Chapter Eight

 

Once, in Northport, I found myself down by the water, walking through the flat old park. I'd like to sit on a bench, shake a hand or two, and maybe wait for someone to invite me in for a drink or for a night of bracing conversation. There were some cool artists in Northport--it was close enough to Manhattan, but the houses were large and cheap, good space for studios, so painters were drawn to the little burg. Me, I was drawn to the water (this was long before I knew what horrors waited for us all in the depths of the salty seas) and to the men who worked it for their daily bread. One guy, a round little man, the kind of joe you'd say was built like a fireplug if you thought fireplugs were a lot thicker around than they really are, was an ace with a net and a rowboat. George never failed to drag in a net full of porgies or blues, even when the other fishermen would just stare at their feet and swing empty buckets as they walked through the park and up the hill to their little homes. And George's fish were peaceful; they'd try to breathe the poison air, huffing and staring from within the lattice of his old net, but they never flopped or twitched. They were coming home, they knew.
George would clean his fish right on the shore, scaling them but never hacking off the heads or tails, while flies circled him and his catch like black snow. There's more than one unsold painting of him tucked into racks in Northport attics. The artists would wait, along with the flies, for the first traces of a red-streaked sunset, because they knew that that was when George would be coming home.
Mostly I just watched George scale, gut and sometimes fillet his fish right on the spot. He was a swordmaster with his sharp knife, black with age with a worn wooden handle. He could scale a fish in two strokes, gut it in one, and then take just an extra second to cut it into filets or steaks. Nobody could touch him for speed or grace, neither machine nor dancer could do George one better. The painters never even bothered trying to capture his real speed on canvas, instead they just went abstract on him--George's head floating above a swirl of red rain, a great white streak cutting through the sky, or just the park at dusk, George-shaped hole where he had been standing, and nothing but flies and fishguts littering the damp grass at the bottom of the canvas.
With the first fish, George would always cut out the sweetest meat and throw it away. "Leave something for the flies," he explained to me, or if I was sitting too far away, to nobody but the flies themselves. "Go on, eat your own," he'd tell them as he pulled another thick bluefish from his net, but they just kept swarming and buzzing, smacking into his head or hands, or landing on his shoulders. I swallowed more than one big horsefly myself that summer.
"You like fish?" George would ask, and I would offer to pay him, but he'd just hand me fresh-gutted fish wrapped in newspaper and wink at me, because he knew I was watching him the way I'd listen to jazz, with a heart full of love and desire. He never seemed to remember that sure, I do like fish, especially the porgies grilled still in the skin. Memere would take off the heads and tails for us first.
Three days went by and there was no George. On the first day, the painters stayed till the sun sank into the sound waiting for him to come in, but he'd never been out that day. On the second day, fewer people came, and fewer flies too. On the third day, it was just me, waiting for George, drinking a beer out of a paper bag while on my little park bench a few yards from the pier, but I didn't see him until I decided to head for home by way of the bar. He was inside, working a cat's cradle with thin white wire.
"Look, Jack," he told me. It was the first sentence I'd ever heard him say that didn't talk about fish. "Look at this." His voice was deep and dead. And George shook the wire from his fingers and into my outstretched palm. The wire was …soft. Like nylon, it was nylon, a strand thinner and tougher than I'd ever seen.
"That," George said, nodding to the mess of twists and knots in my hand, "is the future. I retire now. They'll make nets from that stuff one day, nets five miles long, and they clean the sound from Montauk to Brooklyn." I snorted, too dazed to comprehend him--I thought poor George was joking till he slammed a fist against a table. "No!" he shouted, and damn sure if his voice was the only one left in the bar, or even the town. "They will! The oceans will be lined with huge nets, they'll drift on the currents and sweep up all life. The tuna, the shark, jellyfish, porpoises . . . WHALES!" Some dumb drunk tittered way in the back of the room, but George didn't even have to turn around to shut him up. George inhaled sharply, and the heckler swallowed the rest of his giggling.
"Fishing, it's not an art anymore," he said. "It's war. It's the gas hissing into the showers at Auschwitz."
It was war. It's war now. There was a drift net, just like the one George told me about those years ago, ethereal and rising from the Pacific, dragging its way across America. Whole towns were falling into its haunted tangles, the souls of their resident fools the catch of the day. And me and Neal and now Bill, all piled into a Caddy Neal found parked in Goodland's local Methodist Church, were trying desperately to outrace the tide. We'd be ahead in one town, then stop for the night under a cracking moon, and in dreams I could see the dark strands drift across the night, taking whatever little town we were holed up in with it. In the morning, mugwumps ruled and the air tasted of salt and scales.
We learned to drive at night, and to head only to the cities, where there were nooks and crannies to hide in, bars a human being could still get a drink at. We moved under ground, through sewers and into basement pads with those few people, usually dharma bums and older Beats, or wild women with ironed hair, who knew enough to resist or dodge Cthulhu's inexorable reach.
Tramps and hoboes poured into the cities behind us, trembling with stories of life on the road and rails. Great beasts twenty feet long were strapped down to flatbeds and screaming their way across the country, the beetlemen drivers happy to rip off and consume their own ears just so they wouldn't have to hear the wailing, wailing that could kill a man. Wheat fields burned under waves of green fire; it was cold and flowed like heavy ocean water, and left no smoke behind. "You don't burn up in it," one fellow told me, "you drown in it." He'd seen his woman go down under a wave of the stuff, and then come up, green spurting from her nose and mouth; then she went down again. "I waited for her to come up again, you know, because you're not a goner 'til you go down three times in normal water, but with this stuff you don't get no second chances." Then he cried until Neal's new girl for whatever that town we were in, Mandy or something, took him to a couch and fed him jelly-jar wine 'til he was able to sleep.
Driving was insane. Neal never slept anymore, and always wanted the wheel. He drove is in a wild route--up to Omaha for a horrible afternoon tour of a city in flames, then he pulled a massive U-turn, smoking the back wheels nearly off the back of the car, and sent us hurtling back towards Springfield. Bill was mostly on the nod--though I could never catch him making the connection, he always found his horse, no matter what lonely highway we were traveling down--so I'd have to wrestle Neal for the wheel one-on-one. I was slower than he was, and he knew the tricks of prison infighting: the knee to the balls was just a feint, I'd jerk away and right into where his thumb was waiting for my throat--but I learned a few tricks from the sutra Kilaya left me with, and sometimes I could grab that thumb and bring Neal to his knees, then start heading East again, back onto Route 66. And in the backseat, halfway between dreamland and pipe dream, Bill would mumble and prophesize of the horrors that awaited in New York. Men transformed as they strolled down the street, then scuttled up buildings with their new claws, or the tentacles with a thousand kissing suction cups, and there nested and bred for the new Reich. Babies born hideously deformed, they shattered mama's hips on the way out, all head and horns plopped atop corpse bodies. Bill called them the lucky ones.
The unlucky ones were still men and women, still normal. Far too normal, square as houses. What could they do but keep their heads down and pretend that their bosses hadn't been driven mad, and hadn't demanded that the mail room boys take off their foreskins with the sharp rocks he brought in from his driveway back in Westchester County? Cuddle up to the beetleman in bed next to you once a week? Sure, as long as he brought home his paycheck and a bag full of groceries. Better to close your girly little eyes and think of John Fitzgerald Kennedy while every hole in your body was probed by chitinous appendages, while the clicking laughter of the beast that was once your high school sweetheart ground into your ears like street glass.
New York, New York, a town so cool they damned it twice. The cult was strongest there; when Cthulhu awoke, the tidal wave of fear and change he burst forth from rose high over this land and finally broke over the purple, smog-choked sky of midnight Manhattan. Black rain fell like blessings, and coated the concrete and glass steel mountains of the haunted isle. Wall Street was ankle-deep in blood, Central Park a range where the livestock was all one succulent meat, all long pig. Get a job patrolling the border with a sharpened stick, why not? Better them than you, and besides, you got to sleep in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, away from the smell of horse shit from the fancy hansom cabs and the sound of bones crunching under the jaws of mile-long trains of maggots.
"Just settle in for the ride, boys," Bill would mutter to us in the backseat, as I wrestled Neal for the wheel, but he wasn't talking to us, he was talking to the poor old New Yorkers who had bowed before the Dreamer, and let Him put the blinders on their souls.
In St. Louis the Cadillac gave up the ghost. We left it on the street and walked three abreast right down Pershing Avenue. Bill was alert for a change, though his face still twitched--he blinked rapidly like a boy made slow from too much self-abuse. I almost didn't believe him when he nodded at some scorched-out ruin and said, "I was born there." Neal was strangely quiet; he kept peering up at the sky, watching the stars only he could see. We walked past the old John Burroughs school, then turned onto Price Road. "My folks have a little place up here," Bill said.
It was a damn mansion on five acres. Neal didn't even look at it, he just kept his neck craned towards the sky and twitched whenever I asked him something. The house had been trashed; a hobo jungle reined within. Steel drums littered the lobby and the roof above dripped soot like the night sky did these days. There were bottles all over the floor, and most were empty. I had to kick over seven before I found one with a little canned heat left. It was cold in the house, colder than it should have been for a sultry August evening. The drift net was passing overhead, making sure every last little guppy of a man was captured and made ready for the soul-killing knives of mugwumps. We weren't escaping, I realized. We were just being gutted and tossed aside, for the flies.
Burroughs's home was a bit of a lightning rod for every hep cat and grifter in town now. They had their stories and their battle scars (missing ears, black tongues from speaking the profane words they once overheard, eyelids sliced open with straight razors just so a body wouldn't be scooped up in his sleep), and not much more left. They didn't laugh anymore, and I missed the old lungs full of guffaws and corny old jokes. They just lay around the rooms among the cracked-up furniture, pissing and snorting and sometimes just grabbing for anyone new, someone who hadn't heard their stories a hundred times before. And we were new, so we got an earful. There was this cat named Chinese Charlie--he wasn't Chinese, but he'd been to Hong Kong and spent six months there before stowing his way home--and he told me about this girl he saw walking down a country road, her breasts big and hanging out of her nightgown. "I'm no raper of women," he told me, and his voice was painted with cheap rum and loathing, "but these days it seems I'm the only one. So I walked up to this girl, not because she was a stack of hotcakes, but because she was lost in a daze, just walking down the side of the road with her arms out to her sides, like a flying Wallenda on a circus tightrope, but I walked up to this girl see, and on her breasts she had faces! Little baby faces, like the stillborns' heads in formaldehyde jars!" Chinese Charlie was so earnest and solemn about it, laying there in the corner of the room, I just had to laugh. I cracked up like that was the funniest punchline I'd ever heard in my whole life, and the great dining room shook with my laughter.
"Oh Lord, did you get a look at what her real face looked like? Was there a family resemblence?" I asked him. Chinese Charlie frowned at me and poked a big sausage finger right in my chest. "You're cruel, you know that? You're a cruel man. Selfish and uncaring. The world is falling into the shitter, and you're here, taking some primrose path. Kickin' back. Traveling, not living. Kitchen gets too hot, you're the first one out the door. Think of that poor girl for one minute! What's she gonna feed those babies if her tits are the babies? You gonna marry that girl? Gonna give her a home and spending money for formula and food to keep those babies strong? Or are you just gonna lay her, and then tomcat right out the door into the dark of the night? She's eatin' for three, damn you!" With that Chinese Charlie folded his arms across his chest, tucked his chin in and rolled over, his back to me. All the rest of the men in the joint did that too, each turning away from me in turn. Some of them turned smartly like soldiers, others just swayed, or sat and stared right through me. I had gotten what I wanted, finally, to be left alone. No longer a shining star, not the swirling center of every big time. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be, so I ran off to find Neal, and I did, out back.
Out back was a huge expanse of blasted prairie. White wheat, smacked flat against the earth, crunched under my feet. Neal was easy to find, he was sticking right up and gesturing at the sky, and two girls were sitting on either side of him. Both of them were thin little things, thinner than he liked usually, with long ironed hair, one a dirty blonde, the other with glasses and hair like bootblack. They turned when they heard me but Neal didn't. He kept his back to me, one hand on his hip and the left outstretched towards the sky. He knew me though and said "Hi Jack, look!" And I looked right over his shoulder and at his hand. His forefinger and thumb were crooked to look like the letter C, and I looked through them (the moon wasn't bright, but I could see starlight glinting in his fingernails) and saw a star.
"So, which one of the stars on Orion's belt do you want to see me put out? Huh? Don't believe me? I can see you frowning, I have eyes in the back of my head." He laughed and the girls chuckled supportively. Neal squeezed his fingers shut. Something sizzled, like a chick lighting a cigarette, but neither of them had one, and when Neal took his hand down, the star on the left end of the constellation was missing.
"Cute," I said, looking up, squinting, trying to look for the tendril of cloud obscuring the star, but there was nothing. The sky was empty of anything but tiny white stars--even the tentacles, the wrathful face of Cthulhu and his burning moon-eye, were all gone. Just like that little star. It didn't twinkle; it was gone.
"I put out a star. A few are missing, do you notice them, or, heh heh, do you notice not them? There's a little poem for ya. Ever do astronomy in Boy Scouts, Jack?" Neal asked. I looked down, and the girl with the bootblack hair looked up at me and said, "It's true. Look at the Big Dipper." I couldn't bear to crane my neck up that high; I just did not want to see what Neal was doing to the sky. "You're going off the deep end," I told him. "Listen. Don't you remember the kids?"
"Oh yeah. Yeah, the kids," he said, and he squeezed his fingers shut again, just like snuffing out a candle. "Poor kids, poor old things, but there's no free ride out here, you know. The wheel just keeps on turning, and if in this life you don't get a chance to fall into bed with a belly full of beer and a lovely girl, then maybe in the next, you know. Got to look at the big picture, the big paint-splattered action painting." He turned to me, "The universe is a Jackson Pollock. I guess we're all just a bunch of drips and--!" he said, and then the nervous heh heh hehs of Neal's craziness ate the rest of his sentence. He turned back to the sky and went back to putting out stars.
Back inside I stepped over tangled messes of tramps and musicians with scraggly beards, kicking past comic books and bongo drums and empty bottles, and took up the steps to find Bill. He was up in his boyhood bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed like a bus was about to pull in and take him downtown to the Woolworth's, reading a little pulp digest. He looked up at me with his wide and tired eyes, went "Hmph" and then turned back to his magazine.
"Neal is putting out the stars. He holds his fingers up and crushes the life out of them right up there in the sky. I stared at where one used to be; it wasn't twinkling. He's doing it."
"Impossible," Bill muttered. He licked his finger and turned the page.
"No, it isn't! I saw it . . . "
"Co-in-ci-DENCE!" he barked. Bill finally set aside his magazine, leaving it open face down like a tent so he could get back to the short story he was reading. I saw the cover. Something named Super Science Stories, it was yellowed and dog-eared (like Bill himself, already, his habit having stolen life's best years) with a pin-up girl, naked except for a green sheet, on the cover. Lightning spilled from her fingertips and above her: a city-sized foo fighter drifted in space. "Look, there's no way, no matter what powers Neal may be making Faustian bargains with. Stars are light-years away, sometimes thousands of light-years away. The sky you see tonight died an aeon ago. We're just late in getting the news, is all." He pulled himself across the bed to the little window and parted the curtain. "What's missing?" he asked.
"The left star on Orion's belt. If you look over--"
"I know where it is!" He peered up through the window, licked his palm and smeared the dust on the glass with it to get a better look. "Alnitak, I think. Yep, not there anymore." He turned back to me. "Eight hundred years ago, that star sniffed itself out, not tonight. We just figured out that it was lost this evening. The star was dead by the time it was named. Didn't you ever have a telescope as a kid, Jackie?" he asked. Bill rose, like an old man, and in a step was across the room and kneeling in front of a two-shelf bookcase painted in a gay red. He pulled another little paperback out from it and flipped through the pages, wetting his thumb each time. "The belt of al-Jauza," Bill chuckled, "al-Jauza," he said again, and then another time. "Sort of . . . the central female. I should have paid more attention when I was in Tangiers."
He looked up at me. Bill had that sallow yellow skin, still. I wonder if he had actually just been this way as a boy too, stuck in a tiny room on top of a mansion, playing with fantasies of star charts and bug-eyed monsters, and shooting little birds with his Daisy air rifle. I almost asked him, but I didn't care that much, and the old bull was on a roll.
"Mother Space! That's a kick, ain't it? The woman at the center of the cosmos, upon which all creation revolves, and Neal is trying to get her to drop her knickers. Man, some fellas never change." Bill pushed out his leg and wormed back up onto the bed, then got on his back and picked up his magazine, holding it far from his face. It was a weird pose, a way to tell me to leave and go downstairs and see if there was enough beer in the Frigidaire.
I was halfway through the door when Bill cleared his throat, the soft machines in his throat and chest clanking and grinding. "You know, Jacques," he said, "Neal could not have extinguished those stars, not in the traditional three-dimensional universe, the world of length and breadth and width that moves through time like a cosmos-shaped arrow. But if there was a higher world, think of that? Think of the universe of a black orange speckled with white all the way to the seeds, in the hands of gods who ooze through reality like gin sluicing through ice cubes in some propane salesman's after-work cocktail. If Neal could reach up and into those higher dimensions, he could extinguish the stars now, but be doing it eight hundred years ago. From the vantage point of those higher worlds, where even time was just a ball to juggle, Alnitak wouldn't be a massive gas giant many times larger than Sol, it would be a pinpoint, a flaming matchhead. Easy to snuff out between two fingertips bigger than galaxies. The trick would really be to only snuff out one star and not a billion of them."
Bill turned over onto his side and hugged himself. "Yeah, that would do it. Of course, if he had that kind of power I wish he'd just create a tesseract and drag New York over to us. These damn cross-country trips make me sick to my stomach. All that driving and those lonely wormy roads." The open magazine Bill put over the side of his head like it was a tent. "Turn off the light on your way out, would you? Thanks."
So that was it. I left and headed back downstairs, the tiny buzz of my own enlightenment smashed flat by the very idea of Neal. Neal, bigger than the world. Neal, who wept for kids like a man, who only needed a wheel in his hands and four on the floor to navigate the bardo; Neal, who had it all in his hands. Neal, who wasn't out back anymore, so I went through the kitchen and saw Chinese Charlie making the girl with the bootblack hair, the two of them squirming under the man's street-beaten Army overcoat. I caught a glimpse of the curve of the girl's breast--no face, just a little underripe plum of a nipple. Good for Chinese Charlie.
In the kitchen, I was alone. It was a big room with a cool tile floor under the trash, crumpled butcher paper and stains from spilled beans and slapping footprints. And there was beer. A whole palette of cans in corrugated cardboard cases, all warm. There was no ice in the Frigidaire's freezer section, but that was fine. It was cooling down quickly out on the front porch, away from the sounds of homeless moaning, and with at least the mansion between me and the dead stars missing from the sky, so I took a case out there with me and cracked open can after can. It was a game, how much beer could I get into my mouth and throat without puffing out my cheeks. After a few tries, I swallowed a whole can (minus a waterfall of foam down my shirt and slacks) of the bitter stuff in one swift and graceful chug--head back, arm up, mouth open wide, it was the sweetest inhalation.
I tried it again and again and lost the trick as the booze hit my bloodstream. I kept trying though, and let the empty cans roll from my fingers and off the porch. The earth itself tilted strangely, like a car doing ninety on a hairpin turn round a mountainside and I saw the sky. The stars were going out, slowly but surely, one at the time, like baseball players dawdling before finally leaving the field and heading back to the dugout. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, just ink peppered with sparkles, and fewer of those by the second. I drank another beer because beer was real. My tongue was already numb, so that made it easier (it was some horrible local brew, made from black river water and aged for a day or three) to just pour it down my mouth like a trough. Rough beer does a number on you right quick, drinking paint mixed with pebbles wouldn't have been much less fun, but it was numbing like it I wanted it to be. Numb like I want to be, fingers tingling and heavy against the latest can. I dropped it and booze fed the earth. Onto the second case, very heroic. Even my bones were drunk. The porch felt so good, thick paint still held the heat from the daytime, and stretched out and drifted off to sleep.
I dreamed of a raft on a winedark sea, bobbing slow and gentle like a kid being dandled on his grandpa's lap. The water was like quicksilver, running fast and dry over my skin and pooling in my boots and pants. It was warm out on the ocean, the damp heat of summer was a little campfire and blanket both. Then from the purple sky tentacles fell like curtains, but I was not afraid. They stroked me, fingers in my hair, over my lips in that thrilling lover's caress. The tentacles kept me warm as a chill rose from the bottom of the sea.
From ten thousand miles away I heard the screams, tinny AM radio yelps. My consciousness flew in lazy circles and dips, away from my body and towards the old mansion; it was being torn apart by space itself while robed cultists holding their torches high chanted from the curb. Space no longer defined by absence, but by presence, the presence of those familiar slithering tentacles. They weren't unfurling down from the sky, they were the sky, the space between breaths and raindrops. Like a honeybee I drifted between them, tiny and disinterested in anything but sweet ambrosia, a glistening puddle of spilled beer. Limbs and sprays of blood, splintered wood and hissing pipes flew past, but I could just buzz around them on etheric current. The tentacles were everywhere, and that isn't a description of their location, but just a fact of existence--if something existed, it was thick alien meat, stench and rubber and molten lead blood in five dimension. The world we knew was just cheap ink, flat and stretched beyond recognition against the Silly Putty surface of the REAL world. The world of the Great Dreamer, whose every somnambulant twitch and snort shook the planet and every work-a-day mind it. Except for honeybee me, my brain on a wing and a prayer.
And Bill. He burst out of his boyhood room (which was but a mass of tentacles) with a moviehouse tommy-gun and screamed about Nazis and Bombay. Stars and torchlight danced in the trap of his impossibly thick Coke bottle glasses. He lifted the gun high and with an Indian war whoop, pulled the trigger. Flames belched forth from the muzzle and bullets ripped through the air (and through the meat of the Old God's waking dream). Bill cackled as he swept back and forth with his machine gun (spent casings fell like rain, and danced on the hardwood floors) and made headway, step after painful step. Outside the mansion, some of the cultists, those old schoolmarms and clock punchers, choked on lead and fell, grinning blood.
But it wasn't. The bullets ran out before the cultists did, and Bill's hard march forward stopped, his tommy-gun's riot of poetry reduced to impotent clicking. Then the clicking of the beetlemen picked up the beat, and the drapery of tentacles returned to drown him and all the other riffraff in the Burroughs manse. He went down beneath undulating black waves, his fist clenched and veined like marble.
Then Neal, nine hundred feet tall and glowing with St. Elmo's fire, parted the curtain and smiled. A kid peeking to watch a girl roll down her stockings and then, after an eternity, unsnap her bra, that was Neal's smile. And as easy as a boy pushing curtains aside, he saved the world. The Dreamer Of The Deep was pushed aside with a casual wave, the kind of wave Neal would offer girls as we drove past.
I woke up on the porch, my shirt stuck to the paint thanks to sticky beer and burnt blood. Gunpowder filled the air. Most of the rest of the mansion was gone, like it had exploded, but the field and streets were utterly clear of any debris. The house blew up years ago. Nothing but an eastern wall and blasted black fire-places topped with impotent, wilting chimneys in the distance remained. The bricks dripped a pungent slime. Bill stood right in the middle of the wreckage, smoke dancing from the barrel of his gun like he'd been smoking it. Neal was stretched across a couch, one perfectly preserved (not even cigarette burns, forget the lack of ectoplasm of scorch marks) eating from a tin of Vienna sausages. He was stabbing into it with his old pocketknife and eating the meat right off the tip of the blade.
The streets were littered with corpses, beetlemen and Beat both. I noticed the head of the girl with bootblack hair (well, her hair and the rancid meatloaf it was attached to) but everyone, everything else, had been thrown a bit too forcefully across the landscape to makes heads or tails of. They'd been just a little too sober when the psychic onslaught began. Loose shoes were everywhere. Bill walked through the doorway, the only part of the house's façade still standing after the porch, and kneeled down next to me. Behind us, we could hear a can hit the ground and Neal's chainsaw snore start up. I looked back at him. The poor guy had wet himself during the night.
"He's going to betray you, you know," Bill told me, his voice an aria wrapped in a bull's angry snort. I looked up at him. I never liked Bill, really. He was a fag, and a rich boy, he never had to fight for anything. When the rest of us Beats were exploring the country, he ran off to Mexico, to Asia, to anywhere where a boy would bend over for an American dollar and a smile. He was a junky, his soul had been eaten away years before R'lyeh rose in the roiling Pacific. But I respected him, because he was a survivor, a roach like the mugwumps. When Neal and I were dust, William S. Burroughs would still be kicking around (hell, the bastard would still be writing for publication; I already shot my load with that) so I didn't punch him in the face right then and there. Anybody else I would have, even Neal; if he came to me and said "I'm going to betray you, you know. Tie you to an obsidian slab and draw your heart out through your nostril, just to make Cthulhu chuckle," he would have gotten a faceful of knuckles. Not Bill though. I didn't like him. But I respected him.
"It's pulp fiction. Neal's not on our side, he's on his side. Against the Dreamer, but not against the starry wisdom Azathoth teased him with."
"How do you know?"
He snorted again (it was dusty without a house to protect us from the wind kicking through the ruined wheat). "I read magazines. You two were best friends once, but now, years later, you're just going through the motions. Two dreamers chasing dreams. He's married--when he's not balling girls two at a time while we stand guard, he's playing house with some heifer and teaching his rugrats how to pray, hands all steepled together at the side of the bed." (Bill almost got a punch there too, but I was too drained to move.) "And you . . . Christ, Jack. You know your problems. This spiral path only has one ending. Of course he has to betray you, and by doing so, betray us all. It's The Shadow. Neal's the butler, and the butler did it. That's the goddamn ending to the novel he's writing about this! Pure pulp fiction."
He plopped down and tucked his legs under his ass like a kid. "Eh, fuck it, Jack. Neal would be crossing you over a pussy if he wasn't going to cross you over the whole goddamn ball of mud. Fuckin' world half deserves it anyway, as far as I can tell."
"Yeah, so why you'd come save us back in Kansas, hmm?" He wasn't looking at me, so I could lick beer off the plank in front of me (the smell had been driving me up the wall) and listen to him answer at the same time. I didn't want to look at Bill. He looked so old, like a snake skin left behind.
"I told you already," he croaked, "there's only one ending to this. You and Neal ain't the only ones with a taste of enlightenment. A dragon came to me, after decades of chasing it, and told me what needed doing. You know, I'm going to move to Kansas one day."
"Wow."
"I'm not looking forward to it either."
For a long time we did nothing but listen to Neal snore. "So . . . "
Bill finally turned to me, his eyes a squint. "How are your sales?"
And I laughed. I roared like the damn King of England after the court jester shits himself. "Damn! Royalties! Is that all you can think of?" He wasn't joking, but I loved the man's punchline. I laughed more and more, just jiggling on the porch; it crippled me.
"Real good. Haven't had to write another word, really."
"Yeah. The ban's off my book now. It's doing well. Thanks for the title by the way." Then we heard Neal stir and stopped talking about books. Neither of us were in the mood for any of Neal's theories of literature now and I wasn't interested in hearing about how this would make yet another thrilling chapter. He spilled off the couch and hopped up onto the porch (ignoring the skeletal doorway that still stood) and stretched his arms out, a farm boy taking in the view of the north forty.
"Woo! I tell ya boys, this is what happens when we stick our heads up above ground. We got to be gophers from now on. Or mole people! Just like in those old serials. We'll come up at night, for provisions and women in pillbox hats and bullet bras. They'll hold their little hands to their cheeks and screech when they see us, but gemstone tiaras and princess gowns will make 'em ours again, right, my mole brothers?" Then he laughed at his joke, alone.
"Let's find a new car," Bill said and we were off. The neighborhood was deserted. Doors flapped open and shut in the wind, little stores all ready for customers with the blinds pulled up and display cases shiny, but not a man was about. No squirrels either, and the sky (only blue streaked with the sharpest of purple clouds and the occasional stream of a moon rocket heading off the marble) was free of birds and bugs. And damnit if every car we came across wasn't a burnt-out husk.
"This is getting repetitive," Neal said, as we stumbled across the second used car lot with nothing but smoldering hunks on display or in the windows. "Aren't there any good ghosts in this country? Or is every inch of the way going to be madmen and spirits from the fifth dimension?"
Good ghosts. That reminded me, there were good ghosts. Spirits summoned by bebop and cooked up in sweet whiskey. Called by blood, but not blood tainted by human fear and madness, but the good blood that spilled from food and fed the earth. The world was still drenched in the spirit of the Lord, and his little children, the wayward ones who never left their childish things behind, they were the ones set to inherit the earth, if only we could end the reign of the cult. So I summoned one, the good old-fashioned way. I walked to the other side of the street, where the traffic would have headed east had there been any, and stuck out my thumb.
Bill and Neal stayed on the other side of the highway and just looked at me. A pair of yokels taking in the real live genuine article. King of the Beats. Looking to hitch. On the road again.
And the car pulled up, an old model Cadillac--prewar it looked like, all curves but for the creased hood up front. It looked familiar, and then it pulled up. It was a Sedan by Tiffany's--glass spun and blown, translucent but without motor or works, and I was in the passenger seat already. A younger me, baby eyelids fluttering in sleep. Jack Kerouac, minus a decade and change, and a thousand gallons of cheap alcohol, the years peeled off my skin as if by a potato peeler. And Neal was driving with an easy smile and only a wrist on the wheel. He was young too, nose not so red yet, hair full and black, not pasted down over his receding hairline. Our paunches were missing.
"So, you two fine upstanding American citizens need a lift anywhere in particular?" ghostly Neal asked me. Bill and the real Neal cut across the street quick like bunnies to take in the car. The one we had already driven in, the one with the cracked leather dash from the New Orleans heat and the Colorado altitude (but this dash was smooth as mirrors).
"We actually need the car," Bill said, and he grabbed for the door handle but his hand passed right through it. "Neal!" Neal said, sliding his butt up onto the hood. "Care to know who wins the third race in St. Louis twelve years after your trip? Write it down, make sure you're here on the day, and you can double your life-savings. It's all scientific, like the theory of relativity. You've been driving so fast you caught up with yourself."
Ghostly Neal laughed. "And all you want is a car, eh?" He nudged my doppelganger, who awoke with a slow-motion start. "Sounds like a good deal to me. Can't beat the scientific method, and I'm sure Sal and I can ride the rails, and dream some dreams of our own."
My Neal smiled and just told him, "Childhood's End, guaranteed." Neal in the car ducked down and found a pencil and scrap of paper, wrote down the name and tucked the scrap in his shoe. He just stood up and walked through the car. Young Jack opened the door and stumbled out, yawning fiercely and with a fist in his eye to drive away the sleep. "Whuzzat?" I said, brilliantly.
The car was solid, and ours, and drove like we were three inches over the road, which we probably were. I waved to my ghost, but he was too busy rubbing his face to wave back. Young Neal whooped and waved, and we all (even surly Bill in the now solid backseat, his other hand over his nauseated stomach) waved back. Bill turned, "Nice trick, getting your own car from yourself."
"Yeah, and it probably never needs gas! Hey Neal, how did you know what horse was going to win? Or was it just grift?"
"Nope, honest injun, Childhood's End is going to win. Neal ain't though. That was yesterday's race, and we were too busy moving into William's abode yesterday to get down to the track. And the phone was disconnected, so I couldn't place any bets from the house." He looked into the rearview mirror and addressed the backseat. "For a bunch of Richie Riches, your family sure knows how to be inconveniently delinquent with the phone company. Don't you know that International Telephone and Telegraph takes no prisoners? Ma Bell!" he shouted and stepped on the gas hard, taking the wind out of us passengers. We ate Missouri for breakfast in the American dream car.
"Yeah, but how did you know?" I asked Neal again later when we were idling and Bill was off pissing in the trees off the side of the highway. "Enlightenment for worldly trivia is a blasphemous thing."
Neal just kicked off his old stitched rag of a shoe, leaned down and pulled a wrinkled scrap of paper from the toe. He smoothed it between his fingers and held it out for me to read. Under the smear of lead, I could just barely make it out: Childhood's End. "That's why I always wanted to drive, brother. I didn't want to get here too late. But I guess I did." Then Neal dropped the paper and let the wind take it as he walked off into the trees and started to piss as well. I leaned back on the wheel well and put my palms back against the purring hood of the car. Even running at an idle in the afternoon heat of Missouri, the steel of my past was cool to the touch.