Copper Crawdad Pageant in Chains

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

Alright, alright, alright! We must
barter our way back from God then, all the way
from Genesis, creeping backward, back, but
keep your opaline eyes fixed forward, keep your
filthy hands to yourself, and keep your feet
on the platform at all times. Don't look back.
Too many wine jugs and coffee cups and mugs
of chicken noodle soup back there. We'd gone
up to New York and stared upwards at those
soaring steel canyon walls, craning our own
aching necks, stiff-neck stunned, and then
all those museums glutted with paint and lapidary,
and once more staring at the pulsing tide-tugged
humanity through the corner windows of Italian
restaurants. Horses and hay bales and old
ice wagons and yellow dogs that bellow
and slump away into litter alleys. Joceyln
puffing steady-fast through puffy lids on brown
cigarettes, gazing languidly down along her
horsey nose, sniffs disdainfully, all-knowingly,
been there, seen it all, done it all, don't
need any more advice from a hillbilly nobody like
you, and I'm more jaded and cynical than
you'll ever be in your wildest dreams. The elms
are pitifully pulling up the concrete, fingers
reaching for the air and light. River tugs
blare distant-cool. In the purple mountain mist
they say the ghosts of the revolution may
still be seen on certain cold nights in October or
early November, glittering when the stars
behind them are in particular conformations. Myself,
I'm skeptical of all these kinds of
legends and innuendo. Rose Marie pulls a pen out
from behind her ear and starts scribbling furiously
in the tiny notebook she totes about everywhere
she goes. "For my novel," she volunteers
when no one will ask her about it or even
notice, and she makes a wry try at a smile, but
I know for a fact that Rose Marie never
even finished fifth grade, and I'd give a pretty
penny to look in that book, cos I'll bet it's
just hen-scratched to help her feel
herself into life, or maybe two pennies, but it
wouldn't be worth any more, and probably not
even that.

We were still up in Nebraska Territory fighting
the Indians when word came of Henry's parole.
No one cared. Henry never had any sense anyway,
common or otherwise, and besides, we had the
horses to mind and our noses down in the dirt, sniffing
out the signs. The war hadn't really got rolling
yet, but we were all pretty excited about it
and keyed up, you bet. At nights we set our sentries
and built our fires and whetted our knives and
thought about certain girls we'd known or
hadn't really, mostly, but it being unlucky
to talk about such things, we mostly listened
to the sad wailing of the wind and anticipated the
fast food franchise chains and dirty
strip mall clones that one day would
ruin all this savage, wild land. The buffalo
were already long gone. I had a harmonica and I was
pretty good playing it. Could speak Spanish
real good, too. I always wondered what
the wolves thought about all that spectacle; but then again,
the rattlesnakes were a greater caution,
and they said the rattlesnakes were all deaf and
couldn't hear a thing. But you never know. Do you?
No.

Like how Bridey Lee Tullison used to could play harmonium
and even dance passably before she lost her leg
to shark bite. Now she steps up to the pool table, just
tottering barely. "Anybody feeling lucky?" she thunders out.
None of us is, I guess. Bridey likes to slide
the beads along with her cue, back and forth, back
and forth, the green lamp glow making her face go
all Frankenstein. She's a big girl, is Bridey Tullison. She
racks them up after a while for herself,
loses the game.

There never is really enough time in outer space to
get all the work done that you really need to do, no
matter what they claim down in mission control. That's just
babble-babble for the TV consumers anyway, they who
eat their TV's with no salt and only a little chili or gun
powder. I saw how somebody had sneaked through
the park during the night and covered up all the bums with
sheets of green lettuce and a few hundred dollar bills. Like
waiting in one of those sterile county office buildings for your
driver's license all afternoon. Evidence-based medicine? They
don't do that anymore; haven't for years. Whatever
it is you're waiting for or you were expecting, you would
probably be better off on one of those
steam locomotives, great big iron horses
clanging and cutting through the
soft substance of the American night, and grasshopper
abdomen walls and thoraxes and all. No
matter how elaborate their insides are, all burnished
with glass and crystal and gold leaf and
wet plaster paintings and skinny shining people with
champagne glasses and tiny spy ear buds sneaking
into other unwelcome private conversations
in tuxes and black evening dresses diamond cluster earrings
and pearls, the rooftops all look equally patched and shabby
from high and dry satellite eyes. I asked Veronica
for a glass of buttermilk, but she just climbed aboard
the Spruce Goose and was gone: whoosh. Never
heard from her again, but they say she landed a
big fish way down in Argentina. A gunrunner, I heard.
Meanwhile Dale Anderion calls me up on the phone, so I
don't answer, and he leaves a roaring message: "Dale Anderion
here. Just calling to let you know your batteries have been
roasted and frosted and are ready to be
picked up tomorrow after nine." I don't know anything about
any batteries, frosted or plain, and I don't
know anyone named Dale Anderion anyway, so I
pull on my Stetson and catch the next
ostrich caravan out of town. No one ought to
be made to live like that, clearly. Those are some seriously
twitchy leg tarantulas climbing up and down your back.

Antonio's Market is this tiny, cramped, hot little store down
Galveston way, with high towery ceilings and, for some strange
and mysterious reason, it always smells like
pipe tobacco and pig meat and Tabasco sauce. We used to
hang out in front of the store and watch
the fishermen come back home after they'd been on the Gulf
for about a week, eating raw onions and drinking pop. Sometimes
oilmen too, and other types of cowboys
and miscellaneous ballerinas. When the weather turned cold
and the daffodils came exploding down out of the clouds,
or the moon got pregnant and the window boxes winked,
the suspicious-eyed widows would start their
salt-throwing rituals ‑‑ crazy Russians! ‑‑ and they always
insisted how good managers impose order on chaos,
while bad managers only layer more turmoil on top
of the bedlam that's already reigning. Down there where
the banjos and tremendous trombones were playing
all day and on into the night, grown men and women
have been known to throw down all their sundry accoutrements
of their professions or allotted trades and dance intoxicated
in the streets in funeral ecstasy, granular
red fire steaming from every letter, especially the vowels.
Despicable witches. Charity: thy name be unknown
to any man. No inferiority can be attached to this hand,
this hand which clutches the pen rather than
guiding the hard-biting plow over this grueling,
backbreaking ground. F55. Press enter and
clear apertures. Pesky pyridium. What we need is
a little more carnauba wax and gelatin. I'd
aimed to sleep more today, but I
awakened too soon, it seems. Hitchhiking down blue
and lazy highways to lands crowded with lost
shade-grinning fathers and abandoned dreams. Surprised
as strawberries, of such stuff these colossal
mountains are built. Science and the spirit, I say,
always: science and spirit. The spirit is weak;
the spirit falters, but onward, science, to the bitter end!
How weak is my spirit, but how dear has my
blue valley grown. We'll raise up our foreheads to the
bright green sun, eyes closed, mouths
hanging open wide, expecting casual revelation. Instead,
I dwell among cavemen who'd eagerly, pruriently, trade all their
computers in for the monks' candle-lit cells if they thought they
could only get away with it, scattering chocolate
dewdrops wheresoever they might venture, eating
handfuls of coconut-flavored cake, they who require
that I copy out these interminable chains of
alphanumerics in my own clumsy and indecipherable longhand,
apparently only to prove to them, over and over, what
tricks are included in my tediously limited repertoire. Alright,
alright, alright!