Pulphead: Essays (5 page)

Bub came up from behind, also in camo. “In the middle of the night,” he said. “It woke me up.”

Jake said, “It sounded like a baby crying.”

“Like a little-bitty baby,” Bub said.

Jake was messing with something at my feet, in the shadows, something that looked alive. Bub dropped a few logs onto the fire and went to the Chevy for matches.

I sat there trying to see what Jake was doing. “You got that lantern?” he said. It was by my feet; I switched it on.

He started pulling frogs out of a poke. One after another. They strained in his grip and lashed at the air. “Where’d you get those?” I asked.

“About half a mile that way,” he said. “It ain’t private property if you’re in the middle of the creek.” Bub laughed his high expressionless laugh.

“These ain’t too big,” Jake said. “In West Virginia, well, we got ones the size of chickens.”

Jake started chopping their bodies in half. He’d lean forward and center his weight on the hand that held the knife, to get a clean cut, tossing the legs into a frying pan. Then he’d stab each frog in the brain and flip the upper parts into a separate pile. They kept twitching, of course—their nerves. Some were a little less dead than that. One in particular stared up at me, gulping for air, though his lungs were beside him, in the grass.

“Could you do that one in the brain again?” I said. Jake spiked it, expertly, and grabbed for the next frog.

“Why don’t you stab their brains before you take off the legs?” I asked. He smiled. He said I cracked him up.

Darius, when he got back, made me a cup of hot sassafras tea. “Drink this, it’ll make you feel better,” he told me. I’d never said I felt bad. Jake lightly sautéed the legs in butter and served them to me warm. “Eat this,” he said. The meat was so tender, it all but dissolved on my tongue.

Pee Wee came back with the Jews, who were forced to tell us a second time that we were damned. (Leviticus 11:12, “Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.”)

Jake, when he heard this, put on a show, making the demi-frogs talk like puppets, chewing with his mouth wide open so all could see the meat.

The girls ran off again. Pee Wee chased after them, calling, “Come on, they’re just playin’!”

Darius peered at Jake. He looked not angry but saddened. Jake said, “Well, if he wants to bring them girls around here, they oughtn’t to be telling us what we can eat.”

“Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend,” Darius said, “I will eat no flesh while the world standeth.”

“First Corinthians,” I said.

“Eight thirteen,” Darius said.

*   *   *

I woke without having slept—that awful feeling—and lay there steeling myself for the strains of Praise and Worship. When it became too much to wait, I boiled water and made instant coffee and drank it scalding from the lid of the peanut butter jar. My body smelled like stale campfire. My hair had leaves and ash and things in it. I thought about taking a shower, but I’d made it two days without so much as acknowledging any of the twenty-nine-footer’s systems; it would have been silly to give in now.

I sat in the driver’s seat and watched, through tinted glass, little clusters of Christians pass. They looked like people anywhere, only gladder, more self-contained. Or maybe they just looked like people anywhere. I don’t know. I had no pseudo-anthropological moxie left. I got out and wandered. I sat with the crowd in front of the stage. There was a redheaded Christian speaker up there, pacing back and forth. Out of nowhere, he shrieked, “MAY YOU BE COVERED IN THE ASHES OF YOUR RABBI JESUS!” If I were to try to convey to you how loudly he shrieked this, you’d think I was playing wordy games.

I was staggering through the food stands when a man died at my feet. He was standing in front of the funnel-cake window. He was big, in his early sixties, wearing shorts and a short-sleeve button-down shirt. He just … died. Massive heart attack. I was standing there, and he fell, and I don’t know whether there’s some primitive zone in the brain that registers these things, but the second he landed, I knew he was gone. The paramedics jumped on him so fast, it was weird—it was like they’d been waiting. They pumped and pumped on his chest, blew into his mouth, ran IVs. The ambulance showed up, and more equipment appeared. The man’s broad face had that slightly disgruntled look you see on the newly dead.

Others had gathered around; some thought it was all a show. A woman standing next to me said bitterly, “It’s not a show. A man has died.” She started crying. She took my hand. She was small with silver hair and black eyebrows. “He’s fine, he’s fine,” she said. I looked at the side of her face. “Just pray for his family,” she said. “He’s fine.”

I went back to the trailer and had, as the ladies say where I’m from, a colossal go-to-pieces. I started to cry and then stopped myself for some reason. I felt nonsensically raw and lonely. What a dickhead I’d been, thinking the trip would be a lark. There were too many ghosts here. Everyone seemed so strange and so familiar. Plus I suppose I was starving. The frog meat had been superb, but meager—even Jake had said as much.

In the midst of all this, I began to hear, through the shell of the twenty-nine-footer, Stephen Baldwin giving a talk on the Fringe Stage—that’s where the “edgier” acts are put on at Creation. If you’re shaky on your Baldwin brothers, he’s the vaguely troglodytic one who used to comb his bangs straight down and wear dusters. He’s come to the Lord. I caught him on cable a few months ago, some religious talk show. Him and Gary Busey. I don’t remember what Baldwin said, because Busey was saying things so weird the host got nervous. Busey’s into “generational curses.” If you’re wondering what those are, apologies. I was born-again, not raised on acid.

Baldwin said many things; the things he said got stranger and stranger. He said his Brazilian nanny, Augusta, had converted him and his wife in Tucson, thereby fulfilling a prophecy she’d been given by her preacher back home. He said, “God allowed 9/11 to happen,” that it was “the wrath of God,” and that Jesus had told him to share this with us. He also said the Devil did 9/11. He said God wanted him “to make gnarly cool Christian movies.” He said that in November we should vote for “the man who has the greatest faith.” The crowd lost it; the trailer all but shook.

When Jake and Bub beat on the door, I’d been in there for hours, getting weaker, rereading
The Silenced Times
and the festival program. In the program, it said the candle-lighting ceremony was tonight. The guys had told me about it—it was one of the coolest things about Creation. Everyone gathered in front of the stage, and the staff handed out a candle to every single person there. The media handlers said there was a lookout you could hike to, on the mountain above the stage. That was the way to see it, they said.

When I opened the door, Jake was waving a newspaper. Bub stood behind him, smiling big.

“Look at this,” Jake said. It was Wednesday’s copy of
The Valley Log
, serving Southern Huntingdon County—“It is just a rumor until you’ve read it in
The Valley Log
.”

The headline for the week read
MOUNTAIN LION NOT BELIEVED TO BE THREAT TO CREATION FESTIVAL CAMPERS.

“Wha’d we tell you?” Bub said.

“At least it’s not a threat,” I said.

“Well, not to us it ain’t,” said Jake.

I climbed to their campsite with them in silence. Darius was sitting on a cooler, chin in hands, scanning the horizon. He seemed meditative. Josh and Ritter were playing songs. Pee Wee was listening, by himself; he’d blown it with the Jewish girls.

“Hey, Darius,” I said. He got up. “It’s fixin’ to shower here in about ten minutes,” he said. I went and stood beside him, tried to look where he was looking.

“You want to know how I know?” he said.

He explained it to me, the wind, the face of the sky, how the leaves on the tops of the sycamores would curl and go white when they felt the rain coming, how the light would turn a certain “dead” color. He read the landscape to me like a children’s book. “See over there,” he said, “how that valley’s all misty? It hasn’t poured there yet. But the one in back is clear—that means it’s coming our way.”

Minutes later, it started to rain, big, soaking, percussive drops. The guys started to scramble. I suggested we all get into the trailer. They looked at one another, like maybe it was a sketchy idea. Then Ritter hollered, “Get her done!” We all ran down the hillside, holding guitars and—in Josh’s case—a skillet wherein the fried meat of a still-unidentified woodland creature lay ready to eat.

There was room for everyone. I set my lantern on the dining table. We slid back the panes in the windows to let the air in. Darius did card tricks. We drank springwater. Somebody farted; the conversation about who it had been (Pee Wee) lasted a good twenty minutes. The rain on the roof made a solid drumming. The guys were impressed with my place. They said I should fence it. With the money I’d get, I could buy a nice house in Braxton County.

We played guitars. The RV rocked back and forth. Jake wasn’t into Christian rock, but as a good Baptist he loved old gospel tunes, and he called for a few, God love him. Ritter sang one that killed me. Also, I don’t know what changed, but the guys were up for secular stuff. It turned out that Pee Wee really loved Neil Young; I mean, he’d never heard Neil Young before, but when I played “Powderfinger” for him, he sort of curled up like a kid, then made me play it again when I was done. He said I had a pretty voice.

We all told one another how good we all were, how everybody else should really think about a career in music. Josh played “Stairway to Heaven,” and we got loud, singing along. Darius said, “Keep it down, man! We don’t need everybody thinking this is the sin wagon.”

The rain stopped. It was time to go. Two of the guys planned to leave in the morning, and I had to start walking if I wanted to make the overlook in time for the candle-lighting. They went with me as far as the place where the main path split off toward the stage. They each embraced me. Jake said to call them if I ever had “a situation that needs clearing up.” Darius said God bless me, with meaning eyes. Then he said, “Hey, man, if you write about us, can I just ask one thing?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Put in there that we love God,” he said. “You can say we’re crazy, but say that we love God.”

The climb was long and steep. At the top was a thing that looked like a backyard deck. It jutted out over the valley, commanding an unobstructed view. Kids hung all over it like lemurs or something.

I pardoned my way to the edge, where the cliff dropped away. It was dark and then suddenly darker—pitch. They had shut off the lights at the sides of the stage. Little pinpricks appeared, moving along the aisles. We used to do candles like this at church, when I was a kid, on Christmas Eve. You light the edges, and the edges spread inward. The rate of spread increases exponentially, and the effect was so unexpected, when, at the end, you had half the group lighting the other half’s candles, it always seemed like somebody flipped a switch. That’s how it seemed now.

The clouds had moved off—the bright stars were out again. There were fireflies in the trees all over, and spread before me, far below, was a carpet of burning candles, tiny flames, many ten thousands. I was suspended in a black sphere full of flickering light.

Sure I thought about Nuremberg. But mostly I thought of Darius, Jake, Josh, Bub, Ritter, and Pee Wee, whom I doubted I’d ever see again, whom I’d come to love, and who loved God—for it’s true, I would have said it even if Darius hadn’t asked me to, it may be the truest thing I will have written here: they were crazy, and they loved God—and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that, which I never was capable of. Knowing it isn’t true doesn’t mean you would be strong enough to believe if it were. Six of those glowing specks in the valley were theirs.

I was shown, in a moment of time, the ring of their faces around the fire, each one separate, each one radiant with what Paul calls, strangely, “assurance of hope.” It seemed wrong of reality not to reward such souls.

There are lines in a Czeslaw Milosz poem:

And if they all, kneeling with poised palms, millions, billions of them, ended together with their illusion?

I shall never agree. I will give them the crown.

The human mind is splendid; lips powerful, and the summons so great it must open Paradise.

If one could only say it and mean it.

They all blew out their candles at the same instant, and the valley—the actual geographical feature—filled with smoke, there were so many.

I left at dawn, while creation slept.

FEET IN SMOKE

On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Elsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and in the strict sense of having been “shocked to death,” was electrocuted. He and his band, the Moviegoers, had stopped for a day to rehearse on their way from Chicago to a concert in Tennessee, where I was in school. Just a couple of days earlier, he had called to ask if there were any songs I wanted to hear at the show. I asked for something new, a song he’d written and played for me the last time I’d seen him, on Christmas Day. Our holidays always end the same way, with the two of us up late drinking and trying out our “tunes” on each other. There’s something biologically satisfying about harmonizing with a sibling. We’ve gotten to where we communicate through music, using guitars the way fathers and sons use baseball, as a kind of emotional code. Worth is seven years older than I am, an age difference that can make brothers strangers. I’m fairly sure the first time he ever felt we had anything to talk about was the day he caught me in his basement bedroom at our old house in Indiana, trying to teach myself how to play “Radio Free Europe” on a black Telecaster he’d forbidden me to touch.