Just North of Nowhere (53 page)

Bunch woke. He had one of those dreams. About the Italian lady, about her, Cristobel Chiaravino. She was on him about something he didn't remember what. About making something of himself in this life.
Damn
, he thought,
the woman would not let go.

Bunch took a long yawn of a breath. Air smelled good, he thought. Something had passed in the night, in the morning. Something had passed and Spring was there. Finally.

The Old Rattler Ken considering: a hundred years blind, going and coming, then waking one day, sighted, seeing stuff and folk unseen for a passel of years! With all that in life, cripes, how does a man know much of anything for certain? Maybe it all just naturally gets more wonderful. Maybe old friends just naturally do start dropping by to say hello after a lifetime of not. People he thought dead a half-century, now suddenly show up, passing the time of day. Maybe? Cripes, in a world this wonderful how does someone even know if he's dead?

When it takes a guy a while to get somewhere—even down to the damn can—a guy’s got time to consider stuff like that. Maybe that’s good, maybe not. Ken didn’t have a damn choice.

He shuffled down Slaughterhouse Way from his flop. Pretty soon, in the midst of consideration, he looked up to see the day. Coming back from blindness, he did much to consider how he spent his light. He listened to the birds as always. He watched them now, too. Like he almost never did when he was a boy. Watching the morning tweeties, he put a whole mess of other things to the sounds he’d been used to this past century: it was dust he smelled when he heard them flapping by the corner. He couldn’t get enough of the way a worm’s rings glistened in the sun, the way they twisted in their beaks. And damn! How the water sparkled – hell how it exploded! – when one of them slate gray ones with the sharp bills swooped out of the heights and hit the river— swack! Like THAT—then grabbed air, angling back up the bluff.

Ken felt the old sun crawl above the trees, saw sunlight chase the shadows around and under them, or into the house basements along the way.

“Git, shadows! Scram, dark! Dive bird!” he called out. “Wriggle worm,” he said.

Moving wasn’t like being a little shit, not any more, but he got there, eventually.

The sawmill chugged. A head of steam blew its wet top at the morning. He smelled hot leather belts that slapped the wheels, breathed flying sawdust and tasted the char on the kiln-dried logs as the man-high blades screamed through them. At shift change, the overnight workers trudged into daylight, yellow-dusted and squinting. “Glück auf!” they shouted to the day men coming to work, scrubbed red and wide awake. At the gate, they traded shadows with the night men who dragged them along the trail of snus to their beds and wives, or down the street for breakfast beers at the Dancing Queen.

“Glück auf!” Ken called to the world.

The Valley Steam Passenger and Freight Line locomotive chugged along the banks of the Rolling River. It coughed a husky greeting to its brother whistle at the mill.

“Whoo-HOOO-oooP!” Old Ken called to both. “So-long,” he called to Madam Adam, and Mr. Bedlam, sitting prim and straight and staring straight ahead at one another, “So-long, my darling dear!” he called to Madam and waved to her from tip-toes. He also waved to the Ambidextrian, tied and rocking in his seat, “So long,” he called to the Mummy King leaning from the windows in the salon car, waving, trailing linen ribbons in the wind. Behind them, the menagerie and critter show gondolas. “Whoo-HOOO-oooP!” he called to the car of bright glass cages and its chaos of serpent, its scaled and feathered beasties, hairy behemoths and all the terrors of the world. The critters, writhed, uncurled, flapped leathern wings and gaped toothed mouths at him as Bluffton passed! “So long and see you soon again!” he yelled.

Ken rounded the corner at Commonwealth, thinking White House breakfast, thinking Mrs. Tim, thinking steaming grits and sizzling eggs, the brewing pot of pretty good coffee always ready, by damn! This morning, Ken was thinking a slab of pie. Pie was his want this damn morning. Pie and coffee. Damn.

Ken took the first three of the last fifty-two paces toward Mrs. Tim’s Restrant.

But…

…at the edge of the town was nothing. No place.

What the hell?

He looked, blinked. He rubbed his eyes. Where there had been the restaurant there it wasn’t. There had been. He remembered. The little Swede had scrabbled like a spider, building that whole long summer before the blindness came…

No. There was no word for it: there was nothing. There was the street, the apothecary, the ironmonger’s then, where the diner ought…was nothing. No restrant, no Mrs. Tim's. Nowhere, no place.

The long train’s whistle sighed and disappeared, car by car by car into the no place.

Oh, he could see it not being there, all right. Light was creeping Main Street like a ripple in the Rolling. A spring zephyr stirred, some dust lifted and wove gold in the air. But where breakfast had been almost forever, now was nowhere. A nothing that went on forever.

The Old Rattler caught a whiff of something old, older than the town, older than him, for cry-eye!

Damn confusing morning
, he thought,
hain't been a morning like this since?

Hell, there hadn't been a morning like it since never.

Ken spun in the dust. He looked up and down the street.

That too. The long stretch of the main street ended in the same sort of nothing. Where the field had been, the Carnival, the far bluffs, rising at the end of the Main stem: the same empty that had eaten the White House.

“Well, okay,” Ken said, “Okay. This is better. A fella can only take just so much wonderful! Thanks,” he said to the nearing nothing, “Least I can see you coming! Cripes…”

That smell? What the hell, that smell was…? To top it all, from across the river, up the bluff that still remained, there was a sound. A sound that was almost light.

Wait. Wait! I know what you are!

For a moment he went dizzy thinking it would vanish, the bright sound, before he pegged it. It was light and youth and green shoots up the burn in his pumping legs and everything there was is what it was.

It’s here and now gone!

No it wasn’t. A few seconds he heard it again: the rattle of snake, the up-spine chatter of a big one, a big old one off the bluffs. In pretty quick time, the one was answered, one, two, then another, then a fifth.

From the still shaded bluffs, from the sun side of the river, the snakes called and a guy…?

Hell, a guy just had to answer that! Old Ken sucked in morning, breathed in sun and dust and the smell of cave and dirt and the high old green acid scent of snake, morning, life, death and love.

“Damn! Here I am! Still here!”

Of the things you don’t want to see being made, “sausages” and “laws” are on everyone’s list. Trust me, “stories” should be there too. For example: I wrote “Little Girl Down the Way” in about 1998. It’s a story about a 7 year-old who is tormented and murdered by her mother. Such a thing happened about 40 years earlier in the basement of a house 30 yards down the alley from where I now live in Chicago.

When a webzine asked me if I had something they could record and podcast I gave the editor a choice: he could have one thing or “Little Girl Down the Way.” He chose “Little Girl...”

Shortly after the recording was ‘cast, I got an email from a ‘loader. He was complimentary, said the story disturbed him – in that way that horror should – and, as a father, he was impressed and moved by it.

I thanked him for his kindness and, for his time, gave him a little of mine, a few paragraphs – slightly more information than I offered above – on the story’s fetchings.

A return note said, in essence:
I'm sorry I know that. I thought this came out of your head.
He was vexed, I guess, at finding my Little Girl to be a child of the world and not solely of imagination.

Though “Little Girl…” is a ghost story that posits the not particularly original notion that heaven and hell can be the same place depending on who you are, I volunteered the information that I hadn’t made up the whole thing. I parted the veil. His disappointment? My fault.

Thus, while people ask, “where’d that come from?” I think they really want to believe story germs arise from that essentially imaginary festering place, the Imagination.

I’m about to blow it again so you may want to close the book and walk away, Bluffton intact.

I’ll wait...

To you who remain, who like to peek up the sleeves, look at this: Bluffton’s nearly real—I lived there for a few weeks. I arrived in town the same way many of the visitors in the book do: by setting out for one place and ending up at another. Here’s how my passage was earned:

For one incredible year in a life spent mostly in a scramble for theatre directing gigs I made a killing in series television. Later, I commenced making living as a writer for the City of Chicago.

I arrived in “Bluffton” in the time between those benchmarks, a time when I was picking up beer money as a bar poet, getting by doing here-and-there jobs and, mostly, was dependant on the kindness of friends.

One such friend asked me to paint her house. The kicker being that the house was several hundred miles north of Chicago.

“Leave the City!?”

“...for a week...!”

“And give up show business!”

But seriously! She needed the job done (and I
am
a good painter) and her offer came from that well of largesse from which I had been dipping my precarious post-Hollywood living. I dared not poison the source by turning down the gig. And she sent rail fare.

Thus provided, I headed north on Amtrak.

My friend picked me up at the closest station – which turned out to be a good 50 miles from house and job. After a starlit drive through an increasingly improbable landscape of ridges, bluffs and peaks seen dimly beyond the two-lane roadway on which – highway signs seem to warn – deer might frequently be found dancing, we made one final curve, a dip, and turned down a narrower way between what looked like a pair of patient dolmens. The road widened, we passed a sodium-lit cluster of corrugated livestock pens, and there: my friend’s peeling house.

By daylight...

Well, you've been there. My friend’s new hometown bore a striking similarity to Bluffton.

Let me take a breath.

I was born among the Appalachian foothills of eastern Pennsylvania. Having become a galvanized flatlander during my Midwestern years, however, the bluffs on either side of and hovering over the little town felt both familiar and alien. The area’s monadnockical peaks, its profound suddenness of ridges, and the rough clamor its valleys made in the stolid rectitude of the corn- and dairyland that surrounded it seemed like a geologic freak show!

“Ah well, we’re in ‘the driftless zone’” my friend said.

Never heard of it. I catalogued the word because I like knowing things. Without substantiation, I believe knowing things makes me interesting at parties. The chapter titled “Some Words About the DRIFTLESS” reveals all you need know about the zone, ice ages, and geology, for this book. It’s mostly true so you can use it at parties. Habitual Googlers: input “Coulee Region” for similar results.

Back to house painting. This was summer and mild, mild weather. The work was not difficult – the kind of repetitive effort that sometimes hints at nobility of purpose and spiritual rearmament. From a ladder three stories above the street I was surrounded by trees (lots of) and rocky bluffs (everywhere). The peaks, steeples, stacks, and dormers of the town poked out of the greenery and, from between the trees across the road, I caught sparkles from the pretty little river that ran through it all.

Every morning, an old, old guy shuffled below me, heading toward the main street. Once there he turned the corner and was gone. This block-and-a-half heat of what seemed a daily constitutional took about a half-hour.

I asked.

My friend smiled gently, “Oh, that’s ____? So far as anyone knows, he’s the oldest person in town.” She grinned as though she’d invented the notion. “He trapped snakes when he was a kid!” she said.

Another regular underpasser was a shirtless guy who rode by on his bike every half hour or so. A boombox tied to his handlebars blared Eagles tunes.

“Him! Oh. That’s ____,” no smile here, “he does stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“You know? Around town. Jobs.” Sounded narrowly close to my career field. That summer, she mentioned, he’d decided it would be better for everyone concerned if he flopped under the boundary bridge on the roadway outside of town. “That or share a room with _____”—the aged snake hunter.

“Guy lives under a bridge?”

“Mm.”

No more explanation.

There were other people, people like my friend, those who’d moved to this pretty little town on slender whims or had come to bury themselves urgently or seek resurrection when some moral death had visited. She, others, I, had come, were there for a while, would leave soon.

There were natives of course, those whose existence seemed relatively solid because they’d been born, were raised, and had come into their knowledge of good and evil in this pretty place where a little river rolled out of the driftless zone, flowed through town and left for bigger waters. It was all so damn mysterious, so comfortable!

My one-week job took stretched to two and a half. In the time I took to paint my friend's house, something came awake in me. Chicago, maybe, has too many big shoulders. Maybe too much of the strange sulks in the sodium brightness of the 3 a.m. el stop, maybe too much creeps in the alleyways of Wrigleyville or too much sorrow outgases from
Tribune
or
Sun-Times
wrapped dreams dozing in the exhaust-black gangways of the Loop. Maybe there are too many ghosts of theater fires, spirits of the gun-burst dead, or of little girls whose brief flames have winked out with just a flicker. Maybe I’d sorted through too much urban ruin to see the simple disarray of life lived at one’s own pace. Or maybe I’m too self-absorbed to notice other people in the first place, but something in this little place had charged me.

Back in Chicago, I couldn't get my friend’s driftless town out of my head. I finally gave myself a writing assignment, one I used to give beginning playwrights when I was teaching that unteachable craft at the headwaters of the Mississippi. The exercise: build a person on paper; create him or her in nouns, verbs, objects and complements: he is so tall, so fat, she is wearing this and that. Don’t define. Don’t conjecture; don’t tell how he feels, what she thinks. Certainly don't tell what YOU think. Just state the facts.

If you complete the assignment, you haven’t gained from it. If you’re fortunate people begin to crawl from those facts, things begin to take place.

I was fortunate. From my first page – about the guy who “does stuff” – another guy had began to creep from the shadows, a guy from the college town in eastern Pennsylvania where I lived during my third undergraduate incarnation. That PA townie and his bunch of thugs had hung at the hoagie shop beneath the apartment where I lived and was doing my first serious writing. His buddies called the guy Bunch.

Bunch of Long-Ago had nothing to do with Bluffton’s handyman. PA Bunch was not the guy who biked up and down my friend’s street picketing my presence on that ladder...

Okay! Yes, that could have been it! ______ was pedaling up and down, Eagles squawking, because he was pissed. Pissed at me. I was doing his thing. I had HIS job! He should have been on the ladder and I...? I was some terrorist from the city looking for what I could take!

Probably not, but maybe. And somehow long-gone Bunch had muscled his way into the driftless guy's skin, borrowed his clothes, provided a name, and—like/that—was living under the bridge at ‘Engine Warm’.

Old Ken grew out of the old snake hunter (alas, no longer rattling with us) who shuffled below my ladder every morning. That old guy wasn't blind but on the page he was a suddenly sightless old guy who’d slipped sidewise out of my pre-teen years in Pennsylvania, an ancient piano-tuner who moved through the world knowing where old, immovable things had always been.

Those were the exercises.

Bluffton began with Old Ken waking to daily blindness after his nightly dream. Out of Old Ken’s walk came the American House—Eats! And there came Olaf Tim and from his kitchen, Esther, the scent of pie trailing and the Sons of Norway celebrating their darts losses. Slaughterhouse Way was just around the corner.

Making Old Ken a dweller in the past and Bunch a guardian troll gave me freedom to separate myself from the reality of my friend’s town. I started making up fibs and telling damn lies about everyone I’d known, met or thought I should have gotten to know up there.

I renamed the place Bluffton.

Characters started bumping into each other and the bumps became stories. The stories spawned other parts of town, places that didn’t exist or needed to change to suit the bumps at hand.

Other people sprouted. We suddenly had a town cop – the real place didn’t – who was born, solely to warn Bunch about peeping Miss Chiaravino! The service station – the real version of which had closed decades before and never reopened – had to have an Einar to peek at that old beater Volvo and who, under a different name and face, was another graft from my long-ago Pennsylvania past.

In Chicago life got better, got worse, got better. You know. For me, Bluffton was becoming a place to rest after I finished something else, a reward for being a good little do-bee.

I went to the real place only a few times after I started building its doppelganger in my computer. I visited my friend and took a few notes but I hope you understand: Bluffton was its own place by then, a place more real to me than my friend’s town. Visits confused the picture.

It also became a place to protect! See, I never felt I had to share Bluffton with more than a few friends (we're all friends here, aren't we?). As I mentioned at the beginning of these proceedings, I wrote them as a means to read in public. I published only a few of the stories and most of those were written on request for themed anthologies for which I was too lazy to audition a new cast of characters and build new sets and props. Why bother? I had a whole town to explore.

Friends who’d heard or read a story or two would sometimes ask, “when are you going to publish Bluffton?”

I kept saying, “Someday, maybe.”

For my friends then, here you are.

And there you are. Disappointed?

Okay, someday I'll write a story called *Sigh*

In the spirit of full disclosure: What I said earlier about my first ‘serious writing’… Frankly, a story I wrote in 5
^th
grade about the Snake Lord and his Dread Castle Midnight was awful good! It was really scary and won the 3
^rd
and Spring Playground Summer Storytelling contest in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1952. I don’t know that I’ve ever been as serious about my writing, since.

So thanks to you, Bunch and old blind piano tuning guy, and all the others. Thanks, Ray and Isaac, Murray, Robert and Doc. Thanks William and Sherwood, and thank you Ellie at the library. Thanks Christine and Sally. Thanks Alan, Marty, Wayne, and hugs to Tina – many hugs to Tina! Thanks Walt, sorry you missed it! Thanks Misses Smith, Kerkauff, Ash and Kemmer. Thanks Mr. Gerhardt and Mr. Collins. Thanks Mrs. Feinerfrock, you didn’t really scare me! Thanks Albin and Ted. And thank you Mike. Thanks for it all, Fern and Brock. And Tycelia: all my love to you forever.

Lawrence Santoro

December, 2006