I Am the Fruit of the Applegate Trail

Another entry from the occasional blog I keep called LET'S GO: PEAK OIL! I add to it as I travel the country, on vacation or otherwise, in this the era of Peak Oil. Peak Oil is a concept developed by Shell Oil engineer M. King Hubbert to describe the likelihood that the infinite abundance of petroleum could turn out to be relative. It's just a travel blog, not a diatribe.

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DAY TWO: I Am the Fruit of the Applegate Trail

The Rogue River

Southern Oregon has the Klamath River, the Rogue River, the Illinois, the Chetco, Coquille and the Umpqua which mainly travels through the center of the state, but breaks itself well into the south with hundreds of streams and capillaries which run like water off the back of your hand. There are other rivers too or they may just be forks of the same, but they all burst out of the Cascades to the east and rush to the Pacific in the west. Remote as the Oregon coast can be, towns settled long ago at the mouths of these rivers.

Recently I found a campsite on the Rogue, near Grant's Pass, and spent a cloudless night there under warm late summer air. Southern Oregon is September country, gold, green and dusty. The sun is still lively and bright at this time of the year but pitched at an angle that favors the rocky little valleys and waterways. It encourages the yellowness of the earth, without blinding you to it like in July. Meadows don’t have much of a chance here, with the crowding of mountain ranges pushing up from California - the Siskiyou - and east from the Cascades - the Klamath. Instead, cedar and fir shoot up on every slope and cool the corners and bends of the rivers. Despite the state border, Northern California-Southern Oregon is one unified ecosystem. If geography were allowed to settle borders, that alone would qualify this as the State of Jefferson.

The campsite I chose, about ten miles west of the freeway, is the unfortunately named Indian Mary Campground. For a county park, it’s pretty deluxe, with flat grassy yards, showers, and river launch - not for nothing the “crown jewel of the Josephine County Parks system.” I made it in before nightfall and cooled off in the Rogue, just below my site. It was still brisk at this time of the year, moving with purpose. Not the kind to wade into, but the kind to stand in ankle deep on slippery shale and scoop water onto my chest and over my head and under my arms before warming up again, dripped dry under the sun.

But is it the truth?

But Indian Mary Park. It is proud to have been the site of the smallest Indian reservation. I thought I just chose a crown jewel, but here, on the banks of the Rogue, land was given to the daughter of a local native - also unattractively Christainized to Umpqua Joe - who apparently warned white settlers in the 1850s of an impending, perhaps retributional, attack by natives. The settlers survived and in thanks gave him, or probably just put him in charge of, a ferry near here to carry other whites across the busy Rogue. Upon his death, having been shot by his Mary’s husband, Mary was put in charge of the ferry and the flat little area of riverbed around it. This, thanks to the Dawes Act, became her own reservation, which she turned around and leased to the stage line she’d been ferrying for and moved into town, Grant’s Pass. I don’t know what happened to her there. But a local historian, Percy T. Booth has told their story which, hopefully, one day, will be made into an opera of love and regret.

I woke up late in the morning, around 8:30. I headed back down to the river to sit and meditate. I found a small, flat sandy area, shaded by trees above the river and sat happily and quietly. When I looked at the space with fresh eyes, I could see that the sand ended at a little bank where the true forest stopped and though I was about 15 feet away from and a few feet above the river, this was unmistakably once part of the river, the sandy bottom of a pool with eddies curving against the bank with thick roots of overhanging trees and stones caught among them. However many hundreds of years ago, I was sitting on a spot for salmon to be born and die and regenerate.

I headed west and north, mainly following this part of the Rogue, with a quick stop at a river landing with restaurant and patio bar for ice and to spruce up the coolers. I passed through a few intersections which could have taken me the sixty or seventy miles to the coast, which can only be an awesomely lonely drive. At one point, my road gave up running two lanes, getting crammed between the river and mountainside, and I had no idea where I would bail if another car came at me.

The network of Oregon trails

After awhile I blundered into Wolf Creek where I hoped to catch up again with the 5, and it’s here the supposed usefulness of Joe and Mary’s ferry came to mind. There’s not much that I could see that made up Wolf Creek, but there was the Wolf Creek Inn, very proud of and happily sporting its National Landmark status not only with a plaque near the door, but an entire nature and history trail packed into its tiny front yard. It was already hot out, but I followed it from one sun weathered panel to another guiding me to the habitats of local flora and fauna (hemlock, spruce, tanoak; bears, hawks, otters) to the hardships of the Applegate Trail. I’d never heard of it, but here I was standing on it, outside of the inn which at one time was the haven of mule trains and settlers headed to the calmer, friendlier Willamette Valley.

Like the rivers out here, the Applegate Trail was one of the off shoots of the Oregon Trail. In order to avoid crossing the Cascades and/or the Columbia at any point on the way to settling in the Willamette Valley, the Applegate brothers had the idea to outflank the Cascades by coming in from the south. Meek's Cutoff inspired a movie with its deadly, questionable try at hitting the Cascades head on. Applegate's idea was thought preferable even though they first had to cross the Black Rock Desert of Nevada (which today is still only habitable by nomadic ravers and artists clever enough to cart in bicycle powered refrigerators, ice castles, yurts and temperate Bucky Ball domes one week out of the year) before jackknifing north. There it heads across the Southern Cascades, Klamaths and hits the Siskiyou Pass at the California and Oregon border, a mere 4500 feet.

But even here the traveling must have been dogged, with the countless hills and crags and descents and fordings, thank you Indian Mary. The trail succeeded, ultimately, after settlers killed and relocated the natives and discovered gold for a short while. It succeeded enough for someone to start the Inn and bring in paved roads and gas stations and to be used in parts as a starter road for Interstate 5.

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I Try to Leave Town

This is a recent entry from an occasional blog I keep called LET'S GO: PEAK OIL! I add to it as I travel the country, on vacation or otherwise, in this the era of Peak Oil. It's just a travel blog, not a diatribe.

M. King Hubbert

For those who want to be educated, Peak Oil is a concept developed by M. King Hubbert, a geologist for Shell Oil in the mid-1950s. He drew a bell curve to describe the ramp up and then down of each oil field exploited. But he then extrapolated that the same simple bell curve could predict America's oil production overall. The tail of this bell curve touched down somewhere between 1965 and 1970. And at some point in 1970 or '71, American oil production hit its peak.

Under a rubric like this, car travel is a special challenge to those who like to see their life as a pinnacle expression of the times they live in, like me. It encourages you either to embrace the concept of a diminishing economic structure with nihilistic abandon, ostentatiously exult in the freedom you think only God can grant this country, or ignore it altogether and hope for the best vacation ever.

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In September 2012, after what felt like a year of working one stressful project after another, all I wanted to do was leave town and see something different. I'm not entirely certain why I chose the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, but I don't think that really matters, the why. It's the journey, right?



DAY ONE: I Try to Leave


Is it assumed that when traveling the first steps out the door are the hardest? Maybe not for business travel - there’s something at stake. And we have systems in place for business travel. Carry-on luggage, personal hygiene containers that fit just so inside the carry-on luggage, shirts that won’t wrinkle, and securing the right amount of Ambien.

But if the point of vacation is encouraging the nothingness and the stakeless, dawdling in the first hours is really just practice for letting go. It’s all in handling the dawdling and the dukha you create by dawdling.

This is the first camping trip of the year, even though it's coming late, in September. But the crowds should be thin. I know enough about myself that, even though I dream, dream wistfully with hand under chin and staring off to the right, that I will be on the road before 9am, I know such a dream is impossible without packing first. The night before.

I was already half-packed in the morning, some camping gear, some clothing, a small of box of utensils. A better start than usual. I was riding a little preparatory high bringing the last bag of clothes (of only two bags; this one was mainly hiking shoes and emergency wear like anoraks and sweaters) when the suspicion that I was leaving something behind crept up. And I was: there was no sleeping bag. I went back into my apartment and pulled out the sleeping bag, which I keep next to the tent. Right. Got the tent. I pulled both out and found the self inflating bed roll. Oh that’s right, I pitch the tent and put down blankets and unfurl the bed roll and lay the sleeping bag on top. That’s my process.  All but forgotten, but into the car they went. Such a roomy little rental hatch back, too, I decided. There’s plenty of room left.

But why?

Damn. No coolers. I usually bring two of them, with food.

I need food. I need to stock the coolers with food.

I remember there’s a system for that too, the sub-routine of any camping trip: sustaining food in the coolers with bags of ice. While hiking that trail, immersed in the illusion of living closer to the level of nature, the bags of ice in the coolers are always thawing. It’s an on going maintenance program, part science (how close can I keep food before it warms past the line toward botulism) and part creative engineering involving proper drainage of ice melt and keeping food from greasy submersion. To reach that problem, which I know will be the only problem to solve while camping, I have to buy food first.

Actually, to do that, I need to go to the bank first. I have this check that needs depositing, the check that will pay for my vacation.

Actually, to do that, I need to go to the laundry mat to get change to put in the parking meters outside the bank because the bank’s parking lot is being repaved. I remember how, three days ago, I was stopped from pulling in by yellow caution tape dangling across both entrances and then couldn't back out. Someone making the same mistake was behind me and neither of us could move because a stack of cars was lined up at the intersection waiting for the traffic light, pinning us both to our mistaken expectation that our bank would have a parking lot waiting for us. We were stuck for several minutes, waiting and shrugging in different, frustrated ways. A third person ultimately had to let both of us back out in front of them so we could unravel ourselves.

I had to look for parking then and need a space to be available, metered or otherwise, now. But to park, I need to break this twenty.

I know, I’ll buy some gum from the gas station. My rental doesn't need gas, but I'll go to a gas station which is built for easy coming and going, to buy gum and receive change. The gas station looks full. Several people stand holding hoses to their cars in a space that is neither easy nor going. There’s a panhandler who waves me towards an empty spot on one of the pumping islands, but I decline. I just want change, I say a bit out loud, not that he can hear me, though I smile making my way slowly to the curb outside the food mart where someone else is parked. I defy the law and leave my car behind theirs, barely leaving room for people to exit the gas station.

Inside the food mart there are aisles of packaged food I’d never eat unless I needed change or instant calories while on a long drive. They don’t have the flavor of gum I like, but that’s ok. So is the small line of people asking for a gas receipt or directions to the highway or if the guy behind the counter has a colder can of soda than the one just grabbed from the refrigerated section. I feel empty handed approaching the counter with just gum and no gas purchased outside. The guy at the counter handles us all swiftly. But he can’t break my twenty.

“Hhmpt,” he says. “I don’t have enough ones.”

We both consider the tall stack of twenties pinned under the bill catch on one end of the register tray and the one or two worn dollar bills pinned in their slot. The tens are not so full, the fives are crowded and plentiful. Two quarters rest in their curved slot, compared to a heap of nickels. “I’m supposed to have a delivery come soon.”

I guess he means a money delivery. Like from Brinks.

“Just take the gum,” he says. He pushes his lower lip up into the top, almost like a frown, and adds a quick brush with his head, an easily understood international gesture of concession, friendship and conspiracy. You got the best of this deal, it says, now go. He throws in a wink for good measure when I don't heed it right away.

“I can’t. I need the change.”

This is more banality for him. Our conspiracy is gone. “I don’t know what to tell you. Go to a store. Next.”

I don’t get change, but I still want the gum for some reason, so I give him my debit card. He asks if I want money back. No, I don't. I have a check that needs depositing which will now mean double parking outside the bank and hoping I don't get a ticket. I still have to go food shopping and while doing so debate with myself on whether getting a container of humus will only add to the yuck of melted ice water in the cooler. Oh, I haven’t bought ice. I haven't left town. I have to drive almost seven hours to reach a campsite in Southern Oregon before the sun goes down. I have to get to a camp site that still has spaces, and set up a tent when it’s dark. And I’ll still have to eat. Which means cooking in the dark. Which means I’ll have to build a fire either right away when I get a campsite or make my way around with my propane lamp and try gamely to set up my propane stove.

Which, I remember while walking to my car unwrapping my new pack of gum, is sitting on top of a shelf at home, placed at eye level so I wouldn’t forget it.

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The Singing Detective, Peg O' My Heart

"You've got to spread joy up to the maximum 

Bring gloom down to the minimum

Have faith or pandemonium's 

Liable to walk upon the scene ... "

- Johnny Mercer

It used to be that when a character turned her body and tilted her head just so, the song that came out was not a post-modern questioning of the audience’s semi-conscious acknowledgment of their – or her own – cinematic dreamstate. The simple beauty of the American musical was – sorry, is – the use of music, voice and dance to further a story.

That was the idea, any way. In practice, musical songs were – are – often stuck to the character like word balloons: reveries, wishes, fears, wheres-I-come-from and whats-I-want points of view. It’s easy to keep the faith in the simple beauty of the musical theater idea: taking an ancient and profound instinct for dramatic song and dance and jazzing it up in genial, wiseguy American talk.

Which of course is not at all the point with Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986). Even though it's a substantial modernist meme he's given us, the way characters burst out of their edgy millennial time and space to sing old-fashioned pop songs from eras gone by. It’s a tactic so irony-laced, so Brechtian in its aggressive distancing of audience from story, so very very post-modern; and when I say post-modern, I mean old-fashioned.

But he can’t help it. Coming of age creatively in the ‘60s, achieving greatness in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the 2-pop of post-modernism, I understand Potter as a man of his time, especially if he didn’t like his time at all. That he wrote for television, building one disenfranchised, sexually combative, culturally undermining script after another for the BBC to be watched by pepperpots and coalminers during the exhausted liberalism of the 70s and raggedy Thatcherism of the 80s, only burnishes his po-mo cred. But antagonizing the audience, ala Godard, Waters, or Potter, still seems tired today. Very far from retro appeal.

What isn’t tired, in fact what leaps with fanciful energy, is the mixing of genres, taking the rules of one and applying them onto another. Also an intrinsically post-modern thing to do. The operative difference being our choice of verb: today we mash genres, like children or mad scientists, rather than undermining them, like Patty Hearst or the Red Brigade.

But when it comes to Dennis Potter, at least with The Singing Detective and his  director Jon Amiel, I get the feeling 25 years later that antagonizing the audience was a practiced flourish, like jazz hands. It gives the audience what it came to expect, and could be artfully distracted by. That way, they have room to maneuver for three other, more challenging tricks: playing gently with genre mixing; foisting a healing, and dare I even reach for this, sanguine story onto an audience primed for antipathy; and lastly, indulging in the deadliest, eye-gougingest of all narratives: the imperial author at work.

The sometimes lurid, never truly sentimental breaking into song is only one aspect of the The Singing Detective – and before I step one letter further you’ll have to accept that the story is not possible without evoking the caustic British flair for derision; because, it turns out, The Singing Detective’s narrative path is the crawling out from under self-derision.

Michael Gambon plays Philip Marlow, laid up in a National Health hospital on a metal gurney bed with horrifying psoriasis, passing the time reworking plotlines and mediating on his life. He is a writer and in the first instance of derision, from author to character, he is a writer of detective fiction, assuredly bad and assuredly aware of 1) his given namesake, 2) his failing to live up to that namesake and 3) the fate dispensed to him of 1 and 2. This is before anything else happens.

The meta-whatness of just this name extends further, upward and outward, as most of the story concerns the authorial play – or is it childish torture? – between a writer and his characters. Dennis Potter the writer suffered from horrible psoriasis in a National Health hospital’s metal gurney bed, no doubt passing the time dreaming and meditating on his life, his plots, and the prismatic intersection of the two which turns people into characters. And at some point was struck by inspiration. Examining this artistic mechanism, analyzing from what real-life event a character is born, is given a name and sometimes dies, is the mystery genre that underwrites The Singing Detective.

There are three and finally four storylines whose checkerboard intersections make up the movie. One: Philip Marlow, pulp detective writer, suffers from full body psoriatic anthropathy, rendering him virtually immobile. Tender, inflamed, scaly with white dead skin begging to jump off, his very self is so hateful and lowdown it wants to burst itself from the body of the man it’s crippled. The goings on in the open ward hospital, overhearing other patients gurgle, chortle, argue and die; being handled carelessly and carefully by nurses; and examined like a thoughtless specimen by roving teams of doctors, make up the daily routine of Mr. Marlow.

Incidentally, it’s in this level that Joanne Whalley (“An arresting, dark-haired stunner of 1980s and 1990s continental filming,” says her IMDB profile) and Imelda Staunton (so oppositely merciful 18 years later in “Vera Drake”) play through Good Nurse v. Bad Nurse turns, and in their own skillful ways undermine their author’s stereotypes.

Suffering from his own, possibly self-inflicted, grotesqueness – the brave image of Michael Gambon, naked, except for Gunga Din white swaddling around his crotch, laid out on his open bed for a leering examination by a group of doctors – he begs to be listened to .... “Just listen, please just listen,” he whimpers to the doctors and when they finally bend an ear, he proceeds to say nothing but a thin murmuring of helplessness. Oh, and don’t let me forget: this agonizing trial of embarrassment is delivered with a cakewalking ensemble piece of doctors and nurses lipsynching “Dry Bones.”

But his warbling plea is enough for the doctors to suggest he see a psychiatrist. Which he does, in an area we might refer to as Level 1A, The Psychiatrist, set in what looks like an empty school room. It is the one place in his world Marlow finds compassion, assistance, and intellectual honesty.

Two: “The Singing Detective” itself, a creaky detective story featuring Marlow, the Singing Detective, played with the clean skin and pencil mustache of Michael Gambon and his creaky American accent. There is no room here for pshawing the amateurish elements that abound – the hardboiled cliches (trenchcoats, cigarettes and dames = trouble), the Third Man dutch angles, wet streets and raking light, Nazi (or are they Russian?) spies, a pair of lurking thugs and murder most foul: Am I right or am I right?

By night, white-tuxed Marlow sings in a nightclub and after hours is, I suppose, a famous detective. He’s hired by Finney, or Binney (Patrick Malahide), a decorous thin man with something to hide who, after visiting the nightclub and picking up one of the ladies employed there, finds himself in the crosshairs when the lady is later found dead in the river. Finney is not to be trusted, nor are the ladies, nor is the plotline, even though one of the hospital patients later on reads “The Singing Detective” with lipmoving relish.

Level Two is not to be trusted, not only because of the hackneyed tawdriness, but because it’s here the cross-sectional movements of the past, the present, and the artistic, traverse. Languishing with boredom, Level 1 Marlow spends his time mentally tinkering with his novel in Level Two, half-amused, half-distracted until the possibility arrives, up in Level One, that the novel may be optioned by a Hollywood producer. This comes with a visit from his ex-wife, Nicola (Janet Suzman) who, aided with authorial guilt and anxiety, travels throughout Level Two (and into Level Four), with the same freedom as his beautiful, tragic mother.

With nothing but time and pain on his hands, the tinkering in Level Two turns into a quest and a reckoning, seeking the plausible truth of the detective story and then the truth of the elements that made the author what he is. Put another way, Level Two, the detective story, is the inquisitive mystery tale as metaphor for the psychic healing going on in Level One, but you knew that already, didn’t you?

Level Three is the most gorgeous, though often terrifying, and emotionally rich of them all, The Past. A young boy sits on a tree limb, swaying with the wind in the Forest of Dean and we, in our one hundred foot cherrypicker, look down on him like God. We visit him once, twice, three or four times for a little while, accepting right away this is a young Marlow, his memory image checked in on occasionally by his incapacitated adult self, but the wistful glimpses don’t go much further until later.

And then we learn he lives with his Mum and Dat, who live with Dat’s own mum and dat, barely more evolved than peasants. Mum (Alison Steadman) is really, obviously lovely and Dat (the sublime Jim Carter), is a quiet, unambitious but loving coalminer, and together they sing (maybe? actually?) with a third friend Raymond Binney at the local pub. Right: I said Binney.

Any way, Mum is a rose among thorns, or so she thinks and eventually takes young Philip with her to London to live with her family. The train ride to and fro involves ogling soldiers on leave from World War II, a scarecrow passing on a distant hillside, and the sad memory of leaving stoic Dat behind at the train station. Why she leaves isn’t fully explained, but here in the land of memory, nestled in the Forest of Dean, we return frequently, repeatedly, to the time young Philip discovers Mum unpleasantly laying with Raymond Binney. There on the dirty ground, under branches of the trees, dry humped by the oafish Binney, Mum and Nicola occasionally transverse.

Also here, in Level Three we drop in at the pub several times for mostly serene, until they’re not, reminiscences of Dat and Raymond, cuckold and friend, lipsyncing songs like “Paper Doll” for the crowd to Mum’s piano playing. Faces from that formerly happy crowd pop up as bystanders and onlookers throughout the other levels.

Whether his mother’s infidelity is the cause for relocating to London isn’t exactly said, but her evident sense of guilt is picked up by the boy. His backward rurality does not fit in the big city, with its boisterous relatives and loud, always just emerging subway cars roaring in tunnels. He yearns for his father, learns to distrust his painfully guilty mother and in the underground, asking for his father as the train approaches, we see the first blemishes of the psoriasis. As the train continues to approach, he leaves her, runs away, up out of the tunnels, never to see her alive again. The prostitute fished out of the river in Level Two is a Russian spy, is Nicola, Marlow’s wife, is Philip's abandoned mother, a suicide, and the levels blur and confuse.

As do the other events and people found in Level Three, such as those from his school. Where we meet the plummy voiced, swatch wielding harpy for a teacher, Miss –– , played by Janet Henfry, whose performance, and indelible face, must be seen. Called forward by the teacher out of suspicion for having shat on her desk after school, Philip, the Defecator, lies and denies it. Which the teacher accepts, since he’s a smart boy. Still, under threat of a terrible beating to name names, he tearfully fingers Mark Binney, son of Raymond, heir to adultery. Who, Marlowe tells us in the psychiatrist’s office, was so beset by the tyranny of the teacher and Marlow’s deceitful scapegoating that he eventually believed he did shit on teacher’s desk and went mad. Is it the scarecrow, or the teacher or is it Hitler who waves from the passing hillside at the train carrying Philip away from and back to his Dat?

I said there were ultimately four levels and here is the final one, with its quasi-relief from self-derision. As Marlow’s condition slowly heals itself and his guilty mind creeps toward absolution, so improves his bedside manner, even though his flippant playing with the characters of his novel and the people of his life loosens and emboldens them to run amok and reemerge during bed-confined night terrors.

Here – or are we in Level One? – estranged wife Nicola may or may not have news that a fly by night Hollywood producer wants to buy the option on "The Singing Detective." Having spent years indulging in guilty vindictiveness, Marlow can’t help stretching out the plot of "The Singing Detective" to include a new twist: a duplicitous set up by Nicola to steal the rights to his novel and go off with screenwriting partner the sniveling Mark Finney – is it Binney? – and reap millions in success.

Added to the paranoia of bedside visits by Nicola are the lurking thugs, free agents from the novel now skulking in the edges of reality. When their author wasn’t looking, they awakened as trenchcoated Rosencranz and Gildenstern, having realized they are characters without names, caught up in a plot they have no control over. And they want answers. So does a policeman who appears bedside at night with menacing suspicions that it was he, Marlow, who killed his mother and dumped her in the river.

But it’s the thugs who break through and collar Marlow in the hospital one night, demanding their due. Weak and unable to restrain them, he is mugged, roughed up, a pitiful scrape in the hands of his characters. What would a hack do but summon the help of his hero, the Singing Detective himself, who comes to the hospital room, readily armed, and shooting far beyond the six rounds a real pistol would allow. Down goes one thug and finally, aiming at the second, the fat babyish Thug No. 2, unarmed and asking for mercy, the Detective  takes aim with the bedridden appeals of petrified, authorial Marlow, and kills him, Marlow, with one clean shot to the head. The author, the conjuror, the rememberer, the lying embellisher, the shitter, the self-hater, dead by a free hand. Kill the cowardly derision.

So what do the songs mean? What of the elaborate show stopping numbers? And please, don’t think for a moment Potter chose musical hall numbers and American standards from the ‘30s and ‘40s as a way to be creepy. He loves these songs. ‘80s Britain, and the people who don’t like these songs, are the creeps.

There are two show stoppers: one is the “Dry Bones” cakewalk and the other comes at the threshold of his cure, in episode 5, I believe. Marlow arranges it to play mischief with a sunshiney band of Christians visiting the ward so as to uplift spirits and get the patients to sing to Jesus. That an evangelical group, hardly barely threatening except to those who can’t ignore them in their beds, would matter a whit to Thatcher-whipped Britain seems, after what we’ve been through, startling and dear. In fact, Marlow’s/Potter’s acidy atheism would quickly dispatch them if they didn’t do themselves in by appealing to the ward to cheer up and sing along to a doleful, foursquare hymn, “Be In Time.”

Life at best is very brief,
Like the falling of a leaf,
Like the binding of a sheaf,
Be in time!

We can jump over the memory of a scene earlier, in the school, when the presbyterian teacher gives lessons on the life and structure of the leaf to her grubby young students, as well as the fire and brimstone prayer she leads them through asking for God to tell the class who was the shatter. Classroom truths and reckonings are left to the psychiatrist’s area in Level One-A.

But in the ward, where the physical healing works in tandem with the psychic, Potter and Marlow, with Amiel’s realization, want a generous message, a hopeful message – and its forgiveness and gentleness and love – yet can’t do anything with the unrecognizable thing stultified by the Christians and the teacher. Instead, Potter and Marlow take it, rework it and set it free to the lively, carefree seeming delight of Bing and his backup singers: “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive, e-lim-in-ate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don’t mess with Mr. In-between.”

The song itself, with its almost glib, applecheeked American optimism veers dangerously close to the creepiness some other calculating writer and director might reach for by setting old tunes to bad new times. In fact, I wouldn’t blame you for expecting Marlow and Potter to rail against the banal reductivism of “Accentuate the Positive.” But remember: Potter (and Marlow) like these songs. The glibness miraculously loses to Bing’s jauntiness, and we’ll take jaunty over silly old hope any time. Which is why Marlow suddenly awakens to the real quality of Nurse Mills (our lovely Joanne Whalley) whose primary role, beyond that of eye candy, had been administering the greasy, curative balm on his skin: “You’re the girl in the songs.”

“What songs?”

“The songs you hear coming up the stairs when you’re supposed to be asleep.”

/End

"The Singing Detective, Peg O' My Heart," © CMartin, 2011

Hana Matsuri

Great is the matter of birth and death

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The pomelo is a fat, sunny yellow fruit that sits in your hand like a waterlogged softball. When you want to open it, you have to dig in with your thumbs the way you divide bread, down and out, and when you break through the puffy rind and start peeling, separating the thick white matting from the fruit, it makes a soft burpy exhale.

Inside, the fruit is barely colored, a spring fruit already drained. Wan, as if very very young and kindly ethereal, and it tastes exactly like that. As sweet as grapefruit longs to be, not pink and highstrung bitter – grapefruit being a pomelo’s New World hybrid offspring, further along the evolutionary conveyor. Pomelos originally blossomed in Southeast Asia but they flourish very nicely here in California.

I know all this because when I walked through the farmer’s market today there were yellow lopsided piles of them in all the stalls. It’s April and April gives us cheery early fruit the way children careen through the house while the parents are still sleeping. I bought a couple because I liked tossing one in my hand while deliberating. At the bottom of my bag, they settled doofishly, making the bag swing heavily on one side.

So check this out: Wikipedia calls that matting between the rind and the fruit glomish – a word I couldn’t find anywhere else. I was on my way home, and ok a little spring happy now, you might say pomelo-headed, looking it up, head down in my ‘droid. Glomish couldn’t be found anywhere, except GoogleBooks which cited a couple words like it in the Century Dictionary (1889): glome and glomerate. Both of which being preciously exact terms for balling yarn. As well as the deliriously trippy “a bottom of thread,” a definition begging for more study the next time you’re stoned. But it felt like we were on the right track here. Pith, the spongy white intermediary between rind and fruit may be more botanically accurate, but once again, I prefer the metaphor: a ball of yarn wound around the fruit.

Sensing a curb, I stopped. Good catch: red light. The wind turned brisk and annoying. Sharp and slappy. Its rampant swirl gussied up the blondish hair of a lady walking next to me and rattled up my sleeves, lifting my jacket off my back. Cold. I thought about coffee and when I made it into my neighborhood, I went for a cup.

Another petulant wind slammed the cafe door behind me. It startled a couple of hardworking laptop users nearby. And then back to their screens they went. I was now in the public office space, with cables on the floor and inaudible, dedicated people carefully, hermetically sharing space. All tables occupied. But in the center, at a table near the window, I saw my old friend Miranda sitting with her friend Columbine. Compared to everyone else, they were lounging and goofing off.

I knew Miranda from a job we had. We semi-dated and had some laughs but the whole thing was sort of vague and accidental seeming. Which was sometimes fun, especially when we’d bump into each other at parties and then go spend the night, but the rest of the time I didn’t like the feeling I had to keep up with her. We were really tugging in different directions. But it was good to see her. I knew we shared the same neighborhood, but always, apparently, at different times.

She used to talk a lot about Columbine without actually describing her, including her as an also-participant in almost every adventure. They went to school together and afterwards Columbine followed her out here, although I lose track over the rest of the story. I’d only met her once or twice, including one uncomfortable moment when my friend Burnsy said “oooh, that’s tough” and mimicked pistols and holsters when she told us her name. In the cafe, they sat slung down into their chairs, stretched legs passing each other under the table.

When I brought my cup over, Columbine lifted her eyes to me without commitment. I couldn’t tell if she remembered me or not. Miranda was busy, hunting with her finger down the screen of her tablet. With their bags, coats, coffee cups, wadded up napkins, twisted sugar packets, and two books left a-kilter in favor of Miranda’s little wishing well, her tablet, the available space was scanty.

I fetched my coffee and wandered over. I noticed a cloud move over the cafe and we lapsed into shade. Outside a lost sheet of newspaper was picked up and carried away with a swooning pirouette.

“Authorities suspect a homeless man whose body was found in a shed behind an auto parts store on Wednesday died of natural causes,” she read. Columbine nodded for her and sipped her full cup carefully.

Miranda continued. “Another homeless man found the body in a shed on the 500 block of Elysian Avenue, and contacted police about 5:35 a.m. A mattress and the deceased man's personal belongings were in the shed too, indicating he had set up a shelter.”

“It was cold last night,” Columbine said.

“My point,” Miranda said and looked up. “Hi!”

“Hey,” I said, and she patted the empty chair next to her. I shook my bag off my shoulder and sat. I also started to fish around in my bag for a pomelo.

“Like, the auto parts guys didn’t know a human being was living back there,” she continued. Columbine didn’t answer. Leaning over my bag, I looked up at her and she swung her gaze from what I was doing to something indefinite in another direction. Miranda had gone back to her tablet.

“Another. For your consideration. ‘A Sikh temple burned to the ground last night in a fire Abilene fire officials deemed suspicious,’ ” she read. “ ‘The temple, the second largest in the nation, had just been completed last month and had enjoyed a well-attended open house party for the entire community last weekend.’ Again, oh my god. They do everything big in Texas.”

“Like, ‘we open our doors to you and this is what we get’?” I asked, not sure what the game was. But I was willing to go along. To hang with Miranda sometimes means to transcend the hanging altogether.

“Precisely,” she answered. “The turbans rile up the yokels everytime.”

I pulled the pomelo out and put it on the little cafe table. It took up more than its allotted space. Columbine didn’t know what to make of it.

“What’s that?” she asked, budging a slim, knuckly finger from her crossed arms.

Miranda overrode the side conversation, finding no bottom to her outrage. “ ‘The renovations at the temple had cost $1.7 million and eight years of grass roots funding.’ ”

I said, “A pomelo.” The sun returned, briefly.

Columbine nodded. She didn’t look away and it made me think she either wanted to know more or was glad for the new distraction. I didn’t know what to do with both my coffee and the pomelo. I needed both hands to work the pomelo. So I held my coffee for a moment and let the pomelo sit under her scrutiny, which lasted only as long as Miranda was preoccupied, silent.

Then Miranda announced, “My favorite has to be the mural, though,” and straightened in her chair, done with the daily news, ready to give herself to us fully. Columbine was waiting for her and said, “Isn’t that like the yellowest fruit you’ve ever seen?”

“That’s like a grapefruit, right?” Miranda asked. I nodded. I told them everything I just told you. Both girls nodded. At one point a rogue eruption of wind banged against the window behind Columbine and the sunlight changed. A brief squall of cold eked inside. And then the sunlight was back.

When I was done, Miranda went back to her tablet, but Columbine lingered on the topic, saying, possibly to herself, “A ball of yarn sounds really warm now.”

She wore the darkest green, dark like forest undergrowth green, retro polyester warm up jacket, with a collar that rolled and tucked in on itself atop her shoulders, out of which stretched her pale neck, up from the fluted bones of her clavicle and an even brighter, sprightly green swoopneck tshirt inside the jacket. The taut polyester made her arms and chest seem slight, girlish and bendable. Now that she mentioned it, her whole body seemed incapable of generating any kind of heat.

“Want a piece?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

I placed my coffee on the floor by my foot and tore it open. The puffy burpy peeling made the fruit seem like a little alien gift amid the formica, pre-packaged treats and professional veneer. It took a while to peel, and after a moment Columbine attended to Miranda. “If you look long enough, you’re going to find one, so ....”

“One what?” I asked. It sounded like she meant, “so give up.” Or, “enough already.” But Columbine didn’t answer, and Miranda held firm to her search. 

Eventually, she said by way of Miranda, “We have two deaths, and now with the homeless guy ...”

“Forty-seven,” Miranda corrected, waving away the offer of a pomelo wedge. “Remember? The car bomb in Afghanistan. Over burning a Koran. Though all they did was kill other Muslims. Plus the homeless guy. Forty-eight.”

Columbine added to the list. “The police beating.” She pinched at a piece of fruit between her finger and thumb and carried it to her mouth.

Miranda started at the beginning. “We have the car bomb, the death of the homeless man, the fire at the temple, the police beating, the motorcycle guy, the mural – “

“And I’m saying it won’t be hard to find a rape in there,” Columbine told Miranda, then corrected herself, deferring to her friend’s worldview. “Although maybe not.”

Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

“Exactly,” Miranda agreed, keeping the conversation just out of reach to me. “Another victory for the under-reported. I just want to find one to satisfy the category. Possibly not there.”

My eyes moved from Miranda to Columbine, unwilling to weigh in until I knew better. Together, we settled among the cafe’s busy-fingered stillness. A sunbeam beat through the clouds and landed, splayed, on our half of the place, mostly on Columbine. Who finally gave in, I guess, out of politeness and with initial, peremptory eye contact. “We’re listing acts of suffering,” she said, returning to pick at a polyester nubbin. “Or she is. I’m listening.”

Miranda looked right at me. “It’s Buddha’s birthday. You know that.”

“Oh right. April,” I said. Columbine nodded, in chorus. Miranda was already flicking at a pomelo peel from her end of the table, around a napkin, pushing past a straw, on the way to Columbine’s side. I ventured new info: “Hana matsuri.” Which didn’t go anywhere at first. So I asked, “What’s the motorcycle? The mural?”

“The mural is ... something like, a woman in LA paid some local graffiti artist kids – neighbor kids – to paint a mural on this long ugly wall in her alley next to her house. And the homeowner’s association had a fit and went out of its way to get the city to make her paint it over. And then fine her. The LA Times had this picture of her, just weeping. Probably from the wrongheadedness of the whole thing.”

“Wow,” I said, impressed.

Miranda wasn’t finished. The off-hand distraction of the peel flicking picked up slightly. “Though I like one of the kid’s reactions: I’m used to seeing my stuff painted over.”

Columbine said, with lo-fi comfort, “That’s so ridiculous.” She had moved from the nubbin and was spectating Miranda’s peel soccer when she asked “What’s Hana ...?” just as Miranda flicked the peel, sending it flying between me and Columbine. “Ooops, sorry. That was littering,” Columbine watched it fly past her and land on the floor. Then looked to Miranda. “I’ll pick it up,” Miranda said, and grabbed her tablet.

“As for the motorcycle, I have to read it to give it justice.” And she did, while jumping to her feet heading to pick up the peel. Her adroit coming-to, and the rattle of her bracelets made me take her all in for the first time: rich purple paisley blouse, gold jeans, thick heeled boots that were not in the least cumbersome and even strengthened her gait. Bold red knot keeping her hair back. She was in full, vigorous pique.

She read: “ ‘A man on a motorcycle died after he collided with a big-rig truck while trying to elude a Contra Costa County sheriff's deputy in Diablo Valley, authorities said today.’ ”

Tablet in one hand, she picked up the peel with her other, underutilized one. The sunshine swept away from the floor. Cupping it, lightly tossing it to herself, she strode to the push-bin garbage stand nearby, still reading outloud.

“ ‘The incident began when a sheriff's deputy spotted the motorcyclist riding erratically on Pleasant Park Boulevard near Ketchem Road at about 9:30 p.m. Thursday, said sheriff’s Sgt. Chester Leem. The man refused to stop and ran a red light before turning south onto Ketchem, Leem said.’ ”

Push, deposit, reflexive hand wipe down her jeans. She pivoted and headed back. I have to say here: I really liked Miranda. Especially this memory of her, reading outloud amid the concentrating, ear-budded heads, passing over them, with an inappropriately audible voice suborning their day just a little. And now that I’m thinking about it, it may have been one of the last times I ever saw her. Only a year and a half later or so, she was dead, and Columbine and I were at her funeral, she more hollow and shocked, I think, than I was. It didn’t really seem a stretch that I or any of us would out live Miranda.

Still and though. There in the cafe, she continued. “ ‘The man ran another red light on Ketchem at Folsom Ave and continued south before he collided with a Coca-Cola big-rig truck on Folsom near the on-ramp to Interstate 680, the sergeant said.’

“ ‘The man died instantly in the collision, authorities said. His name was withheld until his family could be notified.’ ” Miranda was standing at our table.  “That’s suffering,” she reported. “All the way around.” A little whisper inside me reconfirmed that I had broken up with her, if that’s the right word. More like, distanced, I guess, but now ... ?

Half a mile up, a cloud moved and the sun broke through again, landing on Columbine’s shoulders. She and I were nodding, without much to say. So Miranda said it: “Happy Buddha’s Birthday!” She was almost laughing, but you had to know her a little. “A good time of year as any to pay witness to suffering. Maybe subvert it.”

Then she turned to Columbine. “Hana matsuri is the ....” then looked to me for support. “Flower....? Festival?”

“Hmm-hmm. Hana. Matsuri.”

“Josh lived in Japan,” she explained to Columbine, striding around to her chair.

“I taught English,” I added. “It was cool. During hana matsuri, you pour hydrangea tea on a statue of the buddha and that way you clean your soul.”

I was playing with the serrated paper sleeve on my cup, peeling it carefully in half. Then I realized Columbine had turned her attention to me. “I was only there a little while.”

“Yeah, I thought you went to Cambodia,” Miranda asked.

“First Japan, then Cambodia. Japan was too ... I felt like all I was doing was helping raise little businessmen. Cambodia – I thought I could help people. In a real way.”

The sun had been lingering successfully for a while, warming up the window and the air around us. A little too much for me, almost inducing a headache, though I’m sure it was just right for slender Columbine. She was sitting upright, fully engaged. “And did you?” she asked, like a reporter. And then answered herself, as if the question came from a neophyte, painfully obvious. “You probably helped like a whole village.”

She made me smile. She was blinking thoughtfully, having given up on coyness and already, actively, processing whatever it was I was saying to her. She was really pretty and I began feeling a little self-conscious.

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess. You just plant the seeds, you know. And hope something comes out of it. If anything, it was the least I could do after bombing them to smithereens, burning their fields, raping their women.” Ucch. That was a bit much, I thought, and made it a joke. “Not me, I mean. My government.”

“Exactly,” Columbine said, I think about something else, and then dropped her gaze to pick up a straw and wind it around her finger.

“We wouldn’t think that of you,” Miranda said.

Columbine politely, momentarily, reengaged eye contact. “That would be totally ... totally cool. How did you, how does anyone get involved with that?”

Miranda jumped in quickly. “It’s not that hard.” And to me: “Right?”

“Nope.” Someone’s cellphone rang in, loud. “There’s a gazillion organizations.” I said opening my hands. “I could ... hook you up.” She cocked her head, easily dodging that, and I let it go, it being lamer than I intended, and we resumed our friendliness. Over the next several months, I think I saw her more than I saw Miranda. She wanted to get out, do something great, or at least try to, because those things are really quite hard, volunteering overseas. In the cafe, while the phone rang, we formed a secret, minute pact to be used later. Then she remembered it was her cell and broke away, fishing through her bag on the table.

“Hey,” she said, answering, and then got up. The sun that was warming the back of her head and her shoulders fell onto the table. Her other hand tugged down the white zipper of her warm up jacket.

Miranda was watching this new thing take place. “Boyfriend ...” she warned, tiltling her nearly empty cup.

I thought about making fun of her, protesting, but I gave in a little. “I’m sure. No harm trying.” She put down her cup with an empty thwok. Then her cheeks flushed a little. She knew that I knew that she knew I was looking at her. “Besides ...” I started to say and waited for her full attention. I really, really liked her.

/End

 ◊      ◊     ◊

A careful reader will note the clumsy choice of name for Columbine in a story about flowers. She actually predates this, belonging originally to another, longer story, not at all about flowers. This is more of a backstory sketch for her. A careful reader can be also a forgiving one, no?

"Hana Matsuri," © CMMartin, 2011

The Mercenary Comes Home, Part 2

Start The Mercenary here

Photo by Anja Niedringhaus / AP

I`m a man I`m a man
Run run run I no go run
Run run I no go run
Brothers and sisters
Na GOAT dey run, n MAN dey stand
I`m a man I`m a man

- Fela Kuti, "Fear Not For Man"

 ◊      ◊     ◊

Every step he took brought him further away from danger eventually. He accepted the tight uncomfortable pants. His gun was safe back there. It moved with his hips. The only place for him was out of this city. Egypt was a crazy idea, but he felt crazy. Crazy was what saved him. He swung the crispy plastic bag like a beggar, because no one would bother a beggar.

He forgot about his sidekick, but that was ok, for a while. It was still back there, scraping the top of his ass a little, the biting little fucker.

An hour later, he was on a paved road, his heartbeat back to a casual lightness. Every step sent the city, fraught with gunfire and rebellion, people running amok, killing and taking over their own city, and sucking him in like quicksand as if he cared, in fact the entire last several days and nights, into a single slathered picture memory.

He was wondering about food, but kept walking.

Every now and then a vehicle would pass, either in the direction he came from or in the direction he was headed. Whatever that was. Maybe Egypt, but mostly south. He wouldn’t say no to Egypt. The one fact becoming certain was that when sun went down, he’d have to find a house with something to hide in and sleep. Planning for this was not a new procedure and its moment came without shock or anguish because its regularity predated being hired as a soldier.

Getting into the barracks and company of men was vitalizing. It broke his life of roaming and helplessness and hidden dismay. The people in his village who didn't leave and the refugees who did and who he met on the road all advised him: he should find a rebel group and belong. And then he could achieve something. When he found the group, bivouaced under trees in the desert, they asked him questions and let him enter. Some of the men liked to fight and so fought everywhere, and that was ennobling. Some of the men fought to get payed the way his father sang at weddings, and that was cunning. And some of the men fought with the hope that their fighting elsewhere could some day, somehow, be returned to Chad for revenge and establish the right kind of power. That was inspiring. They made their camp under the trees an unruly junk yard. 

Locating food and shelter for the night was child’s play compared to that..

Did he really want to give up being a soldier? The near disaster he was walking away from was the exact opposite of what he wanted to be involved in. It was a mess, men got swallowed eaten and forgotten, he had been tossed aside, and it all meant nothing.

As he saw it, the bag in his hand was two things: his recent self and the shedded skin of that self. Now he was in a blue shirt and tight pants, the clothes of a stranded civilian and easy pickings for anyone who wanted to be tough

As a soldier, he had men all around him. They made a group and as a group they could look outwards at anything that crossed their path. They could choose to engage it or let it pass. A man swinging a bag on the road had to be careful about everything and everyone, especially if they were in a group looking at him. He had to be careful even about the sun going down and dragging the heat of the air with it and from him.

The sound of the diesel truck stopped him from thinking like a lonely person and made him turn around. It shuddered emptily, moving quickly in his direction, rumbling with purpose. Show yourself, he decided and pulled out the fatigues from his bag. He waved it to them: “Hey Hey Hey!”

The truck flew past him, spitting bits of gravel into his neck and hair. He looked at the heavy wheels and thought of jumping on somehow, but it was gone. Then it swerved gently to the side and waited, panting.

He ran up to the passenger door and the open barrel of an automatic pointed between his eyes. A shiny black face glared at him. He swerved back a step, but didn’t think to put his hands up.

“C’mon,” he said.

“What are you doing?” the driver yelled from inside.

There was no good answer for Tewwe. He eventually lifted his shoulders  and showed the them the area they were in: nothing.

The man with the rifle said, “He’s got a uniform in that bag.”

The driver tried again. “Where’d you get that uniform from?”

He decided to answer. He spilled everything he knew: about being recruited, offered pay, Captain, the cold building they were bivouacked in the last few nights near the freak Colonel’s compound. But kept the name of the rebel faction and the camp he walked into six months before out of it. Factions had colors and pride and private treacheries. It was all homeland crap, but it still mattered. That was what passed between Tewwe, the two men in the truck and the black hole of the rifle eyeing him.

“We’re going for more men. Get in the back,” the driver yelled. It was a big, open face truck and he moved quickly to the back, climbed the metal panel and jumped over, but not before overhearing the rationale going on up front, that even if he was a deserter, they were already ahead one warm body.

Settling down, squirming around rivets, it never occurred to him until now that someone could see him as a deserter. He was redeploying himself and the dickheads up front will hear about that, he promised.

The sun swiveled across the front of the truck and found a place to land on his left shoulder as they headed south. Realizing this, south and all it entailed changed his mood and his frame of mind. South meant a long, agonizing ride through the desert. He remembered he had no food. Night will come and bring a rattling desert chill to the back of truck. Perturbation, and a minor dread settled on is chest. Shit. He remembered musing about Egypt, when he was free. He reached around, banged on the cab. Nothing came back.

After a long while, he thought very little, especially after the sun left. Peaks of thought were as short and widely separated as the contour of the desert, monohued like the full moon. This was the thin trance of waiting, upon him again. When the truck, breaking the headwind, lurched into a long curving reroute to the left, he didn’t bother to look, just let his body roll with the bend. The stars were dense.

A deep unknown stretch of time later, the truck slowed and then came to a stop. Their forward heading ghosts went on without them. Front doors opened and the two men stepped out silently. The driver stepped to the side and looked in at this passenger.

“Go pee if you want,” he said.

Tewwe didn’t return the look, just shook his head. Then changed his mind. Agile arms and legs sent him over the truck panel and the sand gave slightly under his boots. He didn’t pee. Stretching felt good. The goon with the rifle had his pants down, his back propped against the toasty front grill, trying to dump.

“Where are we going?” he asked the driver, and then inserted his own answer. “Don’t tell me. Fada.”

He meant to show he knew something about where they were headed, but it was a childish joke. The driver looked at him coldly. “Ounianga first,” he answered. “Visit the pig on your own time.” Fada and its people gave birth to and spit out the fat criminal prick president everyone else hoped at best to avoid, better yet see swinging from a tree. But his spaniels and henches kept everyone at knife point. Comparatively, Ounianga spread itself like honey over an oasis between where they were and the treacherous pile that was Fada. 

Tewwe’s juvenile guess made the driver warily curious. “What’s your story again?” Tewwe told him, in crisp, dry terms. He took his time. That it didn’t end well earned sympathetic nodding from the driver. His commandant, higher up than Captain and therefore tantalizingly closer to the pay and rewards promised to everyone, ordered the driver and twelve other men into ambulances provided by the freak’s perverse, unmilitary son. When the citizen-crowds marched, they were supposed to drive up to them, lights and horns flashing and when the crowd let them in, they opened the doors and started shooting.

“Terrible,” he said. “Terrible. I did that, but I also learned how those bastards think.” He touched his head. Locked safely inside. “It’s something your Fada pig-fuck would pull.”

Tewwe took the opportunity to be insulted. “Don’t confuse me with – ”
but the driver raised his hand and turned his cheek.

“Joking. Don’t get so hot.” He went to the cab, reached in and pulled out a bag just as the rifleman returned, tying his belt. The driver handed Tewwe the bag of food.

“Came out yellow,” the rifleman said.

“It’s that fish. I told you.”

Tewwe ate a little while the slim driver spoke. The driver liked to use his hands, deftly. He had beliefs, sturdy and earnest, crafted little by little by experience and driver-seat contemplation. Tewwe learned that the commandant was a template for planning and stalwart reserve, working collaterally to build a resolute force of modern, democratic fighters. We will be the spoils you bring home, the commandant told his men, the driver among. And as one, made of many, we will inflict real justice on the thieves and reprobates your family and kin all have to hide from individually.

Tewwe admitted this was the man he wanted to meet all along.

The driver agreed. The commandant himself pulled him aside and sent on this little mission because why? Trust, the driver answered. And loyalty in return. Fighting for the bedouin ass and his son didn’t matter as much as establishing relationships, learning who to trust, and recognizing what you really saw when you looked.

“When I opened fire in the ambulance, I recognized what or who I was shooting. Those people – they’re right. You’ll see. I was breathing their air. And so were you. So was he,” thumbing at the rifleman.

“I just want my pay,” the rifleman snorted, unfunny. When the other two didn’t pay attention, he sucked his gums with his tongue and spit.

Everyone back in their places, the truck churned on. It found a railroad and followed on the right of way. The packed sand and gravel helped their speed and for miles they hurtled track side, slightly canted and aloof from the shifting desert floor.

photo credit: Andrea Pistolesi

All the driver did that night was keep to the simplest route, and on the way passed black misshapen wrecks of tanks, peeled open with fire, still sitting cold and vacated, their turrets pointing south, meaningless and forgotten that night and every night. In the demi-moonlight of mission-haste and nonchalance, they looked like desert rocks. Even though they were also sent this way thirty years before by their employer, the same despot colonel whose whimsical fury was no different attacking the desert or defending his compound. It was also the route the commandant suggested.

In the back, having made friends, the prickly chill and the hunkered waiting in a dull trance didn’t take Tewwe over completely. Instead, he rolled in his mind what the driver was getting at. Justice, until this moment in the back of a fleeing truck, did not really hold any weight. Imams mentioned it but he couldn’t cut through their scolding and berating. Its lightness and certainty may as well have been compassion for aliens in the distant future.

But because of their shared gunfire experience, the driver managed to be the first to put a little context into Tewwe’s thinking. And out of that alchemy, his imagination tried on a little moral clarity. The vicious yellow teeth of thugs who broke into his home and left with his uncle then came back for his older brother, they brought into his home the wind of evil. The policeman who coolly collared his friend Janjan at the market for no good reason and stuck a reptilian finger in Tewwe’s face for silence and permanent foreboding, he spread the evil further. The official who accepted the money in a sack from his mother in one hand and with the other made his mother jerk with a sharp, hooked penetration that forced her to come whenever he called and return home even more frayed and poor – he was the infector and administrator of evil.

And still he was not the cause. These and the countless incidents everyone shared but didn’t speak about, until he couldn’t stand the ringing of awfulness in the air any more and left, it all oozed from the sore of Mustafeh Kep. He knew it because he was old enough to be alive when Mustafeh Kep appeared in his family’s region, sent up from Njdamena by the pig of Fada. They could all be eliminated from his memory at the hands of justice wielded by an army of inflexible men convinced of their truth and rectifying power.

First the sunlight warmed his forehead and eyelids, making sleep a little cozy and pleasant. Then the doors banged shut and he remembered lying in the back of a truck. He sucked in long warm breath and curled over his shoulder as the rifleman stood at the truck panel.

“Get up. We need some breakfast.”

He climbed down and found himself standing on the side of a thoroughfare already come to life with smoothly striding women, their children and the crumbly gaits of older men. The rose colored pinnacle rocks in the distance, the date palms, squat buildings nearly windowless and blind to the sun and the arcading dyed cotton sheets flapping above merchants, one next to the other down the length of the thoroughfare – he’d dropped into the time and setting of his unfinished childhood.

“What the hell are you doing?” the driver asked. He was heaving a large drum of gas into the truck’s fuel line.

I used to live here. “I know this place,” he answered. The cool floral scent of the lake, invisible but faithfully near, whipped around him.

“Hurry up.”

The tight pants screeched up his leg with his quick hop-to and finally tore along the inside seam. He shook his other leg to give it and his asscrack some room and then headed across the dusty road for the family who fried fangasou with the raisins. The pistol rocked and rolled in the jacket’s pocket as he jogged.

It should have felt like a homecoming morning, but the lopsided heft of the gun and the business he rode in with wiped that from his mind. It was only sentimental any way. He was concealing purposes and looking warily in all directions again, reviving that hunch-shouldered need to be invisible.

The building with food was a short walk upwind, but people were watching him already. He realized he was different now, walking upright, dressed modern, eyes on something. Who else wore that here? They were seeing purpose, confusing him with a stranger. Definitely – well, hopefully – not seeing the boy returned, the one who’d left in a panic the last time rebellion was fomenting around here and people started disappearing one at a time, or were popped in the street and left stone cold dead until nightfall and his own family scattered like beetles, children scurrying to hide in other homes. And he, gone.

“Good morning, mother,” he said to the old woman in the doorway. She was either waiting for him or guarding the door, the slanting shadow of morning sunlight cutting her in two. He didn’t want to shout. “Six fangasou. With raisins?” The woman didn’t move, the creases of her face dry and stagnant. Her bright little eyes blinked. He held up the paper money, hoping that would trigger an order to daughters inside. Instead she withdrew from the doorway. Two men sat against the building, regarding him.

He approached the doorway. What was she doing? As his eyes got used to the dark, he didn’t see a soul, not at the work table with the cups, knife and bowl or near the fire with the pan and the snapping grease. A thin almost naked child came around the corner, her mind on something else. A young woman yanked her back. He took a step inside when he heard the two men to his right stand up quickly and hurry away.

He turned around in the doorway as a cloud of dust moved across the street. Down by the truck two men with guns aimed down at a figure spread on the ground, a third waved a gun over the truck and two other men grappled a figure with his hands tucked behind his head. Their voices were secret, wind wiped.

Shit. His body whipped around once, twice. Shit! What?

A sixth man climbed into the cab of the truck, and started the engine. This was daylight organization, precise. The five men herded the driver and rifleman into the truck bed and then drove off, efficiently stranding him.

Bewildered, he backed into the house. Two women held three children while the old woman dangled her hands in front of her body. You’re trespassing, he thought and found a rear door.

The sunlight was brighter back here, opening to the desert. He kept  himself against the building, troubled, worrying, scanning his mind for a plan. Mustafeh Kep’s power now proved omnipotent, patrolled with men circling so high off the ground you could never see them. Their vigilance was devotionally hostile and they were deliberately kept untethered. The pitiless speed they used to snatch the truck, the driver, the rifle man, their guns, their plans, their bodies overwhelmed him.  He was lost in any direction he went.

He brought himself around to the front again and darted across the street, up another way perpendicular to the main road. There were residences scattered up here, people he knew, and maybe they could shelter him until nightfall, but after that he hadn’t a clue.

There were hills up this way and the road would eventually go out to the lake. But now he recalled the nature of this road. This was the road to the night building, the building among trees that was black inside, without rugs or furniture and an empty morning dread on the walls. The building everyone knew to avoid and swallowed in their minds that it even existed.

The truck sat outside.

A hundred yards away, the ravine he and his cousins played in and used as a safe conduit to visit the building after every incident could still protect him, even now. He crept close to the homes on his way there, then dashed to it when there was no more shelter. The gun, his sidekick, bounced against him.

There really wasn’t any planning in the ravine. He would snake with it, climb up its sides just outside the building, hide and then kill. Get the keys with or without the driver and the rifle man and drive away. More importantly, he would kill. For the first time, killing something that counted. Send his own message that the time had come. That was enough to goad him up the ravine.

The covert crouching was satisfying, menacing on its own. He relished the idea of laying these snarling assholes onto the bloody ground.

It was a quick exposed run from the ravine to the sheltering, desert-flaked sidewall. He sensed the noiseless vacuum of intention all around him. Against the building, but not touching it, he didn’t breathe. Rocks lay everywhere outside, their shadows pointing away from him, pointing away from every spot of the desert they lay in. But there was no where to go.

Then a shriek. It burst through the building and cut deeper and spread its barbs further inside him than he ever dreamed possible. Immediate and quailing like the shriek he heard in his home when they took his older brother to the back room and forced everyone out and he was kept still by the hostile ugly man pointing the weapon.

He was unmovable. And the next queasy wail turned him into water.

From the front a boy came around the corner, carrying a ball of fangasou in his hand. A half-mooned mouthful was bitten from it. He stopped when he saw Tewwe. Unmistakably, his cousin Djamou – this much older, this much left behind. Djamou gasped, uncertain if it was true.

“Djamou!” someone bellowed coming outside. He was reprimanding a child but also gripping a rifle with hair and blood smeared on the butt. He turned the corner and his sun shadowed face found Tewwe. Young Djamou, poised helplessly between now and then couldn't say a word either.

/End

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"The Mercenary Comes Home," © CMMartin, 2011

The Mercenary Comes Home, Part 1

The earliest phase of the Libyan upheaval, you may recall, was just an uprising, inspired by the apparent successes in Egypt and Tunisia. Libyan military officers defected and opened their ammunition dumps to their fellow rebels. At the same time, Colonel Qaddafi, wishing to spare his relatively tiny defense forces, hired mercenaries from Mali, Chad, Niger – black Africans all, and especially loathed by Arabs and Berbers of the Maghreb north. The Chadian mercenaries, particularly, have been led on by Qaddafi for years as a way to perpetuate his ongoing secret war against the Chadian government, also known as the most corrupt government in the world.

Photo by Anja Niedringhaus / AP

"Who would be born in a man's man's man's world?"

- Everything But the Girl, "Trouble and Strife"

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Translated from the Chadian French

Each man’s steps were routine, sometimes assertive, from the hips, but more or less cohesive to the unit. Each one was quiet. This wasn’t their city. Their boot falls popped and smeared with tiny crunches of glass and stone. To anyone hiding in the buildings, the crunching sound turned the neighborhood over to the African men, who were stepping through on behalf of the unseen but fantastically self-televised Colonel Dictator.

Most of the men didn’t give a crap about the neighborhood or anyone in the buildings. Anyone peeking was just cowering. The people likely to do anything to them were out with the crowds, the poncy Arab shits gone berserk. They, by not being here in the neighborhood, were the ones who held the black men’s attention. The men listened ahead of themselves, making their way down the tight Maghrebi street. The nearby uproar was rippling off the buildings, from somewhere.

Just a block ago the uproar was thin, speckley and distant. But they were heading towards each other and, leaving his body for a second, he thought: if the sound weren’t invisible it would be rising overhead like a khamsin dustcloud, looming, then shrouding his head and the street behind him.

Captain spoke from behind, in the middle, cursing and yelling sex talk back at the invisible crowd, trying like a football fan to make his men relaxed. Behind the captain, the tight-lipped, sunglassed overseers in their jeep kept pace, but tenuously, obligations teetering.

This was not like last night, in the pickup with the machine gun. That was almost like a night on the town, careening wherever they liked, pulling the trigger, yapping bullets into the air. They were having so much fun that when someone suggested they find some local pussy, that free, wild idea marked the height of possibly everything.

Today was different, the distant crowds. And the new orders: keep the terrorist crowds away from the plaza, shoot if you have to. He accepted the grim security detail trailing them: it was their country, their heads. Of course they’d want to see the job get done, done right. It was fortifying having experienced military watching.

He’d drawn the far right flank and chose to keep his eyes peeled that way.  A heavy gun was a safe gun and he was glad his grip was tight, a man’s. His small gun, a pistol – ok, that was still his sidekick – but it was tucked like a secret down his back. The heavy gun, held in front, was business.

Treading forward, his leg kicked at a small cafe table and it fell out of the way. He stepped onto a box of small fruit, then got annoyed by it. Who puts food on the ground? And also: it was almost clumsy. So he looked away from Captain and the minders on the chance they were looking at him, evaluating his stumble through boxes and tables. He put his attention into the vacated cafe on his right. The television was still on and it showed the upheavals and battles throughout the country in small pieces, Arabic flying out of the speaker. Best part was knowing he was ahead of the tv. It didn’t know what they were going to do.

Huh – Tewwe thought, humorously, with his safe gun. The drinks in the glasses were still shaking from the people who beat it. Funny. Except that another, smarter part of him said: No, wait. A shiverous no. And then his mind caught up – the ground was vibrating. It made him turn forward.

The tank ahead peeked out from the intersecting street. He felt his line, the men, bend backwards with disbelief. Its gun waggled, like an arm putting on a coat.

Captain saw it too and, irate with the sudden switch in power, yelled “God damn donkeyfuckers – “ and to his men, “Wait, let them come ...!” And then yelled at the tank, “My dick! In your mother’s camelcunt!”

Then the uproar arrived, whooshing down from the far side. The loose spray of the crowd poured into the street, consolidating, curling and gathering in front of where the black soldiers were walking. It buckled the line, sending the men toward Captain, making him angry with panic.

“Get away from me! Shoot, you fucks!” Behind him, the military jeep wheeled around and sped off. Tewwe saw it and decided they were probably heading to let higher ups know what they saw. Or to fetch reinforcements. The crowd and its commotion, overwhelming the little plattoon of soldiers, gathered in front of them, chanting, and he caught himself still standing upright, surveying. Not moving.

Mahmud Turkia / AFP / Getty Images

They didn’t just have chants and songs – incredulously, they had guns too, but no soldiers of their own. They just waved the guns around, shouting viciously, hatefully, buoyant with uprising. The rogue tank was still banging inexpertly behind them, trying to turn towards the foreign soldiers.

Then the bullets flecked and picked all around him. He pointed his safe gun at the crowd and then straight ahead at the dumb tank and then back again at the crowd. But rivulets of the crowd were spreading and collecting in front of him, sealing off his advance. Not all of them were armed, but all of them were angry, yelling infuriated variations of “Get out! African niggers: get out! Libya for Libyans!”

He didn’t want to fire at them, shouting banner-wavers in jackets. You fire at men who have guns and can take it. He shook his safe gun at them instead and yelled  something like, “Get out of here! No one wants to get hurt, you assholes!” just as angry and outraged as they were. “Give it to your wives!”

But the bullets kept flicking in from the other side, so he turned to fire in that direction and saw Captain snap backwards, spin like a dancer flinging blood and fall on his face. A yellow flash in the corner of his other eye and a frightening chunk of building erupted nearby. 

The men, his men, his friends even though they weren’t really but now they were – they crumpled, or fell, or ran backwards firing away. Only one man stood still, raking the crowd until he was struck from the side and left his feet. The crowd pounced on his spot.

The wheeling drunken tank took another swipe at the corner of the building. He felt the shocked air press him back against the cafe wall. The instinct to give room led his feet backwards and nearly tripped him over the upset cafe table. Still facing the crowd he sent a long step over the square tabletop dodging the metal column and spiking legs, hopped, and then dove to his knee. The rifle rested on the table edge and he pulled the trigger with a jolt. Some people’s shirts and chests ripped open, but then the tank announced itself again, cutting into the building nearest him with an ear dulling boom.

Some of the crowd on his end turned to the tank. “Tell that idiot to stop! There’re people here!” and yes! he agreed, that’s right. Shit with the tank! He wanted to get up and join them, waving his rifle. Get this back to something we can handle.

He glanced to his left and realized he was the most forward soldier. The rest of them were heading backwards, firing away or running. The swelling, impending moment of disaster grabbed hold: now was the time to leave.

So he about-faced, with his gun, and right away grasped how far they were separating from him. The sinuous membrane of coterie snapped and then he was just a black pebble left behind. The tank erupted again, giddily, and he felt exposed, available to be pricked by countless bullets or blown away by explosion. He crouched low, like in the movies, keeping his head down. He ran like that along the walls of the street until the fear was so much he fell into an empty space on his left. The doorway of a shop. The floor made his shoes slip and though he sensed the dangerous chaos diminish behind him, he wanted to run, get the hell out, go far away, get to safety, get away, go back.

He picked through the boxes in the hallway. Shoved away chairs. It was dark and there was something like a branch or a stick on the floor, a mop. It snagged itself between his legs but he crashed through or over it, tumbling at a wall in the blackness that gave way and whoosh: there he was in daylight. An alley, long. So he ran.

His hands were empty. Where was his gun? He felt it bang against his ribs, strapped without memory across his back. The alley had wires and tangles and boxes. A cat stopped, petrified for the newcomer. Behind him the crowd noise erupted into the empty shop as hundreds upon hundreds, regaining their street, marched over bodies and streamed ahead, thrilled with themselves.

The end of the alley came quickly and opened into another cross-street. When he got to the edge, the crowd noise blustered around the corner, unseen. He crouched against a wall and knew that if he peeked around, he’d be shot at. But he had to.

No one was there. Only the bodiless clamor of the crowd. Where were they going?

The rat survives, he thought, and ran across the street, then against its walls in the direction he guessed was opposite from the crowd’s and turned again into the first opening he found: another street. Also empty of people. Where were they? They were in the crowd, all around him. He ran down this street, too. And then chose another alley. Only to find that alley had an end.

It stood passively at the far end. Friendly. Like a door. He ran all the way up to it and it said, climb me. He found a way up, clutching with his fingers and digging with the cusp of his shoed toes and with a heave, over he went. He landed like a boy, on his feet, with a clack from the rifle butt, running before he found his balance, pumped, because when he was a boy, he got away hundreds of times and now he was doing it again, getting away and running, even here.

As if the wall was the perfect barrier, the angry din of the hundreds who wanted him dead disappeared. Then, not entirely. But enough to tell him he was ok, and with his gun, even safer. These were residences. Or rather, he was in the backs of residences. With fences, garbage, a couple trees, a ruined car, and a football rocking in a puddle.

Clothes flapped. He took a minute and settled into his breathing. Then his eyes started to see. He was in the middle of a city he wouldn’t give a finger for, in other peoples’ country, supposedly trying to help them save it from the riotous shitheads, the terrorists, who were trying to take over. He flashed on that cruel indomitability he sometimes tried to show off. But it wasn’t there now. He was still catching his breath.

Am I shot? Tewwe wondered. He patted himself, looked for blood on the ground. Clean, he thought, and laughed. They went through me. Ha!

The joke about magic dissipated. He was alone, among other people’s houses. This city sat on garbage.

He had to go. This whole enterprise was a dead end. Captain was dead and therefore no one would be impressed. If Captain was dead, he was worthless. He had to start all over again, find other men, this time smarter and better, more willing to help him and take him wholly, friendfully.

It’s not going to be these Libyan fucks, even with all their money and a savage delusional Colonel who flounced like a sheik, happy to kill his own people. That embarrassed Tewwe. Because up towards the sea, the Colonel’s men were folding like clothes in a basket, against a crowd of pussy Arabs who didn’t know how to shoot the rifles they found.

Embarrassment then bitterness: now he had to give up on seeing any reward, the leather wrapped money rolls, the money which the uniformed Libyan greaser said would do everyone good: first to help kill terrorists here, then punish and overthrow the fat criminal scumbags back home. You know who he would have started with? He would have started, first day, first hour, with Mustafeh Kep, le patron des fucking connards, the shithead who puts his foot on your throat, on the floor of your own home.

No, maybe, I don’t know. His breath caught, he was realized he was staring at the ground, making squiggles in the mix of sand and pavement with a stick. He stood up, intending to walk. But he was still swimming in his own thoughts. Maybe coming here was a mistake. A good guess, sure. But not any longer. Just have to find others to operate with.

The wind pushed his cheek. Clothes – that’s right. Hide these soldier clothes.

Clothes were nearby, in a yard to his right so he headed there. A blue shirt with white dots snapped on the line, black trousers bounced. He noticed a frayed lengthwise tear on the side of the shirt and a faint brownish tea stain around it. Still, very smart. A puffy sleeveless jacket sunned itself on the back of a chair. White stuffing pursed itself from a gash there, too.

Do it.

Soldier fatigues dropped to the ground and tangled around what his aunt called duck feet. The long sleeves of the rough-like-canvas army top wouldn’t let go and he angrily yanked one inside out around his fist. Relax he thought and the other sleeve slipped away effortlessly. On went the shirt. A wet spot on the shirt pinched his side, just where the tea stained hole was.

Oh, it dawned on him. A bullet. He connected the jacket with the shirt. and when he slipped into the jacket, he lined up the hole and gash like evidence. He jiggled his finger through the connection.

Soldier clothes stay with me – in a bag – from somewhere – he decided, looking around. He grabbed a torn white plastic sack caught on a weed and shoved his troubles inside, the soldier’s clothes.

The change of clothes brightened him, like a Saturday night.

He swung his safe gun behind him, slid his sidekick into the small cave of his lower back and walked. Within the first couple of strides, he was just a visitor here. Shades, like those worn by bodyguards at a nightclub, would be perfect. But the pants began to rebel: we’re too tight. They cleaved up his crotch, trying to divide his balls and nearly splitting the seam inside his thighs. Then the pistol chafed the top of his ass. He felt foolish.

 Further down, another yard. He dropped his troubles onto the ground and stepped in. He unswung his safe gun from his shoulders onto a rickety table. Gray pants, with stripes. Hell no – faggots. Ok, fine. Just by looking at them, they were big. Maybe with a rope or belt....

“Get away!” someone yelled in Arabic. It startled him. He looked around at several black faces. “What are you doing?” He turned to grab the rifle but another man held it in his thick paws. A fat man, with small white eyes, purple cheeks and little lips pursed with menace.

Tewwe answered with his first impulse. “Journalist,” he said and played the trick of believing it himself.

They didn’t believe him. Someone said, “Mercenary fuck.”

“No,” he corrected, countering with deeper belief, “A journalist.” He wrapped his conviction with an accent and some protective indignation. “Egypt. BBC.” He remembered that journalists were oily cowards and so raised his hands defenselessly, decorating his face with a toothy grin.

Even though they glared at him, a thoughtful pool of plausibility and consideration spread among the men. They were black like him and secluded like him in a country of Arabs and Berbers chanting and shooting in the streets beyond. 

“What are you doing here?” the man most directly in front asked. He tilted his head menacingly when he spoke, but he wore his clothes peacefully. The man of the house.

“The crowd!” It was beyond obvious. He kept his jaws tight and happy teeth showing, knowing to limit the words expressed to keep any accent buried down his throat.

Finally one of the men looked sideways at the master of the house. “There are black journalists.”

“What’s this?” the big man with his automatic yelled. It looked small against a body like that.

“Safety,” he answered, with a shrug.

His answers, his scared reasonableness, his hiding, his digging through people’s backyards like a dog cast a persuading glint onto what the men saw before them: journalists get into people’s business, his accent is from somewhere strange, he was afraid like they were of their neighbors and the used to be Arab friends who were now shooting at and rounding up blacks, no matter whether they lived here or not. Weren’t they all Africans, putting years and their families into living and working in a country just because it was only marginally better than where they came from? Isn’t a fragment of mercy like that enough among people? And all this because poor luckless Africans were chosen by the greasy thug in Tripoli as his defenders and some of those used to be friends secretly agreed, the maniac has to go?

Well, turmoil always washed misfortune up to anyone’s doorstep, like this journalist weasel.

Someone jumped hastily, believing the stranger. “We want to be free!”

“Stop,” the master of the house said, clearing the political air with a vague, harmless slogan. “Libya is for Libyans.” For godsakes, the stranger could be a spy, too.

Tewwe leapt into a final, lunatic gambit, summoning the Siwi-Arabic voice of his Egyptian mother and every radio program he’d overheard. “This is the BBC. Rebel mans ... journey today, with courage for bread, like Egyptian persons .... toppling the monkeyface. Old Arab Qaddafi in sheets with camel today.”

To the men, it was a bewildering array of words, smeared with foreign sounding accents and the blithe imbecility of the British. Enough to obscure a threat in their backyard.

“What news do you have?” someone else asked, but the man of the house stopped it there.

“Get out – whatever the hell you are.” He waved him away like smoke. “You have no right walking among our homes.”

Tewwe relaxed his grin. He nodded, apologetically. He used his eyes only to look at each man with a sturdy grace. Respect. The fat man kept his rifle and used it to move Tewwe along.

He retreated, one step at a time, steadying his gaze on each man, even when he bent down and grabbed his bag. Then he turned and walked, his mind swerving between bravery and prayer that a guileless retreat would prevent them from shooting him in the back.

/Continued

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Next: Into the desert at night, home by morning

  Next Part

"The Mercenary Comes Home" © CMMartin, 2011