Stories for Chip (48 page)

The screen door hissed closed behind them.

There was a kind of sanctity in the Kansas sky, clear and deep, constellations invisibly hung like bright mobiles.

The streetlamp at the foot of Jim Lee's yard attracted all manner of insects, a cloud of wingbeats like a swarm of thoughts with no skull to pen them in, moths bumping against the glass sealing them off from a mercury-vapor heaven. Bats flapped after them in strobe-light movements, swooping swerving veering off with uncanny precision.

Jim Lee looked up at the bright lure. “The quantity a motion here an' everywhere else is as never-changing as Superman's uniform—if Descartes is to be believed. But the soul can alter direction some. Will makes a difference.”

“All we gotta do is wish, huh?”

“Does seem to be a flaw in theory somewhere. But ain't it possible a destination in mind up there—” Jim Lee lifted his chin. “—becomes a fate down here?”

Parked underneath the light, Jim Lee's truck was a yellow somewhere between banana and bumblebee, The Hog painted in fancy script on a bug-shield peppered with kills.

Streetlamps spaced half a mile apart marked the way to town.

Jim Lee reached down, turned a Country Western tune up loud. Just as the song ended, the truck jerked to a stop, and Jim Lee yanked the emergency brake.

The Round-Up was already filled with body heat, with walled-in smoke and idle conversation no more intelligible than a flock of chittering birds. What with the music, Logan could barely hear his own boots clumping on the wooden floor.

“Whaddaya say Jim Lee…?”

Hands reached out to slap the broad back Y-ed over by suspenders. Logan a couple steps behind, always at Jim's heels, out of high school but still three years away from the 21 you needed to be to drink anything harder than wine or beer.

Larry behind the bar and behind him black-and-whites of the town at the turn of the century, of him during his rodeo days, #27 plastered on his back, the bull's ass six feet in the air in one.

“How's the neck feelin'?” Larry's big hand, gloved in the old days before he shoved it under rope wound around the bull's chest and humped back, came over the bar and squeezed Logan's. Rough as a grindstone.

“'S'alright.” Instinctively Logan put two fingers to the swelling under his collar, the scab still bloodying his shirt.

Jim Lee leaned over the bar. “Nothin wrong with him a beer won't fix.”

Larry popped open a couple of bottles, shook his head. “Jesus God, lucky you ducked when you did.”

Jim Lee held the bottle up to the hazy light. “A cold beer is like a scrambled egg—you can't beat it.”

Logan's head was full of coke and the woodgrain patterns under his bottle, Jim Lee talking nonstop to him, to Larry, yelling down to the guys a few stools away, already motioning for another beer.

Larry switched the empty for a fresh bottle, the shine dulled by a film of cold sweat.

Don Moody, a third-year law student, was leaning against the wall, posed like some movie-poster icon. “Who do I luck lack?”

“Truman Capote. Now get over here an' pick up a round.”

Age notwithstanding, Logan lifted a tumbler, bottom soaked in a little puddle of sour mash that Larry's rag would sop up in a swipe, touched rims with Jim Lee and Don and Larry. The whiskey burned going down, the fumes cleared his nose.

Broncobuster, bullrider, Larry could've handled that mare even without a saddle. He had scars under his T-shirt from the time a bull had walked all over him, stomped him good, nobody expected him to be breathing after that, much less back behind a muscled hump in a year's time. Wasn't any riled bull or even a bucking stallion that had clipped Logan's head, was a broken-in mare. He'd seen a bunch of Cherokees in Oklahoma, too lazy to go through the hoo-ha of putting on saddles, gallop past him as though he were whiter than the Anglos standing next to him.

“How was Mexico, bud?” Don with that baby face of his that was never going to grow much of a beard, round as the spare tire around his waist, no good for hula-hooping but jiggled all right if Don took off at a run. “They got pyramids like they say?”

Grander than anything in Kansas, built by his distant cousins long before that mixed-up Italian with a Ptolemaic map as misconceived as his Atlantic Ocean crossing was even born.

Billy Boy shouldered between Logan and Don. Thick hair greased back, Elvis Presley sideburns he ought to have shaved off, he kept a plastic comb in a T-shirt pocket. Black on his fingers where engine gunk had settled into tiny cracks in skin, Billy looked at Logan with glossy pupils as big as hubcaps.

He was saying something, but Logan's head was bouncing to jukebox music. Fueled by powdered angel bones, alcohol mist settling over his better judgment the way clouds could gang up and blur the Moon, he knew he could do better, just wouldn't make it to any radio station in Frontenac. The over-and-over beat was background for Don wishing for grazing rights to the grand majority of women who walked by, Jim Lee's open-mouthed laughter, Billy Boy's out-loud figuring a system to hit the lottery.

“Ah'm tired a standin' on concrete ten hours a day, breathin' in exhaust an' comin' out smellin' like a grease pit.” Billy slowed down enough for a sip from his bottle.

Logan wasn't listening any more. The midnight freight he'd been riding had slowed suddenly, brakes shaving a squeal off the metal they were pressed against, curled in his ear while his body took on the weight the engine had been hauling. Suddenly he was afraid the legs of his stool were about to splinter and he was going to go through the floorboards ass-first.

Larry waved him and Jim Lee behind the bar, hustled them to the back room he used as an office. Jim Lee pushed aside receipts, bills, letters, invoices, cleared a corner of Larry's 1940s desk stolen from the office of some movie private eye. Pulling out his razor, Jim Lee sliced lines like clean white scars on the desktop, a couple of them snapping Larry's head back like twin jabs from a boxer. Hoo-ee. He shook his head once—quick as a twitch—sniffed, wiped at his nose, and then the rag in his back pocket was flapping up and down as he hurried out to tend bar.

Jim handed Logan the rolled-up dollar bill. “Oughta keep you up for a while.”

Logan pushed open the door to the bar. Voices, music, bad lighting, nodding heads, smiling faces all came together, fused like the tiny continents of bone that make up a skull—a fugue waiting to be composed, one that would take in even the wispy fleeting shapes the smoke wove itself into. He couldn't have been as almighty as he felt though, because Jim Lee's arms made his look skinny and smooth, were a wake-up call, a hey-hello—wasn't only his arms that needed work.

Friday night in southeastern Kansas. No hills to speak of, no lakes thereabouts, just strip-mine pits filled up by rain, the ocean a long haul as it happened, and Chicago a good nine hours' drive. Things showed up newer on the broad boulevards of the city, phrases like freshly-minted coins, the shine already gone by the time they reached the callused hands of awkward farm boys, talked about while beer labels worked on by nails chewed to nubs came away in sticky little balls dropped into ashtrays crowded with cigarette butts.

Jim Lee dragged on his gnarled cigar, adding to the smoke softening the pinball machine's yellow flashes, a kid across the room leaning into the flippers as if the shiny ball were tracing out his fate in its pinging odyssey.

Why not see how high the smoke went? Snort it, shoot it, pop it, climb a mountain, add a few stories to that skyscraper, aim a hollow arrow through a tube of gravity, send a dog, a monkey, a man to penetrate the starry mysteries that only come out at night, when it's dark enough to see what's melted in the white-hot glow, what's trapped in a miraculous net of bone and sinew. They were a bunch of cast-outs, wing-broke and unhaloed, trying to return to some forever-breaking dawn. Same as the moth willing to die for its immortal moment immolated. Combustible wings. Fluttering against the skull's dome webbed with cracks, calcified, its skylight sealed-up, lacquered with consciousness like an oyster shell smoothed with nacre. Everything in it turned to ash in the short-circuit where old lumber and vulnerable bone had collided.

“You know, this two-door town parked in the middle a nowhere had its heyday once.” Jim Lee's eyes turned to slits above his smoldering cigar. “Used to get men of ill repute from Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, once in a great while even a black-sedan-turned-gray by the dust of half the Midwest, but you could still see the New York plates when it pulled up in front of our very own pool hall.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Right across the street. Stobart's. Boarded up now, but Sto's used t'hop, back then—a bit before I was a regular.”

Look close enough at Jim Lee's eyes alight with the bygone, awash with beer, you might see in the dark irises tiny twins of Stobart's Pool Hall just as he remembered it.

“Used to come from all over…” Jimmy Lee's hand circled over the bar like a bird about to set down. “Right here.” His finger whitened at the tip where he pressed on the bar.

Jim Lee, a freckled kid on the black-and-white streets of yesteryears, a cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth, a pack rolled in a T-sleeve. Then at 17 leaning on his cue stick, freckles about gone, a white guinea-tee showing a weightlifter's arms, not too arrogant to smile. A Lone Star in the other hand, fingers pressing a smoldering butt to the cold-sweating can.

Theme and variation. How many other teenagers looked just like him? Even went to Joplin and got tattooed. Smoked the same brand of cigarettes and drank the same beer in Stobart's.

“Those days I was so cool when I stepped outside, temperature dropped.” His cigar a cold cinder, he looked at what was left as if he were missing something. “Left home sweet home to become one of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children—Yoo, Ess, Em, Cee. Fer the free scuba lessons. Damn near broke an eardrum.” He tipped his bottle all the way up. “A dive as outta this world as a moonwalk. You can go down in the same spot two, three days in a row an' it's new an' unfamiliar every day.” Jim Lee aimed an index finger at Logan's chest. “You'da never come up.”

Jim Lee down there in the water-dark, sinking and lost, following the beam of his flashlight, eyes peeled just in case those rumors about a sunken civilization were true. His undersea excavations maybe after a way to be that buoyant all the time, that wonderstruck, that close to the sound of his own breathing, to the ocean's breath sweeping things along, making kelp forests wave like the hair of Old Man Ocean long forgotten, topside temples gone to ruin, a pagan god half-buried face-down in the sand now, too at ease ever to move again, a natural formation on the bottom giving off a little greenish smolder in the sea night, a smidgen of glow maybe what caught Jim Lee's eye as he wove through those kelp strands—why'd he come back to Frontenac? The only waves here were in the lapping woodgrain patterns on the bar.

Yes, a kind of motion, as if the wood were breathing.

“Hey buddy, what're you starin' at so hard?”

The woodgrain pattern shifting, trembling under Logan's fingertips, the vibrato of mothwings.

“You don't wanna know.” Jim Lee squeezed his eyes closed, massaged his wrinkled brow.

Somebody tugged on Jim Lee's suspenders on his way out.

“Awright, awright, g'bye.” Jim Lee adjusted his suspenders with a thumb under each. “Can't unnerstand why they gotta mess with a man's apparel.”

A little later, Jim Lee's head bowed, his back slumped like he was feeling the weight of those oversized volumes he read, or maybe it was his gone-from-the-earth mother, a slow leaving, cancer of some kind, maybe that's what made him look old and worn, defeated, all three.

“I drink …” Jim Lee lifted his bottle. “…therefore I am.”

Was that all he'd managed to distill from his dusty stacks of books, an old joke? Was that all that'd come of sitting up late amidst the holy clutter of his collectibles, pouring out whiskey meditations on William Blake, wrestling with the sometimes insufferable, often impenetrable verses of the Bible by candlelight and cigar glow till sleep slipped up behind him, left him face-down on the table beside a hardened puddle of wax?

“They toll me philosophy'd help me pass the L-SAT, the logic an' all, but I don't hardly remember none of it.”

“Logic leads t'Aristotle, not t'God.” Jim Lee finished off what was in his bottle. “Plato wiped his ass with it.”

Don waved a hand. “Heard he was a fag.”

Jimmy grinned. “You couldn't be a waiter in Aristotle's Diner.”

“Shit.” Don shook his head. “Philosophy about as good as forchin tellin'….”

Who to look for in the insect buzz around a streetlamp? In the smoke-swirl conversations around them? Descartes? Or a higher-up?

“You ever been to one a those prayer meetings?” Don pointed at Logan with his bottle. “One with snakes? Those hillbillies pick up handfuls a the poisonous suckers at a time, never get bit. Straighten ‘em out like a fistful a arrows, stand ‘em up like shocked hair.”

Jim Lee shrugged. “Whaddya expect a farmers who drink their corn?”

“They thank thay're saints from the Babble. Reincar-nayted or somethin'.”

Not reincarnated, Logan thought, something different, the soul a song composed of a certain number of elements already there in the ancient Sumerians and their drumbeat songs, reshuffled over the centuries till you got a Kansas farmboy blowing his harmonica blues. Old as the hills in Oklahoma. No one ever really comes back, it's all odds, theme and variation, some things that look like others are bound to show up.

“You and Jim Lee read too many bucks, I can't hardly keep up with you.”

Did Logan say that out loud? Or was Don reading minds?

“The Lord works in mysterious ways all right.” Billy nodded confidently. “The night old Stobart died of a heart attack I dreamed he was drowning and was callin' out for help.”