Chapter Five

 

The best thing about riding with a trucker like Ed was his ready supply of solid laughs and a glove box full of bennies. He was taking them by the handful and not bothering with the Coke he held between his knees. "Both hands on the road, eat the yelleh line all up," he said over and again. Ed wouldn't take the new interstates being slapped up; he said that there were too darn many moon rockets being hustled left and right on wideload trailers. "They say they're fer the Reds, heck, they say the rockets don't even exist, but if you see 'un, it's fer to blow up the Reds, but I know betteh. Rockets to the moon. Sekrit bases on the fahr side of it. I see 'em firin' in the desehrt," he said, not once or twice, but every time he took a handful of bennies and chased them with nothing more than the swirling cheekload of saliva.
Me, I drank my share of Cokes and swallowed enough diet pills that I forgot all about California. I don't remember much except for sweaty dreams of missiles firing in the night until we hit Highway 99. The windshield and cab both (Ed liked to drive with the windows open, though he cursed the wind and splattered bugs) looked like Araby from the dust and sand. Ed handed me a hot apple and I bit into it with relish. My hair hurt from being blown so hard.
"Hey," he yelled. "Going all the way to Montana!"
"Nah!" I told him for the third time or so. "Just to a filling station round here."
"That one good?" he said and nodded to an oasis right off the side of the road, six pumps and a restaurant that looked to be named EAT. But the pump handles and hoses had been removed and storefront windows had been shattered and stood agape like the mouth of a toothless old codger. Like Ed's own mouth.
"I'm looking for one that hasn't been built yet," I said nice and loud, and we both laughed. "How 'bout that one!" Ed cried and pointed to a scraggly bush on the opposite side of the highway. "Or that one!" and his finger whirled. "I'll stop right now!" Both canned-ham hands were back on the huge steering wheel now, and Ed hopped in his seat, jumping on the brake; the truck stuttered with his stupid enthusiasm, "Here," and I jerked in my seat, "or here!" and another jerk, "Or how about here!" and the jerk next to me jerked suddenly too and smacked his paunch into the rim of his steering wheel. Then he leaned back and drove on like he wasn't a jittering freak at all, but just some salt of the earth fellow bringing ottomans to Montana and coffee tables to California, all part of some crazy living room algebra.
"How long you been driving this rig, Ed?" I asked. I smelled something acrid and ashy like a campfire of garbage, the clutch a bit burnt maybe.
"Three weeks. Three weeks Friday." I laughed so loud and he joined me. I couldn't take my eyes off of him. Then he stopped and explained that only a month ago he'd been selling siding, aluminum siding. He'd worked his way up from the crew that'd actually wrap homes in the stuff; he had a good eye and a steady hand, and even better, a wide jack-o'-lantern smile and a nervous tic. The tic, Ed demonstrated, was a spasm in the neck, it made him tilt his head and wink and smile wide as the prairie for a second of thick white teeth. Whenever he said something like "Howdy" or "Friday" Ed would have this friendly little spasm, the kind of freak folksy smile that made me want to hand him the shirt off my back, and my pants too.
"So I was really good at sellin' sidin'," Ed explained, his face twitching in robot warmth at the word "really" and oh yes I knew he was really good at selling siding. "But the bosses wanted me to sell more and more, every day," (twitch twitch twice in a row there). "They gaymee a script. It said 'really' and 'very' and 'pardon me' and 'today' and all sorts of other words that set off mah tic.
"But it done gone set off too much and mah face froze," and he turned to me with his wild smile and wink, a face that forgot to fade back to human proportions. The skin across his face was stretched across the bones and bunched up by his right eye. His smile was wide, too wide, like some tough in a bar had taken a knife to Ed's cheek and left a big flapping scar from lip to ear. He held the look for a long time (good thing the road was mostly empty, I could feel the truck drifting across lanes) and then turned away. "Scared the shit outta alla us. It was stuck lahk that for a month or more. But the boss took money outta his own pocketbook and sent me to the doctehr, and he fixed me up. Long needles and ointments and it worked."
"And then they fired you, Ed? Why would they spend all that money on you just to let you go?" I asked him.
"Nah. When I got back to the office, boss didn't want it tah happen again. So he kept me in tah office and I sold sidin' over the phone. But folks just plum stopped buyin'. The boys in tah bullpen were real sorry to see me go though. They said they lahked mah face." And he smiled again, this time for real, a relaxed smile fueled by the joy of the road. He took a hand off the wheel and idly passed his palm and twitching fingers over the dash, looking to corral some wayward pills.
As the day drifted into afternoon I began to worry a bit as so many of the Highway 99 roadside diners and truck stops seemed to be closed. We'd barely crossed the state line by my reckoning, but already some of the little roadside establishments were boarded up; others seemed open at first but as Ed slowed we saw that their windows were darkened, pumps locked, parking lots home only to weeds growing into brush. I didn't want to dip into a town yet, not if even Frisco was set to fall to the demon in the sky.
I remembered too many old towns from my trips with Neal back in the fifties, back when the little burgs of ol' 99 were still half-mad with freedom. One ville I'd never even wrote about broiled away under the Nevada sun, little more than a scattering of buildings around a chain link fence factory. They didn't do anything themselves down in little Compassion, Nev. All the food was trucked in, all the trucks were stuffed with government cash and miles of fencing on the way out, but when sun set and weeks ended, the whole town went a little wild. Old men drove their creaky Models A Fords in crazy eights around the town square. Girls and guys both thumped on iron drums and whooped it up on their porches. On the edge of town, Neal and I saw lizards and brown mice scattering like they'd been called by a Pied Piper playing "Anywhere but Here." Neal kicked at them as we walked past the one lamppost in town and into the weekend bacchanal. Party was religion, between Friday at five and Monday at nine. I even got a day job at one of the bars, lifting drunken managers and linemen up firemen style, walking them across town and dumping the bodies out by the factory gates for a splash of cold water from the foreman's bucket. The mayor paid me off personally, with his wife's pie, plus a handful of old silver dollars and a great and loving handshake.
They don't make towns like that anymore.
Our ribbon of highway was a long stretch of nothing, except for a little wrinkle. A tent, a folding table and an old convertible, and a hill of dirt in the shade. I nudged Ed and asked him to please pull over, and even before he brought the truck to a complete stop, I was out the open passenger-side door, shouting, "Neal! Neal! It's me Jack! Hey Neal! C'mon out!"
And out of the dirt pile he walked, legs and arms loose and swinging. I hopped out of the cab and tumbled to my knees. Neal was already on me, dusting off my pants and shoulders, "Jack! Jack, old chum, old bean, old buddy! It's been--"
He stopped and looked away from me, shifty-eyed. Then he turned back, flashing me a grifter's smile. "It's been a long while! How's the book going? Did you get my letters? I still have a bunch of yours." And he ran behind me and both hands on my shoulders started hustling me towards the little tent. "You need to meet my partner too." I turned to Ed. He was out of the cab and urinating on his front tires, for luck or at least for lack of another place to politely let it fly.
So I ducked under the flapping tent roof (the walls were rolled up to better fling dirt away) and noticed a shallow little hole, some maps on a card table and a man snoozing alongside the freshly dug ditch. He had wavy hair, the kind that looks windblown before the wind even starts up, and cheap glasses. One arm was tossed casually outside the shade of the tent and had tanned into a bright gold. Neal woke him up by kicking a bit of dirt on him. "Hey Nelly, Jack is here." Nelly just smiled and nodded though, not bothering even to pop open one eye and give me a gander. I liked that about him, actually.
"So! Let me tell you everything!" Neal started. "God, chronologically. No, too long and ridiculous, in order of importance." He flung out a hand and gestured like a Broadway producer. "This! Is! Your! Last! Chance!" He waved both arms, almost ready to fly. "It's a filling station! You know, I almost called it On The Road filling station, but I thought that might get me into trouble, you know, with your publishers. It'd bring the girls in though--it's amazing how many of them drive past here after they give up their Hollywood dreams." His arm was back around my shoulder, and he turned me back towards the road and waved his hand again in a feverish attempt to transform Ed's long-winded piss against his piss-poor truck into an opium dream of chicks in cars, all smiles and cat-eyed sunglasses, here to ball.
"Neal?" I asked him. "Wouldn't this be the first chance gas station from California's point of view?" And he laughed, that old powerful laugh. The laugh that made him the center of the world once upon a time, and he turned again and shouted over his shoulder, "Hey Nelson, you were right!" If Nelson responded, it wasn't with his voice or body.
"Is that guy okay?"
"Oh yeah--he's been doing most of the digging. I'm more of the idea man. I'm going to make this an A-1 roadside attraction. Hang out here all week, pumping a little gas, maybe helping a motorist in distress or three, then Friday at five, I'll hang up the Closed sign, then roar back into LA. Maybe head on up to the city. Nelson can watch the place on Mondays even, if I'm too hungover or if my babies need me."
"Babies, eh? Are you still with--" I'd forgotten her name. She had had a hang-dog look about her. "Nah," Neal said, before she even came to me. He knew he was far beyond whomever it was I remembered. "I want to settle though. You know, being kept in stir does a number on a body sometimes." He looked up at me again and then his face exploded into yet another smile, this one a warm smile, a grin from his boozy little heart. "You're here!" he said, realizing it for the first time. Then he looked up at the sky, "Boy's really something. Looked like something I scooped up in a net once, when I was down in Baja." I just looked at his chin, flat as an iron. He was shaved utterly clean, the veins in his neck still blue under pasty, pimpled skin. Neal hadn't been out here for long.
Ed in his foghorn voice said, "Hey thyeah, Jack. Ahr yer comin' along or is this tah spot?" I nodded and trotted up to him. We slapped hands, his still sweaty from the slick wheel of his truck, mine cold, tingly. Neal was a little off, somehow. Time and distance and a sky full of madness (and as I shook Ed's hand, I saw Neal was peering up at the sky, not in fear or in wonder, but seemingly in communion. He was rocking on the balls of his feet, like he used to do for Allen's poetry back in New York) had done a little something to him, I wasn't sure what. Once Ed rode off, his truck growling like a fat old dog, I walked back to Neal and looked up too. The tentacles were seemingly right overhead, black and translucent at the same time, and swirling, ever swirling and knitting into one another as they spewed out of a central vortex, a black pit of tiny red stars.
All of this, like some psychedelica splashed over the plain blue and white sky as if from an overhead projector.
"Do you see the constellation?" he asked me, or he asked the sky itself. I just got a look at his nervous, bobbing Adam's apple. "They're alive, you know. The stars. Swirling in infinity. They are the infinity really; they just seem like little sparkles from here, but this planet it just a pebble swimming in between the stars, the matrix." He didn't look at me, but Neal changed his tone, he got all friendly, the Dale Carnegie way. "Jack, you ever draw a connect-the-dots page. You know, of an elephant balancing on one stumpy leg on a platform, and a big beach ball on his tusk. I tell you Jack, connect the dots up there." He smiled, I could see it in the twist of his cheeks, but he was still leaning back, head up, trying to see the whole swirling, dreamy sky at once. "Go on Jack. Keep looking up. Connect the dots. Chaos at the center of the universe. That's all it is you know."
"Neal, c'mon," I said and I stepped forward. Too late already, I thought, my last chance blown. I wanted to tackle him, shove his face back in the dirt, God help me, remind him of his kids if I had to. But Neal heard my footfalls stomping in the sand and he snapped his head back to me, "Don't you see, the country, maybe the world is going mad again! I'll have something to write about." And I laughed.
A giggle at first, half-nervous, half-hysterical. "You know," Neal said, "the plane of the earth is becoming non-Euclidean. Jack, we're an hour from Denver now, Jack. Tomorrow we'll be four thousand miles from the same city. Remember Denver? Remember the black mountains that looked like clouds?" He hiked his thumb behind his shoulder, and I looked over at what he was pointed at. Yep, mountains like angry clouds, or the shadow of the Great Dreamer.
"Fuck, Neal, what happened to Colorado? Did it get bigger? Did we get bigger?"
He shrugged. "I dunno. What do you think, Jack?" More grift, more unctuous flimflam, asking me. "Let's go eat on it." And off he walked before I could say yes. I was carried off in his wake back to the tent where he told Nelson, "We're driving up to Mom's. Bring you back a sandwich?"
Nelson stirred, barely. "Rule number one, never eat at a place called Mom's."
Neal turned and smirked, "He says that every day."
"And don't play poker with a man named Doc," Nelson said before drifting back to his little opiate sleep.
And don't drive across country into a maelstrom of shifting sands, deadly cities full of slavemen and snickering queers, along highways lined with drunken babblers and ghost trains, all under horrible bright blue skies with a guy named Neal. We took the car, and on the way to the diner Neal told me of his own brush with the primordial beings, with the demon Kilaya. He didn't get the girl (surprisingly enough, Mary wouldn't stay a virgin around Neal) but instead one of the demon's original forms. A man, Mongloid but muscled, from the torso up. Waist down, Neal said, nothing but knife. Neal was in Mexico, he said ("I went out to get some milk for the kids. It took me six weeks."), and saw the spirit out in the wild brown of some dead field, scratching out a path with the tip of his body-blade. "It was us, Jack," Neal explained, giggling, "our trips, the way we stitched this country together. It was a message, a sign and a portent, a telegram from God. And then he whispered in my ear." And then Neal whispered in my ear, and it wasn't the sutra that Marie had buzzed before. Neal had received a darker teaching.
He had walked down to the whirling spirit, and not knowing what else to do, bowed down to it. And in the now slowly spinning blades, Neal saw himself. Two reflections, one on each side of the blade. The first good ol' Neal, slick hair, sparking eyes and a voice like a monk's flittering flute. But as Kilaya spun, the sinister side of the dagger showed another image; Neal sallow and deflated, gray skin stretched over deformed, spiked bones. Lips gone, replaced with a huge slash of jagged skin showing off jaws and gums. But in that horrible petrified rictus of a face, power. The phantom Neal's eyes glowed and pulsed with it, his tongue long as snakes and thrashing, ready to kill. And able to kill as well, with a word, with an alien syllable mere humans can't even dream of pronouncing. Neal could do it; he birthed a generation, he could kill a generation--all he had to do was bind himself to the black and squirming chaos in the sky.
"But," Neal said, his face alight, painted orange by the slowly setting sun. "But that wasn't a warning, Jack, it was a promise. Like Kilaya learned compassion and turned to the protection of the dharma, I can. That's why it was sent rather than some other bodhisattva, some old man or baby. The world's changing again, there's power in the skies. We should grab some, use it. Call your big New York agent for me Jack, when we get to a pay phone. Use a whole burlap sack full of quarters if you have to, because we're going to rewrite the world." And with that, we were at Mom's.
The man with the golden arm was right, Mom's was awful. Brown cherries in the pie, gray vanilla ice cream and flickering lights. Mom's had a jukebox filled with old white jazz 78s, long since warped from the sun and the sealed tin diner atmosphere itself. The speakers sang like weird and distant whales, even the clarinets were deep and made the floor rumble and whine. Neal was drawing a symbol in pepper and salt. "Yin and yang. You can't play the notes without the rests, as you well know." And he placed a pinch of pepper over a tear drop shape of salt. "Sometimes attachment can be best conquered through excess. Remember my letter? The bit about the girl on that bus from, damn, what was it, fifteen years ago now? The little perfect virgin on the bus. The way I blew past all the small talk and chitterchat, the way I made sure she was meat for me. A little pink rosebud between her sweaty thighs."
"Wait, I thought you didn't get that girl."
He snorted, "I didn't!" and the symbol of the Tao collapsed in a burst of sandy condiments. I wiped my hands with a napkin. "But I owned the wanting of it, of her. That was enough; I was dejected back then, and of course found another girl a couple of days later," he said as the girl with his bacon sandwich found him and he smiled at her. "But now I am not. The seeking is the thing, not the getting, you know?" I didn't, really. "So," Neal said, "I think I should give myself over to the Dark Dreamer, and then, bound to that power, I can use it to protect reality from the on-rushing chaos overhead. Embrace the threat, it vanishes. Resist it, and it remains." He shoved the corner of his sandwich into his mouth lustfully, and spoke through the crunching. "I'll be a dharma protector" is what I thought he said. So I said, "What did you say?" and he swallowed like a snake and said, "I'll be a dharma protector."
He leaned across the Formica table like a guy reaching over for a kiss from his teenybopper girlfriend. All that was missing was the shake. "Look at me, Jack. I know you have the gift too. The jazz. I didn't even write my letters in Earth characters, Jack. You never would have been able to read them otherwise. If you didn't have the jazz in you. Look at me, friend. Is there any trace in me? Yeah, I want to settle down, but I'm no mugwump." He wrapped his long fingers around his own throat. "This neck has never felt the noose of a tie."
"I really don't think that qualifies you for bodhisattva status," I told him. Neal's eyes were placid like frozen lakes.
He nodded. "No!" An upraised finger, one of those queer little gestures Neal learned from some cementheaded correctional officer in reform school. One finger could shut up a room of tough little snots. He wagged his index finger at me, and it had a callus. His little Underwood typewriter must have tasted some blood too, when he wrote his letters. "Not yet! But that's the journey, right? A cross-country trip through chaos and cultists, that will be the initiation. We'll see the old, the crippled, the dying, the corrupted twisted man-animals who call themselves Ned and all their bowling league buddies too.
"Jell-O molds. Have you ever seen this stuff?" He grabbed the sides of the table and shook it. My slaughtered cherry pie filling jiggled, and crumbs tumbled and spun in little orbits on the plate. I saw a hair in the mess (great) but Neal was the really disturbing thing. "Gelatin, like bloody cranberry sauce. Everyone's eating the stuff. My kids, Jack! They feed it to my kids in school!" He relaxed and slid his hands across the chrome rim of the table, back towards his own side. "I had to leave, ya know? I just had to recapture the old magic." Then he looked out the big window. "Nobody needs to buy gas around here anyway."
"Nobody but us." There was silence then, except for the popping and buzz of the giant neon MOM'S sign on the other side of the ceiling.
Finally Neal said, more thoughtfully than I ever heard him (and it was sad, when even he felt the need to think before acting rather than just diving on in, a pure spirit), "Maybe it's not so bad. Is it really any worse than what happened before? People killed themselves for reasons just as foolish. People go to work, stuff themselves full of meat, get down on their knees and wail before something or other, crap out babies from bloody crotches, then feed the worms." He turned to me with his old smile, "Is it even any different? We're back, looking for--" And he stopped, tongue out, eyes twisted up thinking, finally like a writer, about what would be the perfect word. "--further. And nobody else is anymore."
"Yeah," I said, slow. Neal was just a bit too off. He could see things I couldn't, he knew things I didn't, and he was trafficking with dark spirits it seemed. The road was mine, this country and this trip were still mine, but those places between the spaces, the breathless vacuum between atoms of air, those all belonged to Neal, that's what the little Marie-buzz in my ear told me then. "Not so different, not yet. But once we get back on the road, I think there may be problems."
And with that, it began. The earth rumbled. Glassware and forks sang like a terrified little Greek chorus. The horizon exploded in pillars of flame. Rockets, sleek and curved, like the sketch of a torso, flew up into the purple sky, slow but furious. Dust devils marched and whirled like an army of goblins across the landscape, blind, mad, tumbling into one another, all-consuming and all obscuring, except for the shafts of white hot flame. The far side of the diner was shaking now as the missiles went up in a row, like stair-steps to heaven in the distance. The poor jukebox, already a hothouse of abused jazz, just couldn't take it. The scratchy warbles of the downbeat sped up, sputtered and finally screamed, then stopped, skipping in mid-terror, like a hyena or cinderblocks scraped on their corners against a steel-grated killing floor.
"Ed was right. Like the Tower of Babel, they want the moon. They have no idea what they'll draw down from the heavens, do they?" Neal answered by pushing my napkin into my lap. His he wrapped around his face like an old movie desperado and stood up purposefully, a man about to rob a bank, or at least demand a loan from one. I followed him out of the diner and into the dust storm just as the lights at Mom's went out. The juke croaked out a final goodbye.
Outside we waded through the dust; mostly it just played in whirlpool waves about our shins. Neal stumbled, but I snagged him, and tossed him back up against the wind. Together we made the car and just fell over the doors and into the dusty seats. Neal hadn't put the roof up, but I pulled it up as he tried the choke and after a few minutes of yanking and losing and getting smacked in the face by wind and tarp, I got the old clam shell down. Neal got her going like a purring kitten and wiped down wheel and dash with his napkin. He whipped mine right off my jaw and smacked the dust off the seat with it. Then he stopped and stared straight past the pitted windshield into the shifting sands.
"I think we forgot to pay," he said. The car groaned and tilted to the right, nudged by wind.
"Drive," I said and Neal said where and I said, because America had to be remade and reset, the needle of her hot five jazz record placed on the very first grove again, "Go east young man."
And he did, full speed ahead on a wake of sand, more sideways than forwards, bumping and lurching while the motor grumbled like it was full of marbles, till we found highway again. Then the tires kissed asphalt hard like a well-paid whore and we were off, beyond the wind and sand. In the mirrors, though they were cracked and jagged, we could see them though. Moon rockets in each glass facet, climbing the jewel of the sky. Dozens of them, leaving scorched dead earth behind.