Ablutions

Three

Discuss the renting of a vehicle and your conversation with the pockmarked counter man about the cars he has to offer you and then about the cars he does not have to offer but that he wants to speak of anyway, foreign and luxury automobiles he hopes to someday sit in and drive around in and whose horns he would like to honk and whose powerful stereo systems would push air through his hair. Discuss his lewd innuendoes when you say you do not care for the color or make of the rental but only the size, as you plan to lie prone inside its walls. You make no visible response to the intimations, being medicated on fat white pills, with many more in an aspirin bottle stashed in your suitcase (you scattered a dozen aspirins atop the white pills as a diversionary tactic), and the counter man, understanding there will be no mannish banter, drops his head to tap chicken-like on his computer.

You select a truck with a shell or camper top and when the man asks for your destination you tell him you are driving to the Grand Canyon and he makes one last pass at friendship, asking for the purpose of your trip (he is typing and speaking at the same time, which impresses you), and as you have no real reason but only an elusive, mesmeric feeling for going, you tell him a lie, which is this: When you were twelve years old you visited the Grand Canyon with your mother and father and spent three happy days and nights in the area, camping out under the stars, burning hot dogs over a barbecue pit and watching them fall from the sticks into the fire, cursing, catching and killing lizards and snakes — all the wiles and whims of any fast-paced boyhood. Or this at least is what you have been told took place those years past because you cannot, inexplicably, remember a single thing about the vacation, not the canyon's alleged breathtaking scale or the mules that are said to carry camera-laden passengers the eight miles down a treacherous trail to the canyon's shaded floor, and you share your frustrations with the counter man, telling him how bothered you are that one of the world's wonders has been shuffled from your mind, and you tell him that at the end of the day you simply believe the Grand Canyon deserves another chance to make a proper, durable impression.

The counter man has ceased working and is looking into your eyes for signs of psychosis. He asks that you have a seat while his people bring the truck around and you do not sit but stand at a nearby brochure display to listen in as he speaks on the telephone with his regional manager and you hear him retelling your story of the Grand Canyon Forgotten with emphasis on the mutilation of blameless reptiles and he describes your crooked glasses and underarm sweat stains and you hear him call you a weirdo and then a real weirdo and he requests the authority to deny renting to you on the grounds of suspicious vehicular intent but the manager, either a sentimentalist or else a hater of snakes himself, is unconcerned by the story and the truck is brought around forthwith and the counter man is frustrated at his unsuccessful attempt to ruin your plans and does not wish you bon voyage but turns his dented head away to hate at the walls.

Your next stop after the rental office is the health food store, where you will stock up on supplies for the long desert journey. You have never been to a health food store before and are looking forward to the experience, this due more to narcotic euphoria than an interest in herbs or roots or any other healing elements. The rental truck is brand new and you fiddle with each knob and button and your feet feel as though they are bound in sable pelts, making for inelegant driving, but the sensation of movement is as pleasant as the quilted dreams of deepest sleep and you are not worried for your safety or the safety of your adopted vehicle, which you recall is insured from grille to tow knob, and you watch your feet rise and fall on the clean rubber pedals and experience a profound satisfaction at their activity.

Your trips to the health food store and the Grand Canyon were motivated by a visit with a liver specialist called Eloise, working from a strip-mall office in the dead-hilled community of Agoura, deep in the San Fernando Valley. She came recommended by the child actor, who called her Magic Fingers and said she could repair the bloodied organs of decrepit winos, but you were nervous about the visit because people often died around doctors and you had not seen one in years and the pain in your side had increased so that you sometimes doubled over in hissing pain.

Eloise was forty-five years old, with ornately decorated chopsticks crisscrossed through a bun of black and gray hair. She led you to the examination room and asked that you take off your clothes for your colonic and you froze and said, but I'm not having a colonic, and she slowly turned and her expression was severe and she said that just by looking at your eye coloring she could tell you were poisoned with alcohol and hepatitis and that there had to be a prompt and total change in your life or your liver would turn to charcoal and you would die, and that you had to begin treatment right away even though she did not have time for the procedure, and she made a stab at bedside humor, saying she would make time by eating her lunch throughout.

Her lecture frightened you — it was what you had been dreading, to the word — so much so that you surprised yourself by agreeing to the colonic, which was as you suspected it would be, humiliating and disgusting, and when she said you would have to go through this many times before your body was completely cleansed you wondered if death was not the more dignified route to take. Also you were shocked when you learned she had not been joking about her lunch: She put away a large bowl of rice with steamed eggplant and zucchini, all the while gesturing with her plastic fork at the running tube, alive with bouncing excrement.

You are thinking of all this as you walk from your truck to the health food store entrance. Eloise was unhappy when you canceled today's appointment (you called on a pay phone from the car rental agency) but when you told a lie about a family emergency she said she understood and that you were a good boy when you promised you would not think of drinking alcohol or taking drugs or aspirin during your absence. Wrenching a shopping cart free from the corral you decide you will not see her again and will try not to think of the colonic again and you will not tell anyone about the colonic and are glad to have ventured all the way to Agoura, where you will never in your life return and so never by chance bump into anyone who had seen you in the office, and you think of the stories you have heard of those who die only after they stop drinking and of the doctors who raise their hands up and say, "What a shame the man didn't come to me sooner." You decide Eloise is one of these, and feel a heavy burden lifted the moment you divorce yourself from her.

That you have wasted a portion of your pill-high thinking of such things as doctors and corkscrewed tubing is madness, and you strike them from your mind and relax your hands on the grip of the cart and stretch your neck to test your high and you feel that it is still with you and you enter the health food store and are contented to find it smells just as you hoped it would, like a giant, wheat-filled pill. There is soft music piped in from the ceiling and you browse the aisles for forty-five minutes, putting things in and taking them out of your cart and speaking with the store employees, telling them you contracted hepatitis C through a blood transfusion (lie) and are now in need of advice, and in their scrambling sympathy they refer to magazine articles and websites and they give you bottles of every sort, pills and muddy-looking juices, and also a pound of trail mix and a large container of blueberries, evidently a strong antioxidant. The manager offers to loan you a few books and she pulls these inspirational texts from a tasseled suede bag and fans them out on the counter for you to look over but you graciously decline and wish her a good morning and she responds in kind as do her coworkers, pimply, pretend hippies, tugging on their smocks and waving.

Sitting in your truck you open the bottles and take some of the good-for-you pills and then some more of your special white pills and you open a can of beer — you had stopped at a gas station and bought a single can of Budweiser — and stick this between your legs before setting out on your trip in earnest. There is traffic heading into but not away from the city and you stare at the disappointed faces stuck in their cars and lives and you feel the next wave of pills coming on and are certain you have made the prudent choice in planning this vacation and you drink your beer in one long gulp, breathing with your nostrils as you had been taught as a boy, with your eyes watching the road at a painful downward angle that makes you laugh (at the thought of the cricket-legged muscles on the backs of your eyeballs), and you toss the empty beer can out the window, or rather let go of it and it is sucked out the window (also funny), and you pull off the freeway to stop at a gas station for another can of beer and a phone card.

The truth is that you had not planned to drink on this trip and in fact this was its grand if overly dramatic purpose: To travel and see the world without any alcohol and to think of what was broken in your life and wonder clearheaded about the mending of these broken things. This was the plan and it was a fine plan, only midway through your previous night of work you were offered the bottle of white pills at a price so low you were morally unable to turn it down. You took these pills home and thought to leave them untouched in the cupboard as a present for your homecoming when it occurred to you to bring a few along in case of any emergencies — certainly they would offset your desire for whiskey — and you were happy with your realistic point of view and you took four pills to celebrate this and also to test their strength and you were happy again to find the pills were stronger than you had hoped and when you entered gas station number one your only idea was to purchase a phone card but your high made you dull-minded and there you were in the aisles, looking and pretending not to look at the coolers and at last giving in and purchasing the one can of beer, and later when you realized you forgot to buy a phone card you stopped at another gas station and again you forgot the phone card (you remembered the beer) but took comfort in the thought of the next gas station, and you wondered where it would be, and would the cashier be friendly or unfriendly, and you felt an uncommon patriotic shiver as you considered the country's innumerable gas stations and markets and rest stops, small businesses thriving or going under, the owners gambling their very lives on customers like yourself, travelers in need of single cans of beer and forgettable phone cards, and you looked forward to the next gas station, gas station number three, and you drank your beer down so that you might meet up with it sooner.

Traffic thickens in Covina and you exit the freeway looking around for gas station number seven. You drive past an old bowling alley and decide to wait out rush hour at the bar, swearing to yourself you will not drink a drop of whiskey, and you say it aloud: "I will not drink a drop of whiskey at the bar in the old bowling alley in Covina." You do not drink any whiskey but you want to terribly and you pour out two more white pills and lay these on your curling tongue (you shudder at their taste and fill your cheeks with beer). Time passes, an hour, and when you do not feel the pills coming on you know there are too many blocking up your bloodstream and that by taking any more you are wasting them, and so for the time being you cancel them from your mind and focus instead on your surroundings.

You do not bowl and do not want to bowl but find the sound of bowling therapeutic and also the sound of the baseball game on the television, which you do not watch. You noticed seven or eight classic cars in the parking lot and it is easy enough to pick out their owners: Men and women in their sixties, bowling and drinking and talking; the men wear matching shirts and are members of some type of car or social club. A few of the women, old enough to be grandparents, are made up like bobbysoxers, with poodle skirts and pony-tails. One is jumping and clapping at her husband's bowling ability, acting the part of the spry teenager. She is drunk, and follows her husband to the bar and asks in baby talk for a Long Island iced tea; when he refuses, she complains and you hear him say to her, "Goddamn it, Betty, if you don't settle down and shut your mouth up you'll be home with the cats next time we ride." The bartender winks at you and you look away, laughing into the flat of your palm.

Your right pants pocket is filled with blueberries that you eat with each sip of beer and a drunken woman at the bar is making fun of you, asking if you are eating grubs and potato bugs. "'M talking to you, Tarzan." She turns to the bartender. "The King of the Wild Bowlers," she says. You ignore her and she settles her tab and drifts away to the lunch counter and the bartender apologizes, saying in the woman's defense that her husband has recently died of "balls cancer" and that she is roughing it out these last few weeks. He brings you a beer on the house, and then another and another — he is drinking tequila shots but hides this fact from you don't know who; he initiates this apparent rule-breaking as a bonding point. Other than the occasional walk-up you are his only customer and he asks you friendly bartender things about your life and then he speaks about his and you tell a bad joke and he laughs too hard and lays a hand on yours as if for support and then strokes the top of your hand and winks again, and this wink is the wrong sort of wink and it makes you uncomfortable and you tell him to watch your drink while you step out for a cigarette and he balances a napkin on the beer can and you leave the bowling alley just as the social club erupts over some crucial bowling error. (Betty is sitting a lane away from her friends, arms crossed in frustration at a life passed too soon, and with too little excitement.) You try to sleep in your truck but owing to the heat and discomfort of the cab you cannot and so after stopping at a gas station for a beer, and again forgetting the phone card, you are shortly back on the 10 freeway, heading east toward the desert.

Discuss Las Vegas. It is eleven o'clock at night when you arrive. That you are here at all demonstrates ill will toward your goodwill trip intentions and eleven is a particularly dangerous time for someone struggling with whiskey jitters but as before you promise not to touch a drop and swear you will drink only beer and that you are stopping by only to wonder at the lights and also to duck into the piano bar at the Bellagio for their blue-cheese-stuffed olives, a personal favorite and rare treat.

You stumble climbing onto your barstool and the bartender — tall and leathery, his thinning hair bleached white and spiked for a ridiculous effect — dislikes you on sight. He looks to have been a cocaine addict in years past and is now the perennial desert bachelor. Sensing his disapproval and understanding the sensitivity of bartender-customer relations you do not ask for the olives right away but order a beer and tip extravagantly and he takes your money but gives no thanks and will not engage in any casino chitchat. You order another beer and throw more money at the man but can see he is steadfast in his opinions and so you go ahead and ask for a cup of olives as a side and he is glad to be turning you down when he tells you the specialty olives are not bar peanuts tossed around randomly but offered only when ordered alongside their top-shelf martinis. You tell him you had not meant to speak belittlingly of the olives and of course you will pay the cost of this special martini except you don't want to drink a martini but only eat the olives with your beer and the bartender cuts you off and says the olives as a house rule are not to be sold or given away as snacks and you cut the bartender off and loudly order a top-shelf martini with extra olives and no martini and the bartender is now truly unhappy and he brings you one olive and tells you to "eat the stinking thing and fuck off down the road," and walks to the end of the bar to regale a regular with this, his latest story: The drunk who really, really wanted some olives.

You are never angry and now you are angry and you do not know what to do about it. You want to attack the man but think with a shudder of your cellmates in a Las Vegas jail and so instead take four more white pills and hatch a revenge plan. You do not eat the olive. You squash it in a twenty-dollar bill that the bartender will have to clean before pocketing, and taking up a pen from your bag you write these words on a napkin:

You are forty years old, a bartender in a bar in the desert. You hate the customers and the work but are trapped in the life as you have no other skills and have had no schooling or training of any kind. You have wasted your life drinking and doing drugs and sleeping beside women with hay for brains. You are alone and of no use to the world, save for this job, the job you hate, the job of getting people drunk. What will you be doing in five years? In ten years? There is no one who will look after you and you could die tomorrow and the only people who would care would be your bosses, and they would not be sad at your passing but only annoyed about having to interview new staff.

Your hair looks impossibly stupid.

You place the folded twenty atop this note and walk away to hide behind a row of slot machines and watch the plot in action. The bartender picks up the money, peeling it open to find the olive, and raises his eyes to find you. He does not find you and you are proud of the revenge results so far and are preparing for the bartender's reaction to the napkin when he, without noticing the writing, balls it up and tosses it into the garbage. He drops the dirty twenty in his tip jar and resumes his work.

Your heart is broken; you sit there feeling it break. Your chin is trembling when a woman in tights and a bow tie taps your shoulder and points to her tray and asks what you want to drink and you say, double Irish whiskey no ice, and she walks off to fetch it and you, realizing what you have done, stand and leave the slots before she can return and you head for the exit and ask the valet how far it is to the Grand Canyon and he tells you, and you hand him too much money and drive quickly away from the shimmering, nightmarish town. (You try not to look but the casinos seem to be breathing, their glowing bellies expanding and contracting as you move past.)

You do not drive to the Grand Canyon but head north into Utah. There is no reason for this. Whiskey or no whiskey you are drunk and angry at yourself and you wonder why you are unable to help yourself and your mood is desperate and no pills will change this and so you take no more and you do not stop for single cans of Budweiser and by the time you pull over to sleep you are sick and in pain. You try and fish out four aspirin from the bottle but they have burrowed past the white pills to the bottom, and so you empty the bottle onto your lap and pick out the aspirin this way. You are parked in a truck stop fifty miles outside St. George, an expanse of dirt twice the size of a football field, and yours is the only civilian vehicle among the semi trucks. You gag down the aspirin before climbing into the airless shell of your truck and curling up with your blanket to sleep.

You do not sleep, or anyway you do not sleep well. There is an Indian casino opposite the truck stop that shoots from its rooftop exploding fireworks hourly, this in anticipation of the coming Fourth of July weekend. Also, the trucks that come and go throughout the night are forever settling and rattling and honking, and their horns are as loud as a ship's and you jump at the sound and rub your eyes raw and by dawn you have surpassed the pain caused by the drinking but feel you have become part stray dog, the touch of your skin like a bald and miserable animal. It is dry and hot out but you do not drink any alcohol. You enter the truck stop market and buy two bottles of water and drink these along with two handfuls of blueberries. Before getting back on the highway you put your wallet and pills into the shell so you will be forced to pull over before deviating from your original travel plan. You do not listen to the radio as you drive and you have no thoughts but rather a sound in your mind, or a weight, a gathering blackness. It holds your head to the side.

It is seven in the morning and you are just outside St. George when the bloody noses begin. You have not had a bloody nose since you were an adolescent and you are so tired that you do not notice anything at first but you touch your lips and come away with red fingertips and look down to find a line of blood drawn down your shirt front and soaking into the crotch of your pants. You stop in a diner and clean up in the bathroom, changing your shirt and washing your pants in the sink, as you did not bring a spare pair. You do not want to reenter the diner with a wet spot on the front of your pants so you dunk them entirely in water, wringing out the excess, so that they are now a uniform color and less likely to draw attention as long as no one touches you. You will not let anyone touch you.

You order a trucker's breakfast that you eat exactly one bite of. The waitress teases you about your lack of appetite and when your nose begins to bleed again she catches your chin with her dishrag before any blood can fall onto your clothes or plate. She is grateful for the departure from her routine and you hold the rag to your face and talk with her, making friends, and you ask her for a route through Zion National Park to the Grand Canyon and she writes down directions with a warning not to travel a particular highway that would take you through Colorado City and you ask her what's the matter with Colorado City and she says that's where all the "plygs" live and you ask her what a plyg is and she says, the polygamists.

"Don't you know about the polygamists?" She dips the rag in your water glass and dabs at the dried blood on your face. "Nastiest people I've ever met. The Mormons, or Latter-day Saints as they call themselves now, are changing with the times, but there's still a few of these holdouts with their caveman ways. They were getting nudged out bit by bit and got so fed up they ripped up their houses from the ground and had them transported across state lines into Arizona. They're a town on wheels now and they hate outsiders like hell. I went through there once but you won't catch me back again. They wouldn't have doused me with water if I'd been on fire, I don't think. I feel sorriest for the women. Can you imagine what they must go through in their lives?"

After settling your bill you purchase a map at the gas station next door to search out the quickest way to Colorado City and you are happy at this new adventure: The discovery of and visitation with the mean-hearted, exiled polygamists of northern Arizona. The day grows warmer and dryer and your bloody noses are coming more frequently but you are using your previously soiled shirt as a bib; the blood drips off your chin and you watch your gory reflection in the rear-view mirror and wipe yourself dry and eat more blueberries. You slap at your head and the steering wheel — you had meant to buy a phone card in the last gas station.

Discuss Colorado City. It looks to be deserted and you are wondering if the polygamists have rolled away once more when you see from the highway a group of houses resting atop brick and wooden blocks. You turn off and park beside the village and are disheartened when you do not see anyone about, no faces in the windows or even an unfriendly rustling of curtains, and though you had planned to you are not brave enough to knock on a random door and ask for phony directions. You drive farther into town and come upon a string of roadside shops and park outside a churchy-looking thrift store. You walk the length of highway but each store is either closed or condemned and you turn back to your truck. When your nose begins to bleed you walk with your head held back, plugging your nostrils with your fingers, because you had not wanted to stroll around a strange town with a bloodstained shirt tucked in your collar. Now your nostrils are packed with clotted blood and your hands and the steering wheel are sticky and you have no water to clean yourself with and you drive ten miles down the road and are upset at having missed Zion National Park to look into a couple dusty windows and you wonder if you should call your waitress friend in St. George to bring her up to date. Hoping to wash up and have a cup of coffee you park outside what you think is a diner but turns out to be a social hall and you enter to find it is full of celebrating polygamists.

There are a hundred or more people in the hall, men, women, and children, and a hush blankets the room as you enter. Here is the reason for their empty homes and closed shops — a wedding, a funeral, a pre-Fourth bash, something. The children are barefoot and dirty, their faces hidden behind the long smocks of their mothers and sisters, women watching you with fear and revulsion. The men's sleeves are rolled up to the biceps, revealing a lifetime of labor and also tension caused by your presence; they look at one another and wonder what will be done with you. The party is separated by gender.

It is just as the waitress said — these people hate you and will not rest until you have gone, and you stand smiling dumbly in the doorway looking around for a coffee urn, and not finding one you call out, not to a particular person but to the polygamists as a body that you are looking to eat something, and is there a decent restaurant in the area? No one answers and in fact it is as though you have said nothing, as though they are looking not at a person at all but at the door standing open on its own, and the feeling of the group is, which one of us is going to close it?

You leave the social hall and return to your truck, continuing on until you hit a small post office where you park to write your wife a postcard (she is living with her mother in Connecticut). The wind whips through the cab and blood drips from your chin and drags across the card and here is what you write: "Beware the plygs of Colorado City, Arizona. They have no cups of coffee for the likes of you." The clerk in the post office is not a polygamist and she agrees when you say they could use a strong drink. "I treat them like they're ghosts," she tells you. "It's easier that way." You ask for a tissue to clean your nose and she fetches this along with a Dixie cup of tap water to wash off the dried, brown, flaking-off blood.

It is Friday, the third of July, and you are standing beside the truck with your hands clasped behind your back. The look and scope of the Grand Canyon is a world beyond anything you had imagined, anything seen in magazines or movies. The sky is gathering a deep red at the edges as the sun drops to the horizon and people line the lip of the canyon and none are speaking but only standing and watching. You look at their faces, sensing their amazement, and wonder why you do not feel similarly — for you the effect of the view is a distinct discomfort and uneasiness. You are dizzy from a strange rush of hot blood in your stomach and the closeness to something as fundamental as this canyon. You were not prepared to feel anything other than pedestrian amusement, and it weakens you in your spine and legs. Clutching your stomach through your shirt you say to yourself, There is too much of the earth missing here, and I just don't want to know about it.

A hundred-year-old lodge is connected to the parking lot and though you are still not hungry (you finished the last of the withering blueberries) you walk over to see about dinner, if only to get away from the canyon awhile, but the dining room is full and the hostess says you will have to wait an hour or more to be seated. She suggests you head over to the saloon to sit out the rush and tells you to drop her name for a free cocktail (at the word your face puckers and your neck recoils into your shoulders like a turtle and the hostess, raising her eyebrows, moves on to help the next customer). You still have not taken a pill or touched alcohol since you woke up this morning.

The sun has set. You pace past the saloon several times but do not enter and you tell yourself you will not unless delivered a sign informing you to, though you do not mean to wait for the hand of God to reach from the canyon and open the swinging doors but something more along the lines of catching sight of a pretty girl at the bar, or for someone coming or going to wish you a good evening. When no such thing happens you walk to the saloon doors to peer inside the darkened room and the bartender's eyes and the eyes of the customers turn to you and are shining wet like a raccoon's over a trash can, and you catch sight of the rows of glowing bottles and again feel the heat gathering in your stomach, only worse this time, as if blood is pumping outward from its pit, and you push away from the flashing black eyes and rush back to the truck, climb into the shell, and close the door at your feet.

You are panting in the windless quiet of the truck. There is something unmistakably wrong with your stomach, some new pain you have not yet experienced, and you search with your fingertips for its center. When the pain and heat do not subside you gag down four aspirin and lie back in hopes of sleeping but the burning discomfort will not allow it, and as it comes in sharper waves you listen to your own moaning and whining and this is the most wretched and lonely noise you have ever heard, and a sadness like a lead-weighted curtain drops and covers you and now, with no alcohol or narcotics to disguise the long-hidden emotion, it takes over your body.

Here is a force more powerful than yourself, a quickening black-crazy desperation hurrying into your bones, and you are frightened, as in the alley at work on the night your wife left, that you are damaging your brain, and you punch at the insides of the truck, except now the pain does nothing to pacify you but seems to intensify your desolation. You are flipping around fish-like in the shell, slamming your head on the wheel well hoping to knock yourself unconscious, and blood is streaming from your nose into your eyes and mouth when some recessed, rational part of your mind informs you that this is the purpose of your coming to the Grand Canyon, and so you let go of your body and allow the attacking pressure to smother its weight on you and you wrap your face in the blanket and scream through visions of the sadness of your wife and of the women at the bar and your life at the bar and the regulars at the bar and your life alone in the house where you once lived with your pretty wife but where you now cannot look out the windows, and you think of the loneliness of the murdered ghost in the bar and you scream and scream covered in the greasy blood and tears until your voice is blown out and you push only creaking air and do not recognize your own sound and your body in time exhausts itself, of both force and emotion, and you can no longer move and are merely shivering, and then you are settled, and still. You remove the blanket from your face. Your eyes are open and you are breathing.

A half hour of calm passes and you open the tailgate of the truck to bow your head at the wind. You wipe away the sweat and blood and grease with your blanket and look out at the moon hanging low over the canyon. Your body aches as after intense exercise and you feel a contentment, a kind of pride or sense of accomplishment, and think to walk to the canyon edge to study its blue-black nighttime coloring and you squat to exit the truck, taking the long step to the ground, and as your foot hits the earth your sphincter muscle involuntarily releases and two days' worth of blueberries and a good deal of blood blast down your pant legs running over your socks and shoes and gathering in a steaming puddle at your feet:

Silence.

It is no small feat to clean yourself but you go about it with the facility of a washerwoman, leaning over the sink of the nearby public bathroom and scrubbing your pants under hot water with a found flat stone wrapped in paper towels. You throw away your underwear and socks and stand naked from the waist down, stains running the length of your buttocks and legs, and you catch a piece of luck in that there is no one around to witness this scene. You put your wet pants and shoes back on and head for the saloon but it is just closing up, and when you ask the bartender for one shot of whiskey he declines. When you tell him you will pay double for a bottle he says, "I saw you give us that look over the doors earlier," and that is that. You take to the road.

You drive sober through Flagstaff, Sedona, and Jerome, settling in the early afternoon in Prescott, Arizona. There is a rodeo in town and the streets are overrun with horse trailers and street vendors and drunken desert people dancing and kicking up dirt. You check into a twenty-five-dollar motel and ask the woman behind the desk where the nearest bar is and she tells you about the section of town called Whiskey Row a half mile down the road. "Whiskey Row?" you say. She asks if you are traveling alone and when you say you are she warns you to be careful, because the rodeo can bring out a mean crowd and the local law enforcement is understaffed and generally uninterested. You thank her and she hands you your room key; it is bent and attached by a heavy chain and screw to an eight-inch block of particleboard. "People love stealing my keys," she explains. "I wonder if they put them in memento boxes or throw them out the window or what."

You walk straightaway to Whiskey Row, bulky key dangling from your pocket, and enter a bar and order a shot that you drink in a gulp. It hurts going down and your face contracts grotesquely and you fear you will vomit but you clutch at your throat to keep the shot in your body and the nausea soon passes. The bartender is an attractive female, roughly your age; she apologizes for staring and asks if you have ever tried whiskey before and you tell her you have not. Laughing, she asks how you're liking it so far and you tell her not very much but that you've heard it's an acquired taste, and you order another and she brings you this on the house before moving down to help another customer. The drink goes down smoothly enough and the bartender smiles when you order a third.

The bar is full of cowboys and their lizard-women and you listen to the scraping of their boots on the warped wooden floor and the sound of their voices carrying on, telling their stories, and you wonder, why does everyone have to lie? You are out of place here, an obvious stranger and city dweller, the recipient of dirty looks, but the cowboys are too busy assembling a quality drunk to bother with you, and anyway it is early in the day yet for purposeless violence, with the sun still out and ice cream-sticky children shrieking on the sidewalk.

The bar is filling up and the pretty bartender has little time to talk but after your fifth shot she knows you were lying when you said you never touched whiskey before and when she gets a moment's break she returns to you, her arms across her chest in simulated dismay, and you raise your hand repentantly and offer to buy her a drink so that you might make peace, but she says she cannot drink on shift and points to an antiquated rotating camera nailed to the ceiling above her head. You then ask when she gets off work and she tells you six o'clock, and you share with her your plan, just invented, which is this: You will retire to your hotel room to bathe and become handsome and at the end of her shift you will return and then, with her consent, the both of you will walk arm in arm to the rodeo, where you will whoop at the depressing, unfunny clowns and the tortured, hate-crazy bulls and the pathetic-loser lasso-artisans, and where you will drink without fear of probably broken cameras inside of which there is almost certainly no film, and afterward, more drinks, quiet drinks alone in a room somewhere with no one to interrupt you with their life lies and sour breath and weird, girly elf shoes, and then afterward, and afterward… and you trail off, and the pretty bartender smiles shyly and brings you another whiskey and pours herself a soda water and you touch glasses, and drink.

You apologize for rambling but she is smiling more and more now, and she admits she will be waiting for you at six, and she points to the stool she will be sitting on, and you in your happiness reach out to touch her hand and she takes up yours and her fingers are so soft and warm and your hearts are beating very fast when the barback, a quick, modestly pompadoured Mexican teenager, rushes up and whispers something in her ear and her spine grows stiff and all joy leaves her face and she drops your hand and walks to the far end of the bar to serve the impatient, thirsty cowboys. You are confused and ask the barback what just happened and he will not or cannot speak to you but as he wipes down the bar he motions with his head toward a large man drinking alone in the corner. The man is staring at you, and now you understand. Husband or boyfriend, he has some type of claim on the bartender and is displeased with your rapport, and you wonder, How long has he been watching? And did he see you looking each time she leaned over to fetch beers from inside the cooler? You raise your whiskey to him and drink but he only stares, and the stare is of an unmistakable sort: Soon he will walk over and insult and humiliate you by telling you to leave and if you do not leave he will drag you out with your hair in his fist and if you resist he will beat you into the dirt on the sidewalk and the dirt will be crunchy on your teeth and tongue, and the bartender will see all of this and you will hear her screams of mercy mixed in with the encouraging whoops of the cowboys and lizard-women and there will be no chance of victory or even a decent showing of spirit with so massive a man as this and so, with no other available option, you settle up your bill and stand to go. The large man watches you leaving but turns away as you reach the exit and you catch the gaze of the worried-looking bartender and hold six fingers in the air and she smiles imperceptibly and then, with the man now greeting an approaching acquaintance of his, she faces you directly, pushes her hair back behind her ears, and winks at you!

Now you are free on the street and you will not be beaten or forced to chew sidewalk dirt and you are more or less in love with the bartender and you cannot believe how crazy your heart really is and your pace quickens at the thought of your motel room, of rest and of cleanup, when you round the corner and something strange happens: You walk face-first into a horse hitched to a lamppost. He is an old, beaten horse with a scooped back and bare knees and fat flies cooling themselves on his eyes and he rears back at your touch but soon grows calm and leans into your hands as you reach up to stroke him. You have seen people in movies giving horses sugar cubes or other sweets and you search your pockets for mints or hard candies but find neither of these, only your white pills, and so you give the horse four, and then accounting for his weight, four more (he licks them off your palm, his tongue like a warm, living steak), and you watch him chew up these pills, his jawbone as long as your forearm, green-black flies still wading in his eyeball water, and feel a sudden compulsion to reach back and slap him hard on his gray cheeks and this is just what you do, you box this sleepy old horse's face for him (discuss, if you can, why you do this). Again he rears (the flies somehow hanging on) and you want very much to punch the animal in the face but you only yank down on his bridle and scream in his face the words "Bath time!" and you run like the devil to your room and all those you pass watch your dusty wake in hopes they will catch a glimpse of your pursuer and glean from his expression some motive for his fury.

There is a mantle of dust covering everything in your room and a group of holes pockmark the wall above the headboard of the bed; seven holes, each punched with a small blunt tool from the inside out. You fill these with tissue paper, worrying as you work that you will find an evil eye hovering in the darkness. Standing back to look at your handiwork you say to the wall, "Wall, I have made you ridiculous." You draw yourself a bath, only you did not wash out the tub beforehand and are forced to drain it, clean it, and draw yourself another. You are very tired and fall asleep in the bathtub and when you wake up the water is cold and the clock radio says it is ten minutes to six and you remember the worn blue jeans and sleeveless T-shirt of the bartender and leap from the tub, slipping on the wet floor tiles as you dry yourself with the sandpapery towels.

You return to Whiskey Row to find the pretty bartender is gone. Her replacement rolls his eyes when you ask if she will be back — a common question, apparently — but when you say you had plans to meet her he nods and hands you a drink ticket upon which is written the word Sorry. "She must've liked you," he says. "Far as I know she's never been sorry before." You say nothing to this, but shrug. "Consider yourself lucky," he says. "Her man would've spilled your brains, and that's a fact." (You think of the sidewalk dirt clinging to your clammy brains and make a distasteful face.)

You order a beer with the drink ticket and move to the nearest open stool where you make friends with a lizard-woman named Lois, who tells you apropos of nothing that she is fifty-seven years old, and who hits your arm and calls you a dirty flirt when you ask her for the time. "Anybody can tell my watch is broken," she says, holding it up for you to see. "You don't have to make up lies to talk to me." You tell her you only wanted to know so that you would not be late for the rodeo and she becomes irate and says that you don't know a single thing about rodeos, and you agree, and she asks you not to talk to her about any rodeos, and you promise her you never will again, and she tells you that she's been around rodeos all her life and if you'd like she will accompany you to the rodeo and you tell her, thanks but no thank you, and she falls to glowering. When you offer her a drink she perks up and introduces you to her son, a man your age named Corey, sitting on the stool next to hers. He is dog-faced and dog-haired and has small eyes set very far apart and a baby-blond mustache growing into his mouth, and when Lois whispers in his ear he extends a hand to you and says, "Lo says you're buying drinks." You tell him you had planned on buying a few and he says a few would be fine, and he orders himself a shot of tequila and a Mexican beer and when given a price by the bartender he points not at you but to the wallet tucked in your hand.

Three rounds later they are desperate for you to stay. Lois grows adamant that you not go or anyway that you not go without her, and she holds your wrists and tells you the rodeo is "nothing but a heartbreaker" but refuses "on principle" to elaborate. Corey, less subtle than his mother, says, "I wish you'd stick around and buy me more tequila." But you are thinking of the bartender and you tear yourself away from the duo. Lois follows at your heels to the door and spins you around at the exit and says, "I used to be beautiful," and in the light you can see this is true, and you tell her she is beautiful now (she is not), and she smiles at you and asks coquettishly if you would like to be friends for life and you say, of course.

"You know about a spit shake?" she asks.

"No, Lois, I sure don't."

"They probably don't have it in the city, that's why you're all walking around with knives in your backs. But you've heard of blood brothers, haven't you? Well we can't do that one anymore because of AIDS and all, so out here we do a spit shake, and once you do a spit shake, you're loyal to the end. See, first you put a great wad of spit in your palm, and then me in mine, and we just grip our hands real tight and slippery—"

You cut Lois off before she can pack her fist with saliva, telling her you do not have time for the ritual just now as you are late to meet somebody, but that you will return after the rodeo and will be more than happy to oblige her then, and she is sad about your leaving but you tell her it is better this way, because now you will both have something to look forward to, and when you get back you can both spit all over each other if she would like, and she nods her head and reenters the bar, saying that she'll be around, and you'll know where to find her.

The pretty bartender is not waiting at the entrance of the rodeo and is not in the stands at the rodeo and is not at the concession booths and is not leaning against a fence with her arms crossed smiling at the exit of the rodeo. The rodeo is dull and hot and you cannot concentrate on its happenings, as busy as you are looking around and with the smell of the animals strong in your nostrils, gripping the pit of your stomach. Sitting behind you is a cowboy tapping repeatedly on your spine with the toe of his boot and apologizing; children are led away by their mothers to be put down in their beds and the eyes of drunken men that remain fall critically on you. The bartender has no plan of coming here. When the sun goes down the overhead lights snap on with a creaking, buzzing click and your hands look like an angel's hands floating before you in the glowing fluorescent whiteness.

Back at the bar you catch sight of Lois and Corey before they do you, and you push through the crowd to sit beside them. The room is at capacity now and there is a country-western band playing on a stage so high that as you pass by, the fiddler's boots are a foot above your head. Corey's little eyes meet yours and he points out your return to Lois, who swings around, waving entreatingly. Her head looks as though it has been taken off and put back on improperly — even without your money it is clear they have continued drinking in your absence. Lois works her elbow like a pump handle while summoning phlegm with a series of deep inhalations and you watch as she spits four times in her palm, and when you reach her she is beaming, holding the puddle of mucus out between you.

"All right," Corey says, "now you in yours."

You do not want to touch Lois's hand but can see no way out and so you spit once in your palm and hold it similarly outward. But this is not sufficient for a spit shake, neither the amount nor the ingredients, and you are informed to "get some glue in there," and you make a hacking sound with your throat and cough up a large ball of phlegm into your palm and clasp hands with Lois, whose spit runs over your knuckles and causes you to wretch so that you fear you will vomit, but you do not vomit and it is all over soon enough and Corey passes you both bar napkins and declares Lois and yourself Official and True Friends for Life.

"For Life," Lois says.

Drinks and more drinks, bought always with your money, and you find Lois's hand is resting on your thigh. Her thumb draws back and forth and Corey can see this and does not seem bothered but you are uncomfortable and try to involve him in the conversation. Lois drags her long, painted nails across your lap.

"Leave him alone," she says to you. "He's trying to make it with girls."

This is true. Corey's pickup method is to stare, with his little pig eyes, at the heads of unaccompanied women until they are made so uncomfortable that they ask him to stop; when he does not stop they collect their effects and move to another part of the bar, outside his field of vision. He does this again and again until there are only accompanied women within sight, and he drinks more tequila and begins looking at them, and they lean in to tell their cowboys and the room now turns to ugliness and the night begins its unraveling.

You are separated from your mind. Lois's hand is worming down the front of your pants and Corey is laughing and licking his mustache and you drink whiskey after whiskey and are taking pills now as well and Lois sees this and says, you don't know nothing about pills, and she hands you a baby-blue circular pill that you eat and which Lois begins immediately rooting around for, forgetting she has given it to you, and she empties her bag on the bar (you spy a roll of condoms) and says, that pill was just deadly, that pill was deadly and I lost it, and you give her two of your white pills and she orders two more tequilas, one for Corey and one for herself, and she gives her son a pill and he takes this without looking at it and chews it up, followed by the tequila, and you hear a cowboy tell him to stop looking at his wife, and Corey, having given up any hopes of finding love on this night, crosses over to fight the man, who stands and grips the neck of his beer bottle in his hand.

Lois does not stay to watch her son in battle but steals you away to the back of the bar and leads you to the darkened dead end of a service hallway. She is on you now, her gaping mouth breathing hot and foul-smelling air on you, and she places your hands on her body and yanks at your belt and zipper, and finding your body unmoved, begins whining and clawing your chest and humping your leg and she tries putting your hands up her skirt and inside of her but you drop them to your sides and your head lolls back and you are laughing, knocking your skull into the damp and sticky wall. She is in a frenzy and drops to her knees and you watch her head moving frantically back and forth and at the other end of the hallway you see the silhouettes of cowboys and you hear their shouts and wonder if they are watching your romance or the fight with Corey, and then you see Corey walking down the hall toward you and you smile at him and say, "Happy Fourth of July, Corey," and he has blood smeared on his cheek and he draws back and hits you in the eye and you drop to the floor and through your covered face see him drag his mother away by the arm like a rag doll.

You correct yourself and stand and return to the bar. Lois and Corey have moved to another table and neither will look at you and you are no longer friends. You try to buy the man next to you a drink but he politely declines, handing you a napkin for your bloody eye. "But you're sure you don't want something?" you say. "I'm sure of it," he says, then orders a drink and pays with his own money. The lights come up and the country-western band says goodnight and the bartender will no longer serve you and he points to the door and you file out with the others, speaking to those on your left and right and people smile and slap your back patronizingly but will not respond properly to any of the things you say.

All of the bars on Whiskey Row have closed and the street is overrun with drunks. Discuss the cowboy that is lifted up and carried the length of the street on the crowd's shoulders — here is the winner of the rodeo. He is just a boy, not yet twenty years old by the looks of him, and his smile is the truest and most handsome smile you have ever seen, and he looks sober and embarrassed at the fuss, but beneath this is an unqualified joy and pride and it is a living dream for him as he raises his hat and tosses it to the crowd, and you see the dagger hands of lizard-women reaching up to take pieces of him as he passes by.

The sight of the rodeo champion makes you sad in your heart and you decide you will visit your old horse and maybe steal him and ride him into the desert, but to do this you have to backtrack against the flow of the crowd and you are shoved and kicked at and offensive to those who touch you, and women gasp as you pass and recoil as you draw near, because your drunken blood is dripping freely from your eyebrow and your eyes are wet with tears, and some of the men you push past want to knock you down but are so repelled by the sight of you they move on or their women pull them along. But now you trip or else someone hits you from behind and you fall to your knees and a pair of hands are on you and they drag you to the side of the road and drop you there, and you are lying down in the dirt watching the boots file past, hundreds of pairs of cowboy boots, no two alike, walking along together in a pack.

The crowd thins out and you sit up against a hitching post and across the way you see the Mexican barback and call out to him and he walks over. He has a date on his arm and he asks if you are all right and you do not speak but give him the okay sign. His date asks him a question in Spanish and he answers in English, "This is the guy I told you about, the one that almost got it from Penny's boyfriend," and she nods. Now Penny the pretty bartender and her boyfriend come over to say hello to the barback and they see you on the ground and Penny gasps, and the barback asks her boyfriend if he is the one who did this to you, and he promises it wasn't and he reaches down and picks you up to stand and it is unusual to have his strong hands on you because he only wants to help you now, and he asks where you are staying and you point towards the horse and they as a group walk you in this direction. Penny cleans your face with a tissue and asks you what happened, and who did this to you, but you cannot remember just then and you say you don't know. Her boyfriend and the barback are holding you up and the barback's date says something in Spanish that causes him to laugh and Penny asks him to translate, and he does: "She says he walks like a cigarette thrown out of a car on the highway. You know, the way the cherry dances?" and they suppress their laughter at the girl's joke. You break away and they do not follow after but call to you, apologizing, and you hear Penny's boyfriend saying, "Let him go, let him go if he wants to go," and you stagger closer to the old horse, thinking of him standing in the alley by himself with nothing in his mind but gray sound and all of a sudden you are so sorry for hitting him like that, and you cannot understand why you would do such a thing and it seems to be the worst thing you have ever done in your life, and you choke and cry at this and have never felt so intense a hatred for someone as for yourself at this moment, and you will not ride the horse but stroke his face and make friends with him and you will give him more pills, all the pills you have to help him with his life's pain, and he will not know why but he will feel a supreme happiness and a change in the sound of his mind to a kind of heavenly and eternal music, and when at last you reach the alley there is goodness and repentance in your ringing spine and ringing heart but this vanishes when you find that the alley is dark and the tired old horse is gone.