Chapter 15: Hejira Time Should Olney get on his pony and ride? The last and final? If so, where to? There's nowhere left. Mammon-envy, it would appear, now belongs to a former life, a life that's ending today, that's ending right now. And it's so long to that mail box of perfumed love letters from the checkout chick at Von's, adios to those neatly filed bills to pay on time, keep-on-truckin' to coffee perkin' and toast a-poppin', a fond farewell to solitudes and satisfactions, and a big wave goodbye to the cozy sunlit walls of a rental all his own. So long routine, so long reams of joyously typed pages: the book he was always going to write! So long lazy Sunday's on a furnished couch, the little volume of Basho fallen to the floor of snores. So long one and all; sure would've been a slice. What then is the plan? His eyes glaze over like blank slates, cortex shutting down with a meaty thud. Without money it's freight trains next. Heyohboy. Of course, connoisseur that he is, Olney will pick the best. Perhaps a comfortable potash carrier, one of those prairie-crossing hoppers with posh hobo apartments at either end. He'll have two bedrooms to choose from in his slotted-metal suite, with an section of structural dead space in between for luggage. No front doors, though. Sorry to say there'll be no way to keep out those nosy whistling winds. But, were the sun ever to shine, he'll have at his disposal a lovely verandah of titted steel. Here he can idle away the hours by frequently shifting his meatless beggar's behind while gazing at the passing landscapes of God's cold and bleak. Complete privacy is assured: all the weirdos will be in the boxcars clutching thin air for warmth. No one to bother him in his freezing serenity, no intruders with shiny red faces hopping on board at the last minute in brand new running shoes speckled with blood, who knew whose. Money! Apart from submitting the old dream of chasing bags full tumbling out of a Brink's truck, Olney's think tank seems to have gone brain dead. Still, the idea suits his temperament. Better yet, he might one day stumble across a brown paper sack on the sidewalk, dropped in a moment of panic by an old usurer so paranoid of being robbed that possession has become intolerable. Much more agreeable to find the booty while strolling than to have to run for it. Why, people were finding sacks and bags and briefcases full of money all the time. If Olney were to walk the sidewalks of Earth for the rest of his innumerable lives, it could even happen to him. And if he chose the sidewalks near big city banks, the odds would greatly improve. Sooner or later it had to happen. One fine day a terrified thief would zip past him, the heist a success, but here comes The Man, closing in like a well-travelled nightmare. Split-second brainstorm, thief stashes loot in a pile of debris a few blocks away so that a few blocks later when caught: "Who me? I was out joggin's all, just joggin'. What's that? I'm gonna jog the next twenty years in Folsom? Fuck you, ya bastids." And off he goes with chaperons to a little room downtown where the echoes of fists punctuating reasonable inquiries such as "Where's the dough, chump?" resonate back to Olney who comes up the street casually, ears cocked to what sounds like muffled epithets just out of range. Psychic from hunger and scanning the sidewalk for coin and butts anyway, he is unwittingly guided by the thief's brain beam to that very pile of refuse. With the usual neck-breaking double take Olney's eyes swoop on the--wow, what's that?--grey corner of a durable utility bag sticking out of a heap of leaves, twigs, beer cans, pop cans, crumpled cigarette packs, candy bar wrappers and the usual peels, cores and rinds of in-season fruit. Yep, muses O. with the speed of light, not much covering that ol' bag down there--whisk--and he's up and away and it's a hearty adios motherfuckers, lifetime villa fantasies doing battle with simple butterfat cravings for dibs on the next minute. Pragmatic necessities, like getting the passport in order, would come Much Later... Olney reaches across the counter to rip most of a paper napkin from its metal holder, seconds before Helga replenishes the already overloaded supply. He wipes his brow. Is he sweating? No, it's more a gesture for any "himselves" in attendance. None of them are, of course. As usual, he's not getting any sympathy or even interest from those jerks. Can't count on commiserations like, "Aw, the boss's really having a tough time. Maybe we ought to come together and help him out. We've never met, I know, but hi, my name is Skippy the Punk. I work over in Community Relations." "Oh, yeah? Well, I'm Rip the Whacker and where I work, we pulverize creeps like you." Hopeless. §§§ While Olney is contemplating the cup of hellbroth before him, the front door swings open to admit Moon Food regulars, Dester Blut and Grunty McGhee. They crumple into the booth next to Chick and Cleola, whose combined lust for boiled scallops and an eggburger are about to be gratified by the two plates Helga is about to deliver. Dester and Grunty share a room at the Terminal Hotel. Liquids junkies like most folks, their day invariably starts with a big saucepan or two of cowboy-style coffee and numerous roll-yr-owns. Fit as pawn shop fiddles after downing their robust swill, the two galoots then take to the backalleys of town for the joys of fortified wine and comatose reminiscence. Anabiotic pit-stops to the Moon Food for more coffee and the odd bowl of chili punctuate their menu of earthly delights. A typical evening finds them in front of the rabbit ears, each with a poor boy of bourbon courtesy of the state and Slobodan's Fine Wines. One such interlude of post-alley revivification is occurring right now. Sipping coffee while awaiting the chili beans Hong Kong Helga orders without being asked, Dester and Grunty busy themselves by fishing through their pockets for packets of Tops and Bugler tobacco. According to a long standing ritual, they manage to spill most of the tobacco on the table. Honoring tradition still further, they manage to spoil several rolling papers with their unfeeling fingers. During these solemn occasions, Dester and Grunty eye each other with disdain. Dester wouldn't light up a Bugler if the Krauts were pulling his toenails out, while Grunty wouldn't smoke Tops even if it meant a roll in the hay with Dolly Parton. Sneering disagreements over the esthetics of life have formed a major bond between the two old friends. Olney's dream of counting hundreds, fifties and twenties in a swiftly rented room at the Terminal Hotel drifts and fades. Pursing his lips for a sip of coffee, he notices Dester and Grunty in the mirror doing the same. Three pairs of eyes squint through the steam rising from three utility cups of nerve pounder hoisted by six team-working thumbs and indexes to three pairs of yooping lips that quiver as they feel their way along the warm edge of contact. In a future without Loomis bags to dump on the spotted bedspread, Olney would probably slip down the hall and knock on their door, hoping to enjoy a little TV while discreetly sipping his own pint of bourbon. Oh, no, not bourbon. Was that to be Olney's future? A future in which sludgy, torporous bourbon capped a day ill spent? Thus gone the dreams of serene accomplishment rewarded by cognac's amber clarity? His reverie is about to don combat fatigues for a self-massacre when he notices a man limping briskly in front of the cafe. Olney has seen him often, hobbling around town as if he had important business to attend to. The man is blind, or nearly so; his stick continually swings in front of him, never touching ground. Perhaps, having memorized the city streets, he's showing his contempt for dowsing the chasms and abutments so troublesome to ordinary blind people. The man is dressed in a dark brown pinstripe suit with wide lapel and gleaming pied patent leather shoes. He might be from one of the eastern European or Balkan countries, with the round rosy cheeks and oval face of a man alien to emptiness and isolation. How long has he been gone? Years of exile without feedback have given him a lonely, faded distinction. He stops for a moment, in front of the window. Framed in an O of the MOON, he cocks his head at a questioning angle. Is there a glimmer of shapes behind his dark round glasses? Or is he looking for something else, a feeling, a sense of kinship nearby. Is he stranded here, at the ends of Earth, for the rest of his life? Never to see again his invaded and violated homeland? Does he have a wife? Olney, no advocate of diminution through marriage, hears himself saying, "Give him a wife, O Lloyd. Let him return everyday to a tidy home, to a fussing little femme Balkanique who gives him comfort and love and companionship. Don't drop him here all alone, even if he is responsible for the deaths of thousands..." Oops. Well, to be frank, Olney has been harboring little ships of suspicion concerning this man. Somewhat ashamed, he wonders if these suspicions aren't the result of Daisy Hent's daily breakfast of organic glue, or, to be generous, some trivial aspect between remote planets. Still ... could this man be a ... a war criminal? Funnelled through channels and mouse-holed to a freedom bought and paid for by Right wing governments bent on the overthrow of evolution? Freed by the same governments who turned a blind eye to Raoul Wallenberg's imprisonment for saving the lives of thousands of helpless Jews? Could he have been a hastily commissioned young lieutenant called upon to supervise the liquidation of a people local legend had it were evil? He may well have come from a village in the Balkans, a place typical of anywhere, the world's meshugginations of no interest to anyone. Until one day, with little warning, in came the hordes, the animal brain goose stepping in shiny boots. Saviors to the reactionary, an outrage to the sane, they marched in to surround, intimidate and reduce humanity to grovelling fear. And from the ranks of the weakest chose their likenesses, gave them status and extra food for their families. All they asked in return was obeisance to terror and extermination. What could he do? our Balkan case history. He was only a kid then. Virile male children, their juices boiling for love and glory, are such easy prey for the Molochs, in whose fat, soft hands, rebellious children have no choice. Like foster parents intent on committing premeditated abuse, the Molochs degrade love into rape, glory into violence. In America, some years later, our young Balkan recruit would have had a wonderful menu of causes to choose from. He could have learned from his American counterparts who bombed abortion clinics in the name of God. "God don't like abortions. If He did, I wouldn't be here," they might say, detonating from safety. He could have joined in the exchange of heroism for butchery by participating in a U.S. sponsored death squad in Central America, congratulated by his good buddies for his ingenious solution to the threat of communism as he ripped open the bellies of screaming pregnant women and scooped out the commie-loving fetuses, or better yet--"Hey, that's a really great idea"--shoved the husband's faces into the gaping bellies of their dying wives and held them there until they drowned--"Umeruhca'll forever be in yr debt. Freedom's won another page in history." (While back home, at a Dairy Queen down the block from the patriot's mom and pop's house, a shapely twenty year old university student licks an expensive and tasteless soft ice cream cone, flakes of hot fudge-substitute vibrating like insect wings between her teeth as she admonishes her boyfriend, "Of course human life is sacred, silly. C'mon, let's go somewhere, I'm bored.") As Dester and Grunty receive their steaming bowls--"Aw, can't we have two packets of saltines each?"--the Balkan blind man passes out of sight, head bobbing like a conscience-stricken chicken pecking for time. In the same barnyard as Olney, Chick and Cleola, Dester and Grunty and Helga, even the Odd Chinaman, all with compounded layers of life like the history of Çatal Hüyük, each flattened hearth unaware of the one above or below it, helpless to join one another up the chimney and into the miracle, out of history and time, off this prison of compressing gravity, where no mind can concentrate for long... §§§ Chapter 16: Life is but a Dream |