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A HalfMan Dreamer
David Matlin
Wesley’d always be out in the hills walking or riding a horse, alone most
times, some with us to play rangewar, recreate the nineteenth century
settlements that had dripped into the smallest canyons over who’d end up in the
future we were to live, being inferior or superior. Rusted pistol, bits,
horseshoe, bone. That’s what’d appear through the dirt after spring rains.
Wesley could be found walking that map. We’d watch him from a ridge, lean over
or get on his hands and knees like his father’d done before him to dig up ants’
nests or clods, smell the world that way. For his father. It was the soil he was
after, its health and disease. For Wesley. We weren’t sure. And if he was
either, sure as hell he’d never say, watch us watchin him and be in his saddle
when we came up, ready to race. Wesley’d rode the tunnel one night between
Detroit and Windsor. There was a person holding the hand straps in a packed bus
between countries under the Detroit River. Wesley wrote he was from Montreal.
Had used his aunt and uncle’s name and address in Kansas City to sign up with
the 82nd Airborne. They trained him for assault Hueys, a door gunner with a
machine that spewed out enough ventilation for ten wars. He was back. Didn’t
want the citizenship offered or the decorations, wanted to sign up for classes in
Montreal, see if it might be possible to walk a sidewalk again with trees
shading it, read a book and study without hearing prop blades above his head cut
and wump the air he and those bodies below him had breathed before he applied
the almost weightless butchery of oxygen lying between his forefinger and the 50
caliber trigger he’d come to know so well. They talked and had some drinks in
Windsor. Wesley told us that was when he decided to sign up for classes. Start a
little at the bit. Took a Saturday course in archeology where there’d be a dig
in swamps north of the city, and another, about the Chinese, the ancient Chou
and Shang.
The Indian site was pre-Columbian. There were potsherds, arrowhead fragments, ochre stains, charcoal from five hundred year-old fires. Fish and bird bone showed too at this camp which may have been used for decades. Wesley liked the
work. Doing soil samples, mapping each find and the exact level of its
appearance. This contact with those long gone others, what thinking was brought
about them as each unstable, half corroded fragment appeared out of the dirt
they may actually have stood on assumed a quietness for Wesley, this stem from
another world and its shadows. The stuff about the Chou and Shang. He studied
the pottery of the older people, how it moved toward the elaborate finely poured
bronze vessels of the Shang, the drama and mass of the pieces. He examined that
for hours wanting to ask about them, his questions over jade knives and burials,
axe blades that seemed to him had been forged to cut off the heads of gods. His
teacher spoke and read Chinese, was Quebec French, a scholar of Asia who said
things about Vietnam, its history when asked, would describe a Delta or northern
villager. He was one of the earliest to tell that America might kill part of
itself there and got publicly scorned down, his gentle unswaying revelations
jeered. He would almost whisper about the Shang when Wesley talked to him. Their
metal technology, the delicacy and brutality of their transformation of
rhinoceros and tigers into sound engorged bronze bells inlaid with silver and
gold. Wesley had a small room he rented off Cass Avenue. He’d try a bar, mostly
listen to the talk, then go back and read, imagine the fall run he was missing.
I’d had a chance to come home but re-upped, volunteered for a meaner tour.
Wesley said he wouldn’t touch the Pacific without me being there. Had never seen
a real winter and the colder it got the better the girls looked.
He said he’d stay.
The trees were stripped. Ferns gone from yellow to brown at the old Indian
site. Grasses looked a burnt grey before the planetary slide. Wesley told us the
lowering sun nearly scared him. And when he walked into the deeper woods
surrounding the dig he’d see deer gone grey too eating fast as they could.
Nearly anything with a hint of nutrition. A cricket here and there, and the wild
flowers looking like something had charred them from the crown down, and soon,
whatever it was that did this to the flowers might lick the three or four
forlorn crickets lick away their songs as though those were bodies too.
Everything half dead and the left half-life nervous. The forest had a stench
too, he’d never known. You’d smell its sleep setting in, every day going closer
to the near to be entered dreams risen up in the acrid grip holding the forest
in its new settled latency. Crusts of thin ice splintered over ponds, this
growing faintness of cold, slipping before any sun-ray then to sneak back like
these spread frozen webbings were echoes wandered from some desolate voice that
had scented the world, wanted to stop it in mid-breath as Wesley watched, over
puddle, lake. It didn’t matter. The rains had come to soak the moistureless
coloring leafs, pull on them and then the fall winds to cut at the forest, cut at
every branch and twig. Cut the wasps, ground hornets lumped over any sugar
lurched apple, plum, dead squirrel. He told us he’d even come up on a maple, a
huge sweet thing covered, weighted down almost from top to trunk with monarch
butterflies, tens upon tens of thousands opening and shutting their wings, the
color of them flexed almost into a mountain to crush the moveless being where
they’d landed. We’d all seen lady bugs do something like this, cover pine stumps
in the coast range, each red dribble of them to make that remnant into a burnt
insect flamed stone but nothing like these butterflies pulling at that maple as
if a more ancient sun had landed just there, split itself into these creatures
to be their flood, lingering in this tree. Wesley thought about the Kiowa, Tom
Green. What he’d told about butterflies. His ancient grandmothers and aunts who’d
had their minds shattered by butterfly journeys. Their female yearning. Some to
come out of trances somehow stacked in a permanent silence, brought to early
death, or spin themselves in a cocoon of far voicings and emergencies that might
save the life of villages.
He sent a note to the Indian about the swarm. Tom Green wrote back he was glad
Wesley had come upon such wonderful trouble. That it was luck almost good as
life and death themselves to have seen such a tree and that he wished Wesley
more of the same kind. Tom Green filled the mail envelope with the brown color
stems of the Rosa Damascena with its small pinked, light enfolding glands.
Wesley remembered those glands cover everything but the petals of this ancient
rose to keep all but the butterflies and bees from the nectar. Tom Green asked
him to lay those stems at the maple’s base next time there was a chance. He also
mentioned he was glad the butterflies had called the way they did that day. He’d
ring his grandmothers on an extraterrestrial telephone and let them know. He
said he hoped Wesley wasn’t getting too smart or too stupid and left off with a
warning from his old aunts about seeing one too many trees like that. It was ok
with maples. If it’d been a black walnut, why then the butterflies had the right
to hide the dick of the witness anywhere they wanted. The chosen one had the
usual five days before giving up the prize. Wesley could practically hear the
Kiowa giggle over that with his ancestresses. But he was glad for that maple too
and laid the stems of the Damascena at its base. The Kiowa would have done
almost anything to give Wesley those five days than the one where he’d be a
corpse in a Mekong rivulet.
Tom Green wrote Wesley earlier about a trip he took to King Lear Peak as it
overlooks the Black Rock Desert, gone with a Shoshoni he knew. They walked into
a canyon. Some old still preserved burials were there and they wanted to remind
themselves about certain things. There were eagles circling the upper sandstones
and it was quiet enough so you could about hear the wind thrush the feathers of
their flexed tails. That didn’t last long. The noise of big engine pick-ups
ripped at the Mesozoic cliffs. Tom and his friend climbed a ridge for a better
look. The trucks had thrown up a contrail of dust but that didn’t block what the
men down below were after. A small herd of horses, fifteen or twenty boxed in.
The animals trying to get a distance that would never exist again. The people in
the trucks came to a stop. Got out. Reached into the open beds for chain saws.
Tom could see them fiddling with gas, oil, the spited introductory revs of the
smoking machines. It didn’t take long. And you could hear the animals scream
above the pitch of steel and those razors churned through Equus meat like that
was no more than a salt engulfed slug. The horses stared at what was happening
to them, at the men who’d do such a thing who were tossing still quivering horse
sections into a pile. Those boys and their equipment had bathed and it didn’t
seem to Tom any different than what had taken place off Newfoundland and the
Gulf of St. Lawrence all the open years back when walruses by the million got
brain clubbed, the sixteenth century coves from Quebec City to Cape Freels, to
the nameless canyon where he now stood were forever the poised beginning come
with its kiss, and whether it was Basque fisherpeople or ranchers’ sons the
hemorrhage had the same calling card. Where it had drifted to Tom and that
Shoshoni didn’t know. If it surfaced in Asia Tom felt those people would
redesign the feast and the butcher, make it so that America would maybe like the
taste of itself better’n anything else. He said too, he wished they’d send him
rather than Wesley. Send the one’s who’d lived. They’d know who to kill and kill
war with it. Wesley went back to that maple when its leaf and butterfly weight
had gone, its posture held by steepening ice-cut air. He heard a lone bird
singing. One incantation emitted from the skeletonized maple. A vireo. Some
leftover quaked hard like the other things there, before even the softest wind.
Chipmunks snapped their jaws under the risen winter sky pushing at it seeming to
disintegrate both the ancient high bowl and the vireo holding itself, holding
itself in the incantation against a first word and all the accumulation to
follow. As if that song were part of the irresistible stones, the Sioux ones Tom
had told him about flying between worlds, search the strange tides there for the
drowned, bird or wolf eaten, the flash flood crushed, and that seeing what’d
happened in that canyon Tom was scared, not in any usual way fear comes, but
about if any of those dreamers sent their stones, what those voyeurs on their
wraith journeys would stumble onto.
Wesley came back to his room after unearthing some more pre-Columbian
otherworld. It was still late afternoon. A Saturday. He looked at his Voight fins.
His life-cord ankle straps. And then out the window. Snow flurries licked at the
sills. I’d told him I’d been shot. A wound through the leg. I asked him if he’d
send me something from those people in the forest he went to visit. Red ochre
arrived. I’d carry it with me. Without it I might be dead. The people we were
fighting. They knew how to shoot. Head shots that would come from nowhere and
left you inside this shame. It couldn’t be filled up. With anything. Nothing. No
one could prepare you to know what it felt like to see a man that way. I didn’t
want to say too much about that, its perversion. The things it’d make me ask and
wonder. Get me or someone else churned into a run through the procedures. He
said he didn’t want me to live to come back thirsty for a surgical noose, swell
my veins like so many others where we came from. And here was the ochre. If it
made them come alive in the world of the dead then maybe it’d do something to me
twice-tubed for lift off that converts you into a twenty-four degree
pocket-rocket. The shadows underneath. They were filled with tunnels and boys
uniformed and masked. Their steps throbbing against secret stairs. The greasy
infected cement, cracking with the strain above it, its surface ready to erupt
downward into this place. In one corner, a couple there is locked in a candle
lit dance. The woman’s hunger. She wants the male to unwrap himself. Show his
penis. When she sees it a sound from her throat equally blood chambered rushes
over the masked boys in the semidarkness wanting someone to kill. Her teeth have
the sexual carnivals of her past etched into them. Her laughter animates the
held scenes there and the candle formed shadows on the walls behind them flutter
with the growing erection, its transparency meeting the facial dangle of her
tongue, the sleeve of her labia lushly flowered. On one of her teeth dawn has
the jaws of water without flesh. The direction of the journey shines there.
Wesley’d been in one. A bar where mostly negro workers went. He was the only
white there some Saturdays, attracted to the hard dancing and drinking. The veil
it held. They’d watch him. Show him unmovingly, the remote jeopardy that bore
them, the underscent of transparencies holding them, and which gave them a layer
of deflected surveillance. And how its body if inflated would mangle him. But
only for a second. Then to take back the near appeared thing. Offer a shot of
Johnny Walker Black. Cut the lemon for him. Pull it through his teeth. Let it mix
there at the gate of his body. Wesley’s habit was to carry a knife. Maybe it
went back to both his mother and father. Tools and at least what protection
might pretend even when none could ever come. No Mexican/Indian like his
mother’s people would set themselves anywhere without that. His father had three
or four favorites. Wear them down to different formations for peeling,
examination, cleaning. Another hand with a little piece of steel that’d go
finally where words couldn’t, make those sounded bent things into shafts of a
dead mine. No thoughts about violence though these things seemed to say always
what the rules were, even in the remote world of roses. The cold mystery of
their bloom in that desert where he’d learned to watch. Slowly he found they
carried knives too, quiet and steady and real. Not for show. But in range. To be
drawn and used. You could concentrate both ways on that mirror. Get spent or
stand. Let the veil of race go. He knew they had shown him the sexual garments
of the degradation. The sex mummy come to bathe everyone in this Egypt with all
its inmost ornaments. It scared him how they let him sway before them, let their
drops of permission sweetly splash, and watched, knowing this boy in his
whiteness. What he had come to ask, and
maybe, for them, what they’d become ready to give.
A wheel cougar whistle pierces the
dead ears
of the dead. The underworld beast has
straight legs
flanged at their ends holes punched for axles.
The association of ease however does not
exist and the wheels
inspire no utility no solution to burden.
The cougar's
tongue is swollen hanging in desperation from a
twisted face. Rabies
tears at its eyes and jaws
and the wheels
are hydrophobic insignias
flowing water and rain
viral convenience disshaping water of
mind and mind/earth
There’s a gap in the geologic history of Michigan. It’s called “The Lost
Interval.” To call it huge is to call upon an abyss that makes the nine days and
nights it takes in some stories for the dead to fall into the lands where they
go seem like the candle in the sunshine trying to keep up with the vast spiders
and their fiery tracks as they swim across infinity. It is almost like it’s an
apology but one too vast and now infested with nothing and what’s beyond nothing
as it labors at its stupendous circumferences. What’s lost is
two-hundred-eighty-million years of geologic time from the end of the Paleozoic
where the Mississippian scruntches into the Pennsylvanian to the Pleistocene.
There’s some microscopic plant spores from the Jurassic, whisp-charmed
tremblings from the Age of Dinosaurs laid down maybe in now untraceable stream
valleys when Mesozoic Michigan was a desert and the risen land extended itself
above the invading oceans and the huge Silurian reefs of the Kokomo Sea.
Michigan offers up a mysterious even wonderful blank where all the furies of
life and death gather upon this core of dreamlessness and its petals waiting for
the secret bee who never came and never will. The Iroquois did something similar
in the mid-1600’s. Set out on an extinction campaign against the Huron, Jesuit,
Cat, Tobacco, Neutral, and Fire Nations. They made what’s now known as Huronia,
the old floor of Ice Age Lake Algonquin, a fertile plain extending from the
southern Georgian Bay to the flats of Lake Erie, into a home sale vacuum cleaner
demonstration gobbling any opposing humanity, a place they loved to visit and
till its human emptiness until alcohol, cooking pots with their iron, and the
lust for vengeance a hundred years later began making that wilderness from north
of Albany to the Carolinas and from there to the edge of the Missouri into a
version of decay where it is said in some chronicles they took to biting each
other like dogs.
And cool air
filled with military rated felonys these MRF's their preference for
any surgeon
General's warning sideways winding in the trees popped
dead
from the cold wild womens' broken eggs they've thrown to
the ants
After eight at night it began to fill with men. Wesley didn’t mind that.
Probably he didn’t know. Carried his Western friendliness, not conscious
necessarily of the affordable ease it occupied, its simple intimacies to be
finished or unfinished and leave living alone that way. He’d go for a beer. Some
talk. The gay men anxious for the silent alarm, smoking, almost trembling with
the possessions this one minute would begin to allow. Sometimes he’d watch the
assertions of these men willing themselves this one faint interior between the
repulsions of loneliness and sex hunt. The femmes came earliest, though not in
drag, here it was too dangerous even before these newest permissions, to talk to
the bar’s owner, a woman they adored named Lilliane. They wore beautiful
sweaters before the fall’s encroaching cold. Hair and skin cared for, the
arrestment of boy presence and body finely lined against the sway of pants. The
bar’s owner, a Jewess born of trader parents in the Congo adored this
desperation around her, the men who sacrificed themselves to it and came upon a
shocked compassion about themselves. The immense sexual arrangements splashing
them with panic and a remote nerve before their panic they would not slip from.
Cocksuckers. You could spew that word easily enough. But I’d seen men around me
in rice-paddies release themselves and not care about closets and cheerleaders
ever again. War smashing the shrewd overlays of denial making cocksuckers in a
firefight, braver for the afterworld they’d step into that meant saved lives in
battle and love and friendship. Wesley’s mother had Mochica ceramics she wasn’t
afraid of. Gone to Peru to buy them, set with her leather gloves to shroud her
small almost skeletally delicate hands, knee-long black hair, sure to have her
ivory, mother-of-pearl cigarette holders and sunglasses. Take a checkbook ready
to turn anyone else’s to pulp. Fly to Lima via TWA or whatever got there
quickest. She’d arrive looking just like any other Mestizo. If she could have
taken her two favorite Chrysler convertibles she’d have done that too. Instead
she wore her own hand knitted dresses, snake skin high heels, careful that her
lipstick drew a just right sexual wash on the cigarettes in her ashtrays. She
didn’t necessarily want other men or women, the farmer, the Jew she lived with and
sometimes for, was enough goddamned trouble. The two words “high maintainence”
sometimes floated up, and a letter’d be picked out from the adjective or noun,
shredded like it was a dragonfly, put back, offered a chance to grow new wings
and legs. She told Wesley and me once after one of those trips it made her feel
berdache to dress up. Shock the gringos and European Spanish who wanted the art
too, she’d gone after. Her aloofness shifted her, allowed things like that to be
said even to a son. The ceramics she bid on. A dog fucking a woman. Eyes of her
staring insatiably at the mounted animal. The grievance of her ecstasies
singeing her. Her reluctance and terror consumed by the drifting invitations of
passivity, the tales of submissiveness and their corpse-like deceptions anchored
there. Her hold upon the dog flowering into conscience, rage, and her panic. The
cloud-burst of instructions poised against the life of women. Mr. Pork Chop. Mr.
Blister Straight Up. Mister Sister and his incurable grievances. Dwarfs,
Hunchbacks, Hairlips. The heads of their penises brushed by facial, vaginal lips
folding, moistening. The dwarfs are still unravished by the skeletal
deformities. One is dressed. The flayed skin of a captive has dried. Sucked
itself tight against him. His hip dysplasia, swollen abdomen, enhance the
impression that the victim’s soul has been shoved up his ass. Only the Ladies of
the Court will be allowed to watch this dwarf who prepared their enemas. Brought
them to the first dreamed border of womanhood. They’ll watch closely the shades
of blue his body will turn. Wait to see if he’ll become the number of an ancient
lunation when the ancestors in his line gave birth to the swallowed God. These
things she brought back scared those earliest Europeans so they wanted to break
or hack everything in that world. The accusation of sodomy and the morbid
pressure of conquest. Everywhere they saw eroticism and everywhere it fueled their
justification. Ceramic masterpieces from Mexico to Peru showing men sitting on
each other. Anal penetrations. The humanity so firm, unswaying, it is almost
indifferent. Skeletons riding vessels of water jacking themselves off, the final
relict of the once fleshed bone swollen with just enough drops of blood.
Prisoners suffocating. Slowly, their cocks risen with each equally swelling last
breath, bulging them. Anal sanctuary between women and men. Everything to be
smashed, censored. Their amazement at the sexual diversities beyond procreation.
“Sodomitic” they called it. Throw away yourself on this show. Fart. Shit on your
toes. Ooze. Issue a liquid. Cut yourself. Be adhesive. Get glued. Ashen green.
Break flesh. Glisten. Hang. Just hang. Spread. Blood spotted. Burst open. Open.
Be fuzzy and disintegrate. Go dry Mr. Blister. Go drop Mr. Sister. Sling that
dead iron. But the masterpieces were alive and everywhere. The men and women
carnally tending each other, for what millennia receding back toward the
Northward glaciations, to keep a human heart and not forget? This Indian
behavior. Inferiority. Filth. The drag queens who stood against the murder,
impressed the Spaniard with the insinuation of themselves, standing, unyielded,
were burned or eaten alive by dogs as honor to the Iberians.
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