my fingers—his eyes traced my hand. Klaus Kinski came to mind, as Herzog’s Nosferatu, and grunions filled my head, beneath a heavy moon. We were alone.
“That little flake,” said the man as he nodded to the monkey, “is called José.” He sucked a tooth and gestured to a crucifix he himself must have painted red. “Ronald, though, he’s not so bad as Fortinbras or him.” Tattooed across the fingers of one hand was the word BEND, across the other, GIVE. A cigarette twitched in the webbing there. Empties fouled the dash.
“We hit a bear,” I said.
Why I did I couldn’t say. We’d had an accident. What difference how? Maybe I feared any less a case for invading the old man’s turf—and sure as shit I had such a feeling, like I’d missed some glaring portent of doom, I didn’t know—would send him on a rampage. Or maybe it was just his creepy gaze.
“Who’s that?” he said. Dinky was still in the mud.
“He’s sick.”
“I see, I see, so that’s who he is.”
“Listen, mister, we need a ride bad.”
“You need something bad,” said the man. In slow order he tapped the Christ, the monkey, and the yellow dog beside him. “What do you fellows think R-E this crisis?” I stood waiting while he sucked his teeth some more and spit. “Throw him in,” he said with a jerk of his thumb to the rear.
“He’s sick,” I said.
“You hear that, Fortinbras?” he said to the dog.
I found no change in the geeze’s tone, but Fortinbras dropped from the window and appeared in the bed behind him. A spate of dolls in varied dismemberment lay about the beast, some missing heads, others arms or legs. The man shot me a look part fishy, part fatherly, his eyes running off two ways at once.
“You going to lay one, boy, or get off the pot?”
I wanted to be naked, to lie naked beneath a tender sun. I wanted the smell of a clean bright day, and heat, tart and dry. I wanted a heat that lasted, endless sand, visions of dazzle and grain. Why wouldn’t his eyes release me?… Lanterns, vultures, many things in hell… I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever… Madmen know nothing…
I got Dinky in the cab. The man took my hand. It was smooth and hard and cold as outer space.
“The name is Super.”
“Andrew,” I said. “That’s Dinky.”
“Pleased to rub truth with you boys.”
“We could use a doctor now, I think.”
Super gripped his wheel. “You do what you’ve done, you’ll get what you’ve got. Catch our drift?”
Dinky drew himself up to look at this strange man. “We hate doctors,” he said.
“Then which way you going?” I said.
“The only way that’s good,” Super said, “and that’s the way we come.”
“That is good,” Dinky said with a smile. “Because we sure do hate a doctor.”
BIRDFEED AND BULLETS, THE WEEPING BARK OF A million pines…
A freezer’s scent of the clinic and the morgue…
The gleam of a roadside can…
The road wound on, the road kept winding, and sound was a cat’s rough tongue…
Super’s face was constant motion—that silver beard, those leathery cheeks, tiny eyes that flitted and bounced…
He ranted and sang and whispered and howled, and he did it all with ease…
We’d been forsaken, more or less, adrift with the phantoms that were the old man’s words, loosed, it seemed, with each wave of his troubling hand…
At some point he set in about the doings in our cabin, inexplicable, he said, slippery, he said, though never exactly what…
I saw the lovebird, its gaping beak and eyes, I smelled ice cream and road kill and blood…
That familiar longing had returned, for my noons of summer, counting minnows in a jar and naming each breeze. What had happened to those days?
A meerschaum appeared in Super’s hand and then from the glove a bag of gnarly weed, but Dinky went on drooling. Super crammed the stuff in the pipe and with a nail snicked the match he’d somehow managed to keep…
He chortled and smiled, puffed and drove, happy is as happy can…
I took the pipe, he the bottle…
The road was thick with water and mud and stones from the crumbling earth. At every pothole my friend yipped like a dog asleep till at last he jerked to with eyes that could’ve been eggs. When Super gave him the pipe, I thought he’d start coughing, but instead his face melted with the smoke from his lips.
“I was going to ask where we were,” he said, “but now I don’t even care. Onward, Benson!”
“We are no man’s slave,” Super said, and jerked his thumb aft, referring, I supposed, to the bed of broken dolls. “If you care to differ, interrogate the rest.”
“I’m an army man, mister whatever-your-name-is,” Dinky said.
“The name, boy, is Super.”
“The way I said, Super,” said Dinky, and drew himself up, “I’m an army man. And the only thing I’m good for is knowing what makes the grass grow green.” He pointed at Super. “You know what makes the grass grow green?” he said. “Bright red blood.”
“See what you know after you’ve been wearing that grass for a hat a few years.”
“He’s not always like this,” I said.
Super let out a noise, maybe a chuckle, maybe not. “Oh, but you know he is,” he said. “He’s the marathon man. Catch our drift?”
“I am man!” Dinky shouted. “Hear me roar!”
In the distance a light appeared, I hadn’t seen it off to the west as we came in—who lived out there? I thought, there’s a light out there attached to nothing, it looked, a lonesome bulb in the trees—but then soon enough, like everything else, the question fell away, and when I looked up, we had reached our cabin.
The man turned his body and head in tandem. His mouth was an earwig, his eyes gleaming coins. “We’ll be sorry to see you go.”
“You don’t have to go,” Dinky said. “This is our place.” Super fixed his gaze on my pal and said no more. “But we’ve got booze,” Dinky said.
“We’re a free man, boys, and wish you alike.”
It must’ve
