My worn and dusty shoe dangles Above a billion years Three thousand feet of history Just beneath my sole
The river’s cut is steep But the fall is not my fear Instead the eons stacked in shades of red Countless to a squint Each the span of all of human history But not fissure, crack or grain of sand To mark my desperately important life Humility here is cast in stone
Clear sky night Mirror to infinity My quarrelsome curiosity persists What chance I am now? What chance I am here? And because of me, who is not? By what chance me instead of they?
Reflecting on infinity There is no chance that I exist My carbon chain evolving Since long before Amoeba fucked amoeba And for all time since Through famine, drought and war Flings and rapes Disease and rarely peaceful bounty The chance of me Ten thousand eons beyond the one
The other then Who if not for me? In the star-light blue it’s clear There must be none but me My parents parents parents lay upon themselvesu And their parents parents parents lay upon themselves Through all of time And I became inevitable
And you, Dear, became inevitable And these words became inevitable And this moment became inevitable And you and I became the resolve of all of history We are impossible to be We are impossible not to be Yet the eons insist That we take this our moment With and without our will To enrich the sediment of having been And become a part of our own grand and deep canyon Our rich and colored geologies Celebrated by futures hence
When I arrived at O’Brien Barracks, I was tired. I hadn’t slept on the plane from JFK to Rhein-Main or on the bus from Rhein-Main to Schwabach, my low-quarters were scuffed and my dress greens were wrinkled and stunk from the travel. There were five of us ‘cruits and when we got off the bus in the middle of the dirt parade ground in front of the barracks for the 1/1 Cavalry Squadron, there were catcalls of ‘fresh booty’ and whistles and threats, ‘get back on that bus ‘cruit ‘fore I beat your ass’ and we stood there, in the September sun with our duffel bags at our feet, all of us privates E-deuce fresh out of Basic and AIT, and we wondered what we’d gotten ourselves into. It was 1975.
The story circulating in our new unit as we shuffled our feet in the gravel and dust waiting for what we didn’t know, was that a guy had been court martialed and given a jail sentence and a dishonorable discharge for pedaling dope. The guy who’d narced him out, Spec-4 Jimmy James, Jim Jim they called him, Jesus-freak and likely Army lifer, was jammed into his own wall locker and thrown out the third-story window of his barracks room. A noteworthy event, even for the Cav.
The Army is gossip driven and Jim Jim’s demise was, if nothing else, good gossip. The story with its oddly specific details was told over and over for weeks. There were discrepancies and inconsistencies between tellers, but overall the story hung together. And because of those details, it seemed to me more likely true than not. Even though it would take a several guys to do the thing described; even though they were complicit in murder; even though there had to be absolute trust amongst conspirators as Jim Jim’s roommates, platoon members, friends, NCOs and officers, were called into the MP station and questioned, no one was ever charged with Jim Jim’s death by broken neck.
The details were explicit, consistent and horrifying such that I imagined them for myself; yanked from dreamless sleep, a sock jammed into my throat; the crunch and blinding pain of my nose cartilage smashed flat by gloved knuckles, the salt-taste of blood, the whispered curses in the sleeping quiet, voices I knew from the mess hall, the EM club, local gasthofs; my blankets tangling around me as I twist and kick, trapped in a stockade of hard-muscle as the blows don’t stop; gloved hands grabbing my legs, my shoulders, my arms; fighting for air through the blood in my nose and throat and the sock and the leathered hand crushing my neck; my locker door banging as I struggle and kick and beg without voice as they wrestle me to it, and limb by limb force me inside, my dress greens and overcoat and khakis cascading from their wire hangers around me; the darkness, the darkness, the hideous fear, the hollow sound of my grunts and voiceless pleas echoing around me and the locker doors slam shut. As I kick and push against the sheet metal walls and the flimsy shelves give and buckle around me, my locker is tipped on its side, hoisted and balanced by whispered curses and moved in shuffling steps and then no longer balanced and starting to slide with me head down and the horrifying realization; and the long, long, forever long fall.
I don’t know whether my imagined story is what happened or not. What I do know is that it doesn’t matter, because it could have happened. In 1975, three years after they were pulled out of Viet Nam, soldiers of the 1/1 Cav were still in shock that they had been ground down and thrown out by barefoot farmers. For combat units, and the Cav was that, it was particularly humiliating. It destroyed for us the legacy left by our fathers and uncles; we were no longer the unbeatable force for good. It was personal. It was emotional. It was something felt and not talked about. It was PTSD before PTSD was a thing. That disorder, that humiliation, that 7.62mm headshot to morale had left the Cav badly wounded. And throughout the ranks, troops were drinking and taking drugs and talking to Jesus to ease the pain. And so we learned, we ‘cruits.
There are a lot of ways to die in a peacetime army. The Jeep, the ubiquitous M151, canvas top, no seatbelts, no roll bar, was notorious for rolling over and killing driver and passenger, usually an officer, not that its reputation slowed us down; being mostly teenagers, we’d wind up that gutless 4-cylinder engine, bang out the clutch and drive those little trucks as fast as they would go. POL drivers, a lot of them teenagers, too, would race five-ton trucks through mountains and villages on thin German roads in the dark of early morning, a pair of 650-gallon fuel pods behind them sloshing full. Stoned on hash and crank and awake for days, they rolled those trucks off the road, ran them into barns and other trucks and tracks and civilian vehicles and whatever else that didn’t get out of their way. They died, too. A Sheridan driver going fast down hill can’t make a curve on a mountain road and the little tank plunges fifty feet to land upside down in a creek, the TC standing in the turret crushed and dead, the driver drunk and court-martialed. Tank gunnery at Graf, guys sleeping on cots in Tent City, an artillery round lands on their tent and kills them all. The arty guys said it was a short round. Didn’t matter, eight guys dead and Jesus nowhere to be found.
And we killed each other, too.
In the mess hall, two guys arguing, a dozen of us not watching over coffee dregs and cold scrambled eggs, getting late, time for formation. I knew them both, not well but well enough to know their names and nod in passing, Snow and Hook. Brought up on a dirt farm in Alabama, Hook was getting out, he was in the final days of clearing post, signoffs from S1, S2, S3, the Arms Room, the Mailroom, Supply, the Reenlistment NCO, and the rest. He was going home, back to “the world.” Four days to go.
As “fuck you” and “motherfucker” and “n****r” got louder, Snow and Hook stood up from their mess trays and faced off. And then we were all standing and the shouted hard-consonant whispers to “kick his ass,” “beat that motherfucker,” “slap that bitch” engulfed us. And from the circle of starchless fatigues and stubbled cheeks and unshined boots, no call to stop, to think, to shut the fuck up and sit down. I share that shame.
Hook shoved Snow, two hands on his chest, and Snow followed up with a wide, slow roundhouse that banged into Hook’s cheek. Hook looked surprised, like the punch hurt his feelings more than it hurt his face. He stared at Snow like this wasn’t part of the story, as though the punch had taken the narrative in a direction he hadn’t expected. Then, as though at just that moment an idea occurred to him, Hook groped for his belt and unsnapped the sheath and pulled out his knife, a 4” folding Buck, the same knife that was on my belt, the same knife on display in the lighted glass counter at the PX. Snow watched with the rest of us. He looked surprised, too.
The stabbing was overhand and clumsy. Snow never raised his hands to fend it off, never backed up, never looked away, as though he never believed that his friend would cut him. But cut him Hook did, striking down and hard into his chest. Snow stepped back, a sad, maybe disappointed look on his face; he never said a word, just stared at his friend and then he stumbled back another step and collapsed on his side halfway under one of the mess hall tables and there was silence and the blood pooled on the floor and we who’d stood and watched turned in our trays at the dishwasher window and hurried out to morning formation while the Mess Sergeant called the medics and the MPs. And so Hook didn’t ETS or go back to the world and marry Margaret or Mary Sue or buy a new Chevrolet or a Kenwood stereo or eat mom’s cooking or go to college on the GI Bill. Instead, he went to Mannheim, the Army prison in Europe, for twenty years. I testified at his court-martial.
The black vinyl snapped and cracked when I sat on it. The night was cold like that. I fumbled the key into the switch, twisted it and the engine ground around until it’d hacked itself into a roar. Even in the cold, the cab stank like gas and sweat and grease burgers.
I grabbed the mic off the dash, “Eight-two in service, whatcha got Ronald?”
“H.P., northbound 35E at Maryland. Accident, car’s in the lane.”
“Ten-four, in route.”
I stomped the clutch and ground the stick into reverse. It was five-thirty in the evening, dark and starting to snow.
Eight-two’s one of Ronald’s wreckers. It’s got a strong motor and good tires, but the body sits on the frame like the fat on Ronald’s belt, kind of saggy and loose. It makes a racket going down the road.
At the end of the block I was driving forty miles an hour. I blew through the stop sign with my foot on the floor. The Highway Patrol contract is big dough and they like us on the scene quick.
I caught a yellow at the intersection and was hoofing it fast up Rice Street when I saw Eight-eight coming the other way. Red with white lettering, Ronald’s trucks stand out from the traffic. George in his blue company coveralls was on the seat.
He tossed me a thumbs-up as he rolled past, then cracked the radio, “Stevie, you got that Highway Patrol?”
“Ten-four.”
“Just come south on 35, looks a good one. Bet you want to know who’s at the scene, don’t you?” I could hear the cackle in his voice.
“Shit.” I said, then keyed the mic, “Nice George, ain’t it, I can’t cuss your mother over the radio?”
“Why’d you want to do something like that for?” He laughed.
“You might want to circle back and get on at Pennsylvania, traffic’s jammed tight down to spaghetti bowl.”
Spaghetti bowl’s a little hollow in the middle of Saint Paul where a wad of freeways and ramps come together like noodles. “Ten-four,” I said and swung Eight-two down a side street.
The radio cracked again, “Lovely Rita, meter maid…” That’s George’s idea of being funny. I screwed down the volume.
The road surface was good yet and I drove fast down Pennsylvania. Two blocks from the ramp, the street turned into a parking lot. Nothing moving. I flicked on the red lights and went up the oncoming lane, a sure ticket if I was caught. According to the law, wreckers aren’t emergency vehicles. They’re supposed to appear on the scene same time as the ambulance and fire guys but with no red lights or siren or fast driving.
I went up the ramp at a crawl, leaning on the horn, red lights flashing. They moved over as they could and I inched by, wheels crunching axle deep in the snow on the one side, mirror grazing cars on the other.
On the freeway, the shoulder was open. I turned off the red lights and put my foot down. By the time I reached the scene, I was doing sixty-five still on the shoulder. I slammed on the brakes and skidded in rodeo-style, pisses her off every time.
Like George said, it was a good one. Somebody’d driven a Delta 88, a beater, banged and rusted to the knees up the bumper of a brand-new Pontiac. Parts and glass and pieces of yellow plastic were spattered all over two lanes of pavement.
I said hello to the cop. She was in the lane directing traffic.
“How you going, Rita?”
She was a few inches shorter than me, five-eight or so, with black hair she kept chopped off at the middle of her neck. Her hat, one of those Smokey the Bear things, she wore tilted down over her face. When she was feeling friendly, she’d tilt it back and pinch it there with her thumb and finger while those green eyes strolled around your face, then she’d yank it back down and all you’d see would be her chin and the brown felt brim of the hat.
She’d been on the force a couple of years, us seeing each other on the job now and again, when we ran into each other in a burger joint. Both of us were eating alone so we sat together. We talked for must have been two hours. When we were leaving, I’d asked her out.
“What do you do, Steve, for a living?” she’d said to me.
“You know what I do, I drive for Ronald.”
“What are you going to be doing in ten years?”
“Hadn’t much thought about it. Same thing I suppose.”
“Think about it,” she’d said. “Call me when you change your mind.”
That was six, eight months before. I hadn’t called her though I still saw her on the road.
“If Ronald wants to keep the contract, he’s going to have to get you guys on the scene faster. I’ve been out here dodging drunks for forty-five minutes.” The hat brim stayed low on her face and her chin, lit by the lights of the passing cars, looked like the butt end of a two-by-four.
“You expect this raggedy piece of shit’s gonna fly, Rita? Traffic’s stopped solid all the way down to spaghetti bowl.”
“Get it out of here.”
“How about the Pontiac?”
“She can drive it.”
The Olds was tore up good. So was the kid driving it. Young, eighteen may nineteen, he looked a Minnesotan, dirt blond hair, heavy shoulders and stumpy legs. He had on a jean jacket over a red vest and chopper mittens on his hands. His nose was bleeding from where his head must have hit the wheel. You could see on his cheeks where he’d been spearing it around with his mittens. He’d been sitting in the cruiser but came over when I backed up to his car.
He right away started talking about his old man. Said he was going to thrash him for wrecking the car. I looked it over. He wasn’t going to be impressed, that was sure. The grill was stove in all the way to the motor block, the hood was wrinkled and the bumper was lying on the pavement under the car. But that wasn’t my business.
I told the kid to sit in the truck while I hooked up. I threw a 4×4 under the twisted metal where the bumper used to be to protect the straps. They weren’t cheap and I’d cut one a couple of weeks before on a twisted bumper. Ronald would not be pleased if I wrecked another one. I threw the bumper on the back of the wrecker with timbers and chains and made a fast pass with the broom to make Rita happy.
“Where to?” Rita’d stopped traffic and waved us into the lane. We were rolling north on 35.
“How much do you think to fix it?”
“I expect it’s junk.”
The kid moaned. I looked across at him. He was sitting doubled over with his face in his hands.
“Go easy,” I said, “It was a piece of shit.”
He didn’t say anything, just sat there hunched over on the seat.
“Where you want to go? It’s costing you by the mile to have me drive you around.” I pulled off my gloves and slapped them on the defrosters to dry.
“Shit, how much is this going to cost?”
“Twenty-five to pick it up, buck-a-mile after the first three.”
The kid was quiet for a couple of seconds, then told me his address. It was in a little burg about forty miles north of the city. In that weather, it was going to be a ride. The snow was coming down thick and it was starting to blow, the gusts were shaking the truck, and the road was getting icy black. I could feel it getting slick through the wheel. I crunched around on the seat until my back was comfortable, lit a cigarette, then picked up the mic and called Ronald. I could hear in his voice he was pissed I was going out of town. Bad weather’s where he makes his money. He’d want all the trucks he could get.
“What work do you do?” I said to the kid.
“I’m studying some classes at Vo-Tech.”
“What are you taking up?”
“Pipe fitting.”
“You like it?”
“Could you not talk to me,” he said.
It was dark in the cab, but I got a glance at him in the headlights of on-coming cars. His head was leaned back against the window and his eyes were closed. His hands were fisted up on his knees. His jacket was open and he’d unzipped the vest. His bloody mittens lay on the seat between us.
“Whatever, you’re paying.”
We rode along like that, not saying anything. After a while, I clicked on the radio. It was a piece of shit Ronald’d salvaged from a junk car when the original died. Outside the city, the only station it would pick up was top-forty. I left it on to cover up the racket from the truck. The D.J. was babbling on the telephone to some teenage girl, ‘the ninth caller’. Every time he’d pause, she’d squeal. She’d won some record by a group I never heard of.
“Turn that shit off.”
“Look friend, you don’t have to listen to my conversation, but I’ll do what I want with the truck.” I twisted the volume up. The kid was starting to annoy me.
I glanced at him again, he was staring out through the windshield. Wasn’t much to see, just snow, big flakes of it coming straight at us in the headlights.
“I get a smoke from you?”
I didn’t say anything, just took the box out of my pocket and tossed it on the seat.
He punched the lighter. “I got to apologize,” he said. “We just bought that car and we ain’t got money to get another one.”
“Been there.”
“You been following that shit about farmers?”
“Seen something about them having troubles on TV the other night.”
He laughed, “I seen that. Bunch of guys standing around with shotguns holding off the sheriff. Ain’t no point in it. Banks and the government are going to get theirs no matter what. I know. My old man’s a farmer and that shit happened to him. Fucker’s took damn near everything we owned. Pretty much all we’ve got left is a few acres and the house. That’s how come we’re driving that piece of shit car and I’m going to pipe-fitting school, ain’t no future in farming.”
I looked over at the kid. He was staring again through the window at the snow.
We rode along not saying anything. After a while, he kept talking. “Now my old man’s got a job at a gas station. Works with a couple of guys I went to high school with. Makes four-fifty an hour. My mother’s cashiering down at the dairy store.”
“No money in that,” I said.
“Nope.” He changed the subject. “You know what the icing on this shit cake is? You know that cop back there?”
I said, “I know her.”
“Bitch gave me a ticket.”
“No shit? For what?”
“Following too close.”
I had to laugh. “Don’t surprise me. She gave me a speeder once. Said she’d clocked me over the limit four times in a week, time to slow me down. But I’ll tell you what, the woman gives a shit. Once saw her give mouth-to-mouth and CPR to a guy for must have been half an hour when it was twenty below, her going back and forth and back and forth between blowing in his mouth and sitting on his chest. Guy puking all over the place and her down on her knees on the shoulder just keeping on. Had to haul her away in the meat wagon, too, but the guy lived.”
Kid didn’t say anything. By then the road was slick enough we were only going about thirty and I was putting my attention to managing the truck. We’d passed a bunch of cars in the ditch already. Ronald would have my ass if he had to come pull me out.
I figured we had to be getting close, but the snow was too thick to see the exit sign. I told the kid to watch for the ramp. Fifteen minutes we rode like that, not talking, him peering out a hole he’d rubbed in the ice on the door window. We found it, skidded past and backed up.
The ramp had about eight inches on it, but the Eight-two with the kid’s car on the back rolled on up. He told me to take a left at the top. It was a half hour, him giving me directions, before we got to his place.
The drive curved up a hill to the house between two lines of trees. I could only barely make out the wheel ruts under the snow.
The truck slid around some getting up the hill but we made it and I pulled it up in front of the house. It was grey and even by the headlights you could see it was needing paint. There was plastic taped over the windows. Out back was a barn and a pole building.
“Where you want it?”
“This is good. Go ahead and unhook it. I’ll get my old man.” His voice was quiet.
“Can’t put it down ‘til I get paid.” That was Ronald’s rule. Ronald ran a tough outfit – over the radio. Always seemed kind of amusing when he expected a driver, who’d be standing in front of some hardass customer, to be so tough; “Take nothing but cash, don’t unhook ’til you got it.” Then you go in his office and he’s got bars on the windows and a .38 in the drawer.
The kid went inside. A couple of minutes later a guy came out. He was wearing Sorels, laces dragging in the snow, and zipping a parka. It was green with fake wolf fur around the hood. He tromped over to the car and I slid out of the truck.
He stood there staring at it, his bare hands resting in the snow on the fender. He didn’t say nothing. Just stared at it. Under the boom lights it looked bad, it looked like a loaf of bread somebody’d stomped on. I was facing him on the other side of the car. I’d turned off the truck and in the quiet you could hear the snow hissing when it hit the ground. And you could hear him breathing, slow and deep.
Then suddenly, he spun around and started yelling at the house. “Jesus Christ! Roy! Get your ass out here. There was a hoarseness in his voice, the kind that comes from dry cold and cigarettes.
The door slammed and the kid came stumbling down following in the old man’s footprints.
“You little son of a bitch.” Then his hand swung around and hit the kid in the face. It must have hurt, especially with that nose, but the kid stood there and took it. The hand pulled back again, “You goddamned, worthless…”
“Sam, don’t you hit that boy.” The door crashed again and a woman came running down the path. She slipped and fell, picked herself up and kept coming. She didn’t bother to brush off the snow. An old woman, maybe sixty, she was wearing just a brown dress and house slippers on her feet.
“Ellie, goddamn it, you stay out of this.”
“Sam, I’m not going to stand here and let you beat my son.”
“It’s okay, Mom.”
“Shut up, Roy. Get up to the house.” The old lady was standing in front of the old man, her hands on her hips, her elbows poking straight out to either side, “Don’t do this, Sam.”
“Look what he did to the car, Cat.”
“I don’t care. We’ll get another one.”
“With what?”
They kept on that way. I got back in the truck, I didn’t need to hear it.
After a while, the old man came around the truck and I got out, “How much?” he said. He had his wallet out.
“Seventy-three.”
He’d pushed his hood back and under the boom lights I could see his face clear. He looked older than the woman, bald on top with straight grey hair hanging down over his ears. His nose was red with busted blood vessels and his lips were raw and blistered like he spent a lot of time outside. He stared at me. His eyes were glassy and grey but steady, like the headlights of an old car on a dark road. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.
“Look,’ he said like he didn’t want me to hear, “we ain’t got it.”
“I don’t set the prices, I just drive the truck. You can’t pay, I got to take the car.” I could feel Ronald leaning on my shoulder.
He stared at me for what must have been a minute, the headlight eyes flickered, “Take it,” he said.
I got in the truck and started it, then turned It off. The old man hadn’t moved. I got out and shuffled through the snow to him.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”
“Get the fuck out of here.” The headlights had come on strong and bright and were aimed straight in my face.
“Listen,” I could see the old lady standing on the other side of the car watching us, “I can get a couple of hundred bucks for that car at a scrapyard. Lots of good parts in it. Why don’t I give you the difference now between the cost of the tow and what I can get for it. Save you some trouble and you’ll get a few bucks out of it.”
I didn’t see it coming. I guess I didn’t expect it. Out of nowhere his fist slashed around and caught me on the side of my head and threw me back against the truck and then I was lying on my back in the snow with a tingle in my spine and a whistling in my ears and the old lady was bending over me asking about my health.
She pulled me to my feet and leaned me against the truck while she brushed off the snow, all the while saying how sorry she was and please don’t get pissed off. The old man didn’t move, just stood there.
I didn’t say anything, not to the old lady, not to him, just put my foot on the running board and got in the truck. He didn’t move even when I backed the car right up to him turning it around. He just stood there. He wasn’t looking at the car or the truck or me or nothing.
I headed down the hill. I was at the bottom pulling out onto the road when I felt the truck start to go. I spun the wheel and stomped the gas. Too late, and slow and gentle Eight-two and the Olds slid into the ditch.
I didn’t bother trying to drive it out. Eight-two was a two-wheel drive truck, dualies in the rear and it was almost on its side, the car jackknifed up against it. It wasn’t going anywhere. Ronald was going to be pissed.
I called him.
“You what? Damn it, Steve.” He clicked off the mic and there was a long quiet during which I knew he was saying a lot of shit you can’t say over the radio, then, “Can’t you winch it out?”
“Got a car on the hook.”
“I can’t get anybody out there. Highway Patrol’s going to close 35 if the snow doesn’t let up. Let me call Freddie’s and see if they can get a truck out.”
Freddie’s is a little outfit that runs around the area north of the cities.
I was afraid to idle the engine on an angle like that so I didn’t have any heat and the seat was so steep I was jammed up against the door. I lay back on the black vinyl, closed my eyes and shivered.
Ronald hadn’t called back when I heard a noise, a clanking. I couldn’t see anything from inside the truck but it was getting louder. I got out. I had to climb through the passenger door because the driver’s door was wedged against the side of the ditch.
It was a tractor, coming down from the house. I could see the outline of the old man’s parka behind the wheel. And next to him, the kid sitting on the fender. It was an old machine, looked like a dinosaur skeleton with wheels. It had chains on the back that clanked in the snow.
The old man pulled it around in front of the truck and the kid got down. He had a log chain over his shoulder, “Where you want to hook it?” he said.
Links the size of my fist and caked with rust and black grease, damn thing must have weighed a hundred pounds. I grabbed an end, hauled it through the push bumper and shackled it to the frame rail. The kid dropped the other end over the axle of the tractor. I climbed in and started the truck and he flagged on the old man.
Old bastard must’ve spent most of his life on a tractor seat. It it’d been me, I would’ve backed up and put as much slack in that chain as I could then run at it and try to snatch the truck out. Not the old man. He come up against the end of that chain slow and gentle, then eased into the load, letting them tall tires bite down through the snow into the gravel road. As soon as he got traction, boom, he snapped the clutch out and I buried my foot and the Eight-two jerked forward and we earned a couple of feet.
A bit at a time, it took us more than an hour to drag that truck out of the ditch but we did it. And we didn’t break anything. While we were at it, the old lady came down with a thermos of coffee. She was better dressed now in a long coat and rubber boots. She put the thermos on the truck seat and started shoveling snow and hauling that chain. She could pick the damn thing up as easy as I could.
“I was afraid you might have trouble,” she said when we stopped to catch our breath. “Sam and I pull two or three out of here every winter. Sam,” she yelled, “get down and have some coffee.”
Just when we got the truck back on the road, Ronald called to say Freddie couldn’t make it. I explained what had happened, standing on the running board to keep the snow out of the truck, then turned to say thanks. But the old man was headed up the road to the house, the kid sitting on the fender. Already I could hardly see them for the snow. The old lady opened the passenger door and pulled her thermos off the seat, “You want some to take with you?” she asked.
I poured a cup and climbed into the truck. In the cold the black vinyl had hardened. When I sat on it, something tore under my ass and then, stitch by stitch, I felt the seat cover rip wide open. I didn’t bother to look at it.
“Eight-two clear and headed for the barn,’ I said into the mic.
“Ten-four, Eight-two, come on in.”
I dropped the car in the lot and pulled the wrecker around in front of the shop. There were six or eight trucks inside. From under the four-oh, a White tractor with a Holmes 650 wrecker body on the back, I heard the chatter of an air wrench. I squatted down to see who was working on it.
“Stevie, what’s happening. Sounds like you had a time of it.”
“A little tough. Kid ran his car up the ass of a Firebird. The old man couldn’t pay for it.”
George laughed, more of his humor.
I asked him if Ronald was around.
“Nope. He went home just after you cleared.”
I shrugged and walked back to office, picked up the phone and dialed Rita’s number. I didn’t have to look it up, it was one of those that sticks in your head. The clock on the wall read just past midnight.
Spring semester, 1973, eleventh grade. I was sixteen. First day back after winter break, the principal called me into his office and told me that he was putting me on OJT, no more curriculum, no more math, history or French, no more cutting up frogs. On the Job Training was two morning classes a day and a job and that was fine with me. The two classes were the OJT class (we learned how to balance a checkbook) and a gym class; the work experience was to provide the rest of our education. This all happened after my grey-haired French teacher caught me cutting her class for the umpteenth time and sobbed in the principal’s office. In fairness to Madame, it wasn’t just her class, I’d had attendance problems in all my classes.
The first job my OJT teacher found for me was at Apache Carwash at Apache Plaza, a strip mall a few exits up the freeway from my mother’s house. The job paid $1.60 an hour. My co-workers were mostly on work release from the state prison.
It was a full-service carwash. Customers drove in one end, got out of their car, walked to the waiting area at the far end of a long, narrow baby blue concrete hallway with sagging ceiling tiles and paint peeling off the walls in Wheaties-size flakes, then drank stale coffee or not and watched through the fogged plexiglass window for their car to come squeaking and jerking out of the steaming wash tunnel.
Most of the time, I worked on the entry end where we vacuumed the carpet, washed the floormats and pilfered the cars, sifting through the ashtrays for change amongst the cigarette butts, groping under the seats, giving glove boxes a quick rifle. One guy found a snub nose .38 Smith & Wesson under a driver’s seat, put it in his pocket and carried it around for a few days until he lost it. Another guy found a leather blackjack but had to give it back when the owner came looking for it. The pilfering was finders keepers, there was no sharing. When the mats were clean, one of us would idle the car onto the chain and roller belt that pulled it through the sprayers, brushes and dryers.
On the far end, when the car rolled off the end of the belt, the outside was hand-dried, the upholstery wiped down and the inside of the widows cleaned. The best job on that end was driving the cars off the line across seventy-five feet of wet concrete to one of the two overhead doors; the challenge was to spin the tires to get up as much speed as possible then dynamite the brakes and skid to a stop before you hit the door. One of the guys smashed a Corvette through one of the doors and that slowed things down for a few days.
One afternoon, a guy drove in with a dark grey Lincoln Continental, mid-sixties, suicide rear doors, nice car but grimy like it hadn’t been washed in while. As the guy was getting out I looked in the back, garbage covered the back seat and floor up to the top of the front seat; burger bags and boxes and paper cups and fries and chicken bones and chunks of fish burgers and bits of meat patties and half-eaten buns dry and greasy with mayonnaise and ketchup and wrinkled tomatoes and pickles, the whole mass sticky from coke-colored soft drinks splashed over the pile like he’d thrown the cups over his shoulder when he was done being thirsty.
The driver, smirky guy, thirties, wearing a suit and tie and an overcoat, saw me looking at his mess, “All yours, buddy. Have fun.”
I opened the rear door and trash dumped onto the wet concrete floor at my feet. I yanked the yellow rope that shut down the line and Petey, the guy on the passenger side, he’d done time for assault, he and I got to work grabbing fistfuls of the nasty shit with our bare hands and dumping it in the steel trash drums. Frank came stomping back in his rubber boots to see why the line was down. Frank was the manager, he was maybe thirty, rumor was he’d done time for B&E. He saw what we were doing and yelled in my face, “You’ve got my fucking line shut down for this shit? Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him if he thinks I’m going to be his fucking garbage man. Fuck him.”
Frank grabbed the keys out of the ignition, opened the trunk; golf clubs, golf shoes, leather brief case, suits and shirts wrapped in clear plastic from the drycleaner, a couple of bags of groceries. Frank picked up the drum I’d just filled and dumped it on top of the groceries and clothes. And then did the same with the drum on Petey’s side. The garbage overflowed the trunk and Frank couldn’t close the lid until we’d tucked and crammed it into the crannies and the three of us slammed it together. We had fun, just like smirky man wanted.
Tex, tall, faded 501s, t-shirts, Mickey Mouse boots, Army field jacket, his last name, Dallas, sewn above one pocket, US Army sewn above the other, long hair, heavy beard, salesguy smile. He’d done a couple of tours as a grunt in Viet Nam. After he got out, he drifted around the country until he ran out of money and tried robbing a gas station. He got busted and learned his lesson and gave up armed robbery. Now he was peddling dope: weed, crosses, reds, blotter, black beauties, junk, blow; whatever a guy asked for, Tex knew where to get it, what was good, how much was too much, what was a fair price. He supplied the whole carwash.
After a couple of months at Apache, my teacher found me a job with Associated Motor Carriers Tariff Bureau, Inc., AMCTB. The company compiled and printed trucking tariffs; my job was to proofread pages and pages of columns and columns of numbers and once proofread, hand them back to one of the dozen or so floral-dressed, high-heeled, big-haired old ladies in the typing pool clacking away at pistachio-green IBM Selectrics. When they were done painting out their mistakes with lumpy whiteout and vaguely aligning the corrections in the rows and columns, they’d slap them down in my inbox and spin around and click click click back to their desks all the while not looking at me like the mistakes were mine. I’d print them on the company’s AB Dick offset printer, collate and staple. The job paid $2.50 an hour, a nice little bump from the carwash.
My immediate coworkers were Dicky and Catman. Dicky was working to make AMCTB a career, he was short, skinny, balding and thirty and had diabetes and a wife. He was our boss. Catman, good looking guy with good hair down to his shoulders and a skinny black mustache, was 24, eight years older than me, and lived in his mother’s basement in a wood-paneled apartment that he’d built for himself. He had a waterbed and no plans for a career beyond five o’clock.
I’d get to work at 10:30 and at noon Catman and I would take our lunch break. On Wednesdays, we’d take his car, a yellow ’66 Impala, 283 V8, automatic, black vinyl top, chrome Cragars, and head over to Mr. B’s, blow a number on the way if one of us had some weed. Mr. B’s was a tired, street-front bar with blacked out windows facing University Avenue that on Wednesdays hosted a lingerie show, Mr. B’s Lunchtime Lingerie.
We’d been there a couple of times, me sucking down screwdrivers, before the bartender got around to asking for my ID; I showed him the draft card I’d made on the AB Dick and that was good enough for him and forever after, when I gave him the nod, he’d mix up orange juice and vodka with two maraschino cherries on top and a little plastic straw and hand it to me with a wink. Drinks were sixty cents, I’d give him three quarters.
Once the show got going, Catman and me and twenty or thirty other guys would stand in a press to watch, guys in dusty work boots standing next to guys in shined dress shoes, all of us, drinks in our hands, heavy-breathing the hot fog of cigarette smoke, Mennen deodorant and sweat, shuffling and shifting our feet on the butts and spilled liquor.
And the skinny girls with ribs you could count and no butts and no breasts, and the fat girls with G-string floss disappeared between wobbling cheeks, and the girls trying to hide yellow bruises behind silky scarves and makeup that looked like latex paint, and the girls with scars or bandages or missing teeth just trying to get through their set, would, one at a time, clump around that little stage in their platform high heels, painted fingernails clenching the smudged stainless steel pole as they peeled off their costumes and bras while pretending with no enthusiasm to dance to whatever music was on the cassette tape they’d handed the bartender. And we whistled and yelled and threw coins on the stage and went back to work.
In June of 1974, my high school gave me a diploma certifying that I was educated.
I got out of the Army in March of 1978 and stayed in Europe. It was cold in Germany and I hitchhiked south. I met Clayton at a campground in San Sebastián in northern Spain. Tall, skinny, scuffed leather-soled wingtips with no socks and food-stained khaki shorts, Clay had worked in a shoe store in London. He had an Isles complexion, a perpetually startled expression, and drove a faded blue Renault station wagon with a dented-in passenger door. He was twenty-eight and on the run from his pregnant girlfriend.
In Madrid, we picked up Beau. He was a Kiwi who’d worked as a stevedore in Tauranga before coming abroad. Beau was an ugly man, 5’8” or so, thick legs, heavy shoulders, hard, powerful short-fingered hands, untrimmed beard, bald head, and a round face that looked like back on the docks he might have lost a few, thick, crooked lips, smashed-flat nose, cauliflowered ear, his left ear. The three of us jammed into the Renault with our backpacks and from Madrid, we traveled south through Cordoba and Sevilla to Algeciras.
The Lonely Planet Guide warned us that Morocco was dangerous, that travelers should have experience. After several weeks in Spain, we declared ourselves experienced, filled out customs forms, waited to be waved across the border and drove west along the cliffs toward Tangiers, the Mediterranean with its glassy waters far below becoming more intense and shockingly blue as the sea got deeper. As evening set in, we followed a tiny switchback track to the beach and set up camp under the trees fringing the sand, just like in Spain. Clay set up his tent, Beau and I threw our bags down on the sand, the canopy of trees with the stars of Orion glittering through as our tent. We built a fire.
The axe handle blow to my head made a deep, cracking noise that echoed through my skull and shattered my consciousness into small pieces, each piece part of a larger reality, a jigsaw puzzle dumped out. It was quick, the blow and its echoes, so quick that I didn’t feel it in the moment, but only remembered it afterwards. Putting the puzzle back together took time, and yet, all the while my mind was struggling, my body was twisting and writhing. And that’s when the pieces came together. We’d rolled out our sleeping bags at some distance from each other, I was closest to the car and took the hit. Trapped in my bag, I rolled toward the car and shoved my head underneath trying to protect it from the axe handle and the punches and the stomping feet.
Forever moments later, I heard Beau bellow in his Kiwi accent, “Bloody fucking hell!” as he charged into the mob standing over me. There were six or eight of them and they were focused on kicking the shit out of me and he took them by surprise. As they turned on him, I got to my feet and together we fought, Beau and I, leaning back on each other, shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I remember hearing an animal howl that didn’t stop, that didn’t pause to breathe, that was a constant in our struggle. I wondered what it was as I shoved and kicked and punched at the shadow shapes in front of me before realizing the howling was me.
One of them had a flashlight, the beam slicing through the dark giving my memory of the event a black-and-white cinematic quality. As we struggled, I grabbed a rock from our firepit, perfectly formed to fit my hands and just heavy enough, an early man’s killing stone. I lifted it above my head and brought it down with the force of a hundred and eighty-five pounds of military fitness, adrenalin and terror just as the light flashed across a neck and bare shoulder and that’s where that rock hit, exactly in that confluence. He collapsed on the ground at my feet.
That was the end. They yelled and called to each other and ran into the dark, hauling with them the man whose neck I’d crushed. We called for Clay and got no answer. Frantic and terrified, we felt our way through the trees and underbrush where his tent had been searching for his body, certain that he was unconscious or dead. After many minutes, a faint “hello” and then another. We returned the call and Clay stumbled into the ruins of our camp clutching his hatchet. He’d heard the attack and had ran off down the beach and was unhurt.
We stuffed our wrecked and bloody gear into the car, drove up the switchbacks and spent the rest of the night in a thatched roof truck stop smoking hand rolled black tobacco cigarettes and telling tough-guy stories and bad jokes while the town doctor yawned and set my arm and sewed a dozen stitches into my head and six into my arm and another dozen or fifteen into Beau, all without the luxury of anesthesia.
The next morning when we should have been driving, we went to the police. That was inexperience. My French was horrible, my Arabic non-existent and Clay and Beau didn’t try. To this day I don’t know what we were accused of, but the cops were hostile and serious. At four o’clock in the afternoon, after being questioned aggressively about the night and waiting for hours perched on a wooden bench in a small room with concrete walls and no windows, they gave us back our passports and let us go.
We drove out of that town and stopped the car. The conversation, and I remember it well, was about whether or not to leave Morocco, whether or not to turn around and go back to the ferry, back to Spain. I argued, leaning against the Renault me with my arm in a blood-crusted sling, against leaving a country we hadn’t seen. Beau agreed and then so did Clay.
* * * * *
We needed a place to sleep. As we talked, Taibi and Aref, a couple of carpenters working on a house across the road, came over and squatted down and brought out their kief and a pipe and passed it around and I told them our story. Taibi invited us to stay at his house. It wasn’t far. I translated his offer and Clay shook his head no, “Let’s try to get to Tangiers tonight.”
Beau said, “We won’t make it, mate. It’s getting dark, road’s shitty, we ain’t slept in two days. Probably thieves and bandits out there, besides.”
I said, “Let’s stay with Taibi.” Clay didn’t say anything.
Aref grinned and waved and shouldered his toolbelt and walked away down the road and the four of us climbed into the car and Taibi gave directions, pointing us down desert dirt roads until he told Clay to stop in front of a prickly pear cactus hedge. The hedge was ten or twelve feet tall, maybe four feet thick, neatly trimmed and dense so you couldn’t see through it. We grabbed our gear and he led us through a tiny wooden gate into a dirt courtyard with a small concrete house with a flat roof in the middle. The hedge completely surrounded his house.
Taibi set up a tarp on poles in the courtyard and we laid out our sleeping bags. His wife brought us dinner, couscous and chicken in thick sauce. We sat cross legged and ate with our fingers, copying our host. When we were finished, Taibi wanted to talk. Sitting side-by-side on the ground, we talked world politics, carpentry, fishing, scuba diving and I don’t remember what else. We talked in French and when Beau and Clay couldn’t follow the conversation, they went to sleep. That went on, him talking to me in French and me nodding until it was 3:00 in the morning. Finally, I gave up and told him that that I needed sleep and he nodded and shouted out a command in Arabic.
A young woman, his daughter, stepped around the corner of our tarp as though she’d been waiting and stood silent in front of us. She was sixteen, maybe, and teenage-thin. Her hair, in the flickering yellow light, was a thick, wavy auburn-black that she wore pulled back over her shoulders. Her complexion was smooth and clear, the golden sand color of the North African desert but richer, deeper, more complex. She was wearing a white and gold kaftan that touched her body in a way that accentuated her small breasts and slim hips. She was barefoot.
At first, I thought her eyes were black but as I looked at her and she stared back at me and her father talked, I realized that in fact her eyes were the same unfathomably deep blue as the Mediterranean viewed from the cliffs above. A soft smell of citrus, tangerines or maybe mandarins, surrounded her, the scent just detectable over the stink of kerosene. She stood, her lips tense and pinched, her feet together, her arms stiff at her side, her eyes never moving from mine while her father proposed our marriage. It took a while for me to understand.
Tangiers, Rabat, Casablanca, Fez, we spent a month in Morocco, camping in campgrounds patrolled by uniformed, no-nonsense guards. Our days we spent walking the narrow, thousand-year-old cobblestone streets, drinking mint tea in the markets under cobalt skies, canvas tarps shading us from the desert sun, and in the evening, smoking joints rolled from a mix of hashish and black tobacco.
Beau and I became quite close. Clay became increasingly bitter and distant. The Renault was his, he was our driver, and so we were forced into an uneasy truce when we were in the car and when not, we separated, Beau and me, our tents side by side in sandy campgrounds, and at some distance, Clay’s tent, the nylon sagging around the little aluminum poles bent and broken in the struggle. We never talked about it, but the attack ruined us.
We left Morocco the way we came, on the ferry from Ceuta to Algeciras. Clay dropped Beau and me at a train station. I took the train to Nuremburg then to Rhein-Main Air Base, got on a C-130 and started college that fall.
