Boonville (11 page)

“What do I care if it's dark outside?” Blindman said. “Night, day, inside, outside, it's all the same to me. Colorless, shapeless, without reason. Pixilated pariah? Fuck you and your
Reader's Digest
enriched word power.”

There was something in Blindman's hostility that triggered a vague memory of somebody saying he had once killed a man. Killed as in dead. Not living, not breathing, not just down at the Lodge tipping a few beers back with the Kurtses. Another thought entered John's mind, what if this nut is flying on something from his goody bag? God only knows what he's taking, he can't even read the labels. John began to find that early morning clock radio alertness, ready to break on through to the other side.

“Don't talk to me about dark outside,” Blindman said. “I was ready to believe anything to see light, sold flowers, shaved my head, raised chinchillas, gave my money away, special diets, special chants. Nothing. I'm blind. That's the way I like it, because light is an exploded star, something that's already been decided. You see nothing but reflections of particles that don't exist except in a dead moment passing toward absolute darkness. Give me sound. One
big explosion! The truth!”

John thought about bolting for the door, but it seemed silly to run from a blind man in your own home. Where do you go at four in the morning when you live in the middle of nowhere? Who was going to help? And how were they going to try to help you? Maybe a preemptive strike was the answer. Violence seemed Boonville logical. Deputy Cal would understand a plea of self-defense and they could bury Blindman out back with the road signs. It went without saying, Blindman wouldn't see it coming.

“Goddamn,” Blindman said, calming himself. “I need some more No-Contact.”

“No-Contact?” John asked, temporarily holding off his ambush.

“I only do over-the-counter drugs,” Blindman informed John, who didn't believe this kind of craziness could come in the form of a capsule. “There's a Raley's in Ukiah open twenty-four hours, and if I'm broke, I can steal what I need. The clerks there would never arrest a blind person for shoplifting cold medicine.”

“It's good to know you wouldn't take advantage of the kindness of strangers,” John said, reclining to a less aggressive but still siege-friendly stance.

Blindman was still gazing three feet to John's left. It was strange to talk to someone who could only look you in the eye by accident.

“The tough part of No-Contact,” Blindman explained, “I need the wifeback to open the Contac* capsules and separate the red balls from the blues and whites. Only the reds mix well with No-Doz. Luckily, she's used to piece labor. I can melt everything myself. Stuff is twice as good as cocaine, a hundred times cheaper, legal, and instead of destroying your nasal passages, it cleans your sinuses. I haven't sneezed in five years.”

“You ought to be in line for the Nobel Prize,” John assured him. “You could be the first antihistamine junkie to win the award.”

“We all got our vices,” Blindman said. “You're probably addicted to pain and don't even know it. The noble sufferer. Blame everybody but yourself. Edna told me about you and your family.”

John couldn't imagine Grandma having a conversation with Blindman, so it was preposterous that she could have told him anything personal about his family. And, it wasn't true, he wasn't addicted to pain. He just had a high threshold, that's all. Why else
would he be tolerating Blindman? He couldn't speak for his parents, it might be true about them. At this point in his life, John didn't care.

“You don't know me, Blindman,” John said.

“But I knew your grandma,” Blindman told him. “In the biblical sense.”

“What are you trying to say?” John asked.

“I'm not trying to say anything,” Blindman said. “I'm telling you, I porked your grandma, lunged her doughnut. How clear do you need it?”

In order to have been born, John knew his grandparents had to have had sex, but he didn't want to reflect on any specific grope. Maybe he could handle thinking about it in terms of old photographs, a black-and-white snapshot couple walking hand in hand, spreading a blanket, laying down and coming together to produce his father in a moment of shared passion. But not Grandma without Grandpa. And not Grandma as an old woman. And not Grandma as an old woman taking in the appendage of a blind, petty-thief, junkie, cultist drug-dealer. Not Grandma and Blindman. John didn't need it that clear.

“I don't want to hear this,” John said, wishing his telephone worked so he could call Deputy Cal. “I'm sure my grandma would have nothing to do with you.”

“Which shows you what you can be sure of,” Blindman said. “It only happened once. Edna had read somewhere cum was made up of the same substance as the fluid that protects your brain. She wanted to save it, for health reasons. She believed you could fuck your brains out. The way we went at it, she made a believer of me. She was a strange woman, but she grew the best Mendo Mellow in the county. I was hoping you came here to do the same. That's why I stopped by. The bag was because Prairie Mama told me you could use some help.”

John wished Grandma had told him she had slept with Blindman. Not that he had told her about his one-night stands, all three of them, each an awkward entering occurring before he had met Christina. In every case, John had felt like he had done his best, until in post-orgasm depression the women shook his confidence by saying something like, “It's O.K., we can try again later.” Christina had been the one that taught him how to “make love,” fulfilling his desires and satisfying him with the notion that
she would be the only woman he would sleep with for the rest of his life.

John was a sexual throwback, having completely missed the sixties free-love influence. He didn't even get the seventies until the eighties were fully under way. In Miami, a “Look, don't touch!” voyeurism was dominant. Floridians were on the cutting edge of strip shows, phone sex, Bain de Soleil ads, and cheek-to-cheekless dances. His parents, being McCarthy-era, Legion of Decency inspired, believing in one mate, one ejaculation for one child, of which there was only one, were no help either. His father screwed around, but nobody was supposed to know. His mother was an inebriated June Cleaver, the perfect apron-wearing housewife until the sneak-drinks of sherry kicked in and she stalked around the house making lewd comments about Tom Jones's bulge and rubbing against the ironing board to the rhythm of fiercely creased pants and a Vegas version of “I Want to Kiss You All Over.” Apparently, Grandma had her kinks too.

John formed the disgusted expression cut into a thousand scraps of wood at the thought of Blindman's seed spilling into Grandma's shriveled sanctum. He hoped they at least had the decency to put a layer of latex between them. Grandma wasn't even supposed to like people, why this man? How many others were there? Didn't you need a special lubricant to have sex with a woman over the age of seventy? Who bought it? What else didn't he know? John was willing to accept there had been hints about Grandma growing dope, her place being a shack, Boonville being rural, all about as revealing as Noah saying, “It looks like rain,” but clues nonetheless. He knew Grandma was eccentric, but having sex with this scumbag was something else. What was he to think? What was he to say?

“Do you have proof?” John asked.

“What?” Blindman said.

“Do you have proof?” John repeated. “That you slept with my grandma?”

John wanted Blindman to say something he could refute, that Grandma had a flat stomach and minty breath, or that in the throes of passion she had called out Grandpa's name. John wanted to believe Grandma's dark side wasn't fused with human need. He wanted limits to the dementia of his heredity. He wanted to be told a crude lie.

“Edna wasn't the kind of woman to wear garters,” Blindman offered. “I could get specific, but I doubt you felt her up the way I did.”

“When did it happen?” John said, skin crawling.

“It wasn't D-Day, it was a roll in the hay,” Blindman told him. “The days that matter to me are today and the day I die. You're talking to a man that has never seen a watch. I ask somebody what time it is, I have to take their word for it. When I used to go to the Blind Center it was like going to prison. Sometimes I'd sit in the library reading braille and think to myself this stuff ticking away could be minutes, seconds, or years. When you're in darkness and there's silence, time could be anything. You realize it's in your head. This could be an afternoon in the year 2000, what difference would it make?”

“There would have been a better chance of you catching me awake,” John said.

“Be glad you are awake,” Blindman cautioned. “I had a friend who used to worry over little disturbances. The night I was with Edna, he walked off the side of a bridge.”

“He killed himself?” John said.

“I didn't have anything to do with it,” Blindman answered, as if he had been accused before. “We were hunting. We were drunk. It was an accident.”

Hunting drunk didn't sound like an accident to John. It sounded like the next closest thing to suicide.

“We were in a car, roadkilling,” Blindman explained. “I couldn't get any high school kids to take us out because Cal told them they'd lose their licenses if he caught them driving me anymore. The Mexicans will still do it for twenty bucks and a case of Tecate. Mexicans will do anything for twenty bucks and a case of Tecate, anything but learn the language or drive an economy car.”

John wanted to know how this related to him. People told stories in this town, no point, no moral, no reason. He was tired and in pain. The room was dimming. The moon had fallen to the other side of the cabin. Curtains of geometric shapes filled the room from floor to ceiling, stitching corners, embroidering dust. Blindman appeared in the center, a vanishing point.

“My friend Josh had never hunted,” Blindman said. “The blind have to look out for each other, otherwise our only
excitement is listening to baseball on the radio. I don't let people dilute my life with their conventions and limitations. ‘Visually challenged,' I'd never let someone hang that on me. Rock climbing is a challenge, arm wrestling, river rafting. Someone saying they can drink you under the table, that's a challenge. Being blind is fucked. End of challenge. But that doesn't mean I can't get drunk or get laid or go hunting. I'm entitled too, maybe even more so. Why should I conform to a way of life that doesn't accept me? It's my duty as an outcast, as a blind man, to form another order. And Josh, that straight-living dead sonofabitch, him too.”

“Was he in the People's Temple?” John asked, yawning, figuring if he was going to get the story, he might as well get the whole story.

“Straight people don't go for cults,” Blindman told him. “It's the crooked ones that need order and direction so they can get through the day-to-day. They're the ones that join cults. Josh wouldn't kiss a girl on a first date, so there was no way he'd marry a strange Korean. It was hard enough to get him drunk.”

John was having trouble concentrating. This was about the fifth wall he'd hit in the last two days. He turned to Blindman's bag, wanting dreamless, uninterrupted sleep, not worrying that it was self-prescribed. He sifted through the sack of multicolored pills, tablets, capsules, powders, herbs, vials, baggies, rolling papers, pipes, syringes, spoons, lighters, screens, matches, model glue, a piece of quartz, a half-eaten Snickers, a can of butane, a nine-volt battery, baby laxative, and finally, a bottle labeled ‘Codeine.' With difficulty, John sprang the ‘child-proof' cap and shook two into his palm. Working up a spit, he popped them into his mouth when Blindman's monologue seemed at a temporary pause.

“Go on,” John said, preparing for sleep, grabbing the piece of quartz before setting the bag aside, willing to try anything.

“We had a bottle of bourbon and a case of Bud,” Blindman said. “God only knows if we killed anything because the Mexies didn't speak English. It was ‘gato' this, ‘perro' that, while we clicked off rounds out the car windows. Once in a while Paco or Rabanne would yell, ‘Bambi!' and we'd blast away hoping for some antlers. Basically it's the thrill of the sound, taking a chunk out of the world. I was happy because I knew Josh had never done anything like this, shooting that gun, making that sound. It's the closest thing we got to color.”

“Where did you say my grandma was?” John interrupted.

“Waiting for us to try her new crop,” Blindman said, “We were on our way to Edna's when I told The Beaner Twins to pull over so I could pee. But they didn't know the rules of the road, so they stopped in the middle of Millwood Bridge, about a hundred feet long and two hundred feet down without any railing because it's for logging trucks. I got out my side, and you can read the police report if you don't believe me, I pissed and got back in the car. I didn't hear anything but my stream and the stream down below. I thought Josh was passed out. Next thing I knew, the Mexies were pushing me out of the car at Edna's. I must have blacked out. No big deal, black is black. For me, it's like putting in ear plugs. So I get to the porch here, and then I think to myself, ‘Where's Josh?' Answer, the Boont Dusties. He walked off that bridge, with his zipper down.”

“And in your grief,” John said. “You screwed my grandma.”

“Edna drove me back to the bridge and, sure enough, Josh was at the bottom of it,” Blindman said. “When you're blind you don't have to shut your eyes, but I got a vision of my friend down there, and I looked away.”

John watched Blindman replay his only image of the visual world, a friend dead in a half-dried riverbed. He felt something like sympathy for the drug dealer, even if he had slept with his grandmother. It was no wonder he didn't believe in light, the only thing it had revealed to him was death.