Off the Road - 18

a jazz novel on a typewriter

3

The town we had left, let us admit it, was ugly. It was made from panic and connected by that long silent communion with a wraith of memory and plunged straight away into the dances silence. We left it behind, but I can still see the straightaway cut of the interstate through the bleeding edge of the city. It sheltered the plague that still took a few people after it had been a pandemic that ruled the world. It was like rats clawing in the sewers waiting for a chance to explode. Run the table if you like with the flat land of New Mexico and enter into the flat land of Arizona which still created crinkles and creases for mountains to hoist upwards in bunches and batches and heaves and heavens. At once and had the same time we were go go go going from New Mexico and come come coming towards Arizona to Las Vegas where we would stop.

The ridges and the reveille help to sooth the colored girl chants that still bubbled up beside me along the street streets and dirty white walls where nothing was darkened by the slash of a tree. Somewhere in there, the radio found a slice of Miles with a dead man on the track which sounded like they were going slightly mad with Queens on the table though doing it quite slowly in flamenco sketches with 12 steps to heaven.

It was Charity who started the talking: “Sal, tell me about yourself because Dean only talks about ideas and not people. Only about yourself and how you got here.”

This took me off-guard because I hadn’t ever really talked about myself because I had never thought that I was in any way important to the spinning of the world.

“I’m nobody really, I dropped out of college and worked minimum wage jobs then I received a degree from the local public university which shall remain nameless because it is nameless to the people who go there. This made me basically a further step up from poverty so it is a higher grade of poverty but it still only allows me to rent with some time off for good behavior and allows me to own a car so I can get places where neither the T nor the sun doesn’t shine.” I did not relate how often I had snuck on a bus to get home when I did not have enough change to pay for the ride but then bus drivers knew that poor forgotten little waifs needed to get home even if they did not have enough change in money or change of clothes.

I realized then that that description of my life never exploded with a supernova but strangled out in a white dwarf fashion. In other words, and with words, I judged it the way Dean would judge it, and he would pay me no attention because I only talked about the small things and left the large ones over the landscape like rats rats rats.

“So, what did you get your degree in?”

“I took a degree in English because while I had been speaking it my whole life, I realized I had never been introduced to the lady herself. I still don’t know how to read a novel but at least I understand that I don’t understand, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s a start to think? I could never master the rules of grammar nor even know the attachments to what a word was and why it made a difference.”

“ I still haven’t learned how English was spoken in Shakespeare’s day and can only have understood why the play was played.”

“At least you have some idea of the scope.”

“I think that is a rather tawdry experience if that is the highlight of your day.”

The icy bridge sign came up and there were kernels and chasms of along corridors sprouting up here and there towards the horizon. I knew that we were close to Arizona, but I didn’t know exactly how far. And then suddenly before a great chaser of rock, there was a sign saying that we were now coming rather than going through the high state of the plains.

Then Charity closed her mouth I think he does she knew that Dean was going to say something, and we all knew that Dean might well have something important to say.

“The Petrified Forest is coming up soon. I always thought that having a monument for when the trees became stone meant something.”

And then we went through the Petrified Forest and onwards. Flagstaff Arizona could be felt before it could be seen because there were shrubs and small trees growing up through the sand and in two the light. But that is the tag because the sun resembled nothing less than the florid mushroom cloud that once dotted the landscape as a test of our virility in the atomic age paradigm when we figured out how to make the orb fantastic four a brief second only to drop it down on the city allowing the rats to escape and run rampant through the population leaving only zombies in its wake.

And all I know is that they used English to discuss how to split the atom and chase after the energy for distractive purposes. But that was a long time ago and we had different forms of destructiveness now though I could not even begin to explain.

With Dean asleep there was little conversation in the length and breadth of Tombstone.

And that was how the car went with this piece to the sun and the plague behind us in front of us and around us waiting to strike again when the ships moved in unison and concert.

And perhaps we were headed to the place where the plague would fester the longest in this white sand-blasted heath. The leveling out that that’s imminence would take care of the rest.