July 11, 1980
Merrill find the small black kitten in the parking lot of
Two Guys in Garfield brought the
memory back about the two black cats Louise and I inherited in Las
Vegas that last time we were there.
We didn’t even have a home.
We had hitched up from Phoenix
with all our possessions on our backs, and the single thought of finding Gil –
who we’d learned had picked up and moved there from our last seeing him in Phoenix.
Gil, a plump man that looked more like a grocery store clerk
than a drug dealer, had taken us in when we passed through Phoenix a year
earlier on our way back to Denver and – we had hoped to Alaska, and again on
the way back when Alaska turned to be out of reach.
But the year had taken its toll – on us as well as we were
to learn on Gil.
We had no wheels this time, and had hitched to Phoenix from
L.A., and when we found Gil gone (the person pointed us to Las Vegas), we
hitched from Phoenix to Las Vegas, with the last stretch on the wings of a high
flying gasoline truck on a roller coaster of a road that looped this way and
that, up and down, and around in what was supposed to be a north/south highway,
after the madman behind the wheel picked us up half frozen from an overnight in
the desert. We had unpacked a large white blanket with the hopes of attracting
a ride in the dark after having spent hours staring up at the sky full of
stars.
I remember seeing my first shooting star that night as it
streaked across the sky overhead, and then others, a regular light show we kept
mistaking for omens that someone would eventually stop and pick us up, some
truck or van would pull over and let us in.
We never expected the gasoline truck to pull over or for the
grinning face of its driver to look out and say, “well, what are you waiting
for? Get in.”
And so we did.
“Thanks,” I said, once we had settled onto the front seat
with him. “It was getting pretty cold out there.”
The driver grinned. He was a round man and big, fattened
around his middle on greasy food from highway diners. But he was as warm as
sand and a cheerful as a rising sun at dawn.
“Yep,” he said. “It
gets mighty chilly in these parts after dusk, and the sand cools so quick as to
have you think its snow by moon light.”
He laughed. His bellow filled the whole cab.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
We told him Las Vegas
and he chuckled again.
“Going there like those other folks to make your fortune?”
he asked.
We laughed and told him, no.
“We’re trying to find a friend,” Louise said.
The truck had started moving again and her dog, Midnight (a black terrier she had gotten in LA)
bounced on her lap as the truck hit a bump. She sat on the hump of the
transmission.
“Most folks I meet on the road travel this way to get rich,”
the driver said. “They clutch green in their fists, misers keeping their money
safe.”
He laughed again, a bellow that again filled the cab.
“Then they come back along the same road, thumbs stuck out,
heads down, eyes staring at the ground as if searching for pennies, looking
plum tuckered out, and without any green,” he said.
He fell silent as the desert glowed outside with the first
touch of dawn. Clumps of grass appeared like fingers pointed towards the sun,
and hills rolled northing heading towards the place the map said a dam existed.
I lit a cigarette and closed my eyes, listening to the dog
scratch and the heavy breath of the driver exhaling in a near sigh.
I didn’t dare tell him how our fortune had been made and
lost already, how our riches had come from New Jersey
and not Las Vegas, and had dribbled
away in LA like the receding waves of Santa Monica.
I said nothing, and yet, I got a feeling he already knew or
guessed.
This may be why he started to talk. The words came out
slowly, hesitantly, as if he had to dig each one up like a deeply buried sand crab
which he let wiggle before letting it go.
“I know you,” he said. “Oh not you in particular, but a
thousand faces just like yours, all wearing the same strangled look, like a
medal or a bleeding heart. I’ve done this here run for eight years, and the LA
to Denver run for ten years before
that. I’ve seen your kind walking the sides of highways like lost sheep, with
your eyes sunken and your thumbs hanging out. I guess maybe I looked like that
myself once – lost.”
He lapsed into an uneasy silence as if he’d wanted to say
more, but wasn’t sure we would listen. Louise nodded out on my shoulder with
the dog’s big eyes turning to look at me and then at the driver, head down on
its two front paws.
I petted him, and then I glanced out the side window at the
short streets and the red sandy rock now sprouting up like some new kind of
plant, a plant unlabeled by science, never classified in any books.
I guess that’s what I felt most inside of me, the lack of classification,
a lack of importance. School never taught me who I was, just what other things
were. The teachers made a point of stressing hard, core facts like what
Washington or Jefferson did. They told us that two plus two added up to four.
But they never told us how Washington
hated water, or that Jefferson hated Hamilton, or that
two plus two doesn’t put a meal on a table or a buck in my pocket.
But you had to have money before you could count it, and
count it, I did.
I counted every bill I had taken from that safe back east,
glancing over my shoulder the whole time, terrified that my uncles would
discover me.
“You know, kid,” the driver suddenly spoke again. “I spent a
long time running to every bar and every bitch from here to Needles and it
didn’t do me any good. You goat find a place and stick to it – even if it’s a
hole. Maybe we all have to settle down soon or later. Some folks settle in a
home with a nice lawn and a station wagon, other settle for nothing, taking
cheap jobs and women until they die.”
Again, he paused and I found myself staring at him, drawn to
what he was saying like a fly to fly paper.
“Where do you come from, Marty?” I asked, suddenly curious
about the man and what he had settled for.
The road twisted in front of us and he swung the wheel in
silence with only the hum of tires growling beneath the truck like some partly
tamed beast waiting for a chance to spring away.
Marty chuckled, raising Midnight’s
ears. The man glanced at me his warm blue eyes, thanking me for a chance to
speak and help slay his own ghosts.
He said he was born, raised and died in a little dust bowl
of a town called Simon’s Ridge, ten miles north of Needles, and a million years
away from anything else. It was a ghost town with living ghosts, desert rats
and sorry old men who spent their lives in the town’s main attraction, the
Golden Bear Tavern, telling tales that had died fifty years earlier but with a
sense of undeserved importance. Even the town’s name had come from a doubtful
legend, involving someone who had killed thirteen Indians and six cows in an
epic adventure.
Marty had seen all of them come to the small town from other
places like LA, where nobody wanted them to settle in the small town until they
passed away. Some were even losers from Las Vegas
looking to hide out until they found another dollar to go back or a razor to
cut their wrists.
“They would steal the dollar if they could,” Marty said. “Or
beg for one, promising to pay you back ten fold when they came into their own.”
The town also attracted every dusty stranger and horny
cowboy from a hundred miles around, drunken but with just enough cash to pay
for an hour upstairs above the bar with Marty’s mother.
“For a long time, I didn’t get it,” Marty mumbled. “When I
finally did, I lit out for LA. I was 15, and found work loading trucks.
The problems came later: drinking, women, and fights that
led him to confrontations with the police.
Marty shifted gears as the road wound around in the
direction of Boulder Dam. The landscape changed into ridges and valleys, all
carved out in red stone and short shrubs popping out of sandy soil.
I ached for the sight of a single tree – and evergreen that
might break up the bleak landscape pale gravel.
Marty went on with his tale, but I only half listened. I
kept trying to make sense of what we had done, seeking some logic to why we had
left LA in search of Gil, mapping out the first trip in my mind when we’d first
met him on our way to Denver.
We had stumbled into Phoenix with about five grand left from
the original bundle of numbers money I had looted from my uncle’s safe in New
Jersey, and left Phoenix with only four, not realizing the loss until we’d
reached Albuquerque where I’d had a chance to count it all out on top of a
dresser in a cheap motel.
We’d been ripped off of some of the money I had ripped off,
and I recalled leaving the bag open slightly in Gil’s place while we – me,
Louise and Dan went out on the town looking for LSD to take.
And here, I had thought they were just so kind to us, taking
us in as they had, and feeding us, and seeing us off again with broad smiles –
when the whole time they had plans of their own to escape Phoenix, and used
their stolen cash to make the move after we had gone.
I shuddered. The sleeping Louise stirred on my shoulder but
did not wake. Midnight shifted,
snorted and gave me a dirty look.
Now, we were flying back into Gil’s arms, this time with
only twenty dollars to our name. We were hoping to make a withdrawal from the
money deposited in Gil’s wallet. After all, it was the least they could do.
I kept thinking of Gil’s wife, a quiet, but clear-eyed
woman, always smartly dressed for her job as a civilian secretary working for
the Phoenix police – a perfect
cover for her husband who sold small amounts of drugs to pay the rent.
The truck roared down the final winding hill towards the dam.
Marty’s hands shifted gears with the agility of a circus performer, rarely
slowing down the truck even as the worst of curves, sending me into a quiet
panic as I pondered what would happen if we overturned with all of the gas in
the back.
But my thoughts kept drifting back to Phoenix,
and how we had wanted to press on, after having spent one night in Phoenix,
sleeping in the back of the van, and how Gil and his wife had convinced us to
stay over for a few days.
“You can always leave in the morning,” Gil’s wife had said
sweetly, but the tone felt wrong, like a Sweet Tart, pleasant at first, only to
turn sour later. But I never suspected anything, even when the police
surrounded our van in the parking lot of the Taco Bell the night before we were
scheduled to leave.
“You’ll be going to jail for a long, long time,” the
undercover cop said, a shit-eating grin on his face, coffee-stained teeth
glinting with the flashing police car lights.
Someone had tipped them that we were carrying drugs. But the
police cruiser lights slowly fell away when after their search they found
nothing except our growling dog, Midnight,
and one pot seed at the bottom of a butt filled ashtray.
I never suspected Girl or his wife until later.
As the winding column of the river and the dam appeared, I
realized that we had a lot to collect here, to make up for a year of being over
our heads in poverty, barefooted and jobless on Hollywood
Boulevard.
And then, I caught up with Marty’s stream of talk and
realized that what he had come up to also fit me.
“You just can’t ever get even,” he was saying. “You try and
try but you just can’t do it.”
And we both sat still in this ever moving tank of gas as the
giant concrete arms of the dam welcomed two more losers to the edge of Nevada,
welcoming two more into the flock.
Louise sniffled and stirred, and eventually wok, her eyes
red as they clung to the edges of sleep.
Midnight greeted her with an excited bark, as if he could
read our immediate future, and could see what we could not, perhaps even foreseeing
the two black cats we would pick up – the only fortune we would actually get
out of coming here.
I thought all this ten full years later as I stared down
into the cardboard box Merrill had acquired to house her new found parking lot
kitten, it stretching up, claws scratching as if to climb out, desperate and
empty, hungry, just the way I felt, but hungry for something more than just
food or fame, hungry for some satisfaction I had yet to achieve, and perhaps
never would.
