Give your prospective buyer a taste of the shit-splash and piss from the abolitionists and Negroes who were out of place, out of time, out of luck and, with unanswered prayers, hanging right here above this very road. There’s probably a faint trace of the marshmallow sandwich from the happy picnic under the kicking feet above.
You can stick a piece next to your pigeon’s ear and let him hear the tires screeching out of control from five thousand prom nights. You’ll hear the abruptly ending pleas of the cheerleader’s last ride. There’s Janis, singing about a drifter who decided to squirt and scram instead of riding along with some trucker trying to remember another song. You can tell that pinched-faced woman trying to sell her kids off to rich folks for a good price that she’s already rich if she’s holding a piece marked with the treads of the weight of Elvis as he spun the Cadillac around for one more peanut-butter-honey-and-fried-banana sandwich.
Now that you’ve got the woman’s attention, close the deal. Remind her of the poor boys who jostled shoulder-to-shoulder to Fort Fucking This or That, going to boot camp and getting brainwashed and gung-ho, blistering their knees praying for a chance to kill a Commie for Christ. Sink the hook. Mention those forlorn, lonely flag-draped coffins hiding the addresses stapled to those boys’ big toes, as they wind slowly down these black roads back to Momma and Poppa. While Brother and Sis watch the television wondering if Cronkite’s box score really matters much anymore.
Remind the techie types that pieces of the space shuttle passed along these roads, big rigs pulling part by part, rutting the asphalt, warning lights flashing to premature takeoff, while coked-out scientists perfected the fuel mixture.
If your mark seems patriotic, you got him in the bag. Just mention all the politicians who have been rolling down these roads for the past fifty years, checking their maps for the next shopping mall, sitting behind tinted windows with their trousers and BVDs around their ankles deciding which lie has that statesman-like ring. All those millions of moronic hopefuls racing for the parking lot, smacking their sugar-rushing kids, waiting in the heat like sardines to see a little bit of the history your client is holding in his filthy hand right now. Roads are huge in American politics. Turn to the left, turn to the right. Kennedy got his occipital bone slapped on Elm Street like a slung piece of cantaloupe. You can sell it.
Entertainment? Lennon answered a cop in the back seat as he departed the Dakota for parts unknown, while rain-singing tires spun a last verse of “A Day in the Life.” You can sell this. You have the foresight to see the value in this black asphalt, from this long, long dark road. A petroleum product. Everything America has to offer. How do I know? I’m glad you asked.
I saw it myself. I saw a clumsy generation of American dinosaurs dying right here in the middle of the road. Wrinkled knees with ten times the weight of an elephant thudded down on pinkish-raw skin. Scraping for one last time on the hot black grit. I’d been waiting a long time for it. I knew it was coming. I watched as the old giants slowly lifted their fevered heads, saw their eyes go wild with helpless rage. Mouths opening in senile, uncomprehending groans. I could make out their pale faces suspended high in the brown skies, eyes like dim search lights, cataract-blind and tearful. They wobbled over, cursing useless threats, but they coughed up our own young blood. Infecting us. Until we became the same dinosaur ourselves, when the echo of the long hairless necks beating obscenely on the asphalt had time enough to turn into our own nostalgia.
Death shuffled to the east, shuffled to the west, and over us again. We countered clockwise in a slow, dark circle of power, throbbing to the black bass line of resurrection. We ran blindly on the soft shoulder, screeched around the corner of our ever-present dreams; in a flash, the melted schoolgirl became a white shadow negative.
Clutching our worthless icons, we fought over channels, tried to oppress the world, lost our souls along the highway, became just a fearful guilty hitchhiker, screamed each other’s names, and jumped eagerly into the fire.
Ask anyone who was there.
MY FATHER HOWLED IN HIS SLEEP
My father’s hands were still shaking, his lips moved in silent sentences, his red eyes blurred with the tears of his stolen youth. His language was obscured in the mirthless sound of his gut laugh, and slurred with another Pabst Blue Ribbon. His eyes squinted behind the smoke of another Lucky Strike, his mouth softening from a hard snarl to a weak broken smile in the moments he thought I wasn’t looking. I was looking. I saw a heartbroken boy who walked like a man.
Snatched off his father’s farm by the events of history, he marched willingly under the rumbling thunderheads and into the sunset slash of brutality. My father allowed himself to be trained like a dog to kill, and in that process lost more than he could afford to lose. My father emerged from the nightmare fractured, his soul in pieces.
My father returned to us hollow-eyed, death in a shell of skin, obscured by the ill-fitting uniform. My father lived in a junkyard of human wreckage and tried to make the best of it. My father tore his neck raw against the invisible chain of manhood twisted too tightly, cutting off his inspiration. My father was a dog of war.
JOYCE
A single Airstream trailer sat shining in the envy of the white trash inhabitants of this U.S. military camp. It was the trailer Joyce lived in with her older brother, David, their mother and their troubled father. There was a newly laid asphalt road that led through overgrown forests, ending in a series of shorter roads and four or five rows of pocked, scraped trailers surrounded by marshland and meadow.
On a drizzly morning, in one of those meadows, twenty children were watching some older boys shooting arrows straight up above their heads. David, a broken-toothed ten-year-old, was bent over backward pulling his bowstring, aiming for the sky. The bow vibrated under the tension, and the striped, feathered, steel-tipped arrow launched into the mists above us, immediately invisible in the low clouds.
We stood small in the field, our faces upward, eyes squinted against the filtered sun, silent. Suddenly one of us shouted, and we scattered. The arrow spun downward and embedded itself deeply into the soft earth. Wiping our runny noses, and shivering in our soaking pant legs and shoes, we converged on the arrow like a flock of birds. An older boy pulled the arrow out of the ground, marking the depth it had sunk with his thumb on the shaft. Each older boy took his turn in the contest of whose arrow would drive deeper.
Joyce and I were five years old. I had just had my birthday; Joyce had hers at Christmas. I was completely enthralled with the older kids as they once again displayed a power and privilege beyond ours. We were charged with an element of danger. We knew that for a few brief seconds we had no idea where the arrow was falling, or where it would punch into the ground. The older girls took it on themselves to guide the younger kids out of the path of the descending arrow.
As with most of our games, this one began to shift to increasing risk. I watched the older boys rewarded with cheering and backslapping congratulations for standing under the arrow as it descended, delaying their move to safety as the arrow whispered downward on them. I realized the right to remove the arrow was bestowed on the boy who stood nearest the shaft when it hit the earth. I looked at Joyce, slipped my hand from the hand of the older girl between us, and waited for David to launch the next one.
Another arrow jumped skyward. As it began its climb, an angry adult voice yanked our collective spirit down from the disappearing arrow to the oppression and threat of our parents. The older children looked to the approaching voice. The bow was flung on the grass, the launcher running toward the edge of the woods as his father gained speed and fury behind him. Other hungover adult voices screamed confusing and conflicting directions.
“Stay where you are, Joyce.”
“David, you little son of a bitch, STOP or I’ll. . . .” “Come here. No. NO!! Stay right there.”
My eyes strained for the dot to appear above me. Frozen, heart pounding, face skyward, the arrow falling above me. I could hear a faint, growing whistle and whisper.