Try for a While

The Jeepster couldn't keep still. For forty-eight hours he'd been steady on the move and no place worked for long. He'd think of somewhere to be and go there and almost immediately suck the life from it, he could feel it charring around him. He felt he was on fire and running with upraised arms into a stiff cold wind, but instead of cooling him the wind just fanned the flames. His last so-called friend had faded on him and demanded to be left by the roadside with his thumb in the air. The Jeepster drove westward into a sun that had gone down the sky so fast it left a fiery wake like a comet. Light pooled above the horizon like blood and red light hammered off the hood of the SUV he was driving. He put on his sunglasses. In the failing day the light was falling almost horizontally and the highway glittered like some virtual highway in a fairy tale or nightmare. His so-called friend had faded because The Jeepster was armed and dangerous. He was armed and dangerous and running on adrenaline and fury and grief and honed to such a fine edge that alcohol and drugs no longer affected him. Nothing worked on him. He had a pocket full of money and a nine-millimeter automatic shoved into the waistband of his jeans and his T-shirt pulled down over it. He had his ticket punched for the graveyard or the penitentiary and one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train. He had everything he needed to get himself killed, to push the borders back and alter the very geography of reality itself. On the outskirts of Ackerman's Field the neon of a Texaco station bled into the dusk like a virulent stain. Night was falling like some disease he was in the act of catching. At the pumps he filled the SUV up and watched the traffic accomplish itself in a kind of wonder. Everyone should have been frozen in whatever attitude they'd held when the hammer fell on Aimee and they should hold that attitude forever. He felt like a plague set upon the world to cauterize and cleanse it. He went through the pneumatic door. He had his Ray-Bans shoved onto the top of his shaven head and he was grinning his gap-toothed grin. Such patrons as were about regarded him warily. He looked like bad news. He looked like the letter edged in black, the telegram shoved under your door at three o'clock in the morning. You seen that Coors man? The Jeepster asked the man at the register. Seen what? the man asked. Somewhere behind them a cue stick tipped a ball and it went down the felt in a near-silent hush and a ball rattled into a pocket and spiraled down and then there was just silence. The Jeepster laid money on the counter. I know all about that Coors man, he said. I know Escue was broke and he borrow ten bucks off the Coors man for the gas to get to where Aimee was working. Where's he at? The counterman made careful change. He don't run today, he said. Wednesday was the last day he's been here. And what if he did run, what if he was here? How could he know? He was just a guy doing Escue a favor. He didn't know. He didn't know, he didn't know. The Jeepster said. You reckon that'll keep the dirt out of his face? I don't. They regarded each other in silence. The Jeepster picked up his change and slid it into his pocket. He leaned toward the counterman until their faces were very close together. Could be you chipped in a few bucks yourself, he finally said. Just so you know, the counterman said, I've got me a sawed-off here under the counter. And I got my hand right on the stock. You don't look just right to me. You look crazy. You look like you escaped from prison or the crazy house. I didn't escape, The Jeepster said. They let me out and was glad to see me go. They said I was too far gone, they couldn't do anything for me. They said I was a bad influence. The Jeepster in Emile's living room. Emile was thinking this must be the end-time, the end of days. The rapture with graves bursting open and folk sailing skyward like superheroes. There was no precedent for this. The Jeepster was crying. His shaven head was bowed. His fingers were knotted at the base of his skull. A letter to each finger, LOVE and HATE inscribed there by some drunk or stoned tattooist in blurred jailhouse blue. The fingers were interlocked illegibly and so spelled nothing. The Jeepster's shoulders jerked with his sobbing, there was more news to read on his left arm: HEAVEN WON'T HAVE ME AND HELL'S AFRAID I'M TAKING OVER. Emile himself had fallen on hard times. Once the scion of a prosperous farm family, now he could only look back on long-lost days that were bathed in an amber haze of nostalgia. He’d inherited all this and for a while there were wonders. Enormous John Deere cultivators and hay balers and tractors more dear than Rolls-Royces. Friends unnumbered and naked women rampant in their willingness to be sent so high you couldn’t have tracked them on radar, sports cars that did not hold up so well against trees and bridge abutments. Little by little Emile had sold things off for pennies on the dollar and day by day the money rolled through his veins and into his lungs, and the greasy coins trickled down his throat. The cattle were sold away or wandered off. Hogs starved and the strong ate the weak. It amazed him how easily a small fortune could be pissed away. Money don’t go nowhere these days, Emile said when he was down to selling off stepladders and drop cords. Finally he was down to rolling his own, becoming an entrepreneur, slaving over his meth lab like some crazed alchemist at his test tubes and brazier on the brink of some breakthrough that would cleanse the world of sanity forever. The appalled ghost of Emile’s mother haunted these rooms, hovered fretfully in the darker corners. Wringing her spectral hands over doilies beset with beer cans and spilled ashtrays. Rats tunneling in secret trespass through the upholstery. There were man-shaped indentations in the Sheetrock walls, palimpsest cavities with outflung arms where miscreants had gone in drunken rage. JESUS IS THE UNSEEN LISTENER TO EVERY CONVERSATION, an embroidered sampler warned from the wall. There were those of Emile’s customers who wanted it taken down or turned to the wall. Emile left it as it was. He needs an education, Emile would say. He needs to know what it’s like out here in the world. There’s no secrets here. The Jeepster looked up. He took off his Ray-Bans and shook his head as if to clear it of whatever visions beset it. Reorder everything as you might shake a kaleidoscope into a different pattern. You got to have something, he said. I ain’t got jack shit. Pills or something. Dilaudid. I ain’t got jack shit. I’m out on bond, and I done told you they’re watchin this place. A sheriff’s car parks right up there in them trees. Takin pictures. I seen some son of a bitch with a video camera. It’s like bein a fuckin movie star. Man can’t step outside to take a leak without windin up on videotape or asked for an autograph. What happened? I sent Qualls to Columbia after a bunch of medicine for my lab. He kept tryin to buy it all at the same drugstore. Like I specifically told him not to do. He’d get turned down and go on to the next drugstore. Druggists kept callin the law and callin the law. By the time they pulled him over it looked like a fuckin parade. Cops was fightin over who had priorities. He had the whole back seat and trunk full of Sudafed and shit. He rolled over on me and here they come with a search warrant. I’m out on bond. I can’t stand this. I guess you’ll have to, Emile said. Look, for what it’s worth I’m sorry for you. And damn sorry for her. But I can’t help you. Nobody can. You want to run time back and change the way things happened. But time won’t run but one way. I can’t stand it. I keep seeing her face. Well. Maybe I’ll go back out there to the funeral home and see her. Maybe you ought to keep your crazy ass away from her daddy. You’ll remember he’s a cop. I have to keep moving. I never felt like this. I never knew you could feel like this. I can’t be still. It’s like I can’t stand it in my own skin. Emile didn’t say anything. He looked away. To the window where the night-mirrored glass turned back their images like sepia desperadoes in some old daguerreotype. You still got that tow bar or did you sell it? What? I’m fixing to get that car. Aimee’s car. Pull it off down by the river somewhere. This is not makin a whole lot of sense to me. They wouldn’t let me in out there, they won’t even let me in to see her body. I went and looked at her car. Her blood’s all in the seat. On the windshield. It’s all there is of her left in the world I can see or touch. I aim to have it. Get away from me, Emile said. Aimee turned up at his place at eight o’clock in the morning. The Jeepster still slept, it took the horn’s insistent blowing to bring him in the jeans he’d slept in out onto the porch and into a day where a soft summer rain fell. Her battered green Plymouth idled in the yard. He stood on the porch a moment studying it. In the night a spider had strung a triangular web from the porch beam and in its ornate center a single drop of water clung gleaming like a stone a jeweler had set. The Jeepster went barefoot down the doorsteps into the muddy yard. He was studying the car. Trying to get a count on the passengers. He couldn’t tell until she cranked down the glass that it was just Aimee. He stood with his hands in his pockets listening to the rhythmic swish of the windshield wipers. The dragging stutter of a faulty wiper blade. I need a favor, she said. It had been a while and he just watched her face. She had always had a sly, secretive look that said, I’ll bet you wish you had what I have, know what I know, could share the dreams that come for me alone when the day winds down and the light dims and it is finally quiet. She was still darkly pretty but there was something different about her. The grain of her skin, but especially the eyes. Something desperate hiding there in the dark shadows and trying to peer out. She already looked like somebody sliding off the face of the world. I don’t have a thing. I’m trying to get off that shit. Really? I’ve had the dry heaves and the shakes. Fever. Cramps and the shits. Is that real enough for you? Oh yeah, and hallucinations. I’ve had them. I may be having one now. I may be back in the house with baby monkeys running up and down the window curtains. She made a dismissive gesture, a slight curling of her upper lip. Will you do me a favor or not? Is Escue all out of favors? I’ve left him, I’m not going back. He’s crazy. No shit. Did a light just go on somewhere? He stays on that pipe and it’s fucked him up or something. His head. You can’t talk to him. I wouldn’t even attempt it. I don’t understand goddamn men. Live with them and they think they own you. Want to marry you. Eat you alive. Jimmy was older and he’d been around and I thought he wouldn’t be so obsessive. Sleep with him a few times and it’s the same thing over again. Men. The Jeepster looked away. Blackbirds rose from the field in a fury of wings and their pattern shifted and shifted again as if they sought some design they couldn’t quite attain. He thought about Aimee and men. He knew she’d slept with at least one man for money. He knew it for a fact. The Jeepster himself had brokered the deal. What you get for taking up with a son of a bitch old enough to be your daddy. I see you’re still the same. The hot-shit macho man. The man with the platinum balls. You’d die before you’d ask me to come back, wouldn’t you? You made your bed. Might as well spoon up and get comfortable. Then I want to borrow a gun. What for? I’m afraid he’ll be there tonight when I get off work. He said he was going to kill me and he will. He slapped me around some this morning. I just want him to see it. If he knows I’ve got it there in my purse he’ll leave me alone. I’m not loaning you a gun. Leonard. You’d shoot yourself. Or some old lady crossing the street. Is he following you? He’s broke, I don’t think he’s got the gas. I hope he does turn up here and tries to slap me around some. I’ll drop him where he stands and drag his sorry, woman-beating ass inside the house and call the law. Loan me the pistol. You don’t know how scared I am of him. You don’t know what it’s like. The loop tape of some old blues song played in his head: You don’t know my, you don’t know my, you don’t know my mind. No. I’ll pick you up from work. I’ll be there early and check out the parking lot and if he’s there I’ll come in and tell you. You can call the cops. You still working at that Quik Mart? Yes. But you won’t come. I’ll be there. Can I stay here tonight? You come back you’ll have to stay away from Escue. I won’t have him on the place. Somebody will die. I’m done with him. The Jeepster looked across the field. Water was standing in the low places and the broken sky lay there reflected. Rain crows called from tree to tree. A woven-wire fence drowning in honeysuckle went tripping toward the horizon where it vanished in mist like the palest of smoke. Then you can stay all the nights there are, he said. The murmur of conversation died. Folks in the General Café looked up when The Jeepster slid into a booth but when he stared defiantly around they went back to studying their plates and shoveling up their food. There was only the click of forks and knives, the quickstep rubber-soled waitresses sliding china across Formica. He ordered chicken-fried steak and chunky mashed potatoes and string beans and jalapeño cornbread. He sliced himself a bite of steak and began to chew. Then he didn’t know what to do with it. Panic seized him. The meat grew in his mouth, a gristly, glutinous mass that forced his jaws apart, distorted his face. He’d forgotten how to eat. He sat in wonder. The bite was supposed to go somewhere but he didn’t know where. What came next, forgetting to breathe? Breathing out when he should be breathing in, expelling the oxygen and hanging onto the carbon dioxide until the little lights flickered dim and dimmer and died. He leaned and spat the mess onto his plate and rose. Beneath his T-shirt the outlined gun was plainly visible. He looked about the room. Their switchblade eyes flickered away. He stood for an awkward moment surveying them as if he might address the room. Then he put too much money on the table and crossed the enormity of the tile floor and went out the door into the trembling dusk. So here he was again, The Jeepster back at the same old stand. On his first attempt he’d almost made it to the chapel where she lay in state before a restraining hand fell on his shoulder, but this time they were prepared. Two uniformed deputies unfolded themselves from their chairs and approached him on either side. They turned him gently, one with an arm about his shoulders. Leonard, he said. It’s time to go outside. Go on home now. You can’t come in here. The deputy was keeping his voice down but the father had been waiting for just this visitor. The father in his khakis rose up like some sentry posted to keep the living from crossing the border into the paler world beyond. A chair fell behind him. He had to be restrained by his brothers in arms, the sorriest and saddest of spectacles. His voice was a rusty croak. Crying accusations of ruin and defilement and loss. All true. He called curses down upon The Jeepster, proclaiming his utter worthlessness, asking, no, demanding, that God’s lightning burn him incandescent in his very footsteps. As if superstitious, or at any rate cautious, the cops released him and stepped one step away. One of them opened the door and held it. Doors were always opening, doors were always closing. The Jeepster went numbly through this opening into the hot volatile night and this door fell behind him like a thunderclap. In these latter days The Jeepster had discovered an affinity for the night side of human nature. Places where horrific events had happened drew him with a gently perverse gravity. These desecrated places of murder and suicide had the almost-nostalgic tug of his childhood home. The faces of the perpetrators looked vaguely familiar, like long-lost kin he could but barely remember. These were places where the things that had happened were so terrible that they had imprinted themselves onto an atmosphere that still trembled faintly with the unspeakable. The rutted road wound down and down. Other roads branched off this one and others yet, like capillaries bleeding off civilization into the wilderness, and finally he was deep in the Harrikin. Enormous trees rampant with summer greenery reared out of the night and loomed upon the windshield and slipstreamed away. All day the air had been hot and humid and to the west a storm was forming. Soundless lightning flickered the horizon to a fierce rose, then trembled and vanished. The headlights froze a deer at the height of its arc over a strand of barbed wire and like a holographic deer imaged out of The Jeepster’s mind or the free-floating ectoplasm of the night. He parked before the dark bulk of a ruined farmhouse. Such windows remained refracted the staccato lightning. Attendant outbuildings stood like hesitant, tree-shadowed familiars. He got out. There was the sound of water running somewhere. Off in the darkness fireflies arced like sparks thrown off by the heat. He had a liter of vodka in one hand and a quart of orange juice in the other. He drank and then sat for a time on a crumbling stone wall and studied the house. He had a momentary thought for copperheads in the rocks but he figured whatever ran in his veins was deadlier than any venom and any snake that bit him would do so at its peril. He listened to the brook muttering to itself. Night birds called from the bowered darkness of summer trees. He drank again and past the gleaming ellipse of the upraised bottle the sky bloomed with a blood-red fire and after a moment thunder rumbled like voices in a dream and a wind was at the trees. He set aside the orange juice and went back to the SUV and took a flashlight from the glove box. Its beam showed him a fallen barn, wind-writhed trees, the stone springhouse. Beneath the springhouse a stream trilled away over tumbled rocks and vanished at the edge of the flashlight’s beam. You had to stoop to enter the stone door, it was a door for gnomes or little folk. The interior had the profound stillness of a cathedral, the waiting silence of a church where you’d go to pray. This was where they’d found the farmer after he’d turned the gun on himself. Where here? What had he thought about while he’d waited for the courage to eat the barrel of the shotgun? The Jeepster turned involuntarily and spat. There was a cold metallic taste of oil in his mouth. Light slid around the walls. Leached plaster, water beading and dripping on the concrete, the air damp and fetid. A black-spotted salamander crouched on its delicate rot feet and watched him with eyes like bits of obsidian. Its leathery orange skin looked alien to this world. Against the far wall stood a crypt-shaped stone spring box adorned with curling moss like coarse, virid maidenhair. He trailed a hand in the icy water. In years long past, here was where they’d kept their jugged milk. Their butter. He’d have bet there was milk and butter cooling here the day it all went down. When the farmer walked in on his wife and brother in bed together. The Jeepster could see it. Overalls hung carefully on a bedpost. Worn gingham dress folded just so. Did he kill them then or watch a while? But The Jeepster knew, he was in the zone. He killed them then. And lastly himself, a story in itself. When The Jeepster came back, the storm was closer and the thunder constant and the leaves of the clashing trees ran like quicksilver. He drank from the vodka and climbed high steep steps to the farmhouse porch and crossed it and hesitated before the open front door. The wind stirred drifted leaves of winters past. The oblong darkness of the doorway seemed less an absence of light than a tangible object, a smooth glass rectangle so solid you could lay a hand on it. Yet he passed through it into the house. There was a floral scent of ancient funerals. The moving light showed him dangling sheaves of paper collapsed from the ceiling, wallpaper of dead, faded roses. A curled and petrified work shoe like a piece of proletarian sculpture. The revenants had eased up now to show The Jeepster about. A spectral hand to the elbow, solicitously guiding him to the bedroom. Hinges grated metal on metal. A hand, pointing. There. Do you see? He nodded. The ruined bed, the hasty, tangled covers, the shot-riddled headboard. Turning him, the hand again pointing. There. Do you see? Yes, he said. The empty window opening on nothing save darkness. The Jeepster imagined the mad scramble over the sill and out of the window, the naked man fleeing toward the hollow, pistoned legs pumping, buckshots shrieking after him like angry bees, feets don’t fail me now. The Jeepster clicked out the light. He thought of the blood-stained upholstery strewn with pebbled glass and it did not seem enough. Nothing seemed enough. He stood for a time in the darkness, gathering strength from these lost souls for what he had to do. He lay in the back seat of the SUV and tried to sleep. Rain pounded on the roof, wind-whipped rain rendered the glass opaque and everything beyond these windows a matter of conjecture. The vodka slept on his chest like a stuffed bear from childhood. It hadn’t worked anyway, it might as well have been tap water. Things would not leave him alone, old unheeded voices plagued his ears. Brightly colored images tumbled through his mind. An enormous, stained-glass serpent had shattered inside him and was moving around blindly reassembling itself. He’d concentrate on more pleasant times. His senior year in high school, he was his leaping body turning in the air, the football impossibly caught as if by legerdemain, he heard the crowd calling his name. But a scant few years later he was seated alone in the empty stands with a bottle between his feet. A winter wind blew scraps of paper and turned paper cups against the frozen ground and the lush green playing field had turned brittle and bare. He wondered if there was a connection between these two images and, further, what that connection might be. A picture of himself and Aimee the first time, try to hold on to this one. Fooling around on her bed. Her giggling against his chest. A new urgency to her lips and tongue. Leonard, quit. Quit. Oh quit. Oh. Then he was inside her and her gasp was muffled by applause from the living room and her father chuckling at the Letterman show. Other nights, other beds. The Jeepster and Aimee shared a joint history, tangled and inseparable, like two trees that have grown together, a single trunk faulted at the heart. Drink this, smoke this, take these. Hell, take his money, you won’t even remember it in the morning. You’ll never see him again. Ruin, defilement, loss. One pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small, one pill puts you on the road to Clifton with a Ford truck riding your bumper. For here’s what happened, or what happened on the surface, here’s what imprinted itself on the very ether and went everywhere at once, the news the summer wind whispered in The Jeepster’s sleeping ear. The truck pulled up on Aimee past Centre. Escue blew the truck horn, pounded on the steering wheel. She rolled down the glass and gave him the finger. She sped up. He sped up. She could see his twisted face in the rearview mirror. The round O of his mouth seemed to be screaming soundlessly. When she parked on the lot before the Quik Mart he pulled in beside her. He was out of the Ford before it quit rocking on its springs. He had a .357 magnum in his hand. As he ran around the hood of his truck she was trying to get out of her car on the passenger’s side. Just as he shot out the driver’s-side window the passenger door on the Plymouth flew open and she half-fell onto the pavement. She was on her back with her right elbow on the pavement and a hand to her forehead. She looked as if she might be raking the hair out of her eyes. He shot her twice in the face. Somebody somewhere began to scream. Hey. Hey goddamn it. A man came running out of the Quik Mart with a pistol of his own. His feet went slap slap slap on the pavement. Escue turned and leveled the pistol and fired. The running man dropped to his palms and behind him the plate-glass window of the Quik Mart dissolved in a shimmering waterfall. The man was on his hands and knees feeling about for his dropped weapon when Escue put the barrel of the revolver in his own mouth with the sight hard against his palate and pulled the trigger. Now The Jeepster opened the door of the SUV and climbed out into the rain. He raised his arms to the windy heavens. All about him turmoil and disorder. Rain came in torrents and the thunder cracked like gunfire and lightning walked among the vibratory trees. His shaven head gleamed like a rain-washed stone. He seemed to be conducting the storm with his upraised arms. He demanded the lightning take him but it would not. Mouse-quiet and solemn, The Jeepster crossed the rich mauve carpet. Who knew what hour, the clock didn’t exist that could measure times like these. This time there were no laws stationed to intercept him and he passed unimpeded into another chamber. Soft, indirect lighting fell on purple velvet curtains tied back with golden rope. He moved like an agent provocateur through the profoundest silences. This chamber was furnished with a steel gray casket, wherein an old man with a caved face and a great blade of a nose lay in state. Two middle-aged female mourners sat in folding chairs and watched The Jeepster’s passage with fearful, tremulous eyes. He parted another set of purple curtains. Here the room was empty save for a pale pink casket resting on a catafalque. He crossed the room and stood before it. Water dripped from his clothing onto the carpet. A fan whirred somewhere. After a while he knew someone was standing behind him. He’d heard no footsteps but he turned to face an old man in worn, dusty black hunched in the back like a vulture, maroon tie at his throat. His thin hair was worn long on the side and combed over his bald pate. The Jeepster could smell his brilliantined hair, the talcum that paled his cheek. The Jeepster looked bad. He was waterlogged and crazed and the pistol was outside his shirt now and his eyes were just the smoking black holes you’d burn in flesh with a red-hot poker. He laid a hand on the pink metal casket. Above where the face might be. He thought he could detect a faint, humming vibration. I can’t see her, The Jeepster said. The undertaker cleared his throat. It sounded loud after the utter silence. No, he said. She was injured severely in the face. It’s a closed-casket service. The Jeepster realized he was on the tilted edge of things, where the footing was bad and his trip tenuous at best. He felt the frayed mooring lines that held him part silently and tail away into the dark and he felt a sickening lurch in his very being. There are some placed you can’t come back from. He took the pistol out of his waistband. No it’s not, he said. When the three deputies came they came down the embankment past the springhouse through the scrub brush, parting the undergrowth with their heavy, hand-cut snake-sticks, and they were the very embodiment of outrage, the bereft father at their fore goading them forward. Righteous anger tricked out in khaki and boots and Same Browne belts like fate’s gestapo set upon him. In parodic domesticity he was going up the steps to the abandoned farmhouse with an armful of wood to build a fire for morning coffee. He’d leaned the girl against the wall, where she took her ease with her ruined face turned to the dripping trees and the dark fall of her hair drawing off the morning light. The deputies crossed the stream and quickened their pace and came on. The leaning girl, The Jeepster, the approaching law. These scenes had the sere, charred quality of images unspooling from ancient papyrus or the broken figures crazed on shards of stone pottery. The Jeepster rose up before them like a wild man, like a beast hounded to its lair. The father struck him in the face and a stick caught him at the base of the neck just above the shoulders and he went down the steps sprawled amid his spilled wood and struggled to his knees. A second blow drove him to his hands, and his palms seemed to be steadying the trembling of the earth itself. He studied the ground beneath his spread hands. Ants moved among the grass stems like shadowy figures moving between the boles of trees and he saw with unimpeachable clarity that there were other worlds than this one. Worlds layered like the sections of an onion or the pages of a book. He thought he might ease into one of them and be gone, vanish like dew in a hot morning sun. Then blood gathered on the tip of his nose and dripped and in this heightened reality he could watch the drop descend with infinitesimal slowness and when it finally stuck the earth it rang like a hammer on an anvil. The ants tracked it away and abruptly he could see the connections between the worlds, strands of gossamer sheer and strong as silk. There are events so terrible in this world their echoes roll world on distant world like ripples on water. Tug a thread and the entire tapestry alters. Pound the walls in one world and in another a portrait falls and shatters. Goddamn, Cleave, a voice said. Hold up a minute, I believe you’re about to kill him. When the father’s voice came it came from somewhere far above The Jeepster, like the voice of some Old Testament god. I would kill him if he was worth it but he ain’t. A son of a bitch like this just goes through life tearnin up stuff, and somebody else has always got to sweep up the glass. He don’t know what it is to hurt, he might as well be blind and deaf. He don’t feel things the way the rest of us does.