You Play the Black & the Red Comes Up Up (18 page)

THE GOLDEN MOUNTAINS

I
took the bus up to Los Angeles and walked around. I went to a shooting-gallery along honky-tonk row and started shooting down the little white birds. I shot a long time till I'd knocked down all the little birds on one side and my money was pretty nearly gone. I had two dollars and some change left, and I gave it to the kid that worked at the shooting-gallery.

Then
I l
eft Los Angeles and found the road
I
came in on. I walked all afternoon and around evening I caught a freight going out.

And that's the way I left California, just the same way I came in, sitting in that boxcar with my legs hanging down and the train bucking slow up the mountainside.

I guess it was true what Genter once said: that the minute you crossed into California you went crazy. And I think that the minute you cross the mountains coming back, you change again. Because the ne
xt morning, sitting in that box
car and the freight heading down to a flat desert, all of a sudden something happened to me.

It was like all I had done in California was just a dream. And at first it felt good, and then it felt worse, because Sheila was only a dream with everything else. And that was bad.

I could remember everything about California, but I couldn't feel it. it tried to get my mind to remember something that it could feel, too, but it was no use. It was all gone. All of it. The pink stucco houses and the palm trees and the stares built like
cats and dogs and frogs and ice-
cream freezers and the neon lights round everything.
I tried to remember everything, to make Sheila real again. But it was all gone now: the hide-out at the top of the chute with the sunshine making a honeyed smell come up from the wood; and the women all going round with trousers on or shorts; and the big dirt cliffs beside the ocean with the seagulls screaming very high up and on Sunday the stin
k
ing lines of auto traffic; and the way people were always nutty over some religion, like the night they sang those Ecanaanomic songs and cheered when the blue light went on Patsy; and the way they knelt in the streets with the cardboard signs and prayed for my delivery.

And I thought about coming over the Santa Monica mountains and seeing Hollywood all lighted up like a fairy city; and the way the men in yellow smocks stood on Sunset Boulevard waving bags of Krispy-Korn and trying to sell movie guides to the homes of the stars and how I never saw anyone ever stop to buy one; and the smell at night of orange blossoms and night-blooming jasmine; and the geraniums growing ten feet high, and the smell of lawns in the long summer with the sprinklers going on them all through the dry season to keep them alive; and the drive-in hamburger stands where the girls wore top hats and trousers that were always tight over their behinds.

And the smell of eucalyptus trees with the bark always shagging away; and the mountains always there only sometimes hazy and faint but always with big signs on them so that the mountains were advertising boards that you could see miles away; and the way people always stuck signs everywhere without being ashamed like
fuerte avoca
dos
for sale and goats at service.

I thought about at night when the people all built fires on the shore and you smelled the sea and woodsmoke of eucalyptus logs all mixed together; and the way the seals swum around in packs and the way the pelicans flew like squadrons of seaplanes; and how the helldivers always flew as if they were in a hurry, or else sat on the waves, calm, until a breaker came in and then dove down under the wave and came up at the other side pert as you please.

I thought about the way the grunion run, and I thought about how one night Sheila took off her shoes and stockings, and when the wave went out she would run right down and
pick up the grunion off the sand where they were laying eggs, and skip back before the next wave came in.

I remember the way we went after them, laughing and getting wet, just catching the fish with our hands and letting them go again, and how the fish flashed silver in the moonlight, because they only run at full moon; and I can't forget how Sheila looked, laughing and holding up her hands full of fish, shining and wiggling.

And I thought about Genter and how he gave Sheila the lilies, and how he cried in my cell, and how he was the night he told me about California being only a moving picture. I remember him saying that some lands were a father to a man, and beat him; and some were a mother to him, and loved him; and some were a wife, and had to be loved; but California was just a whore who dropped her pants down to the first man that came along with a watering-pot.

And I thought about all the things they'd said about Genter after he was dead, but it didn't matter; because he knew more than they did. Anyhow, he was the only man in California with enough sense to know he was crazy.

And I thought about Dickie, and how I'd fixed up things for him when he got to be a man.

I thought about all those things, day and night, sitting there with my legs hanging out that boxcar; but it was no good. I could think about them, but I couldn' t feel them, and that was what was bad. Because Sheila was gone with everything else, and I couldn't feel anything about her, either.

And I knew there was something I had to do and something I had to wait for, and it wasn't till I saw it that I knew.

But when I did see it, I knew all right. Because I looked out of the boxcar and there it was—my mountains that I'd seen when I was a kid and that I'd always wanted to see again.

There they were across the desert with its sage and chaparral and Joshua trees and organ cactus, all gold and purple in the afternoon sun just like they were that day when my father stood by the road, trying to get his pride to let his muscles lift his arms to flag a car.

And I knew that if I didn't go there now they'd escape me forever again, and that it was only magic luck that had brought them; so without thinking a second I flipped

myself off that boxcar and hit the ground and went rolling over and over with the breath knocked out of me and my body hurting inside from crashing into the ground, and feeling everything was torn apart and the last thing I remembered was thinking that it couldn't be me that this was happening to.

It was night when I woke up, so I must have given myself a good wallop coming off that freight car. But I couldn't feel that I was hurt anywhere and I could walk all right.

It was pitch-dark but I wasn't afraid of losing my way. I knew where I had to go, and somehow it was like something would be sure to tell me how to get there.

So I walked all that night, not getting tired at all, and at sun-up I was on a road going up through a canyon. I couldn't see my golden mountains, but something told me I was going the right way. So I climbed up and up on this road, through this canyon, and all along the roadside everything was green and in bloom. There were fields that were all scarlet and yellow with Indian-blankets and there were paper-white poppies and desert flowers by the thousands. Even the cactus was in bloom with red, waxy flowers, and the Joshua trees had great white flowers and all up the hillside were the big yucca blossoms growing up twenty feet high and so straight that you could see why the Mexicans call them the candles of God.

I never saw so many flowers, and they were all very much bigger than I'd ever seen them before; so big that they made me feel as if I'd grown suddenly little.

And I went on up that road to the top of the pass, and the rocks there were all scarlet and purple and very rugged.

Then, as I came round a corner, I saw an old Mexican, sitting on a burro. He was just sitting there, looking very old with his white beard. He had a white serape and his thin cotton trousers were old, too, but very clean.

He didn't say anything, because most Mexicans have learned that Americans don't worry about being polite and greeting each other when they pass. But I learned from the Mexicans their way of being polite—and this was a very old man. So I said:

"Good morning, Don Uncle."

I said that in Spanish, and I call him Don because
although he was a peon he was very old and you should show respect.

And when I said that he lifted off his big straw sombrero and swept it across his chest with the most beautiful gesture I have ever seen. And he said:

"Vaya con Dios."

"Walk thou with God also," I said.

Right when I said that I was over the pass and the sun came through the veil-mist and way across a big desert I could see my golden mountains.

And the minute I saw them I was me again and I could feel again, and I could feel Sheila was gone. I could feel my insides hurting me where they were empty because Sheila was dead and I knew as long as I lived that pain would always be there. It was the only thing left of her. The only thing I could have. And having it made me so happy that I began running down the slope.

I ran down through the fields, through the great white paper poppies and the Indian-blankets, and I snatched them up in my arms as I went. And I ran on and on, down the hillside to the big desert that I had to cross to get to my golden mountains.