Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (42 page)

After the soul dies, the spirit takes some time to mull over the soul’s experiences, and then the whole process starts over. Chart, daimon, a new incarnation–done time and time again until the soul finally gets it right. It can take hundreds of lifetimes (or maybe even thousands–or millions–for all I know…). A soul rises through the
Bardo
as it achieves greater consciousness and compassion. But at the end of each successive lifetime, a soul doesn’t always rise higher. Choices made in one lifetime can have a positive or negative impact on the next. As a general rule, whenever you get something that pleases your ego, you’ve usually traded away something that’s important to your soul. That’s just Basic Karma. But don’t sweat trying to be perfect. Half the answers you need are already there in your mistakes. If you want to learn more, you can always sign up for Karma 101.

Obviously, Keats had just had a refresher course when his daimon inspired him to write: “Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making’. Then you will find out the use of the world.”

That about sums it up exactly, only you should try to remember: we’re the makers of our own souls.

LIFE EXPECTANCIES

H
elen Swannson sits on a wrought-iron bench under the yellowing willow tree in her backyard, contemplating the shambles of the little pagoda that her grandson, Gordon, made for her while he was still in kindergarten. She’s thinking about death. Not her own death, particularly–although she feels it will be coming soon–but rather, the experience of death in general.
Why does everyone have to leave?

Her best friend across the street, Mabel Nyquist, lost her battle with breast cancer a year ago. The radiation treatments made her weak as a jellyfish and then all her pretty silver hair fell out during chemotherapy. Helen sat with her and brought over homemade peanut butter cookies and pink lemonade, but Mabel died, bald and bewildered, despite those efforts.

More recently, Harry Patterson, Helen’s neighbor on the corner, keeled over from heatstroke this summer. He was only 65, but he should have known better than to be out mowing his lawn in ninety-degree weather. Harry was vain about his lawn. He’d planted his front yard with some new kind of clover-hybrid that required a lot of attention. He wanted to keep it green even during the dog days of August. One of the neighborhood boys riding by on a bicycle found him, Harry’s flabby white belly rising up from the clover like a giant toadstool. The red gas-powered mower stood beside him, still spinning its blades and roaring for more.

Then there was the one she couldn’t get over… her oldest son, Malcolm, dead in a plane crash some three years ago. Always the daredevil, Mal was. But to fly his Cessna straight into his very own house–
what on earth could he have been thinking?
Thank God Gordon and Cynthia hadn’t been home when it happened.

There were oh-so-many people she’d known who were gone now
. That’s what happens when you get old.
She supposes she should just be grateful that she’s still alive, but her gratitude is wearing thin at the age of seventy-six. She can’t see the point to any of it. Most people think of their lives as difficult to manage and full of drama, but really, what’s the use of all that activity? All the scurrying and worrying, what does it amount to?

Besides, living isn’t all that hard, when you get right down to it. You just muddle through your day and then you go to bed at night. When you wake up, you start all over.

Helen’s day always begins with coffee. She still loves the smell of percolating coffee on a chilly autumn morning. It’s one of the few pleasures left to her. That and the sound of her washing machine when it’s in the middle of its rinse cycle–a sound like ocean waves lapping at the pilings of a pier. It reminds her of happier times with Milt in their cabin at Morro Bay, and later, with the boys. Mal had tried to make Gerald eat a dried-up old fish eyeball once, something he’d found on the beach. He had Gerald pinned in the sand and even though he was only six, little Gerald yelled,
“Eat it yourself, you goddam son-of-a-bitch!”
The language shocked her. And in public! She was so embarrassed. She couldn’t remember whether Gerald had eaten the fish eyeball or not, but when she got him home she washed his mouth out with soap. Later, Milt found a baby quail under the back porch. The boys wanted to raise it as a pet–Mal even found a shoebox and lined it with soft green grass–but the bird was dead by morning. A broken neck. Gerald said a cat must have done it, but Helen had her doubts.

So many memories….
Her recollections and daydreams amount to pretty much the same thing these days, everything intertwined like a fat ball of wriggling eels in her brain. Her mind is going–she knows that much. What happened yesterday or last week is fuzzy at best, but scenes from forty, fifty, or even sixty years ago are still clear as day. She loses whole afternoons listening to the washer’s rinse cycle while she sits in the pantry with her asthma machine, breathing vaporized vodka from the inhalation tube. It calms her, helps her think. During a hospital stay, a doctor once wrote on her medical chart that she was an alcoholic.
The nerve of him!
An innocent old woman with asthma, being labeled that way….
Boy, oh boy, did he ever get an earful.
By the time she was finished, that doctor’s ears had turned so crimson they looked like the gill slits on a red snapper.

She often has dreams of the sea. Sometimes she’s a walrus or a ball of quivering light in an underwater cavern where sharks swarm in on her from the shadows. Strange hieroglyphics are written in the sand on the ocean floor. There’s a pirate’s treasure hidden somewhere, but she can’t find it. Giant manta rays swoop down at her like velvety bats and the sharks twitch their tails and bare their bloody, jagged fangs. She’s never felt so lost and alone, so utterly desolate.

On the mornings after one of those dreams, she hits the asthma machine early. Then she gets behind the wheel of her 1973 Ford LTD Brougham and drives (well under the speed limit) to the Fashion Fair Mall in Fresno, where she can spend the whole day among other people, enjoying the free air conditioning.

She used to be quite the shopper in her day. Furs, cashmere sweaters, silk blouses, beaded handbags, and Italian shoes; dresses from Cristóbal Balenciaga, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Coco Chanel. But as she’s gotten older, she’s found it increasingly difficult to find flattering clothes. Inside, she still feels like an arthritic twenty-five-year-old, but when she looks in the dressing room mirror, she’s appalled. Whenever she thinks of her famous décolletage on the Sunny Maid Raisins boxes and compares it with what she has now, it makes her want to howl. Not even a lifetime’s worth of moisturizers and conditioners could prevent her from turning into the very product she used to represent–a shriveled-up San Joaquin Valley raisin
(although she makes a far better-looking raisin than most women do at her age, she can say in her defense)
. Now she buys clothes for hiding in, rather than preening in. Most of her wardrobe, accordingly, is baggy and brown.

So shopping isn’t as much fun as it used to be. Sometimes she misses that trance-like state she got into whenever she roamed the aisles of the better department stores. But being at Fashion Fair brings some of that feeling back for her.

Milt used to get the same hypnotic kick from running the lumberyard. When he talked about his day, sometimes he sounded just like a little boy with an elaborate train set. To hear him tell it, he started his business with one locomotive that chugged off to Chicago with nothing behind it but a line of credit from the local bank. In Chicago’s central hub, Milt’s locomotive was coupled up with boxcars from all over the country: boxcars loaded with nails and ball peen hammers from Pittsburgh; flatcars stacked high with plywood from the coast of Oregon; still more boxcars weighted down with sacks of cement from Arizona. When the train got back to Kingsburg, Milt’s men unloaded the whole kit-and-caboodle and sold it all to the local farmers. Then the train took off again with its boxcars full of the farmers’ money. This time the train took a different route, stopping by the state capital in Sacramento and the White House in Washington, D.C. to drop off a few boxcars
(Milt believed in paying his fair share of taxes…).
Then the rest of the boxcars were uncoupled in Chicago in exchange for another round of goods and the whole business started over. Only this time, there was a difference (and this was the part Helen loved to picture): now, at the end of each train, there was a caboose, and in that caboose was something called
profits
–money she and Milt could spend.

Even during the Depression there had been enough cabooses to provide quite a nice life for them. People still needed to eat–and San Joaquin Valley farmers produced food in abundance. But after the war, when the vets returned home to raise families and build houses, the cabooses started coming in fast and furious. Suddenly, or so it seemed, they were rich.

So she never had to work. Why any woman would ever
want
to work… well, the very idea never made a lick of sense to her. Aside from the obvious superiority of being allowed to spend each and every day as one saw fit,
who would stay home to raise the children?
The feminist agenda was a disaster, in her opinion. As more women entered the workforce, the marketplace simply adjusted to absorb the increase in household income. In other words, housing prices shot up. Now women were
forced
to work because it took two people working full-time to maintain the lifestyle that one man used to be able to provide on his own.

Of course, without a job, there was always the problem of boredom. Milt never gave her the attention she thought she deserved. Especially in the early days, when the lumber business was just starting and he was off selling insurance every evening after work to cover the huge debts they had run up. She was young and pretty and there she was, just sitting at home all by herself. So she entered the Sunny Maid Raisin Queen contest as a lark. But really, deep down, she wanted to show Milt she was still desirable–
and he’d better watch out.
When she won, Milt hardly batted an eye. So it was his fault, really, when she started the affair with Max.

Max with his constant laughter and lunging inside her, his stench of sweat and Havana cigars. The weight of him, his hairy chest almost smothering her. And always, when he rolled off her, the stories and lectures, the ambitious plans. Max was a talker, unlike Milt.
How she loved him for that!
But she still loved Milt, too. After all, he was providing for her. And he was never unkind. During the affair, she pretended to be frigid with Milt, but there had been some embarrassing overlaps. Her husband also had needs, sometimes too urgent to ignore. It pains her now to think of it, but she would just lie there like a petulant child, fists balled at her sides, refusing to look at him so she could better hide her orgasms. Things went on like that for quite a while, more than a decade. Then Milt found out about her affair in the most humiliating way possible, from some nosy Parker of a local policeman. Milt didn’t horsewhip her, although she probably deserved at least that. Instead, he just withdrew from her, went inside himself. He asked her if she wanted a divorce. Feeling defiant and unjustly proud, she spent the next two weeks at Max’s small house in Fowler. And then something happened that made her realize what a horse’s ass she’d made of herself.

It was just a little thing, really… something that shouldn’t have even mattered. She woke up early on a Sunday morning and asked Max if he wanted to go out for pancakes. Max was a heavy sleeper. He rolled over and mumbled to her, “Just let me get ten more minutes of shut-eye.” Ten minutes turned into twenty, then an hour. She was starving. She remembered she had a Snickers bar in her purse
(all her life, she’d had a terrible sweet tooth…)
and so she ate that on an empty stomach. By the time Max woke up, the sugar had given her a pounding headache. “You still up for pancakes?” he asked her. She told him about her headache, complaining that it was his fault she’d eaten the candy bar. “My fault? How can it be my fault?” Max asked her. “Helen, don’t you see? You’re always blaming other people when your own silly choices go wrong. Our friend Mister Sartre would call that an example of living in bad faith.”

So she was living in bad faith, was she?
She’d never felt so insulted in all her life. She told Max, right then and there, that their affair was over. She went crawling back to Milt, begging him to give their marriage a second chance. It took Milt quite a while, but he eventually forgave her. Actually, she seduced him–and made it clear there would be no more acting frigid on her part from that point onward. Malcolm was born about nine months after he took her back.

Gerald arrived a year later, and then she was done. Early menopause set in not long after, drying up her libido
(poor Milt found himself shut out again).
Raising two rambunctious little boys while she was having hot flashes wasn’t easy, but for the most part, she enjoyed it. Of course, there had been days when she felt like the both of them were sucking the life out of her with their endless, whiny demands. Gerald at the age of two had been especially trying in this regard. If he saw a wad of gum stuck to someone’s shoe, he could scream, without tiring,
“Ger-Ger want gum-gum!”
fifty or sixty times at the top of his lungs. Fortunately, those days had been rare.

As the boys got older, she liked them a little less. It wasn’t anything she would ever admit to anyone, but in her heart, she knew it was true. She watched insincerity creep into their smiles, saw them learning to lie and cheat and steal. She tried her best to instill a strong sense of values in them, but Milt was raising them to be businessmen. They’d be lost if they didn’t know how to fake a smile and slip the knife in while telling people what they wanted to hear.

What a world, what a world….

Mal and Gerald sharpened their new skills on each other. There was nothing but hatred between the two of them. Always fighting, always tattling, trying to get the other one in trouble. It was like Cain and Abel. It didn’t stop when they became adults, either. She could feel it when they were in the same room together–a low current of animosity that could erupt into a full-blown fistfight at any time. By then they were two giants. Gerald stood 6’-9" and Mal wasn’t much shorter.
(Where did they get those genes? No one in her family, or Milt’s, had been anywhere near that tall.)
It would have been ugly to see them go at it. Maybe that was why Mal drank so much around the holidays–so he and Gerald wouldn’t start pummeling each other with turkey legs and gravy tureens, or spattering each other with her special fiesta-green tapioca pudding.