The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (15 page)

Finally he spotted something. A thin wet smear like a snail trail. It led from where the book bag had been ejected from the bike, to an opening in the curb for draining rainwater into the sewer.

Straightening up, but finding himself unsteady on his feet—close to blacking out from pain and blood loss and more than that—Gorch experienced a renewal of those phantom signals from his absent index finger. A whispery sensation of brushing caresses, and an odd subtle tugging, as if he had inserted his missing finger through a hole in a wall, and on the other side little fish were nibbling at it.

Love Songs from the Hydrogen Jukebox

T.E. Grau

D
oyle had only been back on the Hill for two days when he already planned his next escape.

He disappeared three weeks ago from a reading at City Lights, hitching to SFO and flying twenty-three hours to scratch an itch in some Indonesian shithole. Screaming through the jungle, devouring the local medicine, taking full advantage of lax prohibitions on deviant behavior. He always went alone, and came back looking like he had grown an inch, with a couple of new scars, a bag full of bizarre trinkets, and enough stories to tide us all over until his next disappearance. I didn’t blame him for skating, at least not that night. The poet was garbage, mixing tenses and mushing up metaphors without knowing exactly why. Must have sucked down his scoop of melted Ferlinghetti back in Boise through a game of telephone. The girls thought he was sharp, but I suspect only because he looked like Tab Hunter. He could have looked like Borgnine and the birds still would have been chirping, just because he was standing a few feet above the rest of us, shadowed on the illuminated roof. Everyone’s supposed to be beautiful when heated by the spotlight. I thought he belonged further down the coast, where blond hair and a football chin earned you a paycheck and the pros write all the lines for you. Still, he scored pretty sweet that night, saving his best verse for after the show.

In Doyle’s absence, North Beach seemed to hold its breath, more out of anticipation of his return than the government spooks who were poking around the filthy dives and unheated squats that cloistered together on Telegraph Hill, hoping the rest of the tourist world would pass on by and head to the Golden Gate. The feds made their best attempt to blend in, wearing Hawaiian button ups and dungarees, trying to score a lid or making conversation with the street corner glamour boys, rummies, and shirtless Negro kids who cross-stitched the streets on their modified Schwinns. But we knew what these deadbeats were up to, combing the area for reds or fags, or the nightmare scenario for every Betty Crocker American—the homosexual communist. We could spot the stiffs as soon as they arrived, even before the whoops from the street told us there were fleas on the dog. Because no matter how deep their cover, how much research they did on the Vagabond Tribe, those Washington Joes couldn’t help tucking in their costume shirts, and their footwear was always showroom clean. A square can’t fake an octagon no matter how many angles they play. Not enough degrees.

We told Doyle about the Hoovers when he got back, but he brushed it off as he launched into a mad tale of getting bent on shots of deep bush nutmeg stirred into Coca Cola while a Sumatran mountain witch unfolded from a steamer trunk and pulled seven rusty nails out of the spine of some crippled child. It was wild, like all of Doyle’s stories, and no one knew where the facts ended and the ball of yarn began. No one cared, either. He was our Shaman, even to those who didn’t know what that title meant. He cured us with his words, wiping away the disease of home and the poison of memory. We were all going to make a new go of it on Telegraph Hill, so we naturally needed a gathering point. That point was Doyle, who seemed to be here before any of the rest of us arrived.

As he told the story of the mountain witch, Doyle passed around one of the spikes to the group gathered in front of him like a prayer circle, settling in between the roaches that disbanded their three-week circus and skittered back into the walls. This was holy time, and no one—not Jack or Allen or any street corner messiah—could touch him as he spun his silk into day-glo tapestry, hovering a full six inches off the floor. Still, earlier in the day, I saw something in his eyes when the agents were mentioned. A flash of rage that cut rare in his wide, placid face that always danced on the verge of a private wink. He knew things that we didn’t, even about ourselves, and that seemed to include why the government was sniffing around the Hill. But after that day, it was never mentioned again.

His homecoming shindig was a real blowout. Everyone in North Beach knew Doyle, and held him up as their golden calf, molded in the desert under the gaze of a fickle God to give them something tangible to trust. No one knew exactly where he came from, but he had an air of Back East breeding, tempered with something carved raw boned in the wilderness. The symmetrical features, the aristocratic nose. Hair that woke up better than your entire newly pressed outfit. He obviously had money, as his frequent jags to Peru and Afghanistan and a hundred other obscure destinations showed, but he lived like a pauper, dressing in worn-out trousers and a navy t-shirt. And he never wore shoes. “I like to feel the earth moving beneath me,” he explained to me the day after I first arrived while we blew through some choice Hawaiian Tai stick. He was a strange cat, Doyle, but that was why we all loved him. “Hero of the outcasts,” a junkhead we all called Raggedy Man croaked one night before vomiting into a bucket on the porch. The beat-down tramp, who lost his real name in a bloody cow pasture in eastern France twelve years back, just wiped his mouth, smiled, and nodded out, knowing no one would hassle him until he ventured back into the streets. We were the Outcasts, every dancing one of us, and we were all under Doyle’s protection from whatever wars haunted the outside world. Just as long as you were within his circle, and so many of us were. We’d fight to stay within the insulating glow that leaked out from behind his eyes, and probably do other things, too. Everyone needs a family, and we were all Doyle’s.

At the party, the girls whipped up some mean sandwiches with fresh sourdough and end cuts of Italian dry from Molinari’s, while the fellas mixed a batch of jungle juice in a bathtub half buried in the back yard. Doyle owned the house, a sweet three-story Queen Anne Victorian just off Columbus Ave, but not a car. Said he didn’t like to squirm through life inside a greasy fish tin. The sidewalks told the best stories anyway, and the love songs playing from the cracks held the sweetest harmonies. Six inches off the ground, no matter where he went.

“
Nellll
-son,” Doyle called out in a singsong voice. I turned and found him reclining on the cinder block retaining wall next to the alley, staring up into the murky night sky. The bricks must have only been a foot wide, but he made them seem like a king-size mattress. “Nelson Barnacles,” he mused, as if tasting the words. My last name was Barnes, but I was thrilled that Doyle finally gave me something new. Something that came from him. He gave lots of people nicknames, and now that included me. The glow around me suddenly grew brighter. I felt protected in a way Raggedy Man never could, especially because Raggedy Man ended up with his head caved in and missing both eyes and his left arm when he was fished up from under the wharf last week. Dumb bastard ventured too far out of the radius and ended up behind enemy lines. Just like in that cow pasture in eastern France. “Come check this out, Barnacles.”

I downed my glass and walked over to Doyle, drying my hands on my pants like a school kid called to the front of the class to receive a ribbon. I always hoped that Doyle liked me because I was interesting or special in some way, but deep down I knew it was most likely because I slept in my
’
48 Buick Roadmaster, which was the last working ride on the block. Never mind that it was the only home I had on earth. I probably could have crashed at Doyle’s pad, but I didn’t want to intrude. Anyway, I had wheels, which meant Doyle did too.

He gestured to the sky. I looked up, and couldn’t see anything through the incoming fog that reflected the light from the city back down upon itself like a golden canopy. “You see what I see?” Doyle asked, more to himself.

“Yeah… Yeah, I think I do.” I saw nothing, but it was very important for Doyle to think I was on his level at all times, even though I couldn’t find his floor if you built me a golden elevator.

Doyle exhaled a perfectly shaped nimbus cloud of spicy smoke that he was holding in the entire time. It didn’t smell like grass. It didn’t smell like anything I’d ever come across. His voice dropped an octave. “Nelson, we need to find the hydrogen jukebox.” He turned his electric blue eyes on me. “We need a cleansing.”

I paused, then nodded slowly. “We sure do.”

He stubbed out the narrow joint on his tongue and swallowed the roach. “Fire up the sled and let’s burn.”

I waited, expecting him to continue, but Doyle just stared at me, looking stone-cold sober, like a professor waiting for an answer. “N-now?” I stammered.

“If not now, then when?”

I thought for a minute, climbing through the gauze that spread from my stomach until I discovered that his question was rhetorical.

Doyle waited for me to say what I was supposed to say, what anyone would say, but I didn’t, so he smiled and hopped down off the ledge, landing lightly on his bare feet. “Meet me out front in thirty,” he said as he disappeared, taking the light with him.

I stood in the dark for several seconds. “Where’re you going?”

“Provisions!”

***

Thirty-two minutes later, we were rumbling down the Hill like a dull spear thrust into the slow rising sun, just as the city was shaking off the regret of the night before.

Sugarboy rode shotgun, rolling an Atomic Fireball across his stunted teeth and awkwardly jerking his head to the Kay Starr song on the radio, a gut full of bennies beating a hole in his heart. Doyle was in back, sitting between Cincinnati and some cat I’d never seen before. He called himself Escofet, which could have been a first or last name. Didn’t matter, really. Just another punter riding the carousel. I took him for a queer, with his sweat-stained silk shirt open to the waist and long lashes that fluttered over black eyes that looked perpetually on the verge of tears, and presently seemed to be locked into watching me in the rearview mirror. A lurid tattoo of something ripe and naked peeked out from behind the row of pearl buttons. Doyle brought new faces and names in and out of the group almost daily, and it never mattered the color or persuasion. He had an interest in all of it, and tried every inch of it on for size.

In between sips of Old Fitzgerald and necking pretty heavy with Cincinnati, Doyle called out directions just as each turn was almost behind us. I yanked and careened, lurching the Buick through three lanes of traffic and a hailstorm of curses, finally catching the I-80 out of the city. My dad would have had a heart attack with the way I was beating this car. Doyle howled above each tire squeal, instructing every disgruntled commuter in turn to sodomize various family members in a variety of creative ways. Cincinnati giggled like she was seven instead of twenty-four and nowhere and drunk, while Escofet kept watching me in the mirror. Sugarboy popped another handful and lit up a joint, lost in the world just outside his window as he ground his nubs further into his gums.

We crossed the Red Bridge and invaded darktown Oakland like roaring barbarians, waving to the mothers heading to the salon and nodding to the hard-eyed neighborhood toughs manning their posts under the eaves of shadowed stoops. By this time, I was dipping into the road whiskey, and after a few slugs stopped wondering where we were going and focused on how capital it was that we were getting there. “Tapping in and letting go,” as Doyle so often called it. Tapping into the lizard brain to learn the secrets of the reptiles, and letting go of the ego of the sapien. It wasn’t easy for a boy raised between hay bails.

The row houses ceded ground to rugged hill and Spanish fir, and we soon made our way onto the 24, passing Emeryville and Upper Rockridge as time seemed to speed up while the fish cans around us slowed like unwound toys.

***

The highway thinned out, the energy in the car plateaued, and an unspoken silence crouched just below the radio backbeat and the roar of the pavement. I watched the painted signs pass above us, looking for clues. No one said a word for a long time, going through what they were going through. Escofet’s eyes made the minutes into hours.

“Where’re we headed, anyway?” Sugarboy asked as he turned to the back seat, his bloodshot pinpoints darting from Escofet to the creep of Cincinnati’s dirndl skirt that showed just a hint of rounded cotton. He had finally pulled himself back together long enough to ask the question I had been meaning to bring up back on the Hill, but didn’t have the guts. I wanted to seem the bold adventurer, tearing off in the pre-dawn slate without a destination in mind or a care in my soul. I wanted to be Dean Moriarty. But I was just Nelson Barnes, all smooth hull without texture, and what I was most concerned about was the five-body wear on my wheezing shocks.

Doyle took another belt from the bottle and grinned, squirting a rivulet of warm liquid between his teeth onto the back of my neck like a spitting cobra.

“Up into the rim. Forehead of the Western world… We gotta get a better view of things, you know?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and neither did Sugarboy. The back seat, on the other hand, seemed drenched in understanding. The unifying power of liquor and forgotten modesty. Finally, I tried to join in with a chuckle. “We going mountain climbing? I didn’t bring my boots.”