The Joshua Tree Page 13

  Heart to the sand he’ll lie.

  So strong, so true, so noble,

  He’s oh so young to die.

  Cry his name, shriek his name, as even now the buzzards wing over.

  Your face is in your vomit in the sand.

  They’ll come, with shrieking tires, and they’ll say “Jesus, two,” and they’ll go with shrieking tires.

  Sirens winding winding, dying as the feet crunch in the little flowers. Silence, the idling motor, and “This one’s had it, look.” The rough grasping of your shoulder, the thumb in your eye, the ear to your breast. No, no, no, no! Shudder the breath back, bitter, bitter gasps.

  The face, so slowly turning from you, down into the sand. Never to breathe again, nor ever you. Silence in the roaring of your heart, in the dying of your heart.

  “OK, start it. For Christ’s sake start it!”

  You never asked how you got home, back to your room where you’d hardly been for weeks and weeks. Was there a hospital? Were there reporters? Pictures, the long columns neatly clipped, they’re lying there on your table. How? It does no good to remember, it’s all there, ready when you need it. And if that is not enough, there are the embarrassed calls, the embarrassed absences, the silences wherever you go. Solicitous, or as if it had never happened, or just one of those things. But usually nothing nothing nothing.

  lilies

  For was he not your keeper, did he not hold you, cupped in his beautiful hands? Safe-keeping, what there was left after the bus stop, the freezing wind. And now his hands are clutched in the sand, the lilies lie crumpled beside him. You are nothing.

  pure

  burial

  Can I remember, and honestly? Is there such a thing as memory, for is it not always of the present moment? Can I, sitting here, now, this moment, the warm granite, Will with a cane pointing to the shadow paintings back in the shallow cave, can I cancel everything that followed, can I forget? Remembering is forgetting, forgetting the future of the past. How can I, when each moment vibrates so, is so complete that there can be nothing else? How can I forget?

  black women

  shrieking

  You’ll be there, Lily, somehow, and you’ll be controlled, oh so very calm. No tears, no fevers of regret. How well you take it all, Lily! Letters from his family, from yours, writing them all so correctly. And the inquest, and the coroner, and the police, and the reporters again and again – he’d have been amused in his anonymous way. He’s dead, that’s all, head twisted right around and of course he’s dead. No use turning inside out, these things happen. They just happen.

  to their

  emptiness

  It’s the only way to do it now, the modern way. He’s there in the coffin, his head’s on quite straight. Flowers all gay, hardly crushed, though someone mutters over the champagne, “Pay for quality and get supermarket seconds, guess who rakes in the difference.”

  Waterman’s, the Funeral Home of Distinction. Even the Burlingame high-class uses it. Such a sad occasion, but so nicely done, so pleasant and efficient, really quite painless. Who’d wear black these days? So funereal, and I can tell you, I’d like to know, when I’m lying up there, that everyone’s having a real good time. Real French stuff, lovely music. Such a nice young fellow, lucky the girl didn’t get killed too. Rock of Ages, the Chippendale Room, bereavement, the purring limousines, so well arranged. A fine man, Bob Waterman. Oh, are you the girl? Such a sad occasion, and my how lovely you look, a picture!

  sand sifting

  through

  cold fingers

  Not far either, you can hear the diesel working, like a little bulldozer or something, the gravedigger, and he has an umbrella over his perch to keep off the California sun, and he’d never know if he dug up some poor fellow’s skull. Electric lowerers, the gray gloves. Leave as soon as decent.

  Lily, standing up so well.

  The helping hungry hands. Yes, of course, you’d love to, seven-thirty? Nick’s, well why not? A new band, the dance floor’s bigger, the bar is very very chic, so very dark. Of course, of course, and why don’t we dance again? Yes, I’ll have one, and cigarets please, gold-tipped. I never eat. No, do not touch me, never touch me. Please don’t, please don’t, damn it! don’t!

  Old friends of his, they’ll comfort you, take your mind off it. His roommate. At least he’s learned to keep his hands to himself, or to others. No, no, there’s no reason, you just find it so disgusting. And he doesn’t talk about it, thank God, you’ll scream if you hear it more, or do you remember how to scream? So heavy with smoke where he takes you, you wouldn’t know this place. Grass smoke, but he’ll not bother you with it; he’s learned.

  sweet

  dewdrops

  Faces in the dark, passing, passing, floating with their smiles and postures and vague or clear desires. Desiring, it has nothing to do with you. Sex, like a taste for olives, or beer which you can’t abide, except that it’s bad and wrong too until it’s for keeps, and then, well, you just do, even if it is olives.

  on the

  petals

  Colin

  Colin

  Sex, this hunger on the floating faces, it’s evil too, this way, it’s evil like the grass because they make it so, they would have it so. It washes and breaks on you like the ocean on a ledge, without effect. All so strange. And sometimes, for an instant, Pa flashes before you, and then it hurts and you turn quickly away.

  Back to the floating faces, the game, the reaching for you, the dodging, the simulated laughter. And always the twisting feet and the gesturing hands and the swinging hips and the shoulders always beckoning – the rock-hard driving music. The game, but you must be different. The other girls – and how much they hate you, hate you, hate you! – the other game, the prize so plain for all to see, so easy, so bad. You, it’s the brilliance, the noise, the dance, the floating pieces of people, the tight tight closing out. Men the accompaniment, but always hovering, never alighting.

  His roommate, so docile tonight, yet an extra way of sliding his eyes away, of giggling, of sweating on his narrow forehead. And a sort of shiver. And the hard voices with his friends and the silence when they see you coming back from Ladies. Always the pressure, hard as bone.

  “Here Lily, here’s your stinger, your day’s ration. Wish I could get high as easy as you.”

  “It’s because you start so low, you see.”

  Drink down the stinger, Lily, straight down before the burn and the awful taste catches up with you. Don’t grimace, it wouldn’t be the game. High, how could they know? Every nerve hollow, the endless echoing, the blood so thin and dry. But what does it matter what they know?

  Drink it down. It will be your last one, ever.

  The glass, why won’t it set down straight? Eyes of lead, so very very tired. The music retreats, tinkly, yet is it not really right inside my head? How overbearing it was, blasting from the speakers, what relief. Except this bang banging on my temples, the last blood I have, all pumped there. Why must it, banging, banging, banging? Floating faces, hovering, moths over my flame, feeble flame, to burn their wings if they alight. Nicer this way, nothing matters, rest a little, lie here a moment, just a little. Banging, banging, banging.

  Yes, yes, take me home, that would be nice, very nice.

  bull-roarers

  “I’ve got’r OK here. Take her feet, Pecker; won’t be long before you take the rest too, man, or what’s left from Perry. Man, you really doped her! That’s one way. You bastard.”

  Where is the sound? Help, oh help, oh help! But where is the sound? Help is an idea, help is a sound. Where, where? Clawing, but my fingernails are empty. Strike, but my hand drags on the dirty floor, dirty, dirty, dirty. Banging, banging, banging, upside down, the hurting hands. So dark.

  Is that light, fire in my blood, the color of pain? I don’t know that ceiling. Why won’t you take me home? Aren’t my eyes crying, though you’ve killed my tongue, can’t you have pity for me, pity, pity, pity?

  Through the
numbness, what is there, this numbness, black and rotten back of my eyes? Why are there no answers? Crumpling. The thinnest thread of fiery heat. Draw it tight, is there nothing, no will? Draw it tighter, burn, sear; hovering, never to alight.

  Unconnected, foreign masses, hollow numbnesses, unconnected to the hot thin thread, lying dead, pressed under the strange ceiling. Pressed, under glass, the stiffening moth, fluttered so in the bottle, chloroform. No connection, no meaning, only the thread.

  The color of pain in the black rottenness.

  Draw in, there’s no heat left. But the heaviness, a mountain of seaside sand, and so far away, unconnected. Widening, widening, no, no, no, but the will is dead.

  Pressing. But this is me, there’s no room, there’s no room, there’s no room. Closed the numbness, closed against oh God! Where can there be pain? It’s something else, it’s birth, I’m being born of me, bearing myself. How can there be room for pain? Oh God to cut the hot thin thread!

  The wrenching, pressing, the convulsion tearing, tearing to the soul. Hot stink roaring. Sear. The thread of my soul drawn from me. Oh God that I may scream! The hurting, hurting, hurting.

  The light, it hurts so. Why do you slap me, again, my cheek? You’re saying “Get up, Chrissake, got to get you home, taxi, Jesus what a mess, how’d I know? expect me to believe Perry that he’d never touched you, what else for? all that time, all that hard-to-get and the flirting, Chrissake stop crying.”

  bee’s

  You’re saying? You’re talking to me? Words, but they can’t get in, nothing can get in, nothing can alight, I’m Lily and my father’s Joe Tocca who won’t let anything happen to me, never.

  Honey

  Let me sleep, and the light, why must you carry me, can’t I just sleep? Hold me, Pa, I’m hurting so, press me tighter, tight, no! no! it’s hurting hurting, why do you go on hurting little Lily? Let me sleep, please let me sleep, please, please.

  sail

  the Winds

  keel

  the Seas

  So you’ll sleep, little Lily, and you’ll never know how long. Waking sleeping waking. Sometimes the roaring traffic and the blotched familiar ceiling, turning slowly. Sometimes the dark and the smog stench. The bed so hot and narrow and where are the cool edges? and the sheets are bitter wrinkles and you have no strength to move. The bed trembling to your chill that shudders in your skull, clutches, closed so tight between your legs, so private and yours but why spasms, the hurting? The bed so heavy, pressing. The bed, floating, hovering, turning slowly, dipping slowly, your feet whirling and whirling over your head. The sheets, crumpled, smelling sweat, and the slime if you move however little.

  Sleep and the throbbing throbbing pain, when do you separate it, where is it? When finally is it a knife pressed to your bladder till you would burst? The ache, the floor of ice and are you naked?, and you’ll not have time, and the seat’s so cold and you flinch on the ache and nothing and little spurts and your breasts tighten to nubs of pain spurts and spurts till the ache is taste. And the other pain and you’d open your eyes and you’d see oh God! Black, caked and cracked, smearing your thighs, knotting your hair that you’d never never seen . . . Black ringlets, hidden.

  Vomit, the gluey mucus. You must not remember, you must not remember. Anything else. To piss again, it hurts, it aches so still. Bloated full, if only it weren’t cold, if only you were not shaking so, if only you could find some warmth and put it down there to relax, relax.

  It’s no use, you remember. “Doped her, doped her,” the pressing, the ceiling, the searing thin thread, oh pity, pity, pity!

  Shaking retching. Crawl, the slime, and even crawling fall from the convulsive cold. The rug, the smell of dust, a corner pulled onto your bed, that’s all you can do, the blankets, half doubled, the gasp of the wet ice sheets.

  “out

  of the

  lowest,

  the

  highest

  reaches

  its peak”

  Let no one ever come, let you never be seen again. Shame, shame that must end everything, and you wouldn’t die because then they’d know. No one left, no one, nothing but to hate with all the last strength you have, you want nothing nothing nothing. Each face hovers and you hate it away, hate it for ever away, to never never come back. Tap tap tap, flexing in the fat palm. The long corridor. The black glass dimming to nothing the headlights along the line of poplars, LILY OF THE VALLEY. Slowly turning, turning down into the sand. So well arranged, so comforting, so smoothly lowering, lowering. Here, the braided lead rope, whirling in the hay dust, in the puddles of lemonade. Snap snapping in the wind, clutching, slowly the wheel turning, turning. Cunt stinks, you can say it now, you can say it now, you can say it, and you’d never even heard it had you? stinks in the Ladies, the cold wind from the black desert daybreak. Yes of course, of course, of course. And who’d be able to eat polenta? And who’d be able to stop screaming with the sand of the Santa Ana grinding in your teeth?

  There, Lily, it’s over, it’s finished. You have come to your end. It is good to know this, that there’s nothing left. Peace comes from that, the hollows fill with peace. A kind of warmth that slowly makes its way out from the bitter sting of the center. Shame becomes a passive thing, the soul can loosen, ready finally to move on and away. You must let it, you must help it. Poor sweet soul that has cried so many tears that no one has seen, that has always wanted only the sun and the buzzing of the honey bees down in the yard, the rattling and the bacon through the register, the blue sage tipping up into the sky. You will let it go.

  Desert voices

  Let us receive this soul, this gentle sad soul, we the desert, the olive hills and black peaks, distances down the curve of the valleys, the pure sun slanting up the canyons.

  Yes, we receive, we accept, those that would come to us. There were so many, there are now so few. But now is nothing, time is nothing but the cycling. Forever is moments linked to this circling sun. We are not indifferent: each is all because there is no all, so we totally accept. Come to us, let the leaves fall as they will, lie down with us, join us, be the eternal rebirth, received and receiving.

  We bear your scars: the asphalt and the concrete lined over us; tracks deep in the sand, uprooting, the clutch of rigid hands, the scream of the sirens; the borings and strippings; the rippings and the pluckings and the cutting, cutting, cutting; the burnings; the debris, the stinks, the creeping pollutions. We must heal; O let us!

  Hear us, for we speak to you too, as we do to all. Let our voices be. You who walk in our valleys, who have known our summits, who have drawn your food and drink from us and have given us back of yourselves, you do not deny our voices as the others are wont to now. You listen, you accept, and you reply. And in us are your ancestors, the line of life from the far past, and through us they speak to you and you to them.

  How many centuries of summers, up from wintering in the plains, up for the hunting and the gathering of the pinenuts and acorns and berries and bulbs, grinding grinding on the granite? Metates of the Chemehuevi to grind their foods, worn into the ledge convenient to the cave entrance, the pestle still hidden in a crack of the stone face. The fruit of the earth against the bone of the earth, feeding its children. We speak to them.

  Mysteries accepted, the magic from the rehearsal of the hunt, the harvest, the healing. Magic on the cave walls: palm trees, children, the cross and the bow and the deer, the snake to bring him calm, the flying arrow, the fish and rams’ heads and flying double geese. Others voiceless. While she, how many many is she?, crouches naked on her haunches, or rabbit skins on her shoulders for the evening cooling, grinding grinding.

  Acorn meal. You learned that too, old Will, from your friends who’d wait nearby the stamp stamp of your milling, ready to drive an arrow from their stiff bows – strange wood, not from these parts at all – into the gathering curious bighorns.

  Yucca fiber sandals, baskets, pots, the seed-beaters. Yours are different, yours do not always nor e
ven often spring from your own hands. Yet somehow they speak.

  They speak to you. But there’s the fear and the loneliness in your heart, thinking sometimes that there will be no one after you to listen and reply. Silence is you, shutting off your reply, for you would not tell them that the end is near, that their magic and maybe the very voice of the earth itself will perish. You who came so far to hear our voices and to speak, from the banks of that weeping river, from the flying manes and the streaming tails over the steppes. To join them. The last.

  This girl, this Lily girl, can she, O can she too hear our voices and reply?

  Stem of grass: Willy’s shaman rope

  Earth’s

  fruit

  for

  Down in the canyon bottom. Arrow-weed with its rose-purple blossoms: arrowshafts, prayer sticks O God of the Giant Lily, animal traps, baskets, eyewash brewed from the little new leaves. Inkweed for the basket designs. Peach-brush to give its sweet fruit, jointfir brewed for squaw tea. Cattle spinach where the Indians tethered their horses for the browsing – in Death Valley we’d be calling it saltbush; that’s where it grew best, mostly.