Just past the little white frame Free Will Baptist Church at the north end of Prenter, I threw a right at the Peabody Coal Company sign and headed up the narrow hollow. “A trailer on the right” was about the most cogent of my directions, and as soon as I came upon a trailer on the right I pulled up and stopped. The trailer didn’t look anything like Birtie Mae’s had in the Dancing Outlaw video, but I got out anyway and walked up a red dog driveway toward it.
I saw what looked like a face of fur at a window as I approached the front stoop. The screen door swung open and either a big, bareback, long-haired, bearded man or a bear stepped out. Its shoulders were shaggy and massive, and the thing stood there with its huge, hairy, ape- man arms folded across an amazingly hirsute chest and huge belly, observing me as though I had just walked down the ramp from a flying saucer. Take me to your leader, hairball, was what I felt like saying, but instead I managed to croak the question as to where could I locate Birtie Mae White’s trailer.
The thing simply nodded toward the road and mumbled something about the trailer being up acrosst the creek a ways to the right, if that there was the place I was really wanten to go to, whereupon it turned abruptly on its heels and disappeared back into the trailer, shaking its huge head.
A fucken creek? I reflected. Back in my Red Ride, I found myself on a dirt road in moments which you can bet wouldn’t be even a dotted line on any map. Then I came to the creek, which was unfortunately nearly dry, hence I had no good excuse not to roll down into its rock-filled bed and bounce across into what felt to my suddenly faint heart like an alternate universe.
The rutted dirt road wasn’t much wider than my vehicle, and it wound into the deep woods. I buzzed up my side window to keep the low leafy branches of trees from slapping me in the face. There was an air of seclusion and secrecy and menace in the narrow hollow. I had a sudden image of the hollows between these hills as constituting an enormous labyrinth, as though they were corridors in a great maze of intricate passageways and blind alleys.
The great writer Jorge Luis Borges first discovered the idea of the labyrinth as a boy in an engraving in an old book he came across in his father’s library, I recalled as I guzzled a cold Bud. And it became a lifelong symbol for Borges of being lost in life, of modern man’s bewilderment in the world; but it was a symbol for Borges also of hope, even salvation. There is a presumed center to every labyrinth, and if we think of the universe as a labyrinth, as Borges did, then it must have a center, even if that center is horrible, or demonic, like the half-beast, halfhuman Minotaur, which was confined at the center of the mythic labyrinth Daedalus built for King Minos on the ancient island kingdom of Crete. It is nonetheless a center; and if we believe in it, we at least can believe in a chance for some kind of meaning. And we can at least hope that the center is holy, is divine. If there is no center at all, then the universe is chaos and we are up a river of shit with no philosophical paddle. I guzzled maybe three tall cold ones while I entertained these reflections, for all the good they got me in the bravery department, the reflections or the cold Buds.
As I drove on slowly down that narrow hollow deeper into the maze, I reflected upon what I might find at the secret center of my own labyrinth of life. Would I find my own future, or my past, waiting patiently for me in the present around the next bend? Whenever I begin to wax philosophical, I tend to get a chubby, as I did that day. I thought of Holly then, sort of out of the philosophical blue, a philosophical inkling, I guess one could call it, as my sixth sense kicked in, of the amazing pain I would feel months later when she would dish out the blow-by-blow details of how she had begun the New Year’s with a bang, literally, biblically, with a forty-five-year-old handsome architect who had never had a serious relationship in his life, which made him the perfect man, of course, for her to philosophically fuck and drive me nuts as Nietzsche.
I rounded a bend in the dirt road and, instead of any secret center of answers, I came upon a trailer set perpendicular to the road, but on the left, so it could not have been Birtie Mae’s, and I started to drive past it. I noticed what looked like a flock of huge ugly crows pecking about in the dirt yard. Then it dawned on me, they were actually these scrawny, ugly, black chickens. Really ugly, black, spastic, speedy chickens, who commenced to come scratching and jerking toward my vehicle, as though they were zonked on chicken-nip, or chicken-acid even, and I had this sudden picture of them pecking at their reflected, ugly images in the shiny sides of my polished Red Ride. I put the pedal to the metal.
In a blink I was barreling into a virtual tunnel of leafy branches that washed over my windshield like green waves. All I could see on the sides was a blurred impossibility of leaves and stems and vines and thorny runners. I slammed on the brakes, and began to inch along the bumpy trail until, after what seemed like ten miles of this wilderness confusion and gloom, I came to a yellow pole-gate across the road, with a Peabody Coal Company sign on it, bearing the warning not to trespass. I sat there quietly listening to the faint ticking of my vehicle in the otherwise deep silence of the surrounding forest. I couldn’t even hear a bird. There was no sound of moving water. Insects didn’t seem to buzz. The world had never seemed so quiet to me, so suspended, and the woods so dark and deep. I got a good case of the blues suddenly. I felt sad, old and empty, those things, and I had the crazy urge to simply get out of my vehicle, my cool Red Ride, even leave it running, leave its engine running deep in the woods up a dead end dirt road, and go climb over that gate and walk off to trespass into whatever secret country that trail would lead me into and not look back. Find a good secret place to fall off the face of the Earth from.
For a long time I had known that there was only emptiness inside me now in a place where hope and dreams used to be. I had to take a leak, but before I could do anything about it, I felt what I can only describe as a sort of shivering in the spooky woods, and rustlings, and the sense of something really big nearby, breathing heavily.
Over the years I have come to suspect that what we finally have to fear the most is carried in our hearts. But when I sensed something really bigger than me breathing heavily nearby in the dark Boone County woods that humid, drizzly Indian summer day, I threw my Red Ride into reverse and barreled backward out of that green hellhole. I was dripping with sweat and the muscles (such as they are) of my back and stomach felt like tiny fists opening and closing tightly, or a dozen spastic little heart attacks blinking on and off at once, from my twisting so intently around in the seat to steer frantically as I returned as rapidly as possible in reverse toward the world as I have always known it.
Those ugly black chickens, which looked like two-legged rats with feathers, scattered as I swung back into the dirt yard in front of the trailer to turn around. When a tall, rangy, ropy-muscled young man wearing shades and a baseball cap over his shoulder-length, greasy blond hair, who was bareback and heavily tattooed, came out onto the concrete stoop, and stood there looking me over, my first impulse was to gun my Red Ride on out of there, no questions asked.
But I opened the door and swung my sore, sweaty old butt out, then I sort of waved my open hands at him, instinctively I reckon, to demonstrate I wasn’t an armed and dangerous sort of fellow. I took a few hesitant steps in his direction, at which point it dawned on me again that I was wearing my silly, sissy sandals and not packing a pistol. I had intended to wear my old Western shit-kicking boots that day back in the boonies, which always made me feel taller and tougher somehow, and helped me summon up my inner John Wayne if an occasion called for it, but the Indian summer day had been sweaty and sticky, so I was unfortunately wearing those flimsy, rubber-soled, sissy sandals, which had a tendency to flop off my feet. All of those amazingly ugly, black, evil- looking, feathery fowl were all around me, clearly real rat-curious about the taste of my naked toes.
The young half-human simply stood there on the stoop, his thumbs hooked behind his belt, clearly sizing me up for supper. He scratched a spot near his left nipple, which was covered with an elaborate tattoo of what appeared to be a bloody dagger plunged into a human heart. He spit a thin brown line of either snuff juice or blood out into the yard. Then he said: —What’s happening, dude?
—Birtie Mae White, I gasped, as I took a few tentative kicks at one particularly black evil chicken that apparently had its heart set on my big toe, —where does she live?
—Jest back down the road a ways, the young mutant said, flashing his pointy brown teeth in a hungry smile. —They’s a little turnoff left. She’s back up in there a little ways, dude.
—Thanks a million, I muttered, and as I was turning and trying to kick at the increasingly encroaching chicken-rats my right sandal flopped off my foot and I stumbled. Those evil, black birds went wild, cackling like crazy, rolling their beady eyes, flapping their stunted wings, waiting for me to just hit the ground so that they could be upon me. I hopped around trying to get the sandal back on my foot, and finally banged backward against my vehicle breaking my fall, where I steadied myself and struggled with my sandal. At which point I noticed that the young hillbilly cannibal had come down off the concrete stoop and was hovering just a few feet from me. He nodded toward my vehicle and said, with blood dripping from the corners of his mouth: —Cool ride, dude.
—Listen, Pluto, President Teddy growled and pushed off his red Rough Rider and stood there all puffed up and jutting his manly don’t fucken trend on me jaw, —or Saturn, or whatever the fuck your cannibal mutant motherfucken name is, I’m in possession of a sawed-off twelve- gauge shotgun that is primed and loaded and I’m not interested in any fucken invitations to dinner. Kill one of them ugly, fucken chickens, if you want a snack.
—Yo, dude, the young man said quiedy and smiled, shaking his head as though bewildered, as though bemused and perhaps entertaining a vague pity. He lifted his shades off then, and his steady, curious eyes were gentle and blue, and what he said was: —You really oughtta chill out, Dad, man.
Tell me about it.