Americana

12

I am falling silently through myself. The spirit contracts at the termination of every passion, whether the season belongs to pain or love, and as I prepare the final pages I feel I am drifting downward into coma, a sleep of no special terror and yet quite narrow and bottomless. Little of myself seems to be left.

1) Intense solitude becomes unbearable only when there's nothing one wishes to say to another.

2) Saints talk to birds but only lunatics get an answer.

I have reached the point where the coining of aphorisms seems a very worthy substitute for good company or madness. Surely this account falls short of either. Too much has been disfigured in the name of symmetry. Our lives were the shortest distance between two points, birth and chaos, but what appears on these pages represents, in its orderly proportions, almost a delivery from chaos. Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory. There is no mention of the scar on my right index finger, the white medicine I took as a child, the ether visions of my tonsillectomy. In my mind the resonance of these distant things is sheer thunder, outlasting immortal books, long and short wars, journeys to other planets. In short I have not been cunning enough. I have taken the middle path, neither heaven nor hell, and no amount of self-serving research can persuade me that cunning does not grow its sharpest claws at the very extremes of consciousness. Not that this work has been engineered to no purpose. It is a fond object. I like to look at it, pages neatly stacked, hundreds of them, their differences hidden from the eye. Every so often I move the manuscript to another room in order to be surprised by it as I enter that room. It never fails to be a touching thing, my book on a pinewood table, poetic in its loneliness, totally still, Cézannesque in the timeless light it emits, a simple object, the box-shaped equivalent of the reels which sit in my small air-conditioned storage vault.

I've been studying the footage of late, hour after hour. There is a crippled beauty in some of it-Sullivan on the swing, all shadow and menace, a long dark heron wading through one's empty sleep. The Fort Curtis episodes are only a small part of what eventually became a film in silence and darkness. The whole thing runs nearly a week, the uncut work of several years. Viewed in the sequence in which it was filmed, the movie becomes darker and more silent as it progresses. There are the Fort Curtis segments. There are demonstrations, speeches, parades, riots. There is a vacation I took in Vermont, and people entering my apartment, and selected parts of a love affair. Then there are long unedited scenes in which friends and strangers declaim their madness to the camera. At this point I dispensed with sound. There are houses, all kinds of houses, everywhere I went. There are newspaper stands, store windows, bus terminals and waiting rooms. There are nuns, hundreds of them, so very black and white, perfect subjects in their long procession, soundless as beads passing through a hand. I returned to individuals briefly- women and boys in hospital corridors, deaf-mutes playing chess, people in tunnels. The true play could not be found in theaters. The true play was ourselves and we needed shadows on which to chalk our light, speed to conquer sequence, infinitesimal holes in which to plant our consciousness. I began to underexpose then, to become ever more crude, destroying shape and light, attempting to solve the darkness by entering it fully. There are museums toward the end of the movie, overcast scenes shot in marble halls, all empty, submarine in appearance, being crushed by darkness spreading from the edges of the screen, limestone kings barely visible, pleasant Flemish ladies in square frames, and then, finally, for a long time, there is nothing. I myself appear briefly at the very end, reflected in a mirror as I hold the camera during the first of the Fort Curtis scenes. These twenty seconds of film also serve as a beginning.

The movie functions best as a sort of ultimate schizogram, an exercise in diametrics which attempts to unmake meaning. I like to touch the film. I like to watch it move through the projector. This is my success. Sullivan and Brand, in their surgical candor, taught me to fear and envy the artist. (Brand, of course, as it turned out, was a writer of blank pages. That's how I think of him, definitely a novelist, by all means a craftsman of high talent-but one who chose words of the same color as the paper on which they were written.) I wanted to become an artist, as I believed them to be, an individual willing to deal in the complexities of truth. I was most successful. I ended in silence and darkness, sitting still, a maker of objects that imitate my predilection.

From this window I can see the ocean, far out, rocking in that blank angry sheen which foul weather sets upon all waters. Later I'll walk on the beach for an hour or so. If the weather has cleared by then I'll be able to see the coast of Africa, the great brown curve of that equatorial loin. But right now it is a pleasure to anticipate slipping once again (a paragraph hence) into a much more filmworthy period of my life.

There will be no fireworks when the century turns. There will be no agonies in the garden. Now that night beckons, the first lamp to be lit will belong to that man who leaps from a cliff and learns how to fly, who soars to the tropics of the sun and uncurls his hand from his breast to spoon out fire. The sound of the ocean seems lost in its own exploding passion. I am wearing white flannel trousers.

Clevenger's paleolithic lavender Cadillac was equipped with air conditioning, deep-pile carpeting, padded instrument panel, stereo tape system and a burglar alarm. Behind the wheel he seemed a veteran jockey not at all awed by the magnificence of his own colors. He was about fifty, a small man with a neck of Playa clay traversed by wide deep ridges. Clevenger was a Texan. He had picked me up somewhere in Missouri where he had been visiting his sister and her family. When I told him I was heading nowhere special he had grinned and told me to get in. He kept grinning through most of Kansas and I could only guess that his own youth held some dry secret of thumbing days and freight cars and nights spent with song-less men in the crouched light of fires. We stayed at the most expensive motels and Clevenger ate steak and home-fries for breakfast. He was superintendent-in-chief of a test track for automobile and truck tires just outside a town in West Texas called Rooster. This was the last week of his vacation and he was seeing to some private business interests which were apparently fairly lucrative and certainly well spread out. After Kansas we tore off a corner-piece of southeastern Colorado and went charging across New Mexico. The journey was very boring. We kept moving toward the seam of earth and sky but never got there, and nothing was undiscovered, and time was confused. Jet trainers skimmed over the mountains and desert. The past returned in plastic. Ecological balances were slipping and things seemed not quite the sum of their parts. Troopers bulged with sidearms. There were neat reversals of the currents of history and geography; the menu in a frontier-style restaurant included a brief note pointing out that the main dining hall was a replica of the main dining hall at the famous Cattleman on Forty-fifth Street in New York City.

People fished, hunted, took their sons to visit the inevitable new military installation and talked about places like Phoenix and Vegas as if remembering some telescopically distant moment, some misty green leaflet of childhood on the planet Earth. All those days in fact were not far from one's idea of life on a lunar colony; everywhere we went Indians ranged across the landscape like workers thirsty for oxygen, men sent to move stones in a place which is nothing but stone. Kenneth Wattling Wild (of Chicago, River Forest, the U.S. Marine Corps, Leighton Gage College, Chicago, Insomnia and, no doubt, River Forest again) had once written:

Death came in twos in the night

with whisky vengeance on its breath.

Our carbines lay by the river.

This too, then, moon and painted ponies, seemed the coming and going of time set free from whatever binds it. Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the gallop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps, Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation's soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation. Even now, writing this, I can impart little of what I saw. The Cadillac averaged close to ninety and its windows were tinted bottle green for the benefit of Clevenger's sunbaked eyes.

But he never tired of driving. We stopped only to sleep and eat. He made quite a few phone calls, met some people now and then, and several times parked for a moment at the edge of a town and gazed with an appraising eye at vast pieces of real estate. But these delays were timed to coincide with the sleeping and eating stops, and we were always on our way again soon enough. Clevenger loved the road. It was a straight line of marked length and limits, and progress could be made upon it only in the most direct of ways; some snug lane curling through highest Bavaria would have destroyed his mind. He let me take the wheel only as a matter of form. When he was not driving he talked hardly at all and I thought the wheel might be his secret vice, the only circle in his life, and he was close to being lost without it. Time slipped forward and back, and nature was off-center, and I listened to the radios. We switched from car radio to stereo tape to Sullivan's world-shrinking portable. Sometimes I was able to work out a lively mix and statesmen or commercial announcers chanted beneath whoops of soul-rock. Clevenger got a kick out of that and would tickle the accelerator and jab an elbow into the padded door. Most of the time I stayed with the portable and the car was filled with the sounds of big beat, gospel, ghetto soul, jug bands and dirt bands, effete near-lisping college rock, electric obscenity and doom, wild fiddles of Nashville, ouds and tambourines and lusting drums, and then with night I would twirl the dials to hunt for jazz, and with luck I'd catch a scrap of catatonic Monk, or Sun Ra colliding with antimatter, and some note would pin together pieces of the spreading night and it would all make sense for a moment, the mad harmonics bringing most of what was sane to those who ran with death, and we would head into the gulf of early light with that black music driving over me and I would feel a stranger in my love of it, for I did not run with anything.

At breakfast Clevenger eyed the waitress, a slow-moving woman wearing a white uniform and no stockings, a woman who knew so well the tensions of her own body, its points of firmness and elasticity, and how to make the most of walking and standing, that after a few minutes the uniform became more or less superfluous. Clevenger ordered his steak well-done and ran his thumb and index finger the full length of his cigarette before lighting it.

"Some women you lay," he said. "Some you screw, some you bang, some you hump. That there is a royal hump and a half. That is a camel ride to a place well below sea level. One-night stand to beat the band. That there is stuff."

"It's the no stockings that gets me," I said.

"Only one thing better than no stockings. That's stockings. They get you coming and going. It's a good old world as long as the little baby girls keep growing up."

"When do you have to be back?"

"Three days," he said. "I have to sneak up on Phoenix first. Come on down with me, Dave. Wife'll be glad to have some company. She gets lonesome way out there. Coyotes and Mexicans. She's a San Antonio girl and if things turn the right way maybe I can get us back to San Anton. That's a real nice city. Little woman doesn't get along with my sister or I'd have had to take her along on this tour of ours. Everything works out for the best if you wait around long enough. Look at the legs on that thing. They are awesome. She is one awesome thing."

"I don't think I should tag along too far. I've already abused your hospitality."

"Hell, don't worry about that, Dave."

"I'm practically broke. I've got to make some kind of move."

"I can put you on for a while. Hell, you can drive a car. You come on down with me and take a look at the track. It won't pay much but at least you'll be making yourself some cash while you're deciding what your next move is."

"Maybe I'll do that."

"No maybes now. And from here on, keep your money in your pocket. No need for you to be laying out. I got everything in hand. We'll have us some belly laughs before this thing is over."

On his way to the toilet he said something to the waitress and she smiled, full mouth and narrowing eyes, a nice warm sendoff and maybe a sly ticket for a return trip. Then we were on the road again and Clevenger was never happier. That woman had started some rotary pool of low blood going, a fine mean leveling at the edge of his mood, and he talked well into the afternoon, cruising at close to a hundred and hunched forward around the wheel so that his bottom rode up slightly and he was sitting on his thighs. He told me he had two divorces to his credit, bobbing his head and flashing a victory sign. His first wife was part Mexican, part Apache, part Welsh, a slug or two of French Canadian. He was nineteen years old when he met her and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Their troubles began when she tried to bite off his right ear during an argument about another man. Clevenger pointed to the side of his head and I leaned over for a closer look; there was nothing very distinctive about the ear but I nodded anyway. His second wife was a salesgirl. She never bothered him. She spent all day at the five-and-dime selling toys and things. At night she cooked, cleaned, ironed and mended. Clevenger began to beat her.

I wore my magic plaid rallying cap. Clevenger pushed hard into Arizona. I asked him where the big Navaho reservation was and he said we were well south of it, which was fine with me. We ate lunch in a powder blue saloon and I went into the men's room and looked in the mirror. My hair, uncut since New York, had thickened considerably and I liked the way it was massed behind and below the hat, which I wore low over my forehead and cocked just a shade to one side. I hadn't shaved in two days but it looked all right. In fact I had been told several times in the past that blond stubble is rather attractive. I checked for dandruff. The next day we began the last leg to Phoenix.

"You have to keep them down," Clevenger said.

"Who?"

"Whoever's closing in on you."

We passed a young man on the road but he wasn't carrying a guitar and in any case it would have been impossible for Kyrie to have walked this far in so short a time. Beyond the windshield all the earth was pale green lymph as if something had gone wrong with the sun, leaving this invalid civilization submerged in aqua-light. Good wombs and bad wombs. The earth curved. I visualized my apartment then, empty and dark and quiet, furniture from John Widdicomb, suits from F. R. Tripler and J. Press, art books from Rizzoli, rugs from W amp;J Sloane, fireplace accessories from Wm. H. Jackson, cutlery from Bonniers, crystal by Steuben, shoes by Banister, gin by House of Lords, shirts by Gant and Hathaway, component stereo system by Garrard, Stanton and Fisher, ties by Countess Mara, towels by Fieldcrest, an odd and end from Takashimaya. We had lunch in a huge glass cafeteria that stood just off the highway; about a dozen trailer trucks were parked outside. After we ate I called my home number, collect, and listened to the phone ringing in the empty rooms. It was a sad and lovely experience and I was able to see dust settling on the tables and books and windowsills. Everything was still and I could walk through the rooms, touching the edge of the mantelpiece, turning the pages of a book left open on the coffee table. With my index finger I rubbed a thick line through the dust on the radio. I blew at the shower curtain and looked into the mirror above the wash basin and I listened to the phone ringing. I had been reading that book not too many weeks ago and it seemed possible that some small odd ether still clung to it, making an eternal moment of what had been a wet finger turning a page. Then the rooms were empty again, even in my mind. I was not there and nothing moved. There was only the sound of the telephone.

The truck drivers sat over their cups of coffee in a sort of contained delirium, men who had done a thousand times what had to be done, understanding it too well. We got going again. Clevenger, at the wheel, pointed to a group of ten or twelve small dwellings located in a shallow valley about three hundred yards off the road. They appeared to be huts of wood and clay. He slowed the car and pulled over.

"That's where they are," he said. "A year ago they were maybe three or four. Now I hear it's up to twenty."

"Who are they?"

"Bunch of kids. Younger than you. Living down there with the Indians. Hell, I don't know what they're up to. I hear they claim some kind of agrarian squatter's rights. That's government land they're on, so it's only a matter of time."

"I think I'd like to take a look. Do you mind?"

"It's a free country, boy."

"Maybe I should take my stuff. I've been enough trouble."

"Tell you what," he said. "You go on down and have your look. I'll run into Phoenix and pick you up soon as I can. Have two Jewboys to out-hustle. Take me no more than a couple of hours. Then we'll be on our way."

"I've been enough trouble, Mr. Clevenger."

"Get your ass on down there, son. And get used to calling me cap'n. That's what the boys at the track call me."

I slid down the embankment and walked across a field of flat stones and sagebrush. The huts were arranged in no discernible pattern and there did not seem to be any village square or center. A few people sat on the ground-two young men, a white girl holding an Indian baby. I sat next to one of the men. He wore no shoes or shirt and his pants were tan chinos cut off above the knees.

"Dave Bell," I said. "Just having a look around."

"I'm Cliff. This is Hogue. That's Verna and the baby's name is Tommy. Or is that Jeff?"

"That's Jeff," the other man said.

"So you're living with the Indians. What's it like?"

"It's the total thing," Cliff said. "It outruns all the other scenes by miles. We all live like persons. There's a lot of love here, although it gets monotonous at times."

"Are these Navahos or what?"

"These are Apache. Exiles from an Apache tribe about a hundred miles east of here. Misfits more or less. They refused to become ranchers like the rest of their people. There's only eleven of them here but we expect more to come. There's eighteen of us. We'd like to have more of them than us. It's an emotional factor."

"I don't want to sound like a critic at the very outset because you've probably had plenty of those coming around but I don't think I understand what you expect to accomplish."

"We don't expect to accomplish anything. We just don't want to be part of the festival of death out there."

"Here comes Jill," Hogue said.

She was very thin and seemed to be coming at us sideways in small skips and bounces. She couldn't have been more than seventeen years old. Her hair was reddish brown and there were several dozen muted freckles swarming about her nose. After introductions and further commentary, she offered to give me a tour of the village. I liked the way her gums showed when she smiled.

"I'm from Trenton, New Jersey," she said.

"I'm from New York."

"Neighbors!"

She wore a man's white shirt, tails tied around her middle, and blue jeans cut off above the knees. We went into one of the huts. It had a dirt floor with a carpet on it. There were several straw mats, a sleeping bag, some rolled-up blankets, a Matisse print propped against a wall, and that was it. A man with blue hair was asleep on one of the mats. It was hot and dark. We sat on the ground.

"Are you happy?" I said.

"We're all happy. This is the happiest place in the world. I mean that really seriously."

"Are the Indians happy?"

"It's hard to tell. They don't say much. But they must be happier than they used to be or else they'd go back to ranching."

"You're pretty young to be living like this, not that I'm criticizing. Did you run away from home?"

"My dad and I both ran away. Mom was driving us batty. It was psychorama twenty-four hours a day. I guess I love her and all but it got pretty bad. All she did was drink and smoke and yell things over the telephone to my father at his office. So then he stopped coming home from work. So then after that he came and got me at school and we sneaked my things out of the house when she was shopping and we got into the car and ran away. My dad's in Tempe now trying to start a dry-cleaning place. He comes out here on weekends to see me."

"Don't you get bored?"

"Anything's better than working for the death machine. We all try to dress the same way here. Simple and beautiful. But it's not like uniforms. It's just part of the single consciousness of the community. It's like everybody is you and you are everybody. Sex is mostly auto. You can watch someone doing something with himself or herself and then they can watch you do it. It's better that way because it's really purer and it's all one thing and you can do it with different people without anybody running for their shotgun like in the death factory out there. Sometimes it's not auto but mostly it is and it's two people mostly because two is still the most beautiful. I don't know what the Indians do."

"Look, Jill, I'm not a reporter or anything, so you don't have to tell me things that are private or sensitive."

"It's okay," she said. "I would tell you anything because you remind me of my brother. He was killed by the police."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"It's okay. I loved him very much but I wasn't sad. You have to get beyond that."

"Who's that guy over there?"

"That's Incredible Shrinking Man. He sleeps every day at this time. At night he goes into the desert. He's the one that started this whole thing. He has so much love in him. It won't be long before they kill him too. He believes in the truth of science fiction. The cosmos is love. Something is out there and once we learn to welcome it instead of fear it, we'll find out that its mission is love. His name is the name of an old sci-fi movie. At night he goes into the desert to watch for UFOs. He's seen lots of them. We've all seen them. This is a good place for sightings. That's one of the reasons he started the community out here. The visibility is terrific. So then they'll kill him because he preaches love."

"I believe in the saucers."

"Almost everybody does," she said. "But people are afraid to admit things to themselves. If we can learn to welcome instead of fear, the whole universe will heave with love. But the festival of death is going on all the time. That makes it hard for some people."

"I knew a boy at college who did what you did. He left school just like that and went to live with the Havasupai Indians. He lost forty or fifty pounds."

"They're north of here. I think they're farmers and planters."

"I wonder if he's still with them. Leonard Zajac. A very brilliant boy."

"This is the only community that's sci-fi oriented."

"I know another guy who's walking to California," I said.

Incredible Shrinking Man rose to his elbow. He was wearing plaid bermudas. He was well-tanned and very muscular, dispelling the vague sense of undernourishment in the area. His hair reached down almost to his shoulders. We stood to shake hands and I realized he was about six feet eight inches tall, broad across his bare chest, lean at the waist. His grip was gentle. I found myself exerting pressure. Then we sat down again.

"This is an interesting thing you've got here."

"The locals fear us," he said. "What they don't realize is that we're much more conservative than they are. This is a very conservative settlement. We want to cleave to the old things. The land. The customs. The words. The ideas. Unfortunately wilderness will soon be nothing but a memory. Then the saucers will land and our children will be forced to embrace the new technology. If they're not prepared, if we don't prepare them, there'll be an awful lot of confusion. We have to learn to accept the facts of technology without the emotion it engenders, the death impulse. But soon big government will take this land from us and install silos and missiles and lasers to keep out the UFOs. Big government beeps out everything in the end. Screaming meemies wield all the guns. Pimps and brainwashers are gaining power footholds. The answer is indistinguishability. Become indistinguishable from your neighbor and his neighbor and his neighbor. The death circus is coming to town and benign totalitarianism is the only feasible response."

"I'm not a journalist," I said.

"Whoever you are, you're welcome. Everybody's welcome. Love lives in our own galaxy. We sing at nine."

"Jill said you've seen a lot of UFOs out in the desert."

"He calls them love-objects," she said.

"I've seen them by the score. Night things filled with love. But they won't land until the time is right. The thing is out there. Jupiter and beyond the infinite."

"I have my own theory about UFOs," I said. "They're not from outer space at all. They're from the oceans. The depths of our own oceans."

"Who pilots them?" Jill said.

"Dolphins."

"He's just kidding," she said to Incredible Shrinking Man.

She and I continued the tour. A few Apaches played cards inside one of the huts. The girl Verna was still holding the Indian child. A group of eight young men and women, all of them appearing a few years older than Jill, sat in the dirt playing a game of jacks. A boy of fourteen or so, an Indian, knelt at the fringe of the group; there were two fielder's gloves and a baseball on the ground beside him. I picked up one of the gloves, a very old Luke Appling model. I spat into the palm and pounded it a few times. The boy got up and we walked slowly past the last of the huts and started playing catch. At first we stood only thirty feet apart and tossed the ball easily back and forth, limbering up. Then we doubled the distance and began to throw a bit harder. Then he moved back another ten feet and started firing. It was dry and very hot at the rim of the desert. I felt wonderful. The boy had a strong and accurate arm. The glove was soft with use, not as well padded as the later models, and my hand began to sting. He moved still farther away and I tossed him some high flies, which he fired back on a line. I took off my shirt. The sun felt good and my face and neck and upper body broke into lavish sweat. He moved across the dirt and weeds, kicking up dust, purposely delaying his break for the ball so that he could make an over-the-shoulder or backhand catch. My hand hurt badly now and I could not recall feeling this good in many years. I continued throwing long high flies, first to one side, then the next, and the boy veered and cut and back-pedaled, always sure of his terrain, dodging the larger stones without taking his eye oíf the ball. Sweat was collecting at my navel and I would rub it off with my right hand and then rub my hand in the dirt and wipe off the sticky dirt on my pants and blow on my hand then, drying it further, and then lean back and heave another long arching fly into the mouth of the sun. All trace of lettering had long since vanished from the baseball.

We walked back to the village. I draped my shirt over my neck. Jill came toward us and the boy was gone. We sat on the ground and she put one finger to my chest and then touched her lips with it. We stared at each other for a moment.

"Why does he dye his hair blue?" I said.

"Vanity."

"To what end?"

"Vanity's end," she said. "It's silly for a person to repress his own vanity. Make love to your body and you kill the death inside you."

"There are certain inconsistencies here."

"I think his hair is beautiful. Why shouldn't he have blue hair if he wants to? Do you feel it threatens you in some way? Really seriously now, what harm is he doing? If you let yourself be what you want to be, physically and spiritually, you can kill a lot of the death inside you."

"I love to be instructed by the very young. It implies I'm not yet a lost cause."

"I could never instruct you," she said. "And I could never get mad at you. It's not just the brother thing either. You're so beautiful."

" And that's important, you think."

"Youth and beauty are always important. It's what the death police hate most. They want to kill us and fuck us at the same time."

"I admit he's a striking figure. I suppose the Indians think he's a god."

"The Indians think he's a fag," she said, and she giggled for a bit, then slapped herself on the wrist as punishment.

"Your gums show when you smile," I said. "It gives me an almost death-dealing pleasure."

"I got all shivery when I touched you before."

"Do it again."

"I better not," she said.

"Your eyes are hazel."

"Do you want to stay with us?"

"I don't know. Maybe I'd better keep right on going. I'm trying to outrun myself."

"Is this like a suicidal period?"

"I don't think so."

"If it is, my dad could probably help. He's a great guy. So then my screamy mother takes her repressions out on him."

"Did you watch me while I was playing catch with the kid?"

"A-mazing."

"Baseball is so beautiful and lazy. It's our version of the café life. You sit there and nothing happens. I really love it. The season's underway now. If this were 1955 I could be sitting in the bleachers at the old Polo Grounds, watching the Giants play the Cubs. All around me there would be shirtless old men with sunken pink chests and their pants rolled up over their bony knees. What is it like? It's like a seashore at the end of time. Jill, your hazel eyes destroy me. It's nice sitting here. A spot of small talk with our dusty tea. Fatigue is such a luxury these days."

"You should stay," she said.

"Somebody's coming by to get me. I'm surprised he hasn't turned up yet."

"This is a part of the world," she said, "where people don't always turn up."

We walked back to the hut. Incredible Shrinking Man was standing out front, almost as high as the hut itself, wearing just the bermudas, his body a rich tempered tone of pennies, the blue hair hanging lank, strands of deep muscle extending along his arms. It was an astounding sight and as we approached I slid my shirt down off my neck and put it on. Later the Apache boy came for me and we took a sponge bath together behind his hut and then everyone gathered around several fires for hamburgers and corn, and a girl played a guitar and sang some western ballads, and still Clevenger did not come. In the darkness at the edge of the assembly I kissed little Jill and touched her softly beating hooded breast and she put her finger to my wrist. Incredible Shrinking Man walked into the desert for the feast of his infinity, white dwarfs and waltzing binaries, the first fictional inch of the space od-yssey. Hogue, Jill and I settled down to sleep in the Matisse hut. A small fire burned. Hogue told of his life in Canada and Mexico, the search for gold, then God, then the perfect vacuum; his grandfather had prospected near this very site, a gunslinging man who was not averse to mule-meat, but his father, the all too timid issue of the panning days, had ended up in hardware. The three of us lay far apart. Soon the fire died and I thought she would come to me in the darkness, freckled Mescalero maid smelling of leather and sagebrush. But she did not come. And at dawn I woke to see Incredible Shrinking Man leaning into the hut, his naked body stained with the blood of the rattler he held in his hand. Jill got up and moved toward him and they went silently to whatever place they went for the ablutions of late and early man.

The Cadillac was waiting. We had just finished lunch and Jill walked with me toward the road. Clevenger stood outside the car, wearing new boots and smoking a cigarillo. Jill said goodbye at the foot of the embankment and I asked her to wait a moment. I got my suitcases out of the trunk, emptied both, and then filled one with almost all of my remaining clothes and slid it down to her.

"You can sell this stuff and get some food."

"Don't go," she said. "It's bad out there."

For the first time since I had met Clevenger we were heading east, south and east, and if he seemed less happy it might have been nothing more than the tight fit of new boots. He asked me to get his sunglasses out of the glove compartment. There was a revolver in there, a long-barreled thing, probably a.45, and I wondered how often he took target practice or in his mind fired from the speeding car, knocking off coyotes, redskins, small foreign automobiles. And now he was doubly screened behind stained windshield and sunglasses, bowed low in his cool church, and I knew this was why I was with him, to search out the final extreme, the bible as weapon, the lean hunt of the godfearing man for the child who confounded his elders. Clevenger drove with one hand.

"They ought to be drug out in the desert and horsewhipped. "

"They're not bothering anybody," I said.

"That's government land they're on."

"So what."

"Hey boy, you got your back up, ain't you? Chip, chip, chip. I can't say I blame you. I did my best to get back last night but the wheelers were dealing and the dealers were wheeling. It was a right fine mess. Then there was this woman."

"It's okay," I said.

"Call me cap'n now."

"It's okay, cap'n."

"There was this woman. A pot of warm syrup. I hate like hell to have to be getting back. The goddamn punctured lung of America. But that's all right. We'll have us a pig-party. Hey, see that gulch over there?"

"I've never been to Texas."

"Where we're going ain't exactly Texas. It ain't exactly no place. See that gulch we just passed? That's a piece of local history, that spot. I get put in a good frame of mind just thinking about what happened there. Of course some people wouldn't think it was so damn funny."

"I'm listening," I said.

"Now this girl was about twenty-one years old. A sweet little coed. Spends a night with a married man. Goes home the next day and tells her mama and daddy. Don't ask me why. Maybe just to rub their faces in it. They decide she needs a lesson. Whole family drives out into the desert, right out to that spot we just passed. All three of them plus the girl's pet dog. Papa tells the girl to dig a shallow grave. Mama gets down on her hands and knees and holds the dog by the collar. When the girl is all through digging, papa gives her a.22 caliber revolver and tells her to shoot the dog. A real touching family scene. Make a good calendar for some religious group to give away. The girl puts the weapon to her temple and kills herself. Now isn't that a heartwarming son of a bitch of a story? Restores my faith in just about everything."

"This is the only country in the world that has funny violence," I said.

"And what do you think the parents are charged with? Now what do you think? Go on now, take a crack at it."

"Manslaughter?"

"Manslaughter, hell. Cruelty to animals. Intent to kill, maim or otherwise injure, or suffer to be killed, maimed or injured, or an accessory thereof, a damn dog. That beats my meat. That's the living dead end."

He howled then, the consummate reb yell, a two-syllable sound that was hog call, battle cry, the bark of the saved soul at a prayer meeting. I didn't understand Clevenger. There were shades to him which dimmed what I kept expecting to find. Literature. Movies. We cut across the scaly land and it seemed to glide a tongue among the bones of mules and greed, and all signs pointed to national monuments, to Organ Pipe, Casa Grande, Saguaro, Chiricahua, Gila, White Sands, loving attempts to embalm the long riddle of the cliff-dwellers, and we moved into evening, crest of the setting sun at our rear window, the tender menace of our land, freetailed bats in flight above the whispering huts of mystics and every unwritten death singing in the hills. Literature. I told Clevenger about Incredible Shrinking Man, his great height and brawn, the energy of his presence.

"I ain't seen the man yet who bullets bounce off of."

At some point in the night, sleepless, as I stood by a window overlooking a blue swimming pool, I remembered walking once past the Waldorf and St. Bartholomew's and the Seagram Building and then looking across the street to see a lovely girl in light green standing by the Mercedes-Benz showroom on Fifty-sixth Street. It was a summer evening, a Friday, and the city was beginning to empty. I crossed to the traffic island and paused a moment, watching her. She was waiting for someone. The violet twilight of Park Avenue slid across tall glass. Traffic slowed and the mild bleating of horns lifted a half note of longing into the heavy dusk. There was a sense of the tropics, of voluptuousness and plucked fruit, and also of the sea, a promise disclosing itself in tides of air salted by the rivers and bay, and of penthouse hammocks and huge green plants, a man and woman watching the city descend into the musical craters of its birth. And she stood by the window, not quite facing me, shapely and fair, all that elegant velocity bottled behind her, concealed torsion bars and disc brakes, the poise of fine machinery, and her body then, softly turning, seemed to melt into the rippling glass. That was all there was and it was everything.

"We'll be sucking hind tit if we don't get moving," Clevenger said.

He was putting on his boots in the dark. He had slept only two hours after driving close to four hundred miles and it was still deep night when we set out again. He said he had not slept at all the previous night, needing only a hot towel and shave, the bite of a crusty cigar, to keep his senses on target. I turned on the portable radio and we listened to the Reverend Tom Thumb Goodloe, a country singer and preacher shouting out of El Paso. Clevenger began to smile.

"Adams I say. Aldrich I say. Andrews, Armstrong, Bancroft, Barton, Bennett, Box, Brown, Bryan. Give me Calder. Give me Carpenter and I'm all right. Give me Cartwright, Cassidy, Cole, Cooper, Curtis, Dale, Dixon. I want Elliot on my team. Fowler sounds like my kind of man. I want Benjamin Cromwell Franklin. I want Calvin Gage. I want Albert Gallatin. I want Gant, Gillespie, Gray, Green, Hale, Hamilton, Hawkins, Hunt, Ingram, Jackson, Jennings, Jones, Kenyon, King, Lambert, Lane, Lawrence. Lewis I say. Lightfoot I say. Lindsay and Logan. Love, Marshall, Martin. Maxwell I say. McClelland, McCoy, McKay, Mercer, Mitchell, Moore, Nabers, Nash, Orr, Pace, Parker, Patton, Phillips. I want to hear the right-sounding names like Powell, Proctor, Reed and Reese. I want to hear Rhodes, Robbins, Rockwell, Russell, Sanders, Scott, Slayton. I want to hear the old-time names like Smith, Stilwell, Taylor, Thompson, Tindale. I want the good people on my side. Trask, Turner, Tyler, Wade, Walker, White, Williams, Yancey, York, Young. They were all there, every last one of them, raising the lone star standard. And by God there was a Goodloe too. Robert Kemp Goodloe. And I was not a stranger in my own land."

"What was that all about?" I said.

"He likes to read off some of the names they got scratched on one of the monuments over at the San Jacinto battleground cemetery. War with the Mexicans. Sam Houston. Army of the Republic of Texas. He likes to leave out all the foreign-sounding names."

"Plain talk of the plain people. Only a youth but a youth with a song. Only a poor native son but a son with a hymn in his heart. Dirt farmer and banjo player but all Texas is my home and I am not a stranger unto it."

"He's warming up now," Clevenger said.

"If you can't pronounce a man's name, that man is a stranger; and if he don't look you in the eye, he runs with danger."

"Nothing but hell, ain't he?"

"Soft white underbelly. Spread those words around and tell those good neighbors of yours to keep the ball rolling. Tell them you heard those words from out of the mouth of Tom Thumb Goodloe, the midnight evangelist, twenty-six years old and on his way to the glory road. Now what are those words? Those words are soft, white and underbelly. Spread them around, friends. We're too soft and too sweet and we got to bear down on all those people that blaspheme our Christian nation with their catcalling and their jibbering like an Islamic sect from out of the motion pictures. We got to blitz them, friends. We got to send our linebackers. Keeryst Jesus was not a stranger in his own land. He spoke the lingo. He ate the grub. He felt right at home. Now our fine engineer, Mr. Dale Mulholland, signals me it's time to do some singing and I ask each and every one of you out there to join along with me, right there in your beds or in your kitchens fixing a late snack or what all you're doing. Will you come to the bower? Those that know it raise their voices with me. Those that don't, should. But first we have to pause so's I can read this commercial message."

I didn't know what was so funny but Clevenger was driving all over the road and punching the steering wheel in glee. I changed stations, a wave of exhaustion coming over me as I slipped down into the seat. Ten minutes later a Spanish-speaking disc jockey signed off in a blur of static and a few seconds after that another voice traveled across the long night.

"Fools, pretenders, pharisees and knaves. Beastly here with the final hour of 'Death Is Just Around the Corner.' Some philosophical patter. Some strolls down lobotomy lane. An occasional pocket of dead air. It's just occurred to me, like jukes and jingoes, that you won't be needing my special form of truth much longer. Drugs are scheduled to supplant the media. A dull gloomy bliss will replace the burning fear of your nights and early mornings. You can look forward to experiencing a drug-induced liberation from anxiety, grief and happiness. Endoparasites all, you'll be able to cling to the bowel-walls of time itself But I shall be missed. Pills and magical Chiclets are no substitute for the transistorized love which passes between us in the savage night. I pale with sickly forethoughts. But onward, chloroformed brutes, into the mysteries and mayhems. I ran into an old friend today, Lothar Nobo, the former George Jefferson Carver Eleanor Roosevelt III. No doubt the news has reached even the most barricaded among you that Lothar Nobo is currently the nation's chief spokesman for black manhood and pride, pending release of next month's top forty. I first met Lothar last year on the J. Edgar Hooverplatz in West Berlin where we were both attending the international book-burning fair. If I recall, he made a few rather demeaning statements to the press concerning the private parts of our esteemed head of state, H. C. Porny. But I don't want to talk about that. Suddenly I prefer to discuss more gentle matters. Enough of obscenity. My life is being overwhelmed by redeeming prurient value.

Everywhere I walk, I see the flowering of my nightlong labors. Now that history has absolved me, and with a vengeance, I think I'd like to go very far away-to the Aran Islands, to the Sahara, to some village high in the Himalayas. There to situate my stale body and well-paid mind against the wild dogs of nature. Sea, desert and mountain. What neo-saintly El Dorados of solitude. What amazement on my face when I emerge from my earth-covered wickiup to see not the diffident old gents and waxy ladies of Sixty-fourth Street but some tall Mephistophelean yak shambling through the snowdrifts. I spin my Harry Winston prayer wheel. Or I stand above the furious sea, urbane man of Aran, spitting in my own face. Temporal salvation. Alone, I might be able to sustain a serious thought or two. Pure mathematics of the desert. To be gone from this radioactive puddle. My skin is getting dry and flaky. My tongue is coated with isotopes. My extremities, all of them, are turning blue. All secrets are contained in the desert. Lines intersecting in the sand. Where you are and what you are. Bedouinism in all of its bedpan humor. Buckmulliganism in its bowl. An Irish Arab lives in my inner ear, announcing news, weather and sports. He is Jesuit-educated and wears the very best that dogma can buy. Speaking of clothes, all the eunuchoid trend-spotters out there might be interested to know that when I saw Lothar Nobo on Fifty-third Street this afternoon, right outside the Museum of Modern Commerce, he was wearing a braided Sassoon lion's mane, a speckled leopard-pelt jumpsuit, and a pair of king cobra elevated shoes. The shrunken head of a former Oakland policeman was dangling from the love beads around his neck. Lothar and I shook hands warmly and then he gave me the latest black power sign, locked pinkies and thumbs down, a form of greeting prevalent among the members of a nomadic tribe in south central Algeria who worship the mystical eye on the back of American dollar bills. Without further comment I'll now read the note which Lothar handed me at that time. Quote. I would like to take this opportunity to remind the white rapist imperíalist power-hungry genocidal warmongers that they have exactly twenty-four hours to get out of Africa, Asia, South and Central America, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand. Failure to comply with this order will result in a worldwide orgy of bloodshed that will make World War II seem like a Quaker picnic in New Harmony, Indiana. Unquote. Jungle and desert being built, rhetoric by rhetoric, in the dark crack of the dawn. Hammering out those bronze names. Also known as: Ahmed Abu Bekir. Halil Rassam. Shafik Bey. Imam el-Mahdi. Kwame Mwanga. Majid Said. Hassan Karami. Rashid Nimr. Muhammad Lateef. Mustapha al-Attassi. Dugumbe Ujiji. Ismail bin Salim. James Lumumba. Abdul-Rahman Alami. Yakoub Mahmoud. We were sailing along on Shafik Bey/ when a noise from off the port bow/took our breath away. My little ineffables, my trolls and trogs-you think there are noble sounds in these names of the desert. Bulrushes and scimitars. My bosom lightly trembles with the laughter of the angled Saxon. Which is what I am. Triplicate flesh of the graded sequence. Extract of the terminal afterthought. File child registered in the provisional substring. Picture transmitted by numerically shaded values. Standardized implementation of the coded tabulator. I am the inconceivable Mandrake. And I see we have to pause now for a recorded announcement of crucial importance to everyone within the sound of my voice. In the meantime, don't do anything detrimental to the national incest."

The test track was a nine-mile circle in the desert. It was sunrise and we were parked on an overpass watching the trucks and cars move beneath us. Clevenger said they rolled twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, all kinds of weather. Every so often one of the drivers falls asleep, he said; goes barreling off the road; turns over six or eight times; burns to death. Trucks don't bounce as much as cars but seem to burn better. Then he said it was time to be checking in at the office but first he took a turn around the track, nine very hasty miles, his final burst for the wire, speedometer quivering at 117. I wondered why he had come out here before going home.

In the office he showed me some schedules and gave me a brief run-down of the operation. He had twelve more or less steady employees; four were white, two black, six Mexican. The workload was informally organized in such a way that the Mexicans did most of the driving, the blacks most of the tire-changing, the whites most of the balancing and measuring as well as the checking of air pressure, temperature, tread loss and the rest. I told him I wanted to drive and change tires and he seemed to look at me in anger at all dumb-ass northern guilt and innocence, although his head did not move the slightest, nor his eyes; it was just the way it seemed. He checked his mail then and we did not speak for a long time. The cars and trucks went by and the land ran dead flat up to a bank of blue mountains far off. I said it looked like rain.

"Anybody who tries to predict the weather in Texas is either a stranger or a damn fool."

"Right," I said.

A man stood by the window drinking something hot from a paper cup and Clevenger went outside to talk to him. I called Warren Beasley at his home.

"For our cash jackpot of $840,000, can you identify the man or woman who was playing third base for the Philadelphia Phillies at the exact moment that James Mason walked into the sea to save Judy Garland's career?"

"I don't talk money without my lawyers," he said. "Who is this?"

"David Bell. I heard the show a couple of hours ago. I'm down here in the middle of nowhere. I thought you were kind of unfunny there with the black militant thing. Why shouldn't they have whatever names they want? Did I wake you up?"

"I couldn't sleep," he said.

"Anyway it was good to hear a familiar voice."

"I agree with you. I listened to it myself. Cheered me up considerably."

"I don't get you, Warren."

"It was on tape. I've been taping for the last three or four months. Doing it live was too much strain."

"I should have known," I said. "I really should have guessed. We're all on tape. All on tape. All of us."

"Sorry, Tab, if I upset that delicate circuitry of yours. But it's really more practical this way. I can tape a couple of shows at a time and take a day off now and then."

"It was better the other way, Warren."

"Only in the ontological sense. But I have to admit I haven't had one good night of solid sleep since I went over to tape. I think that's my wife's fault more than anything else. The first four were insomniacs. Consequently I slept like a baby all those years. My metabolism is based on subtle polarities. But the current bitch is always in the sack. She's like a serpent asleep in warm water. I'm helpless against this kind of power. And when I finally doze off for a few minutes I get the tapeworm dream, which I haven't had in years. Listen, Tab, come on over and have a couple of bloody marys with me. We'll sit by the bed and watch her sleep. She does a certain amount of finger-diddling every morning about this time. If you get over here real fast you'll be able to see it."

"Warren, I'm not home. I'm in goddamn Texas."

"When did this happen?"

"I don't know," I said. "I left about five weeks ago. I don't even have a job anymore."

"Look, she's starting."

"Goodbye," I said.

I went outside and Clevenger introduced me to two white men named Lump and Dowd. He said he'd get the women as soon as Peewee showed up. We went around to the garage. A small dump truck stood in the center of the concrete floor and dozens of tires were stacked against the wall. All over the place were weighing and measuring devices, rags, jacks, tire-irons, carburetors, rims, hubcaps, exhaust pipes. Lump carried in two cases of quart bottles of beer; he carried them one on each hip, a hand gripping the far edge of each wood and iron case. He and Dowd sat on a tire. Clevenger sat on a fender of the dump truck. I leaned against a bare section of wall. We started drinking. It was seven o'clock in the morning.

We drank straight from the bottles. The beer tasted awful at that hour of day but I said nothing and kept drinking. The others were drinking about twice as fast as I was. Dowd chugged half a quart and then said he'd best be getting outside for a kingsize piss and everybody laughed. We drank beer for about an hour, each of us in turn drawing laughter by standing in the huge square of the open garage door and pissing onto the gravel outside. When my turn came, there was both laughter and applause as if by this act I had joined them in some mythic union. I found myself pleased with their benedictions. Peewee showed up with a fifth of bourbon and we started passing the bottle around. Through a window I could see the cars and trucks circling the track, headlights off now. Clevenger went to the wall phone and spoke very softly and evenly for no more than ten seconds before hanging up. Dowd lowered the garage door.

The women arrived half an hour later. There were three of them, all Mexican. The young one wanted to know where Danny Boy was and Clevenger told her Danny Boy was in jail minus his right eye. Dowd took the fat one into the cab of the truck and she got on her back and pulled up her dress. His knee slipped off the seat and he fell over her leg and down under the dash. We were all laughing. He crawled out onto the running board and dropped to the ground, laughing and vomiting, one foot still hooked to the running board. Lump walked right over him, then opened his pants and got on top of the woman. Clevenger took off all his clothes, stepped back into his boots and told the young one to sit inside a truck tire that was standing against the wall. As she lifted her dress he got on his hands and knees and put his head inside. Peewee had the other one against the bare wall, dress up, biting her breasts which were not uncovered and trying to work his way into her. I dragged Dowd over to the back of the truck and when I was sure no one could see what I was doing I kicked him hard in the ribs. Then I finished off the bourbon and poured part of a bottle of beer on Lump's head and he laughed and kept going. Peewee began sliding down the woman's legs. Over Clevenger's rump the young one looked at me, picking her nose. Peewee was on the ground, curled around the other one's legs, biting, his pants not quite off. Lump came out of the cab, took off all his clothes and picked up a quart of beer. Clevenger came out from under the dress and got on top of the fat one in the cab. He told her to take off her dress but she wouldn't and he began to laugh. Lump threw the bottle at a wall. I saw Dowd crawling past and I helped him to his feet and pushed him toward the young one. He fell over halfway there. She was still in the tire and Lump went over and put his head under her dress. I kicked Dowd. Peewee had the other one's shoes off and he was putting one of her feet inside his pants. She looked down at him and laughed and then he laughed and she dropped on top of him and they lay together laughing and pulling each other's hair, biting, rolling from side to side. I couldn't get the garage door opened and I leaned my head against it, feeling myself falling and waiting to hit, wanting to, but somehow still standing, the door cold on my cheek. Clevenger was slapping me on the back and repeating the words soft white underbelly over and over. I turned and saw the fat one pouring beer all over Dowd. Peewee was standing now with a length of pipe between his legs and they all laughed. The young one was still inside the tire. Lump pissed against the wall. Dowd got up and put his arms around the fat one and threw up again. She punched I him in the face, twice, hurting him, and everybody laughed. Peewee was out of his clothes now and he crawled over to the young one and put his head under her dress. Clevenger told me to watch out for the fat one. Her cunt had teeth in them. The fat one and the other one sat on the running board sharing a bottle of beer. Dowd, on the ground again, said it was time he was getting his. He lurched toward the two women, tried to get up, lost his balance and hit his head on the edge of the bumper. Lump was standing in his own piss. I went over to Peewee, grabbed his ankles and pulled him away from the young one. I dragged him along the ground on his belly and face. Clevenger poured beer on him. Then I went to the girl sitting in the tire, pushed her dress up around her hips and buried my face between her legs. Her thighs parted and then closed, wet against my ears, and I tried to put my tongue higher into her, feeling again as though I were about to pass out. She was patting my head. Someone pulled me away from her and I crawled toward the fat one, trying to take off my shirt, just my shirt. Clevenger got to her first and they went to the back of the truck and after a while managed to climb in. The other one pushed me to the ground, straddled me, unbuttoned my shirt and took it off, and began taking off my belt. I could see Dowd. He was still out but there was no blood. The woman had my cock in her hand and she was trying to put it inside her. I pulled her down to me and kissed her and she let go finally and just lay on top of me, moving from side to side and licking my face. Then she straddled me again and I realized she was pissing all over my belly and chest. She got up finally and sat on the running board and drank some beer. I pushed myself up to my knees and fastened my belt. Then I threw up. Lump was under the young one's dress. Peewee was on the ground smoking a cigarette. I crawled over to him and asked for a drag, although I hadn't smoked in several years. We sat next to each other sharing the cigarette. Clevenger eased himself down off the truck, took off his boots, got dressed and put on the boots. The fat one stood in the back of the truck and the other one handed the bottle up to her. Clevenger made a phone call. Lump came out of

the dress and pissed all over Dowd. The young one sat inside the tire.

Then Clevenger left by a side door. I went after him and got my suitcase out of the car. He said he'd be back in half an hour. I watched him drive around the test track. He went around three times, almost twice as fast as the trucks and other cars. I looked at that huge circle of asphalt, nine never-ending miles, something left behind by a crazed or childlike people. It made me think of Warburton for a moment, his final memo, and I began to juggle the alphabet, to fit it together finally, three names from two, anagrammatized, a last. jest from corporate exile. I went back to the garage and got my shirt. Then I ran across the track and across fifty yards of dirt and out the gate onto the road. Clevenger was still circling the track. I put on my shirt and walked for about half an hour. It started getting warmer. Dead coyotes were hung on wire fences. A car stopped for me then, an old Studebaker. The driver started up again before I had the door closed. He was a one-arm man wearing the dress blues of the United States Navy. Along the road and spread out across the desert were hundreds of oil drills, their black shafts stroking, triangular heads and lean frames, slave colonies of gigantic worker ants, the science fiction of prehistory and hereafter. Black smoke came gusting out of a refinery and covered the land and sky. I asked him where he was heading and he said Midland. On the radio Bob Dylan was singing "Subterranean Homesick Blues." We came out of the smoke and I asked him how long he had been in the navy. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, a slight wincing man with the thin mouth and white-blond hair of a secret planner of bank robberies.

"You think I'm not navy because of the arm. You find me incongruous. That's always been my strength. I project a mystery that a lot of men and women have tried to unlock. But maybe the mystery is in themselves. You're wondering how I know so much about people. I've been places all my life.

I've been to China, one of the few. I'm a voracious reader. I studied at the sore bone in Paris. That was before the arm."

"No offense meant. I was just asking."

"Everybody's interested in the arm. There are other parts of me, deep down, that nobody has succeeded in reaching. I have an insatiable curiosity about people from all walks of life. The way to learn about people is to keep your eyes and ears open and your lips sealed. I roamed the streets of Paris like a cat. I was silent and watchful. Nobody messed with me. I carried a knife all through my Paris days. I had only one intimate friend, a writer-painter from Harlem. He was sleek and wiry. He was the coolest spade in Paris. He was the ace of spades. We were like two cats prowling the Left Bank. I carried my knife at all times. Mess with either one of us and the other'd cut your throat."

"What was his name?"

"Whose name?"

"The writer-painter," I said.

"You're being polite because you're afraid of me. Fear impels people to ask ingratiating questions. I've been noticing that for quite a few years. It's an intricate thing, fear. I've been making a study of it during my travels. There's a whole literature of fear in the libraries of the world, just waiting to be read and synthesized. It's the arm that worries people. Mystery is the white man's enemy. I'm one of the few with soul. Let me take a gander at what the hell you look like."

"How far is Midland?"

"I'm taking a gander," he said. "First billboard we come to I'll park this vehicle behind it. Then we'll see how much mystery you have. I'm hung. I'm hung like a fighting bull. I'm yea big. We'll see who's more man. Bigger gives it. Smaller takes. Them's the rules of the road."

"That's it," I said. "Let me out."

"Rejection is one of the banes of our time. People should never reject each other. You think this is nothing but vulgarism on my part. What I offer is more than merchandise.

Men have paid plenty for my sexual gifts and proclivities. But my mystery isn't for sale."

"Stop the car."

He slowed down and pulled over to the side. I grabbed my suitcase and got out. And then, a delighted child reciting a rhyme, a child remembering word for word some old lesson or torn bit of lore, he leaned toward the window and said victoriously:

"Good little boys do not accept rides from strangers."

A deaf-mute couple took me the next forty miles. They looked enough alike to be twins. I sat in the back seat next to a guitar. Then I rode a short stretch with a man who sold rat poison and had once been a delegate to a political convention. A former stripteaser picked me up then and took me into Midland. She used to play gin rummy with the Duke of Windsor. I got a room, shaved, showered, checked out and rented a car. I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.

In the morning I headed west along Main Street in downtown Dallas. I turned right at Houston Street, turned left onto Elm and pressed my hand against the horn. I kept it there as I drove past the School Book Depository, through Dealey Plaza and beneath the triple underpass. I kept blowing the horn all along Stemmons Freeway and out past Parkland Hospital. At Love Field I turned in the car and bought a gift for Merry. Then, with my American Express credit card, I booked a seat on the first flight to New York. Ten minutes after we were airborne a woman asked for my autograph.