Chapter 17
September 5th came. I counted out day twelve. Two hundred and forty-nine miles behind us was Denver. We were flying now, already about fifty miles into flat, spacious Kansas. We had thanked Megan for putting us up for the night. Declan had warmly hugged his sister good-bye, and we were off like that. The great stretches of the plains of Colorado had passed; it was hundreds of miles of dizzying yellow fields and lazy-eyed Susans that called to us from the roadside, but we wouldn’t fall under their hypnotizing spell. There simply wasn’t enough time. Looking at the road bridges in the horizon, we tried to fathom their distance; we tried to guess how far away they were. Lucas guessed four miles, and I guessed fifteen, but it was only 2.8 miles to the first bridge.
“But I thought the naked eye can see for at least fifty miles,” Declan said.
Lucas just shrieked in laughter at him, looking ahead as he drove, not even turning to him now.
Monotonous miles rolled by us on the lonesome road; these were the idle times in between the friendly faces and this was always the worst of it all. Memories of Colette played over and over again in my mind; I heard ballads composed of lonely lyrics, spinning sideways in a dream, a boomerang whisked out over the empty fields of Kansas, and came right back in to sit with me.
Her candor
A plaid chair made of wicker
Her soft light may always flicker
Although
The wax turns into liquid
Intrigued without a doubt
Impressionable as something
I tipped it to pour it out
To know
“Can the naked eye see the moon?” Declan asked. And out came another shriek of laughter from Lucas, who then rolled down his window and screamed an ear-piercing scream into the lonely western Kansas sky. He screamed a native warrior’s cry; a cry above the silence that he was so accustomed to, pulling the energy from the clouds of the past, and trying to make something significant of it all. We were all screaming forward, breaking into the lazy early afternoon at close to eighty miles per hour, trying to overcome the speed of sound.
After more rolling hills and well into the state on Interstate 70, a wily coyote suddenly ran right across the road in front of us. I was driving now. I tightened on the brakes, panicked at first, then relaxed and eased up all at once. I saw the sly canine scatter to the shoulder. In the rearview mirror, I caught him looking back at us; he was just a little curious, but not enough to know that this big rolling double-ton machine with the surfboard attached to it almost ran him down flat, just like in those old Roadrunner cartoons. The coyote took one last look at us before he ducked into some tumbleweed brush by the side of the road and disappeared forever; he wandered on with his own existence, simply oblivious to his sudden luck to live another day. The country music from the local snowy airwaves played to us, and a radio commercial for International Harvester told us how great it would be to own one: the “Combine Harvester International 1440 of 1984!”
My father, Frank, was a parts man for International Harvester heavy equipment tractors. He once sold their bulldozers and backhoes; he did this for the better part of his blue-collar career. The company’s huge, one-sheet, four-colored, glossy calendars always adorned the door to the back shed in our Eighteenth Street kitchen year after year. These calendars ran the whole paneled door of the shed. Behind the shed door, Frank kept his case of ginger ales at room temperature in the sweaty summertime; the shed that led to a further back shed where the old cigarette cards of boxers had been tacked up 100 years before us. Old Man Woodward, who had built the house, had punched the cigarette cards up there for sure; he had punched them up way back in the 1880s, those faded colored illustrations of old boxers, like Joe Coburn and Patsy Cardiff, with their drawn fists up. The cards themselves survived through the winter cold of close to 100 New England years and also weathered the humidity of all of those moist, exhausting summers . . . except now, they had become part of the old shed beams themselves, and could only be flaked off with a jackknife; otherwise, they would have fetched a collector’s fortune for me, for sure.
Luke had been reading Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb, all the way from Denver to Topeka. He talked in the car about chapters twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen.
“They’re the best chapters in the book, Mike. You’ve really got to read them,” he told me.
Shirley MacLaine was all the rage in 1984 with her revelations of past lives and reincarnation. These New Age beliefs centered around the theory that everyone had multiple lives; these “lives” were like rooms in an infinitely large house, and we all passed through them, they said, going from one room to the next when we died—just opening and closing doors, walking throughout all of eternity like this . . . except the next room could be bigger and better than the one behind you if you suddenly became “consciously aware.” That was the whole purpose of life, the “New Agers” said . . . to learn, to grow, to be a better person, and to graduate into the next room; sort of like how it all happened in Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull as the seagull flew to higher and higher planes. Of course, there was the whole “consciously aware” hurdle that you had to get over, I thought. It was magical, I guess, if you got to the next room (your next life) “consciously aware” of it all.
Someone in one of these New Age groups had explained to me that “consciously aware” was the realization of the lives we had behind us, before birth, and to be ready for those ahead of us, after death. Before we were born, we were someplace else, and simply had opted out of that place at the time of death to take on a whole new experience. We didn’t necessarily have to have lived on earth; we could have lived anywhere in the universe, they said. We could have been extraterrestrials or even free-floating souls without a body. If we became aware of just who we were before this life and what we had learned in those lives and applied that to our own life, the lives ahead of us would get better and better.
But where did we go if we never became “consciously aware”? Supposedly, we went into another life anyway, but just not aware of any of our past lives. I wondered if I had been Mark Twain. I secretly wished that I was.
“Do you ever wonder if Scientologists are reading this stuff?” Declan asked. “Don’t Scientologists believe in extraterrestrials? I sure would never want to come back to earth as a Scientologist!”
I thought back to this one crazy guy in a Scientologist building in Los Angeles. He had the two big Dalmatian-colored mastiffs with him as he tried to convert us to Scientology while we worked as grips for the American Film Institute. He wouldn’t leave us alone. He kept on hanging around and talking to us. The Scientologists believed in extraterrestrials.
“Did you know that Jimmy Carter believes in extraterrestrials? He’s even seen UFOs!” Declan exclaimed.
I guess it would be kind of cool to have a religion that truly believed in extraterrestrials. I used to believe in them, I guess. There was a day in 1980 when I lay in a hospital bed in Lowell with mononucleosis and scarlet fever, on top of it. I hallucinated in my 104-degree fever about being with the extraterrestrials on Tralfamadore in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. I really thought I was there, lying in a Tralfamadorian hospital with an IV going drip-drip into my arm. But then I got over the illness.
I made a wish on a shooting star
I made a wish in a speeding car
People in cars are like people in jars
But people in jars can’t get close to the stars
’Cause they’re airtight
The New Agers said that there were supposedly millions of planes of existence out there too, and there were millions of beings that looked and thought like us in those other dimensions; millions of other selves like me that had taken the opposite path from a path that I had taken.
“I hope one of my other selves is dating a black girl right now!” Decky gasped. “Geez, I’ve always wanted to date a black girl!”
Heaven seemed a lot less complicated; there wasn’t all of these opening and closing of doors, just one waiting room if you didn’t make it all the way—a room called purgatory. You live a good life by being nice to people, and then you die and go to this beautiful warm place called purgatory, and as long as you repent, you never have to worry about walking through the wrong door again. You’re done.
“The Jews don’t even think there is a hell!” Declan remarked. “Just a longer stay in a place like purgatory, depending on how bad you lived your life.”
I kind of liked the Jewish plan. It seemed a lot easier than Catholicism with a little less guilt.
I wondered while we drove along in the car that day if extraterrestrials believed in heaven and hell. We talked and talked on that long ride across America, the miles in between friends and family, for there was so much to talk about, and we never wanted to tire of it. If only it could have lasted forever.
I had once visited this famous medium psychic lady, Morticia Comet, back in Anaheim in 1983 with Dolores the polytheist (from the circuit board factory). When we walked into the place, I saw that Morticia had a waiting room in her house filled with gullible people who each wanted to give her twenty dollars for a psychic reading. Dolores and I were two of those people that day. Morticia pulled each of us into another private room, one by one, and took our money; she turned her eyeballs up into her head and went into a crazy trance, her voice turned real smoky, and she told me that she was channeling a spirit none other than Seth himself! I wondered how she could do this if Jane Roberts was the only one who channeled Seth. Maybe channeling spirits was a nonexclusive thing. Maybe anyone could channel a famous spirit like Seth. I bet old Morticia would have channeled an extraterrestrial too, if only I had asked about one.
Morticia Comet told her victims exactly what they wanted to hear. She looked me over; she looked at my calloused hands from weightlifting and guessed that I worked as a laborer somewhere. I told her she was exactly right. We all had come in droves to see Morticia the gypsy lady. We lined the waiting room in nervous anticipation of what good fortune would come next . . . all for the price of a twenty-dollar bill. It was like the sad plight of the lemmings.
On that day in 1983 in Anaheim, the gypsy told me that I had fought for the Confederacy in America’s Civil War. I asked Morticia about my hot left foot that was always bothering me when I lay in bed at night. I had fought in the 49th North Carolina Infantry, she said, and had lost my left leg in The Battle of the Crater; that’s why I had this crazy hot foot at night. My left foot would continue to turn insanely hot when I lay down to sleep for the rest of my life because of that gruesome battle, she said. The frozen water bottle (to rest my hot foot on so I could relax and go to sleep) would have to stay at the foot of my bed forever. For twenty dollars, Morticia told me that the hot foot would never go away.
“Did I die in that battle, ma’am?”
“No, you lived for many years after it,” Morticia told me. Of course, I did!
I also asked the twenty-dollar gypsy if she knew the author Richard Bach, and sure enough, she used to date him! Of course, she did! She told me everything I wanted to hear, all for the price of twenty dollars.
In Kansas, we drove by alfalfa fields, fields of hay and grasses, and steel silos, with cattle in the distance. All of the livestock appeared to be frozen miniatures so far across the fields, frozen yet discernible, dotting the low hills for miles. Here we were right smack-dab in the middle of America, I thought, sailing east with a surfboard atop our car, the three of us braving the seas of waving grains, spellbound, cruising on the greatest deck of the greatest ship of our forever beautiful lives.
Declan had picked up a crazy straw hat somewhere along the route. Lucas and I had no idea where it came from. He pulled it out from his collection of things to wear through Kansas like Huck Finn. All of a sudden, Decky wanted to stop on the shoulder for a single long strand of wheat or some grain to clench between his teeth while we drove into the radio airwave stock calls of a country-accented announcer. We pulled over briefly for Decky to get his fix, and the announcer then proclaimed, “Mayweed at 262, large corn at 292 and a quarter, and soybeans at 629 high!” In the sun, I watched swirls of miniature wind tunnels kicking up on the harvested torn up fields around us. Out of the car, I now sensed the Midwest humidity, the musty and sticky humidity that had slowly overtaken us, mile by mile, deep into Kansas. We had long left the cool, smoggy breezes and urban streets of Denver behind.
Denver was 300 miles behind us. The sea of Kansas roared with waves of rolling green hills; corn and soybeans called the odds against everything now. Time was flying. Four big western states were now nothing but written memories in a notebook; the smoky sand castles of ghosts and gamblers who played their own futures in Winnemucca were gone. The eve of the burly Midwest now beckoned to us to stay close and follow her eastward.
The ’80s band Berlin dribbled the song “The Metro” from the radio. It was new music of synthesized sounds, electronic keyboards, and a fast-paced tempo; a tempo too quick for Kansas. It didn’t belong here. This was the tempo for beer-drenched disco nightclubs in Huntington Beach, I thought, where DJs like Snaggletooth Sabbath sat in dark booths while people lined the packed dance floor smoking their cigarettes. Music for the dance clubs . . . the beat playing over and over as our beach friend Brian Kelly shrieked the corn dog whistle at all of the passersby. If the girls turned to look his way while he shrieked that whistle, he had a chance to take them home.
On that lonely coyote highway in Kansas, we passed a few more fields colored with rusted alfalfa before the landscape finally turned into the hills and trees of Luke’s native Topeka.
We had arrived! Topeka at last! Past the city, we pulled into Luke’s childhood driveway at dusk. I silently observed the waning light in the smoky rural wind, with the orange sun highlighting a faint five-mile distant Topeka dome; a dome nestled in the forefront of a skyline that slowly sank back toward Denver and Winnemucca and Huntington Beach.
We got out of the car as Midwest screen doors slammed on their rusty wire springs everywhere. There was an unexplained comfort to it all . . . the smell of the last of the August air lingered in the night, somewhat cooling; the monotone buzz of the cicadas went uninterrupted. It reminded me of where we were and where we might have been. The buzzes were close enough to the sounds of my summer childhood to awaken all of the Eighteenth Street memories again. The cicada sounds were different than their New England cousins, however. The New England Dogday Harvestflies had much thicker accents, deep and chainsawlike, accents that extended for a minute or two longer and sounded more like the sounds of engines from minibikes twisting up those Christian Hill streets. The Kansas cicadas were softer yet more succinct.
I wondered for a moment about the biblical plague of the locusts as I looked out onto the cornfields in Lucas’s backyard and listened to the emerging night of his Topeka. I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was a picture of the Midwest in my mind with swarms of locusts all over the crops from some distant story I had heard. Perhaps it was from the background ringing of the cicadas themselves.
The storms of thorns
Reigned outside
As thick as a plague of locusts
A shelter of comfort
Reigned inside
Where people had turned to their faith
Luke’s mother, the sweet matriarch of the Coppens family, was sitting in her living room watching TV when we walked in through the back screen door of her house. His father had long left his mother to raise seven kids on her own. The wire spring stretched and then pulled the door back, making it slam on the threshold, boldly announcing our arrival. I watched the Everly Brothers singing on TV in the reflection of the big picture window across the Topeka living room as Mrs. Coppens all at once jumped up and smiled, then moved quickly to her son. The Everlys were live in concert singing “Bye, Bye, Love.”
And the cicadas joined in and sang up from the cornfields that lay just out the back door in the Kansas night. They would never leave, for they belonged here; their sounds had been a part of these regions for centuries, I guessed. They were the sounds of the earth that came before us all, sounds that were with the natives of the plains all the way to the Merrimack, sounds that came with the retreat of the great mile-high cliffs of ice that first exposed these virgin resources of our great, beautiful America and begat all of creation.