The Name of the World Read online

“He getting it somewhere.”

  “Three thousand, four thousand,” the old man said. “He goes every weekend.”

  “He getting it from the A-rab.”

  “He don’t never win. He go to the river, he lose a lot of money.”

  “Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. I know,” the younger said with considerable assurance.

  “There’s the river bus right now.”

  “Is it Eddie?”

  “Naw. Eddie don’t drive that river bus no more. Eddie’s got a sister…”

  “He got a sister? Eddie?” The younger man was finished with my boots now. He tapped each twice with the heel of his brush and pulled my cuffs down.

  “Yeah. He got a sister…Now: you get in some water,” the old man said to me. “Go ahead, stand up to your cuffs, your feet gonna be as dry as the desert. That’s that woman driver driving today,” he said to his partner. “See her?”

  “Yeah. I see her.”

  “She’s down in Chicago,” he said.

  “She is?”

  I gave him ten dollars.

  “That’s why he driving down in Illinois now,” he said.

  “Go ahead and keep the change,” I told him.

  “Thank you very much,” he said to me. “Her,” he told the other. “Her, I’m saying. Eddie’s sister.”

  I left them to feel their way through a forest of pronouns and approached the woman driver of the bus to Riverside. She sat hunched over her big flat steering wheel examining a notebook as I looked up at her through the open door.

  I had a twenty in my fingers. “Can I just pay you and get on and ride?” I asked.

  “That’s exactly how it works,” she said.

  I got on board.

  “I don’t need a ticket?”

  “I got tickets. And they got tickets inside.” She made change. “And you can order tickets through the mail. The whole world wants to sell you a ticket on my bus.”

  The bus was almost full of passengers, many of them probably going to the casino in Riverside. I sat next to a tiny old gentleman wearing sunglasses like the black bulging eyes of an insect. Across the aisle sat a small boulder of a man who revealed to me, as soon as the bus had swung onto the interstate highway out of town, that he played blackjack in Riverside several times a month; that his name was Vince; that until hard work had worn out his joints he’d made his living principally as a Sheetrocker, but now he survived on government disability checks supplemented by his natural good luck. Once he had my attention Vince kept talking, looking deeply into my face. Meanwhile where the tiny old man looked, from behind his black orbs, nobody knew. I understood that poker players often wore sunglasses to keep their emotions secret. I sensed he was being stoic about something enormous.

  Getting aboard this bus had been a crazy impulse, but I’d actually been meaning to go to Riverside for some time now. A musician by the name of Smokey Henderson, a trumpeter who led a jazz trio and whom I’d met through Ted Mackey, had told me that as a regular thing his group played in a club attached to the Indian casino there. I’d enjoyed their music at Ted’s house once or twice, and it just seemed like the right kind of day to go looking for more of it.

  Riverside lay forty-five miles out along the two-lane blacktop known around these parts as the Old Highway. I’d been told it was a quiet town, part of the reservation along the Sioux River.

  I was expected later that afternoon at a small gathering of the History Department, a monthly coffee klatsch, but by getting on this bus I’d acknowledged that it didn’t matter anymore if I spent time among my colleagues or ended up dozens of miles away listening to jazz.

  Our bus left the interstate and turned onto the Old Highway. My friend Vince across the aisle, who appeared to be in his early fifties, was telling me about a friend who’d been on his mind a lot recently. “He died two years ago. Three years ago, I think. He destroyed, just destroyed, his liver. He swelled up bigger than a fucking toad. That’s the third guy I’ve seen do that. He swelled up this big around,” and so on. I didn’t mind very much. Vince had a colorful past, had been married often, worked at hazardous jobs, fought in the Vietnam war, spent 210 days in jail the previous year for assaulting an alcoholism counselor right in the counselor’s office, and, like many people you sit beside on the bus, as I’d found out since I’d quit driving a car, he apparently ran through this history repeatedly in the privacy of his thoughts and felt proud to share it with any polite listener. Overhead, the sky continued clear. The fields had been plowed in straight rows, but nothing had sprouted yet, and from here to every horizon we saw only the fastidious organization of lifeless dirt. Come late August the horizon would no longer be visible. The Old Highway would drill like a tunnel through tall corn. The sound of insects in the fields would be deafening, and above it all would carry the call, the whir-and-twitter, of redwing blackbirds. Right now we drifted through a soft ocher haze of dust.

  Here along the Sioux, I saw as the bus carried us into Riverside in a bubble of air-conditioned artificial silence, Sam Clemens would have truly felt at home. Here was a river town with a Tom Sawyer feel, sunny and muggy and lazy, whose silence continued after we’d stepped out into the heat, life in general so quiet the flies were audible.

  The bus stopped before a tobacco-and-fireworks stand run by two women decked in turquoise and wearing buckskin gowns and beaded headbands. Nearby several longhaired Indian men stood around talking, in jeans and boots and checkered shirts with the tails hanging out. Two of them clutched at one another, empty-eyed and drunk, waltzing together with such languor it took a minute to understand they were fighting. The Old Highway kept on across the river and quickly out of town, intersecting the main street and the weedy swatch of railroad right-of-way paralleling it. There were two casinos, each with its nightclub and restaurant, one with a small motel. Otherwise the town seemed built of service stations, hardware stores, lumber yards.

  Vince urged me to come to his favored casino, the one closer to the water. By this time I could see he’d attached himself to me, and I went along.

  Near the river the air felt even wetter and heavier. There were budding willow trees, and somewhere loud cicadas. The waterfront smelled of agricultural chemicals but also of something sweet and strangely familiar, like cotton candy. Joined as it was to the Mississippi, the river reached a finger of the South into the region, while the casinos, one russet, one sky blue, both covered with murals depicting empty arid desert scenes, and Vince’s with a tall eagle-topped Styrofoam totem pole, labored to produce a Western flavor.

  Smokey Henderson’s trio was in fact playing in town, and right here at Vince’s gambling spot. According to the poster just inside the tavern’s entrance, they didn’t strike up until the evening. Of course I’d known this but hadn’t consciously considered it. I hadn’t asked about return buses, either. I think I really intended to stay overnight, drinking and gambling to the detriment of my health and finances. Excessively, in other words. I couldn’t expect to find much to distract me until I started. Why should I? Why should anything be going on in the sunny lifeless afternoon, why would there be any attempt to entertain these retirees interested only in killing the most time with the least number of quarters? But apparently something was happening inside, past the barroom where Vince and I sat. A half-dozen young women had assembled in a clump at the back of the large room, and a couple more were just coming from the darker recesses, the entrance to a showroom with a stage. “You ain’t getting me back there to watch little girls shake their pussies,” Vince told the bartender, taking me by the arm and sitting me on a bar stool beside him. “Naked girls used to make me howl, but now they just give me a serious dose of heartache. Ask me what my favorite pastime is and I’ll tell you: My favorite pastime is blackjack. I’m too fat and I’m too old.”

  Vince ordered vodka. I had a club soda. From the showroom came disco music with a booming bass and a crisp piercing treble. Apparently, I gathered as he and the bartender discussed it, an amateur striptease
contest was in full swing. The several young women around the place may have been amateurs, but they looked like professional strippers on break in their silken dressing gowns, kissing their cigarettes so as not to endanger their lipstick, guiding their gestures so as to protect their long false nails.

  The blipping of video gambling games underlay everything. To one side we had the entrance to the dance competition, and on our right the barroom gave way to an acre of space ranked with electronic slot machines. I saw no crap tables, no roulette, only these instruments sounding like young waterfowl. Vince assured me they kept three tables in the back where live blackjack was played.

  As soon as we had our drinks in hand, Vince, talking over his shoulder the whole time, led me into the back room toward the dancing in which he’d claimed to have no interest. He stood well under six feet, but he had tremendous mass and solidity and moved like an ocean liner among the small tables. Just following his silhouette in the near-dark I had the impression that all of his life whatever he’d approached had given way, that if he chose to keep walking now he would explode, if very very slowly, right out through the opposite wall. He got to a vacant table and sat with his back to the stage, where a woman in a thong and nothing else shook her hips and raised her arms and wobbled her breasts. “Skin to win!” somebody shouted, and others took it up, but the loud canned accompaniment stopped abruptly and she danced offstage smiling and bowing.

  During the next ten minutes two more women came out heavily clothed and got down pretty quickly to their bare chests and G-strings. Meanwhile Vince kept on in a voice not loud and clear but certainly audible. Lots of his acquaintances, he seemed to be saying, had an inexplicable natural knack for gambling. “Or my brother. Take him. The sonofabitch bastard is just plain dumb-lucky. What can I say? Some people. If he buys a lottery ticket, it’s gonna hit. Not the big hit, but just enough to where, I mean, he’ll come home with twenty tickets and a six-pack and scratch off enough of them ten-dollar jobbies to drink for the next week. Then he’ll sit around stupid drunk on three beers and say such ridiculous stuff I just wanna drop the sonofabitch. I mean just slap him till his eyes bleed. I mean, the question has to be answered: How long can two guys, two grown-ups, live in one single trailer? It was Mom’s, and she left it to him, at least that’s the way the will was written, but it’s mine just as equally, I think he understands that. Anyway, the point is,” Vince said, “mankind was not bred for the close confines. You can get trained to it, but one day you might just shoot somebody. Oh sure, yeah, it works in the military, or in jail, but there they got you locked up, they got their finger on your spine.”

  I doubt there were more than a dozen others at the tables around us. All men. Middle-aged, middle-income, midwestern. Golfers. In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don’t know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their clichés yet full of helpless poetry. Meanwhile the music whamming and bamming. The women shaking themselves almost shyly.

  Vince spent a good half-minute lighting a cigarette while the MC came onstage behind him. This was a small Asian or Native American woman in a black pantsuit who introduced each dancer again—there had been nine total—and delivered the decision of the judges, who were nowhere to be seen, and summoned forward the winner, a woman in a black Cleopatra-style wig wearing red bikini bottoms and a red vest with quivering red fringe. She tiptoed barefoot onto the stage and received her prize money in a large envelope which the MC was obliged to stick in the waist of her briefs because she held a tall bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her face was a beautified mask, like a Kabuki player’s. They gave her name as “O. O’Malley,” or close to that. But as a matter of actual fact, she was Flower Cannon.

  “I know her!” I said to Vince.

  “Who? Her?” he said, turning around briefly. “Yeah, she’s here every other Friday. She wins about half the time.”

  The music started again but not quite so loud. The stage went dark. Flower Cannon stood bent over in the corner putting on a pair of tennis shoes. She straightened up and raised her beer to her mouth and guzzled. Now she wore an old overcoat like a chemist’s smock.

  “Show’s over, time to play cards,” Vince said. But Vince seemed much more interested in continuing his monologue than in getting to his favorite pastime. As he talked he worked his eyebrows nonstop; they arched and flattened calisthenically. He seemed to be signaling wildly from somewhere inside himself while he confided in a casual tone.

  Suddenly I said, “She shaves her pussy.”

  His cigarette stopped just short of his lips. He looked at me, squinting past the smoke. “Yeah, a lot of them do that.”

  “She shaves her cunt bare,” I said.

  Vomiting up these cruel vulgarities forced the blood into my head. Please remember, I wasn’t drunk, hadn’t had a sip of anything stronger than club soda. I felt happy, there’s no other way of putting it.

  I said, “I know her. I’ll probably fuck her one of these days.”

  Vince stayed quite still for a couple seconds more. “I doubt that,” he said.

  Vince got louder as he drank another round, and then another. I didn’t know what he was saying. I listened while peering mainly at his eyebrows. Every now and then I answered. It was the kind of barroom conversation in which two people talk at cross-purposes until, sometimes anyway, one punches the other one.

  My habit when I’ve been humiliated is to go out and buy a book. When I wiped out a small IRA by trading like a crazy roulette addict, I bought a book on stocks. When I played golf in the Virginia suburbs and everybody laughed, I found a book by Gary Player; after some practice I got pretty good, good enough to like these outings with lobbyists. After this incident in a bar I found a book in a small, exotic store: 101 Defenses Against Attack. I see I’m stalling. My friend slugged me. His fist snaked out like the knotted end of a whip and struck my forehead and the bridge of my nose. A polar whiteness exploded in my face. And although I wasn’t out, didn’t sleep, my thoughts all turned to questions, and I tipped over onto the floor. Sat there trying to push myself upright. I’m sure everybody thought I was drunk.

  Under my hands the floor felt gritty with what I thought might be sawdust. It took me a little more time to remember what I was doing down there—I was trying to get up. I looked up to see Flower Cannon beside the stage. She’d taken off her black wig. She had her drink tipped up high and she was looking at me sideways. But out of a sort of libertarian barroom tact, I think, neither she nor anybody else seemed to be making very much of this incident. A couple of guys from a neighboring table helped me back onto my chair while I said, “I’m all right, I’m all right.”

  Vince himself had disappeared, and a good thing—a person with his criminal history couldn’t afford any more trouble.

  As soon as I could stand up straight, I left. On my way out I suddenly felt dizzy and sat down at the bar and asked for some orange juice. I sipped at it no more than a couple of minutes and then made my way out to the bright parking lot, where I realized I hadn’t even stopped off at the men’s room to see to my condition. My hands were filthy where I’d pushed myself up from the floor. Along with the grit of sawdust I found the stains of spilt drinks on my knees where I’d crawled around looking for my senses. I began to realize I had no idea where in the world I was going.

  A man approached me, a young man frowning intelligently. Apparently he’d followed me out of the casino. “I saw that in there,” he said.

  I leaned against a car.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded and tried to smile. “Excellent.”

  In retrospect, there’s the humiliation: I forgot to be outraged, tried to play the cowboy.

  “If you want to press charges, I’ll show up in court.”

  “It was just one of those ridiculous—aah,” I assured him incoherently, “you know how it goes.”
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  “That was a completely unprovoked attack.”

  I recognized him. He was a grad student with an office in our building, the Humanities Building. I didn’t know what subject he taught, but whenever I went down the stairs I passed his office, and it seemed he was always there, always talking in a self-assured nonstop voice to one of his students while others waited outside his door or sat on the stairs nearby. In a way, he was a junior colleague of mine. My embarrassment was now complete.

  “If there’s anything I can do—”

  “I’d really feel worse if you troubled yourself about it at all.”

  “Yeah, I get you,” he said. “Okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Just tell me you’re navigating on your own power, and I’m outa here.”

  “I just needed air. I’m all right.”

  After he’d left me I moved myself a few paces and sat on the bumper of a truck while I tried to make a plan for the rest of the day, which looked completely unappealing now. I determined I’d check on bus schedules. If I didn’t learn of a bus leaving very soon, I’d get a motel room and watch TV or nap while I waited.

  But now I found myself signaling across the parking lot to Flower Cannon as she came out of the casino. She headed right over, whether to greet me or because her car was parked close by I didn’t know.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a man’s wrinkled linen sports coat. Her makeup was gone.

  “We’re actually acquainted,” I said.

  “Yes. Hi,” she said.

  “Do you remember me?”

  “Sure. You just got knocked out in there. You’re quite memorable.”

  “I was just going to ask you for a ride back to the University, if you remember me.”

  “Michael Reed, right?”

  “Yes. Michael Reed. I need a ride.”

  “Did he steal your car, too?”

  “I’m glad one of us sees the humor in it.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just laughing because I’m drunk.”