Sign Languages (15 page)

Oh God, I pray my knees on the stained oval rug by the bed. My elbows deep into the horrible soft mattress that rises around me at night like mud, quicksand. Oh God, I'm sorry I missed the war. Missed serving at all. I love this country of ours. I have a tiny flag I got from a store. It's a pin and I wear it on my shirt collar up above where it buttons down. Always on the left side over my heart.

Protect this nation under God from those stupid people who'd bring it down. Those fat black mothers and old men. From people whose cheap plastic laundry baskets are split, fold flat under their arms. Those noisy cars, smoking blue oil, destroying our air. Bless people in strong houses on clean streets with bright streetlights.

I don't read things. I've never read anything except what's necessary. Street signs. Directions on medicine bottles. On hand dryers: push and rub hands together vigorously. I don't read the Bible. Only those magnetic-letter signs in front of churches. In the beginning was the word. In my Father's house are many mansions.

I love this country. I hate I missed the wars. How about those women who take shopping carts home?

Who do you love? All the other Americans. The astronauts who work where it's clean and clear. The boys in uniform. Mothers whose children are fat, rosy-cheeked, lovable. Thin fathers in suits. People with their own washers and dryers. With new cars.

May everyone get the gifts this year that'll do them some good. That'll save them from the lions.

In my wallet there's a wrinkled bumper sticker. If I owned a car I'd put it on the windshield. “America: Love It or Leave It.”

Toward New Year's I get restless, moving from one boardinghouse to another. In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, ‘I find a wonderful old hardware store. If I'd gone, then gotten the GI Bill, I would own a hardware store. Full of useful things fine people come in to buy to fix drips and torn screen doors. I buy a new ice pick on a card. Still a wooden handle. Still a bargain at $1.29. Someday I'll buy a dozen because you know they'll quit making them soon. Who needs them anymore?

POLICE SEEKING CLUES IN MURDERS

The bodies of two male children, approximately ten and twelve years old, were discovered early yesterday morning by state employees emptying dumpsters at a roadside park on US 250 twenty miles south of Wheeling. State police are questioning residents along US 250 in an attempt to identify the two boys. Details are being withheld pending identification, but sources in the Wheeling Police Department say the two children were bound wrist to ankle and stabbed repeatedly. There is no evidence of sexual molestation.

April 1979

There is rain against the window of my room. Has my life been a dream? I ask my coffee. Do I dream with my eyes open? There's a face in the mirror. It's almost fifty I think.

I read about black holes in a
Newsweek
I take from the bus station. And I'm one. Everything collapsed, collapsing. Unbelievably heavy with years, thirty years of dead leaves, spring green, Minneapolis, Rock Springs, Detroit, Atlanta. The soldier dressing in the morning, after coffee. All the armor, including righteousness.

I am not crazy, I swear to myself. The boundaries of the country expanding, deteriorating. While I can only contract, suck into myself cities and days, my people, their waste.

The gypsy moth takes one, sweeping down from the sky. The moth doesn't read or write or speak or hear, listen, grow larger, only smaller. My hands shake now; my back's bent. My eyes as milky as theirs at their coldest.

I work even harder. A frenzy of concentration while spring brings other things to America outside. We lost the war. The people have lost their resilience. My people only increase.

The man turns to me in the line and snorts at the service. He's there for food stamps. He fails to notice I don't have a letter in my hand. My hand in my pocket. My smile for him and my country. It's everywhere on posters. Around us the faces of Roosevelt, Stowe, Mencken on stamps.

The child I see left alone in the car. A parking lot full of activity but the black hole edges in invisible. I am invisible. I have always been unseen. I'm not in the mirror some mornings. Sometimes I fail to appear until afternoon, over a sandwich. Through me, in the bathroom, there's a crack in the tile, the calendar from two years ago, the naked hooks behind the door. Brass plate gone sea green. Humidity streaking everything. Surfaces the feel of snake. So many simply go unreported. Missing because I've found them.

Had I gone, come back, sat still, it would all be over. But no GI Bill, no store. I imagine myself a General Grant. As short as he, exaggerated next to Lincoln, that great American. Never out of uniform. I lie on cots in flophouses always dressed.

I take the epaulets off, remove the brocade. Wait at newsstands in the poor sections of the city. They buy a paper. I'm in it. And next to them at the same time. The power of being invisible, two places at once; a dozen places at one time. My hand on the Navy Colt fresh from its paper card.

Roman legionnaires served twenty years. Almost all their short lives. This is a prayer. From a black hole to the things it swallows, absorbs—even the light. Tomorrow let me be absent from Lincoln's side. In this photograph I carefully clipped from a book in the library.

I act. All those others sit and carp. Despise the poor, illegal aliens, welfare, communists, atheists, the poor. Action. Action. Action. McClellan to Hooker to Grant—that black hole in the wilderness. The movement of the horses outside muffled by the canvas of the tent. On the cot I alone hold the entire country in my mind.

“MAFIA MURDERS” ALARMING

Salem, Oregon (UPI) The State Attorney General has called for the formation of a special commission to coordinate the investigations of the so-called “Mafia Murders.” The proposed five-person task force will gather information and direct state law enforcement officers in an attempt to capture the murderers who have gone on a rampage the last six weeks throughout western Oregon. So far five victims have been found. All were bound, gagged and shot “execution-style” with one bullet to the head from a .22 caliber pistol.MORE DETAILS ON OP-ED PAGE AND READERS' LETTERS.

August 1983

I don't know if the street's foggy or my eyesight's getting worse. I got glasses last year but they're no help at all. Every morning this month I've walked along Seawall Boulevard past the Flagship Hotel and the Galvez. It's warm, the air thick and salty.

I walk toward town and, with the usually stiff wind at my back, I come into Mae's Café and have coffee, look out the window.

Those people all around me here, but now I thank God for my lousy vision. I nod at the ugly waitress, elbow a space between two delivery-truck drivers. Smell bacon grease, coffee, the terrifying odor of six o'clock cigarettes.

I tell myself stories all day. The garage in winter. My father's auto-repair shop. He'd be late because he'd still be drunk until nine or ten when Mother'd get enough coffee in him to “start his engine,” as she called it.

It is cold, the light through the filthy panes the color of the ashy deposit on spark plug tips. It could be terrifying, I knew. Empty. Greasy. Leaden light. The floor oily. All the surfaces cold. The tools, the destroyed engines. Tailpipes bent in fantastic shapes. But I breathed it all in deeply. Stretched myself on the single stool. The table in front of me cluttered with broken things my father would fix. He could fix anything. Wire this, tighten, solder, wash clean and new with gasoline. I knew I was exceptional too—an eight year old so full of admiration for his father's abilities.

This morning over the black coffee I quit recalling and turn around quickly, squinting hard, which helps me see a bit clearer, farther. I've had this feeling only once before and then it passed. In Tucson at the bus station. I walked all over the place. Feeling it get weaker. My neck hot and prickly, my collar soaked.

He's sitting at the window in a booth. I take my coffee with me, ashamed the cup rattles so loud on the saucer. I sit across from him. He's still looking out at the row of cars facing the window. There's a Polaroid camera on the table by the salt and pepper. He's had a big breakfast, a stub of toast, yellow egg stain on the chipped plate.

When he does look it's only toward me, not at me. My neck cools. I want to say everything at once. I think of the bumper sticker in my wallet. He drinks his coffee and I follow him, my eyes on his face that nods and smiles, his front teeth gapped. Smiles toward me in recognition. We know one another. The feeling's mutual. We do the same work. He takes a deck of cards from his coat pocket and strips off the rubber band, begins laying them out on the table above his dirty plate. It's a game, I think. But I see they're not cards at all but larger—photographs. I look up but his young face is red with concentration as he separates the pictures into stacks.

He's turning them upright for me. I look at them without touching. Pulling my head back I see the details clearly now. I glance up and around quickly but no one's interested in one man's odd game.

I don't stop his deal; I pay at the register for my coffee and his breakfast, pointing him out to the waitress. Outside I lean over the newspaper rack, my fingers through its cold wire frame, and look through the window. He picks up the stacks and wraps around the rubber band.

Downtown it's either foggier or my eyes are worse as the day wears on. In the city library I hold the
National Geographic
at arm's length.

COMMUNITY STILL GRIEVES

It's been almost three months since our city was racked by the barbarous “Posed Murders” of the Jeffrey Holms family: Jeffrey; his wife, Alice; their two daughters—Kathryn, 5, and Sarah, 10. Many residents of Galveston have written expressing their grief at the senseless loss of one of the city's most successful young businessmen. We can only offer this consolation. The Holms family was deeply committed to our community. Jeff and Alice chaired many civic organizations over their fifteen years here in Galveston. But two stand out—the United Way and the Seamen's Mission. The Holms family lives on in these and other fine organizations and in the hearts of all those the Holmses' special brand of humanity touched. So we must, as difficult as it is, put these dreadful things away and turn from the distrust of our fellowman such cruelty naturally brought out in all of us. It's time to invest our emotions in valuable projects that speak of man's worth. This way the Holms family lives on.

October 1986

I think I've had another stroke. For a long time there were only shadows. Then, later, light and color. Now someone pushes me out into the large filthy room full of windows and them and their noise. So I sit but I don't look around at the others.

I tell myself stories until someone pushes me back, hands hoist me onto the soft damp mattress.

Someone visits. Sits blocking the lower windows and my view of scrub oak, an empty bird's nest between forks of a thin branch.

I think it's the awful young man from the seaside café. But maybe it's only the orderly though this uniform is navy blue, the name tag blinding silver in the light. I wasn't on the coast at the end, before the first rain of light, shadows, noise. But if it's him, I turn away. He's crazy. Such nastiness in those photographs. But moving my head takes a half hour. The field of vision slowly shifting to the left. The others in chairs everywhere. The faces. Dirty gowns. Near my feet a yellow puddle from one of us. I clench my teeth. It takes a half day, toward dark, to do that. Surrounded by them now and powerless. My hands nowhere near Navy Colt or thin brown belt. They just go on and on. Living until they're wheeled back inside too.

I cry. There're hundreds here. Hundreds everywhere. Thousands on the street. Themselves. Their children. But the young man chooses foolishly. And takes terrible pictures.

In the Marine Corps our motto was Semper Fidelis. Always faithful. Semper Fi. I had a bumper sticker that said that once. Always true to my country. But not now. Surrounded by so much to be done. Sitting in their piss and stink. In the middle of this herd. Outside some fool takes his Polaroid from door to door. And then visits me here. No, it's the orderly. But he's new then. Knowing the difficulty of my movements, he sits close, his knees touching mine. He smooths the dirty plaid blanket and deals the cards faceup. It's an old game I've played years ago. Mexican Sweat. Except in his version only I get cards. I moan and he talks more. Brings me water. Holds my head back. The young man deals and deals; all the cards seem to be face cards. The game involves questions. A card, his dark finger pointing, a question. Card, finger, question. But around me there is noise. Outside there's traffic in the street. We don't need this game, I try to tell him but can't. My tongue thick. There is work. Let's work. But someone else to my right starts in with questions. His fingers on the pictures are pink and fat. His coat sleeve navy blue with a white strip. But my jumpsuit's black. My hand on the cold struts, the wind a hundred miles an hour through the stubby wings and then I let go. Out of nowhere. The earth coming up like a dream. From here pastures are green and plowed fields brown. Blue lakes, white straight roads. Nothing ugly yet. Not until I rush down and they rush up and the impact is tremendous.

RISING WATER,
WIND-DRIVEN RAIN

August 1687

Pierre Eugene Berthier locked his fingers in the roots along the creek bank and pulled himself up. The two men below stared after him, shading their eyes from the terrible sun. Berthier ignored them; he walked away from the dry creek into the sparse shade of the post oaks. A dozen things might have troubled him, led to another series of desperate pains just below his ribs that would bring a cold sweat underneath the hotter, constant sweat. He scratched his arm covered with the red welts from mosquitoes which swarmed in black droves despite the lack of pools anywhere in the sandy bends of this goddamned nameless creek. “Should we name it, too?” they had joked at first, after they had strangled the bastard farther south on some other, larger creek. Maybe it was wrong to have done it then, as he knelt.