The Salt Eaters (11 page)

And hunched over the liver and onions with no smell to it, they’d talk about the characters in Claybourne: the slick-time gangster who called himself Doc Serge and ran the Infirmary
that never paid its bills but managed to stay open somehow; Portland Edgers, who like Porter had been a race man but wasn’t quite the same after that time he’d had to beat the woman who was taking in all the civil rights workers; Jay Patterson with his shit-eating grin, who never remembered your name but always wanted to shake your hand, would shake your hand two and three times a day and try to pin a button on you; and James Lee Henry, who ran the Academy of 7 Arts, where it was rumored the stash of guns and ammunition stolen from the armory was hidden; the old geezer they called The Hermit cause he lived behind high hedges in a dark house and only once in a blue moon came out, like at carnival when he’d make a speech in the park and then slip away. Of course, toward the end, Porter had made it impossible to speak any other way but reverently of The Hermit.

But whatever they talked about, Porter always managed to bring it round to Yucca Flats, 1955, atomic blasts, no compensation. The man was haunted. And now he was gone. Spun around on a stool by some crazy bitch with no better place to put her knitting needles but in a good man’s life. What would he do now with his fitful nights but rehearse bus accidents on the ceiling or glare at Margie’s back and get dangerous?

He saw it dart out from the marshes, scoot under the shrubs at the railing. Saw it run out onto the highway and stop, its eyes like road reflectors. A dark and furry thing offering itself up. So he took it. Eyes right on it, foot to the floor, he killed it, felt it go lumpy then smooshy in the wheel. And he dropped his hands away one at a time to wipe them on his pants. Barreling down the highway away from it, he kept his eyes strictly off the rear-view mirror. He felt hot and swarmy, felt the chili turning on him. If he could just make it to the terminal before it caught up with him. But already it was rushing him and he was helpless to keep ahead of it, could smell
it jamming up his nostrils, jamming up his lungs. Fire.

The fire that time and him leaning against the house throwing up his insides. Trees like blazing giants with their hair aflame, crashing down in the fields turning corn, grass, the earth black. Birds falling down out of the sky burnt and sooty like bedraggled crows. The furniture blistering, crackling, like hog skins crackled on Grandaddy’s birthday. His mother dragging the mattress out sparking and smoldering, beating it with her slipper and the matting jumping like popcorn all over the front yard. And her screaming, screaming at him as if she knew. And she probably did. His pop’s store coming away from the house, leaning over and crashing down. The store a hole in the ground and just the apples stored in its cellar recognizable. Him standing in the piece of doorway swaying, char and ash sucking at the soles of his feet threatening to take him under the few floorboards left down past the apples and straight to hell for what he’d done.

Swaying in the doorway not a doorway, tar gas filling up his mouth and lungs, and all the sun that ever was crowding in behind him to make him look down where Pop had been, where a lone tin can was now, its label scorched away, a scorched patch of label here, a shine there. And whatever it held about to explode. Beans, soup, tomatoes, okra about to explode in his face. Knocked off the shelf maybe in the first cave-in, pushed to the side by a falling beam, it had gotten smacked to the side by the hoses drowning the place and gotten finally stopped by his father’s head before the men gripped him by his stocking feet and dragged him out, taking their time. Speed no longer mattered for Pop. And then he was alone with the tin can parked at his feet, accusingly, growing fatter and fatter and ready to explode.

He felt like he was sitting on burrs. He couldn’t afford to stop again, not with the hot-metal smell and the lateness. He
just might make it. But one more holler from the grand wizard or whatever the joker in the spangled hat was, one more cranking of a camera, one more anything and he’d snatch free the pistol taped underseat and blow their fucking heads off. All of them. The pains in the ass and the ones who hadn’t yet given him any trouble. Not yet. But they all did eventually. Loyal, loving, there one minute, gone the next. Troubling. But he’d gotten over Wanda and had rewarded himself with blond hair. Soft, caring one minute, pain in the ass the next, face to the wall, in a stew, in a freeze, giving him back talk or worse, just her back and no talk at all.

And of course when he got home tonight, he could count on her to ask him the same dumb thing: “Have a nice trip, Freddie?” No sleep, brains cooked, lousy meals, the worse shift, Porter dead, uniform a mess, so she had it coming. “I ran over a coon. As in raccoon. Not to be confused with the coons your daddy used to lynch.” And she’d cry. Not for him, not for his chafed neck and his jounced nuts, his loss, his threatened pension. But for herself and some dead animal.

There’d be no washcloth in the freezer for his face, no tub run, no jug of tea with chipped ice and sliced lemon to drink, sloshing in the sudsy water. There’d be no decent meal to get down to make up for the chili that had his bowels in a knot. And no intelligent conversation. Just the hot still air of the dirty movie-trailer house smelling like spoiled chops burning in an unclean oven. And her blubbering on about the dead coon on the highway till she was too swollen and bleary and ugly to do anything but hit. But he might not even get the chance. The tin can of a bus stuffed and overheated any minute might explode. Snakes popping in the air like the frogs he slung from the mound back of the house, watching them pop and his mother damning his murdering soul to hell, hymnals fluttering out of them beatup suitcases, music cases snapping open and
guitar strings popping, cartridge tapes spiraling across the highway a tangle. And the cameras catching it all somehow in time for the six o’clock news. Rage, sorrow, sour kidney beans and rice rose up in his throat with shredded cow spilling its terror of the slaughterhouse hammer into his mouth. He dug out the damp handkerchief, hands like claws, and vomited.

“Driver, you okay?”

“I wanna tell you people that my husband here beats up on me—”

“Give us a break and drop dead, lady, willya?”

“Nilda, pass up the napkins.”

“What’s the trouble up there? Hey, you’re supposed to stand behind the white line for crissake.”

“Don’t never lose your mind on holidays or have big trouble, cause all them hospital beds are full up and the doctors are on vacation.”

“Have a drink, lady, and forget it.”

“What’s going on up there? A summit goddamn conference for crissake?”

“Driver, pull over and let these rummies off. They’re stinking up the bus. Hey! Driver! You! Boy!”

“Watch that shit.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“I’m talking to you. Watch that ‘boy’ shit.”

“Another napkin, somebody. He’ll be okay.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“The ‘boy’ who might get around to arranging your bridgework, honky.”

“Let’s all be peaceful.”

“Awww stuffit.”

“Claybourne in five minutes. Last stop.” Fred was finally able to speak.

All conversation stopped. Mouths agape, gestures frozen,
eyes locked on the driver’s cap, or back, or Adam’s apple, arrested, as if the announcement were extraordinary, of great import. They might have been in the playground playing “red light, green light, one, two, three.” Or in a mime studio mastering “statues.” Or in white jackets at a healing session watching the sutures on a woman’s wrists turn from black to maroon to pink to flesh, and staring at the healer, forced to acknowledge something more powerful than skepticism, and be stunned still. They might have been leaning against a stack of bedsheets while Doc Serge, holding forth in the linen closet, explained the symbols on a dollar bill, translating carefully Novus Ordo Seclorum to them and the boy Buster standing mute and immobile. They might’ve been in the corner poolroom instead of whizzing past it, bars, a church, a funeral parlor at fifty-five miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile zone. Might’ve been in Shorty’s pool hall in the exact moment when Shorty rushed to the back, skidded into the corner of the gambling table and warned through clenched teeth “the man” and had been caught in the frozen tableau till some magical bit of stage business registered in the brain as the thing to be doing to render the self invisible to the law.

They might have been sitting on a white stool as the patient or on a wooden bench in a locker room as the patient’s husband, or in the driver’s seat clamping down hard, throat and stomach hot and moist and like a rock, holding still the rage and regret threatening to be thrown up from the depths of the self all covered with slime.

They might’ve been twenty-seven miles back in the moment of another time when Fred Holt did ram the bus through the railing and rode it into the marshes, stirring bacteria and blue-green algae to remember they were the earliest forms of life and new life was beginning again. In the sinking bus trying to understand what had happened, was happening, would happen
and stock still but for the straining for high thoughts to buoy them all up. But sinking into the marshes thick with debris and intrusion. Faces frozen at the glass seeing with two eyes merely the onlookers on the embankment holding their breath, or seeing closer by with two eyes the bullfrogs holding theirs in the shallows, the dragonflies suspended over the deeps and the wind waiting, the waters still and waveless till the shock of the plunge registered and the marshes sucked things under.

Silence on the bus as at a momentous event. But an event more massive and gripping than the spoken word or an accident. A sonic boom, a gross tampering of the weights, a shift off the axis, triggered perhaps by the diabolics at the controls, or by asteroids powerfully colliding. Earth spun off its pin, the quadrants slipping the leash, the rock plates sliding, the magnetic fields altered, and all, previously pinned to the crosses of the zodiac and lashed to the earth by the fixing laws, released. A change in the charge of the field so extreme that all things stop and are silent until the shift’s complete and new radiations open the third eye:

J.D., his fingers splayed out on the horn case, trying to connect with the music. A tune had caught him and held him in a moment when speech, movement, thought were not possible. Something in an idiom that had to be attended to from the total interior, captured, defended. The humming sonorous from his center now was making him eager to get to the Regal Theatre in Claybourne to echo it all after six long years of dumbness behind the walls.

Mai, Sister of the Rice, coming unstuck from the web of time and place, was in the fish canneries of Alaska, the sugar plants of Hawaii, farm valley California, Manilatown, Chinatown, Japantown, all over at once calling together in a single moment the Sisters of the Rice to caucus.

Iris, Sister of the Plantain, loosening, was back in Barnwell
handing out no-nuke flyers and turning in time to have an angry woman with a baby slung over her back rush up to her and spit “Sun lover!” in her face, an echo of what others like her, misrecognizing who and what she was, had spat out years ago—“Nigger lover!”

Fred and Wanda in the bedroom, oblivious to the noise of the elevator on the other side of the wall. The two of them smack up against each other like two halves of ancient fruit succulent and sweet and no cleaving on the horizon.

Nilda was in the hills readying for the medicine dance. Having dreamed the dream that could release her anytime from the earth’s bands, she was waking again to the thundering of white buffalo and the call of coyote to join the peyote gatherers to dance the dance not danced in thirty years.

Palma was walking into the Infirmary’s treatment room as Buster and Nadeen were walking closer, then passing right through their bodies of rushing atoms and currents. The dark aureoles of Nadeen’s breasts spreading her nipples wider, the dream of wings inside the girl her own swelling, the squeeze of his hands on the girl’s belly pushing her closer to her destination. Then leaning over Velma, she was saying, “She carries their baby in his hands and they carry our future in their guts,” before knocking her sister off the stool.

It might’ve been a fingernail scraping across the window, was Chezia’s thought, remembering her first encounter with panes not made of the waxed paper or the greased sheep membranes of home. Or a goat screaming, was Cecile’s, her ears at home on the island where her appetite readied her for rooti and ginger beer. It might have been the shriek of mandragora root uprooted from a bruja’s garden, Inez was thinking, wondering if the old hag of her village still lived. But the sound that released them from the moment of freeze was the screech from the birds returning. And after the sudden change in pitch came a change in light that could mean rain. And then a
change in texture, the air granular with grit that turned the blues to pink-silver and drew eyes toward the windows for signs of a storm.

No one remarked on any of this or on any of the other remarkable things each sensed but had no habit of language for, though felt often and deeply, privately. That moment of correspondence—phenomena, noumena—when the glimpse of the life script is called dream, déjà vu, clairvoyance, intuition, hysteria, hunger, or called nothing at all. Released now, lungs sucked air and feet scraped against the grit of the bus floor. But before the passengers could get back to what they’d been doing, they found themselves leaning toward the windshield as the tall woman with the feather pointing up at the ceiling lifted from her seat and shouted “Look” as though it were a bubble-top bus.

Tendon, feather, bone and flesh were riding against a backdrop of eight-minute-ago blue, of fifty-years-ago blue, rode the curvature to the seam, flying through to what the sages of old had known about gravity and the outer edge, gazing up. Birds riding the air, riding the sun’s beams and back, gliding in light in and out, hollow-boned and tiny-brained but sufficient when living in the law.

“Birds,” shrugged the driver.