After the party, we all go down by the shivering river.
Winter, cold, but nowhere ice. Kirsten laughs at the richly carved salmon sculptures curled all perfect for the tourists, while live herring gulls circle overhead, warm someplace within their torpedo torsos, and occasionally screaming. Ornery as fuck.
Rafe, one acquisitive eye on the tawdry sub-stripmall liquidation warehouse bargain world outlet stores, at last says this: "Let's go. Find something good. Could we?"
And Lucinda knows she gotta head back south soon enough, cross the stupid dumbfuck border before it gets even stupider with dumbfuck holiday traffic, beat the cheap gasoline and dairy hound dogs, the Costco bandits, Walmart outlaws and Bellis Fair pillagers, and make time and peace with the toothy, chummy, American dumbfuck country mouse. (Here I might point out the green, mostly submerged and peeling boat, not so much offshore as offbank, but there have been many observations throughout our history every bit as profound yet equally and utterly ignored.)
An anticlimax, then.
The real cruelty of life is this, a gathering of negatives: We stumble on the only soul who makes us want to do nothing but sing, only to find that their song is not ours, and never will be.
After which the rains come. And boy, do they come. Gets so the local critters all abandon this place, leave their possible return to fate and the glimmering stars. Bridges, backroads washed out. Nowhere left to ford, all ravelled up in muffled acreages and submerged indeterminacies.
I probably loved Kirsten the most, who always laughed and never succumbed until the very end. She revered things with such lively aplomb. The quiet reserve, the crow score, the chicken-scratch bordello throat-song.
"You'll never follow me all the way," she taunts. And she's right. I went on some tangent, sparking off of the mainstream, reading from some profane backwoods gospel, gleaning banjo pickings in scree-fanned draws, collecting possums and coons a-plenty and hurling them half-assed and wild, aimed mainly potwise, learning their death scents too. Like I learnt her sex scent all along. Her sex scent. Near makes me pause it does.
While Rafe laughs his cynic laugh. Not because he's a cynic but more 'cause he lost all belief in being anything beyond or aside from someone won't do nothin' all that good or ere that bad. Settled for things. Best equipped to hang from the fugitive's neck and chant the death knell requiem. Which may as well be a cynic, I guess, oh lord so jaded and lost.
But Lucinda. The real Lucinda. She will return. Again and again, tires crunching cheap motel parking lot gravel, her serious face levelled athwart a serious plane. She will sit alone, her cold, hard nipples gathered like fat, dry raisins, her elbows jutting chickenwise, her lorn, gone cuntwarmth terrible in its loss and desirous in its recall, she unable to feel her twitching nose or pursing lips, her arid breath a spectre so lonely it makes loneliness itself seem near gravid with joy.
"Love is what I felt back there, and love is where I'm headed," she says, a chastened banshee, heart defiant while eyes downcast.
Rafe sneers. Sucks on what's left of his teeth.
"What the fuck you got to sneer about?" I ask, the first thing I ever said in this furious, chaotic world that ever mattered.
No one ever answers. No one ever. I think about crying and realize I got no tears, and everything moves relentlessly on, even if the world itself stops. Especially then.
___________________________
Not even sure why or how, but this post by my awesome friend Dan Mader somehow birthed this piece. Oh, and Faulkner.