Fast Lanes Read online

  After the birth her mother locked the door against him. This country, she always said, will fall from within.

  15. Aqua

  He writes letters to an address in the Yucatán. He pretends it doesn’t matter where she is.

  If she returns, he tells her, she will find his messages in a post office box he has rented in her name. He describes their street and says he is leaving it. Though it is nearly summer, used furs are displayed on headless mannequins outside the second-hand stores. Cuban children melt crayons in matchbook fires. They dot the cracked sidewalks with aqua. Scarlet. Tangerine.

  He puts her belongings in storage. Cleans out the desk and finds a pair of pale blue stockings rolled up in a drawer. He hangs them in the bathroom and doesn’t touch them again.

  16. Knots

  He is at loose ends and visits his family. They are old. Even the cousins are sixty, all of it old. They are small town aristocrats of dwindling means. The old woman in her bed leans heavily on her unbroken hip. She speaks of his father.

  He would be glad you have come.

  I have not come. My friends expect me in France at the end of the month.

  He would be glad you have come, his son.

  She fingers absently a spray of forsythia arched from a vase by the bed. It is the waxy deep yellow of butter melted to a puddle and then frozen. He feels it is violent.

  17. Trainman

  She leaves Mexico. She thinks her sight is failing. Each week, boys’ faces in the market wandered on their heads. She takes the train to New York, she tells no one.

  The morning settles its rust. Machines pour grain in Chessie cars, shadows of a cat. A broken diesel on grass tracks is alone. She sees its underwater bulk, a blank furred rock in waving heat.

  Lengthening noon, the long tunnels. A young black woman stiffens in sleep. Hair like a bleached fox, rolled eyes drawn Asian. Her son stands, sways in the bald dark. Why can we get out. When we gonna get out. His mother moans and sucks her breath.

  Columned houses deserted by the tracks. In a doorway, an old man sits in a wheelchair. Cock in his lap a limpid flower. As they go by he waves a rumpled shirt. Flaps his arms on his naked legs. Yells Hah Hah Hah. His face burns her, she sees him cleanly.

  18. Circle

  He wants her. He feels her disappearing. His desire comes on like acid, the air changes.

  A circus camps in the town, afternoons he walks the grounds. Greased men swallow fire and bulge their black eyes. He feels those torches in their throats. The crowd cheers, tossing hats. Highschool boys in tight jeans with zippered pockets eye the trapeze girls. Lusting, afraid of their faces.

  Faded straw on floors of the cages. He watches the animals. A demented lion rolls its head at the bars for hours. Rancid, stinking of meat. He sees its manged head circle, one round eye that keeps going.

  How could he have had her. Not this hole in the days, its chemical taste. Her voice saying You can’t get it man, I haven’t got it.

  19. Guns

  The old woman gives him a ring inlaid with pearl and a derringer which fits his hand like a musical instrument. She tells him his ancestor carried the gun when the land was only territory.

  Back then they all died of typhus.

  At night he hears bats moving air in the barn. He fires the gun to hear their gargoyle chime. Their fingered wings. The religious air smells of holes.

  20. Letters

  She keeps his letters in a box. She ties it with string and watches for the string to move. As a child she wrote herself letters, signing them Constance, Dimitri.

  Tying each bundle with ribbons. Ribbons she finds in the street.

  At night she sends one letter. To a name in the phone book or someone they mention in the news. Paper blank as a pebble. She uses a cheap plastic pen. She sees her hand hold it like some webbed hook. She wants to choke her wrist.

  Her wrist, wound in a bracelet of lines. And the envelope is smooth and white. Cold rectangle, a piece of snow. She can feel it falling. Open this, she writes across its face, Open this.

  21. Bridge

  Some nights he drives around until the dark dispels. Dirt roads lace the property. Cars hunched in the dark are sexual. The hay fields smell of adolescence.

  Always he drives the perimeter of the town until lights flatten and the river comes up on his right, comes up for years at the side of his face. The suspension bridge shudders and the sound makes its tunnel in him. Still the steel is buckled where one of his father’s drivers pitched into the water. Drunken, the lurching truck.

  He was perhaps fourteen. The old man’s face wavering in light from the hall. Get up, we have the river to drag. The truck hauled up broke water and streamed like something live. Its blunt snout. He shivered on the bridge, aware of his contracted sex, and something gave way.

  Bluegill

  Hello my little bluegill, little shark face. Fanged one, sucker, hermaphrodite. Rose, bloom in the fog of the body; see how the gulls arch over us, singing their raucous squalls. They bring you sweetmeats, tiny mice, spiders with clasped legs. In their old claws, claws of eons, reptilian sleep, they cradle shiny rocks and bits of glass. Boat in my blood, I dream you furred and sharp-toothed, loping in snow mist on a tundra far from the sea. I believe you are male; will I make you husband, uncle, brother? Feed you in dark movie houses of a city we haven’t found? This village borders waves, roofs askew, boards vacant. I’ll leave here with two suitcases and a music box, but what of you, little boot, little head with two eyes? I talk to you, bone of my coming, bone of an earnest receipt. I feel you now, steaming in the cave of the womb.

  Here there are small fires. I bank a blaze in the iron stove and waken ringed in damp; how white air seeps inside the cracked houses, in the rattled doors and sills. We have arrived and settled in a house that groans, shifting its mildewed walls. The rains have come, rolling mud yards of fishermen’s shacks down a dirt road to the curling surf. Crabs’ claws bleach in spindled grass; dogs tear the discarded shells and drag them in rain. They fade from orange to peach to the pearl of the disembodied. Smells crouch and pull, moving in wet air. Each night crates of live crab are delivered to the smokehouse next door. They clack and crawl, a lumbering mass whose mute antennae click a filament of loss. Ocean is a ream of white meat, circles in a muscular brain. I eat these creatures; their flesh is sweet and flaky. They are voiceless, fluid in their watery dusk, trapped in nets a mile from the rocky cliffs. You are some kin to them, floating in your own dark sac.

  Kelp floats a jungle by the pier, armless, legless, waving long sea hair, tresses submerged and rooty. These plants are bulbs and a nipple, rounded snouts weaving their tubular tails. Little boys find them washed up on the beach, wet, rubbery, smelling of salt. They hold the globular heads between their legs and ride them like stick horses. They gallop off, long tails dragging tapered in the sand. They run along the water in groups of three or four, young centaurs with no six-guns whose tracks evoke visions of mythical reptiles. They run all the way to the point, grow bored, fight, scatter; finally one comes back alone, preoccupied, dejected, dragging the desultory tail in one hand as the foamy surf tugs it seaward. I watch him; I pretend you see him too, see it all with your X-ray vision, your soft eyes, their honeycomb facets judging the souls of all failed boys. We watch the old ones, the young ones, the boats bobbing their rummy cargoes of traps and nets and hooks.

  I sit at the corner table of the one restaurant, a diner near the water where fishermen drink coffee at six A.M. I arrive later, when the place is nearly empty, when the sun slants on toward noon and the coffee has aged to a pungent syrup. The waitress is the postmaster’s wife; she knows I get one envelope a month, that I cash one check at MacKinsie’s Market, that I rent a postbox on a six-month basis. She spots my ringless hands, the gauntness in my face, the calcium pills I pull out of my purse in a green medicinal bottle. She recognizes my aversion to eggs; she knows that blur in my pupils, blur and flare, wavering as though I’m sucked inward by a small interior f
lame. You breathe, adhered to a cord. Translucent astronaut, your eyes change days like a calendar watch. The fog surrounds us, drifting between craggy hills like an insubstantial blimp, a whale shape that breaks up and spreads. Rock islands rise from the olive sea; they’ve caught seed in the wind and sit impassive, totems bristling with pine. Before long they will split and speak, revealing a long-trapped Hamlin piper and a troop of children whose bodies are musical and perfect, whose thoughts have grown pure. The children translate each wash of light on the faces of their stone capsules; they feel each nuance of sun and hear the fog as a continuous sigh, drifted breath of the one giant to whom they address their prayers. They have grown no taller and experienced no disease; they sleep in shifts. The piper has made no sound since their arrival. His inert form has become luminous and faintly furred. He is a father fit for animalistic angels whose complex mathematical games evolve with the centuries, whose hands have become transparent from constant handling of quartz pebbles and clear agates. They have no interest in talk or travel; they have developed beyond the inhabitants of countries and communicate only with the unborn. They repudiate the music that tempted them and create it now within themselves, a silent version expressed in numerals, angles, complicated slitherings. They are mobile as lizards and opaque as those small blind fish found in the still waters of caves. Immortal, they become their own children. Their memories of a long-ago journey are layered as genetics: how the sky eclipsed, how the piped melody was transformed as they walked into the sea and were submerged. The girls and smaller boys remember their dresses blousing, swirling like anemones. The music entered a new dimension, felt inside them like cool fingers, formal as a harpsichord yet buoyant, wild; they were taken up with it days at a time.…

  Here in the diner, there is a jukebox that turns up loud. High school kids move the tables back and dance on Friday nights. They are sixteen, tough little girls who disdain makeup and smoke Turkish cigarettes, and last year’s senior boys who can’t leave the village. Already they’re hauling net on their father’s boats, learning a language of profanity and back-slapping, beer, odd tumescent dawns as the other boats float out of sight. They want to marry at twenty, save money, acquire protection from the weather. But the girls are like colts, skittish and lean; they’ve read magazines, gone to rock concerts, experimented with drugs and each other. They play truant and drive around all day in VWs, listen to AM radio in the rain and swish of the wipers, dream of graduation and San Francisco, L.A., Mexico. They go barefoot in the dead of winter and seldom eat; their faces are pale and dewy from the moist air, the continuous rains. They show up sullen-eyed for the dances and get younger as the evening progresses, drinking grocery-store mixed drinks from thermoses in boys’ cars. Now they are willing to dance close and imitate their mothers. Music beats in the floor like a heart; movie-theme certainty and the simple lyric of hold-me-tight. I pause on my nightly walks and watch their silhouettes on the windows; nearby the dock pylons stand up mossy and beaten, slap of the water intimate and old. Boys sit exchanging hopeful stories, smoking dope. Sometimes they whistle. They can’t see my shape in my bulky coat. Once, one of them followed me home and waited beyond the concrete porch and the woodpile; I saw his face past the thrown ellipses of light. I imagined him in my bed, smooth-skinned and physically happy, no knowledge but intent. He would address you through my skin, nothing but question marks. Instructed to move slowly from behind, he would be careful, tentative, but forget at the end and push hard. There is no danger; you are floating, interior and protected; but it’s that rhythmic lapsing of my love for you that would frighten; we have been alone so long. So I am true to you; I shut off the light and he goes away. In some manner, I am in your employ; I feed my body to feed you and buy my food with money sent me because of you. I am very nearly married to you; and it is only here, a northwestern fishing village in the rains, constant rain, that the money comes according to bargain, to an understanding conceived in your interest. I have followed you though you cannot speak, only fold, unfold. Blueprint, bone and toenail, sapphire. You must know it all from the beginning, never suffer the ignorance of boys with vestigial tails and imagined guns. I send you all these secrets in my blood; they wash through you like dialysis. You are the animal and the saint, snow-blind, begun in blindness … you must break free of me like a weasel or a fox, fatherless, dark as the seals that bark like haunted men from the rocks, far away, their calls magnified in the distance, in the twilight.

  Ghost, my solitaire, I’ll say your father was a horse, a Percheron whose rippled mane fell across my shoulders, whose tight hide glimmered, who shivered and made small winged insects rise into the air. A creature large-eyed, velvet. Long bone of the face broad as a forearm, back broad as sleep. Massive. Looking from the side of the face, a peripheral vision innocent, instinctual.

  But no, there were many fathers. There was a truck, a rattling of nuts and bolts, a juggling of emergencies. Suede carpenter’s apron spotted with motor oil, clothes kept in stacked crates. There were hands never quite clean and later, manicured hands. A long car with mechanical windows that zimmed as they moved smoothly up and down, impenetrable as those clear shells separating the self from a dreamed desire (do you dream? of long foldings, channels, imageless dreams of fish, long turnings, echoed sounds and shading waters). In between, there were faces in many cars, road maps and laced boots, hand-printed signs held by the highway exits, threats from ex-cons, cajoling salesmen, circling patrolmen. There were counters, tables, eight-hour shifts, grease-stained menus, prices marked over three times, regulars pathetic and laughing, cheap regulation nylons, shoes with ridged soles, creamers filled early as a truck arrives with sugared doughnuts smelling of vats and heat. Men cursed in heavy accents, living in motor hum of the big dishwashers, overflowed garbage pails, ouzo at the end of the day. Then there were men across hallways, stair rails, men with offices, married men and their secretaries, empty bud vase on a desk. Men in elevators, white shirts ironed by a special Chinaman on Bleecker. Sanitary weekend joggers, movie reviewers, twenty-seventh floor, manufactured air, salon haircuts, long lunches, tablecloths and wine. Rooftop view, jets to cut swelling white slashes in the sky. And down below, below rooftops and clean charmed rhymes, the dark alleys meandered; those same alleys that crisscross a confusion of small towns. Same sideways routes and wishful arrivals, eye-level gravel, sooty perfumes, pale grass seeding in the stones. Bronzed light in casts of season: steely and blue, smoke taste of winters; the pinkish dark of any thaw; then coral falling in greens, summer mix of rot and flowers; autumn a burnt red, orange darkened to rust and scab. All of it men and faces, progression, hands come to this and you, grown inside me like one reminder.

  He faced me over a café table, showed me the town on a map. No special reason, he said, he’d been here once; a quiet place, pretty, it would do. One geography was all he asked in the arrangement, the “interruption.” He mentioned his obligation and its limits; he mentioned our separate paths. I don’t ask here if they know him, I don’t speculate. I’ve left him purely, as though you came to me after a voyage of years, as though you flew like a seed, saw them all and won me from them. I’ve lived with you all these months, grown cowish and full of you, yet I don’t name you except by touch, curl, gesture. Wake and sleep, slim minnow, luminous frog. There are clues and riddles, pages in the book of the body, stones turned and turned. Each music lasts, forgetful, surfacing in the aisles of anonymous shops.

  Music, addition and subtraction, Pavlovian reminder of scenes becoming, only dreamed. Evenings I listen to the radio and read fairy tales; those first lies, those promises. Directions are clear: crumbs in the woods, wolves in red hoods, the prince of temptation more believable as an enchanted toad. He is articulate and patient; there is the music of those years in the deep well, plunk of moisture, whish of the wayward rain, and finally the face of rescue peering over the stone rim like a moon. Omens burst into bloom; each life evolved to a single moment: the ugly natural, shrunken and wise, cradled in a
palm fair as camellias.

  Knot of cells, where is your voice? Here there are no books of instructions. There is the planed edge of the oaken table, the blond rivulets of the wood. There is a lamp in a dirty shade and the crouched stove hunkering its blackness around a fiery warmth. All night I sit, feeling the glow from a couch pulled close to the heat. Stirring the ashes, feeding, feeding, eating the fire with my skin. The foghorn cries through the mist in the bay: bawaah, bawaah, weeping of an idiot sheep, steady, measured as love. At dawn I’m standing by the window and the fishing boats bob like toys across the water, swaying their toothpick masts. Perfect mirage, they glisten and fade. Morning is two hours of sun as the season turns, a dime gone silver and thin. The gnarled plants are wild in their pots, spindly and bent. Gnats sleep on the leaves, inaugurating flight from a pearly slime on the windowpane. Their waftings are broken and dreamy, looping in the cold air of the house slowly, so slowly that I clap my hands and end them. Staccato, flash: that quick chord of once-upon-a-time.

  Faraway I was a child, resolute, small, these same eyes in my head sinking back by night. Always I waited for you, marauder, collector, invisible pea in the body. I called you stones hidden in corners, paper fish with secret meanings, clothespin doll. Alone in my high bed, the dark, the dark; I shook my head faster, faster, rope of long hair flying across my shoulders like a switch, a scented tail. Under the bed, beyond the frothy curtain duster, I kept a menagerie of treasures and dust: discarded metallic jewelry, glass rhinestones pried from their settings, old gabardine suitcoat from a box in the basement, lipsticks, compacts with cloudy mirrors, slippers with pompoms, a man’s blue silk tie embossed with tiny golf clubs. At night I crawled under wrapped in my sheets, breathing the buried smell, rattling the bed slats with my knees. I held my breath till the whole floor moved, plethora of red slashes; saw you in guises of lightning and the captive atmosphere.