Not Fade Away

I lied to you and your friend. I’m not Jack Kerouac. My motives for such deceit were complex – joy, fear, meanness, and self-protection. I regret my thoughtlessness and disrespect to both of you and hope you’ll accept my sincere apologies.

Sincerely,

The Big Bopper

I shook my head at this perversity and diligently inked the Bopper’s name into a thick black rectangle. Underneath I managed to cramp in ‘Love, George.’

It was a clear night, moonless, the temperature warm but cooling fast. Mirage shimmers of rising heat off the desert made the horizon appear to be under water. The highway was as straight as the shortest distance between two points and flat as a grade-setter’s vision of heaven. I powered down all the windows, locked the needle on 100, and took it south.

An hour or so later I hit the junction of 62 around Yucca Valley and ripped on down to Interstate 10, stopping in Indio for gas. From Barstow on, my brain had been cruising entranced, but the Indio pit stop had broken the spell. Back on the road, the twitters, skreeks, and jangles of speed-comedown rapidly became unbearable. A brackish exhaustion now stained my attention, my eyes felt like dried pudding, and I grew increasingly distracted, restless, and bored bored bored. I’d been up for a couple of days, one of them chemically aided, and it was catching up hard.

To resist temptation once you’ve already eliminated it is always easy, but to resist it when it’s within easy reach under the front seat is difficult – especially when you’ve passed the soft flirtations of desire and are down to raw need and can hear those little go-fast pills squealing ‘Eat me, eat me.’ Difficult, yes, but not impossible, not if you’re strong. I resisted the magnetic siren song of benzedrine by fumbling the tinfoil package from my pocket and letting a sugar cube dissolve on my tongue – a sweet, cloying trickle sliding down my throat.

Nothing happened. I should’ve known better. You can’t expect the young to provide reliable drugs. But I was careful. I didn’t know anything about LSD except what I’d heard, and most of what I’d heard had come from people like Allen Pound, a kid who drove graveyard at Cravetti’s. He’d taken some with a psychiatrist in Berkeley, he said, and it turned him every way but loose. A bookcase became a brickwall. When he rested his forehead against a window, half his head went through without disturbing the glass; he’d felt the cold air outside stinging his eyes while, back in the room, his ears were burning. Always curious, I’d sidled into the conversation and asked him if LSD was like peyote. He smiled one of those cool, knowing smiles that afflict the terminally hip and replied, ‘Is a Harley like a Cushman?’

So, even though I suspected Allen Pound of self-inflating bullshit, I was careful. I waited almost seventy miles worth of crumbling nerves before I ate the second cube. Either this had something in it or the stars, like tiny volcanoes, began erupting on their own, spewing molten tendrils of color until the night sky was an entangling net of jewels.

Nothing is more tedious than someone else’s acid trip, so I’ll spare you the cosmic insights – except for the real obvious stuff, like it’s all one (more or less), composed wholly of holy parts, the sum of which is no greater or less than the individual gifts of possibility, all wrapped up pretty in the bright ribbon of past and future, the ribbon of moonlit highway, the spiral ribbons of amino acids twining into the quick and the dead, the ribbon of sound unwinding its endless music through breath and horn, the silver dancer with ribbons in her hair. Oh man, I was out there marching to Peoria, aeons out, all fucked up.

I made two intelligent moves, both making up in smarts what they so obviously lacked in grace. First I got off the road. Simply cranked the wheel hard right and drove into the desert, slewing between cactus plants till the exploding Godzilla eyes of on-coming traffic disappeared. Then, once the Caddy stopped, I tumbled out the door and jammed a finger down my throat. Maybe it wasn’t too late to puke up the second hit. Of course, maybe I hadn’t double-dosed, maybe the first was just a blank. But then again, maybe the shit came on slow. I didn’t care; I just wanted to get as much of it as possible out of my system before my brain became a bowl of onion dip at a Rotarian no-host cocktail party. I managed to gag up the sour remains of the gristle burger and cardboard fries in a slurry of beer. My mind was vomit on the alkaline sand, as indifferently illuminated by the starlight as anything else of matter made.

I rolled onto my back and watched the stars pulse till I could get my breath. Watched them erupt, swirl, and dissolve like so many specks of sugar in the belly of the universe, only to re-precipitate, glittering. I felt what I always feel when I really look at the stars and remember they are enormous furnaces of light, when I look past them and imagine how many billions more exist beyond vision because their light hasn’t yet reached us or they’re obscured behind the curve of space, only now I felt this with an unbearable clarity, the impossible magnitude of it all, my own self barely a twitch of existence, a speck of sugar dissolving in the gut, fuel for the furnace, food for us fools. I forced myself to quit looking (otherwise I’d die) and curled up, trembling, on the hot desert sand. Eyes clamped shut, I sat on the bank and watched the river burn. Felt my empty body lifted on a wave, lifted on the wind, hurled into the darkness to be lifted again.

I have no idea how many eternities I required to regather myself and re-open my eyes. The stars were stars again, but possibly they wouldn’t stay that way if I kept looking, so I cautiously peered sideways across the cactus-studded plain. I don’t know what kind of cactus these were, but they vaguely resembled stick figures, legs together in a single line, arms curving up from each side in an ambiguous gesture of either jubilation or surrender. They looked like sentries – not so much guardians, though, as passive observers, witnesses for some unfathomable conscience. Nonetheless I was trying to fathom it when one of the arms moved. I started crawling pronto for the white shimmer of the Eldorado. I reached up to seize the door handle and put my hand right through the starlight mirage of metal. In a panicked glance over my shoulder I saw more cactus limbs move, but, daring a longer look, saw they were staying put, not advancing, and my fear began fading into a very careful curiosity. It took me a few baffled moments to comprehend that the cactuses were dancing to a music I could neither hear nor imagine. I knew that if I wanted to know their music, I would have to join their dance and feel it in the movement of my mortal meat, within time and space, outside in.

I know I danced, but remember neither the movements nor the music. Or anything else until I came to in the front seat of the Cadillac with sweat in my eyes. The sun was up with a passion. I checked the dash clock – 9:30. I felt like scorched jelly. Need sleep, my brain was flashing; I hadn’t begun to scrape myself from the floor of exhaustion. But the Caddy threw the thickest shade around, and even with all the windows down it was an oven. I had to move. I sat up and turned the key, so wasted that for the pain to reach my brain took about ten seconds. I yelped, hands recoiling to my chest. I examined them dully. They were pin-cushioned with cactus spines. Sweat-blinded and on the verge of screaming, I yanked the spines with my teeth and spit them out the window, thinking distantly to myself that if someone were watching they’d probably say, ‘Now, he’s fucked-up: got enough money to afford a fancy car, then parks in the desert and eats his hands for breakfast.’

Even with the spines removed, my hands were almost unbearably tender. I examined them carefully to make sure I’d removed all the needles, then gingerly reached under the front seat for the bottle of bennies. I wasn’t tempted. Can you say a drowning man is tempted by a life-preserver? Temptation was crushed by necessity. Besides, it’s all one, ceaselessly changing to sustain the dynamic equilibrium that maintains itself through change. And that dynamic equilibrium requires human effort. We each have to do what we can. I did seven.

Tuned me right up, too – had those acid-warped synapses firing at top dead center in no time. For example, I remembered the beer in the trunk. The ice was all melted but the water was still cool. I drank two quickly, tasted the next two, and savored another as I lumbered the Caddy back onto the highway.

The next sixty miles were devoted to severe self-questioning of the round-and-round variety. In retrospect I’d been foolish, first of all, to take the LSD, and then to take more. On the other hand, as that old saying has it, when you’re up to your ass in alligators it’s hard to remember you only wanted to drain the swamp. And what’s an adventure without risk, danger, daring? Excitement was the whole point, in a way. Or was I secretly afraid of accepting the responsibility of delivering the gift, that deep down I knew it was an insignificant gesture, a spasm of fake affirmation in an indifferent universe? I didn’t have a fucking clue.

And from this speed-lashed tautological self-analysis, only vaguely slowed by beer, out of a puddle of confusion I created a whirlpool of doubt; despite the energetic rush of amphetamine confidence, I felt myself sucked down toward depression. There’s no drug stronger than reality, John Seasons once told me, because reality, despite our arrogant, terrified, hopeful insistence, doesn’t require our perceptions, merely our helpless presence. I debated the truth of this all the way to the Arizona border. Finally I pulled over and banged my head against the steering wheel to make myself stop thinking.

I started with a light, rhythmic tapping, but that only seemed to increase the babble in my brain and I did it harder, hard enough to hurt. Then I slumped back in the seat, gasping, eyes tightly closed, and immediately had a vision: a tiny orange man, maybe three inches tall, naked, was carrying what appeared to be a piece of glossy black plywood as big as he was across a thin black line suspended in space. He was walking anxiously back and forth on the line, intently peering down. The plywood was cut roughly in the shape of an artist’s palette, but lacked a thumbhole. The shape strongly reminded me of something personal, but was obscured in a shroud of associations. Finally it came to me: chicken pox, seven years old, an image of Hopalong Cassidy astride his horse. That was it, a jigsaw puzzle, a piece of Hoppy’s black shirt.

The tiny man, the color of a neon tangerine, was still aimlessly walking back and forth along the line, his eyes shifting between the line and the plywood. It wasn’t until he turned and walked away from me for a moment that I realized the black line was the edge of a surface, and looking more closely I saw it was a thin slab of crystal suspended in the air; it was exactly at eye level, and without the black line on its upper margin, I might’ve missed it completely. I tried to stretch myself up to see over its edge, get a better view of the surface the little orange man was stalking, but I couldn’t break the angle of sight.

I watched, fascinated, as he roamed back and forth, looking all around, occasionally setting the piece of plywood down and sliding it around with his toe, then picking it up to continue what was evidently a search. I strained again to see the surface, but my gaze was locked dead level with the crystal edge and the parallel black line above it, a shadow laminated to translucence. At last I grasped the obvious: the little orange man was working on some crazy fucking jigsaw puzzle.

By the way he moved, lugging the puzzle piece as big as he was, it was plain he had no idea where it fit and, judging from his tight jaw, was becoming increasingly frustrated. I desperately wanted to scan the puzzle, to see what was done so far and what the emerging image might suggest, but despite one last effort of fierce concentration I couldn’t see beyond the edge. I wanted to offer the little orange man my help, add my vision to his, but there wasn’t much I could do. I decided, though, that I could at least encourage him, and had just opened my mouth to speak when all hell broke loose.

I guess I should say all heaven broke loose, because the sky opened and poured rain, rivers and tidal waves of it, a deluge. The little man lifted the piece of puzzle above his head for what meager shelter it offered. I was sure he’d be washed away. But as abruptly as it’d started, the rain stopped, and he immediately returned to his work, even more intently, as if the torrential downpour had washed the image clean. Then the hail began, chunks of ice the size of tennis balls. Again the orange man took cover by lifting the puzzle piece above his head, staggering under the hammerstroke force of the blows, grimacing at the deafening roar, his tiny penis flopping against his thigh as he struggled to stay upright. The moment the ice-storm abated, the wind came up in huge gusts that sent him reeling almost to the edge before he was able to hunker down behind his piece of the puzzle, the power of the wind bending it over him like a shell. No sooner had the wind eased than lightning fractured the sky, fat blue-white bolts sizzling toward his head. He lifted the puzzle piece to deflect the stunning power of the bolts, spun by the brain-wrenching blasts of thunder that instantly followed, and I was already laughing by the time the tomatoes started splatting down, followed by a literal shit-storm of raw sewage, then writhing clumps of maggots, large gobs of spit, and decayed fruit. Once the fusillade of cream pies ended, I was tear blind and gasping for breath, doubled up on the front seat of the Caddy. I swear by all that’s holy that I was laughing with him, not at him; laughing in true sympathy for all of us caught, tiny and naked and nearly helpless, in the maelstrom of forces we can’t control. This was the laughter of honest commiseration, of true celebration for the splendid and foolish tenacity that keeps us hanging on despite the blows.

When I finally managed to look again, the little orange man was still standing there, resolutely holding the battered piece of the puzzle above his head even though the sky was clear. He was looking directly at me, glaring. His lips moved, but there was no sound – he looked like a goldfish pressed against the aquarium’s glass, working water through his gills. It took a couple of heartbeats for his voice to reach the interior of the Caddy, to break with a deafening boom that rocked the car on its springs and flattened my lungs. He vanished with the sonic blast, but when my hearing returned a few moments later his words were waiting for me, not shrill or angry or bitter or even very loud, but absolutely corrosive with disdain: ‘That’s right, you idiot – laugh.’

‘Fuck you!’ I screamed back, enraged by the injustice of his flagrant misunderstanding. ‘You don’t know shit!’ There was no reply.

Seething, I fired up the Eldorado and aimed it down the road, yelling, ‘How could you say that? I was laughing with you. Completely with you.’ But even righteously wronged, I heard the false note in ‘completely.’ I was laughing with him, at least 80 percent, and another 10 percent from relief that it wasn’t me, and another 10 percent just because it was funny. So even if my claim wasn’t completely true, it was true enough, and I didn’t deserve his contempt. ‘You mean little orange shithead!’ I railed. ‘Jerk! Who are you to judge my laughter? You know I would’ve helped you if I could. That black piece shaped like a palette – it’s part of Hopalong Cassidy’s shirt. I put that one together when I was seven, you asshole.’

By then I was tapering off to mutters, the dull throb in my skull reminding me I’d been beating my head against the steering wheel, and I twisted the rearview mirror around to check for damage. Fear hit me like a hell-bound freight. It wasn’t the small lump or little smear of blood that jolted me. It was my eyes. They were crazy.

I pulled over immediately. At the rate I was going, I’d be lucky to make Texas by Christmas – if I made it at all. I was insane. Out of my mind. Why kid myself? I’d been beating my head on the steering wheel, watching a naked little orange man running around working on jigsaw puzzles. Worse, I’d talked to him. The night before I’d died in a whirl of starlight and danced with a cactus to music I couldn’t remember. The night before that I’d stolen a car and crossed a man who was at that very moment probably rounding up a posse of well-paid goons who would be grossly pleased to turn me into a shopping bag full of charred meat and bone chips. By any objective standard of sanity, I wasn’t. Not even within hailing distance, not if facts were faced and no bullshit allowed. But even granting that I was totally flipped out, maybe this was only a temporary condition, the result of drugs, exhaustion, stress, dislocation, and a weak psychic constitution going in. Maybe I didn’t even know what crazy was, in its deeply twisted forms and dark forces. Maybe I wanted to be crazy so I wouldn’t have to go through the normal rationalizations and self-justifications of unfettered indulgence. And thus my speed-racing mind babbled on until I finally gave up and pulled back onto the road. If it really got bad, I could always pound my head on the wheel and try another vision. That I’d seen the little orange man secretly cheered me; vision belonged to pilgrimage, and despite all my romantic notions, I’m a classicist at heart. I was disappointed, however, in the quality of the vision – neither heavenly nor beatific, more on the order of grotesque slapstick. Maybe I should’ve pounded my brain with something heavier. I wondered what sort of vision a solid whack from a ballpeen hammer might produce, or what undreamable cosmic insight might accompany the blow from a wrecking ball. I wondered how much it cost to rent a crane for thirty seconds. I wondered if the orange man had been a real pilgrim’s vision, or just a leftover from last night’s acid feast, the deluded projection of spiritual hunger. I wondered what spirit was. I wondered what I actually wanted out of all this. I wanted to get there, wherever there was. I wanted to deliver the gift. I wanted to lie naked against Kacy and have her turn sleepily and snuggle as I ran my hand along her fine warm flank. I wondered where she was and what she was thinking, then I wondered why I was delivering Harriet’s gift to the Big Bopper when both were dead, gone, and done with. Was it because I couldn’t deliver my own gift to the living? Babble babble babble on into Arizona. When I looked in the rearview mirror again my eyes didn’t look so crazy, just tired and confused. I needed a break.

I got it on a long stretch of empty highway about five miles out of Quartzsite, Arizona, when I saw a figure walking east on the shoulder of the road, back turned toward me. True, I was tired of listening to myself and felt a sudden desire for company, but there was something in the walk, in the slope of the shoulders, the sense of weight, the trudge, the isolation against the landscape, something indefinite but definitely wrong that made me come off the gas. When I was fifty yards away, down to a roll, I saw it was a woman. She wasn’t hitching. She didn’t even glance up as I passed.

It’s always tricky when it’s a woman alone in a lonely place and you’re a man; no matter how noble your intentions, you have to be considered a threat – there’s just too much ugly proof you are. I pulled off about seventy yards past her and got out. She walked closer and then stopped. She was short, chubby, in her early thirties by my guess, with messed auburn hair cut short, wearing faded jeans and a wrinkled grey blouse clinging where sweat had soaked through. At that distance I couldn’t see her eyes, but her face looked dull and puffy. It wasn’t something wrong that I’d noticed, but that something was missing: no purse. Five miles from the nearest town, no broken-down cars on the shoulder, and no purse. I felt a sickening conviction that she’d been raped or mugged. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I waved, smiled, and leaned against the Caddy’s left-rear fin, waiting for her to offer some sign, but she stopped and stood still, watching me. I didn’t feel fear from her, no wariness at all; just fatigue.

‘You all right?’ I tried to put into my voice the truth of my concern, but it sounded clumsy even to me.

Her chin lifted half an inch. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. It sounded like the truth.

So I told her the truth, too. ‘Well, I was asking myself the same question about forty miles back down the road, and I didn’t know if I’m all right either. But I am headed for Texas, and I’d be glad to give you a ride anywhere between here and Sabine Pass, with no come-on, no hassle. If you’d prefer, I’d be glad to call you a cab in the next town to pick you up – even pay the fare if you’re short – or call a friend to come pick you up. But if you’d rather just walk on along, say the word and I’m gone. Or if there’s some other way I can help, I’ll see what I can do.’ This had turned out to be a speech, but I was having trouble keeping the truth simple.

She walked five steps toward me. ‘I’d appreciate a ride into town. Thank you.’ She said this with a sad formality, as if manners were all that remained of her dignity.

I went around to the passenger’s side. ‘Do you want to sit up front with the idiots or would you rather sit in the back and be chauffeured like a princess on her way to the casino for an afternoon of baccarat and dashing young men?’

She smiled thinly to show she appreciated my attempt. She had lovely eyes, the dark, lustrous brown of raw chocolate. I wasn’t an expert, but I was sure she’d been crying. ‘The front will be fine,’ she said, ‘with the idiots.’

I ushered her into the front seat and said, ‘I know where you’re going, but where are you coming from?’

‘Same place. Quartzsite. That’s where I live.’

‘Well then,’ I asked, irrepressible, ‘where’ve you been?’

‘Changing my mind,’ she answered, her voice husky.

‘Yes indeed, I know what you mean. When I’m not changing mine, it’s changing me. We’ll have to discuss the importance of change in sustaining equilibrium as well as its relation to timing, knowledge, spirit, and the meaning of life. And what love and music have to do with the purpose of being. When we get those figured out, we can tackle the tough ones.’

She looked at me sharply, a flash of irritation, a hint of contempt. ‘I have two young kids. Boys. Allard’s seven; Danny’s almost six.’

Her name was Donna Walsh. Besides the two boys, she had a husband, Warren, who’d lost his job in the Oklahoma oil fields and finally joined the Air Force in desperation. He was learning aircraft mechanics so he’d have a trade when he got out. He was overseas, Germany, and she and the boys were staying in his uncle’s trailer in Quartzsite.

She’d fallen in love with Warren her last year of high school and slept with him the night after the senior prom because she was tired of making him stop when she didn’t want him to. She got pregnant, and in Oklahoma if you got pregnant, you got married.

Warren had left for Germany six months ago, in April. This was only a year’s assignment, then he’d have another year of service in the States, and after his discharge he’d get a job with one of the big airlines as a jet mechanic. Warren could do just about anything with machines, she claimed, especially engines. She wished he was home to fix the ’55 Ford pick-up, which had leaked so much oil the engine burned out. Repairs would run $200 to fix it, but Johnny Palmer at the Texaco said it wasn’t worth fixing. Not that it mattered, really, since Warren could only send $150 a month, and that had to cover everything. Tech Sergeants didn’t make much, but like Warren said, learning jet mechanics was an investment in the future.

Warren was basically a good person, Donna said, but it was a lot of responsibility and pressure to get married so young, with two babies right away. And when he got laid off in the oil fields, he’d started drinking too much, and he only hit her when he was drunk. Not that he beat on her much – she didn’t want to give that impression. It had only been three or four times tops, and once she’d asked for it by nagging him about finding a job, and he really had been trying.

Another time it was just one of those things: she was cooking dinner and little Danny was three and he wouldn’t quit crying and it was hot that evening, over a 100° easy, and Danny just wouldn’t stop and Warren had drunk way too much beer and started screaming at him to shut up, which only made Allard start in crying too; and Warren had slapped Danny so hard it sent him flying against the dinette, and when he did that Donna didn’t even think, just swung on him with what she happened to have in her hand, a frozen package of Bel-Air corn, and it opened Warren’s left eyebrow along its whole length – he still had the scar – but he didn’t make a peep, even with the blood running all over his face, he just stood up real slow, pushed her against the fridge and started hitting her in the body with his fists, hitting her hard in the stomach and ribs and breasts until she passed out.

He didn’t come back for a week after that, a week in which it sometimes hurt her so bad to breathe she’d hold her breath till she got dizzy, a week when it was all she could do to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the boys. She’d called around to Warren’s family and friends, but nobody had seen him. When he came back he was pale and both his eyes were black-and-blue; he’d needed nine stitches to close the cut. He was sober when he came back, and he was sorry. It was the only time she’d ever seen him cry. She made him promise never to hit the boys like that again.

That was the last time he’d beat on her till just before he’d finally given up job-hunting and enlisted. She was asleep when she heard him stagger against the table, then lurch toward the pull-out sofa bed they shared in the front room. He loomed over her. She was lying on her back looking up at him, but there was enough glare from the porch light shining through the uncurtained window behind him that his face was hidden in shadows. She could smell the whiskey.

‘It’s all your fault,’ he said quietly.

Donna saw the blow coming but couldn’t move. He hit her in the belly, doubling her up. She couldn’t breathe or scream or kick. Paralyzed, terrified, she watched his fist ball up again tighter and tighter till she thought the knuckles were going to pop out of the skin. She thought she was going to die. She heard what a scream sounds like when you don’t have the breath to scream. But he didn’t hit her again. He hit himself square in the stomach, right where he’d hit her, and began to methodically beat on his own face. Gasping, she inched across the bed until she could throw out an arm and reach him. He stopped at her touch. His fist opened and he reached down and touched her hair, lightly, and then down to the base of her neck, gently massaging as she choked for air. Still rubbing her neck, he pulled the sheet back slowly and lay down beside her and took her in his arms. She was naked; he was fully clothed. They held each other tightly, silently, for a long time. Donna said it was the most intimate she’d ever felt with him, and was aroused even as she cried. She pressed her thighs along his legs and wiggled in closer, but he had fallen asleep or passed out.

Warren always sent the money every month with the same short letter. ‘Hi. How are you? I’m working on B-52s. Keeps me busy. You boys mind your momma.’ He’d called on the Fourth of July. Mostly he’d talked to the boys, who were so thrilled they just jabbered away about everything. When she got the phone back, she couldn’t think of anything to say, so she just said they all missed him. She wanted to tell him how much she missed him, and how, but the boys were yammering and tugging at her and he was too far away. She’d written him every week till that phone call. Now it was about every two weeks. It was so hard to say what you felt when you couldn’t look at each other.

She told me all this as we sat beside the road and, after a while, drove the five miles to town. She spoke in a husky monotone, staring down the highway as if she were trying to describe a picture she’d seen as a child. She needed to talk. If you can’t believe she’d open up to a total stranger – a man at that – well, it stunned me, too. Stunned me. I sat there with speed racing in my blood and didn’t say a word; just listened. Sometimes it’s easier to be honest with a stranger, someone you know you’ll never see again. Safer. No obligation but the blind trust opening the moment.

As we pulled into Quartzsite I told her I was starved and offered to buy her a late lunch if she wasn’t in a hurry. She said she had to be at the trailer by 4:30, when the boys got home from school. Usually they were home by 3:00, but today the lower grades were putting up Halloween decorations.

We stopped at Joe’s Burger Palace and ate in the car. We picked at our burgers in silence for a few minutes, a comfortable silence, then made small talk about life in Quartzsite. But small talk seemed to diminish whatever had passed between us, and after a few meaningless exchanges she shifted around on the seat to face me and told me, without introduction, what had happened that morning. As she spoke, her voice gathered force, but it barely escaped the undertow of weariness in her tone.

‘I got up at six like always, then woke up the boys and got them dressed. Danny couldn’t find his blue socks. They’re his favorites. He couldn’t remember where he’d left them. I told him it wasn’t going to hurt him to wear his brown ones for a day, and he started crying. Kids can get so strange about clothes, like they’re little pieces of their lives. So I hunted for his socks and finally found them under his pillow. Under his pillow, can you believe that? They were so filthy I think I found them by smell. It reminded me everything was dirty, and I had to do the laundry.

‘I got Danny’s socks on him and then made their oatmeal and poured their milk. Allard was telling Danny all about skeletons and ghosts and how ghosts can just wooooosshh at you out of nowhere, and when he was woooosshhhing his hand to show what he meant he knocked over his milk. I wiped off the table and was about to get what had dripped on the floor when I smelled something burning: I’d put the oatmeal pan back on the burner but hadn’t turned it off like I thought. The oatmeal was charred to the pan. I filled the pan with water and some baking soda to soak, but the smell of burnt oatmeal had filled up the trailer. By then the boys were going to be late for school, so I got them all gathered up and figured I’d take care of the mess when I got back.

‘I walked the boys to school, which is about eight blocks, but when I got back to the trailer I couldn’t open the door. I don’t mean it was stuck or I’d forgetten the key – I just could not open it and go back inside to the smell of burnt oatmeal and spilled milk and dirty laundry. Physically couldn’t. So I turned around and started walking.

‘At first I thought I’d go to Curry’s market a couple of streets down, but I walked right past it – just as well,’ cause my purse was in the trailer. Then I thought I’d go by the old Baptist church, but when I saw it, with all the stained glass and heavy doors, I didn’t want to go in. I walked on past the church and just kept going, know what I mean? Not thinking about anything in particular except how good it felt to be moving in the clear air. Just walking. When I reached the highway and saw the broken white lines going on so far in the distance that they seemed to turn solid, I felt happy. I kept walking. Two or three cars stopped but I shook my head. I wanted to keep going.

‘I know I’m a little overweight but as I walked along I started feeling lighter and lighter and lighter, like the wind could pick me up and fly me away, the way I felt it could when I was a little girl. Then it all collapsed in me and I started crying.’

Donna blinked rapidly as she remembered that moment, jaw quivering, but there were no tears. She shook her head. ‘But you know how it ended. Here I am. But I walked a long way down the highway thinking how every promise gets broken one way or another, how every hope you have is hoped for so hard and so long it’s almost like praying, praying so you can believe in something, but it never turns out that way. I’ll tell you what really got me blubbering, was that I knew I was going to turn around, cross that damn road, and come back. Knew I couldn’t leave. I’m ashamed to admit it, but there’s been a few nights when I felt like the best thing to do was get the butcher knife out of the kitchen and go stab the boys in their sleep, kill them before they found out what happens to dreams. Is that sick? But you can’t do that any more than you could let them come home to an empty house with Daddy in Germany and Momma run away crazy. They’re too real to hurt like that, too real to escape. So I’m coming back because I don’t really have a choice. I didn’t understand it, but I made a choice with Allard and Danny. I’m going back and opening that goddamn door of that trailer and walk into the smoked-in smell of scorched oatmeal and curdled milk and filthy socks. Now that’s grim.’

‘I admire your courage,’ I told her.

Donna shook her head. ‘If I could walk away and be happy, I’d still be going. But something that wrong gnawing on my heart, I could never be happy. Not that I’m happy now, with no break from the boys and the walls pressing in and a husband I don’t know about, but this way there’s a chance things’ll work out. Maybe not, but I have to do what I think’s right and hope it is, I guess.’

‘I hope so, too,’ I said, ‘and I think it is. But if Warren ever hits you again, I’d get out from under. No maybes. Just leave.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I told myself that.’

‘Promise yourself.’

‘What about you?’ Donna asked. ‘You coming or going?’ She was deflecting the pressure of the question, not begging it, and she’d had enough pressure for the day. So, still sitting in the Caddy, our half-eaten burgers long cold, I told Donna what I was up to, my own mess and now this journey. I didn’t mention Eddie getting run over – it wasn’t necessary – nor that the car was stolen. I did tell her about dancing with a cactus and the little orange man and the upwelling babble in my brain. In the course of explaining, I was taken with a strong intuition that she’d appreciate Harriet’s letter, so I asked. She thought about it a moment and said she would. I dug it out of the glovebox and handed it over.

Donna sniffed the envelope. ‘Ooo-laa-laa.’ She giggled. ‘Miss Harriet was serious.’

She read the letter slowly, nodding, shaking her head, smiling. When she finished she folded it neatly, returned it to the envelope, and began to weep. So much for my deep intuitions, I said to myself, but then she reached for me across the front seat and we held each other.

As it turned out, however, my intuition was better than it seemed at first. It wasn’t the letter that got to her, she said, as it was remembering that Ritchie Valens had died in the same plane crash. Ritchie Valens, it turned out, was one of the reasons she’d slept with Warren that first night, the night she got pregnant with Allard. Not Ritchie Valens personally, but a song of his called ‘Donna,’ Donna the heartbreaker, a lament for his lost love. The school she went to in Oklahoma was too small to afford a band for the senior prom, so they’d used records. And when Ritchie Valens sang her name that night in the dimly lit gym – Donna in her gown with her hair done up and an orchid on her wrist, her stockinged feet sliding on the waxed floor as she danced slow and close with Warren – she wanted to grow up into the woman she felt in herself.

When I admitted I didn’t recall the song, Donna looked at me with deep suspicion, like a border guard confronted with dubious credentials, but then she shook her head, smiling, and said, ‘Well, it doesn’t make much sense without the song.’ And in a high, clear voice with just a touch of a whiskey edge and a power and clarity that left me breathless, she sang:

I had a girl

Dooonnaa was her name

And though I loved her

She left me just the same

Oohhhhh Donnnaaa

Ooohhhhh Doonnnaaaaa …

And I was thinking she’d break my heart when she abruptly stopped and said, ‘That’s why I’m crying about the letter. And because it’s sad that they never had the chance to meet. And because it’s really a sweet thing you’re doing – a little crazy, but sweet.’

‘Then allow me to deliver this gift in your name, too – as a tribute to Ritchie Valens, music, and the possibilities of friendship, communion, and love.’

She cocked her head and gave me a smile that was in odd but happy contrast to the tears on her cheeks. ‘That would be nice,’ she said.

‘Well I’m a nice, sweet guy and it’s a very romantic journey – some might even call it foolish, or pointless. You wouldn’t happen to know where the Big Bopper’s buried, would you?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I just thought of a good gift for you.’ She sounded excited. ‘It’s in a big box under the bed, lugged all the way from Oklahoma: a battery-powered record player and a young girl’s collection of forty-fives to play on it.’

‘You’re kidding. Old forty-fives? Are they mainly from the Fifties?’

‘I was seventeen in ’59. Your record player was all there was in Braxton, Oklahoma.’

‘Mainly rock-and-roll?’

‘What else was there?’

‘Well, listen, that’s what I’m supposed to do on my way back from delivering the Caddy – look around for Fifties record collections. I’ve got this friend in ’Frisco named Scumball Johnson, a used car salesman, and he collects Fifties rock the way some people collect baseball cards. Kind of a hobby, but he’s real passionate about it. When he heard I was making this trip, he gave me a thousand bucks to buy with, and out of that I can cover my travel expenses home. I told him I didn’t know diddley about the music but he said that was no big problem – if in doubt, buy everything. He buys ’em, sells ’em, trades ’em, reads these obscure little collectors’ magazines with circulations of half a dozen – you know, just a nut. So, since you’ve got the records and I’ve got the money and we’re both in the same place, I could buy some now.’

‘No, I want it to be a gift,’ Donna said firmly.

I was ready for this. ‘If you insist, I’d be honored to accept the record player as a gift. Scumball doesn’t collect record players. The records, those I have to pay for. That’s business. Of course they’ve got to be in good shape. Not scratched or warped, labels intact, things like that.’

She eyed me with open doubt, and I wasn’t sure whether she was considering the offer’s intrinsic value or its clumsiness. Frankly, I thought I was pretty slick. Finally she said, ‘Okay, but the record player’s a gift – as long as that’s understood.’

‘Understood and gratefully accepted.’ I bowed as much as I could in the front seat. ‘I’d like to take a look at the records, but I’m not sure what your situation is. I’d be glad to drive you to your trailer if you think your neighbors wouldn’t take it wrong. And I wouldn’t mind at all if you’d rather have me call you a cab and meet you somewhere else with the records – and the record player. What do you think?’

She fixed me with those lustrous brown eyes and a smile. ‘I think you’re a very thoughtful man. And for all your supposed craziness, very, very careful. We can go to the trailer. None of the neighbors thinks anything about me as far as I know. About the only person I ever talk to is Warren’s uncle when he comes around the first of the month to collect the rent and try to feel my ass.’ Her nose wrinkled with disgust. ‘The kids’ll be home in a couple of hours. I can move the mess around while you check out the records.’

The trailer, closed all day in the heat, reeked of burned oatmeal, curdled milk, and dirty socks, just as Donna had said. She stopped in the doorway, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly in a murmuring sigh. ‘Ah, home sweet home. You’re welcome to it. See if you can find a place to sit down.’ She left the outside door open and went into a tiny room at the back of the trailer. She didn’t have far to go: the trailer seemed about seven feet long. I hadn’t spent that much time around kids, but even if they sat stone-still that place would’ve been cramped.

Donna was back in a couple of minutes with two large plastic cases, each half again as big as a portable typewriter case. One was turquoise with yellow flecks, the other light green. The latter contained the record player. It was a bit dusty and the batteries were long dead, but the turntable spun smoothly and the needle looked sharp. Sounding upset, Donna said it worked fine the last time she’d played it. I assured her of my utter confidence that new batteries would do the trick and, if not, that I was an ace mechanic, but she insisted on searching for the four-cell flashlight so we could use its batteries to test the machine. She couldn’t find the flashlight and grew increasingly distracted. ‘The boys were using it last night to play flashlight tag. How can they lose everything they touch? I mean,’ she spread her arms, ‘how can you lose anything in a place this size? Damn flashlight’s bigger than the table.’

She was still looking for the flashlight when I opened a small compartment on the side of the case and found a cord for a 12-volt connection; you could plug it right into the cigarette lighter. I held it up. ‘Forget the flashlight. Lookee here at the miracles of modern technology – I can run it straight off the car’s system.’

The turquoise case was full of records. There were three tightly slotted rows, all but a dozen in paper slip jackets. Most looked like they might’ve been pressed the day before. ‘You sure kept your record collection immaculate. Hardly a speck of dust. No reason you shouldn’t get top dollar.’

‘You’d never know to look at this place that I used to be a tidy young lady, would you?’

‘I bet two rambunctious young boys really sharpen your personal sense of order.’

‘Ain’t that a fact,’ she said ruefully. ‘Listen, I’m going to attack the dishes. Take your time going through the records. And take anything you want; they’re all for sale.’

I went through the records quickly. A fairly comprehensive collection, to my limited knowledge. I found the Big Bopper’s ‘Chantilly Lace’ right off, a bunch of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Bill Haley & the Comets, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly galore, five or six of Little Richard’s wailings, the Everly Brothers, some folk and calypso, and a whole bunch of groups and people I’d never heard of. Ritchie Valens’s ‘La Bamba’ and ‘Donna’ were near the end of the last row. I set ‘Donna’ aside.

She was behind me at the sink, scrubbing dishes. I told her I’d set ‘Donna’ aside and asked if she had any other favorites.

She damn near wheeled on me. ‘Take “Donna,”’ she said flatly, ‘that’s the one I really want gone.’

‘No sentimental favorites?’

‘Not anymore.’ She turned back to the sink.

I counted the records and then my money. I was short out-of-pocket and had to go out to the Caddy for the roll in the duffle bag. When I came back in, I counted out the cash on top of the turquoise case. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s get down to business. I get two hundred and seven records at two bucks a pop, makes it four-fourteen, so I’ll call it an even four-fifteen if you’ll throw in the carrying case.’

Donna was shocked. ‘You’re buying all the records for two dollars each?’

‘I know that seems low, but Scumball says it’s standard price for good-to-excellent condition. I don’t know what the market’s like here, but even in ’Frisco he can’t get more than three dollars a pop. And I am buying them all, remember, not high-grading it for the good stuff.’

Donna pointed at the turquoise case. ‘You’re gonna give me over four hundred dollars for those records, is that what you’re telling me?’

‘Four-fifteen,’ I corrected her. ‘I’m sorry, but I really can’t go higher.’ I tried to look sorry.

Donna was shaking her head. ‘You know those records aren’t worth nothing much. You’re just looking for a way to give me charity. I appreciate it, George, but that ain’t right.’

The truth was, I didn’t have the vaguest idea what used records were going for, but two dollars seemed fair to me and that allowed me to put some honest righteousness in my bluff. ‘Donna, I’ll write down Scumball’s number. Call him at work and he’ll tell you whether I’m bullshitting or not.’

She decided to believe me. ‘No, there’s no need for that. God, I guess not. You’ll have to excuse me, but I was figuring a dime at the most, and you’re telling me two dollars. Four hundred! Hell, if I knew I was sitting on a gold mine, I’d of sold ’em a long time ago.’

‘Glad you didn’t.’ I grinned. ‘And I know Scumball will be.’

Donna insisted on coming out to the Caddy to say goodbye – plus she wanted to make sure the record player worked. I plugged the adapter into the cigarette lighter and hit the switch; the turntable began revolving. I was tempted to play ‘Donna’ and ask the real one to dance a slow one right there in her scuffed yard in front of God and the neighbors, holding her close before I aimed it back down the Interstate. But seeing as how she didn’t need the pain, I picked a Buddy Holly at random. It dropped smoothly onto the turntable and the tone arm lifted over and laid the needle in the groove:

I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be:

You’re gonna give-a your love to me.

I wanna love you night and day,

You know my love not fade away.

Doo-wop: doo-wop: doo-wop-bop.

My love is bigger than a Cadillac,

I try to show it and you drive me back.

Your love for me has got to be real

For you to know just how I feel.

A love for real not fade away!

I hit the freeway full-bore and feeling good, a farewell kiss from Donna still warm on my cheek. Since I had the record player all set up, I figured I might as well listen to ‘Chantilly Lace,’ seeing as how I was riding its ripple of consequence into my present madness. I dropped it on the box. There was the sound of a phone jingling, then a low lecherous purr:

Hellooooo, bay-bee.

Yeah, this is the Big Bopper speaking.

[a prurient laugh]

Oh, you sweet thang!

Do I what?

Will I what?

Oh bay-beeee, you know what I like:

And then he starts singing.

Chantilly lace and a pretty face

and a ponytail hangin’ down,

a wiggle in her walk

and a giggle in her talk