The Correspondence Page 4

  Ibiza was on fire as we approached by night from the sea. A third of the island was burning. We anchored and watched airplanes swoop to fill their tanks with seawater. They flew high over the mountains and dropped water on the burning trees again and again. It was the biggest wildfire on the island in all of recorded history. It was still burning the next day when we left.

  Shlomo, swimming just before we pulled up anchor, was stung by a jellyfish. “Do you want me to pee on it?” I said.

  “No, I want you to shit on it,” he said. “Americans!” he said.

  On that boat, surrounded by blank water and blank Hebrew, with a somewhat less blank Spanish awaiting me on shore, I was free from the obligation to apprehend and interpret. If I don’t understand what you want from me, I don’t have to try to do it, I can’t.

  The sea is incomprehensible and uncomprehending, the sea doesn’t care, which is terrific, depending on what kind of care you are accustomed to receiving. The sea is wet.

  As a teenager I was once waved through a roadblock by a police officer who then pulled me over and ticketed me for running the roadblock. “I don’t understand what you want from me,” I said, something I had already, at that early age, said many times to many different people.

  “What’s the matter with you?” the officer snarled, something many different people have said to me, and when my father and I went to court we found I had been charged with attempting to elude a police officer and failure to comply. My father knew the judge, or should I say the judge knew my father: she had been his girlfriend in high school. My father and I were wearing the nicest clothes we owned.

  “Well, Mr. Prosecutor, what do we have here?” the judge said, smiling.

  “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” said Mr. Prosecutor, and he was also smiling, and they were speaking to and for my father, not to me, although I had been charged with attempting to elude a police officer, for Christ’s sake, I still don’t understand it. I got off with a fine for making an illegal turn. The judge knew my father, everyone knew my father, just as everyone had known my grandfather, and even people who had not been alive at the time knew that all the lights in Hodgenville, Kentucky, had gone out when my grandfather died.

  I was not a tree, I was an apple, I had not fallen far from those trees but I had fallen. Somewhere there had been an apple and a fall. This much we knew.

  If anyone wanted something from me on that boat, he said my name. If no one said my name, I was not wanted. And I was not wanted, I floated for a month in a sea of unmeaning noise, I was free from the horror of being deformed by another person’s needs and desires.

  I became a twin, a sibling to myself, and I gnawed myself for nourishment in the red cavern of the womb, relaxing into my own death.

  I ate myself until there was nothing left but my mouth. Then I ate my own mouth. Then I died.

  But no one ever dies. I got off the boat and hailed a cab and took a train to Madrid.

  In Madrid I went to the Prado, where I looked at Goya’s Saturno devorando a su hijo. There he sat, sickened, with his horrid mouthful, and the whites of his eyes were huge.

  I had always thought of Saturn as vicious, as power-mad. I had never realized how frightened he was, compelled to commit and experience horror against his will. I began to cry. I felt sorry for Saturn. He didn’t want to eat anyone. His stomach hurt. He wasn’t even hungry.

  And I flew home. Last night I dreamt the Devil bit my penis off. This morning it was still there, or here. Where I am is called here.

  LETTER FROM KENTUCKY

  JOHN C. SKAGGS was born in Green County in 1805, thirteen years after Kentucky became our fifteenth state. His son, Ben Skaggs, was born in 1835 in Bald Hollow and married Missouri Ann Carter.

  Their second-eldest boy, Will Franklin Skaggs, had his pick of Pleasant Poteet’s granddaughters. He could have had Delilah or Myrtie Scripture, but he chose Ella Green Poteet. Their third child, after Carter C. and Elvie Omen, was Sylvia May.

  Meanwhile, in Larue County, Elmina G. Dixon married Bryant Young Miller’s boy, and they bore a girl they called Mary Bothena Doctor Bohanan Sarah Lucritia Miller Rock, who, mercifully, named her own son Charlie.

  And Thomas Jefferson Quinley’s daughter Sefronia married Edwin Russell Wheatley, and begat Mildred Lucille, who married Robert Raymond Salisbury, who called himself Butch Daniels—of whom we will not speak.

  Their son married Charlie and Sylvia’s daughter, and begat me: “His Majesty the Ego,” as Freud wrote in 1908, “the hero of all daydreams and all novels.”

  This happened in Kentucky, except for the Freud part. That happened in Austria.

  I was born in Kentucky and lived there for the better part of three decades.

  As schoolchildren we were taught that the word Kaintuckee came from Ka-ten-ta-teh, which meant, in Cherokee, “the dark and bloody ground.”

  Later they said Ken-tah-ten meant “future land” in Iroquois. In high school, they claimed it was Wyandot for “land of tomorrow,” and I recall a field trip to see a documentary with that name.

  Before long, historians were telling us it could be Seneca for “place of meadows,” or it might be a Mohawk word, Kentah-ke, meaning “meadow.”

  And from time to time there was an expert, often but not always on a barstool, who argued that the region in its pristine state had seemed to its settlers to be nothing but wild turkeys and river canebrakes: Kaneturkee.

  It was clear that no one had any idea what he was talking about—and, in this manner, the most valuable part of our education was received.

  I flew back to Kentucky on a cold spring day aboard a paper airplane that every sneeze of wind knocked sideways. Next time I’ll swim. Everyone hates flying. Even birds hate flying.

  A sign in the airport said LOUISVILLE WELCOMES TOGETHER FOR THE GOSPEL NAZARENE YOUTH INTERNATIONAL 2012 PENTECOSTAL FIRE YOUTH CONFERENCE. There was nowhere to sleep. The many hotel rooms of downtown Louisville were occupied by boys and men in red T-shirts with white crucifixes ironed on. They stood in traffic, gawking.

  Someone had cut down the peach tree in the front yard of my old Preston Street house. There was a scrap of vinyl siding across the front step, and plastic wrap on the inside windows to keep out the draft, and wax paper fluttering under a gap in the door.

  Across the street from that house had once been the only bar where they had known what I wanted, a shot of Jim Beam and a suitcase bottle of Sterling, and Bill set it up every time he saw me coming. It was called B & B Bar, said to have been named for its owner, Bill, and then for Bill again, because what kind of name is the B-Bar.

  I had seen an old man get shot in front of that bar because he wouldn’t give two kids his bicycle. I snorted pills off the back of the toilet in that bar with a woman I didn’t understand was a prostitute: but later it became clear to me.

  Blind John, still dripping rain from his trip to the ATM, offered me a hundred dollars to let him go down on me.

  “I think you’re in the wrong bar,” I said.

  “Maybe you are,” he said.

  I lost a lot of money shooting nine-ball in that bar. Listen to your uncle Tim-Tom and never play pool for money against a man called Doc.

  I saw a little man stab a big man with a carving knife on that bar’s front steps. Later the wet knife glimmered under the streetlight on the hood of a prowl car. The big man went to the hospital. The little man went to the penitentiary. I don’t know where the bar went.

  I drove down to the tractor-trailer plant where my father had managed the repair shop, but the plant had closed. I had worked there twice.

  The first time was in the touch-up shop with Orville, soldering brake-light wires and repainting trailers Andrew had banged his forklift into, as a summer job and as a warning from my father. This was the kind of job I was going to wind up with if I didn’t straighten up and fly right. I was the only man in that garage with ten fingers.

  The second time was in the decal shop as a college drop
out. I had not straightened up, I had not flown right, this was the kind of job I had wound up with.

  By day, Mayflower trailers, Frito-Lay trailers, Budweiser and Bud Light trailers, Allied trailers. By night, drinking Colt 45 with Allen down by the train trestles, and later Boyd crawling around on the floor with a cardboard box on his head, insisting that he was a Christmas present.

  I read The Faerie Queene—counting syllables, thinking about the number seven—and thought: One of these days I am going to jump off the Second Street Bridge.

  Finley’s was gone, too, nothing but a pile of bricks. At Indi’s, eating the rib tips with red sauce and macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes and gravy, I listened: “You never know. That’s what I told them at his funeral this morning. I said, all right, see you later. But I was wrong.”

  And I remembered my friend Allen asking me if I saw a plain white van parked across from his house down by the racetrack.

  Allen said, “Tell me something, man. The van is real? I’m not paranoid? It’s been parked there for days. Three days.”

  “I am sure that is true.”

  “Listen—am I crazy? Could it be the FBI?”

  “Allen,” I said, seated in his forest of pot plants, “let me ask you a question. What amount of drugs and paraphernalia is in your house, do you think? And what is it the FBI gets paid to do all day? I am one hundred percent certain it is the FBI. I will see you later.”

  I said, see you later, but I was wrong. I did not see Allen later. Allen went to jail.

  I took the Gene Snyder Freeway out to the Bible College and got off at Beulah Church and drove past AMF Derby Lanes (“all you can bowl”) and Highview Church of God and Highview Baptist Church and Victory Baptist Church Camp.

  An old woman with a long gray ponytail was doing yard work, cutting back bushes I had planted in front of the house where I had grown up, where I had tried to grow up. A tired black dog lay in the yard, her yard now, not mine.

  It’s an old story. The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh: you go back to the place, but the place isn’t there anymore.

  I drove out of Fern Creek down Bardstown Road toward Buechel, past Cash Xpress and Mister Money, past Xtreme Auto Sounds and Ventura’s Used Tires and Global Auto Glass, and past the Heart of Fire City Church, the pastor of which had once helped us move some furniture and when it came time for my mother to write him a check for his services he said, “Don’t cheat a blind man, sister, I can’t read.”

  I drove to my uncle Charles’s house out in Okolona, past Latino Auto Service and The Godfather (the strip joint that once had on its marquee THE MAYOR IS GAY PLEASE SUE SO I CAN PROVE IT), past Liquor Palace 5 and Discount Medical Supplies, past Furniture Liquidators Home Center, past Cash America Pawn and Cashland, past The Mower Shop, past Los Mezcales and El Molcajete, past Big Ron’s Bingo and Cashtyme Cash Advance (“You’re Good For It!”), past Moore’s Sewing & Learning Center, and DePrez’s Quality Jewelry and Loans, and Floors Unlimited, and Chain Saw World.

  I turned on the rental car’s radio and the man on the radio said, “Your gift right now, just twenty dollars a month, could help. Seventy-three more gifts needed. People like you, doing their part. One song left in this challenge. Standing in the gap for those who need it. We here believe in the infallible Word of God. Unchanging principles for changing times.”

  I drove past something. Then I drove past something else.

  “There is an awful lot of drugs now in these small towns and big towns both,” my uncle Charles said. “You may not know the police shot that boy you all used to play with. Said he was cooking meth down there in his shed. They had him surrounded and he came out alone with his pistol. Found thirty-seven shell casings when it was all done with. What was his name?” But Charles couldn’t remember the dead man’s name.

  “You’ll stay with us tonight,” my aunt Alice Carol said.

  “I have a hotel room near the airport.”

  “Honey, everything in this town is near the airport.”

  “I guess I made a foolish decision.”

  “You’ve always been foolish.”

  My aunt was teasing me. She didn’t think I was so bad. One Thanksgiving—we were listening to the old boys jaw for hours about hiding up a tree with my grandfather’s shotgun in order to shoot a neighbor’s brown dog that had killed two of their chickens, and after both barrels were empty there was nothing left but the dog’s collar and its tail, which they’d helped the neighbor bury—she turned to me and said, “If you want to be a writer, why don’t you go get a pen and paper and write down all these lies?”

  Standiford Field was now called Louisville International Airport and the Executive West Hotel was the Crowne Plaza, but Executive Strike & Spare still stood on the other side of Phillips Lane. I walked across the street and shot nine-ball for a couple of lazy hours. It turns out it’s like riding a bike—you never forget how, and especially not if you never knew how in the first place.

  Overheard at the bar: “He and his friends see this old man take his wallet out at the liquor store, so they know he’s got money, and they follow him home. But his wife’s there. Now that’s two counts. I called him and his mother says, He ain’t here. I called back. I said, Santino, I heard you cut your monitor off. You know you got court this Friday? You coming? You know that’s another felony? Do not shave your head again, I told him.”

  “It’s funny what order we all remember the salad dressings in.”

  “My youngest daughter has excellent upper-body strength.”

  “I sleep very well on the floor.”

  I took 64 East out of Louisville through the junction. Panels of cars and blown-out tires were scattered in the breakdown lane. I passed Exit 8, the off-ramp to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, such as Southern Baptist theology is. The speed limit rose to seventy, and mangled deer, coon, possum, turkeys, and skunks began to appear.

  Over the Kentucky River, in Fayette County, I stopped and for three dollars I ate a plate of biscuits and sausage gravy that would almost have fit into a football stadium.

  “Here comes Rex. Today’s to-do list: raise hell with the waitresses.”

  “That ain’t on his list. That’s just normal.”

  I did not change to the Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway, which is the way I would have gone fifteen years earlier if I’d been drinking beer with my friend Gary on our way to Red River Gorge before he went crazy and they put him away in Central State for the first time, but not the last.

  Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-girlfriend slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine. I am guilty.

  Before any of that happened Gary and I were good friends, and we were together in the pro-Martin faction when Lawyer Jack pulled a knife on Big Martin one night in the kitchen of the Highland House and Martin just shrugged and picked up the kitchen table and hit Jack with it.

  Gary and I agreed on that dispute and on other important matters, we camped out together, we got high and talked about numerology, and it was in this way that I became important enough to him to lash out at when he fell ill.

  “You blue-eyed Jew,” he said to me as his mind disappeared. “You dumb piece of fuck. I’m going to stuff six dollars and ninety cents in pennies up your ass and staple it shut.”

  Six ninety was 138—which was 23 times 6 (the 2 and 3 of 23 multiplied)—times 5 (the 2 and 3 of 23 added). Gary could go on for hours about the significance of these numbers to him. He had infinite bad luck, he would say, because of 138: an unlucky 13 conjoined with the sideways Möbius strip of an 8.

  They wheeled him away, strapped to a stretcher.

  Gary had written, “Jack looks like your dad! Whew! Happy reading!” in the copy of On the Roa
d he gave me for Christmas in 1992. I don’t remember if I read it or not. It’s about a road.

  I didn’t have a Dean Moriarty for my long car trip, but I had the man on the car radio. And the man on the radio said: “Pieces of the Divine puzzle will be played out in the coming economic Armageddon. From crisis to consolidation. I want you to pray for me today.”

  We sang about the Blood Wednesday nights at church suppers, Thursday nights at choir practice, mornings and evenings on Sundays, and every summer at a peacock-ridden revival camp in Alabama.

  The old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine. There is a fountain filled with blood. I must needs go on the blood-sprinkled way. He bled, He died to save me. How I love to proclaim it, redeemed by the blood.

  They vainly purify themselves, said Heraclitus, by defiling themselves with blood, just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud. Any man who marked him doing thus would deem him mad.

  Our pastor had a method. After his sermon, we sang “Just As I Am” over and over again—without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, and so on. We would sing until someone gave in. We sang all day.

  It was the same unrelenting method of the middle-school phys-ed coach who, perceiving that Weak Henry was weak, hit on the technique of making the whole class do extra push-ups until Henry finished his allotted twenty. Henry couldn’t make it happen. We did twenty more, thirty more, forty, and, after class, Demetrius and Alonzo beat Henry in the locker room until he peed.

  One morning, after an hour of “Just As I Am,” my mother shrieked and fell into the aisle. My father helped her stand. His face was strange. The two of them knelt and prayed at the altar. A nice old lady wearing a white gauze eye patch smiled. I waited to see what the people who told me what to do were going to tell me to do next.

  I played Jesus one year and Judas the next in the Passion play. I taught Vacation Bible School, and visited and sang hymns to the homebound, and, all that rigamarole having been accomplished, I chased the preacher’s daughter through the cornfield after Sunday evening services until I caught her.