a cup of coffee. He says he finds it much easier to play a role than to be himself since he has no idea who in the world he actually is. He was purchased on the black market back in the forties for six thousand dollars cash at the age of one from a Jersey City adoption agency. The Jewish couple who bought him said they picked him out for his little shock of black hair, dark eyes, and certain Hebraic features which they thought might eventually cause him to be mistaken for their own flesh and blood. As he matured, however, these characteristics became more and more exaggerated, taking on definite simian qualities his surrogate parents could never have predicted. His nose broadened and flattened out something like Rocky Marciano’s. His lips became full and pouty and he developed the habit of never quite closing them. His eyes took on the deep black sheen of an Italian Gypsy and his hair hung in shaggy ringlets with no bounce to them at all. On top of all this his general attitude toward the outside world veered far afield from his parents’ expectations. He was entirely without ambition of any kind. As early as twelve years old he would sit for hours on park benches and stare at the pigeons. He had no desire even to feed them. His only dream was to fall madly in love with a Spanish redhead and live with her forever in some remote village, taking occasional side trips by himself but always returning to her bed. He’s managed to achieve this and claims to be completely satisfied with his current situation. I have no reason to disbelieve him.