Gods Go Begging (36 page)

“You ain’t answered my question, Jesse,” said Hollis as he tasted his latest creation. “Answer my goddamn question!”

“Forgiveness?” Jesse shrugged with an air of hopelessness. “Forgiveness,” he repeated into the coffee mug at his lips. The tarry substance burned its way down his gorge.

“You see, I think there is something here much more important than forgiveness,” whispered Hollis while putting a finger to his lips, indicating that he was in possession of a secret. This was something that he had thought about for a long time. For years the question had ridden his veins on a streak of heroin; it had slipped into his mind every night on a puff of crack cocaine.

“Foolishness and risk are more important,” he said, his eyes burning with certainty. “Them things come way before forgiveness. You’ve gone and skipped the first two steps, Jesse.”

Jesse sat quietly, thinking about his friend’s statement, his battered mind rebelling against every attempt at concentration.

“Is there something that you care most about?” asked Jesse, who had shoved the glass of coffee to one side and was resting his head and arms on the counter. A wave of weariness washed over his eyes.

“You are like me,” said Jesse. “You don’t trust happiness. You have the same horrible dreams. What is it that a man like you—a man who’s seen what you’ve seen—cares about?”

Hollis listened to the question, put his coffee on the counter, then walked around it to sit on the stool next to his friend. He bit his lip as the question sank in. It was a question that he desperately wanted to answer.

“I had this wife …”

With that single phrase, the oppressive fatigue that had filled Jesse’s mind and body began to dissipate; the chill that had been deposited in his bones by those horrid dreams was instantly dispelled. The empty bar filled with empty stools was no more. A layer of warmth seemed to settle in, as though the room had suddenly been transformed into a home. Even the harsh sounds of the street seemed moderated, muffled to a calm and civil softness by the presence of cushions, throw rugs, and curtains.

Jesse had never known that Hollis had once been married. He had never mentioned it once in fifteen years. No matter how hard Jesse tried, he could not imagine it. No tuxedo could ever have been draped on that body; no vows of love could have formed in that mouth.

“Sometimes my Evie, my wife—I married her after my second tour of duty—she would make this here hot tamale pie. You know, the kind with that cornmeal crust and lots of spiced meat and onions, and smothered with Mexican peppers and melted processed cheese. You know, them hot peppers from south of the border down in old Mexico. Anyway, she’d whip that up—all the time humming in the kitchen—and then, while the pie was in the oven, she’d go and make me up a big pitcher of lemonade. Hand-squeezed, mind you. In the pitcher there’d be these square ice cubes, top to bottom, and slices of lemon rind. I hate those round, automated ice cubes, you know. Now, that there was food. That there was food for sure. She’d set it all out and, God help me, I’d eat every damn crumb.”

Now his voice dropped down to a point just above audibility.

“You know, Jesse, I couldn’t never thank her for making that pie. I couldn’t never just open this goddamn, stupid mouth and say a simple thank-you.”

He balled his right hand into a tight fist and slammed his knuckles twice against the counter. The blows brought a trickle of blood from two or three of his knuckles.

“Thank you, Evie,” he sighed. “Thank you, wife.”

He grabbed a cloth from behind the counter and dabbed at the blood on his hand. The sight of his own blood made him angry. He had been seriously wounded a half dozen times during the war, and each time he had wanted so badly to live. How could someone who craves life be so good at wasting it? He touched the cloth to his lips. He could taste the salton sign of life.

“After dinner she’d take a long bath and I’d peek in and see her buck naked; her right arm would be lying on the rim of the tub and her titties would be floatin’ in the suds. I’d want so damn much to just reach out and touch her, all nice like, but I never, ever did. Shit …” Hollis’s voice began to break. “Shit, I had to go and hit her before I could climb up on her. I had to smack her around. Jesus! I’d beat her black and blue and force her to do what she already wanted to do anyways.”

Hollis took another sip of coffee. His hands shook as he put the rim of the cup to his lips.

“Black and blue … What I would give,” said Hollis, with a hardened tone of stark intensity, “to be back there for one day. What I would give to be back there on a hot-tamale-pie-and-lemonade day. I could eat that whole pie, wash it all down with a big glass of hand-squeezed lemonade, then lick that plate clean. Then, after dinner, after a couple of hours of television, she would be there in the bathtub, buck naked. What I would give to be there, to just reach out and just caress her skin.”

Hollis extended one arm as he spoke, stroking the air with a hand. The savage pain in his face eased a bit as his hand touched an imaginary breast.

The image of Carolina drifted into Jesse’s mind. She was probably much prettier than Evie, but just as lonely. After a moment of silence Hollis shivered, then composed himself.

“I thought that war let me see the real things about who we are. It was like all the truth you could handle—not like living in the world, back here where nothin’s true. But I don’t want it no more, Jesse. I would trade it all for her. If I had the chance, I swear to God I would melt right into her, come inside her legs and melt right into her skin like that lavender hand lotion that she loved. I would suck her titties so hard that I could taste the milk that she didn’t never make for the children I didn’t never give her. I would talk sweet nothing stuff into her ear. She always wanted that, my lips against her ear. She always said how she wanted that. I knew what was right, but it seemed so foolish, so weak.”

Jesse reached out with his right hand and touched the trembling shoulder of his friend.

“I’ve been frozen solid even longer than you have been,” said Hollis. “I’ve been frozen stiff, walking the streets and sleeping on sidewalks. I was once so afraid of being a cripple or an amputee, so scared that my next breath would be my last breath, that I slowly learned to love every second of this here life in a really crippled way. Here, inside me,” he placed a palm on his chest, “I love things, I love lots of things, but I never can reach out for them. I got no arms for that. I love music and rhythms, but the foolishness of dancin’ makes me paralyzed. I got no legs for that. Even when I get lucky, I can’t even make love with the lights on. Shit, I see the death in everything even more than the life.”

Jesse ran the fingers of both hands through his hair as he listened. There was a thick residue of sweat lingering there from the night before. Hollis grabbed Jesse’s mug of coffee with one hand and his own glass with the other. He walked to a nearby garbage can and dumped the two drinks into it. He walked behind the counter and grabbed a bottle of El Presidente Tequila Añejo and two water glasses.

“Time for the real thing,” he said as he poured two drinks, six fingers high.

“I see it everywhere,” said Jesse, “even in the courtroom. When I look into the twelve faces of the jury, I feel so much more inside of me, and inside of them. But I can never seem to break through, to say what I feel and what they need to hear. I know what I need to do, but I just can’t do it. I’m trapped inside this callused skin of mine. It’s even worse with Carolina.”

“Vietnam was supposed to be a place where the boys who made it got to go home and screw everything in skirts,” said Hollis. “It was supposed to make us into men, but it turned us all into stone.”

Hollis was speaking to no one now. His eyes focused on a point in space. He grabbed the glass of tequila, threw his head back, and swallowed it all.

“You might be right, Hollis, love in the abstract is the best we can do. Maybe the power to risk is as close as we ever come to God, as close as we come.” Jesse’s voice was still slurred and thick. “You and I can sight down a rifle barrel and pull the trigger, but neither of us can kiss with our eyes closed. It’s the cold that will kill us all. Maybe it’s only that leap out of the cold that can save us, the leap toward the fire. I know I can’t do it yet, and shit, I’ll probably never get the chance to do it. And you, the man who could just reach out and caress your Evie’s skin, would never have needed a lawyer. That man wouldn’t have reenlisted for a third tour. You could be right, risk is as close as we get to God.”

The two men sat staring at each other in silence. One mind was hovering around a treeless trailer court down in Bakersfield, while the other was standing at the front door of a small house in Glen Park. Evie had long since divorced and remarried. Hollis had heard through the grapevine that she had met a dark-skinned Hindu fellow in Boron, and when she found out that he owned a trailer court and laundromat, she quickly became Mrs. Evie Patel. The two had run off to Las Vegas and tied the knot in a country-and-western chapel. A minister dressed like Hank Williams had performed the services. Kitty Wells had been the witness.

But the bartender couldn’t know that her new husband would never eat tamale pie, and when he climbed on top of her at night, there were no pent-up waters seething behind a coldhearted dam. Nothing ever burst and ran rampant, spilling over her in pang after pang of pain and pleasure.

Nowadays, gasping for breath, she mixed the ingredients for the tamale pie with her left hand, the right hand sunk deep into her wet pink panties. These days she stood next to the stove for heat, and sometimes she would—almost accidentally—walk repeatedly into the sharp edge of a kitchen counter and raise hot bruises on her skin—a silent, solo bacchanal of abuse. At night, when her new husband would reach out for her, she would sigh apologetically, her head swooning with cluster migraines and dimming visions of Hollis. She would babble incoherently until the little brown Hindu abandoned his shy overtures, the maiden feigning madness.

Jesse’s mind was on Carolina. He winced as he recalled their last night together. He drained the glass of tequila, then slammed it down on the bar. Carolina had told him that she was tired of their perfunctory sex and wanted some tenderness, just a little tenderness. She wanted to make love in the way that women meant when they used the phrase “make love.”

Naked and tearful on the edge of the bed, she had demanded it as she had so many times before. Jesse had stood there, frozen. He had stood there allowing sorrow to transmute into anger at the impossible depth of her demand. He had done nothing in response. There had been an ultimatum. She would never again sleep in this bed or in this bedroom without love.

“You are a strange lover, Jesse, so full of emotion, but no one ever gets to see it. I know it’s there, but I never get any of it. You love life, but you’re certainly not living in it. Sometimes it’s like you’re not alive at all. It’s like you’re haunting your own living body.”

Carolina, who wore wire-rimmed bifocals at the age of thirty-three, put them on to watch him dress and walk silently out of the room. For half an hour she sat staring at the closed door. Without her glasses she was nearly as blind as some small subterranean creature. Jesse had given her the name of Topo, which is the Spanish word for a small, burrowing mole. Sometimes her names crossed and became Topolina.

After Jesse left the room, Topolina waited for the bedroom door to slam and for his body heat to fade away before she dared move. Tonight his mute intensity had scared her. She had never tried to photograph Jesse. She realized that she was deathly afraid of what the camera might see. She had ruined her eyesight by looking at things too closely. Now she had ruined her life by loving a man who could not love in return.

“Maybe your worst fear is true,” she shouted through the closed door. “Maybe you did die back there on that precious fucking hill of yours.” It was a spiteful sentence that she sorely regretted as soon as she had uttered it.

“I didn’t mean that! I didn’t mean it!” she screamed. In despair, she tore off her glasses and threw them against the door. The thick lenses shattered, mining her carpet with a thousand tiny weapons.

Twenty minutes passed before either Hollis or Jesse moved from his stool in the Dublin City Bar. The two mute men had sat like bookends pressing memories between them.

“I loved her,” said Hollis. He poured another drink for the both of them. “Hair of the dog,” he said.

“To fools,” said Jesse as he raised his glass. All at once the poem made sense to him. Robert Frost had been writing about the process of poetry itself, about the process of creation. It is desire that creates poetry, that sparks into flame those incredibly rare moments of humanity in our mundane and selfish human lives.

Such an irony! Was it possible that a part of something could be larger than the whole? Those lonely and desolate ghost soldiers on that hill in Vietnam had been trying to tell him something. All at once it was clear to him what they had been saying: the end of desire was a greater tragedy than the end of life itself. Ice keeps the hand from reaching out. It is ice that keeps the rhythmic soul from dancing, from improvising. Desire could never be the agent that ends the world.

“You’re gonna make it, Hollis,” said Jesse with a smile.

“Don’t mean nothin‘,” said Hollis.

Jesse stood up. The bartender sighed, then stood up too, clearly disappointed that Jesse was leaving so soon. The men hugged each other, each one less angry and more hopeful than he was just an hour before. As his friend walked through the door and out into the sunlight, Hollis found a clean rag and began polishing the espresso machine. A soft whistle signaled a new relationship between the bartender and the contraption.

Jesse drove down Geary Boulevard and headed back toward the motel. As he crossed the bridge he was aware of an ocean and a sky that were the same shade of blue. He felt so much better now. Hollis and Evie’s story had replaced all the nightmares and the delirium of the night before. When Jesse arrived at the motel, both Topolina and Eddy were standing in the parking lot waiting for him. Neither was smiling as he parked his car and exited.