Off the Road - 06

a jazz novel on a typewriter

6

The problem with maps is that there is territory between the lines. I was driving along the route and had just passed into Gilead, ME.  It looked nothing like the Gilead in any other part of the world: there were rolling hills that were called mountains, and I suppose they were back when they were created but now have been worn down to the nub. It was an object at rest. We passed a junkyard that tried to call itself “Antiques” and I suppose if the iron wheel from your grandfather’s tractor was an antique then it might qualify but there were very few people who would say that. There was a wire fence to hold in all of the rusty wheels along with the sign. Occasionally we could see the Androscoggin River, though it would be called a stream in other parts of the United States. And I admit that I wish to God that I was in one of those places where they had an idea of just what they were living next to. But for now, the ultimate fate of our narrator remains obscure.

Then Dean piped up:

“I once had a garden.”

“Here there are low countries and scrub it would be difficult to make a garden.”

“I can remember the smell of the turn Earth, which is entirely lacking here.”

“The reason is you can drive a truck for hauling the round stones so why do anything else?”

“The reason that you all stones is to get cigarettes and liquor and coffee.”

That last line talked to me because I hadn’t had a cigarette in an hour or so, and that is my limit to go without a hit of nicotine. Dean looked over at me considered my face and took out the next fold of Raw and rolled two cigarettes with it being generous with the tobacco. I took the first one and with that easy deference lit it with a notch and then let the spiky liquid down my throat to get that high just one more time.

“If I lived here I would have just hitched my way in either direction because there is nothing here but nowhere of nowhere.”

“And you can’t stand that?” I looked over at him and saw that he was smoking a cigarette with the durations between the tops going out the window and disappearing like lead air in a lead body with a lead arm somehow controlling the spell.

“I just need to go go go to wherever whenever however I can find. Get me to the place where there are people who don’t move their lips except to say something important.”

“I’ve never found it.”

“At midnight all the agents and their superhuman crew.” I looked over at Dean and saw he was smiling while he was puffing his cig. Then I saw him taking a look at the brush and stones and small pine trees.

“I can hear the way everyone talks around here, yes ma’am no ma’am what are you saying ma’am. Each repetition kills a score of brain cells which never come back. I bet every third email may be called Serena Joy.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If you lived in a village called Gilead chances are you think that God is running the show.”

“I don’t recall asking you if you go to church.”

“Fuck no.” he said “fuck” as if it was a medicine tactical word, taking the place of any other word in a sentence. Perhaps this is because our language wants iambs but the modern often use one short. So were caught between iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter not knowing which to follow so we just say “Fuck it.” And then done.

 Then we passed a heavy truck with two people loading in enormous stones to jumble them to wherever they were buried gasping for air and in the napalm winter freezing to death.

“Dean, don’t you notice that there are only men behind these trucks?”

“That is because the women run things by checking off boxes on their computer and they send out the men to do the dirty grunt work for some pay.”

“An escape quick and narrow?”

“Would you want those men around knocking over sugar and spilling the milk?”

 I looked out around on the slightly twisting road and saw the yellow strip that divided one half from another and realized that this was a convention that the workers could ignore because really it was like a set from the nightclub or the opera hall only in drag. And the men hurling stones were like the extras who did not speak but whose contribution was as vital as any other. It made me feel I like it was the time I was a guest at the local opera when the girl was my wife and I was dressed up all racked in a sharp suit with a beautiful well-dressed blonde on my arm who would eventually be my wife. The day before I had been dressed up like a bum but had borrowed the suit from a friend. The opera production was the daily Fidelio. As was often the case the first act had all of the scenery and the rest was cardboard because there was no money left to envision the rest at the same level as the first act.

“What gloom!” cried the baritone, ringing out from the darkness under a grooming stone. It made me cry. But that is the way I view life too. So, I was crazy to see Opera because it was my life. And that is the way I saw Gilead: with all the mobile home styles and battered up trucks that had been converted to a sort of living space with the back opened up out into the wilderness and allowing in the darkness that came to say:

“What gloom!” with all the flourishes. And the drum and the base hit at the same time.

And then I was done with it and wanted to move on.

Applause.

Are there any questions?