Last Call (4 page)

sky curdled into thunderbumpers

gas tank three quarters leaning on half

Miles slouched over my tiny mind

blowing Bye bye Blackbird

2

because I'm driving all alone

five hundred and thirty-seven more miles

to where I'll sleep tonight

and thirteen hundred more before I hit

the Hill Country in three days running

down the road listening to my new storeboughten Jackpot

Greatest All Time Jazz cassette

out of the dollar sale bin at Cactus Pete's gift shop

Jan behind me in Twin Falls, Idaho nursing

her bellyache mother through another season's

episode of whatever she's dreamed up

to be going around this time

me heading across the sagebrush backside

of Nevada about a hundred and three miles

from godforgotten Ely down to a half tank

into yessir Mr. D. J., an exactly HellBitch headwind

blowing slantwise out of Nogales, Mexico

elegant Duke giving over to raucous Dizzy

shifting down to
Blue Train
granny gear in a fifty mile stretch

rattling my pickup like a snaredrum

pushing the beat across Coltrane's

and my, too, fried brain

3

driving through the desert hurricane

down the road straight south

listening to jazz by myself

approaching the intersection of the designated

Loneliest Highway in America

gas tank now down to one third

twelve miles per gallon dropping by the lurch

looking square across to the quarter line

range cows with washboard ribs

standing butt to the nettlewind bawling

like the last bellhounds at the end of time

Dizzy reappearing to tell me

we all play the same notes

the way I get from one note to the next

that's my style

and there's not a single thing I can do

out here in the wasteland but nod

and hold the truck on the road

in my tightfisted style

right up to the red insanity mark line

I can't break concentration

to argue with my man

acknowledging pissed off as I am

with the circumstances

what I'm giving is all I've got

shadebaked wind children outside the fast-food walls

finger and nose prints pressed into windowpeeped glass

tiny hands beating against the invisible boundary

between light and light demand entrance

             suddenly

eruption of a camperpickupload of tarheel cotton sack ragamuffin

tumbleweeds interrupted from their long southwind roll

to the Oregon border where they might chance align

against a snowdrift fence awaiting castcall

for the Hell's Canyon remake of Deliverance

pour into McDonalds, roiling and clamormongering

this one okay, mama? if it's white people serving I'll eat here

elbow their way forward shouting immediate service demands

what you wanting, mama? you shut up, Billy Don

I aint done reading the dollar menu yet

             humming

a Bill Evans riff I accept my refill from the young

Ronalda apprentice and while turning to the door

whisper as loudly as humanly possible
best deal in town

four cream senior coffee half price

    mama's scream

where does it say that? Billy Don go get him

make him come back and show me whar it's at

I move into sharpwind toward my truck to begin again

driving the road alone listening to jazz

     Billy Don

screaming to the glass pane
wait come back heah

my mama wants you
too late, cracker-buddy

        I'm on my way

out of Ely with love and squalor

walking along minding my own business with my hot

cuppacoffee on the one way path to my pickup, me

I'm getting myself ready to start the last half of this trip

over with once and for sonofabitching all

4

driving down the road listening to jazz

wishing my wife would once and for all

absolutely, ultimately and irrevocably

finally tell her mama she's got a life of her own

fists of wind beating all about

the head and shoulders of my beat up Dodge truck

knocking it across the road like a spent heavyweight pug

and now Humbolt Pass with a foot of new snow

my thermostat shot to Gehenna or Sheol or Dis or dat and back

heater blowing air as cold as a Newfoundlander's

proverbial shithouse in its archetypal Hades or Acheron

like I know my damned room will be

when I get there in about five and a half hours

alone with Billy Holiday singing me

her personal inspired version of

It aint no love in this town you heading to tonight

driving straight south to hell

or Pioche, whichever comes first

5

on the road listening to jazz

the sun falling like winter sky

horizon imploding into a thousand square miles

of juniper and beercans and roadkill

turning left and heading east at Panaca

I say out loud
thank you Lord that's done and over with

this last hundred has to be the easy stretch

we've both been waiting on

but the wind the goddammed wind

that never blows out of the east

I'd promised myself

not once in the history of civilized mankind

I'd heard of in this part of the world twists

shouts and rattles its way ninety degrees larboard

laughs and shrieks like a banshee windowpeeking

at a senior rehabilitation center viva voce

everything out here screaming awful

how loud and alone just dammed alone the whole world is

and I have a frosty ninety four

windstarved miles to go before I sleep

Charlie Parker telling me personally

what I need is some good
windy day lonesome blues

what else on earth do I have left to lose

driving myself down the end of the world road

home to Texas without Jan, listening to jazz

came to pass when Eva Saenz Mendietta the Seer

some called la Bruja visited the monument

with her family and closely inspected

Willy John's sculpture until her vision

rested upon a spot just above the juncture

Willy John's father designated the half way mark

she closed her eyes for almost three minutes

when she opened them pointed at the indentation and said

Veo la cara de la Virgen and all were sore amazed

Willy John's dad who had known Eva Saenz

for almost fifty years even before

she became Mendietta moved to her side

followed her point to the mark and saw

what could be taken as the image of a face

in the rusted metal and proclaimed Well

Eva turned and whispered You see?

and he said Si, comprendo lo que dices

Muy bien she said and then told her family

It is time for us to go, vamanos muchachos

Willy John's father said Eva, mi amor, you know

you're welcome to come back any time you want

she said softly, Cuidado, novio, if this gets out

it will no longer be a sculpture or monument

it will become a shrine ?listo para eso?

Ready as I'll ever be this time he said

I will come back she said, Yes

If that's posta be art

I'd like to know what the hell is it

It looks exactly like the ghost

of a burnt out drilling rig said John Sims

Why you think that?

I been in a oil well fire

that's something I know something about

That and ghosts

and the paisanos came to venerate

by the pickup truckloads

many bringing picnic baskets

to stay the afternoon until Willy John's father

had to build and plumb toilet facilities

put out fifty five gallon oil drums for garbage

then the word spread to the gringos

who came in station wagons in order to make damn sure

none of them could ever see a face anywhere

in that stack of piled up scrapjunk

in spite of their best well-intended efforts

many did see the visage after Willy John's father

pointed it out and after he told them

how it could be seen in noonlight and moonlight

how it changed with the changing of the light

he had to put a gate on the road into his property

to keep teenagers out on full moon nights

and then the day when Reverend Coy Stribling

of the Church of God of Prophesy of Holy and Divine Revelation

came to bear witness and tried to follow

the pointline but seemed to be looking

about six feet above said I seen it

I believe that could be the face of Jesus Christ hisself

which was revealed unto me when I was fourteen

when a woman said Reverend Coy

It's posta be a face of the Virgin is what they say it is

he said It aint no virgins except in the Bible

but they been gone from the world a long time ago

when he offered to hold a church service

there on Sunday next For a official dedication

Willy John's daddy said Nope Sorry

we'll keep it secular this time around

and Reverend Coy waxed sore amazed at the turn down

three days later Eva Saenz Mendietta called

to tell Willy John's father

how sorry she was that happened

sometimes she wished she really were a witch

she'd cast a spell to make Coy go away permanently

or maybe one to give him an actual mind

in the place his brain was supposed to be

Willy John's daddy told her he sometimes thought

Jesus got it wrong in the Beatitudes when he said

The meek shall inherit the earth

when all too often it was like the boilings

when they used to make lye soap

always the scum floated to the top

Boys

or should I say young Christian Leaders

potential Deacons of God's true church

I have little to say regarding today's topic

not being familiar with canonized rites of exegesis

therefore this may be a brief experience

in fact the following is potentially the sum of what

I have to say on the matter of Lamech and his wives

Bigamy or polygamy is a crime

That is a fact upon which I will briefly postulate

In a terribly over-populated world it is an inexcusable act

of poor manners, selfishness and stupidity

I do not know if it is a sin

but I cannot imagine or countenance

believing in a Texan god who would condone

much less encourage it

or a Texas woman who would tolerate it

That is my analysis and opinion

Brother Klogphorne

isn't it adultery? and isn't adultery a sin?

Young man

that is a wholly different topic

but in any case I do not believe it is necessarily so

Adultery is recreation

however, it is dangerous contact sport

recreation practiced by all of humanity

normally based upon a lie and because of the lie

it may or not be sin

Brother Klogphorne

isn't lying a sin?

Not always young proselyte

There are categories of both sin and lie

to which all poets and piddlers are exempt

by fact of diplomatic and professional immunity

and all politicians guilty

the divisions being first malicious

and then those designed to prolong one's life, sacrosanct idleness

marriage or commerce with teenage progeny

which should be automatically forgiven

but not so the malicious

which are lies designed to inflate the self like a toad

or tear down another person like a glow worm

deliberately crushed beneath a miscreant's heel

in order to take away or mar what is rightfully his

or in some instances hers

Brother Klogphorne, then what is sin?

the ones they say you can go to Hell for?

Well sir young believer

while Brother Dante Alighieri who well may

have preached a revival service at this edifice some time in the past

did a remarkable job of stratifying hell-bound sin

I will offer the following as my personally updated

Texas-based additional considerations

The only sins you can go to Hell for from any god I could believe in

are murder of one who did not need killing

stealing something of value or precious memory from someone who

needed it, fraud on the part of politicians and currency manipulators

provocations of any war without the intent

of taking an active role in the actual combat effort

that being overt cravenness

and then the ones you're familiar with from this training

designed to produce the next generational crop of deacons