UNDERGROUND IN AMERIGO
By Edward Abbey
First printed in 1957, in Accent, a literary magazine published by the English Department at the University of Illinois.
Published in Inside/Outside Southwest, March/April 1999.
Alex Flack is a good fellow. I don’t like him, but that’s not his fault. Most of the time he’s all right; he tries hard to be intelligent and fair about things. He smells bad only when he’s coming up out of a black dive and whimpering about his wife.
And what a sad, ravaged face he has: like a cartogram of the malpais: ancient lava. Mesquite, dinosaur tracks. His eyes are small, crinkled, clever, always full of blood and cigarette smoke, the tear ducts are usually puffed up a little with pollen from the Chinese elm. In season, naturally. He’s only about thirty years old.
I was inspecting my favorite junkyard that afternoon when he came along in his 1938 Buick convertible. I could hear the rattle and clang six blocks away. This was in April: the wind was screaming down First Street in a storm of rags and old newspapers and beercans, and the dust was pretty bad. I heard a garbage can flop over and the lid come off and go banging and sliding over the cement. I kept a wary eye on my junkyard: if ever that tangled cantata of rust and iron and old boilers and smashed Chevvies and wire and rails and schoolbuses and broken derricks and ancient steam shovels and trolley cars – jagged and cutting and complicated, poisonous with rust – should stir and rumble, come to life in a jangle of percussion and the snarl of sirens, come at me lurching and clanking and screeching like a glacier of iron, Where could I hide? You’d need a good deep hole: maybe some old abandoned lead mine. I looked around.
“Get in,” Flack said. He reached over and opened the door and the wind caught it and slammed it against the fender. “Come on,’ he said. He had the top down, a curtain of fine silt was drifting over the upholstery, banking up in corners, sifting into holes, clogging the ashtrays. Flack stared at me, a dead cigarette in his mouth. “Get in,” he yelled, “for Jesus Christ sake.” The cigarette waggled up and down.
I got in. Flack stepped on the gas pedal and the car roared ahead, the door crashing shut before I even had a chance to reach for it. “Lock that door,” Flack said without looking at me. I locked it. “It’s not safe,” he explained, “people always falling out.” I nodded, trying to pick some of the sand out of my teeth. I thought I would ask Flack where we were going. I had not eaten my supper yet. I was hungry, too, these dust storms stimulate my appetite. But I was aware of a preoccupation in him which clearly meant that could only be resented. I swallowed some of the sand and asked him where we were going. “Hey?” he said; he couldn’t hear me : the wind was…I noticed that his eyebrows were gray with dust. The wind was making a lot of noise; at the same moment we dipped down into an underpass, while a diesel locomotive rolled over us dragging a tube full of FBI agents. Flack was screaming at me: “I like it down here,” he howled, “it’s nice. I feel good down here.” We came up out of it into the wind and dust and yellow light again, trapped in a channel of racing automobiles. Five o’clock traffic. A red light glimmered ahead of us, swinging wildly in the wind, everybody raced toward it.
The cars started to pile up, condense and telescope. I heard the wham and crump of merging steel. Red brakelights flashing, I braced my feet against the floorboards and shut my eyes. Flack sang the tune he had brought back from Cornwall. “A randy dandy dandy O, A whet of ale and brandy O, With a rumbelow and a Westeward Ho! And heave my mariners all O!” The world swung suddenly on its lateral axis. I fell against Flack — sometimes he smells like nothing so much as an old davenport — and opened my eyes, pulling myself back toward my own side of the seat. We were bouncing down somebody’s back alley past overturned garbage cans and tattered circus posters rippling on garage doors. I thought of Creekside, Pennsylvania. We appeared to be chasing a gray cat. “She’ll never make it,” Flack yelled happily. I heard a squawl as the cat disappeared under our right fender. I looked back and saw it skinning up the trunk of a telephone pole, looking after us.
Flack had changed; he used to have the utmost respect for the dignity and security of cats.
Flack followed the alley for several blocks, driving too fast, crossing the intersecting streets without a glance in either direction. This alarmed me a little; I was certain he wasn’t drunk. I mean abnormally drunk—seeded, liberated. Not that. But then I supposed he was still upset about Ernie.
We pulled into a back lot and stopped against someone’s Ford sedan, nudging it ahead a foot or so. There were several other cars about. Some that I knew personally. The spirits had temporarily left them. “Come on,” Flack said.; he got out on his side. I waited, trying to remember something. The wind was still pouring around us; when I lifted my arm I saw the dust drip from it. I don’t particularly mind dust but I knew this didn’t belong to me. Some bean farmer’s…
“Come on,” Flack said, grinning at me through a mask of powdered topsoil: the grinning ghost. “Come on. Come on.” But he’s always impatient. He stared at me as if I were somewhat difficult to see. A translucent image. But of course the light was bad, a mere vapor of dust and wind. I got out of the car and followed him around a corner of the house and down a flight of concrete steps and into a basement apartment that had an unhealthy, familiar smell. But it wasn’t my own place; I live at the other end of Amerigo, near the sewage treatment plant. There’s a good view of the mountains from there, and the rent is rational. Does it smell? Sure — but what doesn’t?
Flack entered without knocking and I followed. The place had a submarine atmosphere, a solution of cigarette smoke and human voices and a dense amber light exuded by a complexus of plastic and brass tubing set in the ceiling. I blinked my eyes and Flack was lost. Louis Armstrong. Cautiously I began to breathe and then a pretty and intelligent girl offered me a glass of red wine. I took it and asked her if she had anything to eat. Louis Armstrong howling through the smoke and flesh in high fidelity. I had a momentary vision of perspiring radio tubes.
The kitchen was almost as crowded as the front room but the noise was not so bad. The girl opened a refrigerator and invited me to serve myself and then she drifted off. Most of the people around me seemed familiar enough, yet I could not have positively identified a single one of them. Only Flack, whom I could not see. I thought I heard him bawling away in another room: “yes, violets! One bunch of violets! That’s right —“
I started to construct a sandwich of cheese — jack cheese — and imitation pumpernickel. No butter; but I got along quite decently.
“I don’t care!” I heard Flack shouting from somewhere beyond my field of vision. “I don’t give a good goddamn — yes, I’ll pay for it, good Christ. Now you got the address?”
I assembled my sandwich, drank some of the wine, took a bite from the sandwich. Near me on the kitchen table some people were playing with a scintillation counter, pointing it at each other and comparing intensities of radiation. The young man operating the instrument had it aimed like a gun at the chest of the girl beside him. “You’re hot, kid,” he was saying; “my God, but you’re hot — look at this.” The others squinted at the meter, grinning. “My old man owns the biggest uranium mine in Colorado,” the girl said, “no wonder I’m hot. How do you read me?”
“You’re hot, kid,” the young man said admiringly, “my God but you really are hot.”
I stared at them, chewing at my sandwich. From somewhere beyond the haze I could hear Flack: “Yes, two one three Pine. Yes — that’s right, two one three. Yes — okay, okay — “
The young man glanced up, saw me staring at him. His grin faded for a moment, then came back. He pointed the machine at me. I left the kitchen, taking my wine and sandwich.
In the front room the noise and smoke and animal pressure was almost overpowering. I looked around for Flack but couldn’t see him. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall and shut my eyes. I couldn’t see anything anyway. Somebody stumbled over my feet then came back and stepped on them. I did not look up.
On my right they were discussing Ernie’s case but that didn’t interest me very much. I had known him but not very well, to me he’d always seemed a little intangible. Apparitional. He was kind to me once, exceedingly kind, in a way I’d been taught to regard as saintly but impossible. And always gentle, courteous, interested in what I had to say. In fact, I think he was the only person who ever did listen to me. Flack is my friend, of course, but he never pays any attention to what I say. And I talk so seldom, too. About Ernie — but does anyone really care… ?
A suggestion of confusion: I found it hard to follow the conversation around me. They said: Him? I heard he traded his MG for an MIG. Brainwashed. When the Explainer tried to talk to him he spit in his face. That’s what I heard.And: It’s this way: Friday’s the Islamic holy day, right? T.G.I.F. Saturday for the Jews, Sonnesday for the bloody Christers. Yes? Nobody wants Monday. But Nobody. And: I prefer New York because there I feel close to the people. People —? Yes, the masses. You mean the Puerto Ricans? What? I said, You mean the Puerto — forget it sweetheart. What? Forget it…
About Ernie: I hadn’t known that he wrote poetry until a year ago. He never mentioned it to me. Flack told me; Flack thinks his stuff is pretty good. Flack gave me this little book that he’d printed in Denver at his own expense. Full of Ernie’s poems. Dedicated to Flack. Written by Ernie. I read them, sure.
I finished my wine and looked around for the pretty and intelligent girl who had… I couldn’t see her anywhere. Nor Flack, either. The room was so crowded with people, though, you couldn’t be certain they were not there. But no doubt he had already found her and they’d found the bedroom. Well: I didn’t care. No affair of mine. He’s very active, my friend Flack.
On my left they were talking about Heidegger and the problem of Bing. Or was it Bean? I thought of the wind roaring outside, of the dust rising in clouds from the plains of Texas and Colorado and Oklahoma. I could still taste the sand in my teeth.
The doorbell rang. A girl opened the door and through the smoke and shadows I could see a boy standing there holding something in his hand. He mumbled to the girl and she turned around and called for my friend. “Alexander Flack,” she yelled, “Alexander Flack.” It was the same girl who had given me the wine and offered me the treasures of her refrigerator; she saw me staring at her and gave me a smile. “Alexander Flack,” she called again, smiling at me. I felt relieved.
Flack appeared, pushing and shoving through the crowd. He was sweating and his eyes seemed more bloodshot and smoky than ever. When he noticed the girl smiling at me he turned his head and looked at me too, and grinned and winked. There was still dust on his face. He spoke to the boy and the boy gave him what he held in his hand, apparently flowers, for I heard Flack say, “These the violets?” and the boy nodded. They were wrapped in green tissue paper. Flack reached into his pocket and pulled out some silver. “Thirty nine cents,” he said. “Right?” The boy shook his head and mumbled something I couldn’t hear. “Eh?” said Flack, “how’s that again?” The boy’s lips moved. “Now wait a minute,” Flack said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “You wouldn’t try to cheat me now, would you, you little pimply-faced crook? They said thirty-nine over the telephone. What the hell kind of racket is this anyhow?” The boy spoke quietly. “Delivery charge!” said Flack indignantly. “One dollar for delivering one miserable little bunch of violets? You must be dreaming, kid.” The boy spoke again, timidly but insistently, holding out his hand. “Over my dead body,” Flack roared, “over my dead body! Now get out of here before I wring your neck!” And he stuffed the bunch of violets in his jacket pocket and raised both hands toward the boy’s face. The boy backed away, turned and scrambled up the steps outside, disappearing. Flack slammed shut the door and came back into the room with a dull, sick grin on his face, looking for me.
I stood up and gave my empty glass to a woman near me, and then stepped past Flack without speaking to him — he put his hand on my arm and I shook it off — and went out of that cave and up the cement steps outside. I found the boy starting to let air out of one of the tires on Flack’s car. I paid him a dollar and he climbed on his motorbike and went away.
The wind was still blowing but no longer so crazily, and most of the dust had dropped out of the air. I brushed the sand off the seat in Flack’s car and sat down and filled my pipe, waiting. The sun had evidently gone down, from where I sat, surrounded by walls, I could not see the western horizon. But the sky remained yellow, dense, close above my head. I thought of Flack and Flack’s small, desperate wife, then thought of my own wife, then I thought of Ernie again.
The trouble with Ernie — well, nobody knows why he did it. As for his poetry, I could never understand that either. It reminded me of Blake and of Mary Baker Eddy, that’s all I can say. Which means simply that I was never really much interested. The awkward thing about Ernie’s case, from Flack’s point of view, is that Ernie used Flack’s gun.
I lit my pipe and in the flare of the match saw the key in the ignition. I decided to steal Flack’s car and go on home. I slid over behind the wheel and started the engine.
Flack came up the steps. “Wait a minute,” he shouted, “wait for me, goddamnit.” He staggered a little in the dusk. “I don’t want to stay here either,” he shouted, opening the door on the driver’s side. “Move over.” I moved over and he took the wheel. “A terrible place,” he said. “I know how you feel. But I had to see that girl. That’s all. I’ll take you home now if that’s where you want to go.” He spoke without looking at me, backing the car out of the lot. He smashed into a garage door on the other side of the alley, then started the car forward. “I suppose that’s where you want to go?” he said. “Home, back to the wife and kids?” I told him yes, though I have no kids and not much of a wife. “Don’t blame you,” he said, staring through the dusty windshield as the car bounced and rattled down the alley. “Don’t blame you at all.” The alley seemed alive with dark shapes, shadows, moving things. I wanted to remind him to turn on the headlights, but he thought of it himself after he knocked over an empty garbage can.
When we came to the main street he turned left, toward the heart of the city, beginning to sing again: “A randy dandy dandy O! with a rumbelow and a Westward Ho!…” He cruised under a red light while opposing automobiles set up a clamor of horns and squealing brakes. “Lock that door,” he shouted at me, “not safe; opens when least expected.” I locked the door. We dived down into the cool, dark underpass again. “Hey!” yelled Flack, “this is good, this just all right.” The car rose, emerging into the fire and epileptic neon of the city, and Flack began to frown. “No good,” he shouted, “won’t do. Unfit for human consumption.” I shrugged my shoulders.
We crossed the river on the new four-lane bridge. As we approached the corner where I expected to turn he speeded up the car. I asked him what he was up to now. “Won’t take a minute,” he replied. “just a little piece of business.” He drove past my street without turning and on up the hill toward a ragged fringe of the city. I cursed him silently but without serious intent; I didn’t care whether I ever went home again or not.
At the top of the hill Flack turned the car to the right and we drove beyond the housing projects and shopping centers and beyond a few scattered shacks and on north, following the dirt road that went along the edge of the bluff above the river. The wind seemed to have died away, given up, but the sky was worse than ever, a ghastly spectacle of yellow and grimy red, like the blood-flecked yoke of a fertilized egg. Floating in on the wave of darkness from the east was a little icy fragment of the moon.
Flack stopped the car about three miles north of the city. He shut off the lights and hut off the engine and we sat there for a while listening to the rattle of cottonwood leaves and the oily surge of the river sliding past the mudbanks — like a breathing animal. I could smell the silty water and could feel the faint resonant tremor of the earth beneath it. The blue twilight, warm and rich with odors, deep in its silences, gathered around us, intoxicating, stupefying, while Flack breathed noisily and asthmatically through his clogged nostrils and sagging mouth, like a man etherized. I began to feel uncomfortable.
Flack sighed heavily and rubbed his face with both hands. “Come on,” he said. He opened the door and got out slowly. “Come on, got to show you something.” He stared at me dully, as if I were an entirely unimpressive stranger. “You coming?”
I shrugged my shoulders again, the typical response of an ineffectual man, and got out of the car feeling hungry and irritable. I guessed that the easisest way out of this was to humor him.
Flack walked away from the car, away from the road and toward on of the stony hills on the west. I followed him, trying to avoid the prickly pear and yucca that grew, somehow, in this waste of sand and rock and old lava. We trudged up a short slope, slipping now and then on the loose stones, and stopped near a juniper crouching in forlorn isolation on the summit of the hill. First I saw a wooden cross sticking up out of the ground near the juniper, and then the fresh burial mound extending from the foot of the cross to the roots of the tree. So here is where he planted Ernie, I thought.
“Read it,” Flack said, staring down at the grave.
“Read what?” I blinked hopefully. “Read what?” I said, since Flack had no answer. He pointed to the cross and I stepped close to it and bent down and read the words inscribed on the horizontal arm, apparently burned into the wood with a hot awl or chisel.
ERNEST THOMISON FLACK
1931-1949
Born of the Earth,
I give back to the earth
these ashy bones,
this troubled flesh,
but my triumphant spirit
you shall never find.
I backed away from the cross, rubbing my nose respectfully, and looked at Flack. He continued to stare at the grave. “What do you think about that?” he said.
I hesitated. “He was a strange boy.”
“Strange?” Flack grunted, scratched at his crotch. “He was a marvelous boy. He had something.” Scratching vigorously, Flack cleared his throat and spat to one side. “he was something. An angel maybe. Who knows?” He scratched at himself with an irrational, unnecessary vigor.
Okay, I was thinking, so you had a crazy brother. Who doesn’t? Aloud, I said: “You — he wrote the…?”
“What?” Suddenly, Flack stopped scratching himself. “He wrote the epitaph?”
“The epitaph,” I said, “yes.”
“Yes, sure, who else? Am I a bloody poet?” Flack groped through his pockets, found the crumpled withered bunch of violets. “Sure he wrote it, the wise little bastard. Did it all himself — you think he wanted my help? Did everything but shovel himself in.” Flack took a step toward the grave, went down awkwardly on one knee, then on the other, and deposited the violets on the bosom of the mound. “The tricky little bastard,” he mumbled, sagging there.
“Wait a minute,” I said. I stared at him, kneeling like a contrite bull between the cross and the static agony of the juniper tree. “Wait a minute,” I said, “let me get this straight.” I could hear, from down by the river, some crazy bird squawking in the darkness among the willows. “Do you mean to say — ?” Flack seemed to have forgotten me; half-fallen in the twilight, he breathed thickly, muttering obscenities. “Look,” I said, “did you knowhe was going to — ? You knewall along what he was going to do?” Flack did not answer. “Is that right?” I said.
He pushed himself up then, grunting, and turned toward me; his eyes were half closed. “Let’s go back,” he said. “It’s late.” He sighed like a tired man and made a move toward the car, then stopped, looking back at me. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go.”
I tried to answer but could say nothing. “Let’s go. Let’s go,” he said.
I found my voice. “I’ll walk.”
“What? You’ll what?”
“I said I’ll walk.”
Flack shrugged his shoulders, paused, started off again. And stopped again. “Don’t be a goddamn fool,” he said. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
“I don’t want to go home.”
“Well, neither do I,” Flack said. He was silent for a while, considering. “tell you what,” he said — let’s go somewhere, have a drink first.
Huh? What do you say?”
I tried to think of an answer to that. But there wasn’t any, or only one.
On the way back to the car, old Flack began to sing again: something about a bunch of drunken mariners, retribution, and the black eyes of a London dock-whore.
c/o 1999 Estate of Edward Abbey
By Edward Abbey
First printed in 1957, in Accent, a literary magazine published by the English Department at the University of Illinois.
Published in Inside/Outside Southwest, March/April 1999.
Alex Flack is a good fellow. I don’t like him, but that’s not his fault. Most of the time he’s all right; he tries hard to be intelligent and fair about things. He smells bad only when he’s coming up out of a black dive and whimpering about his wife.
And what a sad, ravaged face he has: like a cartogram of the malpais: ancient lava. Mesquite, dinosaur tracks. His eyes are small, crinkled, clever, always full of blood and cigarette smoke, the tear ducts are usually puffed up a little with pollen from the Chinese elm. In season, naturally. He’s only about thirty years old.
I was inspecting my favorite junkyard that afternoon when he came along in his 1938 Buick convertible. I could hear the rattle and clang six blocks away. This was in April: the wind was screaming down First Street in a storm of rags and old newspapers and beercans, and the dust was pretty bad. I heard a garbage can flop over and the lid come off and go banging and sliding over the cement. I kept a wary eye on my junkyard: if ever that tangled cantata of rust and iron and old boilers and smashed Chevvies and wire and rails and schoolbuses and broken derricks and ancient steam shovels and trolley cars – jagged and cutting and complicated, poisonous with rust – should stir and rumble, come to life in a jangle of percussion and the snarl of sirens, come at me lurching and clanking and screeching like a glacier of iron, Where could I hide? You’d need a good deep hole: maybe some old abandoned lead mine. I looked around.
“Get in,” Flack said. He reached over and opened the door and the wind caught it and slammed it against the fender. “Come on,’ he said. He had the top down, a curtain of fine silt was drifting over the upholstery, banking up in corners, sifting into holes, clogging the ashtrays. Flack stared at me, a dead cigarette in his mouth. “Get in,” he yelled, “for Jesus Christ sake.” The cigarette waggled up and down.
I got in. Flack stepped on the gas pedal and the car roared ahead, the door crashing shut before I even had a chance to reach for it. “Lock that door,” Flack said without looking at me. I locked it. “It’s not safe,” he explained, “people always falling out.” I nodded, trying to pick some of the sand out of my teeth. I thought I would ask Flack where we were going. I had not eaten my supper yet. I was hungry, too, these dust storms stimulate my appetite. But I was aware of a preoccupation in him which clearly meant that could only be resented. I swallowed some of the sand and asked him where we were going. “Hey?” he said; he couldn’t hear me : the wind was…I noticed that his eyebrows were gray with dust. The wind was making a lot of noise; at the same moment we dipped down into an underpass, while a diesel locomotive rolled over us dragging a tube full of FBI agents. Flack was screaming at me: “I like it down here,” he howled, “it’s nice. I feel good down here.” We came up out of it into the wind and dust and yellow light again, trapped in a channel of racing automobiles. Five o’clock traffic. A red light glimmered ahead of us, swinging wildly in the wind, everybody raced toward it.
The cars started to pile up, condense and telescope. I heard the wham and crump of merging steel. Red brakelights flashing, I braced my feet against the floorboards and shut my eyes. Flack sang the tune he had brought back from Cornwall. “A randy dandy dandy O, A whet of ale and brandy O, With a rumbelow and a Westeward Ho! And heave my mariners all O!” The world swung suddenly on its lateral axis. I fell against Flack — sometimes he smells like nothing so much as an old davenport — and opened my eyes, pulling myself back toward my own side of the seat. We were bouncing down somebody’s back alley past overturned garbage cans and tattered circus posters rippling on garage doors. I thought of Creekside, Pennsylvania. We appeared to be chasing a gray cat. “She’ll never make it,” Flack yelled happily. I heard a squawl as the cat disappeared under our right fender. I looked back and saw it skinning up the trunk of a telephone pole, looking after us.
Flack had changed; he used to have the utmost respect for the dignity and security of cats.
Flack followed the alley for several blocks, driving too fast, crossing the intersecting streets without a glance in either direction. This alarmed me a little; I was certain he wasn’t drunk. I mean abnormally drunk—seeded, liberated. Not that. But then I supposed he was still upset about Ernie.
We pulled into a back lot and stopped against someone’s Ford sedan, nudging it ahead a foot or so. There were several other cars about. Some that I knew personally. The spirits had temporarily left them. “Come on,” Flack said.; he got out on his side. I waited, trying to remember something. The wind was still pouring around us; when I lifted my arm I saw the dust drip from it. I don’t particularly mind dust but I knew this didn’t belong to me. Some bean farmer’s…
“Come on,” Flack said, grinning at me through a mask of powdered topsoil: the grinning ghost. “Come on. Come on.” But he’s always impatient. He stared at me as if I were somewhat difficult to see. A translucent image. But of course the light was bad, a mere vapor of dust and wind. I got out of the car and followed him around a corner of the house and down a flight of concrete steps and into a basement apartment that had an unhealthy, familiar smell. But it wasn’t my own place; I live at the other end of Amerigo, near the sewage treatment plant. There’s a good view of the mountains from there, and the rent is rational. Does it smell? Sure — but what doesn’t?
Flack entered without knocking and I followed. The place had a submarine atmosphere, a solution of cigarette smoke and human voices and a dense amber light exuded by a complexus of plastic and brass tubing set in the ceiling. I blinked my eyes and Flack was lost. Louis Armstrong. Cautiously I began to breathe and then a pretty and intelligent girl offered me a glass of red wine. I took it and asked her if she had anything to eat. Louis Armstrong howling through the smoke and flesh in high fidelity. I had a momentary vision of perspiring radio tubes.
The kitchen was almost as crowded as the front room but the noise was not so bad. The girl opened a refrigerator and invited me to serve myself and then she drifted off. Most of the people around me seemed familiar enough, yet I could not have positively identified a single one of them. Only Flack, whom I could not see. I thought I heard him bawling away in another room: “yes, violets! One bunch of violets! That’s right —“
I started to construct a sandwich of cheese — jack cheese — and imitation pumpernickel. No butter; but I got along quite decently.
“I don’t care!” I heard Flack shouting from somewhere beyond my field of vision. “I don’t give a good goddamn — yes, I’ll pay for it, good Christ. Now you got the address?”
I assembled my sandwich, drank some of the wine, took a bite from the sandwich. Near me on the kitchen table some people were playing with a scintillation counter, pointing it at each other and comparing intensities of radiation. The young man operating the instrument had it aimed like a gun at the chest of the girl beside him. “You’re hot, kid,” he was saying; “my God, but you’re hot — look at this.” The others squinted at the meter, grinning. “My old man owns the biggest uranium mine in Colorado,” the girl said, “no wonder I’m hot. How do you read me?”
“You’re hot, kid,” the young man said admiringly, “my God but you really are hot.”
I stared at them, chewing at my sandwich. From somewhere beyond the haze I could hear Flack: “Yes, two one three Pine. Yes — that’s right, two one three. Yes — okay, okay — “
The young man glanced up, saw me staring at him. His grin faded for a moment, then came back. He pointed the machine at me. I left the kitchen, taking my wine and sandwich.
In the front room the noise and smoke and animal pressure was almost overpowering. I looked around for Flack but couldn’t see him. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall and shut my eyes. I couldn’t see anything anyway. Somebody stumbled over my feet then came back and stepped on them. I did not look up.
On my right they were discussing Ernie’s case but that didn’t interest me very much. I had known him but not very well, to me he’d always seemed a little intangible. Apparitional. He was kind to me once, exceedingly kind, in a way I’d been taught to regard as saintly but impossible. And always gentle, courteous, interested in what I had to say. In fact, I think he was the only person who ever did listen to me. Flack is my friend, of course, but he never pays any attention to what I say. And I talk so seldom, too. About Ernie — but does anyone really care… ?
A suggestion of confusion: I found it hard to follow the conversation around me. They said: Him? I heard he traded his MG for an MIG. Brainwashed. When the Explainer tried to talk to him he spit in his face. That’s what I heard.And: It’s this way: Friday’s the Islamic holy day, right? T.G.I.F. Saturday for the Jews, Sonnesday for the bloody Christers. Yes? Nobody wants Monday. But Nobody. And: I prefer New York because there I feel close to the people. People —? Yes, the masses. You mean the Puerto Ricans? What? I said, You mean the Puerto — forget it sweetheart. What? Forget it…
About Ernie: I hadn’t known that he wrote poetry until a year ago. He never mentioned it to me. Flack told me; Flack thinks his stuff is pretty good. Flack gave me this little book that he’d printed in Denver at his own expense. Full of Ernie’s poems. Dedicated to Flack. Written by Ernie. I read them, sure.
I finished my wine and looked around for the pretty and intelligent girl who had… I couldn’t see her anywhere. Nor Flack, either. The room was so crowded with people, though, you couldn’t be certain they were not there. But no doubt he had already found her and they’d found the bedroom. Well: I didn’t care. No affair of mine. He’s very active, my friend Flack.
On my left they were talking about Heidegger and the problem of Bing. Or was it Bean? I thought of the wind roaring outside, of the dust rising in clouds from the plains of Texas and Colorado and Oklahoma. I could still taste the sand in my teeth.
The doorbell rang. A girl opened the door and through the smoke and shadows I could see a boy standing there holding something in his hand. He mumbled to the girl and she turned around and called for my friend. “Alexander Flack,” she yelled, “Alexander Flack.” It was the same girl who had given me the wine and offered me the treasures of her refrigerator; she saw me staring at her and gave me a smile. “Alexander Flack,” she called again, smiling at me. I felt relieved.
Flack appeared, pushing and shoving through the crowd. He was sweating and his eyes seemed more bloodshot and smoky than ever. When he noticed the girl smiling at me he turned his head and looked at me too, and grinned and winked. There was still dust on his face. He spoke to the boy and the boy gave him what he held in his hand, apparently flowers, for I heard Flack say, “These the violets?” and the boy nodded. They were wrapped in green tissue paper. Flack reached into his pocket and pulled out some silver. “Thirty nine cents,” he said. “Right?” The boy shook his head and mumbled something I couldn’t hear. “Eh?” said Flack, “how’s that again?” The boy’s lips moved. “Now wait a minute,” Flack said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “You wouldn’t try to cheat me now, would you, you little pimply-faced crook? They said thirty-nine over the telephone. What the hell kind of racket is this anyhow?” The boy spoke quietly. “Delivery charge!” said Flack indignantly. “One dollar for delivering one miserable little bunch of violets? You must be dreaming, kid.” The boy spoke again, timidly but insistently, holding out his hand. “Over my dead body,” Flack roared, “over my dead body! Now get out of here before I wring your neck!” And he stuffed the bunch of violets in his jacket pocket and raised both hands toward the boy’s face. The boy backed away, turned and scrambled up the steps outside, disappearing. Flack slammed shut the door and came back into the room with a dull, sick grin on his face, looking for me.
I stood up and gave my empty glass to a woman near me, and then stepped past Flack without speaking to him — he put his hand on my arm and I shook it off — and went out of that cave and up the cement steps outside. I found the boy starting to let air out of one of the tires on Flack’s car. I paid him a dollar and he climbed on his motorbike and went away.
The wind was still blowing but no longer so crazily, and most of the dust had dropped out of the air. I brushed the sand off the seat in Flack’s car and sat down and filled my pipe, waiting. The sun had evidently gone down, from where I sat, surrounded by walls, I could not see the western horizon. But the sky remained yellow, dense, close above my head. I thought of Flack and Flack’s small, desperate wife, then thought of my own wife, then I thought of Ernie again.
The trouble with Ernie — well, nobody knows why he did it. As for his poetry, I could never understand that either. It reminded me of Blake and of Mary Baker Eddy, that’s all I can say. Which means simply that I was never really much interested. The awkward thing about Ernie’s case, from Flack’s point of view, is that Ernie used Flack’s gun.
I lit my pipe and in the flare of the match saw the key in the ignition. I decided to steal Flack’s car and go on home. I slid over behind the wheel and started the engine.
Flack came up the steps. “Wait a minute,” he shouted, “wait for me, goddamnit.” He staggered a little in the dusk. “I don’t want to stay here either,” he shouted, opening the door on the driver’s side. “Move over.” I moved over and he took the wheel. “A terrible place,” he said. “I know how you feel. But I had to see that girl. That’s all. I’ll take you home now if that’s where you want to go.” He spoke without looking at me, backing the car out of the lot. He smashed into a garage door on the other side of the alley, then started the car forward. “I suppose that’s where you want to go?” he said. “Home, back to the wife and kids?” I told him yes, though I have no kids and not much of a wife. “Don’t blame you,” he said, staring through the dusty windshield as the car bounced and rattled down the alley. “Don’t blame you at all.” The alley seemed alive with dark shapes, shadows, moving things. I wanted to remind him to turn on the headlights, but he thought of it himself after he knocked over an empty garbage can.
When we came to the main street he turned left, toward the heart of the city, beginning to sing again: “A randy dandy dandy O! with a rumbelow and a Westward Ho!…” He cruised under a red light while opposing automobiles set up a clamor of horns and squealing brakes. “Lock that door,” he shouted at me, “not safe; opens when least expected.” I locked the door. We dived down into the cool, dark underpass again. “Hey!” yelled Flack, “this is good, this just all right.” The car rose, emerging into the fire and epileptic neon of the city, and Flack began to frown. “No good,” he shouted, “won’t do. Unfit for human consumption.” I shrugged my shoulders.
We crossed the river on the new four-lane bridge. As we approached the corner where I expected to turn he speeded up the car. I asked him what he was up to now. “Won’t take a minute,” he replied. “just a little piece of business.” He drove past my street without turning and on up the hill toward a ragged fringe of the city. I cursed him silently but without serious intent; I didn’t care whether I ever went home again or not.
At the top of the hill Flack turned the car to the right and we drove beyond the housing projects and shopping centers and beyond a few scattered shacks and on north, following the dirt road that went along the edge of the bluff above the river. The wind seemed to have died away, given up, but the sky was worse than ever, a ghastly spectacle of yellow and grimy red, like the blood-flecked yoke of a fertilized egg. Floating in on the wave of darkness from the east was a little icy fragment of the moon.
Flack stopped the car about three miles north of the city. He shut off the lights and hut off the engine and we sat there for a while listening to the rattle of cottonwood leaves and the oily surge of the river sliding past the mudbanks — like a breathing animal. I could smell the silty water and could feel the faint resonant tremor of the earth beneath it. The blue twilight, warm and rich with odors, deep in its silences, gathered around us, intoxicating, stupefying, while Flack breathed noisily and asthmatically through his clogged nostrils and sagging mouth, like a man etherized. I began to feel uncomfortable.
Flack sighed heavily and rubbed his face with both hands. “Come on,” he said. He opened the door and got out slowly. “Come on, got to show you something.” He stared at me dully, as if I were an entirely unimpressive stranger. “You coming?”
I shrugged my shoulders again, the typical response of an ineffectual man, and got out of the car feeling hungry and irritable. I guessed that the easisest way out of this was to humor him.
Flack walked away from the car, away from the road and toward on of the stony hills on the west. I followed him, trying to avoid the prickly pear and yucca that grew, somehow, in this waste of sand and rock and old lava. We trudged up a short slope, slipping now and then on the loose stones, and stopped near a juniper crouching in forlorn isolation on the summit of the hill. First I saw a wooden cross sticking up out of the ground near the juniper, and then the fresh burial mound extending from the foot of the cross to the roots of the tree. So here is where he planted Ernie, I thought.
“Read it,” Flack said, staring down at the grave.
“Read what?” I blinked hopefully. “Read what?” I said, since Flack had no answer. He pointed to the cross and I stepped close to it and bent down and read the words inscribed on the horizontal arm, apparently burned into the wood with a hot awl or chisel.
ERNEST THOMISON FLACK
1931-1949
Born of the Earth,
I give back to the earth
these ashy bones,
this troubled flesh,
but my triumphant spirit
you shall never find.
I backed away from the cross, rubbing my nose respectfully, and looked at Flack. He continued to stare at the grave. “What do you think about that?” he said.
I hesitated. “He was a strange boy.”
“Strange?” Flack grunted, scratched at his crotch. “He was a marvelous boy. He had something.” Scratching vigorously, Flack cleared his throat and spat to one side. “he was something. An angel maybe. Who knows?” He scratched at himself with an irrational, unnecessary vigor.
Okay, I was thinking, so you had a crazy brother. Who doesn’t? Aloud, I said: “You — he wrote the…?”
“What?” Suddenly, Flack stopped scratching himself. “He wrote the epitaph?”
“The epitaph,” I said, “yes.”
“Yes, sure, who else? Am I a bloody poet?” Flack groped through his pockets, found the crumpled withered bunch of violets. “Sure he wrote it, the wise little bastard. Did it all himself — you think he wanted my help? Did everything but shovel himself in.” Flack took a step toward the grave, went down awkwardly on one knee, then on the other, and deposited the violets on the bosom of the mound. “The tricky little bastard,” he mumbled, sagging there.
“Wait a minute,” I said. I stared at him, kneeling like a contrite bull between the cross and the static agony of the juniper tree. “Wait a minute,” I said, “let me get this straight.” I could hear, from down by the river, some crazy bird squawking in the darkness among the willows. “Do you mean to say — ?” Flack seemed to have forgotten me; half-fallen in the twilight, he breathed thickly, muttering obscenities. “Look,” I said, “did you knowhe was going to — ? You knewall along what he was going to do?” Flack did not answer. “Is that right?” I said.
He pushed himself up then, grunting, and turned toward me; his eyes were half closed. “Let’s go back,” he said. “It’s late.” He sighed like a tired man and made a move toward the car, then stopped, looking back at me. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go.”
I tried to answer but could say nothing. “Let’s go. Let’s go,” he said.
I found my voice. “I’ll walk.”
“What? You’ll what?”
“I said I’ll walk.”
Flack shrugged his shoulders, paused, started off again. And stopped again. “Don’t be a goddamn fool,” he said. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
“I don’t want to go home.”
“Well, neither do I,” Flack said. He was silent for a while, considering. “tell you what,” he said — let’s go somewhere, have a drink first.
Huh? What do you say?”
I tried to think of an answer to that. But there wasn’t any, or only one.
On the way back to the car, old Flack began to sing again: something about a bunch of drunken mariners, retribution, and the black eyes of a London dock-whore.
c/o 1999 Estate of Edward Abbey