testing now
- Title 1
- Beasts of Burden
- Untitled work
- Gone to Walnut Grove
- Ramblings Of A Retired Tramp
- A Architect's Notions Of The City
- From Soledad to the Sea
- The Lion Bleeds Stark Epiphanies
- Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed
- A Dance Between Flesh and Steel
- Train hopping in the WL
- Club
- Mariana
- Night Racing In Shanghai
- a conversation
- Radium Tears Swim In The Cowlings of Departed Wrights
- Poem
- Grandpa Softly Falling After Tiananmen
(This draft being retooled…))
“Ignition!”
With a final pull, the three propellers caught. The engines sputtered, then turned into a deafening growl as it drew in more fuel.
“Chocks away!”
He moved away from the engines to the right-side wheel, kneeling down, wrapping his hand around the small length of rope that was tied to the wheel chock, testing the force he would have to apply to get it to move. As expected, the force of the aircraft yearning to go was pressing down on it.
Bracing himself against the tarmac, he yanked the rope.
Let the magic begin.
He tossed the wheel chock aside, sparing no moment to get down on the ground to let the plane’s wings pass over him. The pilots doing the Cuban run were the type that needed to get off the ground as soon as they hit the runway.
He covered his head with his hands as he waited for the rest of the plane to clear. The sound of the engines was deafening, the gust from the propellers whipping his face.
The last of the wing passed over him. Just like a stage being illuminated, the comforting shade was gone, leaving him alone and exposed to the relentless Floridian sun and its sweltering heat.
He slowly got up on his feet, watching the Trimotor taxi to the runway line, laden with cargo and passengers, lining up behind other planes that were also laden with cargo and passengers. He could tell their final destinations just by their airline names alone.
Rio De Janeiro, Nashville, Monterrey, Havana.
It was with a certain irony that he had originally wanted to be a dockhand.
-
His father, Ignacio Nunez, Sr. and uncle, Santiago Ramirez and his countless friends, were all dockhands, working into the late hours loading and unloading cargo of countless ships that came and left the Florida Keys.
In those days, the port could not afford the luxury of land-based cranes, leaving the dockhands to work with whatever was available to them. The well-off ships going up the Gulf to the southern states were equipped with their own hoists, winches and booms, making loading an easy affair, but such luxuries were few.
More often, old and weary freighters slipped into port to get serviced. They made the leisurely round-about runs throughout the Caribbean, seemingly never in a hurry. Loading and unloading freight was done using sheer force and a convoluted system of often frayed ropes. Teams of two or three hands would push heavy crates and barrels up a steep ramp, where they would be jerry-rigged for loading into the hold, one soul manning the rope down bracing themselves against a railing, shouting,
“Agárrate fuerte! Hold fast! Hold fast! Hold fast!”
Plenty of men hurt themselves doing the work in those days—it seemed like every other month two or three men retired due to some induced injury. As a child, he remembered his fellow schoolchildren jeer out the open schoolhouse windows at the men wandering around town with a lame leg, rattling a tin cup in their hands, a few stray coins clanging.
Whenever his peers would finish and turn around, they would inevitably get confronted by the schoolmistress, whose face transformed into that of a raging, swollen bull. She bared her teeth before slapping a ruler across their backs.
She would then slam shut the window, letting off a string of curses under her breath in both English and broken Spanish, before walking away, giving the boys chilling glances over her shoulder as she walked back towards the chalkboard…
-
“I hated the sound of the chalkboard,” The Guatemalan aviator said, taking a long drag off his cigar, “just like I hated escuela. Such a dull time of life. One moment, Ignacio.”
He fumbled in his pants pockets, eventually drawing a silver-colored flask engraved with the words Que Asi Sea. He uncapped the cork, tossing it aside.
“Care for some, Ignacio? This is good stuff.”
“I would love to,” Ignacio replied, glancing towards the one stray yet to be loaded, dreading its weight, “but I still have freight that I need to load.”
“So be it.” The pilot raised the flask high to his lips, swigging all the contents down within a matter of half a minute. He slammed the flask down on the tarmac, and swayed a little bit.
“You…. okay there?” Ignacio asked. He hefted the crate to his chest, feeling his arms burn, and took the first steps toward the open aft freight door of the Trimotor.
“I’ve seen worse days, friend!” The pilot blurted out, and the swaying abruptly turned into a furious tango, “Let me tell you a story, amigo! The story of the gods, the earth and the virtues of stolen love!”
“I’d rather not hear that….” But his half-hearted plea was laughed aside.
“I was flying over the Sierra Madres at altitudes so high that the wingtips could touch the cusps of the peaks, when an arc of lighting struck across my propellers! As any good pilot would do, I urged my machine even higher, to the roof of the world, where I had a conversation with a saint!”
Ignacio’s arms buckled. A few more steps and the final piece would be onboard. Then he could take his lunch break and forget the whole thing.
“When the saint finally released me from her dominion, my plane fell back to Earth, the ground opening up its arms to receive me. It was going to
swallow me whole! I tugged and tugged on that control stick, trying to get the nose back up, but alas, to no avail!”
Ignacio felt a strong urge to put down the crate, but he gritted his teeth. Just a few more…
“When I woke up, I was staring into the eyes of my furious wife! She was angry that I got a chance to meet the patron sain-” with a surprised grunt, the pilot stumbled and fell against Ignacio. Ignacio felt his arms give way.
The crate hit the tarmac, and the lid splintered. Small round and reflective pieces of glass spilled out and scattered all over.
“Sorry, friend,” The pilot muttered. “Here, have these. So your hands won’t get dirty.” He pulled off his leather gloves and tossed them over.
Ignacio picked up a piece and turned it over in his hand. It was a pocket mirror printed with the picture of a woman for a brand-name advertising soap. His eyes shifted towards the mess. Surprisingly, none of them had been broken.
He could not believe his luck. His hands swept out to grab a handful to put back in, but as his fingers closed around the samples, he heard cracking and felt a sharp pain.
Opening his hands, he saw that the mirrors he scooped up had shattered. He looked around at the mess. All of the mirrors had shattered. His hands burned, and he dropped them…. now he would have to sweep up all the glass shards and frames, and explain…
The pain radiated into his hands and he tried to cry out but he found when he opened his mouth no sound came out….
-
Where was he? Standing on the tarmac on a hot Floridian June afternoon. What had he been thinking about? The old family’s trade as dockhands, loading ships. Unlike his forebears he loaded airplanes and took part in firing them up. Hands on fire as if seared by loading ropes.
He looked down at his hands, and felt a jolt, the shock of conflicting sensations… there were no scars from the glass, no patch left over from a bandage, nothing. Worn hands from throwing countless propellers, lifting crates, escorting passengers to their planes. Perhaps his hands were once on fire, but he couldn’t remember.
All the planes before the Trimotor had taken off now, and as he shifted his eyes to settle on it, the Havana-bound bird had aligned itself with the runway stripes, props at half-speed.
In his mind he could see the fresh-faced Cuban pilot, eyes cast across the clear sea, towards the horizon, beyond the last bit of land at the end of the runway. Clear day, no obstructions. If someone arrived late for their flight or if cargo had been delayed, that was someone else’s problem. There would be no turning back now.
Que Asi Sea. So be it.
The engines leapt into a roar as the pilot threw the throttle wide open. The Trimotor sprang down the runway, gaining speed. The loaded aircraft seemed to hesitate for a second, just as his father did before lifting the last piece out of every cargo hold. Then, the aircraft began its slow ascent into the air, narrowly missing the mast of an ocean liner steaming into port, wheeling free out over the sparkling blue Caribbean.
-
Just as he averted his eyes, there was the screeching of tires and the smell of burning rubber. A Packard had pulled up just behind him. An older man, dressed in a light suit with graying hair got out of the driver’s seat, his face betraying his suppressed panic and anger.
“Freight agent Watterson. Plane just took off, didn't it?” he asked, “You didn’t try to stop it?”
“Well…I’m just the one who loads the cargo and throws the propeller,” Ignacio stammered. “The pilots doing the route to Cuba always want to get into the air as soon as possible. Shippers down there don’t like delays.”
The freight agent’s brows furrowed.
“He ain’t going to Cuba,” he said under his breath, then beckoned for him to follow. “Get in.”
The Packard’s motor whined as Watterson slammed on the pedal, hurtling the roadster in front of the control tower next to the small passenger terminal.
“Manifest, get me today’s manifest!” Watterson bellowed, as he raced up the stairs to the control cabin. Ignacio followed close behind.
The control cabin was in disarray. Operators were on the phone lines with any ships and all hangers, trying to scramble a plane, any fast and nimble plane to get the Trimotor to turn back.
“We got a Curtiss on standby!” someone shouted, accidentally knocking over a pile of papers, which fluttered to the floor, “Mr. Watterson, the manifest….it’s been altered. It’s going to Antigua, not Havana. Five pieces of cargo.”
“I doubt we can intercept that plane in time….” someone else muttered, “We might just wanna let it go.”
“You said….five pieces?” Ignacio remarked, “I counted six when I loaded it.”
Watterson and the operator’s faces dropped.
“What was in it? What was in it?” Watterson demanded, “You got to tell us.”
“The label had ‘GOLD’ stamped on it.” Ignacio drily replied, unsure of what to make of the whole situation now, “Anything wrong?”
“It was stolen dynamite, or munitions, boy. Most likely he is going to sell it to some military or gang down south. Police told us to be on the lookout for that and…here we are.” The old man shook his head.
“Que Asi Sea.” Ignacio whispered, watching the speck of the Trimotor get fainter and fainter.
Then suddenly, the aircraft burst into flames, pieces streaming down from the fuselage and body, the props and wings reduced to shredded metal. Oily black smoke streamed out from the rear, and the remnants of what was the main fuselage plummeted into the sea.
He clenched tight to a corner of the desk, and the sharp pain came roaring back.
“My hand!” he cried. Then, he looked down and realized that he wore the pilot’s gloves, the embedded tiny pieces of glass from the shattered mirrors still glistening bright on the surface of the leather fingers.
The rails here now resembled, if anything, two converging streaks in the godforsaken desert, with what was left of the railhead’s shine reflecting the hazy skies high above.
The Ivory Valley, stuck in between the Carlisle Mountains to the West and the Rosewaites to the South, is funny like that. It messes with your perceptions of time and distance. Standing on the boulders, on top of the peak, you could easily assume that you can cross the expanse in a day, perhaps two, but when you come down the winding, dusty mountain trails and step down from the shrubs clinging onto the last of that fertile, sympathetic soil, you find yourself on those vast salt plains that just keep going on, and on. Without that road, the old railroad, you would lose all life and splinter, crumble into the barren husks of brush.
Fabienne found a curious creature in one of those husks next to the tracks today. It was a pack mule, well….what was left of a pack mule, anyhow. The chalky-white, elongated jaw hung open on strands of brittle cartilage, as if the neurons fired one last spasm before its sweet release into death.
“It’s morbid, Webster. Morbid but beautiful,” she said, gingerly cupping her hands around the skull, bringing it up to eye level, peering through the left eye socket to the pinhole situated opposite, “I can see straight through.”
She let out a small laugh as she set it down and gathered her traveling skirts when something else caught my eye, a bronze gleam coming from the sand not too far from where she found the skull.
I walked a few steps forward and bent down to brush aside the sand, revealing, engraved on the tarnished bronze, black text nearly worn away by the salts.
Mule #108, Construction Corps, Ivory Valley Railway
“What is it, Webster?”
“A medallion. I suppose it’s from the dead mule,” I replied, and turned it over in my hand. Chiseled in rough, hand-hewn grooves in the back was the mule’s true name:
Cain
Another, larger, beast of burden lay dead in the distance, not too far from the ruined train order house. As we left the place where Cain had died, and drew closer, we could see the true extent of what the sand, salt and the indifference of time had done.
The locomotive stood silent on the rails, fire having long since dropped. Stripped of its characteristic fittings, the instruments, whistle, headlight, paint flaked and iron stripped by the pickled wind, rain mixing into brine, leaving trails of oxidation, it now resembled more of a crippled hulk of dead metal than anything else.
The smokebox door drooped open on its one good hinge, and Fabienne, clambering onto the pilot, peered inside.
“You ought to come see this for yourself,” she quickly said, “passing travelers have made quite a nest.”
The inside of that hollowed cylindrical boiler had been padded by materials of all sorts. Streaming in through the holes where the smokestack and adornments once were, the dying light illuminated the yellowed, torn papers, a leftover wool blanket, pillows made from scraps of clothing draped over a sack stuffed with hay.
I was about to climb out, to talk with her about dinner and settling down for the night, when my hand brushed against a piece of something, stiff, worn, and thick. It was a book that had been once jammed into this rat’s nest of a lodging, between burlap and a piece of warped pressboard, likely taken from the train order house. Just when my hands grasped the cover a photograph slipped out from between the pages and fluttered to rest upon the left rail.
-
The night fell fast upon the valley, and as it did so, the chill started to creep in.
With a flick of a match, the lantern lit, its feeble flame growing to a vivid, waxing yellow as it took hold of the wick, and I placed it near the closed book.
Leaving the blanket for me, Fabienne wrapped her traveling cloak tight around her body and slid into the boiler and made herself comfortable on the strange nest of sorts. I took in the view of the tracks and mountains from which we came, fading into the dusk.
“What’s this book for, exactly?” she said, after a slow sigh, and rested her back against the back wall.
“It’s a locomotive log, of this engine. Engine 16,” I replied, gazing upon the photo of that same locomotive parked on a siding in the middle of those same salt plains. The colors had been hand tinted, and from what I could discern, the engine was once painted in a light gray, with a low smokestack and white running stripes extending all the way to the tender from the bright red pilot, adorned with a shining brass center headlight, bells and a nameplate below the cab window.
“The Lady Daylily….”
“Lilts straight off one’s tongue, doesn’t it?” she cocked an eyebrow in amusement, and brushed aside a stray strand of coiled, carmine hair. “They must have had the irony of a poet…naming a locomotive after a flower when the photo was taken in the middle of these flats.”
The four men that crewed Engine 16 could very well have had the ironic sensitivity of poets, with their stature and causal expressions for the camera, hanging out on the tender, seated on the drivers, leaning back in the cab. Dressed in brown waistcoats and sooty shirts, they would not be too far unlike the students who congregated on the university lawn in better days with pens and sheafs of paper, scribbling out manuscripts like madmen, uncaring of their stumblings.
“Should I read the book aloud?”
“It’s quite an unusual way of rousing our minds to slumber,” she said, smiling, “but yes, go ahead at your leisure, dear Webster.” She planted a kiss on my cheek.
With the dinner of bread, cheese, and the last of the dried mint tea leaves warming my belly, I cracked open the book, feeling my fingers trace the green paisley endpages, a corner curling up as I did so, and turned to the first page, feeling the loose action of the spine, created by past travelers who had done the same.
-
Selected Excerpts from the Log of Engine 16
((Pieced together in order from logbook and leftover telegraph orders found in the makeshift firebox bed.))
We only recently got a new log, after the old one was accidentally chucked in the firebox by Ben. Dawson is the only guy besides me that was here around the day we got the 4-8-21Lady Daylily from the Wistrial Lake & Eastern2. Named after some baroness who died long ago, she arrived in the old company shops in Caubo pulled in pieces with wagons over the Hatmars, and it was a pain on the shopsmen in building her back up from sheets of nothing. Originally when she was assembled and operational we were working the shops as a big bastard of a yard goat, now in the middle of the desert on the forefront of construction as a helper. I’m starting to think that we had it much worse than them now, the shopsmen who built her up, that is. She’s numbered 16 because new locomotive deliveries from the numbers 3-15 are going to be delivered progressively, and then we’ll have a proper fleet.
-
The telegrapher, Ross, was proposing to change the locomotive’s name to something more appropriate for the goddamn place we are stuck in. Said that something like Arid would work better. Holy shit, his idea got shut down fast. Ben wanted to maintain the humor. After all, the Ivory Valley isn’t even ivory. It’s more of a dirty white and beige color.
-
The coal that we received from muleman Old Man Looper of the Construction Corps is absolute shit, as Daylily is belching out a horrid, thick, sooty plume, but it does the job. Ben’s having to shovel and bury clinker3in the sand for most of our idle days, but it’s not too bad all things considered. Ross is going to go press for better quality fuel, but I’m not sure if we will get any. Until formal train orders come we are just doing tests and exercising her bearings.
-
I wish we had the time to take a trip out of the valley into the mountains, just so we can bathe and clean ourselves in those hidden cold springs. Whenever we wash our waistcoats, shirts and trousers, and our bodies with rags in Daylily’s tender reservoir to conserve water, we could never get the stink of sweat and ash to go away. Dawson’s getting pissed off at Ross because that guy never has to experience the same things as us.
-
Looper came around with his mules today, with much needed supplements of tanks of water, coal and provisions. Ben’s still pissed that it was still the same shit coal. Was about to take it out on Ross, too, if it wasn’t for a hard slug from Dawson. While Looper took his lunch break on Daylily’s running boards, he told us that on the other side of the valley, construction has been slow but steady. I got to pet the lead mule. His official name is Mule #108 (whose bright idea was it up in the new management board to number mules, anyways?), but Looper took it upon himself to carve the name Cain.
-
We got to help pull the trains today, both loaded with flatcars of construction material and men coming in to complete the line across the valley. I never thought that the shitty coal would work in favor of us, sending that thick black column up into the air. The mulemen driving their supplies to the site paused their work to gaze at Daylily and Engine #2 as we passed, pulling to the site and on the pushback to the halfway point, and for #2, the shops at Caubo.
-
Ross received a new transmission from Caubo. Seems like last night there was a tar fire at the shops which quickly spread to the roundhouse. Being built mostly from wood, they said it was a total loss. Locomotives #1 and 2 were completely destroyed…fuck. They weren’t as elaborate or frankly as pretty as Daylily but…god damn it. I hope that the promised delivery of locomotives gets here on the line soon. For now we are the only remaining engine in the fleet.
-
Two days and no response from Caubo, but for the other work site down the line on the far side of the valley, their telegrapher is going ham. Ross was listening in on the lines all day, and looked pretty wrecked by dinnertime. Still no response from the company. Maybe Caubo’s lines were cut by that fire.
-
Word has spread, from some folks riding down from Caubo, that the company was ruined and there would be no replacement locomotive deliveries, but at the same time there’s been others coming around to say that we should remain where we are because it wasn’t the end of the project.
-
Ben started the long process of removing and scrubbing down Daylily’s firebox, and Dawson and I joined in. After a long day of work we managed to tidy up, with only a small bit of that clinker left in the bottom. Ross informed us when we returned that people were starting to drift away from the construction camp, most heading in the other direction than the tracks, but added that Old Man Looper would come our way again quite soon, however, only taking one mule, Cain, with him.
-
No more communications. The telegraph line to the construction camp has gone silent, and Ross has just been moping all day. Seems like the telegrapher at the camp has packed up and left. Ben finished cleaning out the clinker from Daylily.
-
Fuel deliveries have ceased, and today the tender’s reserves finally ran dry, both in water and what little coal we have. We can’t steam her up anymore.
-
Looper came back, for the final time to us tonight, confused, disoriented. Gave him some water, and he seemed better. Said that Cain had collapsed the day before, just dropped dead from the heat near the tracks when he was leading him. He described the final moments as quick, most likely painless. Laid down on it’s side, convulsed and then died. After that…he could only go on so far, and thought he himself was going to die. Asked us if he could hitch a ride on Daylily on the tracks back to Caubo, and shook his head in disbelief when we told him that she was done for.
-
No more Ivory Valley Railway, the place where we spent half a year of solitude in the desert, with only a locomotive and our minds to mull over. Tonight, when the night is cool, we are leaving on foot. No tears shed, just the prospects of the long trek home. We have already said our goodbyes to Daylily, and we all understand the shitty fate, the loss of memories and meaning that awaits her. If anyone decides to come down here and arrives at her resting place, I hope that she still serves some sort of use to you as she did serve us, be it a place of rest away from the heat or a testament of sorts to our efforts in vain.
-
I gazed over at Fabienne. She had fallen asleep. Beside me, the lamp’s flames were slowly dying, so I took the liberty to blow it out.
Through the holes on the top of Daylily, where the smokestack and two domes once were, I lifted my eyes to gaze up at the sky. The clouds had parted, just enough to see the emerging, winking stars, the same stars that stared down upon the crewmen who left Daylily. Perhaps the irony wasn’t lost on them. A locomotive named after a flower that would perish in such an environment, running on steel rails meant to conquer the valley, perishing itself, left to be savaged by the elements, scavengers and time.
Even life seemed cheap, almost meaningless here—the skull of a pack mule being only a mere curiosity, in a desolate valley named after a material harvested in humid, steamy jungles, and the abandoned railroad tracks, just stretching dead ahead, vanishing before the horizon, seemingly leading nowhere.
But, they did lead somewhere.
In the morning, we made our way out of the Ivory Valley. Climbing those grades, feeling the salinity from the valley turn into fresh mountain air, a cool breeze blowing into our faces, stirred a sense of relief in my heart.
Following those remnants of the same railroad tracks over those mountains to the ghost town of Caubo, still miles and miles from the sea, I couldn’t help but muse what Cain must have felt, seeing the oily black smoke from the Lady Daylily curl up into the air as thousands of pounds of steel hurtled their way across the inhospitable landscape. Could mules even register irony? Two beasts, one made of flesh, bone and ligaments, the other, a stunning iron machine, condemned to the flats for all eternity.
From the scanner propped up on the railroad tie, came a burst of radio chatter.
“80-92, we are approaching Davis siding, over.”
“You ready, Jason?” Christopher asked, pushing aside a stray lock of chestnut hair. “This is our train that’s coming soon.”
“Yeah…I’m ready, Christopher. How about you, Navi?”
“It depends…on your definition of ready,” she responded, folding away the pocket mirror that she always carried on her, and then slung her pack strap over her shoulder. “The fact that the train’s coming doesn’t scare me. What scares me…” she stared up at the open clarity of blue that was the Californian sky, as if counting out her prayers, “is completing The Ritual.”
“The Ritual?”
“That’s what she calls it.” Christopher rolled his eyes, “The Ritual. Hopping a freight train…or as the old guy from the railroad museum said, doing it on the fly…while it’s moving.”
“While it’s moving? Isn’t that a little bit, y’know…dangerous?”
“Driving a car is dangerous yet people are still doing it. What do you think that makes us any different?”
“80-92…” the radio chatter came through the scanner once again, “please be advised that an Amtrak eastbound is coming your way, switching your string to the siding, over.”
“You know what that means, right, Jason?” Navi asked, cocking an eyebrow, “please don’t tell me that a railroad fan like you couldn’t even grasp the lingo.”
“It’s gonna slow and stop to let that train pass-”
“Exactly.” She stood up from the ditch next to the track and walked up the embankment. Sure enough, there was the faint sound of a diesel locomotive’s electronic bell that rang away, down the line.
“Copy that. We will be pulling in, over-”
“We got lucky. Instead of slowing down, it’s gonna stop.” Christopher unplugged the portable battery unit from the bulky receiver and shoved it into his own pack. “Right…The Ritual.”
It’s funny how much love and reverence Navi placed in The Ritual, probably because in all our pasts we never had much of a chance to receive and reciprocate them. The times when steam locomotives and the old hobo guys were long gone, replaced by security cameras, chain link fences, the bulls roaming everywhere, it was far from the wide open spaces that old photos of people on the rails made it out to be. In those days, anyone could hop trains. Now, it was just the dedicated that did it.
And we were the dedicated.
My thoughts were broken by the electronic bell which became louder, and, rounding a corner on the far left track came the freight train, spearheaded by four two-tone gray and yellow Union Pacific diesel locomotives, still coated in a layer of dirt and filth from the Sierra Nevadas. Trailing behind were covered hoppers-freight cars built to carry bulk materials.
We held our breath as the power units passed, lying low just out of sight in the embankment so that the engineer could not catch sight of us and radio the bull. As soon as the locomotive passed and it was the hopper string, Navi stood up.
“The scanner said that an Amtrak train is coming on the right track. This’ll make the ritual a bit easier.” She motioned for us to follow.
The rails of the unoccupied right track vibrated through my boot as we scampered, keeping our backs down, to the stopping freight train. The Ritual had begun.
There was the blast of a shrill horn. The eastbound California Zephyr had met the westbound freight, bringing with it a shadow that threw itself upon the right side of the hopper, darkening the strip between the two tracks on which we stood.
A shaft of sunlight, from the break in between passengers cars momentarily casted across Navi’s eyes, which had changed. It seemed to glimmer, vitrify, with every second as the Amtrak train whipped by on the other track. Her gaze, once reserved, calculating, methodical, had gone to something else-excited, full of life.
“Now…” she said, patting the side of a hopper as if it were her steed, “we find one we can ride in without getting busted.”
Another flash. She took off, and I followed suit, imagining the reactions of the passengers in the Amtrak. They were probably glued to their phones, reading a book, sleeping. We were only a passing glimpse, if anything, from our position, resting on the grain hopper, waiting for the freight to carry us down the state. How could they ever grasp the struggles of three college kids that risked everything, their lives, connections and what little money they had to go see the beaches of San Diego for a change?
We ran, running down the row of covered grain hoppers, searching, searching for the next suitable ride. Our shoes pounded over the ballast, backpack straps flapping loose behind us, carried by the wind generated by the speeding Amtrak train.
Another flash, another shaft of sunlight.
The next covered hopper was a green hulk of Burlington Northern grainer that had no floor, no platform to ride on. The adjoining one wasn’t much better.
“Shit…and all of them with the cubby-holes are facing forwards!” Navi shouted, and kicked the truck of one of them out of frustration before continuing to run, “Jason, how are you coming on?”
“Fine…” I managed to gasp out, and glanced back at Christopher. His glasses were perched a little bit jauntily on the bridge of his nose, but didn’t mind, instead waving me on to continue running after Navi.
“We don’t have much time!” Christopher called behind us, and shot a quick glance behind him, “You better find a car, Navi, ‘cause this Amtrak train is gonna clear soon!”
“Found one!” Navi paused before a rusted brown cylindrical grain hopper, whose red coat had long been worn away by grime and dust. Behind the soot and accumulation were painted words Canada…Canadian Grain Board. She threw her pack into the platform on the far end of the car, the part that Christopher had dubbed “the veranda”.
Another shaft of light. A clap reverberated down the length of the freight train-the sounds of the coupler slack being pulled out by the locomotives in front. Screeches of a hundred steel wheels slowly rolling into motion cut sharply through the air.
I handed my pack in to Navi and put my right boot on the sill step, fingers closing tight around the rusted end ladder, climbing safely onboard onto the veranda.
“Jason…there you are….Christopher? Christopher!”
His boots slipped, and he went sprawling into the ballast. His loose right arm draped the rail, right into the path of a rolling steel wheel.
At the last possible second, he wrenched away, and picked himself up. Blood had trickled down from his right nostril, leaving a crimson splotch on his gray t-shirt.
“I’m…fine, Navi, Jason!”
His pack sailed in, landing with a thump on the hopper’s veranda. The freight was still moving at no more than a jog’s pace, but we knew it wasn’t going to last long.
“Jump, Christopher!” I cried, “if you don’t do it, you’ll be left behind!”
Another shaft.
Christopher’s hand closed around the lowest rung of the hopper end ladder.
A single grunt. Eyes shut tight. The ritual was almost over.
One boot pulled away from the ballast and jumped onto the sill step. The other followed suit.
The train began to accelerate. The slow pass of ties became a light blur.
One final shaft of light. The Amtrak train cleared, leaving the view open once more to the sterile, red shingled tract houses and monoliths of industrial parks of Davis.
Somewhere in one of the houses, someone would look up from their computer, phone, or book and out a window facing the tracks, and, for a fleeting second, catch a glimpse of three kids getting carried off with the freight…and either think of us as idiots or some sort of will-be idiots, both of which we weren’t.
Freight forced us to put away our phones, forced us to be in tune. Unlike our teachers, who would look away, make changes, grow soft, the freights commanded our full attention.
What did they know, after averting their eyes back to whatever they were doing, spending their time, trapped in the cycle of endless work and empty pleasure, posing and posting pictures of themselves for fake points on social media? We will be long gone, miles and miles away, basking in the wind of the speeding train and briny coastal air, laughing, jumping over gaps between the hoppers. Their assumptions meant nothing, meant nothing to the rails, meant nothing to her, meant nothing to us.
In our minds, we carry pieces.
Pieces of a life they cannot see.
We’re too quick to throw things away.
Take this Mack truck, for instance, sitting in the middle of nowhere, rural Sonoma County. From the style of the cab alone, I guess it was made in the 1970’s. Come take a look, the dust, pollen and mold won’t kill you.
The seat’s got springs coming out through the stuffing, but there’s nothing a little bit of thread and fabric couldn’t fix. Windshield’s shot, but what else? The steering column? Still could work fine, for what it is. Tires? They look a bit sad but still could turn. Engine? Heck, if I had the right tools or something to tow it with I could take it over to the elderly, Vietnamese mechanic down in Santa Rosa and pay to have it refitted with a working one from their spread of salvaged trucks out back.
See, this is what I’m talking about. I can’t imagine why someone would abandon this machine, still with parts worth saving, all the way out here, way beyond the highway and just leave it here to die. I’m sick of this world, throwing away good things that still clearly work. Anything could be fixed, even the floor pan. Yeah, my boots are going clear through to the sprigs of weeds below, but imagine if someone welded a steel plate over this. Boom. Fixed! What do you mean that it wouldn’t last long? You have to find a way to make it last long.
Hey….I found documents in the dash. This Mack used to belong to a place called Penderson & Sons Trucking out of San Francisco. Trucking…that reminds me of the first time I ever hit the road, way back in 1988.
-
Eighteen years old, just graduated from high school, and I had no clue what I was doing except that I needed to get to McMinnville, way up in Oregon to work as a counselor at a Boy Scout camp. Back then, I was straight up broke and my parents wouldn’t even cough up the money for a Greyhound ticket, so I had no choice but to hitchhike. There I stood, on the side of Interstate 54, looking like a goddamn idiot sticking out my thumb, watching semi-trucks and station wagons whip by, hard and fast. It took me one hour of just standing there, feeling my legs go weak, before I realized there was no shoulder for anyone to pull over. Turned out that didn’t matter, because a cream semi-truck with British Columbian tags slowed down just long enough for the driver to shout a message.
“Hop in, son!”
Cigarette dangling in his mouth, those aviator shades refracting the light that came in through the rolled-down cab window, you could hardly tell that he was a family man, if it wasn’t for his daughter, a girl about six, seven or so playing with a She-Ra doll in the back. He was asking me the usual questions— name, if I wanted to go further beyond McMinnville, my old high school…yeah, for the whole ride I dropped my entire life story in bits and pieces, like breadcrumbs in a fairy tale. My own father would never do that to a complete stranger; he would cut them off, and shut their soul down with a single sentence of scorn! Turns out the trucker and his daughter had just run a long-distance haul down to San Diego, and were heading home to Vancouver, back across the border. His wife, he said,…well, they were divorced.
“Why exactly?” I blurted out. He took it in stride.
“She’s addicted, son. My ex-wife, I mean,” he told me. “Addicted to pills. The nasty kind, where they force your entire system wide awake, and you flail out without any control. She would go to rehab and come out unchanged, leading to little things that added up to that night. Coming home to see her sprawled out on the carpet, frothing at the mouth, and she would swing at me when I tried to help her…dinners always going uncooked, and me having to do everything by myself….finally had to send my daughter, Evelyn, to live with my own father and mother for the weekends when I was out of town on business trips. Then that evening back in ‘87….Evelyn was attacked by her. She tried to kill her daughter, my daughter! Grabbed a kitchen knife and tried to kill my daughter before the cops showed up.”
I glanced back at Evelyn. She had stopped playing and just sat still on the sleeper bed, watching us talk. And I swear to god, that kid, she had a scar that ran the entire length of her arm. Of course it had healed just enough that if you were passing by, you wouldn’t have caught it, but…it was there. One long, jagged crimson line across skin. My stomach dropped a little when I saw that. How could it be that the mother was quick to throw away her own daughter?
“That’s why I took up part-time trucking,” he said as we drove on, around tight turns, the forests, situated on the slopes of the high snow-capped pinnacles looming ever larger, pines growing taller, more clustered, all packed in the constant layer of mist that hung under the perpetual slate gray skies of the Cascades.
“If you really think about it, son, I couldn’t let the memories of her go. I simply couldn’t. I have the burden to keep them alive, to tell my daughter rather than let her forget and grow up clueless.” I will never forget the sound of him taking a long, quiet drag as we rounded the corner. His eyes had changed behind those aviators, from the loose, casual look that he gave to me to one fixated directly on that road…as if wishing his attention to the road would get him to the destination sooner.
God, what happened to those people, people like the British Columbian truck driver? Oh, sure, there’s still folks around willing to lend a hand, but nowadays the majority only seem to do it for something in return. Yeah, I guess you can say that the truck driver could have easily blown past me, and I would have walked back into Woodland with my tail in between my legs…but he didn’t.
What is it that made him stop to pick me up? To be honest, I struggle to find an answer to such a question. I’m tempted to say that it was from the bottom of his heart, as cheesy as that sounds, but that’s probably not the right answer to that. Maybe it was the love that he felt for that kid standing on the side of the highway. Maybe because I reminded him of some old friend, or maybe reminded him of himself when he was a teenager and took to the road to get places. Or maybe it’s something else completely. But one thing is for certain— he dropped me off at McMinnville with a beaming smile on his face, as if he was watching me go off to school for the first time like I was his son.
-
I didn’t hit the road after that. Not initially, at least. When the week at the scout camp concluded, the camp bought me a Greyhound ticket home. My mind was too wrapped up in all the stuff that happened there, capture the flag games, merit badges, that sorta stuff, so much that I forgot about the truck driver and his daughter. It didn’t mean that they were gone, mind you, just at the back of my mind, untouched.
Soon after I got home, still June of ‘88, I met a girl, Deborah, I believe she was. We had a bunch of things in common—she read books, was well-spoken, and had a penchant for saying how much she helped out the poor at her church. By those standards, you could say I had it set for something meaningful, if it wasn’t for our lunch date together.
Took her out to Richardson’s, an inexpensive but lovely 50’s holdout of a diner halfway across town, on the other side of the Southern Pacific5railroad tracks. It went well, all things considered for a date put on by my dummy eighteen-year-old self. Talked about all sorts of things, mostly things that happened in our old high school. I paid for both of our meals-burgers, french fries, as I recall. She didn't finish hers so she took it with her on-the-go.
We walk out the door, and on the corner, there’s a homeless guy, who’s asking folks for food. What few folks were out on that afternoon were ignoring him. He approaches us, his face stretched wide in the biggest toothless grin under that graying beard and says:
“Hey you two, I feel guilty for begging for food, but I just hopped off of a freight and I got nothing on me to buy lunch…I see there that you have a takeout bag from that restaurant.” I follow his eyes, and what do you know, they are looking at her takeout bag from Richardson’s.
“Deborah, why don’t you give it to the guy?” I said to her, “He looks like he needs it more, I’ll buy you something else later.”
“No, he’s a drug addict. He doesn’t deserve to eat,” she replied, and, before I could stop her, she tossed her to-go lunch into a nearby trash can. By toss, I mean she opened the bag and dropped the food directly in, and then mixed it into the nasty gunk and rotting juices that were in there with her bare hands until it was inedible.
For the record, the guy wasn’t on drugs. And he saw the whole thing, his eyes wide open, blazing with hurt, anguish at seeing that good food go to waste….and she was laughing! Laughing! For what, I don’t know.
I wouldn’t have wound up here, sitting in the dusty cab of a dead Mack in Sonoma if I didn’t feel what I felt and didn’t do what I did next. I saw red. There’s no other way to say it. The homeless guy was still standing there, frozen like a deer in the headlights, paralyzed…like I imagined the trucker’s daughter, Evelyn, on that fateful night when she felt her mother’s hate slash through her arm. Her laugh…cruel, full of malice like I imagined the truck driver’s ex. It wasn’t charming anymore. I felt sick. And angry. Sick and angry.
All I could say at that moment, when that dropped, was:
“I don’t like you anymore.”
I felt myself reach down into my wallet and take out a dollar bill. With shaking hands, I handed it to the guy. Next thing I know, I’m pounding the pavement, dashing home.
My Boy Scout backpack was still there, still loaded with all the goodies meant to go camping. I needed to run. Run somewhere far out of town, live out there on my own for a few days to reflect and come back as some sort of changed guy. I don’t know what I was even thinking during that time. Took my backpack, and decided to raid the pantry and kitchen for food. Grabbed Spam, vegetables, the can opener, dry noodles, and shoved it all in the pack. I heard a voice behind me. It was my father.
“What the hell are you doing, taking food out of the cupboards?!” he barked at me, “I thought you were on a date with Deborah!”
“Not anymor-”
“You’re an idiot, a goddamn idiot, for treating a woman like that—”
I busted out the back door, and my father took off after me. Past a few houses, I could hear his labored breathing grow fainter, and then fall away as I neared the end of the block, but even then, I still ran. I’m not ashamed to say it. I kept on running.
Eventually, I ran so far that I reached the railroad tracks, but when I stopped to rest, my father crashed through the brush behind me. He hadn’t given up! There was the blast of a diesel locomotive’s horn. An Espee6 freight going north was crawling through. Standing there, with my father bearing down on me, and with no time to run further to the highway and hope for someone to pick me up, I had no other choice. I had to get out on this freight train.
The first boxcar I saw had an open door. I decided to take it. Ran full tilt besides the open door, and tossed my pack inside. Then it was my turn. My hands closed around the lip of the boxcar door, and, in that rush of adrenaline, I pushed up with all my might, then rolled in. I’d made the catch! Just in time too, as the train accelerated, and I watched the figure of my father grow smaller and smaller, until he fell off the world completely. Needless to say, I never returned home that day, or in the years after.
Something ignited within my soul that day. I’m not entirely sure quite what. Maybe it was the excitement of my flight from my father or maybe it’s the sting that I still have of remembering my escape. Could I have fixed the relationship with my father…with Deborah? I can’t get you a definite answer for that. Probably not. Could I shut out those memories? I could, but why would I throw away perfectly good learning moments? Like that British Columbian trucker, I’ve got a burden to keep them alive. I have to keep them alive.
They are muddied by three straight decades of spending my time in different worlds, sure. The world of paper shuffling and coughing in an office. The world of passing, emotionless faces that I watched as I stood on the side of a highway. The world of the freight cars dominoing as the Espee local gets underway rolling out of town, and the sheer exhilaration I get wrenching away from the railroad policeman’s grasp and hopping on, just in time. But, as the saying goes, the beauty of the road is that it leaves you with nothing to lose and everything to give.
-
Not too long after I left Woodland forever, I encountered my first hobo jungle7. It was located in the timbers on the border between Washington and Idaho. You see, I was run off by a bull8 earlier that day from a crew change spot on the Burlington Northern9, and dusk was coming down fast. There was no way I was gonna spend the night next to the tracks waiting for a red-eye freight to come through, so I went about trying to find a place just far enough away from the tracks to bunk down but close enough to easily pack up and get running in the morning.
Fortunately I didn’t have to look long, as soon I spotted the faint flicker of a fire and low voices talking behind a grove of trees. As I started walking like the idiot I was, snapping dead branches and crunching over leaves, the voices stopped.
Imagine the incredulous looks on their faces when I finally crashed through the brush into the campfire light, wearing a leftover scout camp shirt and looking like I just wandered off the Wilderness Survival course! They must have been expecting a bull and had pulled out their weapons in anticipation—a wooden spear, pocket knives, switchblades, hell, one of them even had a collapsible hunting rifle aimed directly at my head! In all my years since, I’ve seen folks carry piddly little pocket pistols and sawed-off shotguns, even a carbine once, but it takes true dedication to carry a full-length rifle with you for protection!
“He’s just a kid,” one of them said. He was a weathered, weary old man with a battered straw hat. “Are you a hopper?”
To which I replied yes! And that was all it took. Weapons were slipped back into pockets, and the spear and rifle leaned back against a tree. Before I could protest, they ushered me down on a log around the fire and loaded a plate up with potato and sausage hash, all the full fixins, and told me to eat up. The taste of that hash would be forever seared into my memory—strands of potatoes, crisped by the skillet and the tender, flavorful fat that coated the sausage. To this day, it’s still my favorite dish to make.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked the old man in the straw hat after another guy slipped into our camp, bringing with him a loaf of sourdough bread he swiped from Spokane, “I got my own food!”
“Save it for your further travels, kid,” he replied, “A young guy like you need more calories than us old men….say, how did you end up here anyhow?”
It spilled out of me. I must have spent a whole hour, telling a group of high rollers, junkies, mental ward dumpees, codified vagabounds and probably a murderer or two, about the truck driver, his ex- and his daughter… Deborah and the bum…and last my father, expecting that they would laugh and call me stupid for doing the things I did. But they didn’t.
“My own pa was like yours, except worse,” one of them said, and spat a wad of tobacco into the fire, wiping the juice from his beard with a ragged sack coat sleeve. “He beat my sister and me senseless when he drank too much…that’s why while my sis loped off with some fling, becoming a maiden of the road, I, dug in too deep with my pa’s anger, enlisted the army to fight the Germans. Gave them hell, they returned the favor.” He proceeded to lift his right pant leg, revealing a big chunk missing out of his thigh.
“You know, kid,” he continued, “what’s funny about the road is that it leaves you with nothing to lose, everything to give. So I’d say screw that gal Deborah. Your father too, if it comes to that. They should have realized how good they had it before you dipped out of there.” He angrily trampled a spark that strayed from the fire and slunk off into the night to nods of approval from everyone staying by the fire. If his words were any indication of the future, the flame, the wanderlust in my heart became a blazing inferno, as fierce as the brush fire I witnessed while riding topside on a grain hopper10through rural Tennessee.
Through the last of the ‘80’s till about mid-2010, I traveled all over, on all modes of transportation. Mostly train hopping and hitchhiking-the interstates and mainlines ran deep into my blood. And to make money to keep doing it, I’ve taken up so many jobs, from spending months working on a fishing crew in Alaska to a half-day gig as a soup cook in New York City. During that time, I keep learning a universal truth, and it’s this:
Just like the people that abandoned this truck, folks are too quick to throw good things away. Instead of just a truck or food, like Deborah did, it’s the experiences, memories, people that we waste.
I once got a job, a good, well-paying temporary job, in a popular ice cream shop located in Downtown San Francisco. Name of the place slips me now. My co-workers, college kids, they despised the owner, Rob, I believe that is his name. They wrote him off as some cranky old geezer and put up morbid jokes on their MySpace pages about him, saying that they wished he could die sooner so they’d inherit his shop. They made those same remarks behind his back almost loud enough for him to hear. Rob was grumpy, sure, but he didn’t really deserve it, at least compared to the more horrible bosses I’ve worked with. The Nanuet liquidation warehouse manager comes to mind.
The real reason why Rob was so bitter to the world was because his wife had passed away a year before, leaving him alone to deal with it all. He knew about the shenanigans that went on, but was powerless to stop it. He actually asked me once to help him stop them in exchange for a raise, but since I was trying to line up another job working part-time for a seafood restaurant, I turned him down. I wish I took him up on his request.
One particular evening, he never showed up to the shop to check on us like he always did. Turned out that he had passed away from a heart attack in front of his apartment that night. It seemed like everyone had a change of heart—they were posting pathetic, blatant lies about how much they loved him as a person, the sacrifices that he made to start the business, all that stuff.
Just like what happened as I listened to the British Columbian truck driver’s story and saw Evelyn’s scar…like when I helplessly watched as Deborah taunted and wasted a good bag of food in front of a starving man, I felt sick to my stomach. Sick and angry. Sick at my coworkers for talking crap, wasting their chance to help someone out, angry at myself for blowing my own opportunity to help.
Needless to say, I did the only thing I could do—and that was run. Soon, I found myself stowing away on a ferry across The Bay to Alameda, and then watching out the boxcar door, the moonlight playing across the waters of the Carniquez Strait as I caught the Union Pacific freight bound for Sacramento. It’s those little things, the things we do and then say, that ticked me off, set my soul ablaze, ripped me from what little roots I had and swung me about to see the world all over again.
-
Now to the young folks reading this, is this what made you hit the road?
Figured it as such. It’s the same cycle that leads us to break out. Vanity and selfishness, magnified these days by your Instagram, Facebook, or something. People wasting their lives, getting their constant fix of euphoria, injected by a few pieces of code, making things such as money, looks and status seem like an excuse to hurt and cast others aside: the defenseless, the outsiders, even old friends. People are unable to see how just a little work would keep things all together. Like the clerk at Penderson and Sons who struck off this truck in 2003 because of ….a bad carburetor and expired tags? It doesn’t surprise me anymore. Maybe it’s a little different than I thought. Maybe to be given something, we have to lose something.
Ah, what else is there to say? Oh. Right.
I woke up this morning to find my throat locked up in gunk produced by the Doxorubicin that the doctor gave me for the mass in my thyroid. While I was hunched over the sink, hacking it out, I had an epiphany.
Look. I ain’t gonna lie to you, the life of a tramp is hard, way harder than what books and movies make it out to be. It takes guts, it really does, to hitch rides with total strangers and catch freight trains on the fly, and god forbid if it’s in bad weather!
Times have definitely changed since the day I left the road. Folks simply aren’t doing it much anymore, everyone’s driving now, and rarely stopping to pick us up at that.
The old timers? They’re dwindling, if not gone completely. Most of them caught the train westbound years ago or are slowly rocking in a chair in front of a hospice window, shedding a tear, remembering their old buddies go by.
Those hobo jungles, bustling with folks going every which way and that? Gone the way they came, just a patch of grass by the tracks now.
People have moved on.
I’ve moved on.
But that’s not to say I’m not proud of you, kid. You broke out to run free like I did, all those years ago with Deborah and my father. Much like a lot of the world nowadays, the truck’s a testament to what could have been, a long list of “if only.”
If only we put in the work to make it last.
If only we held it close to our hearts and appreciated the importance of the men that drove it, the people that they carried, the families that they kept afloat.
If only we could find the right person who would keep it running for us until the end of its days.
If only we knew to fix things before they fell forever into disrepair.
If only we could tell and keep the story, even if it were only to share with the stars.
If only we kept it on the road.
Image source: (1) (2)
The lights of the city,
reflect brilliance on their wine glasses,
the glows from the masses,
of high-rising corporate towers, topped with winking peaks of beacons,
rivers of head and tail lights,
merging into a unified iridescence,
playing among the delicate, slender stems,
as champagne bubbles race, twine, laugh, behind clicking, frosted crystals.
-
Ten years ago, he would pause work in his cubicle,
accept a black coffee,
pushed out by a assistant of a whirring silver and bronze automaton,
claws bound with steel manacles,
gather his notebook, stroll down the winding,
ammonia-permeated halls,
to the far porthole window.
-
From the barren, starving desert, thousands of mechanical, fixated eyes and spindled ligaments,
spiked forth steel beams,
foundations paved, concrete sloshing from chutes and churns that never ceased,
his creations, enshrined upon curled paper with what remained of his pen ink,
plans of grandeur, passed under a electric eye,
from which signals darted, flicked, through transmission towers and wires, arcing high,
jolting down the electrified skeletons of skyscrapers, tended to by those machines,
it was upon his own beasts of burden,
that he built the city.
-
The people came,
captivated by promises of wealth, gains, fortunes of incomprehensible magnitudes,
They were, however, swindled by the casinos, beaten by the thugs, what meager money and ambitions gone,
the city took, and the city left them,
slaving away in jumpsuits, under the harsh fluorescent glow of the service tunnels,
starving and destitute.
-
From his high perch in the Starlight Lounge,
furnished with the finest leather armchairs and tables made from delicately inlaid birch brown,
the fizz of the champagne flowed, soothed his lips,
cooled his throat, lingered on his tongue.
The automatons had long fallen dead, remains carted off beyond the far reaches of the city,
cast into the waste pits, picked by scavengers,
oozing motor oil, hydraulic fluid, trickling away, pooling into the rot.
-
Watching the lights of the city,
reflect, merge, and move, bright on his and Edwina's wine glass,
the glow of the masses,
of high rising corporate towers and rivers of head and tail lights,
bulbs, faces, screens, veins, merging into one, shimmering, fighting upwards against the night’s black,
he wonders, he smiles, he laughs,
because it wasn’t the machines who were at the mercy of his city,
instead of those mechanical, fixated eyes and spindled ligaments,
it was men, composed of flesh, bone, blood,
condemned to toil beneath its depths,
for all eternity.
One mile out of Soledad, we hopped off the hotshot freight to hike to the sea. Here the old branch line began, careening away from the Union Pacific mainline to the west, cleaving across the embrace of the strawberry fields in a gleaming line.
Two miles west of Soledad, the weeds began to peek, curling their tendrils around the weathered ballast, creeping upwards, craving the sunshine, up and over any rock in its way.
Three miles west of Soledad, the cracks crept into the culverts. Concrete and corrugated steel, surrendering to decades of constant rain and fertilizer winds, split, spilling its fill into the irrigation ditches below. When I curiously stuck my finger in one to somehow try to stop the crumbling dirt from escaping further, it slipped through my fingers, winding around my wrist, down, down, into the creek below.
Four miles west of Soledad, the branch line’s rail tops were no longer shiny, instead crusted over with rust, flaking away beneath our feet, staining our shoe soles with oxide.
Five miles west of Soledad, the weeds had fully broken through, swaying gently in the breeze through the spaces in between the ties.
Six miles west of Soledad, the culverts gave way completely, leaving small spans of bent rail, split ties and chunks of concrete, which we clambered easily over.
Seven miles west of Soledad, the grade began to drop. Trestles spanning these voids splintered, imploding on themselves, tumbling into the ravines, gullies, accumulating in a peak of rotten timber, out of which oozed black mold, festering through the cracks. We continued trudging, through thickets of brambles, golden grass, thorns and spikes clinging to our socks and shins, eager to seed elsewhere beyond their little pockets of growth.
Eight miles west of Soledad, the ties began to disintegrate. Spikes lay strewn all over, uprooted by the pressure, the shift of the earth brought upon by coastal rains and time. The rails, left without their shepherds, began to widen, waver, and close in. The hills around us had shifted, grown from soft, rounded tops to jagged, and irregular, composed of seasoned, yellowing stone.
Nine miles out of Soledad, the last of the rails dropped away as the ground heaved, shoved upwards, fighting the grade the steam shovels so painstakingly carved. Rock, rubble, tumbled in from the cuts. Silt stuck, ran, wove, with the oxide, leaving stippled footsteps of crimson in our wake. Something else was in the air, too. The scent of aerosolized salt, carried on by the wind, swept inwards, permeating our nostrils, tousling our hair-telltale signs of the Pacific.
Ten miles out of Soledad, we rounded a corner. The skies—rolling gray, touched down from the heavens with its wisps to meet the blue. There we stood, at the end of the line, watching the waves break, caress, retreat from the softened hues of the coves below.
Ten miles from Soledad, we shucked our clothes.
Ten miles from Soledad, we kissed the sea.
Image source: (1)
From Soledad To The Sea was written up based on memories spurred from hiking the former right-of-way of an abandoned Southern Pacific branch line along the Californian coast.
1908
From the ornate lion’s head came a steady trickle of cold spring water feeding the crescent shaped pool of the ancient Roman bathhouse, whose high open windows let in the nourishing warmth and light of the Sicilian day, and outside murmurs of local women gathering to fill their pots around the well.
She had shucked free of her clothes, the stifling linen regimen of dresses and petticoats, whose layers were much more suited for the grim chill of Normandy than the balmy springs of Southern Italy. As she tested the waters, she mused to herself that such a cold bath would relieve her of the heat.
Just like the ancient Romans she had taken a turn in the hot spring already and would have thoroughly enjoyed it too, if it weren’t for the haze that clouded her brain, obscuring her thoughts with the sensations of sheer warmth and ease that the hot water gave.
Here, it was different. It was colder than she had expected—no matter. With a tentative step, her right foot entered the water, sending ripples radiating outwards, towards the tiled wall and the lion’s head fountain. The cold, the briskness of the water, smelling of pure mineral with a bit of rosemary infused, jolted her system wide awake. She felt her legs slightly buckle in response to the shock, but pursed her lips to steel herself. To tremble and flop face first into these springs would be quite unladylike and a discomforting embarrassment to the attendants who were in the eaves, awaiting at her every beck and call.
She moved further into the pool, feeling her foot step over the flowered green tiles that padded the floor. The water was almost up to her thighs now, but the pool being of a uniform shallow depth, she wouldn’t have to swim—swimming remained one of the rare pastimes that he had instilled in her.
Flicking her eyes from the marble lion, up to the frescos on the ceiling high above, she finally understood why the greats of the day built this place and made it their point of congregation. Here people would gather, under those great mosaics and frescoes of the Roman gods and figures, to philosophize about war, the human condition, democracy, love, drawing on the legendary figures that came before them: Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Caesar. She would like to think so for herself, those same ponderings that they once had, but nothing particular came to mind besides the vivifying chill of the water.
At last, she crossed the pool to stand before the stone lion, its white, lifeless eyes staring back at her, its jaw hanging just a bit open as if it were taking in the figure of a hunter, somewhere out in the plains of the strange land just south of the Mediterranean, before the figure would pull the trigger and the beast was slain.
She held out her fingers to the stream of water that bled forth, feeling it splash over her uncalloused hands, droplets running down her wrist, with stray bits of spray splashing onto her breast, sending little pinpoints and jolts down through the skin, lingering and spreading over her as she gradually moved herself into the shower.
Looking up now, through loose strands of her mussed auburn hair, shutting and reopening her eyes wide at the prominent snout of the lion, she didn’t quite see a beast anymore. In fact, behind the wild mane, sculpted in a ring and the long beard that came down to a V was her memory of Edward. Previously, those memories had been dulled by the excitement, the sights to see on the other side of the Atlantic, obscured by the menagerie of dinner parties, steamer trunks and the long train rides with her friends—the grand tour around Europe.
-
The night before, she had been struck by a dream involving Edward. She hadn’t thought of him for so long—four years earlier they had parted due to her father's return to the United States. He went off to fight in the war in Avalon and came home a different man, who had changed from a soft-spoken individual preferring to keep to himself in the company of books to a cold, distant shell. Soon after she learned, through correspondence from a close friend, that he had hurled himself off a hotel rooftop in Paris.
Her other friends had thought it strange that she would fall in love with a soldier, one that guarded a lovely countryside chateau of the French no less. As the others played croquet on the carefully manicured lawn before her, she preferred to stay in the gazebo to finish the last of the tea. It was a strange thing to be considered high society—for in the background, soldiers were posted, rifles slung over their backs, kepis kept upright, gleaming sabers at their side. They marched with a carefully choreographed precision, high kicks at each turn, a salute to the steady stream of royalty and military officers that came in the side, and to each other.
She was about to put down her empty china teacup when a man brushed the back of her chair. By instinct she turned to look. He had gone through the gazebo in transit to his next post at the gate, and bore a lean yet strong stature, with his dark mustache—in those days it was fashionable for soldiers to do so. The softness in his face was framed by darker black hair.
“My apologies,” he spoke with a faint smile. His complexion was soft, yet slightly weathered, with a distinctive scar on his left cheek, which she later came to learn was given from an old acquaintance over a ballerina. He turned away, boots thumping over the gazebo’s polished teak floor as he headed for the exit to the other side and the path that led to his next post, the Lebel gently beating against his back.
She had long resisted the idea of love at first sight—thought the concept was dead the moment that she stepped out of the realm of fiction. Countless times she had met various suitors put forward by her father, the Ambassador Maythorne, and they never worked out. All turned out to be vain men—full of themselves, shunning books and the philosophies that their own fathers tried to instill in them, sneering upon the world and always, each in his turn, waving off her proposals of deeper talk in favor of getting in bed, to the point where she would flee down the steps of mansions and grand ballrooms, half-stumbling on her pointe shoes to get away from them, resigning herself to remain alone and avoid bringing herself further trouble.
He seemed different, however, she thought. With the stature and composure of a military man, strengthened by hard marches over mountains and plunges, rifles clacking into woods, he wouldn’t be the type of man to turn to drink to ease his troubles away. In fact, she would come to learn later that he did, indeed, refrain from smoking and drinking as well. It blockaded his mind, he said, from proper thought.
“Can you please join me, so we could talk awhile?” she had called after him.
“Perhaps after my rounds are over,” he replied, curiously cocking his head up in surprise at her American vernacular accent, and then he said, “the barracks are where I would be.”
-
And so began a love unlike any other she had experienced before. He was apprehensive at first. He had never expected her to follow through after the approach, but several days of short small talk before his rounds and passionate, drawn out nights together, he began to open up, growing more talkative about his life, his wishes.
“I’d like to pose a question, if I may. What is love, Miss Maythorne?” he mused as they lay upon her bed, on one of those nights, staring up at the inlaid plaster ceiling of the chateau. The moonlight filtered in through the porthole window above the dresser.
“What is love?” she murmured, feeling his chest, pressing up to her back, slowly rising and falling with every breath. “It’s just that: love. Endowed by a muse high above, I suppose.”
“I’ve read…I’ve read somewhere,” he curled up tighter around her, “I’ve read somewhere once that it is the synapses of a mind that fire off and draw emotions. But let’s say, someday…someday if the mind falls silent, does that mean that such love, such passion, is gone?”
“Taken by the throes of death, old age, or…by another man?”
He was silent for a long moment, and when she finally turned herself over to face him, she found he had been lost in thought.
“What is it, Edward?”
He shook his head, smiling at the ceiling, before turning to gaze at her.
“What you said,'' he whispered, “as a soldier…that poses another set of intriguing questions, Miss Maythorne.” He gave her a peck on the cheek before falling asleep.
In the morning she awoke to him buttoning up his tunic in front of the mirror. The Lebel rifle had been leaned up against her dresser, next to boots laced and ready. When he caught her reflection, rousing from her sleep, he stepped about to face her, kepi cap over his heart, saying:
“The barracks are where I would be.”
-
And so she went, recounting in the haze of so many past memories, slipping out of her bedroom that night, light on her feet, she was younger then, running past the guest room that hosted her father, Senator Maythorne, treading light, feeling her toes spring over the soft grass of the lawn, looking both ways around the grounds of that royal French chateau, eyes scanning the darkness and glimmer of the shapes on the garden wall, gazebo, fountains, for the night watchman’s lantern, should he come around and inquire why a guest was sneaking out.
The barracks lay at the far end of the grounds and appeared illuminated. There was Edward, sitting down on a crate outside, rifle disassembled. With a grunt, he extracted a glimmer of brass from the chamber before looking up at her, dressed in a nightgown, slightly shivering in the night. The rifle stock and bolt were instinctively put down, and he reached for the clasp of his night cloak.
“I never expected that you would come out here,” he said as he draped the dark blue cloak around her and affixed it with the clasp, stamped in ivory with the cameo of a lion. “Heavens forbid, dear, that you even remembered me.”
Those words stopped her dead in her tracks, and as she turned her head to stare into his chestnut eyes that she found sharp and alert. Even in the darkness, she could have sworn that something was at work behind them.
“What happened?” she finally said, “I don’t remember you…this distant.”
He incredulously shook his head, adjusting his kepi cap, which she noticed had been situated jauntily. A slight breeze blew through the empty chateau, flapping the cloak that she now wore. The crickets were silenced.
“I have always been like that, can’t you remember?” he whispered and smiled, a smile that she thought seemed a little bit overdone. “Perhaps it was the fog of years gone by.”
“We were only about twenty-one when we first locked eyes.”
“Oh, yes, I remember now.” He circled her, and she couldn’t help but feel like a zebra, defenseless against the lion. His walk, sharpened by military bearings and movements, previously fluid, now resembled more of a drunken lurch, jerky, unrefined, and she thought to herself how strange it must be, for a military man as he was, who did not drink, to walk like that! From the fathoms of her mind came back even more memories.
-
She found out he loved to swim—the lake, a quarter’s day’s walk or an hour's carriage ride away, was his favorite spot on the rare days he was fully relieved of duty. He took her out there once, under the guise of a birdwatching trip. The day had been quite chilly when they started out on the walk, but eventually warmed up to a balmy heat.
“I joined the military to see faraway lands,” he said as they walked along the dusty country road. A satchel swung by his side along with the Lebel–orders had come for soldiers to carry it with them beyond the chateau, for the tremors of war had slowly but surely been showing, “I never could have known, Miss Maythorne, that I would be guarding a chateau not too far from the town where I had been raised.”
“It must have been a dull life before I saw you, then.” She let out a small laugh.
“Oh, that’s for certain. Truth be told, Miss Maythorne, I feel more at ease in your company than my guard friends. It was amusing before, sure, to hear them talking about their own loves, who are grounded in cities and towns a ways away from the chateau. Such profound points were made about the subject while they drank, smoked and played cards, reading letters aloud. But…well, I’m afraid that ever since the telegrams have come, they have turned the drink, tobacco, and cards into their new loves.”
“What for, Edward?”
“Have you heard the news? Arguments with Avalon over lines on the map, arbitrary meridians spanning mountains and fields that haven’t been touched in a century or more. They say it’s going to lead to war, but they’ve been saying that for so long that if it even happened, I would be back at the chateau within a couple months or so.”
The lake was a reflective canvas of green and blue hues against the mountains which rose beyond the water pines, beyond which lay Avalon. They settled down in a secluded spot on a small sandbar on the far side, well away from the boathouses and bustling waterside taverns.
They laid on the sandy banks in their swimsuits, in ease after a swim and light lunch, watching the distant wisps of steam launches and pleasure cruises prowling the lake. Hearing the far off warbles of a loon, she couldn’t hold the question back.
“What’s war like for you?”
“War?”
He raised his eyes from the little cairn that he was building with pebbles.
“War.”
“I must admit that I have never seen battle before, Miss Maythorne. They have gotten me through the motions of it, sure.” He squeezed her hand. “To treat my rifle as a…a necessary extension of myself, to march in a column, to signal from the mountaintop with a flag as a semaphore to the flying machines and heavens above, I imagine these things will come into play should we go to war with Avalon.”
“Shouldn’t…I wish I had better words to phrase this, but shouldn’t you be more worried about the storm clouds brewing?”
“We fought them before, in the days when knights and noblewomen still roamed the earth. They brought with them six thousand strong, and when we pushed them back over the mountains they were reduced to only one thousand. Our side departed with two thousand, and returned with roughly a thousand and a half, victorious.”
“But we never returned with half, didn’t we?”
“Half. Half is a trivial sum,” he quickly said. “If we had won with minimal casualties before, I would imagine that we could do the same now. They say that the Avalonian military is horribly outdated, still using the old line muskets and square formations, centuries old. What a little lovely war that’ll be on their hands, to put them into their place!
“And,” he smiled and leaned in, “how lovely, it is, Miss Maythorne, to have you as my love!”
Before she could add other thoughts on her mind, their lips met halfway and she decided to not push it. The Lebel sat a few yards behind them, leaned against a tree, breech open, the glimmer of a brass cartridge peeking out from the shadow of the chamber.
-
“It’s quite certain, Miss Maythorne,” he continued, “that I shall be dragged straight into the depths of two battles, one that we shall win and return victorious, and the other I shall never return from. I know that over the course of nights, days, we lay together, talking about all manners of things: law, order, the natures of war…even love, a love that is quickly lost in the fields. I shall tell you, now, that in war, there is no such thing as love, law, emotion…my men’s brutality…my brutality, reigns supreme over anything else. All left of their lives and all their preparations, will be bodies on the ground, twisted, broken, torn. Ligaments, tendons, muscles, will be just parts reduced to mere strips, picked over by the buzzards and left to decay.”
She stiffened.
“You’re not the real Edward, are you?” she felt her voice grow louder. “We only separated because my father had to be recalled, and not because of the war…so, for me it was back to America, back to the mansion on Telegraph Hill…rest assured, I still thought of you.”
He let out a sneer.
“Who said I was Edward…your version of Edward?”
His face transformed from that of a young man into something otherworldly, mustache and short hair growing longer, tendrils of his mustache morphing into a beard, from a brown to a gray, stopping in a V. His hair, likewise, grew into lengthy, wild curls, covering his entire forehead and sprouted out until they covered his ears. His hands clasped, closed in on themselves, and splayed open, shaking.
Her eyes glanced down at the lion clasp of the cloak, and then back up to face him, she took an involuntary step back.
“When we touched land behind those high mountains, through that endless parade of supply wagons and gun carriages, in a matter of days, we advanced into battle. I remember bashing my rifle stock against the head of an Avalonian. That sickening crunch when that young man fell, his shako adorned with the plumage of peacock feathers dropping into the mud, trampled by boots, hooves…next thing, while spreading kerosene to burn down a barn… I remembered. I remember lying in bed with you in that chateau…posing that question about love…whether it was taken by Death itself or by other men. The notion reminds me of the old philosophers. They speak to each other in vain in those baths about the foundations of government on which the blood of men mix, pool…”
Her eyes settled on the Lebel rifle, lying on the crate next to the barracks. In its current disassembled state and distance, she wouldn’t have time to pick it up, figure out how to feed a cartridge into the chamber, raise it and pull the trigger.
He continued circling around her, murmuring other things, unintelligible things, only a matter of time before he would pounce upon her, slam her down upon the grass in a flurry both of the joy and the yearning to hide a broken man, haunted by the cries of dying men and the final pulse of humanity in the midst of those fields, trying to show her that he, indeed, still had the tune, the music of old inside him when in fact the record had been smashed, smashed to pieces long ago.
Edward’s old military cloak rustled as she sprinted for the disassembled Lebel, and as she glanced behind her, the figure, that was her first and only true love, was snarling and charging her.
She felt her hands close around the worn, chipped rifle stock, and thought it was strange that it had been impeccable before they met. For a fleeting moment, she could have sworn there was a stain, a far darker crimson mixed into it than the wood grain could ever show. She raised it, ready to brain him as he was nearly upon her.
The cloak billowed out behind her as she slammed the wooden stock into his head. He was thrown back and collapsed to the ground. Tossing aside the rifle stock, she bent over his still body, and with a finger traced the outlines of the weathered face and beard, over the mouth, where a mustache used to be before the war. She felt something else coating her hands now, his blood, running from his mouth like a slain lion, sticky, congealing, real.
-
Before she went down to the baths that morning, she had lain on her bed, momentarily paralyzed by those exact thoughts….dreamlike qualities beyond the likes of watercolor paintings, confounded by the twisting, worming terror ebbing into her flesh.
But as the new day began, and maids, attendants, her other traveling companions, high society acquaintances, from Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the like came in and out, busying her with conversation about the day, about their day trip down to Rome which she turned down for what was meant to be a lovely soak and dip in the old Roman baths.
The apprehensive feelings faded, as fleeting as they came to her, standing in the cold pool, once used by folk of old who witnessed those great philosophers speak for perhaps the final time before throwing on their garments and sweeping back into the bustling streets of time and obscurity.
Staring up through the water that showered her head, now acclimatized to the chill, at the blank, dull eyes of the lion, she instinctively knew too, that time, cascading over her, would wash her away as Edward had been. It was a terrifying feeling, but one that surprisingly comforted her.
She, too, would one day be gone from the earth as the soldiers, Edward, the men that once congregated here would go, in a casket, which would one day turn, implode, and become one with the soil again. It was those thoughts of mortality, knowing the liminality of love…emotion, the brutality of the scavengers, other men, that awaited to spring beyond death, that drove all lives ever onward.
Those musings ceased when she drew out from the cold stream of water, and gently padded back towards the lip of the pool, feeling the water’s motions ripple out and in with each swish of her legs.
Climbing out of the pool, she reached for a cotton towel to dry the last of the brisk water off of her body, casting a final eye up to the frescos of dead men high above, before snapping a finger for the attendants to bring over her corset and petticoats.
He was paralyzed in his bed not by fear, but of a nightmare that very well could have been reality, and in doing so he had made it jump the expanse into truth.
Pins and needles shot up both of his arms and legs, holding them down to the sheets, unable to move. So was the core in his stomach, pitching and ebbing, worming inside his flesh. He knew the feelings would subside as soon as he moved the blanket off of him and got out of bed, but for far too long, he had ignored those conflicting sensations.
Get out and go.
The sounds of gray rain pinging on the gutter outside and the morning coastal mist obscuring the hills beyond the far bay window told him otherwise. No. He still had the time today. He could listen. He could remember.
The last thing that he could recall before waking into his current state was the green tiled linoleum of his old high school, its waxed surface reflecting the harsh fluorescent lights overhead, with the scent of lavender bleach permeating his nostrils. It was senior year—he can remember that much. Everything before then was like an overexposed film-only abstract snippets of what school was like, anyhow.
He was walking with a short gait, his right arm swinging as he went, one hand clenching the now-useless Economics paper, the other clasping the single backpack strap slung over his shoulder.
What was placed in his head could be described more like a thick fog. Of course there were other concerns, like the snack when he got home, but the majority of his concerns were nothing except the tail ends of the past. They swirled around in his consciousness, taunting him with promises of closure and truth, and when he drew near, trying to understand, they flittered out from his grasp and plunged into the fog, those foothills, far enough away from the valley where he could never track and chase them down, even if he jumped on the trail.
If he ever found the trail.
He could remember the reflection of his face on a trophy cabinet as he passed. The sunken crescents under his lost and loveless brown eyes stood in stark contrast with the gleaming brass and cool black marble of the academic trophies. Accomplishments seemed so easy when all you have to remember them by was a shining monolith.
It was then that he felt the fever overcome him, but he forced himself to keep going, feeling his knees go weak. The two heavy doors, inlaid with two large panes of rectangular safety glass, loomed large in his field of vision. Beyond the wire mesh in those windows, he could see the golden coastal hills under a clear blue sky.
Just a few more steps, and he could shed that backpack, throw it off, and run. Unlike the tails of those elusive thoughts, which only hung about in a transitory state, beckoning him to follow through when he had other plans, the doors, the golden hills, the sky, and the Pacific that he knew that lay beyond were tangible. This was something that he could reach out and touch for himself, to make his own and not leave behind guilt.
He felt himself let go, in his left hand, that Economics paper, and on his right, the backpack. It thudded to the floor, its main compartment bursting open, spilling across that sterile green linoleum, his textbooks, pencils, homework and stray bits of senior year.
He reached out towards the doorknob. For the first time, the wire mesh inlaid within the safety glass, weaving in and out of one another, reminded him of bars in a cage.
The fever had intensified now, and instead of the heated flush he had felt coming on back at the trophy case, it had become an all-encompassing chill. It crept out from his chest to his body, to his cheeks where he felt it cold, down to his legs. Every muscle in his body started to twitch in unison, fighting to keep him from falling numb. It was a strange sensation—the reversal of polarity in a body.
His palm grazed the brushed metal knob, but it never closed around it. His knees, still locked in the spasms from the chills, buckled, giving way. The wooden doors, the hills, the fair skies, the Pacific that lay beyond flicked up in a blur, out of his field of vision, just like those little revelations within his mind.
He came to rest upon his laurel of waste.
“Michael! Are you alright?” Black horn-rimmed glasses, stubble, a round, vivid face like that of a new teacher and young father peered over him. He had loosened his necktie, after an exhausting day, it was well deserved, “what’s wrong?”
“Mom, I don’t feel good today. I don’t wanna go to school,” he replied, staring up at the flickering fluorescent lights, and let out what felt like a lopsided smile.
-
-
A steaming cup of Arabica Black was enough to kill the turnover in his stomach.
He sipped a little bit more for good measure as he cradled the landline receiver on his shoulder, listening to the beeps and cackles of the switchboards routing the call to the office in Santa Rosa.
“Yeah, Rob…don’t feel too good. I’m not coming into the office today….alright, I’ll work more on those take-home data control disks and bring them back in tomorrow.”
He hung up the receiver and let out a slow sigh, changing a moment to look out the open kitchen window framing the view of the barbed wire fence that hemmed his own property to the hills beyond, whose crests were still obscured by the coastal mist.
Two years out of college, staring at a computer terminal, inserting floppy disks, typing out the same strings of code to create, copy and erase data had netted him this view from a stately Victorian nestled in wine country - just southeast of Santa Rosa. And yet, staring at it all, he realized that this solitude and ease hadn’t helped him catch those moments of true rest, and neither did it ever satisfy the craving for running after those tangents that darted in and out of his mind, by racing for those hills.
His eyes fell on the stack of floppy disks sitting on the kitchen table, picking one of them up, reading the big block of text that said IBM Format. Data was cold. They had no thoughts, no rest either. They were only a string of ones, zeros that controlled everything from video games to nuclear missiles. All that work had given him this….to work with machines that were oblivious, naïve to the struggles of the people that wrangled with them.
And, he registered, looking up from the floppy to gaze upon those hills, no longer blockaded by the double oak doors, safety glass, long hallways, if only he were to break that deadlock…
What next came to him was a whirl. He felt himself stumble into the bathroom and turn on the tap, feeling the crisp water splash over his hands, staring in the mirror. The pair of eyes that glared back at him were alert, aware….calculating, flitting from one corner to another.
He shook his head at the figure in the mirror as he threw on a poncho over his sweater, and grabbed the keys to the truck from the pegboard. As he stepped into the rain, he could smell the musk that the rain was releasing from the rich, fertilized vineyard soil.
His hands trembled as he unlocked the driver’s side door to the cream ‘75 International Harvester pickup. He slid behind the steering wheel, inserted the key, and turned it on. The engine sputtered and died the first time. He tried again, with similar results. Then, on the third, the weary former farm truck’s engine caught, the sharp hacking turning into a steady drone as it warmed up.
Shifting into first gear, he eased the International down the driveway and the country road, coming to the T-shaped intersection that he had used so many times going to work. A battered highway sign stood as a lone sentinel, its arms listing loose on its metal bindings in the wind.
To the right, Santa Rosa. To the left, the Coast.
He let go of the brake and shifted into gear.
Click, click, click, click….clack. He thumbed off the signal switch as he finished turning the truck to the left. The rain had intensified now, and the International’s frayed stubs of wiper blades struggled to clear away raindrops that swept across the windshield, but it didn't matter anymore.
“Good morning, Sonoma County! It’s eight-fifteen, March twenty fifth, two thousand and three-”
The International’s speedometer climbed to ten, fifteen, twenty-five, then thirty, against the gnashing of the gears as the road rose in grade, and after what seemed like a endless parade of curves, switchbacks, rolling over the bleached gray asphalt, vitrified by the rain, he crested the topmost hill, and there before him, was the Pacific– gray and wide with many sheltering coves, jagged cliffs and continual surf.
The truck seemed to fly faster and faster downhill, as if he was gliding weightless, unburdened and free from the doors and his old high school. When he finally slammed on the brakes, he found himself in an empty parking lot on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
A small path cut to the right which led down to a cove, surrounded on all three sides by high cliffs. The rocky gravel dwindled down into fine sand, matted by the rain, leaving boot impressions in his wake as he made his way down.
Standing on the beach, he basked in the chill, taking in the briny air from the surf. Violent in its patterns, it broke over the rocks at the shallow mouth of the cove, spray and froth sent high into the air, suspending for a couple seconds before falling back into those turbulent waters, rejoining as one in the span of seawater that stretched from California to China.
And, he realized, looking at the spectacle, that his own ideas were, in the grand scheme of things, only a drop against the fluid mass that was the ever-turning world. There was no sense catching one specific droplet of water flying through the air when he could just walk to the edge and cup his hands for a hundred.
Try.
To catch those wisps meant running after them into the hills, to the coast, and perhaps then for a few, to dive in and follow. It would mean battling the currents that threatened to sweep him up, out, around, slamming him, transfixed by the prospect, into the roiling sheets, before surfacing again, to gaze at the gray skies. To even jump on the trail meant that one would have nothing but the sheer desire to see what lay yonder. To go beyond those hills, to run down the slope and dive headfirst, to brave the sea in search of its nest, required even more. And god forbid the looks that folks would give you as you came back!
Try-
Tomorrow he would be heading back to those linoleum hallways, sterile, blank, emotionless, except now accented by the neverending cycle of broad fingers stroking over keyboards, the shuffling of papers, the mechanical clicking of floppy disk drives creating, changing, destroying, spitting, infinite strings of-
Try to rest.
He bent down to scoop up a handful of beach sand, feeling the grains run through and escape the grasp of his fingers before plunging into the foam that swept in with the tide.
Thanks for LAN 2D for the critique.
Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed was a three-month long piece in the making. I wrote this way back in January when I was going through some personal health issues that had been sapping away at my energy for school. The disorientation and the yearning to leave were major factors that became the impetus for the piece. It's ready to stretch it's wings and fly, bound for the hills beyond.
A Dance Between Flesh and Steel
Written by lzhoudidion
This is the companion piece to Ramblings of a Retired Tramp. The timeframe of the narration in A Dance Between Flesh and Steel takes place before Ramblings Of A Retired Tramp, while the tramp was still young and on the road.
-
“Have you ever seen the ethereal sight
of burning, silvered moonlight,
tapering the shapes of men,
carrying valises,
sacks,
pails,
waiting, wondering, watching,
the heels of heavenly beams,
glinting upon the rails?”
-
Silvered brown smoke curled up from the locomotive into the golden late afternoon sunlight of the grand hall high above as the passenger train eased into the station. This one she wouldn’t take.
The doors opened.
Out came patrons, chattering excitedly amongst themselves while worming, gliding, swirling around her, padding to the stacks and shelves that lay beyond the platform, passing through a turnstile manned by an indifferent Docent, its eyes fixated on a heavy golden tome, darting up periodically to survey the thinning crowd.
A Wright usually manned the turnstiles, but it seemed like this one had called in sick. No matter. They couldn’t have possibly cared less about the female human in a dress standing on the track. But they will. They will soon. This docent didn’t seem to pay attention to her, but it definitely would if it knew what she was going to do when the next train rolled through.
She felt herself try to smooth out the wrinkles in the dress with the back of her hand for perhaps the eighth time today. It was a nervous habit-she was far out of her element, and she didn’t like it.
The soft yarak cotton, toted to be comfortable and light, fashioned for the summer heat of Old Corinthia, felt stifling, heavy, like linen curtains, the boots encasing her feet, restricting, seeming to squeeze and sap away the muscles that sent them forwards.
The only piece of comfort that the outfit gave her was the bull’s old revolver, obscured by the dress belt. She patted it as she shifted herself to gaze back at the patrons roaming the stacks beyond the station, feeling the cool sensation of the metal of the frame press against her skin.
-
The stench of sweat and tobacco mingled with the musty smell of stacks of long-forgotten train orders and stale instant coffee.
File cabinets had been pushed back against the walls. An old desk lamp had been moved into position, its glow barely making up for the dim recessed lights in the peeling drop ceiling overhead. The coffee-maker under the far vinyl window covered with rusted security bars was half dismantled, a placard propped up beside it, announcing, in hastily scrawled red ink:
PARTS MISSING. WILL RETURN TOMORROW.
The bull grunted and leaned forward across the flimsy folding table, close enough that she could smell the stench of the cheap cigarette he had smoked emanating out of his breath.
“Why do you hop trains?” he slowly asked her. His pudgy, yet weathered face glistened as he spoke.
“I…I don’t know,” she mumbled.
“I said: why do you hop trains?”
She wrenched her eyes away from his hungry gaze and cast them down on the gauze wrapping covering the scratches on both of her arms.
“Hey! Stop picking at that shit.” Before she could react, a meaty hand shot out and seized her chin. The bull’s eyes leveled with hers.
“Look…at me. There must be a reason why you do it, alright? The kids that came before you said that they ‘do it for the hell of it’, whatever that crap means.”
Her gaze wasn’t fixated on him, but rather the dusk skies in the barred window beyond. The faint sound of a horn and amber light pulsated in the distance. Power units. An outbound freight.
“Yeah…I just do it for…the hell of it, I guess.”
He flushed.
“The hell of it? The hell of it?! Oh…believe me, I’ve dealt with my fair share of train hoppers in my career on this goddamn railroad..and let me tell you something. There’s no such thing as someone doing it for ‘the hell of it’. Some people are escaped convicts who somehow had a buddy bail them out of jail. Others, well..they jumped outta mental wards and somehow outfoxed the city cops on their way out.” He shook his head and continued.
“You’re twenty-three. You got your whole life ahead of you. That’s what I don’t get…the kids, they’re stupid, to put it bluntly, you…you should have known better. Someone like you should be going to college, getting a boyfriend…”
He kept on rambling, spewing straight shit about a path that everyone had been herded down, like the pigs in the old stockyards awaiting the slaughterhouse, rooting through bins of sweet feed and guzzling down scraps thrown inside, watching, with glazed eyes, the prizes, the ones covered with blankets, little medals from the county fair, tags scrawled on flank that meant nothing when they were ushered inside by the foreman.
It was obvious which side his bread was buttered on.
Instead of being shoved into a pen with the others, she had walked off.
Walked off long ago.
-
She couldn’t exactly place when and how the rails drew her in. All that mattered in the beginning was that she was lying in the dew-studded grass by the tracks, pack by her side when a hand reached down and shook her shoulder.
“Wake up,” a hoarse voice said, “it's coming.”
“What’s coming?” she murmured, “what’s coming?”
“The train. The freight. Our ride.”
Turning over revealed a battered old man standing over her. His long, graying beard lilted in the breeze. As she stood up, she noticed that a foot or so away, the other hoppers were getting ready, tying shoelaces and checking backpack straps.
A boy bursted out from the treeline.
“Guys, it’s coming! It’s coming!” he shouted, “are you coming? Are you coming?”
The locomotives shot around the corner, the high-beam headlight of the lead power unit piercing through the morning mist.
She stood, feeling the familiar shape of her father’s old satchel by her side, and watched the spectacle go by, the masses of freight cars behind, rolling fast, screaming, clashing against each other.
The eyes of the girl beside her had changed. Instead of the tired gaze that she had shot her when they laid down to rest, they seemed to glimmer, vitrify, as the cars rolled past.
“There!” a kid’s finger shot out, tracking a rustbucket of a Illinois Central Gulf hopper, its sides blanched with cement and grain dust, “make a run for it!”
The others surged forward. She followed suit.
Valises, knapsacks, plastic bags, filled with what worldly possessions they had for the road: clothes, sometimes several sizes too big, candy bars, personal and pornographic pictures, playing cards and cheap cigarettes, were flung aboard. Limbs dangled perilously close to churning steel wheels as they jumped, holding on tight to the freight car’s end ladders.
One by one they hoisted themselves up onto the sloping, sheltered rear platform, until it was just her and the freight.
Her satchel sailed into the outstretched arms of a kid just as seven sets of eyes turned back to watch.
To watch the greenhorn make her first catch.
“Stop dragging your feet!” the middle aged man perched on the rear running board shouted down at her, “you’re gonna get killed if you keep doing that!”
She felt one of her hands close around a grab iron, but was wrenched away when one of her boots stumbled over a pothole in the ballast, narrowly tumbling into the path of the thundering wheels, but somehow found the strength to keep going.
“My stuff is on there!” she gasped up to the man as she ran, finding herself gaining lost ground, “if I don’t make it, throw it overboard!”
He smiled and shook his head.
“No! What’s the fun in it if there’s nothing to lose?!” The sound of a massive blast of air that coursed down the length of the train. The engineer had released the last of the air brakes. She gritted her teeth and put on a burst of speed.
Her hand closed around the lowest grab iron. Her feet, however, had trouble finding footing. The soles of her boots skipped over the ballast as she felt herself falter, torn between the motion of the train and the struggle of her tiring legs.
“How-”
“Jump! If you don’t, you’ll be left behind!” the man spat back.
“But-”
“Just jump!”
She did what she was told.
She jumped.
Her boots left the ground.
There was no resistance.
She did not fight back.
She came to rest on the floor of the hopper car’s porch, covered in grain and cement dust. Her fellow hoppers beat each other’s backs and whooped over the celebration of another clean catch.
Soon she found herself craning her head to gaze at the soaring high stippled gray and beige palisades in the distance as the rising Montana sun swept its rays down from the sky in the east. The train accelerated and the rails became nothing more than twin parallel streaks of rust and gleaming iron gliding underneath their feet.
-
What she worn in the past, a plaid dad’s shirt a size too big for her, taken out of the dumpster of the Salvation Army and given a quick wash in the creek, draped over an old housewife’s blouse with the god-awful paisley print, and jeans that have had everything thrown at it yet hadn’t managed to rip, wouldn’t work here. It necessitated a trip to Old Corinthia, to the bustling market, under the sun sails stretched between sandstone arches.
She had watched the masses of folk move under the dingy tailor’s window. Even though the noon rush had long subsided, crowds still gathered in little pockets, clustering around traders, hawking, in sharp trills, cheap jewels, tarnished silverware, splintered furniture, and broken matchlocks displayed upon trunks and handcarts. Street kids darted in and out between the flocks, clutching coins they lifted from unwary patrons.
The rat-faced tailor cleared his throat.
“Turn to the right if you may,” he said, adjusting his spectacles. She turned to face herself in the mirror.
“Buttermilk yarak cotton. Empire waist, fit for a quiet afternoon at the Imperial gardens,” he continued, nodding at her reflection in the mirror. She continued staring dead ahead, waiting for him to finish, feeling the cool cloth gently swish, the small folds rippling, taking on a life of its own, “accompanied by a bronze velvet belt. Your revolver is…fastened on, with a folding clasp…” she felt the belt gently cinch tight. The revolver pressed against her skin. “Just like so.”
He took a step back. In the reflection, she watched as the tailor dabbled away the perspiration from his graying beard and forehead with a handkerchief.
“What are your thoughts, miss?”
She studied the figure in the mirror for the final time. Gone were the traces of thousands upon thousands of miles racked up in a faraway world—grimy skin, matted hair, strands blown wayward by the wind while clinging to a rushing Florida East Coast hopper, ballast cinders and rust flakes forced up under her nails, and bruises, scratches, running the entire length of her arm from diving into the thorns just beyond the treeline, as the bulls closed in on the others, batons, handcuffs, revolvers drawn, pointed, attack dogs yelping, growling, straining against their leashes and then springing forwards, frothing, as gloved hands splayed open—
“It’s…it’s…lovely,” she finally said.
-
“Why do you think that we don’t let people hop trains?”
“You tell me,” she snarled through the clap of his hands on her jaw.
“I’ll tell you why. Because it’s dangerous!”
“Driving a car’s dangerous too, yet people are doing it.”
“You can’t compare those two!” he spat back.
“Have you killed anyone?”
He pretended not to hear her.
“I said: Have. You. Killed. Anyone?”
“I did.”
He loosened his clamp on her chin.
There was the pop of a holster strap being undone. The bull fished out his snub-nosed revolver. In the dimming fluorescent light, she could read the golden text engraved on the frame:
Bob Clarke-Deputy-Burlington Northern Railroad Police.
“This…” he held it up to the light, letting it reflect and play up and down the polished black frame, “is a Smithy. Smith and Wesson. Standard Burlington Northern Railroad Police revolver, chambered in .38.”
Click. The cylinder swung open.
“This sweetheart is loaded with five,” he slowly said. “Five. Five shimmering, beauties of .38 cartridges.”
She felt her mouth go dry.
“Five. This revolver holds six.” Bob’s hands fondled the barrel, one slowly turning it around and around. A finger coasted over the brass. “Do you want to know where the sixth round went?”
“Where?”
“It slammed straight into the skull of a tweaked out vagrant in a boxcar west of Billings.”
Silence.
“We caught him,” he continued, “don’t you ever forget that. We caught him, in our Mag-Lites, sitting in that boxcar, a can of huffed Sterno in one hand, a pocket knife in the other. My partner heard the sound of gasping, and when we peeled that sliding door back…he jumped out at us with that knife. Raised my revolver,” he cocked back the hammer, “and fired.”
Click.
The hammer slammed forward into an invisible primer.
“Bastard dropped dead. Right then. Right there,” he said with a strained cackle as he set his weapon down on the table, “but, sweetie, a gun doesn’t compare with the trains. The trains…they’re murderers, too, you know that?”
“People in the old days didn’t call it an iron horse for nothing.”
-
An old man’s hoarse shout broke her away from her thoughts.
“But I’m not going to hop trains here! I…yeah…I got no ticket! Where could I buy one?”
He had been stopped at the turnstile in a pocked CP Rail t-shirt and Pittsburgh ball cap over wild curls of hair. In his right hand he clutched a battered suitcase.
They knew, by the appearance alone, who would be inclined to hop the trains. Traditional tramps in traditional, ragtag garb were inexplicably ushered away from the turnstiles or had a Docent shadow along through the entire ride.
“I do it to save them the shitty fate of scrubbing down passenger cars for all eternity,” she overheard a station master say while hanging around the cool marble columned halls of Phalantsai Station, “they don’t deserve it. You read those books, right? Hobo journals…or whatever the hell that’s called? They’re damn good at doing what they do. Damn good.”
“Yeah. I’ve read one, somewhere. Can’t you…you know, just set up a train just for them?” a tinny voice responded.
“Have you seen those trains? They’re filthy beasts, smearing grime, dirt, everywhere. That’s more work on all the Wrights we have penned up at the terminus. And hoppers, they’re not considered exactly upper society in their world, either. They’re hated, hated by the people that guard the rail lines.”
“Why, exactly?”
“Because they say that it isn’t safe.”
A pause.
“Imagine getting killed for little more than trying to ride without a ticket. That’s why they tell me to make it clear to them that: ‘You can hop their own trains on Earth. But not here.’ Afternoon to you, patron.”
The station master turned away and walked back towards his office, an elevated loft straddling four tracks, passing by her without as much of a quiet nod.
They were keen to turn away them, people who rightfully earned their keeps and yet let an ordinary female human, dressed in attire reserved for society ladies of a faraway court, or a pleasure walk in ruined gardens, inside to lie in wait on the platform to pounce for a freight. Her mind didn’t know what to make of it. They were more meticulous at manning those turnstiles than Amtrak bulls, yet less scrupulous in that they couldn’t realize the history…the instincts ingrained within.
-
Twin halogen beams belonging to a pickup truck swept across the ballast. Shadows of cruisers and bulls threw themselves onto the twisting steel canyons of freight cars.
“Did you see her? Did you fucking see her?!” She broke out from the portables! Stole my colleague’s gun, too!
“I don’t know, Rob, but I sure as shit know she’s gonna bolt for the outbound!”
“Once that string of reefers clears, tell them to lock it down! Set the whole system on alert!”
One the shadows brandished a rifle as they flitted past the boxcar she took refuge in. In one hand, she gripped Bob’s old revolver. When the train rolls into the yards at Portland, she could catch a Southern Pacific freight and leapfrog it down to K-Falls before the news tainted their bulls. At K-Falls lay true safety.
The bull’s expression had changed when she had snatched it up from the table and leveled it at his forehead.
“Look…I’m just looking out for you!” he blurted aloud, “I’m sorry that I had to be so hard on you for this, but we don’t take trespassers or hoppers lightly! It is something dangerous, you know? Like…what’s the appeal of jumping onto a moving train several times your size? Nothing! It’ll go on record. What’ll your parents, friends, pastor…whatever the folks close to you think!”
“You don’t know how it feels,” she felt herself say through clenched teeth. “I’d rather go to hell and burn there knowing I lived my life to the fullest on this ground, rather than live and burn myself alive on earth all because a couple pigs promised me that I would somehow get to live my life to the fullest in a box six feet below the ground.”
-
“Doors are now closing. Please keep clear.”
The passenger train pulled away from the station. Faces…humans, animals…creatures, and amalgamations that looked pulled straight from old timer’s tales flashed by through the yellow tinted windows. They were riding the tame, domesticated animal. Hers was an entirely different beast altogether.
The platform was now empty, save for a dwarf dressed in a military cloak who had missed the departure, who, after letting out an audible screech that was silenced by a piercing glare from the Docent, turned away and slunk into the canyons of shelves. The passenger train wouldn’t come for another twenty minutes.
A whistle echoed down the line. She strained to hear. The Library's locomotive whistle chimes, unlike those she had heard back home, emanated a light, ethereal wail so as not to disturb the patrons, standing in sharp contrast with her familiar notions of the blast of diesel locomotive horns. The sound of the chuffing, too, was more subdued. The roar of a diesel locomotive’s prime mover would send everyone scattering.
Her train rounded a corner and burst into view. It, too, was a tame thing, half the size compared to the monstrosities that she had to contend with, back home. Trailing behind was a string of about thirty boxcars. Overheard conversations while reading a book on empires long since vanished had told her that it was the freights that garnered the least attention compared to the passenger services.
The Docent manning the locomotive gave a cheerful wave to his colleague as his machine rolled into the station. The boxcars trailing behind clashed against one another as the entire train decelerated, cutting speed. The first boxcar’s door was shut. Most likely locked. The second one, too. Third, fourth, fifth, tenth, fifteenth…. the twenty first. As it passed by her, she swore there was a gap in the door that had not been shut all the way. It was a sliver, but her ride, nonetheless.
This one was no different than any other back home.
She shot a final glance towards the Docent near the station turnstile, still engrossed in its tome and felt herself tense.
This was it.
Her boots trembled and leapt forwards in a dance.
What a fast time to be alive.
The lights are flashing faster than the broken one flickering in the back of a lecture hall. The people around me are crashing against each other like drunken seals. Drunken seals somehow crammed into a sardine can that was meant for only about a hundred.
My cigarette’s toast. Tobacco’s almost burned down to the filter, so I start to reach down for the pack on the bar counter for another. The glass of Scotch-on-the-rocks that she got for me to nurse is long gone at this point—now it's only pissing ice water that only the guy doing lines in the bathroom would count as alcohol. I took a sip of that anyway…trying to get a kick out of it, but the only thing that it did was dampen what remaining buzz the cig had given to my head.
The bartender’s somewhere…but that somewhere is the other side where all the people are literally throwing down parts of their trust funds and life savings to buy their buddies one more round of drink. Finally he comes around, with a big bruise on one cheek, and I pull out a couple bucks from my wallet and throw it down onto the wood.
“Put the rest on Alexandra’s tab,” I felt myself mutter. He takes a pen to the ledger under the bar, scratching out a passable excuse for a charge on her card, then turns to the liquor wall behind him and refills my glass with the cheap booze.
Where’s Alexandra, anyways? My eyes flicked up from the pitted, waxed surface of the bar and the cigarette pack that I was about to touch that somehow got spared from puke and blood from the guys going all out at each other a few seats down. Where were the bouncers when we needed them the most? In the back of an alley, settling a personal score, I suppose.
She’s…she’s somewhere. Just like the bartender, she shouldn't be all that hard to miss, wearing an old violet dress that used to belong to her mother, with white lace trim and a topaz velvet choker around her neck. Hell, if it was like one of those grand balls of old she would still have fit right in.
Shit. The pack of Camels is empty. I swear there were three, four still left in there when I last checked. Either someone lifted the rest or I lost track of how many I lit up.
The ashtray’s full, either with my own butts or everyone’s, I don’t know.
Someone giggles, stumbles, and crashes into my seat back. When I twist myself around to see, it’s a young guy. He couldn’t have been old enough to get into this place. His nose is smeared with something. I’m tempted to say that it’s funnel cake sugar. I hope that’s funnel cake sugar. I don’t think that’s funnel cake sugar.
“I’m…sorry,” he slurs, before his friends, who are jacked up on something, come out of the crowd and drag him away to the stairs leading down to the dance floor. Their tabs are probably running wild.
And meanwhile, as I glance down from the sidelines, into the pulsating, gyrating valley below the bar floor, with a filled glass of Scotch but no buzzing kick to go along with it, I can’t help but feel a bit lost. Unless Alexandra comes back with more, the reality of all this is gonna slam head on like a fucking school bus filled with watermelons.
Somebody slumps into the chair next to me. I snap my head back to see who it is.
It’s Alexandra. Her hair, which she agonized over all afternoon in the bathroom, done up with spray and curlers into a lovely short bouffant had become mussed. She flashed me a cheesy lopsided grin as our eyes met. It was the grin of a kid who had done something wrong behind their mom’s back but didn’t want to admit it.
“You got any more smokes?” I ask her, half out of curiosity, the other out of a sorta quiet desperation. The withdrawal was gonna come on intense, even though the second glass of Scotch was making up for more than it should.
She pulls out her own billfold and reaches into the cash compartment, finding nothing.
“I forgot…I forgot I spent my last few bucks to get Maya another round.”
“Huh? Who’s Maya?”
“An old friend,” she said, batting the question off with her free hand as she readjusted her choker, “it just so happened that she showed her face here tonight, here as well. But it’s our night…that’s why we came in here, right?”
“What? No!” I felt my voice rise, but it was drowned out when the speakers down on the dance floor let out a thundering belch of bass amid cheers, groans, moans, and percussion of hands and feet. The people in the valley surged forward towards the stage, and then back. “Where have you been…”
“Having fun,” she interjects. Her glazed eyes fell on the pack. I noticed that sweat beaded her forehead. The little wings of eyeliner that extended out from the corner of her eyes were smudged. She had been having fun, alright.
“What kinda fun?”
“Just…fun. Dancing. Drinking…the works. Oh! You still gotta smoke for me?”
She snatched up the carton of Camels, oblivious to its lightness and tipped it towards her outstretched palm—
Nothing.
Her face fell.
“Where did they go? Where did they go?” Her hand shot out and gripped my left wrist. Tight.
“I smoked it all…or at least, I think I smoked it all. But my Scotch-on-the-rocks is still full.” I pushed the glass across the counter to her. God, I don’t think I can handle any more of that taste. My head is starting to throb now. It always does, when the cig’s buzz ceases to numb my brain and tune out the lights, music and the people at each other's throats or melting away into the carpet.
“Oh, what should we do?” she asked me as she nursed my scotch, pursing her lips every time she did so in response to the strange taste, “what should we do?”
She liked her drinks watered down with juices, sodas, and other liquors, to mask the bitterness, the ugliness of it all. I liked mine straight. Straight and fast.
The club’s like that, a crystal prism feeding on denial meshing closely with reality. Slow, cloying. Fast. Straight down your gullet. Where you shine a light, all of it comes in as one, but inside, they’re bent, refracted, splayed upon one another, left to play amongst themselves until they are blended and spit back out, in all different shades.
She leans in closer to me. Her dress brushes against mine. There’s a splotch on the violet fabric. I really hope that it was a spilled beer. I don’t think it was a spilled beer.
She’s trying her best, cracking that smile and cocking a brow now and then as she knocks back more drifts from my scotch, trying to convince me that she knows what she’s doing. But nobody knows what they’re doing…all that mattered now in their moment was to ride the breakers, dancing, crashing, folding, merging into each other under the flickering colored lights that would give the maintenance man a seizure.
“What should we do?” she whispers as she takes the final pull of my Scotch. The headache is going full swing now, driving at the back of my brain like a goddamn woodpecker stripping bark from a tree. It wasn’t the slam that I had initially expected, but it still could hit.
But I can think properly again.
It feels good to think straight.
I feel myself stand up and grab her by the crook of the arm. A torn strand of lace, hanging just a few inches of stitch on the sleeve, brushes against my wrist. Her hand clamps around mine as we make our way away from the bar where I had cemented myself all this time.
We pad down the stairs onto the dance floor. Bodies are twisting, contorting, writhing and revolving around us, some collapsing to the cold floor in a heap. They swarm like dazed trout in a supermarket aquarium. Slobbering faces and empty eyes swim in front of mine, peering in through a manufactured haze.
In front of us, beyond the bobbing heads, two front doors are looming, shrouded behind an arch column, big panes of frosted glass set in a frame of oiled bronze. More figures, standing stiff, stationary around the outlines of coupes, convertibles, limousines, casted upon that glass.
We’re close now. Soon the dance lights overhead would be nothing but the dim amber glow from the valet stand as points of red emanating from silver, white, gray, masses of tailfins flick alive with a snarl, leaping out into the night.
“Hold on…” I say, “hold on.”
What a fast time to be alive.
If I ever still remembered the old song, the chant,
written, spoken for her alone, on a quiet afternoon
beside a meandering riverbank
through the present haze
the crushing embrace
of the sea
of anguished shrieks against plated iron hulls
crumpling great steel pylons
composing the rigs
once stretching skywards towards God,
the swells grow, engulfing the bows
thrusting the prow spotter tumbling back,
pinned against the railing, with the water still
surging through the half-open petroleum hatch
his cries swallowed by the crash
of breaking, folding, writhing sheets
not of water
but cascading gray molten lead.
-
Windswept chestnut locks
a quiet, buttermilk stained smile
blue velvet Sunday shoes
kicking up the dust
tentatively treading over the road’s deep carriage ruts
her father’s old cloak
carried on by the slow draft, curling,
around her, a benevolent serpent, murmuring:
“Mariana,
a bow tied back high in her hair
going over the mines, the fields of home, over the high mountains
turning herself to face the coastal breeze
to the ivory wisps of steamships at port, sprawling across the bay
casting themselves over the horizon, just like ancient triremes.”
-
Taking a rest in the square
sitting, sunning herself
beyond shadows stretched long
over the cobblestones
by drooping eaves.
She averts her eyes,
down to the fabric of her cloak,
running a finger over weathered herringbone weave.
Could it ever be?
Lifting her head,
to meet his wavering gaze,
burning with silvered light
heaving behind churned wakes
turned by heat from plumes of steam
skimming, over the iridescent waters
so light, so free
those soft, beaming eyes
of a young man from the sea.
-
On the governor’s veranda, the sweeping faded curtains
veiling the french doors
sway
its fleeting folds
seeped with mottled white, from the days of sun and shade
dance, back and forth
in and out
cloaking the figure, gazing mournfully out to sea
the gulls, flittering across the heavens, reaching down over the waters,
arc and sweep
crying, as they spread, dive, twist
over the speckled dory trawlers
dodging frayed nylon, rusted iron stays
hawking, in sharp trills,
for long lost, bygone days.
-
My rust-stained gloves are ripped off
by the sheets
from my brittle, petroleum tainted fingers
leaving nothing.
And as the gale begins to close
spiraling its tendrils skywards towards God
swallowing the ruined fields whole
of crumpled steel pylons, towers, platforms,
while they fall
condemned to the deep
I open my mouth to speak
as another sheet overcomes our tanker
miles upon miles from the coast
so far from safe berth
so far from her
I murmur,
against needles, shooting, throbbing, coursing their final trails
through the last of my shot, bloodied nerves:
“Mariana,
turning herself to face the coastal breeze
to the ivory wisps of steamships at port, sprawling across the bay
casting themselves over the horizon, just like ancient triremes…”
All that mattered in those minutes, seconds, milliseconds, was to drive. Drive in the hopes of outrunning the others.
He yanked the Jetta’s handbrake back and wrenched the wheel to the right as another tight turn that comprised the twisting alleys of the old quarters of Shanghai loomed before him.
The roar, the low growl of the faster cars, blessed with all the bounties of horsepower and traction that the rich sponsors of high city society could throw at them, reverberated through the surface streets somewhere behind him. Their shifting gears and internal combustion pounded in time with the broken glove box door as his tires churned over the ancient cobblestones.
He couldn’t catch up with them. Not there, in those heavily trafficked double-tracked veins, where, if he slipped on the execution of slinging around minivans and scooters, the Jetta would be quickly lost behind in the night. The alleys, convoluted as they were, a mess of crumbling stone and grimy concrete panels dotted with peeling banners, bisected those veins. A driver unfamiliar with the southern areas of the city would balk at the prospect of shaving time and advancing position through the backstreets. They were a familiar sort of enigma—a shortcut made possible through the repetitions ingrained in his mind, injected onto his hands, gripped tight to the steering wheel and the shaft of the fraying stick shift.
At long last, the Jetta plunged out of the labyrinth. He swung it onto the road against the protest of brake pads making contact with steel and pounded on the dash as a gleaming compact fluorescent white mass whipped by, tinges of flame bursting out the tailpipe.
So close.
His foot rammed down on the gas pedal, but not before an orange sports car and boxy, heavier sedan followed suit in the opposite lane.
Soon he was once again hot on their trail.
The policeman manning the square wheeled around on his traffic pedestal to face the incoming growl of engines, just as dazed figures of revelers filtered down from the glittering, soaring high nightclubs to watch. A gloved hand shot out, holding the intersecting string of late-night traffic at bay. His baton arched down in a wave as the Skyline, Ferrari, Buick and Jetta skidded around the corner and tore straight through.
He threw a furtive glance in the rearview mirror, at the bobbing of headlights of other sports cars and sedans coming in through the grimy rear window. The other two had caught up. By then, the street had narrowed, narrowed to one lane.
He couldn’t change positions.
He was pinned in fourth place.
Another quick turn, now, this time to the main road.
The big road.
The wide road.
The night guard manning the traffic control point scampered from his booth across the mouth of the highway ramp entrance, vaulting over a concrete barrier separating the lift gate and his post.
His hands wrapped around the lever of the manual override box, eyes staring down the incoming headlights. The cigarette perched at the corner of his mouth glowing just ever so brighter as he slammed down the lever.
The tails of his jacket billowed in the backdraft of six cars thundering up the S-20 freeway North over the Huangpu.
-
No longer penned in by the constricting lanes of the surface streets, they began to jockey each other for their positions, swinging themselves around slower moving trucks and cars. Concrete strips clicked melodically beneath tires. Turn signals flashed, died, and then leapt back to life within a matter of seconds.
He shifted gears, overtaking an overloaded truck packed to the brim with broken washing machines. The hi-beams of the Porsche behind threw themselves through his rear window onto his dash, onto the speedometer needle that climbed ever higher.
100…125…130…140…162 kilometers per hour.
Yellow headlight and red tail lights, coupled with the colors of blue and cool white that drifted from the skyscrapers around him, refracted and bent their glistening shades onto his face. An illuminated sign stretched over the highway flew past. He caught fleeting figments of the silvered neon characters in his rearview mirror.
快乐 快乐 小心 驾驶 安全 安全 回家
Happy Happy Careful Diving, Safe Safe Return Home.
Still the Jetta’s speedometer continued to climb.
He skirted another slower-moving vehicle, this time a coach bus with Sichuan plates, just before a box truck behind him changed lanes, cloaking the Porsche's beams.
The needle counterweight passed the gas gauge which was quivering at a quarter expended.
He added another quick burst of speed to the Jetta, shifting gears in order to accommodate for the change in uphill grade.
The shape of a steel suspension bridge rose before him. In between shafts of harsh light from the streetlamps overhead, below the low concrete slip, stretched the Huangpu River. Craning his head to his right, he could see the brilliant lights of the skyscrapers rising beyond the distant tan promenade of the Bund shimmer and twirl across those murky water.
The sight was familiar. Almost comforting. Unlike the others, he was a taxi driver.. Somewhere on the other side of the city, middle aged men just like him were waiting. In train stations, airports, the harbor, marshaled into rows, a stream of two-tone silver red, yellow and green topped with plastic rectangles with peeling vinyl decals printed: 出租车. Taxi.
When the passengers slid inside the cool interior after hurrying across the muggy summer heat, the meter would chatter alive, its tinny electronic box mumbling to keep all hands, feet in the vehicle at all times, as the driver took in a final drag of a Red Plum cigarette before hurtling away from the stand, into the night, the slip of paper clicking as the spindle spat it out, marking meters, kilometers, charging for the yuan that supported families: grandparents, wives, sisters, sons.
His grandparents…Weijia’s grandparents. His father. Confined to that bed, body racked with chills, wheezing, sputtering every time he tried to sip the salted egg soup mixed with the formula medicine that his son bought him between shifts as a day taxi driver, pictures of old Chinese war films from the tinny television, of defeating the Japanese and crossing the Yalu River burning, wavering in his eyes.
His wife…she was gone, wasn’t she? The empty chair across Weijia was now occupied by stacks of gaokao books that Fanlan had been working on when she came back on the weekends from Suzhou. She didn’t want to make eye contact with her father or brother when she did come around—only scarfed down her rice and slunk off to her old room, slamming the door when it was over. He always felt a pang of guilt, then. She had to work three jobs to pay for school.
His son. Weijia…the way that he looked mournfully at the poster for soccer camp as the elevator rattled upwards towards their apartment after an afternoon playing with his ‘friends’ in the empty lot of Sanlu Market was more than enough, if the bloodied nose, the thrashed shirt received from scoring a goal against the opposite ‘team’ had not been enough.
Sixty seven thousand yuan. A thousand or so more than the old meter could ever earn for him.
Sixty seven thousand damn yuan.
Instead of the taxi meter marking his keep, it was the speedometer.
快乐 快乐 小心 驾驶 安全 安全 回家
Happy Happy Careful Diving, Safe Safe Return Home.
-
The faint boxy outline of the Buick that he had been stuck behind on the surface streets drew closer. It was chasing the Skyline, the driver having slowed in order to try to safely pass a lumbering truck carrying sand, whose own driver had panicked and almost jackknifed his trailer when he saw the Japanese sports car sneaking up in his rearview mirror. He smiled at that. Such a fast car still couldn’t compare with the natural obstacles, the forces of nature, high outcroppings of stone, moving with the speed, the step, of an elephant that was a Chinese semi truck.
Twisting lines that comprised the highway interchange overpass passed overhead.He was gaining quickly on the Buick, and the Ferrari, Skyline before it, whose drivers were at each other's neck, pushing their machines, honed, designed, by their creators, to be testaments to the sweeping European lanes and disorderly streets of rural Japan that gave birth to such to such beautiful and fearsome creatures.
The off-ramp now. He catapulted off the rush of the freeway back onto the surface streets, slamming on the brake, easing the Jetta around tight intersections in close time with the Buick. Fragments of figures, faces peered out from under darkened overhangs of storefronts and security huts.
Then doubling back again, back onto the avenues of downtown Shanghai, clear and wide with no opposing traffic. The home stretch.
A mere thirty years ago, such a sight was nigh impossible to achieve. Now, a two lifetimes of progress and pain achieved it: strobing billboards, LED club signs, electronic dance music that blurted out from the clubs, spilling out onto the street, echoing, among the towering steel, made for a cacophony of sights, sounds, and colors, bright red, green, crashing against cool white, and the black night that flitted back and forth against his windshield.
It sent his foot crashing down, taking the last of the slack out of the Jetta’s gas pedal, to which the engine responded with a low whine. The speedometer fluttered, its needle indecisive, at the edge of the red arc. The finish line was in sight-a plastic banner strung in between two lamp posts over the road. A gate. A gate to a life. A life free of the pains.
Top speed. The Jetta’s nose began to overtake the Buick’s flank…
But it was not enough.
Fourth place.
No yuan for him.
-
When the first pigments of dawn broke through the hazy skies over the Huangpu, he found himself by the Bund.
“You’re getting too old to be driving a cab. You have a lovely voice…try being a public speaker!” she cooed as she lifted a steamer lid to check on her pork buns, sending a plume of steam curling into the cool morning air, “sometimes I worry for your health, driving at night isn’t good for anyone’s soul! Disrupts your sleep, it’s not worth it!”
He could only smile, hand her a five yuan bill, and make a witty remark about other crazy drivers and clueless foreigners while enjoying the little slices of rice cake, lovingly simmered in soy sauce and drenched in a numbing chili oil and cabbage, knowing well that the Shanghai at night that she saw could not be farther than his.
For the shimmering of the skyscraper lights across the Huangpu, the glow of hundreds of taillights, disappearing into the dark, the stillness, the convoluted yet intimate nature of those side streets, devoid of people, showing the scars of the past, and bustling downtown area, still packed with revelers, the foreigners and locals alike, and the pay, when he finally made it there, that could send Weijia to soccer camp and Grandpa Guo his medication, alone, would not make him continue to drive taxis, continue to race.
The way the city moved when night fell upon them all—the cars, energized by the thrill of the darkened streets, bathed in those pulsating, shimmering lights, darting, weaving, their way around traffic, surrounded by shining high skyscrapers and dark gray hutongs and towering, illuminated apartment blocks, the beauty, the sheer fluidity of it all, all the sounds, sights and sensations of the swift roads—were modern China’s lifeblood…Shanghai’s lifeblood…his lifeblood.
“I am not God. I am not a god. I have told you this already, one too many times.”
“If you aren’t God, or the mouthpiece of the prophet, then who are you?”
“My name?”
“Yes, Father. Please. Tell me your name. One of your many names.”
“I was given one name, and one name only.”
“Then speak. Speak your name.”
“I am Lieutenant Johnathan Erwin Musselbrow. I participated in the Long-Range Desert Group, serving Her Majesty until the noon of July 23rd, 1944.”
“That’s a long and convoluted name, Father.”
“I am not your father. How many times must I have to tell you this, through this haze that surrounds me? It’s like a corrupted reel of film, colors strobing across my face, vivid and warm, faces smiling down on me one moment and then all washed out and bleached, figments of silken locks and gleaming eyes coursing through billowing sediment, the next?”
“No. Your name, Father.
It reflects mine.”
“I am Lieutenant Johnathan Erwin Musselbrow, and for all the time I ever spent on this fucking earth I never met a man that shared—”
“Please. You don’t have to say more. Just give us a word of prayer. One final word of prayer. My congregation’s arms are wide open…to receive your word…your final word before we ascend, tonight.”
“What’s up with the men, then, in those black robes and red and golden sashes draped over themselves, standing by your lectern and lined up against the walls and the rear doors, armed with rifles, if you are ascending?”
“They are my shepherds, Father. They are loyal to me, to all of us. The book I hold before me speaks of the necessity of the crucial role that they play. There must be folk that watch over the entire flock, to safeguard them from the wolves peering in through the slats, to comfort the lame, to defend us when the walls of the pen can no longer withstand the crushing weight of Them.”
“Who the hell is Them?”
“The people outside, Father. The government. Tyrannical, ruthless they are, in their misguided pursuits of justice. They crush our devotion, our mission to believe, and produce good people. Good, honest people trying to advance society, to find truth in a world fed by lies through walls of flickering televisions, leaping from one tragedy to the next…do you hear me?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“All we wanted was to advance our world. We built soup kitchens, nursing homes, and communal apartments for the elderly, as more people tore themselves away from the sinful world that lies beyond those doors of the chapel.”
“Them. They are the figures moving outside, splayed across the strobing red, blue, amber lights dancing on the stained glass-windows, correct?”
“Yes, Father. How much I loved my flock. They came to me broken, cradling their mangled wings. I nursed them back to health…and they gave me so much in return.”
“I understand…keep going, now.”
“I…I tried, so hard to separate myself and my flock from the wolves, circling all around us. How much I tried to create beautiful days for my people. I only wanted…if I could only create more to last an eternity. But now the beautiful days are coming to an end. I’m afraid there’s no choice now.
When they come in, they will take my flock. Kill my shepherds. Drag the men and women away to be imprisoned. And the children, so they grow up in a perpetual state of suffering.
Death would be preferable. How could we continue suffering, in service of you? It’s a sweet embrace that sweeps us all…in the end.
With the aid of my shepherds, we’ll step over this threshold together, Father.”
“Father. Father…oh, how I hate that word you label me, I have nothing to do with you. I am Lieutenant goddamn Johnathan Erwin Musselbrow of the Long Range—”
“I knew that this would creep in. Denial, disbelief at something so radical that your subjects would put themselves to you, inflamed through the confusion of all that has happened today. It’s been, frankly…a calamity of voices. False voices, I may add, Father. One voice called out to me over our communal breakfast, another during snack time for the children, and again, during lunch, during dinner. Bricklayers, actresses, scribes…”
“You have a way of mincing their words into the most incomprehensible shit, you know that? Just like a dozen lovely marbled steaks diced into bits and then mixed into a bowl of gruel—”
“You, Father, spoke to me through all the static, the grating interference of other, false idols that try to grasp my voice when I reach out. I became so convinced that the prophet from time immemorial, wouldn’t speak back to me. And yet, through faith alone, I have found you, in our final moments, before our ascension. I understand it’s amusing, to you, to repeat things, like that one record in the music room for Amazing Grace that keeps skipping back to ‘I was blind but now…I can see.’ But I reassure you…please. No more. You were blind, Father, but you can now…see.
So, please, speak.”
“I can’t see shite.
I’m still blind.
The final thing I ever truly saw was the entire column being consumed by oily flames licking gasoline-soaked steel and sun-dried rubber, the bloody Messerschmitts still circling overhead, dropping the last of their bombs onto the mangled wrecks of once-proud trucks, tanks, jeeps. Then…they swooped down, vicious screaming hawks they were, props churning the air into a buzz. Their machine gun rounds tore into those black and crimson tainted sands and into the guts of men: the captain, an ammunition bearer, and a kid who joined us in Cairo off the ship from Bombay, who was crying out for his mother in fragments of Hindi—all were silenced in an instant.
I became, blind, then.
And I am still blind.
And I could never bear to see.
Never after that.”
“Be still, Father. Please. Listen to me-“
“I’m not your father. You do not know my own father. Not your Father that you claim to serve. Father was truly a valiant, brave man, having fought in the First World War with his old schoolboy friends from Grimsby in a Pal Battalion. I could never forget the story he told me…long ago, over frayed, failing smiles of youth embossed on the paper.
Of what once was. Truly beautiful days, long gone.
He spoke of romping with James and Henry behind the woods, towards the creek to fill their Boy Scout canteens. He stumbled into a ditch then, with his friends, sustaining a gouge to the knee, and then, as I sat there, he began to speak of the Somme. As the Germans affixed their bayonets and loaded their machine guns, crusted over by French blood and mud dredged up from the bottom of those godforsaken trenches, coating everything in a horrific paste, he drew his Webley from his holster, stood up on the parapet of the British lines. While lead cracked by only mere inches above his head, he raised the revolver towards those turbulent skies for his men to follow, shouting, in his unmistakable tenor my mother so dearly loved: “Over the top, my friends!”
He ended up surviving the war, you know. You couldn’t say the same thing for the rest. Nearly twenty thousand men were killed on the first day of the Somme. The churchyard at Grimsby was overflowing when the Armistice was signed. I am not your Father.”
“But they’re scared, Father. Surely you have some words to transmit, to pass on, through me. They have no reason to be afraid.”
“I wish I never knew about it, this thing that you call Ascension. They have every right to be scared. Last evening, through that same peephole, I caught snippets of a speech you were saying out loud into a tape recorder, speaking of holding several of your own underwater in what was supposed to be a routine baptism. How is shoving several bodies of women and children in a bathtub until they go limp some sort of re-lease on faith, on love?”
“It was a necessary act, Father. Necessary, in order to keep the sanctuary and my flock clean. Please…”
“Necessary, my ass. You know what was necessary, way back in my mother’s day? The entire village, including the preacher and his companions, required coal to fuel their stoves from the mine over the mountain. My great aunt had the strength equivalent to several workmen from town. She carried, even in the heavy cotton layers of her Sunday dresses, four pails loaded to the brim with coals, up and over the high roads of the mountain. She labored at them, trudging uphill with her burden as drays and carriages swept by, their drivers giving her nothing more than a passing glance. And when she came safely home, she was received warmly from all in town, because of how hard it all was, especially on a young woman like her. You…you’re the drivers in the drays, the carriages. I notice that you never give even a piece of bread to the starving men down the street, only amongst yourselves, and even then…the tithing plate’s your best course, isn’t it?”
“Forgive me, Father. I should have clarified. Tithings are needed to keep things running, to keep everyone from persecution. Persecution from the unloving men waiting outside. That costs money…”
“I am not your father. You called for me. Pulled me through those waters. Is that true…or not?”
“Yes.”
“And I answered. What else is there to it?”
“Your name…why do you call yourself by my name?”
“My name? Lieutenant Johnathan Erwin Musselbrow….of the Long Range Desert Group-”
“Nobody said anything about a Lieutenant…”
“Oh…you. If I still had my hands, those two hands that could fold into fists, I would slam my boot into one of your so-called Shepherds, take his rifle and continue bashing him until he is nothing but a bloody pulp going through that gray, doily carpet down to the floorboards—”
“It’s my name.
Not yours, Father.
It’s not yours.
It never was.”
-
“Oh…you…oh, you.”
My name.
Years ago, before you bought the chapel in town and seeded your so-called congregation through flyers pasted, calling out, in cheerful tones, for the salvation of widows, orphans, the lame, the downtrodden, you broke open a surplus storage trunk that you bought at the market, finding stacks of papers, yellowing, forgotten. Your fingers coasted over the records of countless men who died during and after the war. It stopped at mine. My name. Jonathan Erwin Musselbrow…oh, how it takes flight, off the tip of my tongue…even when the dust, the grit of the desert drifted in, baking my chords…the chords given to me by my father, until it flickered away into a croak.
It’s a funny story, you know, about my name. My father met my mother one fateful Sunday afternoon in 1913 while taking a stroll through my mother’s village, a good way outside Grimsby, to the farrier up the hill. He was a young man, fresh out of the last grade then, and loved to sing old opera tunes. He came up the hill, now, singing his chest out, of tunes proclaiming declarations of love. The shops were closed and the small square was deserted, save for my mother, who was sweeping the stoop of her uncle’s bookshop. He stopped singing, then, seeing her, transfixed, and she looked up with a confused expression, leveling her gaze at his, wondering why he had stopped singing. Well, they looked at each other, and fell in love. When he returned from the war, he still loved her. Said that a postcard of a French gal stretched out on a chaise lounge that looked vaguely like her got him through hell and back. Musselbrow…
My name. It was all for this. Is it not?”
“I cannot…”
“My name, Musselbrow. It caught your eye. A new alias. So you can hide from them. So you didn’t have to run overseas to bloody Cuba, or wherever the goddamn place was, to escape Them-”
“Just say a prayer, Father! They are waiting-”
“A chance to start anew from the stains of your own past, of snot and blood scattered across the old floor of the second wing of some Sunday school, the fucking aftermath of beating children with a ruler because they couldn’t recite the prayers, that chapter, in the intonation that you wanted them to…”
“And I am standing, now, before the lectern, Bible open before me to .38 at the book of Luke. I could not go ahead with the ascension without a word from you, Father…”
“That unmistakable name, my father gave to my mother…you took.”
“There isn’t much time now, Father…”
“I am not your Father. I’m blind, now, yet I can see, directly into the eyes of your so-called Shepherds. Their fingers are poised over the triggers, their muzzles aimed not to heaven, where the Messerschmidts swooped down, with their machine guns set ablaze, but at your own people.”
“What else can you see…”
“I see a figure among the sea of faces sitting in the pews, waiting for your last sermon. It’s a little girl in a blue dress printed with daffodils. She’s the one clutching her dear teddy bear. She reminds me of my daughter, Cordelia. In the final days before I was sent skidding over the Mediterranean to the column that brought upon me my death, I held her in my arms and looked her in the eye for the final time. She was crying. She was only at the age where she could only begin to fathom why her father was being sent far away, and could very well never return home again. I finally set her down, and kissed my wife, Bess on the cheek and shouldered my rifle. The military police had to drag them away, my wife and daughter fighting against their arms all the way, back into the wailing crowd already heaving themselves at the police barricades, trying to see their loved ones for one, final time. You took them away, not by force, but by the lies spewing forth from your tongue. And I could not see…I could not see the difference one bit even if you had the force of a voice high above—”
“Please, stop fucking ranting and give…”
“I swore, then. I swear now, as Lieutenant Johnathan Erwin Musselbrow, even if my word becomes nothing but the gurgles of bile burning down my throat, mingling with the sand and fumes of burning diesel fuel, that such a thing wouldn't happen again. And to that end, your voice came to me. Out of the dark, it reached me, promising, promising to overcome the mistakes made by the folk that sent me out into those sands…and look what I see now, through your peeling veneer of a preacher, in that smug paisley red bow tie and starched shirt, your eyes, spectacles burning themselves alive with hatred, hatred for people that you don’t even know, or care to understand as you sweep your gaze over the flock…the defenseless at your knees, the muzzles of rifles held by people in those black robes pressing against their backs…you want me to pray, send a final word to them, now? Fine. Then I’ll pray.”
“Good.”
“Please bow your heads in one final prayer. Thank you.”
“You’re sick, my son. Know when the guns go off and the whole world gets plunged into an unmerciful, suffocating black, I pray that you shall be the first to face my wrath.”
-
“Betty Grable’s boys are going heavenwards,”
they say
cutting their teeth
on necklaces torn from artemisia
the spread-eagled petals
tapered with the hastened edge
of carcano bayonets
squawking
through the radium-pierced
windows
perfumed at the flaking seams
in double aught
pantone grain
but it ain’t for me
never did
drowning in a concerted oasis
ramparted at the knees
by glass pigment ampules
clamped down with the canines
lacerating the gums
cup your hands
for a fleeting drink
judas
quenching proverbial thirsts
by the oil drums
between the cresting wings of
dragonflies
sharpening their mandibles
no more, no more
tepid sensations of divinity
gauges twinkle, needles leap
famished—full bloom
in the choking exhaust
first on the flight-line
twelve warheads
baptized
for overthrown cathedrals
sobriety
flees
from the toppled gallows
over the quaking flack berm
laughing
with a schoolmaster’s switch
flashing, from their emaciated waistband
a half-cocked luger
fix tight
your bleary gaze
pay attention
about-face
dividends spiral
shearing a golden wing
from your empty pocket-watch
it falls, arrested by no talons
no liberties
to kiss
your sordid lover
a nymph
curled about in a daybed
of talcum-octane sigils
tugging at the hems
while the skies churn
stuffed dark with eighty-eight mil
soot
colors drain, bleating
pipe dreams for a barbed missoula
a desecrated turin
dissipate
if there was any
we never did
resting in two palms propped wide
searchlights grow dim
savoring the brush
tacked to the undulating
halftrack
hills.
-
““Why are you taking my shotgun? Over two capsules? Good heavens, dear, why are you dealing in narcotics?”
“We ain’t in Flen anymore, Elijah. You think we can farm for food in these streets?”
“No, but-”
“Face it. Morality took flight from this city long ago. We need to eat, and they swindled me of the money. Said that they’ll have a courier draw funds from the central bank over the wire and send them down, which would have taken two, three days at the most, and yet, a week later, they still haven’t shown up. I can’t afford to be walking around in this damn cloak and dress forever—it’s already attracted too many strange glances as is…”
“You’re…you’re a lady, dear. I think it’s in the best interest of ladies to let the matter go. As they say, revenge digs two graves. You go out there and shoot it off over a petty debt, over two pieces of Serotonin 21, no less, the entire city is going to be breathing down our necks.”
“A lady? Hell…I never said I was one, Elijah.”
-
Liquified
baling
wire pride
drips with stiffening mucus down the back of my
godforsaken throat
like a shotgun breech cracking open
after
a finger
greased with too many stale takeout pies
and back alley brown packet marlboros
snip the two crescents back
for
tarred wood, pitted bores to jerk
and plunge
double aught
lead buckshot bouquets
straight
into a gaping chest
then
comes the escape
stampede
around cramped quarters where the air compresses
and dew muddies the glimmering panes
bursting out like parasites
fastened to a sunken loaf
embedded tight in the weary concrete
slick as a policeman’s tarnished whistle
dangling over the sewer grate
by a sliver of a nylon cord
drenched
in the flittering hues of a sickly streetlights
framing the plywood stock of
an automatic rifle
twenty rounds
and I have two.
“Are you lost, miss…if I may ask, what’s the matter with your cloak?”
“I…I’m just coming off my shift. At the slaughterhouse, you see. Just a bit of pig blood.”
“Last time I checked there weren't any facilities processing meat located in this district.”
“I’m sorry. It must be fatigue, then. I meant a shop. I have a hand in a butcher’s shop down the way.”
“Unsavory people congregate in these alleys, y’know that? This place is not safe for the likes of you. Did you hear that shot earlier?”
“Yes?”
“Someone definitely died in that one, miss…there ain’t any way, in the condition that this damn city is in, that they even have a passing chance of survival…shall I escort you home?”
“It’s not necessary. I can manage just fine without your assistance…after all, you’re never around when folk need you the most.”
And I turn my back, the piece pressing against the linen folds
as the revolving lanterns
adorned with the extinguished strokes of kanji and putonghua
clinging to the brick alcoves
hang still.”
Tiananmen Summer
Two words, a mockery
dredged under overseas fumes
from Hongtashan cigarettes
peeling alight
within
two fingers
slick as the barges that prowled the Yangtze
anchored underside ruined glyphs
surrounded
in the heat
by bottles of Moutai, with the shot glasses in suit
so we can gaze through heat-transfer crystals
at the blooming sorghum reflections
issuing thick, suffocating plumes
toppled personnel carriers
disfigured students, clutching cable-tie bicycles
vaulting over
Andy Capp fries
vacuum-sealed
in electrified blue foil
calling shotgun
upon a battered Chang Jiang motorcycle
captained by a sullen father
searching for his lost son
snatched in the neck of morning
when they closed in
with automatic rifles
wrenching himself free
through the crowds of breakback day laborers
when he sprawled, clutching his chest
upon the uplifted cowling
of a coach bus
stuck like crusted baitu taffy
passing hands on the fairway shuttle
down to Winn Dixie
to be
stuck to the exhaust panel
of a three cylinder soviet
combine harvester
limping off
a tattered banner
across the undulating cornfields
of Inner Mongolia
Tiananmen Summer.
We stand alone
watching
the coarse road beneath our weary shoes
dissolve
into crimson impressions
before turning ourselves
under the flickering suburban streetlights
for home.
(“Why did you stop? Why…”)
-
I wish to forget
Tiananmen Summer.
But he could not shake
those truncated feelings
chiseled into my perceptions
in wayward veins
of a bygone
Peking opera.
-
test 12348
Image source: [(1)]
This one's been a fun one to write and revise. Thanks to meltedbee for critique!