Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (10 page)

I would do things like that when I was sixteen. I'd hitch-hike fifty miles in the rain to go hunting for the last hours of the day. I'd stand alongside the road with a 30:30 and my thumb out and think nothing of it, expecting to be picked up and I always was.

"Where are you going?"

"Deer hunting."

That meant something in Oregon.

"Get in."

It was raining like hell when I got out of the car at the top of the ridge. The driver couldn't believe it. I saw a draw half-full of trees, sloping down into a valley obscured by rain mist.

I hadn't the slightest idea where the valley led to. I'd never been there before and I didn't care.

"Where are you going?" the driver said, hardly believing that I was getting out of the car in the rain.

"Down there."

When he drove off I was alone in the mountains and that
was how I wanted it to be. I was waterproofed from head to toe and had some candy bars in my pocket.

I walked down through the trees, trying to kick a deer out of the dry thickets, but it didn't really make any difference if I saw one or not.

I just wanted the awareness of hunting. The thought of the deer being there was just as good as the deer actually being there.

There was nothing stirring in the thickets. I didn't see any sign of a deer or the sign of a bird or the sign of a rabbit or anything.

Sometimes I would just stand there. The trees were dripping. There was only the sign of myself: alone, so I ate a candy bar.

I had no idea of the time. The sky was dark with winter rain. I only had a couple of hours when I started and I could feel that they were nearly at an end and soon it would be night.

I came out of a thicket into a patch of stumps and a logging road that curved down into the valley. They were new stumps. The trees had been cut sometime that year. Perhaps in the spring. The road curved into the valley.

The rain slackened off, then stopped and a strange kind of silence settled over everything. It was twilight and wouldn't last long.

There was a turn in the logging road and suddenly, without warning, there was a house right there in the middle of my private nowhere. I didn't like it.

The house was more of a large shack than anything else with a lot of old cars surrounding it and there was all sorts of logging junk and things that you need and then abandon after using.

I didn't want the house to be there. The rain mist lifted and I looked back up the mountain. I'd come down only about
half a mile, thinking all the time I was alone.

That was a joke.

There was a window in the house-shack facing up the road toward me. I couldn't see anything in the window. Even though it was starting to get night, they hadn't turned their lights on yet. I knew there was somebody home because heavy black smoke was coming out of the chimney.

As I got closer to the house, the front door slammed open and a kid ran out onto a crude makeshift porch. He didn't have any shoes or a coat on. He was about nine years old and his blond hair was disheveled as if the wind were blowing all the time in his hair.

He looked older than nine and was immediately joined by three sisters who were three, five and seven. The sisters weren't wearing any shoes either and they didn't have any coats on. The sisters looked older than they were.

The quiet spell of the twilight broke suddenly and it started raining again, but the kids didn't go into the house. They just stood there on the porch, getting all wet and looking at me.

I'll have to admit that I was a strange sight coming down their muddy little road in the middle of God-damn nowhere with darkness coming on and a 30:30 cradled down in my arms, so the night rain wouldn't get in the barrel.

The kids didn't say a word as I walked by. The sisters' hair was unruly like dwarf witches'. I didn't see their folks. There was no light on in the house.

A Model A truck lay on its side in front of the house. It was next to three empty fifty-gallon oil drums. They didn't have a purpose any more. There were some odd pieces of rusty cable. A yellow dog came out and stared at me.

I didn't say a word in my passing. The kids were soaking wet now. They huddled together in silence on the porch. I had no reason to believe that there was anything more to life than this.

I
'M
wandering along, thinking about how
I
'd like to get laid by somebody new. It's a cold winter afternoon and just another thought, almost out of my mind when—

A tall, God-I-love the tall-ones girl comes walking up the street, casual as a young animal with Levi's on. She must be 5-9, wearing a blue sweater. Her breasts are loose beneath it and move in firm youthful tide.

She has no shoes on.

She's a hippie girl.

Her hair is long.

She doesn't know how pretty she is. I like that. It always turns me on, which isn't very hard to do right now because I'm already thinking about girls.

Then as we pass each other she turns toward me, a thing totally unexpected and she says, "Don't I know you?"

Wow! She is standing beside me now. She's really tall!

I look closely at her. I try to see if I know her. Maybe she's
a former lover or somebody else I've met or made a pass at when I've been drunk. I look carefully at her and she is beautiful in a fresh young way. She has the nicest blue eyes, but I don't recognize her.

"I know I've seen you before," she says, looking up into my face. "What's your name?"

"Clarence."

"Clarence?"

"Yeah, Clarence."

"Oh, then I don't know you," she says.

That was kind of fast.

Her feet are cold on the pavement and she's hunched in a cold-like way toward me.

"What is your name?" I ask, maybe I'm going to make a pass at her. That's what I should be doing right now. Actually, I'm about thirty seconds late in doing it.

"Willow Woman," she says. "I'm trying to get out to the Haight-Ashbury. I just got into town from Spokane."

"I wouldn't," I say. "It's very bad out there."

"I have friends in the Haight-Ashbury," she says.

"It's a bad place," I say.

She shrugs her shoulders and looks helplessly down at her feet. Then she looks up and her eyes have a friendly wounded expression in them.

"This is all I have," she says.

(Meaning what she is wearing.)

"And what's in my pocket," she says.

(Her eyes glance furtively toward the left rear pocket of her Levi's.)

"My friends will help me out when I get there," she says.

(Glancing in the direction of the Haight-Ashbury three miles away.)

Suddenly she has become awkward. She doesn't know exactly what to do. She has taken two steps backward. They are in the direction of going up the street.

"I...," she says.

"I...," looking down at her cold feet again.

She takes another half-step backward.

"I."

"I don't want to whine," she says.

She's really disgusted with what's happening now. She's ready to leave. It didn't work out the way she wanted.

"Let me help you," I say.

I reach into my pocket.

She steps toward me, instantly relieved as if a miracle has happened.

I give her a dollar, having totally lost somewhere the thread of making a pass at her, which I had planned on doing.

She can't believe it's a dollar and throws her arms around me and kisses me on the cheek. Her body is warm, friendly and giving.

We could make a nice scene together. I could say the words that would cause it to be, but I don't say anything because I've lost the thread of making a pass at her and don't know where it's gone, and she departs beautifully toward all the people that she will ever meet, at best I will turn out to be a phantom memory, and all the lives that she will live.

We've finished living this one together.

She's gone.

T
HERE'S
only one way to get into it: We saw the deer in the meadow. The deer turned in a slow circle and then broke the circle and went toward some trees.

There were three deer in the meadow and we were three people. I, a friend and my daughter 3½ years old. "See the deer," I said, pointing the way to the deer.

"Look the deer! There! There!" she said and surged against me as I held her in the front seat. A little jolt of electricity had come to her from the deer. Three little gray dams went away into the trees, celebrating a TVA of hoofs.

She talked about the deer as we drove back to our camp in Yosemite. "Those deer are really something," she said. "I'd like to be a deer."

When we turned into our campground there were three deer standing at the entrance, looking at us. They were the same deer or they were three different ones.

"Look the deer!" and the same electrical surge against me, enough perhaps to light a couple of Christmas tree lights or
make a fan turn for a minute or toast half a slice of bread.

The deer followed close behind the car as we drove at deer speed into the camp. When we got out of the car, the deer were there. My daughter took out after them. Wow! The deer!

I slowed her down. "Wait," I said. "Let Daddy take your hand." I didn't want her to scare them or get hurt by them either, in case they should panic and run over her, a next to impossible thing.

We followed after the deer, a little ways behind and then stopped to watch them cross the river. The river was shallow and the deer stopped in the middle and looked in three different directions.

She stared at them, not saying anything for a while. How quiet and beautiful they looked and then she said, "Daddy, take off the deer's head and put it on my head. Take off the deer's feet, put them on my feet. And I'll be the deer."

The deer stopped looking in three different directions. They all looked in one direction toward the trees on the other side of the river and moved off into those trees.

So the next morning there was a band of Christians camping beside us because it was Sunday. There were about twenty or thirty of them seated at a long wooden table. They were singing hymns while we were taking down our tent.

My daughter watched them very carefully and then walked over to peek out at them from behind a tree as they sang on. There was a man leading them. He waved his hands in the air. Probably their minister.

My daughter watched them very carefully and then moved out from behind the tree and slowly advanced until she was right behind their minister, looking up at him. He was standing out there alone and she was standing out there alone with him.

I pulled the metal tent stakes out of the ground and put them together in a neat pile, and I folded the tent and put it beside the tent stakes.

Then one of the Christian women got up from the long table and walked over to my daughter. I was watching this. She gave her a piece of cake and asked her if she wanted to sit down and listen to the singing. They were busy singing something about Jesus doing something good for them.

My daughter nodded her head and sat down on the ground. She held the piece of cake in her lap. She sat there for five minutes. She did not take a bite out of the piece of cake.

They were now singing about Mary and Joseph doing something. In the song it was winter and cold and there was straw in the barn. It smelled good.

She listened for about five minutes and then she got up, waved good-bye in the middle of "We Three Kings of Orient Are" and came back with the piece of cake.

"Well, how was that?" I said.

"Singing," she said, pointing they are singing.

"How's the cake?" I said.

"I don't know," she said and threw it on the ground. "I've already had breakfast." It lay there.

I thought about the three deer and the Christians singing. I looked at the piece of cake and to the river where the deer had been gone for a day.

The cake was very small on the ground. The water flowed over the rocks. A bird or an animal would eat the cake later on and then go down to the river for a drink of water.

A little thing came to my mind and having no other choice: it pleased me, so I hugged my arms around a tree and my cheek sailed to the sweet bark and floated there for a few gentle moments in the calm.

T
HIS
early April in God-damn God-damn begins with a note on the front door, left by a young lady. I read the note and wonder what the hell's up.

I'm too old for this kind of stuff. I can't keep track of everything, and so I go pick up my daughter and do the best I can on that front: take her to play in the park.

I really don't want to get out of bed, but I have to go to the toilet. Returning from the toilet, I see something a note or something fastened to the glass window on the front door. It leaves a shadow on the glass.

I don't give a damn. Let somebody else handle these complicated things in early April. It's enough for me to have gone to the toilet. I go back to bed.

I dream that somebody I don't like is walking their dog. The dream takes hours. The person is singing to their dog but I can't make out what the song is and I have to listen too hard and never get it, anyway.

I wake up totally bored. What am I going to do with the
rest of my life? I'm twenty-nine. I get the note off the door and go back to bed.

I read it with the sheet pulled up over my head. The light is not very good but it is better than anything else I've come across today. It's from a girl. She came by so quietly this morning and left it on my door.

The note is an apology for a bad scene she made the other night. It is in the form of a riddle. I can't figure it out. I never cared for riddles, anyway. Fuck her.

I go get my daughter and take her to the playground at Portsmouth Square. I have been watching her for the last hour. From time to time I have paused to write this down.

I wonder if my daughter will ever leave a note on some man's door in early April God-damn God-damn and he'll read it in bed with the sheet pulled up over his head and then take his daughter to the park and look up as I just did to see her playing with a blue bucket in the sand.