For years I’ve been yammering about a forthcoming, non-bike related short story compilation. Well. It’s finished…all but the design work. Thank you to everyone who gave me that rolled-eye look when asking where I was at with it. Thank you to those who said it would never be done. Thank you to those who continually supported my efforts. Here’s a sampling of excerpts.
Cartwright in the Gorge
Cartwright stood in a stripeless O.D. green uniform in front of the house he’d been reared in, ruck on his back, dd-214 wadded in his pocket, his head pulsing with bad ideas. His father, who was whaling a luster onto the paint of his failing Mercury, aged twenty years in seconds when he noticed him standing there. No no no no no, he said. I did my time, praise Christ. No God Damn Way…
Cartwright looked bad. He’d been held in an Army separations company for months, tight, sweltering quarters shared with mentals, mal-adjusteds and medical discharges. The day he got out a black man twice his age tried pickpocketing him in the Savannah Greyhound station and unwittingly provided a focal point for a lifetime of voiceless frustrations, confidence crushing defeats. Cartwright lost his shit.
He was subsequently arrested by two brushcut, squarehead crackers pink as butchershop pigs. Cartwright’s shirt had been torn from his body. His face was flecked with the man’s blood. He crouched like something wild as they approached and they drew each a sizable black club from their belts. They slapped them into their palms and smiled. Cartwright decided he wasn’t that wild.
On the ride to the station they asked the same two questions every other cracker had asked him in boot camp. How do y’all live with all them earthquakes and is everone a faggit out in Californya? Cartwright’s standard operational lies melded with a hopelessness born of consistently declining concurrent events.
Nah, he said in his best southerly. We keep ‘em corraled in a concertina wire ghetto in San Francisco and feed ‘em chicken assholes and KY.
Having taken his answer as derogatory of homosexuals rather than a snipe at their ignorance they stopped in at Jiggles, uncuffed him, bought him a lap dance from a tired, swag-skinned woman with a puckered cesarian scar and pressed on him several tumblers of Jack. Ol’ Californya Cartwright they said, slapping him on the back. Gave that ol’ monkey one country ass-kickin. Drink up, son.
When he was soused they re-cuffed him and drove to the station where he was booked for drunk in public. The following morning, raw to the rind of his soul and a hundred dollars lighter, he began the long, mind-numbing busride westward over the contours of the continent, ate vending machine dinners, observed a ceaseless river of dead-ending people flowing through the ragged seats, some in the throes of withdrawal, most flying from situations so incomprehensibley demoralizing they couldn’t be dreamed up. He never considered himself part of the effluvia.
His father, recovering from the sudden reappearance of his dissappointing loinfruit, posted himself in the driveway, paper sentry that he was.
Ain’t stayin’ here dumbass, he said. He held the lambswool mitt out like something martial. In the searing light Cartwright could see fine wax particles blowing off, disapeering into thin air. I knew you’d not hack it.
Where’s my car?
Sold it. For what you owed me.
Cartwright pressed his teeth together, ran his hand over his stubblefield of blond hair. What’s left then?
There’s a bag a clothes I ain’t taken to the Salvation yet. About it.
Cartwright walked around him and into the house. He shucked off his boots and the reeking green uniform, old ghosts waking in every corner, until he stood naked in the hallway, transfixed by his reflection imposed over a photo of his mother and father in the better years before she walked off the downtown parking garage. He dressed from a garbage bag of clothes, stuffed oddments into his ruck then went out through the garage where his old bike hung from a U-hook.
No way said his father. I bought that too.
I’ve paid for it. One way or another. Cartwright straddled it and coasted down the driveway past the old man who raised the mitt like a gatekeeper. Adios you miserable old bastard, said Cartwright, riding out of one life into another.
During bootcamp at Fort Benning he’d developed a sinus infection that blew outward through both of his eardrums, ending the Army’s chance of honing him into a man. Laying in the infirmary with cotton plugs jammed in each ear he had a fever dream so hot it seared an image over the back of his eyes and trued his trajectory. It was a landscape of mountains, rivers and trees which cradled him like the very arms of God. The world of absurd discipline, of promises of glory through the utter subjugation of self withered and died like any endeavor against the heart. He knew the dreamed country had been fixed in his mind prior to having vision, prior to the first suprising rush of air into his tiny collapsed lungs. Laying there surrounded by the electrical hum of the hospital, the acoustic ceiling oscillating in the flicker of flourescent bulbs, he knew no matter how far he’d strayed from himself it was and had always been his job to seek out the vision fixed within.
He rode northward drunk on his sudden shiftlessness, on the intervals of crushing silence between the rush of vehicles passing a few feet to his left. Turn your back to your executioner and pedal he murmured. When tired he stuck out his thumb and to those who picked him up he spun outrageous lies. Christians in station wagons hauling six packs of clamoring kids. Rednecks seething with hate driving big trucks that rattled like bombs and belched black smoke. Old men with some depraved need in their eyes. Each time he invented himself anew. Army Ranger. HALO instructor. Three tours in Afghanistan. Shot in the stomach, the leg, the groin, bullet’s still there. They offered him bibles and prayers, a few dollars, alcohol, speed. He refused nothing. They spun their own untruths, their altruism subsumed by desperate loneliness, dark motives. Parting company Cartwright felt hollow, a sad and rampant emptiness radiating from the falsifications, yet he nor they could stop telling them.
He began to stay the bike, finding solace peddling the lesser traveled roads through the bleak and lonely country. He punched a hole in his belt, another, turned down unmarked dirt roads, threw rocks at ranch dogs who howled and popped their teeth at him as if he were an errant one of their own. Arguments with disembodied drill instructors, with his father, with those who had marked or cut him echoed like oceans in a conch shell until there was nothing more to say and the voices subsided into the low clamor of his mind humming along. He told himself he’d been divested of their opinions of him, of his opinions of himself. He did not know if these were true thoughts. Probably not, he said aloud, the words stripped from his mouth by the wind and carried off into the high desert.
He saw things as he rode. A lake floating in the sky. A rabbit with two heads. A ram whose left horn had turned and grown back into it’s skull. He passed a semi-trailer of cows turned over and crumpled into the roadside rocks. Bawling animals and the flat report of rifles permeated his thoughts for days.
Sleepless nights passed in uncomfortable rock grottoes well off the road, his heart a feeble animal stunned beneath the delerious rushing of the earth through space, skipping at the sudden clear fountaining note of a coyote through his ravaged ears before others of its ragged clan piped into a frenzied chorus, the true voice lost in the mobbing. Sometimes in the evenings he felt a rarified kinship with the world, staring into the coalbed of a niggardly fire witnessing in it the formation and destruction of elemental things he hadn’t words for. The wind sawing through the coals lifted sparks and ran downcountry with them. The only true thing he knew for truth was that behind the illusory veneer of man’s petty constructs the world was a brutal, violent, perhaps even a darkly magical place, and in this lay the peculiar beauty no one seemed to speak of, that this was what every spoken word, every law invoked or decree enacted sought to cover up as if it were something best hidden. That everything man did was an effort to color, contain or dilute the hard truth of their brief, flintspark lives. He felt divided into two separate beings, one of manufactured words and ideas, the other of the base elements incandescing in the fire, utterly primitive, wholly organic, ready at any moment to be reclaimed by the dark mystery from which it rose.
The days came bright and hard, heated sage a constant. Failed old settlements floated by, baked so long in the sun they shone with their own reddish light. It seemed he was forever on 395, on the spur roads. He didn’t know where he was on a map but that he’d crossed the state line and it was Oregon now and this part had little to recommend it. He rolled, angled ten degrees into a crosswind, past a placard that read Lake Albert. The wind drank away his sweat, howled through bulletholes in the sign. Foodless and legless, his rear tire went flat and he found the tongue of his seat bag lolling, tools and patchkit vomited somewhere in the past. He looked back the way he’d come, the road spooling straightaway five miles, ten, twenty. Who knew? He could hardly believe he’d come so far of his own power. He pulled on a thread raveling out from a hole in the center of the scalded rubber, no fix for it.
He walked down the day bent over the bike, macadam beating black heat up through his bootsoles, thumb angled at the rumbling approaches of vehicles, eyes narrowing in the rearview mirrors as they dopplered away. The sun flayed him until he took on a vibrating desperation. He looked now like what he was, a lone and austere pariah wavering in the heat, enshrouded in a caul of loneliness. He knew he’d crossed another line he had not seen. Where rides had simply occurred before, now he could not summon one for his life. What few cars came went on until they sank into the earth, reappearing further on until they winked out of existence like guttering candles. He knew he should sit in what shade could be found but a compulsion for movement goaded him, a skewed notion of atonement for crimes he could not remember commiting but knew he yet owed for. He bent over the handlebars and plodded down the highway.
The following day was hotter yet. The wind had died and it was searingly quiet and otherwise it passed much the same. A highway patrolman stopped but would not give him a ride.
We don’t give rides ‘less you got a warrant. You got a warrant? What’s your name? He did not have a warrant.
Town’s twenty miles. You might make it. If you do, water up and keep goin. He sped off. Cartwright watched the brakelights come on, saw something exit the driver’s window. He caught up to it on the roadside, a plastic waterbottle full of piss.
His nose blistered and his tongue thickened. He drank off the last of his water. If he collapsed on the roadside who would stop? None but the mad and serially lonely step onto another’s sinking ship. There’s trial enough without inviting it.
Late in the afternoon he squatted under a Juniper and began speaking into the bleak country the addled words of a prayer remembered from some childhood so far removed it seemed it was not his own. He thought about the bible the Jesusers gave him in Shasta, the pages fluttering in the sage like tarots shuffled by invisible fingers. Around dusk his prayers beseached not just his vague mental image of God but invoked whatever ears the twilight might hold.
Near dark he felt come up through the ground a rumbling, turned to see what looked like a hearse boil up out of the east like an antipodal dark sun. Cartwright moved off the road, began to lift his hand then by some innate sense drew it back, but the driver was already working down through the gears, the front end dipping and the motor roaring down until the car idled roughly next to him, god knew what jumping and howling beneath the hood. A tinted window slid down like a peepshow shade.
Hot! Said a man, eyes afire with some breed of insanity. Balls steeping in their own juices hot! Boy, what manner of hell has happened to you? The man was lean as a whip, ceaseless with outrageous chatter. An electrical current seemed to course through him. Need water? He said. Need food? He beckoned Cartwright to put his bike in the back. C’mon, he urged. Cool in here. Hurry up! I got a little piece a chicken waitin’ on me over in Burns got a fire needs puttin out. Hey! She got a sister…she’s a little thick but she got looow self-esteem. He winked lewdly. Get you in here, boy! He reached down beneath the dash and a pop issued from the back of the vehicle. Go on load up that rattletrap. Ride with Ol’ Jessup here a while. Where you going in no hurry anyway?
Just…said Cartwright, baffled by the idea of a destination, of this specter risen calamitous from the darkening side of the earth and into the evening like a bat.
…air in the conversation already and it not a minute since we met…
Is this a Hearse?
No, this here’s a promotional vehicle for Marlboro cigarettes, he said, lighting one. Course it’s a fuckin’ hearse. Won it off some assclown in Jackpot should a stuck to undertakin ‘stead a cards. You gettin in or what? When he stopped speaking his mouth continued to move as if the conversation did not stop but was merely muted, green veins in relief writhing over his temples. A pair of brass testicles in miniature swung from the rearview mirror, a double edged razor blade on a tether. The man stared out down the road. Tick-tock he said.
The interior was upholstered in black silk like the inside of a high end coffin, pleated like a cummerbun. The man wore a pair of jeans, tiny cowboy boots with little flames on the sides, a black leather vest over a torso covered in lurid tattoos, skin the color of a madrone tree where it showed through. He looked like a junky or a carnie or both.
All right, he said, winding the motor and setting them squirreling off down the road, breath of scorched rubber and the scenery either side of the headlights already blurring past. Course I was gonna pick you up said the man. Be unchristianlike, leave you hangin out here. Lord knows what’d a happened to you. Get you some water. Behind the seat there.
Cartwright turned and fished around for something that felt like a water bottle, his eyes adjusting. Something grasped at his arm and he recoiled as if he’d been shocked.
Big canteen. Can’t fuckin’ miss it.
Something’s back there…
Cartwright stared into the dim recesses of the car, mind straining to put a name to some formless dark shape. He heard a mewling sound.
Yeah. Watch out for Nelson there. He bites.
After a while he made out of the darkness a small dark skinned child strapped into a childseat with a hank of rope. It watched him blankly, it’s head so disproportionately large it seemed to take an effort to keep it on a plane. It straightened it’s head then it listed over again. A lesser piece of rope acting as a tumpline and kept it’s neck from snapping. It’s head lolled against the rope and it stared berry-eyed at Cartwright.
That’s my boy said the man. Gonna be an astrophysicist with that noggin. Eh? Eh? Actually, he’s a retard. Not even supposed to be alive. He drummed his fingers rapidly against his thigh, jutted his head forward and back to some inner beat. Cartwright found the canteen and took a swallow, mouth and throat revolting at the moisture.
Slow down, boy. You about parched. Wouldn’t been more’n a husk tomorrow. Road kill. Good thing I come along.
Yeah said Cartwright.
The man turned, head cocked, eyes penetrating Cartwright like some sixth sense. What you need is a little pick-me-up. Know what I mean? Does it like to party? He slid a plate of glass from a slot beneath the radio, a nude woman etched into it, the name MARIAH in some calligraphic type. He produced a yellowish rock from his vest pocket and dropped it on the plate, took the razor blade from the rearview and pressed it against the glass. Go on then. Chop-chop.
What is it?
Rocket fuel. Hell.
I’ll have some anyway said Cartwright. He took up the razor and shaved the side of the rock, hands trembling. Bits of it flaked out over the plate. How much?
Jus’ whack it all up. What you doin out here?
I just got out of the army. Started heading North.
North a place or a direction?
I got a place in mind, he said, thinking of the fever dream. In that direction.
What’d you do in the Army?
Cartwright hesitated. Not much.
Look like you done somethin.
No. Yeah. I did some things.
Yeah?
I was a Ranger.
No shit? What Battalion?
The Third.
Yeah? Said the man. Me too. He leaned over, pointed to a tattoo on his shoulder, a snake wrapped around a lightning bolt. Seventy-Fifth Regiment. Gothic Serpent. Somalia. He watched Cartwright work the rock into powder. Knock those pebbles down and make two big lines. Ever get you any?
I was in Iraq. Two tours.
Yeah? City or desert?
Both. Cartwright was acutely aware of himself, felt he was on a specimen slide beneath a hot light. He knew he should say something, that it was somehow critical, but the words wouldn’t come and wouldn’t come and he knew he’d passed yet another unsigned line. The water he drank ran through him and came out of his skin.
Shit, said the man. Hey? Ever see the devil dance across the sand?
Cartwright paused, the blade scraping, stopping on the glass.
The man continued staring at him. Shit, he said again, leaning back into the seat. He fished a brass tube from his vest. That’s good right there. Hold that up where I can get at it.
He sucked half a line up his right nostril, finished with the left then handed the tube to Cartwright, who realized the odd smell in the car was the drug gassing off from the man, sulfurous, ether of some high powered solvent. God Damn! Whew! Go on, boy, get that in you…
Cartwright did the line.
I seen the devil once said the man. Everyone who been around the world like we have got a devil story, right? He was sittin in a market bar in Mogadishu. We’d been followin this guy, this Hassan Awale around, advisor to Aidid, like Hitler’s Hess. But you probly knew that, bein a Ranger an all. Anyway. We ended up followin this guy into this open market where he meets with this giant white dude in a white suit. He’s sittin there dressed like some southern plantation dandy, just calm as can be, and him surrounded by these coal black islamy sunbitches. We’re operating plainclothes but everyone knows who the fuck we are, turds in a punchbowl. But this man, he’s settin fire to this liquor, drinkin’ the flames right off the top. I mean, fire’s crawlin right up his beard and over his face. Me an Merckx figure it’s some trick. He’s got some liniment or ointment slathered on keeps ‘im from burnin up. Awale sits down next to him and the man in the white suit points over at us and smiles, lifts his drink. Awale turns. Everyone’s suddenly staring. But this man just waves us off as if wavin’ at flies and everone goes back to doin what they’re doin, which seems to be waiting, all pensive like. Awale and this white dude have their meeting. He’s drinkin down shots of fire and Awale’s refillin his glass like some barbitch. But what I noticed finally was that all these hardasses sittin around, pirates, mercenaries, jihadists. Whatever. They’re scared. An I mean ever one of ‘em. That oily fear smell is thick in the air. Can’t you smell it? Smells like nitro, like if you smacked a shotglass down too hard the place would go up in a blue flame. And it’s because of this man.
When their meeting ended Awale leaned over and kissed this dudes hand. Everything was just way out of skew. Merckx and I split up. He follows Awale, and me, I get word to follow this white dude. He gets into a cab and heads west out of town, everyone at control wonderin’ who the fuck is this guy?
‘Course bein a Ranger, you know what it’s like. Places where death reigns without a veil over it. The dark places of the earth. Everything’s infused with it like an antiglow. The buildings. The people. The light’s all weird. That’s Mogadishu. Iraq like that?
Cartwright’s palms were pressed hard against either side of his nose, eyes clenched shut and his chin buried into his chest. He did not answer. The driver shrugged, smiled, continued.
This man, he said dreamily. He was like that. Like he sucked the light from everything, like if there were any flowers there, they’d blacken and nod as he passed.
I flagged a taxi and followed this guy out of Moog’, out the asshole and into the greater toilet. This scabland. Nothin’ around. Everything sepia. Mind straining poverty, these tiny dirt settlements. A few goats and nekkid kids whackin’ em on the ass with sticks. After a while my driver starts gettin nervous and I point a gun at him and it don’t help.
We follow this taxi for an hour into this great nothing before it starts weavin across the road, straightenin, weavin, straightenin. It idles down to a crawl and rolls over on it’s side in a ditch. I have the driver stop maybe a hundred meters back. This dude doesn’t speak a lick of english and my swahili ain’t so great, but he’s fuckin’ scared, eyes poppin from his skull. The wheels are still turnin on this little Fiat. We sit and watch for a while. Maybe a minute or two. Then the driver’s window rolls down and out through it climbs this woman. She’s like…I don’t know man. Like every girl you ever wanked off to rolled into one. Like Sophia Loren times twenty if that’s possible. It just ain’t. She looks over at us, standing on the driver’s door just cool as can be, then hops off the car onto the top of the ditch and starts walking out into the desert, all high heels, legs, tits, ass goin up and down. This, out in the middle of the fuckin’ Somali desert. Right, Jack.
I take the keys from the ignition as the taxi driver has suddenly fruited a new pair of balls. All them Betty Burkas never elicited in him a feelin’ like the one suddenly runnin through his loins. Anyway. I take the keys and get out, quarter up on the car, that sumbitch walkin’ behind me gibberin’ in swahili and gesturin with his hands. I’m thinkin’ did I somehow follow the wrong car? Was she in there all this time?
I get close, shout hey motherfucker! Get the fuck on out! Nothin. Closer and I see a little brother curled against the passenger door. He’s in a fetal position, got his hands pressed into his crotch. I reach in to grab him and he starts screaming like a woman. I see then that something has happened in a horrible way to his junk. Meanwhile, my taxi driver starts chasin this woman out into the desert, sort of lopin after her like some depraved simian creature, callin’ and cluckin’ in that strange tongue. I could see it in his eyes when I took the keys. Fuckin animal.
She’s out maybe five hundred meters, walkin’ across the baked earth on these stillettos and leavin’ not so much as a mark. She turns towards this guy, throws her arms over her head and starts undulating, her clothes slidin’ to the ground, hips movin like they were on bearings and him slaverin like a dog runnin toward her and she’s just bare ass and ungodly in that strange light. He throws his arms around her. To drag her to the ground. Gonna tear him off a piece, you know? Well.
The man looked over at Cartwright. He was keeled against the passenger window with his eyes rolled back into his skull. A thin skein of blood ran from his nostrils.
Ain’t lookin so good, Ranger. Want me to finish the story? He reached over and lifted Cartrights head up and down by the jaw. Yeah? You want ol’ Jess to finish? Okay. Don’t go pukin’ in my hearst now.
So this monkey, he wraps himself around her like a dog and pulls her to the ground. You know what stopped me from helping her? From making the slightest move? It was a dream I had when I was a kid. Over and over, this nightmare. The scene was happenin exactly as it did then, only then I was the rapist and the dude holding a gun was my future self and the woman bein dragged down had risen beautifully from the earth like the flower from a demon seed. It hit me then that a dream was all any of this ever was. All of it, prefigured or not. And that I’d somehow shifted roles, escaped something terrible. Or rather traded one terrible reality for another. My whole life. A series of funhouse mirrored images. Illusions, agreed upon or not. God knows it and devil knows it.
Well. He managed to get her to the ground and get it out of his pants. But that was it. She, this thing, folded itself around him so tight it broke him in two. After a while his screams wound down. It laid there upon him, sucking him dry, eating his soul perhaps. Then it changed again…just morphed and went slithering off down a hole in the earth. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. I thought watching it was marking me in some way. But I know now I’ve always been marked. The only difference between me and the rest of the world is the degree of acceptance, how far the blindfold had fallen. What I was willing to look at and accept.
He stopped speaking for a moment, head darting slightly fore and aft. The rest of this world, he said. Every mindless zombie movin’ around out there eating and shitting and fucking in dreamland has a dark hand steering them toward an end. Their struggles feed it, and it baits them with hope. There ain’t no consequences. You just play the parts you can. But you better play them well, Ranger.
A jack hare paused in the headlights, darted for the roadside, ran mindlessly back into the road where it made a series of loud clunks as it passed along the undercarriage. The man smiled. He reached down and slid a knife from his bootwell. A hungry mewling issued from the darkness in back.
Once you accept it, there’s no goin back. The hole it leaves if unfillable. But that don’t stop one from trying. He pulled the car to the side of the road. Cartwright slumped bonelessly into the passenger door. His eyes were open and he seemed to be staring at a postcard stuck to the dash, a pastoral of mountains, rivers and trees, but it was too dark to see. The man slid across the bench seat and put his arms around him and stroked the back of his head.
Ranger, said the man. Shit.