We Come to Our Senses (18 page)

The boys and I piled into Douglass's old Bronco, then hit the road with sour mash. I took a drink, said, “Make no mistake, guys. I
adore
Darla.” They had no reply. I then changed the topic to filmmaking: “You know, Larry Semon was from Mississippi. He was a big motion picture—”

“Ha!” Willie cut me off. “His name was
Semen
?”

“That would
so
suck,” Douglass said, and the two of them cackled.

Had I been talking to Darla, or at least to
old
Darla, we would have worked up our shtick while discussing Larry Semon, the forgotten rival of Chaplin, the recipient of a $5,000-a-week studio salary in the 1920s, who became a fever drunk at the apex of his success and decided to make a slapstick version of
The Wizard of Oz
, in 1927 (twelve years before the one we all know), with Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man, and with drunk Semon's drunkard wife cast as Dorothy. A failure so enormous it decimated his career. Died in a California sanitarium, Larry Semon.

But old Darla was not here. The city was not here. The diorama set was not here. It seemed that my only markers of continued growth, of life, were Douglass and Willie, and the film we would make in the Mississippi night.

Douglass stopped off at this boarded-over Victorian shitheap, then got out and snuck around back. He and Willie buy old houses from poor blacks and use Mexicans to fix them up so they can fleece young whites. They started doing so when Douglass was still married to Gina, having bought their first project house care of her VA home loan benefits. Though he and Willie now do quite well, flipping houses all
over town, they never update anything in their own home, out of disdain for their benefactress. “Don't owe Gina or nobody for nothin',” Douglass says, as if not spending the money he makes exempts his indebtedness to her.

As Willie and I waited, the engine cut and ticking, he confessed that he was worried sick about Douglass. Said he wished Douglass didn't have to act like such a stupid, stubborn man. I wasn't sure how to respond, so I didn't. Willie went silent and picked at his cuticles. A minute later Douglass walked back toward us, something big and dark cradled in his arms. He fumbled to open the Bronco's tailgate, then thunked it in the back.

The stench was a crucifixion of the sinuses. I vomited out the passenger's window, and began to regret the decision to anger my rich wife. Willie writhed and banged his head against the dashboard. Douglass was somehow unfazed; he laughed, and informed us that it was only a bloated dog carcass. A dead boxer, he said, which he'd found locked in the crawl space when first inspecting the Victorian, its body amid chewed Ziploc bags. He surmised that the dog had eaten whatever it was supposed to guard down there, meth or crack, then OD'd and baked in the heat.

We drove off with our heads flung doglike out the windows. A few minutes later, on a residential street, Douglass cut the headlights and rolled to a stop in front of Gina's house.

“This is gonna be horrorific,” he whispered, then got out and went for the dead dog. Gas hissed out of the boxer when he picked it up, and a dark liquid ran down the front of his shirt. Douglass cursed God, demanded help. Willie said he
had to hold the camera, then raised the Super 8 like a fist. I cursed God, then got out and grabbed the dog's back legs. The muscles were mush; it seemed as if the beast would crumble from the bone, like decent pork shoulder.

We snuck onto Gina's front porch heaving with nausea. The dead dog gassed out and made a slick smack when we dropped it. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I knew it was Darla.

Douglass whispered, “Okay, now ram a knife in it.”

“Hell,” I said. “I'm going home.”

He started to argue when the front door flew open. There was Gina, holding us down with a modified twenty-gauge, and clad in olive-green panties and a tan muscle shirt, her dog tags swaying. She had black chevron tattoos on each sculpted deltoid, and she barked commands at us in both Arabic and English.

Douglass cried out for Jesus Christ and calm. From the car, Willie laughed and pointed the camera at us.

“A movie within a movie,” I muttered, staring at the lens.

A legion of cops screeched onto the set. They clubbed us for many minutes and we were charged with alcoholic terrorism.

In the holding cell, Willie and Douglass bickered on as if they were back at home, sitting in twin recliners in front of their television. Across from them I was on my back, on a stainless steel bench, staring at the ceiling. I couldn't stop thinking about dogs. About Slump, and the dead boxer. I pictured the latter, frenzied on meth, smashing his head against whatever trapped him in the crawlspace. Smashing and smashing until his dog heart exploded. I could picture
his final movements, so very slow in the heat, his last breath leaking out in a whistle.

“Or was it a
her
?” I asked aloud.

An hour or so later, Willie and Douglass ran out of gripe. In the silence, the jail toilet ran, and we may have even dozed. At some point I looked over and there was Darla, on the other side of the bars, wearing her sky-blue church dress.

“Hey, Dar,” I said.

“Hey,” she replied, her eyes raw from tears. “I'm bailing you out. But then we're done.”

I begged forgiveness, mentioned Robert Duvall in
Tender Mercies
. Her mouth turned up a sad kind of smile. As I walked out behind her, fractured and stinking, Willie promised that next time he'd load film in the Super 8, now that we had an idea of what to expect.

D. Garcia Brings the War

HIGHWAY. GET TO
drinking. Driving to the cemetery I get to drinking, hard. I look over at the passenger seat, and to Berea: hitchhiker, maiden, at our mercy. She is car-window-framed by tumbling gray clouds that still haven't decided if they'll break or not. I look at blond Berea and ask if she's heard of Petrarch. She asks back if he's like Bruno Mars. I say, Hell, no, Berea, then take a pull off the bourbon bottle and tell her that Petrarch was this Italian dude who wrote over two hundred sonnets to a woman named Laura. Wrote them over the course of twenty-something years. He was pure, you know. As was she: Laura.

Well, that's pretty great, Berea says, the Kentucky forest streaking by. Is this, like, a Mexican thing, D. Garcia? she asks.

I punch the gas as Pete butts in from the backseat, yapping that George Harrison and Eric Clapton each wrote songs expressing love to Clapton's wife, nicknamed Layla. Berea says she knows about Layla—the song anyway—and then
Pete corrects himself and notes that maybe it was Harrison's wife, but either way, it's romantic.

Jesus
fuck
, I say, we are not talking about a hippie rock star wife-swap, Pete. Like, Petrarch
didn't even know
Laura, man. He saw her like once, ONCE, from afar, and her purity drove him to throttle this sort of absolute unknown romance pain love to the extreme. I mean, she was married, had kids—was
off-market
. But Petrarch kept on loving, he kept on loving the very idea of her—while respecting her enough not to pressure her. His poems like a highway, his love a pure pilgrimage, a mission, a conquest, a Cause, a . . .

Laura! Laura! Laura! I howl. Bang the bottle on the dashboard, take a healthy pull and say, Hell, Pete, Petrarch sure as shit didn't have to put anything on the radio, or make a pop-culture spectacle out of love.

Berea coos this ethic. She squeezes my shoulder, smiles and caresses the back of my neck . . . but then turns back to fawn over Pete, too. In the rearview I see him roll his eyes at her, which prompts her to reach back between our seats and tickle him, which gets me crazy jealous—and to more of that bourbon. I swerve a little bit to scare her back up front. So then I'm drinking and thinking of Laura when Berea asks: Speaking of music, guys, do y'all have any Toby Wayne in the car? which almost makes me throw her farm-bred, hitchhike, downy white ass back onto the parkway, and which does make Pete respond, No way, Berea, because we totally hate that guy, and we hate pop-country crap in general, though . . .

You won't believe it, Pete continues, but D. Garcia's buddy,
the guy we're staying with when we get to Nashville, wrote a song that megastar Toby Wayne recorded, at which point Berea freaks out and says, No way! twice, before asking, Which one? to which Pete responds, Jesus, I don't know, ask D. Garcia! to which Berea replies, D. Garcia, which one, oh, man, which song, which song?

And she's so beauteous and porcelain and maidenhead-clean when she begs. I plug another gluggeroo, then go ahead and answer, “Urban Cowgirl.”

Well. Berea starts bouncing on the gray bucket seat, up and down, jiggling and spouting, Oh, my god, that's my favorite song of all time, ever, no way! No way! No Way! She begs me, Please, D. Garcia, you gotta take me to Nashville, I can't believe you know “Urban Cowgirl”!

And jesus christ if we're gonna be able to work this out. Stuck in this ride, her boobs bobbing like Cinemax, and Pete handing out Xanax, and I'm gonna pass y'all the bottle in a minute, but first
uno mas
for
moi
, and, No way, Berea, hell, no, we can't put on a pop-country station, no matter how much you sing and swoon. And hello, Hydrocodone; What's up, Weed?; and pass bottle, pass bottle, pass pass pass; snort snort glug snort pass pass snort . . .

and those car cabin sloppy hours melt into the dark, smeary sky . . . the same sky that pressed down during the torrential rains in the desert . . . the slate-gray sky and the slop nobody told us about while we trained on trucks at Leonard Wood, or before deployment from Bragg all those years and miles ago. They gave us no briefing of rain, no training for the mucosal, thrushy slop, the slop that turned the void in on the gut of the
land itself, and into something darker. Something thick and unrelenting in our clothes, in our boots, in the slathered folds of our oily skin, yes,

we now slip like that, like truck tires in slop sand, like tires burdened by forty-ton rigs, slugging for traction or meaning, for anything beyond the Cause. Oh the Cause, my god Laura how it trudges over love

until finally, we reach the forlorn little cemetery, in the woods at the end of some cracked country road. A mist slicks us as we trip out of the car. The wet wind shakes the web of naked tree branches that spurt driblets of spring buds like green acne. We are stumbling in Kentucky, sticky-moist and the bottle down to a thin finger of bourbon, having detoured a hell of a ways from Nashville on Berea's behalf. Unknown Berea, our investment in pure. She is our belief that the miles and the years and the love in the books will be redeemed. That the songs and the flags will be replenished, if we can just move past ourselves, past our infidel past, and back to the Cause, and,

Berea says she doesn't know where her mom's grave is. She wanders the cemetery all wobble-legged drunk and ungrateful; So sue me, she says, you didn't have to bring me here, Garcia. All I ever did was ask.

Pete gets his guitar out of the trunk, takes a piss on some chrysanthemums, props up against a gravestone and starts fingerpicking country blues.

The sharp wind whips Berea's print dress up her thighs. She staggers by headstones and reads the names aloud. I call them back to her in slur until at last we locate her mother: a large slick gray block atop a grainy cement base.

My mom died too, I say.

My mom died, Berea says.

My mom died longer ago, I say.

This isn't about your mom, Berea slurs. It's not about YOU!

I slap her white-pink face. I don't think I mean to; I haven't slapped a maiden before. But I slap her and start to apologize, and then don't. Can't. Her blue eyes idle in momentary disbelief before she yanks the bottle from my hand and drains it, then stomps over and smashes it against some soul now known only as Taken from Us. I turn to Pete, who looks elsewhere while trying to pluck some stupid riff, and I yell, Fuck you, Pete, you recessive runt, you'll never take a woman to protect. Berea storms into my face and says, No, D. Garcia, no. She grips my jaw with ultimate authority, No, Garcia, no—and a minute later thrusts into kissing me, sucking furious as the wind races. And she's crazy, that young Berea, kissing the breath out of me with hot tongue, whispering gasps of, Fuck your mom. Suckles and bites and I respond, Your mom, Berea, and fuck your dad too; tugging at her golden curls and cursing her as she drops one hand and rips my zipper open in a fit, pulls me out and starts working me with her callused dish-wash long beauty fingers; lapping my lips, licking my tongue, my denim-clad hips pained with want, staggering in lust as the wind wags the spit bridge from our mouths; the open zipper teething my prick; as overhead, thick branches crack like deer rifles; as splinters plummet, as beneath our feet the black-green ground heaves and sinks and mushes.

And once more the Cause has confused us, has changed us has charged us straight into the sludge. And Berea drops down, down on the concrete ledge of the memorial to
motherhood, her squat open-legged her cream knees a cradle as she fingers my belt loops and yanks down my jeans, first tasting me timidly and then sucking, ravenous, enraptured, pausing only to slobber and beseech, Please don't shame me, don't you shame me for this, D. Garcia. And I grip the headstone and say I will not and cannot, and then stare out into that collection of hyphenated used-to-be's and start bumping her wispy blond head into her own last name. Little American flags and plastic flowers, American American, my dear god, American, I clasp that granite and shove and dip, my hamstrings taut as she consumes me in pink gully cheeks, her pet noises and gags and muffled moans. The guitar drops off; I glance over to watch Pete, who is now jacking off and sobbing and half crouched behind a tombstone, his grip hand rabid as the other rubs his thinning hair; he stares at me, at my clenched, pumping ass, and within seconds casts ejaculate across a statuette of the white Virgin herself. I then turn back again to worship the dull pink lips that stretch and slide over me before Berea slip-spits me out and, Yes, she cries out, nearer thy God!; she strokes and strokes with hands so slick so tight so wet, her hands like a bolt-action rifle doused in gun oil, her eyes staring up into mine and the wind slapping my faith into submission; and, Come, she demands, Come now, baby, god she yanks so hard so slippery so, Come come come, and Make it real; she slides and grips and Okay, I say, oh kay oh . . . and my baptism erupts over herself and her dead mom.