Sign Languages (6 page)

This desert did what he soon hoped it might with the same anxious expectations you have in a doctor's waiting room. Is this the time or not? And, finally, just come on, just come out with it. He shaved before dinner. They ate without the Chans on these supposed Sundays and only the plump owner and his plumper wife broke the silence, laying mismatched silverware and enigmatic platters with the double lightning flashes of the SS crowding their borders.

There was simple reduction. No trees. Some water. Few birds. The scurry of lizards inside and out. Their own voices low out there by the Suburban in the late afternoon as they folded the tripod, loaded the rod in its case. The Chans already in the truck turning the radio from hiss to hiss. Walliston was from Ohio. He had one old son who drank. Paddy was fifty-six and his teeth occupied all his attention. If Chris looked into Paddy's eyes they never really looked back but down a little at the perpetual curl on Paddy's lips. Tongue prying. Thumbnail picking.

There were these hardships but no dangers. The company's universally recognized logo on the truck obviated a lot. Camaraderie had flared and flickered. Walliston slept the unbelievable sleep of hard work well done. Paddy paced, felt his jaw, masturbated regularly into a sock that Chan #l's sister would wash later in the red water from the well next door.

Then the Suburban broke down, the transmission full of sand that had slipped past seals and evaded the lubrication of heavy oil. All in a little more than three months. So now Paddy took things apart, lost bolts off the blanket, scrambled out from underneath, and pounded his jaw, fists a blur.

But Chris only looked on. From their first meeting in the city to the southwest he had said he knew levels and transits and inhospitable places—though he'd lied because he'd been stationed in Louisiana and Kentucky—but not a goddamned thing else.

He watched Paddy kick the tires and scatter the ugly chickens and he thought about how easily the Deutschmarks accumulated. Level loops were the easiest thing. Not like construction or highway surveying. Anybody could learn in half a day. How to set up, level out, read the rod—hold it if you had to—and fill in the field book. Backsights, foresights, the whole theory of elevations.

They'd have to wait for the scheduled resupply in five days, and someone would go back on the dilapidated Chevy flatbed, the local irregular bus, into the larger Goatville to cable for a mechanic. “Fuck it,” Paddy stuttered over aching teeth, grit on all their tongues, fur in their throats.

So Chris went back early and sat on the minuscule balcony and drank St. Pauli's Girl and thought and remembered and let the remainder of the day's heat suck it away. Take this year and that one too. Take her and him and leave me only residue, salt. Evaporation. Only movements are essential to remember in the desert. One has to be careful with the body. The mind is expected to wander in search of something to latch on to. That brush. The distant hills like memories of hills. All colors shades of red. His past wasn't very much at forty-four and so mandated a slow yield to avoid the heat and distances from just taking it all at once. He was regimented, the loss was scheduled. This space had absorbed a Roman legion, he'd read in a magazine he'd bought in the city after the Eurasian woman had caused him pain. At the old dam farther south it had never rained. It had never rained. What dimension vacuum do such facts create?

It gave looming mirages back. But they weighed nothing and were themselves taken from somewhere else and brought here by fractured light.
Fata morgana
, the Italians called them.

They had the usual goat stew and thick-skinned beans and sharp sour cheese. St. Pauli's too. After dinner he lay down in the faded blue room. He looked at the two posters he'd bought in the city. In one a naked woman was bent over, her face leering over a shoulder, her royal-blue fingernails pulling her shaved pussy apart. In the other a red Porsche sped down a winding coastal highway, the water far below almost transparent. Above the road there were pines and cedars. He rose from the bed and walked across to the posters. If you looked closely, you could almost make out the man driving behind the reflective sheen of the windshield. The woman had rows of pimples on her ass. He took the posters down and carefully folded them at the rough table. He hoped he would get to go cable for the mechanic so he could buy some new decorations.

But Walliston climbed on the smoking, rattling Chevy flatbed. Smiling and waving, he wedged in between cardboard boxes and a lame family going for medicine or prayer. And since they'd already cleaned and adjusted all the equipment over the last several days, he'd left them a series of level loops they'd saved for just such a time. Small ovals near the village, up to the northwest and down back to the brass cap; they could walk, toting the equipment. But Paddy suddenly produced a quart of Boodles at supper and poured it down like ice water. The next morning, which they supposed to be Wednesday, Paddy didn't answer the knocks on the sagging door. When Chris pushed it open, Paddy was asleep in a tangle of loosened clothes and split sheets. Two empty bottles in the middle of the floor.

Paddy's blind drunkenness was unexpected. St. Pauli's was one thing. How the hell had he managed to hide such a supply of hard liquor? He wondered if Paddy'd been drinking on the sly all along. Chris sat that day and the next morning in his room or in the front room downstairs. The two Chans staring in at the door, the strong light behind them. He wanted to rest here too. For a couple of days. Or for a week. Walliston would sputter and pace but that would pass quickly enough. The Deutschmarks flooded in whether he had his eye to the Gurley or down the throat of a beer bottle.

But on Friday he rose early, the chill of the night on his watch face and the useless keys to the Suburban. Without thinking, he sent Chan #1 home and kept the other, who babbled in patois and ran to the truck to jerk out everything until Chris said no, no, and swore and pushed the too-anxious fellow aside.

There were no mirages in the chill as the two walked the loop out from the tarnished cap. Backsight. Foresight. Break down the light metal tripod. Then level it out again. 4.6. 4.8. The level bubble shifting in the sand. His legs splayed away from the tripod. Chan #2 distorted in the first undulations of heat. He looked, waved, copied his own thoughts. Thoughts in numbers only. He believed that was why he had gotten up in the dark and dressed. The desert had almost sucked him clean by now. Besides the numbers and the blue room at night little remained except the expectations of scenery and images of Deutschmarks falling through blank space. He wondered again, at noon, as they lay behind a desiccated bush, where Paddy'd kept the gin until now. He shrugged and folded his paper lunch bag. The swig of red water still on his tongue.

“So, you married?”

He turned on his side away from Chan #2 and put his arm across his face. He shook his head. But the stocky Chan talked on, more than he ever had before though Walliston liked to rib them, make them say foolish things, and turn to Paddy and him and arch his eyebrows.

“Here, you see this?” There was the crinkle of unrolled paper and Chan #2 held over Chris's shoulder the poster Chris had pulled down a few days ago. The blue fingernails and shaved pussy a strange sight behind the low brown bush, its leaves almost completely withdrawn, minuscule and waxy.

“I found it, you see. Behind Xiang's, in rubbish.” Chan #2 laughed and he heard him sit up. The sound of fine falling sand.

Chris turned onto his back, sat up on his elbows. “It's a picture, that's all it is. You can have it.”

Chan #2 shook his grinning round face; his teeth were yellow stumps. He smelled of smoke and cheese. His face, his hands on the opened poster motionless. His deferential smile glowed.

To the west they watched a long row of date palms. Underneath them men and camels moved. There were tents billowing in the wind. The whole looming mirage three feet off the ground.

“You know about women I bet. Anyone can see you do. With such pictures.”

“Sure, if you say so. But you can have that… here,” and he sat up and took the woman and folded her carefully, leaving half her face, one terribly lewd eye staring, and put it on Chan #2's lap. He noticed Chan was missing the top of his left thumb above the knuckle. It ended in a loose tuck of skin that wiggled as he took the poster and looked down into the woman's face.

They worked on. The heat forcing several rests, spoiling a regular day's routine. But he said fuck them; fuck Walliston and Paddy. They worked their way back to the brass cap. He looked, read numbers. Recorded them. 4.4. 5.2. 4.9. His eye now seeing the maimed thumb on the side of the rod. The grinning face seen in silence through the heat devils rising up to dance with and tease distances.

They locked the cases in the Suburban. He walked up the street toward the hotel, but Chan #2 pulled at his sleeve. He turned and rubbed his aching eyes. His mind only on beer and the thick stew and sweetened, reconstituted dried fruit.

The broad face too close to him in actuality. “I please ask question?” Chan #2 closed his eyes for a moment. “Mr. Chris… if can?” His smile faltered.

Chris breathed in the town smells. Beyond the last mud brick house and across a tremendous distance he made out the mountains that surrounded the plain.

“What is it? What do you want?”

“You know about women; you married.”

“No, I told you no.”

“I like to ask question.”

Two small boys herded emaciated sheep around them toward the water trough at the lip of the well. The wind picked up and sent the prayer wheels clattering.

“What is it?”

Chan #2 grinned and pulled him across to a low stone wall. Chris sat; the little man sat on his left hip, hunkered close, his head shoulder high.

“I do wrong, you think? What, then, I do? She say no, no, not now, it too late for that, but…” Chan stopped and looked at him, brought his head up, straightened his back. There was no trace of a grin now. He leaned back and began again, slowly, telling how his wife had been eight months pregnant with their first child and how he couldn't help himself after he'd had too much fun and drink at some sort of card game. He had come home near dawn and the sight of her huge tight belly had driven him wild. He'd pulled her to him. It was awkward, but he hadn't stopped.

Chris listened and then he stopped Chan #2 with a pat on his shoulder.

“But it the child, too, you see. Little girl already shamed she no boy. But born funny, arms cross chest,” and Chan folded his own. “We massage with oil and say prayers, but them not unfold. Not once in a year.”

“Those things happen.” And he stood and looked down at Chan #2. It was twilight and windy and growing cool. Chris couldn't imagine any of the women he'd known with bellies full of anything but food and drink. Inside them there was pleasure and noise. They plunged together. Besides, she'd been too old and he'd never wanted anything but the path of least resistance. Exactly what this place offered. With everything cooked off, only the residue remains. And that, in time, would vanish. A path with no resistance.

Chan followed behind him to the hotel. They talked at the door about tomorrow and Chan smiled and nodded. But then he spoke low and quick. “She and baby go to parents, you see, Mr. Chris. What I say to her, you think? You know; such a man as you know.”

He went inside. Paddy was at the table finishing his meal. He never said anything and barely looked up. Instead he exaggerated his actions. Poured the Boodles in high arcs into the coffee mug. The two of them ate goat stew off the Nazi insignias.

In his blue room he heard the wind against the closed balcony doors and he hoped for a storm that would fall over everything. Sand in gin and transmissions. He felt how the howl increased the cold and how the cold demanded thoughts and movements for warmth. He arched his body under the covers, his mind's eye in the Gurley seeing Chan's thumb. He crossed his hands over his chest. He put them down at his side. He wanted absolutely nothing for himself. He demanded it.

Early the next morning he sent Chan #2 home and had Chan #1 wakened. He took him first to the brass cap and then into the desert. But after ten, and at a distance of a hundred meters, the work didn't matter. This day proved the hottest of the summer and the intense heat fractured the air between them, twisting the distant rod and maiming numbers and hands. They packed up and turned back toward the village.

At noon he left Chan at the Suburban to square things away, but he took the Gurley to the hotel. At almost one o'clock in the morning, when the bright scimitar moon rose from behind the mountains, the level brought its razor edge down close to his eye. This was something he hadn't done in years. And the reaction now was the same as then, and he didn't know why this was. Come see this, he wanted to say. You should come see this.

Half the street below was in darkness; his only companion was the same tethered, restless goat.

HISTOIRE DE MON TEMPS

“Voiture,” I say, listening to the whine of the pickup's mud tires on asphalt. Know it's on the ridge behind me, a mile away. I turn my back to the road. Imagine that my weak vision goes far beyond the four-strand barbed-wire fence to the cows I can smell pissing. To the newest calves I hear now in this new early March grass. Up to the hills covered with some oaks but mostly pines Mothermae called “evergreens.”

“Voiture,” I say when the sound changes. Passing over the bridge where the grate opens. I almost piss on myself, my hand cupped in my open overalls. I feel then smell a trickle. Mothermae pulling the chocolate skin back, the head a pink like here, these phlox at my feet. Flocks of sheep, I used to think. I almost turn to look at the coming truck. Voiture I picked up right here against this post. The one I watched them replace the year we spent most of the summer outside when they brought in the hay.