Cardinal Numbers: Stories (8 page)

It takes vigilance not to succumb to the numbers—f-stops, motel rates, highway designations, diner checks, exposure times—and one is not always up to it. The odometer turning to 50,000 becomes an anticipated Event. The glove compartment fills up with receipts, a wealth of documentation. Billboards and license plates turn unpreventably into algebra. A certain fecklessness sets in. And then a certain tension, which can be relieved only by sight of time and temperature specified in filament bulb mosaic on the rotating sign in front of a smalltown bank.

Awareness deluges when not modulated, when not finely tuned. It can become a kind of panic.

Expenditure: $62.31

1738 miles @ 26 mpg

67 gals, gas @ avg. price 93 cents

Stella, legally, should be starting school, but my wife and I are loath to part with her. Is this a lack of faith in institutions, or something more selfish? Either way, it probably is natural for members of the overeducated class. Daphne’s mother cannot say often enough that her daughter is “too clever by half.” In my own case, form follows function until exhausted but never catches up. A rerun in every direction, I mean. Stella announces: “Chocolate is fabulous.” Daphne has on Verdi or Bizet, and Stella shudders, yells, “I hate this music!” She has something to say with these words; they are not merely thrown up like tinsel onto a tree. We cherish in her such certainties, such firm insistence, and are loath to see them replaced by anxiety, ambivalence, embarrassment, retreat—what, in short, seem to be the necessary perversions.

ROADWAY VERNACULAR

(A Preliminary Syllabus)

Baines, Melissa,
Urban Motif Congestion
, Argon Press, West Covina, 1979.

De Marco, H. D.,
Rest and Respite: From Caravanseri to Truckstop
, printed privately, 1968.

McMahon, T. K.,
Looking at the World Through a Windshield,
HomeRun Books, San Francisco, 1981.

Niemann, Dieter,
Phänomenologie des Autobahns,
Kultur Zeitung, Bern, 1977.

Platt, David Alan,
Neon Democracy,
Dreyfuss-Peterkin, Boston, 1983.

Traven, Bob,
First with the Best: A History of U.S. 1,
Tire & Rubber Institute, Akron, 1965.

“Don’t get too wrapped up,” said nearly everyone who knew about my project. “Drive safely.”

I carried in the trunk of my car a first-aid kit, jumper cables, flares, a heavy-duty flashlight, kept my thermos filled with coffee, was careful to husband my energies and stay alert. Still, as it turned out, the dice weren’t sufficiently loaded.

I remember a distinct but unnameable shift of light, hard impact, raining glass, and then a kind of torpid, nauseous remove that was almost like snobbery. “Oh, just relax,” I might have said. Or, “Call the roller of big cigars.” I remember a texture of white clamshell, surf hissing around my ears. And O’Hara, unmarked and unfazed, the prick, his Dodge half-ton barely scraped, O’Hara making a cozy offer, his arm around me, snuff-stained teeth and rapid blinking.

In the taxi, I came more to myself, lenses spread out around me on the seat. Blue sea and blue sky seemed to roll as one. Just the note, I thought, to fill and then combine the chord. Go on. Make friends with it.

I sold the car and flew home.

DAY OF ACCIDENT

May 18, 1986

TIME OF DAY

10:15 a.m.

WEATHER

Clear

LIGHT CONDITION

Daylight

ROAD SURFACE

Dry

OCCURRED ON

(Name St., Rd. or Rte. #)
U.S. 1

AT INTERSECTION WITH

(Name St., Rd. or Rte. #)
Dade Co. 905

CITY NAME

(Or Nearest City)
Key Largo

I look over the four contact sheets while they are still wet, am pleased right off to see a balance of formal and informal, a mixture of broad long-shot and close-in detail. I pour out another glass of Old Overholt, straight rye whiskey bottled in Cincinnati, and, along with my big-band tapes, a habitual darkroom accouterment. True, I like certain things to be just so, but who cares any more about workmanship? These are bits, blips, snippets, and not as careful as they look. Starting anywhere. Taking the last sheet, reading the rightmost negative strip, which on its upper edge says
KODAK SAFETY FILM
5063, and on its lower edge names exposures 16 through 21.

—paired gas pumps, rectangular digital display units topped with identical
PAY FIRST
signboards

—old man forcing smile in motel breezeway,
NAPA
cap, bill stained

—industrial exhaust stacks, low angle

—church steeple paralleled by traffic light stanchion

—self-portrait behind the wheel (camera held at arm’s length), visible fatigue, characteristic alternation of aimless and frantic

—family group at Tastee Freez picnic table, night (flash fill)

Mom, dad, two girls, one boy. “We’re a service family.” Contemplative dad sipping thick shake. “MacDill AFB, Tampa. Antiaircraft. It’s all computers now.” Taking their latest transfer in stride, fatalists. “Work’s always there, so you follow it.” I had to envy resignation chosen and not settled for. Watched them roll slowly away in a camper lashed with luggage and bikes.

This is “Prelude to a Kiss.” Benny Carter’s 1942 band, very mellow reeds. And these still are only scraps, chips, slivers. That they can be fixed in a coherent sum is the kind of stance we live on, like entropy or antimatter: pretty fictions that don’t explain, furtive agreements of pretense, a wink and a ducking away.

Modulate.

Modulate. All right.

But I can’t stop wanting to know what I’m looking at.

C
HE AND AN OLD
friend, Alberto Granados, launched on a prolonged tour of Latin America by motorcycle and on foot at the end of 1951 … Chile via Patagonia … Peru … the Amazon … Colombia … Venezuela … Granados stayed in Venezuela and Guevara, travelling in a plane loaded with thoroughbred horses, spent a month in Miami.

RICHARD BOURNE

Political Leaders of Latin America

R
UMBLING 12,000 FEET
above the Caribbean: The cargo hold was frigid, and Che, wheezing, heated water for maté with an immersion coil.

“They don’t agree with you, the horses?” asked Placido, the groom.

“Asthma,” Che explained.

Supported by canvas belly slings, the nervous animals quivered in their stalls, breathing in short bursts. Placido soothed them, humming, rubbing, adjusting leg pads. Sucking the maté little by little, like his grandmother, Che thought of Racetrack and Soccer Field as two political parties: pomp and control versus tumult and passion.

In Leticia, where the borders of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia converge, Granados had been hired to coach a junior soccer team. Most of the players went barefoot, and their only ball leaked air. But they were tireless, ferocious tacklers, and ran all day with no more fuel than coffee and bread.

The plane shuddered in an air pocket, and Placido sprang up, throwing his arms around a colt’s neck. Che thought: He works for the horses, not for the boss.

IN
Miami, at the airport luncheonette, Che had a doughnut and three glasses of water. Behind the counter, on a mat of paper grass, was a baby alligator, stuffed, with an orange in its jaws. He did not understand the money or the language. What kind of penance was this? New contexts for study, every form of contradiction. United Snakes, Granados called it. Really, the trip was already over. Proven: He could act on impulse like anyone else, Ernesto, the methodical future physician. Evident: He should have stayed in Caracas.

Che approached a man in an authoritative black visor cap to ask about hotels.

“Sure, you want a place talks your talk, serves your food. Come on, my cab’s right outside.”

In the wide car Che heard American radio for the first time, brass music, an overexcited voice. He thought of Evita when she was on the radio. “Brought to you by Jabon Radical.” Evita as Lucrezia Borgia. Evita as Joan of Arc … Evita dying now in Buenos Aires, but giving her alms to the end, to the unending line of supplicants, her descamisados, moving toward the marble hall on Avenida Real.

“Hey,” the cabbie said. “Are you in the cigar business?”

The Moncada desk clerk didn’t care to see his passport, just cash in advance. The room had a sink, but no toilet. The bedspread was edged with dangling pom-poms of chenille. From the window he could see the backs of several buildings, a Chinese cook smoking by the trash cans.

Later he sat on a green couch in the deserted lobby and read Marti. He could smell seepage, mildew, some disagreeable cologne. He leafed through tattered magazines and saw slogans like “Safety-Flow Ride” and “Self-Cleaning Magic.” Two prostitutes came in, noticed his rope sandals, and went right by. Che smoked his pipe and went to bed hungry.

CHE
knew where he was in the morning: alone with not enough money. He had guava and cream cheese for breakfast. He brewed maté in his room and studied a map. The ocean was miles away.

A postcard (Everglades ’Gator Wrestling) to friends:

Dear Hawkeye & Tonio—Greetings from another onetime Spanish possession. But nobody worries about History here. Everything is paved. When the sun doesn’t shine, they give a refund. The local air seems to help my asthma. Back soon for exams? Maybe.

Love to all—Nesto

He went outside to look for stamps, walked quite a way not finding any. Nearly everyone he saw wore a hat. Their faces, even while smiling, were preoccupied, expectant. Heat came up as he went. There were scarred trees. Dogs ran loose and idlers smashed bottles. An aroma of scorched snack-bar onions passed on the air. Women in white shoes bargained with a man selling fish from the trunk of his car, boys jeered and shadow-boxed—everyone was black. A man in chauffeur’s whipcords stood by himself at the end of the street. He kept looking up, scanning, as though waiting for a bomber group to appear.

ONE
morning the manager of the hotel brought coffee straight to his room.

“Black as the devil, hot as hell and sweet as love,” she said.

Celia carried her wealth on her body, like a gypsy. There were rings on every finger. Che was embarrassed. “Argentina, eh? You look like a gaucho.” “I’m from Buenos. My family is in the shipping business.” “You got the smarts, all right. I’m not so old so I don’t notice.”

It was hard to find Celia’s real age under so much rouge and rice powder. She’d come here just after the war, she said, from Havana, where she’d been a beautician and a santeria priestess.

“Here some busboy wants to turn his sweetheart. I sweep the place, I cut the chicken, pour the rum, but no loa comes. Ogun won’t talk. Shango won’t talk. Nothing. I find out you got to do for yourself here. Nobody else going to.”

Celia was sitting on the edge of the bed now. She squeezed his hand.

“But I like you. What I’m thinking, I could help you get a camera, make you a business. Like at the fronton, the dog track, and the zoo. Also parks and outside nightclubs. Turistas have to prove they been. They pay for you to take picture.”

“I don’t need work,” Che said, lighting his pipe. “Just coffee.”

YESTERDAY
’s newspaper had announced a sixteenth straight day of sunshine, but today it stormed. Che ducked into an arcade. He saw his reflection in the window of a luggage shop, wide-eyed, unshaven, confused. He could not help looking over his shoulder. In Toffenetti’s—Haberdashery for Men, he browsed until ejected by clerks. He ate a small bag of peanuts. The clock over the newsreel-theater box office was encircled by a flickering blue neon tube. Che was tempted to think that measurement, the language of numbers, was another form of hearsay—he was an uncomfortable materialist. But he knew that six hydrogen atoms in a ring with six of chlorine made Gammexane. That intangibly slow summer between terms he had developed the insecticide in his father’s garage, tested it on river mosquitoes in Zárate. His father, tangibly, had offered the capital necessary for small-scale manufacture.

He took a seat in the back row of the theater. The travelogue was about Indonesia. It showed elephants at work in a teak forest. After that came an instructional film on home canning. Che studied the backs of heads, diagnosing impatience and inertia both. Phrenology in the dark, and onscreen the graduated dial of a pressure cooker.

“Here the string beans are processed in steam for at least twelve minutes to insure that any spores of
Clostridium Botulinum
are destroyed.”

Che went into the men’s. He washed, avoiding himself in the mirror, filled and tamped his pipe, saw the feet sticking out. They were battered and bruised, shoeless. He opened the stall door. A tramp lay curled among newspaper, his head alongside the base of the toilet, one eye crusted over.

“Are you ill, señor? Let me help.”

The tramp covered himself with papers. “Beat it. Piss off.”

Che watched an unruly black duck blab its way out of the roasting pan in a color cartoon. He thought of microbes swarming invisibly over the floor.

LOOKING
for a post office so he could wire home for money, Che found a library instead. Granite gray, pillared, dense, it was dustily cool inside, while petunias planted round the flagpole wilted in the heat. The shelves were brown and thick with varnish. The ceiling fans were still. He pulled a book at random—
A Bride in the Hand
by Lila Claire (C)—and caught a falling ant that had been laying its eggs inside, or eating the glue.

The librarian’s freckled elbows supported her at the desk. She had a thin nose, red hair fine as a baby’s, and was lovely in her sleepiness. Just over her shoulder, in light that leaked under the shade, particles of dust barely moved. And Che, struck by desire sudden and acute as asthma, could not move at all. She was Lila to him, a flight. He would turn the other people in the room to paper. He would shrink the room itself. And his hand would fit hers so easily, an afterthought.