Precious Futures

On the way back up Main Street--a redundant sight by now but effectively shielding from the abrasive winds--you spot a convenience store tucked below the outcropping of a three-story business complex, its shadowy entrance hidden in part by a wide support pillar. A neon light in the window glows OPEN, but when you tug at the door, it's deadbolted and gives only a quarter-inch, so you end up pointlessly throttling the pushbar and rattling the bolt to gain the attention of a curlyhaired woman behind the counter packing small items into her purse. The fluorescent panels above the merchandise and lining the coolers are already powered down for the night. Only a gooseneck lamp illuminates her niche by the cash register. She eyes you, shaking her head unapologetically, and reaches for a switch to extinguish the orange mirage that drew you in the first place.
You grumble something vague like a common schizoid streetbum and join Lefty a short ways down the pavement. It's just as well because you haven't a got penny to your name, though that truth only embitters you more. "Say Left, spot me a paper."
"Sorry. I'm down to my last four."
"I only want one."
"Screw you, you smoke too much." He states it impersonally as a fact, but the selfishness rooted in his denial fuels within you an obscure rage.
Upon reaching the van, you ask again more assertively. Again he denies you.
Words are exchanged--yours petulant, his bitterly sarcastic--and by some primitive eventuality, there along the damp solitude of Main St., you end up clawing at each other's lapels, ripping through the pilfered threads with jagged fingernails and growling insoluble curses; even making clumsy grabs for one another's throats. Lefty sets the trumpet down, a tacit gesture of seeing this challenge through to the end. Very quickly though, you manage a chokehold on his scrawny appendage (more like a chicken's neck) and use it to sprawl him across the van's hood. When he tries raising his head to spit profane threats, you knock it back into place with your elbow and brace him there, firmly, so that his resisting flesh squeaks against the smooth metal. He swears and flails like an epileptic child, emitting strange frustrated gurgles of protest when you begin twisting both arms into a knot between his shoulder blades. With no advantage left, one of his heels comes hammering up into your groin.
You never relent, much less retreat, and suddenly hear yourself snarling, "Gimme the papers, give 'em to me!", importing that your lips remember some significance of motive even if your other muscles don't.
A silver SUV turns the corner, purring like some stealth vacuum cleaner at the juristic lull of 25 mph. With Lefty still anchored into submission, you glance up and happen to lock eyes, first, with the passengerside occupant who is nearest you, and then the driver: a middle-aged, bald-shaven man wearing sporty sunglasses on a cord around his neck and half-ignoring/half-gawking at the degenerate spectacle on his hometown strip; commentating, with terse nods of the head to his daughter seated beside him. She is not interested in his remonstrations, nor is she interested really in the scene playing out before her, but stares on with a glassy indifference owed not to nihilism per se, for she's too young, but just a precocious want of appreciation for the universe in general. You watch your reflection, coherently transposed over her face while they pass, and are reminded of one of those portraits where the model's eyes follow you into every corner of the room. Then they're gone.
Lefty rises. You've weakened your grip without realizing, and he shoves you meekly, more to make a point than to inflict damage, rolling his shoulders awkwardly in their sockets, muttering something built around the words, "totally unnecessary". You straighten his hat as a token of armistice and with your other hand fish the papers and pouch from his vest pocket.
Smoking and pacing the brown empty pavement, you agree it might be keen to move the van three or four blocks just to outsmart any fickle ordinances. Lefty commands the wheel, chock-full of asperity again as though the briefest venture was enough to stoke that old pioneer flame. You end up migrating next to a tai chi studio and across the street from a cobblestone courtyard of treaded beige arranged in shrinking circular form like a great stone whirlpool until the very smallest ring borders a fountain. The fountain's centerpiece is two great salmon dueling in mid-air. Presumably, jets of water have been configured to arc from the salmons' mouths, out which you can spot the endmost cylinders of black pipe, yet for some reason they remain inoperative today, in keeping with the town overall. As a backdrop, two symmetrical staircases converge windingly behind a limestone wall in the process of being painted. Very nearly finished, in fact. It's a vibrant mural of about a dozen children locking hands around planet Earth with the words, "Dedicated To The Precious Futures Of Port Angeles" sizzling in a comet's tailstream. Only some more starry, intergalactic nebula needs to be patched up near the crest and right now an array of scaffolding stands before it forlorn.
You spend the next five minutes or so fountainside with your sleeves rolled up harvesting every silver glint from the wet majority of pennies. What little words you speak rebound and echo off the convex wall, vibrating through the cobblestones underfoot. The two ugly salmon chastise dumbly with their cracked, tubular lips (a fish never looked so vindictive) and remind you of senile old men watching themselves get robbed blind but only half-aware of their own resentment.
Lefty notes, out of the blue and in so many words, that whoever painted those "creepy kids" on the mural made equitable assurance to include a Latin boy, an Asian girl, and two blacks of either sex into the lineup, even though so far the surveyed fauna have proved indomitably Anglo-Saxon.
An elderly couple swishes past in matching windpants, not speaking to one another, concentrated too fiercely on the zipper-jangled cadence of their fanny packs and periodic adjustment of visors. There's a hellfire dusk blooming over the hemisphere.
"Pardon, folks! You couldn't spare a dollar between you for two Korengal Valley vets, couldja?"
Neither slows their swishing gait, but the old woman looks vexedly at Lefty like he was a banana tree that'd grown overnight. The man ignores you altogether, or else he's deaf. After they turn the corner, you soon grow disenchanted with your treasure hunt and find yourselves climbing the scaffolding to its topmost rickety platform to oversee night's ritual transition. Neither of you are overly sentimental, but an eye-watering effect is imminent. Lefty eventually wimps out and swivels around to face the unfinished splotches of limestone and blue paint. He props the horn on his knees, fingering either nonsense or a spontaneous composition without blowing. You endure, watching the sun dip at what you swear is a perceptible speed, dropped like a coin through a slot in the gray rotunda over Washington, cooking a rash on the median of bare, gaseous sky like a fried yolk. A ribbon of seawater ignites into torrid discoloration, equally blinding as the star its stems from, while all the rest stands at peace. A honeycoated mirror.
"Remember Napa Valley?" you say.
"You mean do I remember Monday?"
"Sure. Well, back in Napa Valley, I was driving--no, wait, I mean you were driving, and I was watching all the vineyards pass outside the window. It was about dusk like this, maybe a little earlier, and I suddenly became convinced--I don't know, it was something about the way all the agriculture, so lush and perfect, just plummeted into space, down into the ocean--anyway, I suddenly became convinced that the ocean originated as a huge frozen mass of ice that pummeled into the Earth and stuck there long ago, like a missile that forgot to detonate."
"Interesting. Wouldn't the world just check out if something that big crashed into it?"
"How should I know? Maybe not."
"So is this what killed the dinosaurs?"
"Oh, go blow yourself. I was just talking."
"Wait now, don't get frisky. Or maybe once the ice melted there was a flood and that's what killed the dinosaurs. Or better yet, it was the same flood all those Christian scientists say Moses was warned about!"
"You mean Noah, and besides, I wasn't trying to make sense."
"You weren't?"
"Course not."
"Huh. Well, I think you might have a valid theory there anyway." Lefty reaches into his vest and pulls out one of those orange prescription tubes. "I mean, valid as most." He dispenses three pink pills from the tube and tosses them back in his throat, pointedly flaunting the ease of it; he's all too aware you haven't successfully swallowed a pill since the day you were born. Your throat closes up tight as a frog's urethra and makes no exceptions, not even for the measliest aspirin. Every doctor to ever diagnose you (and there've been plenty) was forced either to prescribe liquid substitutes or something in "ballpark range". Nowadays, when you're inclined to make the effort at all, each pill must be crushed on a clean flat surface with the ball of your thumb--more often than not resulting in a spray of the wasted s**t--and then precautiously steamrolled with a ballpoint pen or something similar to a fine enough consistency that will amend passage through the nasal cavity.
"What's that?" you ask, curious if he knows.
"Iso-carbox-ozid." He reads the label, making a face. "Says it’s for dysthymia. That's like depression, right?"
You shrug.
"Well this place depresses the hell out of me."
When you point out he's the one who lobbied to stay so badly, he brushes the comment aside. "Suppose we find, I don't know, like a school dance or something, and try hustling this town?"
Your head hurts; you require nicotine. "Now that's a crackpot theory."
"Not the whole supply, damn it. Just enough for a cheeseburger. Is that too much to ask? Aren't you ever hungry?"
"You're out of your mind. Besides, nothing happens Wednesday nights."
He wheezes a long, tortured sigh, pulling the hat's visor down further over his eyes as the sun reflects off the bare, bony patches of wall. "Don't be naive, we just have to look. I'll grant you, though, maybe the pills are too risky. There is the shwag."
"No."
"Come on, what are you worried about, Republicans? Ain't no Republicans in Washington!" he laughs.
"And you call me naive. They're all the same, Lefty. Backstage they all got the same agendas and want the same sinister f*****g treaties passed." You suck the last ember of life from your cigarette and flick it into the fountain below. "This s**t they let us vote on: gay marriage, taxes, renewable energy and whatnot, it's all small beans. I don't think they care one way or another. If people can pick sides, they're happy. They root for their team, get it? When really if they woke the f**k up they'd see the same dude coaching both--"
"Iso-carbox-ozid," he enunciates.
"Right," you nod in disgust. "That's the American way. Sedate yourself."
"Don't judge me, w***e. At least I don't pretend to give a s**t."
He's right of course. Even with free, unlimited access and droves of time to kill, you can't remember the last time you picked up a paper. There's a black man in the Oval Office, that much is sure. Just recently you've been able to go two hours without being informed of that. Some neo-Lib who fights wars and renews the Patriot Act. Meanwhile, if you can trust the radio, yesterday's bankers and 'corporateers' get to be today's executive cabinet. Enough said, keep your bubonic paper.
Lefty screws the lid back on and pops the tube in his pocket. You recall somewhere along an uncivilized stretch between Lincoln City and Seaside, Oregon, Lefty started dosing this script called Dogmatyl, hoping to have a religious epiphany or whatnot. Instead, he passed out for nine hours, sweating densely in rich cold globules and babbling to himself about squids, archangels, and the Third Reich:
"I dreamt I watched the Americans liberate my grandmother from Auschwitz," he reported later, his face puffy with sleep. "She looked so young, but somehow in the dream I knew it was her right away. My dear sweet nagyi, so young, and yet still so familiar."
A few seconds later he went, "Jesus Pete, that's it! Guess what? You know who she looked just like?"
You had no idea.
"That--my god!--that chick from Crescent City, the one who was all over me in the laundromat."
You had to think for a moment. "The one handing out pamphlets? The evangelist?"
"A dead-on doppelganger," he affirmed, "sure enough . . ."
When you asked about the squids, he frowned and said he couldn't recall any, but that didn't bar him from brainstorming, on the spot, a B-movie synopsis about anti-Semitic mollusks getting bred in the Rhine.
The effects of the drug gradually wore off.
A halo of marmalade sunshine still bobs on the Strait, emanating hotpink spears which incrementally fade to purple, fade to blue, and the farther east you scan the sky, the darker does the blue become and more prominent the stars. You allow Lefty to tongue a few phrases on his horn--something pensive, but infused with a restlessness befitting your circumstance. He doesn't favor the anarchic style of bop one would expect, but rather a lilting minimalist jazz wherein he's able to divest very precise volumes of respiratory power to each note. When you ask what the tune's called, he shrugs a practiced reply of nonchalance, saying he just made it up. But you know that's bullshit because you've heard him play it before.
He goes, "You know, you really should get your pot."
You shouldn't even grace that with a response. "I shouldn't even grace that with a response."
"Remember how much dough we raked in in Frisco? Even Newport! We bought six live crabs off that guy in the boat and boiled 'em up rustic style."
"Leave me alone. It's not worth the shame."
"Hey now," he comforts, "at least you've got rhythm. That's more than most people can say."
"Damn straight I got rhythm. It's you who's the problem."
"Yes, you're probably right."
"Don't patronize me, I am right! You don't communicate. The drummer decides the tempo. The drummer facilitate the time signatures."
"I respect you Stubs, but that's malarkey. No one leads Miles Davis's band but Miles Davis."
"Miles Davis writes sheet music. He makes certain every theme is scraped into his players' cerebellums, regardless who they are."
"So you're saying we should rehearse more."
"I'm saying if you mention that stupid pot again, I'll boil your head in it."
"Oh, so you're saying we should starve!"
"I'm saying you don't need me dicking around on that drum--not drum, pot--to draw a crowd."
"Uh-huh, is that what you're saying?"
"Yes!"
"You're awful sweet."
"Shove it." The only reason he's so adamant about you accompanying is it makes him look like a better musician. You've never played a drum in your life.
Lefty takes your accidental cajolery as an excuse to play more. This is fine because it covers the weird rumblings in your stomach that would only abase you right now. The two salmon are spotlighted like ugly ballerinas on a grand stage, with you and Lefty as stagehands waiting from the catwalk to lower a curtain or swivel a lamp for dramatic effect. Many of the rooftops are at eye level, looking like dead, ambiguous monsters, though the sea's heavy tide could be taken for a heartbeat. Each far-off surge against the docks is a crushing, sonic punch in the pit of your own chest.
Lefty lowers the horn and bounds up without discretion for heights, popping his kneecaps. "So I guess we're just not eating tonight--Bully! Bully!--I'll never be able to sleep this hungry unless I wear myself out first, and I don't know why, but just f****n sitting here only f****n wakes me up more."
"Okay." Your a*s bones are sore from the flatboards. "Let's walk around."
He averts your gaze, grumbling, "Yes. Lets."
Groping down the sideladders in a swift new darkness, it's agreed your best bet is to take the convex staircase, just to see where it leads.
Because Main St. is clearly, and irrevocably, dead.

Reviews

[wyrd]

your dialogue just zips right along. why I dont even notice the lack of vampires. my gosh no one has even bitten anyone yet, and I'm really enjoying this.