Ablutions (12 page)

You stumble climbing onto your barstool and the bartender—tall and leathery, his thinning hair bleached white and spiked for a ridiculous effect—dislikes you on sight. He looks to have been a cocaine addict in years past and is now the perennial desert bachelor. Sensing his disapproval and understanding the sensitivity of bartender-customer relations you do not ask for the olives right away but order a beer and tip extravagantly and he takes your money but gives no thanks and will not engage in any casino chitchat. You order another beer and throw more money at the man but can see he is steadfast in his opinions and so you go ahead and ask for a cup of olives as a side and he is glad to be turning you down when he tells you the specialty olives are not bar peanuts tossed around randomly but offered only when ordered alongside their top-shelf martinis. You tell him you had not meant to speak belittlingly
of the olives and of course you will pay the cost of this special martini except you don't want to drink a martini but only eat the olives with your beer and the bartender cuts you off and says the olives as a house rule are not to be sold or given away as snacks and you cut the bartender off and loudly order a top-shelf martini with extra olives and no martini and the bartender is now truly unhappy and he brings you one olive and tells you to "eat the stinking thing and fuck off down the road," and walks to the end of the bar to regale a regular with this, his latest story: The drunk who really, really wanted some olives.

You are never angry and now you are angry and you do not know what to do about it. You want to attack the man but think with a shudder of your cellmates in a Las Vegas jail and so instead take four more white pills and hatch a revenge plan. You do not eat the olive. You squash it in a twenty-dollar bill that the bartender will have to clean before pocketing, and taking up a pen from your bag you write these words on a napkin:

You are forty years old, a bartender in a bar in the desert. You hate the customers and the work but are trapped in the life as you have no other skills and have had no schooling or training of any kind. You have wasted your life drinking and doing drugs and sleeping beside women with hay for brains. You are alone and of no use to the world, save for this job, the job you hate, the job of getting people drunk. What will you be doing in five years? In ten years? There is no one who will look after you and you could die tomorrow and the only people who would care would be your bosses, and they would not be sad at your passing but only annoyed about having to interview new staff.

Your hair looks impossibly stupid.

You place the folded twenty atop this note and walk away to hide behind a row of slot machines and watch the plot in action. The bartender picks up the money, peeling it open to find the olive, and raises his eyes to find you. He does not find you and you are proud of the revenge results so far and are preparing for the bartender's reaction to the napkin when he, without noticing the writing, balls it up and tosses it into the garbage. He drops the dirty twenty in his tip jar and resumes his work.

Your heart is broken; you sit there feeling it break. Your chin is trembling when a woman in tights and a bow tie taps your shoulder and points to her tray and asks what you want to drink and you say, double Irish whiskey no ice, and she walks off to fetch it and you, realizing what you have done, stand and leave the slots before she can return and you head for the exit and ask the valet how far it is to the Grand Canyon and he tells you, and you hand him too much money and drive quickly away from the shimmering, nightmarish town. (You try not to look but the casinos seem to be breathing, their glowing bellies expanding and contracting as you move past.)

You do not drive to the Grand Canyon but head north into Utah. There is no reason for this. Whiskey or no whiskey you are drunk and angry at yourself and you wonder why you are unable to help yourself and your mood is desperate and no pills will change this and so you take no more and you do not stop for single cans of Budweiser and by the time you pull over to sleep you are sick and in pain. You try and fish out four aspirin from the bottle but they have burrowed past the white pills to the bottom, and so you empty the bottle onto your lap and pick out the aspirin this way. You are parked
in a truck stop fifty miles outside St. George, an expanse of dirt twice the size of a football field, and yours is the only civilian vehicle among the semi trucks. You gag down the aspirin before climbing into the airless shell of your truck and curling up with your blanket to sleep.

You do not sleep, or anyway you do not sleep well. There is an Indian casino opposite the truck stop that shoots from its rooftop exploding fireworks hourly, this in anticipation of the coming Fourth of July weekend. Also, the trucks that come and go throughout the night are forever settling and rattling and honking, and their horns are as loud as a ship's and you jump at the sound and rub your eyes raw and by dawn you have surpassed the pain caused by the drinking but feel you have become part stray dog, the touch of your skin like a bald and miserable animal. It is dry and hot out but you do not drink any alcohol. You enter the truck stop market and buy two bottles of water and drink these along with two handfuls of blueberries. Before getting back on the highway you put your wallet and pills into the shell so you will be forced to pull over before deviating from your original travel plan. You do not listen to the radio as you drive and you have no thoughts but rather a sound in your mind, or a weight, a gathering blackness. It holds your head to the side.

It is seven in the morning and you are just outside St. George when the bloody noses begin. You have not had a bloody nose since you were an adolescent and you are so tired that you do not notice anything at first but you touch your lips and come away with red fingertips and look down to find a line of blood drawn down your shirt front and soaking into the crotch of your pants. You stop in a diner and clean up in the bathroom, changing your shirt and washing your pants in the sink, as you did not bring a spare pair. You do not want to reenter the diner with a wet spot on the front of your pants
so you dunk them entirely in water, wringing out the excess, so that they are now a uniform color and less likely to draw attention as long as no one touches you. You will not let anyone touch you.

You order a trucker's breakfast that you eat exactly one bite of. The waitress teases you about your lack of appetite and when your nose begins to bleed again she catches your chin with her dishrag before any blood can fall onto your clothes or plate. She is grateful for the departure from her routine and you hold the rag to your face and talk with her, making friends, and you ask her for a route through Zion National Park to the Grand Canyon and she writes down directions with a warning not to travel a particular highway that would take you through Colorado City and you ask her what's the matter with Colorado City and she says that's where all the "plygs" live and you ask her what a plyg is and she says, the polygamists.

"Don't you know about the polygamists?" She dips the rag in your water glass and dabs at the dried blood on your face. "Nastiest people I've ever met. The Mormons, or Latter-day Saints as they call themselves now, are changing with the times, but there's still a few of these holdouts with their caveman ways. They were getting nudged out bit by bit and got so fed up they ripped up their houses from the ground and had them transported across state lines into Arizona. They're a town on wheels now and they hate outsiders like hell. I went through there once but you won't catch me back again. They wouldn't have doused me with water if I'd been on fire, I don't think. I feel sorriest for the women. Can you imagine what they must go through in their lives?"

After settling your bill you purchase a map at the gas station next door to search out the quickest way to Colorado City and you are happy at this new adventure: The discovery of and visitation with the mean-hearted, exiled polygamists of
northern Arizona. The day grows warmer and dryer and your bloody noses are coming more frequently but you are using your previously soiled shirt as a bib; the blood drips off your chin and you watch your gory reflection in the rear-view mirror and wipe yourself dry and eat more blueberries. You slap at your head and the steering wheel—you had meant to buy a phone card in the last gas station.

Discuss Colorado City. It looks to be deserted and you are wondering if the polygamists have rolled away once more when you see from the highway a group of houses resting atop brick and wooden blocks. You turn off and park beside the village and are disheartened when you do not see anyone about, no faces in the windows or even an unfriendly rustling of curtains, and though you had planned to you are not brave enough to knock on a random door and ask for phony directions. You drive farther into town and come upon a string of roadside shops and park outside a churchy-looking thrift store. You walk the length of highway but each store is either closed or condemned and you turn back to your truck. When your nose begins to bleed you walk with your head held back, plugging your nostrils with your fingers, because you had not wanted to stroll around a strange town with a bloodstained shirt tucked in your collar. Now your nostrils are packed with clotted blood and your hands and the steering wheel are sticky and you have no water to clean yourself with and you drive ten miles down the road and are upset at having missed Zion National Park to look into a couple dusty windows and you wonder if you should call your waitress friend in St. George to bring her up to date. Hoping to wash up and
have a cup of coffee you park outside what you think is a diner but turns out to be a social hall and you enter to find it is
full of celebrating polygamists.

There are a hundred or more people in the hall, men, women, and children, and a hush blankets the room as you enter. Here is the reason for their empty homes and closed shops—a wedding, a funeral, a pre-Fourth bash, something. The children are barefoot and dirty, their faces hidden behind the long smocks of their mothers and sisters, women watching you with fear and revulsion. The men's sleeves are rolled up to the biceps, revealing a lifetime of labor and also tension caused by your presence; they look at one another and wonder what will be done with you. The party is separated by gender.

It is just as the waitress said—these people hate you and will not rest until you have gone, and you stand smiling dumbly in the doorway looking around for a coffee urn, and not finding one you call out, not to a particular person but to the polygamists as a body that you are looking to eat something, and is there a decent restaurant in the area? No one answers and in fact it is as though you have said nothing, as though they are looking not at a person at all but at the door standing open on its own, and the feeling of the group is, which one of us is going to close it?

You leave the social hall and return to your truck, continuing on until you hit a small post office where you park to write your wife a postcard (she is living with her mother in Connecticut). The wind whips through the cab and blood drips from your chin and drags across the card and here is what you write: "Beware the plygs of Colorado City, Arizona. They have no cups of coffee for the likes of you." The clerk in the post office is not a polygamist and she agrees when you say they could use a strong drink. "I treat them like they're ghosts,"
she tells you. "It's easier that way." You ask for a tissue to clean your nose and she fetches this along with a Dixie cup of tap water to wash off the dried, brown, flaking-off blood.

It is Friday, the third of July, and you are standing beside the truck with your hands clasped behind your back. The look and scope of the Grand Canyon is a world beyond anything you had imagined, anything seen in magazines or movies. The sky is gathering a deep red at the edges as the sun drops to the horizon and people line the lip of the canyon and none are speaking but only standing and watching. You look at their faces, sensing their amazement, and wonder why you do not feel similarly—for you the effect of the view is a distinct discomfort and uneasiness. You are dizzy from a strange rush of hot blood in your stomach and the closeness to something as fundamental as this canyon. You were not prepared to feel anything other than pedestrian amusement, and it weakens you in your spine and legs. Clutching your stomach through your shirt you say to yourself, There is too much of the earth missing here, and I just don't want to know about it.

A hundred-year-old lodge is connected to the parking lot and though you are still not hungry (you finished the last of the withering blueberries) you walk over to see about dinner, if only to get away from the canyon awhile, but the dining room is full and the hostess says you will have to wait an hour or more to be seated. She suggests you head over to the saloon to sit out the rush and tells you to drop her name for a free cocktail (at the word your face puckers and your neck recoils into your shoulders like a turtle and the hostess, raising her eyebrows, moves on to help the next customer). You still
have not taken a pill or touched alcohol since you woke up this morning.

The sun has set. You pace past the saloon several times but do not enter and you tell yourself you will not unless delivered a sign informing you to, though you do not mean to wait for the hand of God to reach from the canyon and open the swinging doors but something more along the lines of catching sight of a pretty girl at the bar, or for someone coming or going to wish you a good evening. When no such thing happens you walk to the saloon doors to peer inside the darkened room and the bartender's eyes and the eyes of the customers turn to you and are shining wet like a raccoon's over a trash can, and you catch sight of the rows of glowing bottles and again feel the heat gathering in your stomach, only worse this time, as if blood is pumping outward from its pit, and you push away from the flashing black eyes and rush back to the truck, climb into the shell, and close the door at your feet.

You are panting in the windless quiet of the truck. There is something unmistakably wrong with your stomach, some new pain you have not yet experienced, and you search with your fingertips for its center. When the pain and heat do not subside you gag down four aspirin and lie back in hopes of sleeping but the burning discomfort will not allow it, and as it comes in sharper waves you listen to your own moaning and whining and this is the most wretched and lonely noise you have ever heard, and a sadness like a lead-weighted curtain drops and covers you and now, with no alcohol or narcotics to disguise the long-hidden emotion, it takes over your body.