Kalevala

 It’s spring in Oklahoma, and in my new T-Shirt the cold makes me shrivel.  The cold is death. Fuck, it's only five thirty. There's that ominous haze on the horizon that one wants to attribute to astigmatism but I suspect it's just the dust settling in this cold windy stew over this greatflat rolling earth.

There’s rumors of a party so we’re riding around in the SAAB, Frank and I, the top down, the heat on, listening to Little Anthony & the Imperials, across that vast country filled  with desire and hope.  He’s driving so I occupy my fingers dusting the dashboard.  The eye caresses the newly planted corn like fingers through hair.

This here SAAB he just spent the morning on, inside, outside, can't fault a man for a hobby.  After greasing the engine he had lunch then drove into town with the pickup to get the summer tires from Steve, setting up a little plinth to mount the plywood ramp and rolling the tires down out the back of the pickup truck one by one. Moving awful slow. His Dad, Frank Sr, watching like an Edwardian Ghost from the breakfast nook as he puts his tie and boots on to go out, like every Thursday, to the Legion, imaging an erection while gaping at Pam's taut flat ass behind the bar.  Once the tires were on and the day was waning right away I showed up, convenient enough for the purposes of this story, since a coworker I don't like dropped me off because Frank's place is on his way and my place ain't, and Frank suggested we try out the tires and I suggested we find the party and Frank suggested we get some wieners first and since tomorrow's payday I told him he's buying and we set up.  Not exactly Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Many times on these roads I am remembering what it is to start anew, there's just so much fucking land, possibility.  Sometimes I look at it like Christ it's just empty, but then you get driving and realize just how weightedly full it all is, non-linear, everything happening all at once in all directions.  The kid who counts out our change for the hot dogs was a little high, his starter beard struggling with the acne for purchase on his red face.  We pass the new trailer park, and the razed lot where the newer trailers will go next, and the water tower and it's like leaving home again the first time all over. Now here we take off on his horizontal rocket, the wheels spinning around, the dashed lines slipping under the hood, "beautiful, man" said Frank, and I nod, or think about nodding, because he's damn right.  This winter, which seems to me to have lasted about three years, was full of long hairy months of driving around on worried roads and neither sleeping nor dreaming just terrified in a million little ways, the minutiae of which exhausts a body and soul wanting for nothing more than to see the sun again, and yet here we are and there is green again, real green, and after so much death, life.  We head west with the cold wind at our backs and I think about Frank, how we'd hung out in the driveway after Mrs. Straus' funeral and shared a 40 and some cigarettes, feeling like I was seventeen again, which would have made Frank feel, what? My age?

We pass a church.  There are fibres of the wood in the steeple, wellmeaning Norse crochets in the basement. What's it called when a thing is representative of itself?  Ontology?  That's what I think about old churches.  Everybody came together to build a big place where they could come together to talk about the importance of coming together.  It's like those statues of Buddha where he's sitting and smiling contentedly, that's all of Buddhism right there.  Behind the church is a ruddy parking lot, empty, save a big van, undoubtedly to take the men's choir to Stillwater for the regional mishmosh.

We pass a vast field thirsting for trees across the road from an old homestead where a shirtless man sits on his porch, one foot up on the railing, looking like he might spring for another tattoo, and a haggard woman, all joints, strides purposefully out the door with a bucket of water to pour out for the geraniums.  He watches her.  She watches the flowers.  We drive past into the gathering night.  It's harder to be an eccentric here than some places so those who do really go at it hard.   The country drifts past in impressionistic flashes where time refuses to exist. Dust and grass and navy blue sky and baking heat and an unbroken scorch of horizon where the sun falls away and Frank takes a wide country turn to the north and I watch the dark irrigated soil seeming to thrum with promise, or secrets, or maybe I should just rub my eyes.  The side-eye remittance of nutrient rich surreality.   Sediment sounds like sentiment. It must be good soil. Stuff grows when you water it. Crops, just one more flyaway hit here like jets to New York or LA, or evangelism, prairie wildfires, tornados, methamphetamine, fracking. 

Frank asks “Ya catch the Mets game yesterday?” I shake my head. Frank continues “S‘not the game like how I remember” and I think, he does this, substitute nostalgia for plot.  It is easier.  Maybe I should too.  Turn around and grow up.  Trade in this libido for a beer gut and cowardice. Then again, Frank hasn't done that, he's just got a foot in that door, a glimmer in his eye. I ask

“Don’t you ever feel like you’re getting too old for this?”

“You’re only as old as the woman you feel.”

“That’s incredibly- ”

“Accurate. Yeah.”

Frank tells me a round and round anecdote about how his work stole some time from him and how he worked his way up the mucous-filled nasal cavity of beaurocracy to find himself remuneration and I listened without needing to add much, it wasn't the kind of story that invited much audience participation.  The mind wanders.  I remember Mrs. Straus, who died in September.  Inside her house was a big wooden table with a sprawling collection of dainty used Kleenex tissues. Striped wallpaper over a green wainscoting.  Her son flew in from Florida and shook our hands, looking greasy.  His mouth amassed with a shantytown of too many teeth.  He asked us where the Walmart was and we told him, he drove his rental car out there while Frank and I and two other former students helped clear out her things, one room at a time, and for the day's work he paid us each forty bucks cash that'd he'd got from the Walmart ATM and then locked the door and took off to the motel and Frank and I went and had steaks and beer and he's been a great friend to me here since I drifted back.  Great conversations filled with both light and shade. Although I’m a loner by nature I’ve learned that on my own I’m in bad company.   

The wind whipping noisily in our ears I take out my phone and copy down the colors of the songs on the car radio as we pass through a couple little two-three block townships, deep red, orange red, lustre purple, sapphire orange, enamel white.  Mood wallpaper of sound for feathery places.  Later we enter the outlet seediness that flourishes with so much idiocy.  Strip malls that stripped bare good fields to build and are now stripped of business at this late hour. What does late capitalism even mean? I ask Frank where he's going. "Just staying between the lines.  I thought you knew." So I direct him towards Graham's house since that's the point I best remember but we stop at a liquor store first for a coupla snifters and some Seagrams, in case there are girls there, which is, after all, the general idea driving the whole endeavor.

The dark has deepened, spilling out to the horizon now.  Decent people are home lying in bed in with woodhewn nightstands matted by good intentions and soft silences and we are crossing the Queen’s River Bridge, one wonders in moments such as this if any animals are out, courting, hunting, a-Maying.  Where is the Thermal Nightingale accountability?  However many of them are there and whither, so many we can never know.  Hiding out in an unknown night reality blanketed by the first twinkly stars and the first billowing breaths of summer blowing the future into the past. 

It's actually getting colder. Where even is this place?  We swing through a wide country turn off the county highway onto a rocky road within spitting distance of the river that slowly gives way to two deeply packed grooves in the earth that eventually just peters into a pair of battered tracks of dead grass that slithers off ahead into a bunch of trees hiden from the view of the now fairly distant county road and I'm sure we're close and Frank comments that if he'd known we'd be doing bump this to the bump SAAB then he would bump have bump waited until later next week to swap out the bump tires, and then we've found it!  You can see it way off, from the cars coalescing, the halogen halo hovering down by the crick.  A kind of pandering light, that, it seems to me anyway, is a blight upon the night.  But we park and hop out, enthralled by the sound of the music coming through the trees, and I recognize her beat-up Hyundai there next to a few pickup trucks, can't believe it's really there, and feel ready for a drink to help steady me, slip down through a thin trail that's slunk through the woods toward the sound, Frank using his phone as a flashlight.

In amongst the oaks is a roofed-in concrete slab where people are dancing and drinking.  One is less tentative about the social repercussions of frolic when one is in the woods, in diffuse light, and with drink. The first person we recognize is Ole’ Train Wreck Patterson, an eccentric anecdotalist with an interesting mind beneath that thatch of redbrown hair thrusting out of his scalp, who had told me years ago that Crazy Horse had a cousin named Touch the Clouds, the kind of factoid that sticks in your teeth a long time, awaiting digestion, like the fact that the Eiffel Tower was erected in 1889, anyway, sitting there in a wicker chair, his one good eye staring right past us as he cajoles Frank with a few words of which, I'll be honest, I can't hear, the music thumping, and Frank has his ear right up next to Train Wreck's mouth when I walk off a few minutes later.  

Searching. There's the Carstons and Vern Webb and his son, and daughter in law.  A guy with a crew-cut who I recognize from Facebook-stalking my sister's hot friend Sheila who must be her co-worker, because he was in multiple pictures of the company Fun Run and, man, that guy is ripped. There's Graham, from whom I'd heard about this event, and I stop to say hello.  Turns out we're all nominally here as part of a ten-year anniversary party for Graham's younger brother Gerald. There's Matt's sister, looking out of it, I wave.  Matt was this guy my age with a great big heart and a real short fuse who died aged 23 by gunshot, although, I think, technically it was not the shot that did it, but the resultant puncture of his heart by bullet what killed him. Semantics.  Darwin would have a bit to say about kids doing dumb stuff who die young.  I say nothing and walk on.  Let’s pretend the world is spun round in rational long-term thought instead of so much spooked emotion.  Frank finds me and we fill clear yellow plastic cups from the keg and end up talking with Cliff Nussbaum about the hog farm, "from a business standpoint it's a more than a break even thing" he says and it only livens up from there into a litany of knee, back, and shoulder surgeries so I wander off again, if anyone asks, to take a leak, but mainly anxious to see her.   Ansty.

Down by the crick there's a scattering of junk and I find a screen turned askew on it's side in the mud, like the mysterious machine from Finnish mythology, which no one really knew what it did but it was thought that it brought wealth and prosperity to whomever owned it.  The Kalevala was to Finish mythology what Garry Marshall’s Valentine’s Day was to Hollywood, a Who's-Who with strained plausibility.  I spent a winter in college immersed in the library's mythology shelf because it was easier than facing the mire that was my life, and something about ancient men's dreams being translated by Time into her mother tongue of dust unto obsolescence was immensely satisfying.  Existentialism is a trip, man.  I kick the screen a bit with my toe and hear a voice I recognize from behind me ask

"Whatcha got there cowboy?”

She wears a tight tube top over a long flowing dress patterned in leaves of white and pink and blue, smiling that wide as a freight train smile.  

"Still just looking," I say.

"Haven't you found what you want yet?”

"It's not all about want.”

She says "Not by my watch.   I am because I want.”

"I guess that's better than wanting because you are. Involuntarily. Because I-”

“I want,” she says as she leans in for a kiss.  Why argue with that? Hard enough for two self absorbed people trying to get wet.  I gave up the metaphysics of true love when I made my first alimony payment.  Sometimes the universe slaps everything you thought you knew in the face and other times a beautiful woman takes your hand and pulls you out of the lonely muddy garbage strewn darkness and onto the dance floor. Frank, giddily animated by the surprise of seeing us emerge into the warm light together walks right up to say hello and give her a hug.

The music is loud.  Our dancing begets other dancers and soon the slab is full of tapping toes and twirling girls.  She talks while I spin her around.  I can tell because her lips are moving but I can't hear any of it.  I twirl her in close and squeeze her to me.

"Don't you think so," she looks at me expectant of my reply.

I said “you’re always saying something.  How is it you ever listen?”

She say, “WHAT?”

Her eyes swallow the rest of the night.  I vaguely recall watching birds swoop around over the crick, and an impromptu game of the newlywed game where we partner up because they need a third couple and of the other twosomes I quickly survey standing around in the wings we appeared to be the least lukewarm on the prospect and at one point they ask me "what’s the one thing that most drives your partner up a wall."

 I say, never being able to pick just one thing.  Seems to me the wind picked up at some point and lots of people left.   The world is full of crooked pleasantries and held tongues.

I don't remember Jay Talbot showing up, but this is how I met Jay Talbot.  She knew him.  Frank knew him.  Everyone knew him but I didn't know him so I started up a drunken conversation and learned that we had a lot in common except that I have some scruples of dignity.  What else is measured in scruples?  That Ass Hat hit me square in the face and afterwards, much, much later when I got that brown tangy liver taste of blood out of my mouth, and the throbbing in my temples subdues a little I realize, suddenly, that I need to leave.  Just as suddenly as we had needed to get there and talk to her, right now, time to go.  I feel myself fading.

There are only four cars left when Frank gets back behind the wheel.  She says "are you sure you'll be alright," and I mutter something and she smiles and says she'll follow along behind, just in case.  I'm ready to crash out but I don't,  there is still more night coming, repeating, but less of it now than before, one can imagine the crescendo of cymbals that accompanies the oncoming dawn, like an Explosions in the Sky song.  Maybe that’s where they got the name from.  Soon it will be Sunday and I remember that I volunteered to read at church.  The Saturday yearning to get laid a kind of dark mirror to Sunday’s pursuit of religion fervor.  Frank starts chuckling and asks "why'd you say that to Talbott?"

"Say what?"

But he wouldn't tell me. He just laughed weaving out of the weeds and out of another weekend, back out onto the highway, the SAAB's headlights dissolving into nothingness in the dark just within grasp of the road.  It's cold in just this new T-Shirt. I tuck my arms in and let the small thoughts of her linger like the last of the night's stars.  Sometimes when you feel lost or all alone you can give yourself a hug. That's what I do.  Looking out and up as we cruise through a chilly windy spring night, something immeasurably distant, like the reliability of the stars, is reassuring.