All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (33 page)

I went on down the bluff, on the little trail. Peter Paul was talking, somewhere behind me. He was on the bluff. I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going back. I would never turn around. People didn’t want such feelings as I had. I didn’t blame them. Neither did I. I just had them. I could see the Mexican village, just a few yellow lights. I didn’t want to go there. I knew I would never learn. People were right. If I lived to be a hundred I would still be just as stupid. I would still do all the wrong things, with whatever people blundered into my path. Something was just wrong. I had missed some door. It would never open now. My chest felt tight.

The door to the ordinary places was the door that I had missed. The door to Emma’s kitchen, or to all such places. There would never be an Emma’s kitchen for me. There was no point in being maudlin. Such things were just true. It was as clear as the stars above the Rio Grande, as clear as the sound of goat bells from the village. Okay. My heart would just have to accept it. I would live in the other places, among the exiled ping-pong players and the old ladies with dogs on their arms, and my true companions would be Godwin and Jenny and all those who had missed
the same door. Okay. I was tired of trying to make things different than they could be. I wanted to go away. I wanted some empty distance. Voices rose from the village, human laughter, liquid in the liquid night.

Not the village. I turned up the river, walking close to the water. Peter Paul had come down the bluff. He was shouting about Mexico. He didn’t like it. He thought I was crazy. I wasn’t crazy, though. Just swirling a little, from liquor and feeling.

“You ain’t gonna catch no ride, over there,” he yelled.

“I don’t want a ride,” I said. “Ambrose Bierce is there.”

Or was it Jack London? Or O. Henry? I couldn’t remember. I crossed the sand to the edge of the water. The water was quiet. I could see far up the river. The moon made the water shine. Spaces filled me. I was not close to anyone, not even myself. Parts of me were drifting. Water filled my shoes. Peter Paul was still following me. I thought I heard Godwin’s voice. I remembered Odysseus, standing by the ditch of blood, keeping back spirits. Those were dead spirits, though. I had living spirits to keep back. I imagined Jill, flying in an airplane across an ocean. I imagined Jenny, working in her flower beds. And my daughter, a completely unknown spirit, one more girl to love, if I ever met her. Too many spirits. I looked up the river. It came out of Colorado, out of New Mexico.

The only space left in me was in my head. All the rest of me was full, wet, a pulp of feeling, squishy as a grapefruit. I noticed my novel. I was carrying it. What stupidity. The clear part of my head knew that much. I didn’t have to write anymore. Knowing things was bad enough.

But then there was Emma. She had liked that about me. Maybe she was right, a little bit. Maybe I had forgotten to tell her I loved her. I couldn’t remember what I had told her, or what I hadn’t. I waded out of the river. Peter Paul
was still following me. I knelt in the sand. He might as well be some help. I opened the box of manuscript. Fortunately I had a pen. I got out the old prologue, and the old epilogue. Granny and Old Man Goodnight were the only good things in the box. Emma might like them. I couldn’t write anything on them, it might upset Flap, but I could send them. I sat down in the sand and scrawled Emma’s name and address on top of the prologue. Peter Paul came walking up.

“Well, you come to your senses,” he said. “You worried the shit out of me.”

I got a ten-dollar bill out of my billfold. I handed Peter Paul the bill. Then I handed him Granny in the flapping tent, I handed him the Old Man, riding. Emma might like them. She had always liked it that I was a writer. If she had understood it, she wouldn’t, but there was no reason for Emma to understand things. She had her roundness, her family that would come.

“Would you mail these for me?” I said, handing the pages to Peter Paul. “I wrote down the address.”

“Sure,” he said. “You’re not really going to Mexico, are you?”

I missed impossible things. I had to stop it. I didn’t answer Peter Paul. I got up and waded into the river. I almost drowned, but not in water, just in regrets. The banks of the river were dark. Thousands of pale stars swirled over my head. Peter Paul yelled. He thought I was drowning. He yelled that he couldn’t swim. He was a nice man. He just wasn’t my companion. I was alone again. I noticed my novel. I still had it. It made me furious, tagging me everywhere. It was like it was tied to me. No wonder I felt weighted down.

I began to beat the box on the water. Peter Paul stood in the edge of the river. “You’re crazy,” he yelled. “Ain’t that your book? What do you think you’re doing?”

“Beating the pages,” I said. “Let me alone! They’re just words, don’t you understand? I hate them! They’re just pages! I’ll never forgive them.”

It was true. I had never felt such black, unforgiving hatred of anything as I felt for the pages in my hands. The box was soaked, but the novel was still there. Godwin had tried to drown Sally. I had tried too. I could at least drown a novel. I ripped up the box and drowned it first. I shoved it under. Then I only had the book. My head was pounding. I would drown it or die. It must have been funny. Some clear part of me even thought it was funny. But my head hurt so from blood that I couldn’t laugh. Peter Paul should have laughed. A boy drowning a manuscript. I would have laughed, if I could have been the one watching. I was never the one watching, though. I was always the one the hilarious things were happening to. I picked off chapters and held them under. They didn’t want to drown. The paper I used was too good. It wanted to float. Pages got loose and floated. I caught them and swatted them down. I shoved them under. No mercy for pages. It was a deadly battle. Part of a chapter slipped loose and floated. I splashed after it and forced it under. Finally it squished. The words gave up. I picked off another chapter, but killing the chapters was too slow. I had hundreds of pages left. Finally I grappled the novel in both hands and dove. I would carry it to the bottom. Only one of us would come up. I was Gary Cooper, in
Distant Drums
. My novel was the Seminole chief. We were fighting under water. The current turned me over, swirled me over. Even drunk I could swim well. The depths of the river were black. My head was pounding. I kicked and kicked, going deeper. The book in my hands was hundred-headed, like Grendel. Parts of it nearly slipped loose in the fast current. I wadded them. My superb condition began to tell on the novel—my superior strength
began to prevail. The novel got squishier and squishier, deep in the channel of the Rio Grande. Finally it got completely squishy, and I knew it was dead. I let it go and came up. My head was still pounding but the river was clear. No pages floated on it, only moonlight and the reflection of stars.

Peter Paul was yelling, but I was too far from him. He couldn’t see me. It wasn’t safe to swim at night, he said.

I didn’t answer. My feet were on the bottom and the river flowed beneath my arms. Jill Peel would be proud of me, if she could know. I had killed it in honorable battle and given it to the sea, as she had wished. I remembered her little drawing, my pages floating down into the bay, a studious sea gull reading them. My face was hot from the fight I had just had. It was always a borderland I had lived on, it seemed to me, a thin little strip between the country of the normal and the country of the strange. Perhaps my true country was the borderland, anyway.

I looked up the river, north and west, to where the Sorrows lay beneath the same pale stars. A hole opened in the night, but I didn’t see the great scenes anymore, the Old Man riding, the Old Woman standing on the ridge, the wild scenes from the past that I usually saw when I was walking some border of my own at night. Maybe all that was over. All I saw through the hole in the night were the bright windows of the hospital, yellow in the Houston drizzle. But I didn’t want to see the windows, I wanted to see the tiny person. My face was very hot. I looked up the river again and saw it coming down to me, shining in a beautiful cold flow. It came from the mountains, like the Ganges, came through the desert, like the Nile. I waded up it. It was cool beneath my arms. All sorts of names and faces troubled me. Emma, Jenny, Wu—also Jill. I turned south. Many famous names lay south of my days. The
Amazon. The Rio Negro. Zapata in the hills. Balboa and Peter Martyr and the great Juan de la Cosa.

I had read of those rivers, and those people. I knew all the great names of the south, all the way from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan. I waded that way and the river flowed down to me. I was so glad. It was one thing I could have. I waded deeper. Such a wonderful thing, to flow. I wanted to so badly. It was all I had ever wanted to learn. I put my face in the water, to cool it. Stars swirled near me, and swirled above me, too, so high, so pale, such distances away. On the bank I was just leaving, the dim bank of Texas, Peter Paul kept yelling for me to come back.

“I had rather go see the rivers,” I said, but I don’t know if he heard me and if he did he wouldn’t have understood, he was too normal to understand, if my friends came and asked him why I had left he wouldn’t know, he had never stood in the river, I don’t think he swirled as I was swirling, he didn’t seem to yearn to flow, he didn’t much want to be undertaken, he didn’t remember Zapata and hadn’t even read of the great Juan de la Cosa, and if they came, my friends, if Wu came, for some reason, or Godwin, or Jenny, they wouldn’t get it from him, he wouldn’t know why I loved the river, why I loved any of the people I loved, they wouldn’t get it from him and none of them could guess, only maybe Jill could, I knew only Jill could, if I had stayed, if she had stayed, I could tell her, she might guess, she had the clearest eyes, the straightest look, the most honest face, I missed it so—but ah no, no chance, better just to want rivers—Jill was gone.