Wolf in White Van (10 page)

They introduced one guest as a guy who’d been a rock musician for many years before he’d started living for the Lord. He was there to explain how the messages got put into rock music, whether it was something people did on purpose or some more subtle process from the spiritual world; his mission was to spell out what the messages meant in greater detail, because sometimes they were hard to understand, and it was important to know what was out there. “Some of the stuff that’s out there,” he said, “it’s really amazing, what’s right out there under your nose.” He gave everybody a grave look, and they passed the same look around among themselves, and I felt, watching, like I was either missing out on something or being let in on a big secret: or someplace in the space between those two possibilities, drifting.

It was hard to follow, but as near as I could figure it, singers whose hearts were in the wrong place were vulnerable to demonic influence when they wrote. They wouldn’t know when the process started, and it would take hold of them before they knew it: they became emissaries then, messengers carrying sealed envelopes. They sang songs they felt they’d written but actually hadn’t, and if you played them backwards, they spread the message of Satan.

Nobody on the broadcast seemed particularly surprised by this claim. The world was a place full of ugly magic. As an example, the guest held up a record by a singer named Larry Norman, which he said was full of backwards messages: “packed” was the way he put it. Larry Norman made Christian music—”the so-called Christian rock,” the guest practically spat—and he’d actually been a guest of Paul and Jan on the show at some point, which they mentioned with a look of concern. And then the guest told the producers to cue up a Larry Norman record, and they played it forward and then reversed it, and in reverse, it sounded like a hole opening up in the earth out in the dark, abandoned desert.

What you were supposed to hear when the record played backwards was the phrase
wolf in white van.
Nobody had a very firm idea of what that was supposed to mean, but they all agreed about what they were hearing: that it was a hellish picture to paint, and for young people to hear. Paul did ask what, exactly, it meant, and the guest talked about the symbol of the wolf in ancient cultures, but nothing got much clearer. It was a dark smudge of an idea shared among believers.

The second time I saw the show it looked like everybody’d kept right on worrying about the whole question between the first broadcast and its twin. They seemed tired, and a little frightened, and they were beginning to repeat themselves, working the meaningless backwards phrases out loud like riddles nobody could quite solve. It took them longer to get from one point to the next; the messages were sticking in their throats, looming before them like visions. That was when I got the idea, because the prayer line number was right there on the screen.

In the hallway there was a phone with a long cord. Mom and me were alone in the house all weekend; Dad was off hunting boar with his friends from work up in Solano County like he did every summer. The house felt so different with fewer people in it. It was the middle of the night; I crept out of my room quietly, and I snuck the phone down the short distance from its little hallway alcove to my room, and I threaded the cord through the gap between the door and the carpet so it wouldn’t get pinched in the jamb. I eased the door shut, and I wondered why I was doing this, but at the same time I felt like it was too late to turn back.

“Praise the Lord, this is Carol,” said the woman on the other end when the line picked up. I always remembered that afterward, the exact sound and rhythm: “Praise the Lord, this is Carol.” Was I younger then than I now believe I was? I told her my name was Sean, and that I had a question for the guest.

Carol laughed. “This isn’t our call-in show, honey,” she said, gently. “That’s that morning show, on the weekdays.”

“I just had a question,” I said. For a minute neither of us said anything and I could hear the other operators praying with callers in the background.

“I know, honey, but they can’t really—” She stopped for a second. “What’s your question, hon?” she said.

What I’d meant to ask her was why the devil would talk backwards: why he didn’t just get his message out directly, by speaking clearly, straight into the brains of the people he knew he could win over. To me this was obviously the most important question about the whole thing, because the devil’s process as they’d described it sounded like a lot of hard work for
almost no gain. But then I thought about my old throne in the backyard, and I understood something about the operator and the people she worked for, and I changed my question. “The devil,” I said, and I just let the word hang for a minute in the air.

I thought she was going to yell at me or hang up, but she surprised me. “Sean,” said Carol, the TBN telephone operator who was supposed to be taking down people’s pledges, “praise the Lord, the devil has no dominion over us. He tries to take back the good things the Lord has done for us, but he can’t, because that power isn’t given into his dominion, amen?”

“The devil,” I said, with a rising inflection to suggest more question coming, but then I found myself cupping my hand between my lips and the mouthpiece. I reached down into my imagination and made a strangled gurgling sound with my throat, vocalizing on the inhale and curling my tongue into various positions to make it sound like I was talking in reverse. I scared the hell out of myself with this sound: it felt real. I kept it up for the better part of a minute and a half.

Carol was a prayer warrior for Jesus working in Costa Mesa toward the end of the last age, and she was made of sturdier stuff than a young teenager might have guessed. “Devil,” she said as soon as I was done, without any break to get her bearings, “you let go of Sean right now. He’s heard the Good News tonight and nothing you can put in his head can drive it out. You loose this child of God from your chains. In the name of Jesus, I pray,” she said. In my room a total silence took hold.

I said “Amen” the next time she asked for an
Amen
, but I was barely listening: I was lost in the story these people all believed, catching currents of it and riding them out into the far reaches of imagined possibility, believing everything they believed but from different angles, exciting perspectives, smoldering momentary vistas without end.

“Sean, you don’t have to live as a slave,” she said. “Jesus paid the price for you. Will you pray the sinner’s prayer with me now?”

“I drink the blood of my slaves,” I said, in a hushed-house whisper clean out of nowhere, shocking myself and feeling the power, and that was when she hung up.

Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself,
tick tick tick tick tick
, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jelly-fish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past.

I looked back over at the TV; everybody had their eyes firmly fixed on the guest, who was holding up more records by so many rock bands. He said the problem was everywhere, it was epidemic. But at that moment all I could see was the wolf in the white van, so alive, so strong. Hidden from view,
unnoticed, concealed. And I thought, maybe he’s real, this wolf, and he’s really out there in a white van somewhere, riding around. Maybe he’s in the far back, pacing back and forth, circling, the pads of his huge paws raw and cracking, his thick, sharp claws dully clicking against the raised rusty steel track ridges on the floor. Maybe he’s sound asleep, or maybe he’s just pretending. And then the van stops somewhere, maybe, and somebody gets out and walks around the side to the back and grabs hold of the handle and flings the doors open wide. Maybe whoever’s kept him wears a mechanic’s jumpsuit and some sunglasses, and he hasn’t fed the great wolf for weeks, cruising the streets of the city at night, and the wolf’s crazy with hunger now; he can’t even think. Maybe he’s not locked up in the back at all: he could be riding in the passenger seat, like a dog, just sitting and staring out the open window, looking around, checking everybody out. Maybe he’s over in the other seat behind the steering wheel. Maybe he’s
driving.

I swept all the old medication bottles from the counter into a plastic bag, and I meant to throw them away, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to because … for a lot of reasons I didn’t want to. As I put them into the bag one at a time I kept coming up with more reasons not to toss them out: casually, like I was trying out excuses. No reason seemed to hold its weight for long. I just couldn’t throw the medications away, was the end of it. I tied a knot in the bag and I placed it back in the cabinet I’d been cleaning. I pushed it back a little ways, thinking
to put it out of view, but then I thought better, and I looked at it for a minute before closing the cabinet. There was plenty more to clean. Old cleansers and rags by the dozen under the sink, canisters leaving rust rings on the contact paper. No shortage of things still left to do.

11
I caught Vicky looking at my face in the light—I was sitting at my desk with some old pictures I’d dug out from an unmarked box. Me and my grandma running with geese somewhere. The zoo, I guess. Or on vacation. I wasn’t sure.

If I’m in a bathroom out there in the world someplace I’ll catch the glint myself on the raised ridges on either side of my mouth area, the dully shining skin. “Pretty bad?” I said.

“No, now, no,” she said, with a little catching laugh in her breath. “You know I work doubles on weekends out at Loma Linda, though.”

“No,” I said. My conceptions of people’s outside lives are pretty crude: basic, two-dimensional stuff.

“I do, I do,” she said. “Anyway, my sister’s friend works reconstructive. They had somebody like you in there just last week.”

Our eyes met. This doesn’t happen for me often, with anybody. It felt so naked. I tried to stay with it, to be present for it, to see where it would go.

“They can do so many things now, honey,” she said, returning her eyes to her work. She was prepping some swabs for my cleaning. “It’s a lot they can do since you first got hurt.”

“I—I know. I talked to them about it a couple years back.”

“How long ago was that?” she said, her gaze back on me, pretty steady. You forget how well people know you, when they know you.

I opened a drawer on the left side of my desk, the personal business side, which doesn’t see a lot of traffic. I moved some stuff around and found a few brochures. One was even from Loma Linda. Imagine.

Vicky looked them over. “They’re in their own building now,” she said. “This one is from when they were still over in the main surgery building.” The western desert gives way a little. Marsh gas? Some smell on the wind.
DON FACE MASK. TRACE BACK. CONTINUE DUE EAST. DIG SHELTER.

“Anyway,” she said, “you could call them,” and she swabbed my cheeks with some glycerine on a compress, so gentle it barely stung at all.

“It’s your grandmother,” Dad said on the phone after we’d finished up our opening moves today. “Last night she—she died last night.”

When you shoot yourself in the face with a Marlin 39A, one thing you don’t think about is what your father will tell his mother when it becomes necessary to tell her something’s happened. My grandfather on my father’s side had been dead for over a decade; he had a heart attack one day in the supermarket. I’d overheard my dad explaining it to Mom after he
came home early from work. “The aisle was empty, it was early,” he said. “He was lying there for—for a little while.” I was twelve; they took me to the funeral at Oak Park and I stood quietly imagining what the screams would sound like if the coffin lid sprung open and something crawled out.

Grandma stayed on alone in the giant house where my dad and his brothers had grown up. When, eventually, the climb up the stairs got to be too much, she moved downstairs, and the second floor became an accidental museum commemorating the last day anybody’d lived there. I used to hide out up there when we’d visit and try to get lost in the dusty, abandoned feeling of a place where nothing ever happens.

What they told my grandmother after the accident was that I had been in a car accident and that everyone else in the vehicle had been killed. This was an important detail, because lots of people get into car accidents and come out basically OK. They break arms or they get concussions, and maybe they get brain damage and can’t remember things like they used to. But they don’t look markedly different, unless maybe their face hits the windshield and the car catches fire and everybody else inside gets burned to death. These were two of the details my father had asked me to memorize in case Grandma ever asked me about the accident and to mention if she did. “She’s not going to ask you to talk about it, I know she won’t,” he said. “But in case she does.”

One of the therapists I had to go to later on tried getting me to talk about why I was angry at my parents, and I’d say I didn’t think I really was particularly angry at them except maybe at
my dad for making me lie to his mother. I only had one grandma left; it felt wrong to tell her stories. “Is there anything earlier?” she’d say then, and I’d shake my head no: the main thing is having to lie to my grandmother. “So if that’s the main thing,” she said, once, “what are some of the other things?”

It gets to the point where you almost want to make something up just to keep them happy, to keep from being the person who makes them feel like they’re wasting their time. But I try to be honest always. It’s important to me.

“There aren’t really any other things,” I said.

In the early days there hadn’t been anybody my parents weren’t going to sue. But they would have needed my cooperation to go after anybody besides the gun people, so that’s who they settled on: the gun people. Most lawyers would have strung them along for a while, I think. But the one they did find, in the Yellow Pages, was a good guy, and he told them point blank that nobody was ever going to get a dime from the gun people. That was the end of that idea. He told them their legal money would be better spent on somebody to negotiate with insurance companies—somebody who knew that accidents happen, and that that’s what insurance is really for, after all.
Accident
: this was the great gift, free and clear, that the Yellow Pages lawyer gave my parents when they called him. He did also say that they might have a case if they wanted to sue whoever’d originally sold my father the rifle, though.

The gun shop where my father’d bought it was on Mission Avenue, down between the drive-in and a used-tires place. It was a stand-alone cinder block building on a weedy asphalt
lot. The shop’s owner, Ray, was the man who’d sold it to him; Ray had served in the First World War with my grandfather. My father hadn’t yet been old enough to walk on the day his own father had introduced him to his old army buddy Ray. Ray owned the building and lived in a small room off the office. At some point before I was born his wife died; he hadn’t remarried, and when my parents talked about him—when Dad would say, at dinner, that he was thinking about going to see Ray this week—I got the feeling that some unnamed duty was being invoked. And so I knew, when Dad told me we were going to Ray’s one morning, that my father had undertaken some kind of internal strategic shift in his approach to dealing with what was left of his only son. His rage was still fresh, but he must have begun to sense the slow beginnings of its ebb.

I remember feeling perilously light in my body. As though a sudden wind might lift me and carry me across the parking lot. I think now I’d be able to identify that feeling as fear, but at the time it was strictly physical: the heaviness of my head, which was with me most days, seemed ignorable. Though I couldn’t yet walk without help, I felt as we cruised down Monte Vista like I might have been able to go a block or two. It made me think about the future, whose actuality was very slowly coming into view for me. The days ahead, the months and years. I was seventeen, so my sense of time was still necessarily limited, but the hospital ceiling had taught me a thing or two about it. I could see it from the window of the car: even when my view hit the vanishing point, I knew there was more beyond it.

It was warm out; when we got there Ray was set up in a folding chair in the parking lot, his back against the side of the
building by the door, face tan and wrinkled, reading the
PennySaver.
He looked up as we got out of the car; saw my dad, saw me, looked back at my dad. “Well, William,” he said, with an audible period at the end of the salutation. Then he looked at me.

“Well, Sean,” he said.

“Hi, Ray,” I said.

“I heard about all this,” he said. He didn’t point at my face; there was no need. He just looked up at me from his chair in the shade, patient like old people are patient. He wasn’t nervous; I had developed a sense for nervousness like an animal’s. It was a relief to have somebody who could look at me and not be nervous.

“Pretty dumb,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I really meant that, but it was a thing I was trying out; it seemed to make people feel more comfortable. He looked at me like a jeweler appraising a stone.

“Can’t argue with you there, Sean,” he said after a while. “I’m glad you didn’t manage to …” He cut off where most people cut off, and took the breath they tend to take. “I wish you hadn’t,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

My father hadn’t said anything yet, but then he said, “Ray,” and Ray got up from his chair: it was a greeting without formalities. They shook hands; Ray took a deep breath as their eyes met. Then he clapped my dad’s right shoulder with his left hand twice, and we all walked out of the morning sun and into the small tan stucco one-room shop with the signs in the window that keep the light out.

In the Conan books I loved back then, history went Technicolor. Men’s lives ended violently and with great consequence, again and again, in glory or squalor according to their fate, and no matter how many times the exact same scene played out, it was always a huge deal; any offense was grievous, all revenge total. Conan prowled Cimmeria, in constant uproar; all Cimmerian truces were false, any tranquil scene certain to open onto vistas of blood washing over the near memories of their antecedents. Cimmeria convulsed without rest. Even in still moments, intrigue waited like gathering fog at dusk.

Inside Ray’s the evening light had suspended itself once before sunset a long time ago, and it was never going to change again. Dust collected and massed on the counter displays: old black combs glued on yellowed cardboard mounts, thick glass jars full of dead spent bullets, a fraying L-mounted card half-stuffed with quarters for the City of Hope. There was no future there; its past was a ghostless harbor. Nothing inside would ever leave the building.

I think Ray got that my father had come on some errand he couldn’t really talk about, something he would have been embarrassed or ashamed to bring up. My father’s errand was also partially or completely hidden from his own understanding, I think: he was improvising. Once we were inside they mainly talked grown-men talk, nothing talk: mutual friends; weather; the L.A. Rams. “Gone out to see—see the Rams yet?” my dad said, and Ray said, “No, not yet.”

Eventually, like a wall-mounted camera sweeping the room,
Ray turned his attention my way. I was loitering near a fishbowl filled with rifle casings, wanting to plunge my hand in up to my wrist, when he started in on a thing about how a gun’s not a toy. My father, his friend—guys like Ray—they seemed to have so much trouble understanding even the most obvious things.

“A big part of being old enough to handle a weapon is respecting its power,” he said.

“I know, sir,” I said. I called my father’s friends
sir
reflexively. It was hard to remember they were real people sometimes.

“Well, I guess you do, now,” said Ray, reaching for some point. But he didn’t have a real sense of what he hoped to say; he was lost. As I became surer of this it felt like warm light gently flowing through me. It was hard not to smile.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Ray carried on for a minute about the power of guns, and the costs of not revering that power; after a while I stopped listening. I let the barren-void melody of his voice lilt its way through the inattentive chambers of my brain. The emotion rising in his voice, his ongoing efforts to control it: I had a brief fantasy of ratting my parents out, of explaining how they’d heard from a lawyer that Ray was the guy to go after if they were going to sue anybody and we were here to see how that idea felt with him right in front of us. But it would have hurt his feelings, and I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to stop him, to explain to him that I had already known about guns when I walked down the hall from my bedroom to the living room while everybody was asleep; that I probably knew more about guns and bullets now than him or anybody he knew. But he
would have taken it the wrong way, and I felt like he was probably enjoying himself. So I stood in a state of partial focus, waiting. Looking for an opening, and then not looking, because I wanted to let my dad and his friend do what they felt like they had to do here. I did hope that at some point I’d be able to explain my recent theory that it isn’t really possible to kill yourself, that everybody goes on forever in multiple dimensions, which was less a theory than an attempt to do exactly what Ray’d been doing since he started talking: to draw some lesson from a place where no lessons were.

There was a poster on the wall behind the cash register; it was a poster I’d also seen in auto repair shops and maybe some other places, I couldn’t remember exactly. It showed a bunch of little cartoon guys doubled over with laughter, their eyes shut from laughing so hard, their chubby little hands clutching their bellies. The caption underneath said: YOU WANT IT WHEN …? I get the joke now, but then it was completely meaningless to me. It could have been in some foreign alphabet, except it wasn’t: I understood all the words, but together, in that sequence, with that picture, to my mind, they were chaos. And so, in a different way, were Ray’s musings, his helpful admonishments and his stern encouragements. They tried to reach across a divide whose distance he couldn’t accurately gauge. But while the person I’d been just a few months before might have understood this and sneered, the person who’d emerged from his bandages saw the impasse and felt something soften inside. I wanted to put my hand on Ray’s shoulder and tell him that when I said I was sorry earlier, I really meant it. But instead I nodded my heavy nod as he went on, and
shook his hand before we left, and drew a few connections between things in my head as the car headed east again on Mission.

As you rappel down cascading chains of mutated ivy, you taste the air. It’s different down here. The all-pervasive dust that clots your lungs begins to clear itself out in coughing spasms whose violence subsides as you descend. The smell of the ivy restores your hope in the journey. Your feet ache to touch fresh ground below.

The descent to the upper catwalk takes two hours, which are spent in a crisscrossing pattern among available vines. Your arms and ankles burn when you land; you tear off a handful of leaves when your feet hit the steel grating and stuff them into your mouth. They are moist and bitter. A new clarity gradually seizes your vision as you cast your gaze around and beneath.