Marfa Lights
I was coming back to New Mexico on an Amtrak, from a family reunion near San Antonio, and I was bored. It was a hot summer day, but the cars were air-conditioned, and some people were playing cards in the club car. I asked if I could join them, and they welcomed me. They had only three and needed one more anyway, though they were just playing gin rummy, and not for money.
The guy that owned the cards, I’ll call him Dr. Bock, was a historian of some kind, and was going to Las Vegas. Perhaps we worked at a university or something; he was a little older, established-looking, with a well-trimmed beard and well dressed. His cards were “presidential” – each one had some American president on it, except that there were less than fifty-two presidents, so there were a few other people on there too, including Ben Franklin and Sacajawea, two I remember. It made a kind of bizarre game of gin rummy, having three aces, and having them be Washington, Lincoln, and perhaps Roosevelt, but history wasn’t my specialty; I’m an English teacher.
The young woman who was playing was very sharp. She introduced herself as Micaeya, or something like that; she had a kind of olive skin and very long, well-braided hair. As we talked it seemed perhaps she was a student in Tucson, going back from New Orleans. She was quite pretty but young, compared to the rest of us, even to Tony, who kind of had his eye on her.
Tony was the fourth guy in the game. He was tall and intense, and dark flashing eyes. As I said, he seemed to like Micaeya, but it turned out to be more complicated than that. It turned out he hadn’t wanted her in the game, and really wanted the game to be for money. And also, as it turned out, she was quite talented, and was winning; this made him steadily more uncomfortable. So the relationship was already complicated. But that’s the way these things are. And, he was considerably older, maybe thirty or more. I had no evidence from her, really, that she even considered him. She was smooth, friendly to everyone, and winning steadily, and she had plenty of time to look at the scenery, which was stunning, in its wide, empty, desert-like West Texas way.
When I told them I was from New Mexico, Micaeya told about how she’d gone to visit a roommate in Roswell, and it was full of alien signs: balloon alien at the car dealership, alien pictures on the windows of the café, alien dolls sold at the gift shop, that kind of thing. This is well known in New Mexico, where towns seek to be famous for something, just so they’ll get a few visitors in a year; this was working pretty well for Roswell, though the kind of visitors those alien museums attracted made folks wonder, of course.
Tony, in a kind of one-upping way, told about how he’d worked for Atari in El Paso at one point, and they decided to throw away a million ET video games in a landfill in New Mexico. It was generally considered to be the worst video game ever made; they’d been stuck with a million of them, and didn’t want them; and Tony himself was partly responsible for getting rid of them. This, he said, was back in the eighties, and he knew there was some interest in digging them up now, if only because they were so bad, or because they’d become a cult item in the intervening time. It was a bad game, though, he maintained. People kept getting stuck in various worlds, unable to get out. There was no way to win.
His story, for some reason, reminded me of a time I was in Iowa, and just off the interstate, I’d stumbled upon an Edsel graveyard. Some guy had collected maybe twenty of them, and left them in an apple orchard, and these apples were falling on them, and then rotting on the ground nearby (it was maybe November) – and the cars, too, were returning to the earth, beautiful in their own way. Edsels were rejected not for being bad, or not working, or trapping people, but because they were too good – their fins were too fancy, and they incorporated a space-ship kind of look before people were really ready for it. Similarly to the ET game, though, they were rejected – many of them had to simply sit somewhere, unused.
The Amtrak rolled into the tiny town of Alpine, which Texans know as the gateway to the whole wide, vast, dry Big Bend region, but which, from this train at this moment in the middle of the day, just seemed like the most remote, isolated place on earth. The town was almost deserted, but several people got off the train, and a few got on, and I’m sure the arrival of the train was itself a big deal in some quarters of the town. Micaeya made a snarky remark about the town, like, she wouldn’t want to get stuck in a town like this after dark, and that was understandable, given that she was black, and had long braided hair, and had plenty to fear. I maintained that you never know, because this is true; not wanting to make assumptions about Alpine, before I’d even met anyone in it. A better generalization about Texas is that in some of these towns they’d rather kill you than look at you, and will, but in most, they are friendlier than you can possibly imagine. But I kept my mouth shut. After all, I’m a white male, and they might treat people like me quite differently from others.
Tony, all this time, kept his eyes narrow and concentrated on the game, which he didn’t tend to win, no matter how much he tried. He knew the southwest quite well, I could tell; he knew, for example, that where there was White Sands, just north of El Paso, there was another White Sands, just like it only smaller, down south of Juarez, on the other side of the border. Yet he was not Mexican, not even a part Mexican; maybe something else, like part Indian, or part Arab perhaps; I couldn’t quite make it out. And I don’t ever ask, or make assumptions based on names like “Tony”. I can tell you that, while the game went pretty smoothly, he was the only person who truly cared whether he won or lost; the presidents, the scenery, the town, these meant little to him. He hated it, though, when Micaeya referred to the presidents as “dead white men” as if they were legion of ghosts, come back to haunt us.
Now it was the historian’s turn to tell his story, as now we were going over a wide river valley, and this seemed to get his attention. I use the term “river” loosely, in the West Texas fashion, because most of these rivers, even the Rio Grande, rarely have water that you can see, except in the rare cases when it rains; this one, however, had this enormous valley that followed it down to the Rio Grande, no doubt, and there was not a road in sight. The train crossed this huge bridge, and we could see nothing but wide West Texas valley on both sides. The memory sticks with me, though the name of the river, if it even had one, escapes me.
It turns out that Dr. Bock had been doing research on the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, who now live in nineteen villages outside of Albuquerque. He had stumbled across the idea that one whole family of these people, who comprised maybe seven or eight of the Pueblos, had actually come from the Caribbean. The person who had made this claim, a native of one of the other Pueblos, had language and other evidence to prove it, but, according to Dr. Bock, he hadn’t gotten very far with it. You could go all the way to the Caribbean, as he had, and you still wouldn’t find much that would really prove it.
But if they had, he said, one would have to make several assumptions. First was that they’d followed rivers like the Rio Grande, or this one, that presumably had real water at the time. Second, they’d come in large groups, as he’d mentioned that their language, like that in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus’ arrival, had separate features for men’s language and women’s language. And finally, he was talking about maybe 1200, or 1300, a time when travel wasn’t really so easy. Did they know where they were going? Did they have a sense of where these rivers led to? He was engrossed in this world of the ancient people, and seemed to know a lot about them. I knew nothing about them, though I was glad we were off the topic of ET video games.
Being from Vegas, he said, he was used to modern people leaving all kinds of stuff in the desert – old neon signs, fighter planes, ET videos – even nuclear waste. But he’d come to admire the people who came and went without a trace, mentioning, on the side, the petroglyphs, which could have been theirs – and he felt that that was wiser and more respectul.
I should mention that at some point this woman, about my age, came through the train, and stopped at our table, for some reason, to start talking about the Marfa Lights. Now we were near Marfa, but of course in West Texas, “near” can mean four, five, seven hours away – but what she wanted us to know was that at night, they swirled around and put out a show worth coming from miles to watch. It’s interesting, sometimes, that landscape that seems totally barren and empty, with miles and miles of rock and useless land, was actually home to interesting things. The Marfa Lights, she said, was among them, well worth your time.
I’d heard this, having spent time in Texas, but it was broad daylight; the sun was shining brightly; and I considered it a kind of distraction. I was interested in Dr. Bock’s apparent knowledge of the ancient people, whereas I had very little experience, or interest, in the supernatural. As the woman left, I’d made it clear, more or less, that she hadn’t sold the idea. Why should I go to Marfa? I had enough problems. One of those was transportation connections in El Paso.
At some point, while Dr. Bock was talking, he seemed to catch Tony cheating at cards. Now how you’d cheat at gin rummy, or even why, when there was no money involved, was a complete mystery to me. I never did figure out exactly how he’d been cheating, but there was no question; he’d won the last few hands, whereas, he’d lost most of the earlier ones. Perhaps he’d had aces in his sleeve (and in that case, it would have been Lincoln)? Alas I had been scanning the West Texas landscape, looking for a sign, any sign, of where we were; no luck. We were coming into El Paso, that’s all I knew.
Micaeya supported him, visibly and verbally; she too had seen it, or at least sensed that something was up with him winning all the time. Whatever it was, they had both seen it, or at least were sure it had happened. They were mad. Whereas neither seemed to mind losing a single hand or two, as I didn’t mind, they did mind losing them, especially losing several, because of cheating. It had spoiled their game. They demanded that he admit it and apologize. Dr. Bock took his cards back and counted them.
At this point I excused myself, having to gather my possessions to exit the train at El Paso. An argument about the winner of a card game seemed particularly pointless, like a terrible video game, and I just had no stomach for it. But as I came back through the train I saw Dr. Bock being escorted from the train. How they had concluded that he was at fault, I’m not sure; perhaps he’d said something suspicious. At this point, Tony and Micaeya were nowhere to be seen. I was getting off the train anyway.
Funny about the stuff I remember: the Lincoln card, with its bent kind of look, when they finally tracked it down; the jostling of the train at the very end there, as if slowing down made it unsteady; the woman who’d come along and told us the story about the Marfa Lights – and how they had never been successfully explained (thus, according to her, making Marfa right up with Roswell as a place that was likely to have experienced, or to be experiencing, extraterrestrial visits) – and finally, the complete and total disappearance of both Tony and Micaeya, right at the time poor Dr. Bock had to go off and explain himself at some police station. His fight was not my fight; whatever he’d done, I hadn’t even seen it, yet I at least felt a little guilty leaving him there alone trying to explain himself. There was a mystery there – some information that I didn’t get – but I wasn’t going to get it, and if you can read this and shine some light on what actually happened, I’d like to know. Something must have happened, I figured, right as I was leaving. Perhaps he had lost his temper and cast a blow, or maybe they had hauled Tony off separately, and needed him for questioning.
In any case, the Lincoln card was left there on the table, and I grabbed it. I was well aware that a deck of fifty-one is useless, as is a single card. But now I have this souvenir, and from that, I tell this story.
As for what actually happened, they do have cameras on these trains, especially in the club cars. But the movies those cameras make don’t show card cheating, or expressions on people’s faces, and besides, after a while, they erase them all, and start over fresh. El Paso is an interesting city, tucked up on the mountains facing Mexico as it is, but it’s way too busy for me, and I didn’t want to spend any more time there than I had to.
4-17
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Butter Churn
Butter Churn
So I’m sitting at this table with other musicians, and some of our audience, after our performance at a small mountain café, in a tiny town in New Mexico not far from El Paso, and I find myself a little impatient with their conversation. I’ve been working at a high school down in another town, down in the desert, and during the testing period I’ve found myself with some time on my hands, and started reading a ragged book, one of many biographies of Jack London. Here’s a guy who goes to Alaska, like I did, but he found out a lot more, about dogs especially, and he made a pretty good living off of it, and he walked around perpetuating this rugged image of himself, and he writes prolifically.
I don’t write prolifically. For one thing, I play music too. And also I have ten kids, and there are these kids around all the time, and they make a lot of noise, and make it so I can’t even play music enough. Once in a while I come out here, way out in the mountains, on winding mountain roads full of elk, where these folks play music, and I play with them, if I can, and they give us dinner when we’re done, which in my case is a chile cheesburger, really good. One of the musicians is a gospel singer, an excellent musician, too, well known in Texas and other places as well. The bass player is the local auctioneer. The banjo picker is a taxidermist. He can tell you how, if someone runs over a cougar, he can make it so it’ll hang on the wall of the barbecue restaurant. Or how some big elk head he mounted, with antlers and everything, looms over the propane guy’s shop. He stuffs them and mounts them, when he’s not playing the banjo, or running the cowboy church. That’s what he does.
It’s a spring night; leaves are budding on the trees and things are beginning to smell nice everywhere, especially since nature starts right the minute you get out of the café and across the road, where there’s a fresh-water river, rare in the southwest. There are elk and deer all over the road, but most of all, things are turning green and coming alive again. In the café they bring us our food, and the conversation turns to chance occurrences with, say, buying some old thing at a garage sale that turns out to be worth $30,000. The wife of the banjo picker, it turns out, is an antique dealer. The gospel singer says, when that happens, it’s the grace of God; he doesn’t care much for the money itself, or getting something for nothing, but does care a lot about the grace of God, it’s a common topic after our performances. The auctioneer has a twinkle in his eye, as he has some experience in this field, where some old dusty thing at an estate auction turns out to be worth a fortune. But he’s a little reserved about what he knows, because what he really wants is for people to come to his auctions, and bid on stuff, and perhaps turn over to him their aunt’s estate when the time comes. He doesn’t want to give the wrong impression, let us think he knows too much. He recently hurt his back; apparently he was moving some piano, and he didn’t even get all that much money off of it, he said, so he probably should have just refused, and made them wait until some young guy would come along and move it, but he didn’t.
My mind wanders a bit. The other day I was at the high school and got sick, and lost my balance. I started lurching in the hallways, worrying that the security guards, who were everywhere, would suspect I was drunk. In fact I was sick, not drunk, they could even test me if they wanted, but I was having trouble walking a straight line, a lot of trouble. And that triggered memories, being totally unhinged from the ground, in a fog, unable to keep my concentration on a straight line. It was not a good feeling.
Jack London, he’d write these stories about people dying in the woods, or dogs turning on each other, or some such thing, with extreme weather, or whatever he’d make up; he seemed to have no trouble coming up with things to write about. I find myself scraping the barrel looking for interesting things to write about. I’m reading about Jack London and the Arctic, and Jack London and his unhappy marriage, and then I get to the part where he’s taking a lot of morphine, and they can’t figure out whether he’d killed himself or just was getting careless treating his own pain which was becoming unbearable, in spite of everything. I’d actually lost a little interest in Jack London back at the point where he married somebody he didn’t love, but then, after a while, I figured, you never know about that kind of thing, how can some biographer tell about who loves whom and under what situation? A lifetime of being sorry he did it, yes, you can understand that, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love her. Maybe that biographer was simply mistaken. And I say that partly as a romantic, one who could look at someone and in an instant be more in love than ever before. That makes me dangerous, of course. My wife worries about me.
All of a sudden, a memory overtakes me, and I think of this time I was a schoolbus driver, out in the country, in Iowa, lurching along and hitting all the potholes in the gravel roads, gravel dust flying everywhere behind me. Rural Iowa is quite beautiful, all green with corn, but I had no time to even look at it. The older kids sat not on the seat, but on the seat backs, way in the back of the bus, because they liked the adventure, the risk, the thrill of the bus bashing them back and forth, but there were some very young kids, the small ones, and they sat in front, scared to death, knowing both that the road had steep ditches right at the edge, and that I was not from around there. I tried to control the rowdiest of them, tried to get them all to sit in their seats; I had to tell one kid to never show me a knife again, not when I was driving, because I had to concentrate. I took my job seriously. I hit a chicken one day; I wasn’t the best driver. It was not the kind of thing you could take for granted, read a Jack London book, or daydream. It took all my concentration. It was hard, and I was not born to be so regular, so dull, so consistent.
At the café, the story turns to a certain butter churn. The antique dealer describes it. Somebody had this antique butter churn in their foyer for what, twenty years, and decided to sell it. It was estate sale time, time to get rid of the antiques. Some guy comes over and buys it for a few hundred bucks. But it’s attached solidly to the floor. They take a hammer to its base trying to get it loose so the guy can take it home. They pound at it from all directions and finally they crack its base, and out comes a hundred gold coins or more; apparently the grandfather, long gone, had been hiding them in there. No wonder the thing weighed a ton! Full of gold coins that dated back, what, a hundred years or more, back in the age of gold coins, and they don’t even make those anymore. The family that’s selling it has to split the value of the coins with the guy that bought the butter churn, because, they figured, it was half his at the time when they found the coins. But the coins way outvalued the churn itself, which was just your standard run-of-the-mill antique butter churn.
Again, my mind wanders. Not into the money, the $30,000, the gold coins, really, or even a butter churn, which I would recognize as a nice antique, pretty to have around, but it’s not like I’d make my own butter, or ever even did. On the contrary, I’m a writer, and sometimes a fiddler, although on this night my string had popped and I didn’t have a spare, and I was stuck just singing a few old songs, western songs, instead of my usual bluegrass fiddle. As a writer, though, I’d read the Jack London book now, and read it carefully, even though he’d married someone he supposedly didn’t love. And there was this other book, a book by writers about how to write, where writers told about writing, and how it healed you, and how the topic of a biography was kind of a victim, and how to write well and such. It had this chapter by some writer where he said, write the stuff that only you can write. That was his main advice. He could have written that in one sentence, but instead he wrote a whole chapter, because that’s what they needed, chapters. But that was his advice, and it stuck with me. Why I thought of it now, I have no idea.
So this one morning, in Iowa, it was foggy, the fog sat on the cornfields, and the kids were stone silent, having perhaps had some wild party the night before. The gravel roads wound around in their maddening way. I was out of sleep, having hitchhiked to Des Moines the previous day, and worked my usual night job; I’d had to go to Des Moines, or near there, to pick up an old ’50 Dodge truck which I’d bought from an old guy. All of a sudden, the gravel, the fog, and the steep ditch, and I’d blacked out, and flipped the bus; it landed upside down in the cornfield; the littlest of the kids landed in my lap. Everything was all right, in the end; nobody was seriously injured. They tested me for alcohol and everything, but that wasn’t the problem. I was sober. Out of sleep, maybe, irresponsible, maybe, but drunk, no.
The mountains are so beautiful, with their fog, their rain, real water coming out of them, the pine smell, and I remember sometimes the time I’d jumped a train, sat on top of it backwards, and almost got hit by a tunnel – after I’d gone through, and lived, that was my first experience with God’s grace, the school bus was the second. The wonders of the mountains, with the grass, the flowers, the elk, the deer, but you have to stop to appreciate them. You can’t go looking at them while you’re driving, or even while you’re on a train.
The mountain roads I drive on up here are precarious – on the way to work, steep cliffs on either side, hairpin turns, swerving this way and that, going down at least 5000 feet each morning to work and back up in the afternoon. The mountain cliffs have boulders that occasionally fall on the road, or on the cars, if the drivers aren’t lucky; I imagine sometimes, that these rocks are messages being dropped by the ancient people, who obviously lived right here, where there was access to water, deer, elk, caves, green stuff, everything they needed. Not a whole lot of money to be made, out here, they didn’t have corn, or soybeans, or all that stuff those Iowa farmers were making a living on. Out in this small town, these folks are ranchers, except maybe the musicians themselves, who seemed to be generally of another mold, maybe the only ones who aren’t ranchers. And I’m not sure how these folks, our audience, make it ranching; there’s so little rain, so much danger, so much to spend money on. Cowboy songs, and gospel, and just about anything else, they like their music; they are actually pretty open-minded, great people. They’ve been nice to me, even when I lost my string, humiliated, unable to play; they liked the entertainment, living way out in the country, they were appreciative. As a musician, you have good nights, when the bluegrass comes right out of the fiddle, everything’s on time, everything works. As a writer, the same is true, sometimes things flow, they go right on the page. Then you have other nights, and don’t play very well, or can’t find anything to write, you could get a million bucks, still not have anything to write. I’m not Jack London, I don’t do it for the money; I work for money, and play music and write when I can. I watch out for rocks when I drive up and down the hill; out in the mountains, I watch out for the elk and deer. I try to keep my eyes on the road. I don’t like losing my balance, or lurching this way or that. I’ve got memories of steep ditches and cliffs, being upside down, kids in my lap.
But I’ll tell you, there are a lot of stars out here at night. You want God’s grace, there it is, they’re all out there. You have to pull over to see them, of course, you don’t want to try to look up, and drive at the same time, the roads are too narrow and wind around too much, too many animals on them. Just pull over and get out of the car. Then you’ll feel like I do: the world has at least put me here, still alive under these stars, still able to write another story. And tonight, this is it.
(4-17)
So I’m sitting at this table with other musicians, and some of our audience, after our performance at a small mountain café, in a tiny town in New Mexico not far from El Paso, and I find myself a little impatient with their conversation. I’ve been working at a high school down in another town, down in the desert, and during the testing period I’ve found myself with some time on my hands, and started reading a ragged book, one of many biographies of Jack London. Here’s a guy who goes to Alaska, like I did, but he found out a lot more, about dogs especially, and he made a pretty good living off of it, and he walked around perpetuating this rugged image of himself, and he writes prolifically.
I don’t write prolifically. For one thing, I play music too. And also I have ten kids, and there are these kids around all the time, and they make a lot of noise, and make it so I can’t even play music enough. Once in a while I come out here, way out in the mountains, on winding mountain roads full of elk, where these folks play music, and I play with them, if I can, and they give us dinner when we’re done, which in my case is a chile cheesburger, really good. One of the musicians is a gospel singer, an excellent musician, too, well known in Texas and other places as well. The bass player is the local auctioneer. The banjo picker is a taxidermist. He can tell you how, if someone runs over a cougar, he can make it so it’ll hang on the wall of the barbecue restaurant. Or how some big elk head he mounted, with antlers and everything, looms over the propane guy’s shop. He stuffs them and mounts them, when he’s not playing the banjo, or running the cowboy church. That’s what he does.
It’s a spring night; leaves are budding on the trees and things are beginning to smell nice everywhere, especially since nature starts right the minute you get out of the café and across the road, where there’s a fresh-water river, rare in the southwest. There are elk and deer all over the road, but most of all, things are turning green and coming alive again. In the café they bring us our food, and the conversation turns to chance occurrences with, say, buying some old thing at a garage sale that turns out to be worth $30,000. The wife of the banjo picker, it turns out, is an antique dealer. The gospel singer says, when that happens, it’s the grace of God; he doesn’t care much for the money itself, or getting something for nothing, but does care a lot about the grace of God, it’s a common topic after our performances. The auctioneer has a twinkle in his eye, as he has some experience in this field, where some old dusty thing at an estate auction turns out to be worth a fortune. But he’s a little reserved about what he knows, because what he really wants is for people to come to his auctions, and bid on stuff, and perhaps turn over to him their aunt’s estate when the time comes. He doesn’t want to give the wrong impression, let us think he knows too much. He recently hurt his back; apparently he was moving some piano, and he didn’t even get all that much money off of it, he said, so he probably should have just refused, and made them wait until some young guy would come along and move it, but he didn’t.
My mind wanders a bit. The other day I was at the high school and got sick, and lost my balance. I started lurching in the hallways, worrying that the security guards, who were everywhere, would suspect I was drunk. In fact I was sick, not drunk, they could even test me if they wanted, but I was having trouble walking a straight line, a lot of trouble. And that triggered memories, being totally unhinged from the ground, in a fog, unable to keep my concentration on a straight line. It was not a good feeling.
Jack London, he’d write these stories about people dying in the woods, or dogs turning on each other, or some such thing, with extreme weather, or whatever he’d make up; he seemed to have no trouble coming up with things to write about. I find myself scraping the barrel looking for interesting things to write about. I’m reading about Jack London and the Arctic, and Jack London and his unhappy marriage, and then I get to the part where he’s taking a lot of morphine, and they can’t figure out whether he’d killed himself or just was getting careless treating his own pain which was becoming unbearable, in spite of everything. I’d actually lost a little interest in Jack London back at the point where he married somebody he didn’t love, but then, after a while, I figured, you never know about that kind of thing, how can some biographer tell about who loves whom and under what situation? A lifetime of being sorry he did it, yes, you can understand that, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love her. Maybe that biographer was simply mistaken. And I say that partly as a romantic, one who could look at someone and in an instant be more in love than ever before. That makes me dangerous, of course. My wife worries about me.
All of a sudden, a memory overtakes me, and I think of this time I was a schoolbus driver, out in the country, in Iowa, lurching along and hitting all the potholes in the gravel roads, gravel dust flying everywhere behind me. Rural Iowa is quite beautiful, all green with corn, but I had no time to even look at it. The older kids sat not on the seat, but on the seat backs, way in the back of the bus, because they liked the adventure, the risk, the thrill of the bus bashing them back and forth, but there were some very young kids, the small ones, and they sat in front, scared to death, knowing both that the road had steep ditches right at the edge, and that I was not from around there. I tried to control the rowdiest of them, tried to get them all to sit in their seats; I had to tell one kid to never show me a knife again, not when I was driving, because I had to concentrate. I took my job seriously. I hit a chicken one day; I wasn’t the best driver. It was not the kind of thing you could take for granted, read a Jack London book, or daydream. It took all my concentration. It was hard, and I was not born to be so regular, so dull, so consistent.
At the café, the story turns to a certain butter churn. The antique dealer describes it. Somebody had this antique butter churn in their foyer for what, twenty years, and decided to sell it. It was estate sale time, time to get rid of the antiques. Some guy comes over and buys it for a few hundred bucks. But it’s attached solidly to the floor. They take a hammer to its base trying to get it loose so the guy can take it home. They pound at it from all directions and finally they crack its base, and out comes a hundred gold coins or more; apparently the grandfather, long gone, had been hiding them in there. No wonder the thing weighed a ton! Full of gold coins that dated back, what, a hundred years or more, back in the age of gold coins, and they don’t even make those anymore. The family that’s selling it has to split the value of the coins with the guy that bought the butter churn, because, they figured, it was half his at the time when they found the coins. But the coins way outvalued the churn itself, which was just your standard run-of-the-mill antique butter churn.
Again, my mind wanders. Not into the money, the $30,000, the gold coins, really, or even a butter churn, which I would recognize as a nice antique, pretty to have around, but it’s not like I’d make my own butter, or ever even did. On the contrary, I’m a writer, and sometimes a fiddler, although on this night my string had popped and I didn’t have a spare, and I was stuck just singing a few old songs, western songs, instead of my usual bluegrass fiddle. As a writer, though, I’d read the Jack London book now, and read it carefully, even though he’d married someone he supposedly didn’t love. And there was this other book, a book by writers about how to write, where writers told about writing, and how it healed you, and how the topic of a biography was kind of a victim, and how to write well and such. It had this chapter by some writer where he said, write the stuff that only you can write. That was his main advice. He could have written that in one sentence, but instead he wrote a whole chapter, because that’s what they needed, chapters. But that was his advice, and it stuck with me. Why I thought of it now, I have no idea.
So this one morning, in Iowa, it was foggy, the fog sat on the cornfields, and the kids were stone silent, having perhaps had some wild party the night before. The gravel roads wound around in their maddening way. I was out of sleep, having hitchhiked to Des Moines the previous day, and worked my usual night job; I’d had to go to Des Moines, or near there, to pick up an old ’50 Dodge truck which I’d bought from an old guy. All of a sudden, the gravel, the fog, and the steep ditch, and I’d blacked out, and flipped the bus; it landed upside down in the cornfield; the littlest of the kids landed in my lap. Everything was all right, in the end; nobody was seriously injured. They tested me for alcohol and everything, but that wasn’t the problem. I was sober. Out of sleep, maybe, irresponsible, maybe, but drunk, no.
The mountains are so beautiful, with their fog, their rain, real water coming out of them, the pine smell, and I remember sometimes the time I’d jumped a train, sat on top of it backwards, and almost got hit by a tunnel – after I’d gone through, and lived, that was my first experience with God’s grace, the school bus was the second. The wonders of the mountains, with the grass, the flowers, the elk, the deer, but you have to stop to appreciate them. You can’t go looking at them while you’re driving, or even while you’re on a train.
The mountain roads I drive on up here are precarious – on the way to work, steep cliffs on either side, hairpin turns, swerving this way and that, going down at least 5000 feet each morning to work and back up in the afternoon. The mountain cliffs have boulders that occasionally fall on the road, or on the cars, if the drivers aren’t lucky; I imagine sometimes, that these rocks are messages being dropped by the ancient people, who obviously lived right here, where there was access to water, deer, elk, caves, green stuff, everything they needed. Not a whole lot of money to be made, out here, they didn’t have corn, or soybeans, or all that stuff those Iowa farmers were making a living on. Out in this small town, these folks are ranchers, except maybe the musicians themselves, who seemed to be generally of another mold, maybe the only ones who aren’t ranchers. And I’m not sure how these folks, our audience, make it ranching; there’s so little rain, so much danger, so much to spend money on. Cowboy songs, and gospel, and just about anything else, they like their music; they are actually pretty open-minded, great people. They’ve been nice to me, even when I lost my string, humiliated, unable to play; they liked the entertainment, living way out in the country, they were appreciative. As a musician, you have good nights, when the bluegrass comes right out of the fiddle, everything’s on time, everything works. As a writer, the same is true, sometimes things flow, they go right on the page. Then you have other nights, and don’t play very well, or can’t find anything to write, you could get a million bucks, still not have anything to write. I’m not Jack London, I don’t do it for the money; I work for money, and play music and write when I can. I watch out for rocks when I drive up and down the hill; out in the mountains, I watch out for the elk and deer. I try to keep my eyes on the road. I don’t like losing my balance, or lurching this way or that. I’ve got memories of steep ditches and cliffs, being upside down, kids in my lap.
But I’ll tell you, there are a lot of stars out here at night. You want God’s grace, there it is, they’re all out there. You have to pull over to see them, of course, you don’t want to try to look up, and drive at the same time, the roads are too narrow and wind around too much, too many animals on them. Just pull over and get out of the car. Then you’ll feel like I do: the world has at least put me here, still alive under these stars, still able to write another story. And tonight, this is it.
(4-17)
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Spring Forward, Fall Back
One of Jocelyn’s problems was that she tended to ignore the time altogether; she blotted it completely out of her mind. She wasn’t late deliberately, like some people, just to get attention, or to make everyone wait for her, or because she needed to be late to have enough adrenaline even to show up; it was more that she forgot about it altogether. She was just as likely to be early as to be late, but she was mostly likely to not even be thinking about it at all. She’d try to aim for the appointed time, and then she’d simply forget about it, in the process of arriving where she was supposed to be.
This was especially painful when her date, Devin, got angry at her for being at least twenty five minutes late at Starbucks; they were going to a musical that night, and he’d had maybe two or three coffees already, waiting for her. He assumed she did it deliberately, he said, since twenty minutes was about the line where a person doesn’t even have to keep waiting anymore. You couldn’t call or text? You didn’t know you were late? When you’re stood up fifteen, he said, you still wait a few more, but you’re already mad. When you’re stood up twenty, then you’re steaming mad and you might as well leave.
Well go ahead and leave, she finally suggested, flustered; she was embarassed at ber own irresponsibility, and admitted to him that she’d been doing this for years, couldn’t help it, and it was all her father’s fault. She was a flawed person, she realized, a good fashion designer, but a bad time manager, but she hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings or make him angry. She ordered a double latte as she told him this, because she figured if they were late for the musical, they might as well be a little more late, but somehow they should settle this before they walked in. She was genuinely apologetic. It all seemed kind of random to her. Fifteen minutes – was this some kind of cultural agreement? Was he mad because that’s what people do? She liked Devin; he was smart, good-looking, not worried about money, able to drive, not gay – all of those were good in Jocelyn’s book, judging men the way she did, being single in Manhattan. She knew him through a friend of hers, Laura, at work, and she’d said he was a nice guy. But, whatever his strengths, he couldn’t make her care about time. Time wasn’t even real. Fashion was real. Migraines were real. A double latte, that was real, or the mink on that woman’s shoulder, those were real. Time wasn’t real.
Devin, it seems, already had had at least three coffees, and he was agitated, though he tried not to show it. This fifteen-minute thing, it was what he’d learned, what he expected, it was the way he read it. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her when she said she didn’t care about time. Well, maybe he didn’t believe her. How could anyone not know they were fifteen minutes late? Or twenty or twenty five? And not text or call? In a world where everyone was pressed for time, where time was money, where making somebody wait was robbing them of precious minutes, especially here in New York, even if you didn’t care about money, it seems you’d at least notice that other people cared a lot. He, in fact, cared more than most people, and he was especially irritated that tonight was the end of Daylight Savings Time, when everyone, by misguided social agreement, set their clocks back one hour, for no good reason whatsoever, as far as he could figure. It was more than a pet peeve to him. He had researched Daylight Savings Time; he had written an article for a national magazine, and the essence of that article was that DST, as he called it, and the conversion to it, cost Americans millions a year in lost productivity. He became angry whenever he thought about it, and he was well aware that at midnight, well after the musical, wherever he ended up with Jocelyn, he’d be thinking about it. They’d get a free hour tonight, and give it back later in the spring; to him, it was an hour to complain about, even though no one was complaining in the fall, when it seemed like you could sleep in.
Jocelyn got her latte and turned to walk to the seat at the small table Devin had picked out and sat at. It was a delicate balancing act, bringing this latte to this table without spilling it, still all the while smiling at Devin and hoping his feelings weren’t too hurt, being forced to watch her with her latte, when he’d already had three coffees, and they were already late. At that moment, to Jocelyn, there was nobody else in that Starbucks, only Devin, nobody else counted, and she badly wanted Devin to forgive her and go on with the evening like it was not such a big deal to go along with your date’s random time schedule. She thought about her father, who had worked at the atomic clock in Boulder; he was a specialist in establishing the perfect conditions for that clock to be exactly precise, and when she’d asked him about it, he’d always give a scientific lecture on those conditions, what made clocks precise, and why atomic clocks were so much more precise than other clocks. It was his own special lecture, and much as she’d loved him – in most ways he was a great dad – in this respect, his scientific lecture would trigger a response in her, a response which made her deliberately ignore time, whenever she could.
Now Devin was involved in a conversation that had started well before Jocelyn arrived, with a guy named Stan – tall, thin, balding, intense, and by himself – and this conversation had to do with Fall Back and Spring Forward, the general name people used for gaining an hour in the Fall, and setting your time ahead again in the Spring. It was socially acceptable to bring it up, to complain about it, to resent changing one’s clocks, so this is what Stan had done, and when you say this to Devin, as he learned, you’re in for an earful. Devin was explaining how America lost billions because people couldn’t function as easily with an altered clock. He was the expert on how this hurt everyone, and could give you many reasons why even gaining an hour was bad. It upset people’s internal clocks. People were an hour late or early for church and other meetings, nationwide. Stan told him he could always move to Arizona, which, as a state, had rejected it, and refused to participate, but to Devin, that was ridiculous, you might as well move to Tahiti. Jocelyn, while walking and balancing her latte, watched them talk in their animated way. Just in the few minutes Jocelyn observed Stan, she observed an edge in him: he was looking for a fight. Or maybe he was looking to irritate someone. He didn’t seem like your average guy, having a coffee to unwind, or coming here for a few minutes to think.
Jocelyn settled her latte on the table and started drinking it, allowing this conversation to continue without interruption. She thought for a minute about the musical, Midnight Hour, which they were about to see, and which was being performed on this evening without any awareness, apparently, that they would be picking up that very hour, as 2:00 would simply turn into 1:00 in the middle of the night, and everyone would relive that hour. Devin was telling how in the history of DST, it was usually done at midnight, but had been changed to 2:00 for reasons of convenience. It was possible that this musical was based on an earlier show or movie by the same name; Devin wasn’t sure, but he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with Fall Back or Spring Forward; that was entirely a coincidence. To her, musicals, On-Broadway or Off-Broadway, were opportunities to watch how people were dressing: what they wore, how they wore it, how it fit on them, etc. Fashion was her world. If they were late, she would see less, as people would not be standing around; she’d have to rely on the intermission to actually watch people. This was more fun for her than the musical itself, and was what she’d looked forward to.
Eventually Devin tried to give Stan hints that their conversation was over, and that his date with Jocelyn was started. Jocelyn was almost done with their latte. The musical was about six blocks away, six blocks of busy Manhattan traffic. They could take a cab, but that was ridiculous; the weather was actually nice, and this was unusual for Manhattan, which was often pretty grim and cold in October. They agreed to walk, and set off.
The six blocks to the theater were along a busy street with signs, shops, businesses, and a large subway stop. Devin admired Jocelyn, proud to walk with her; she was quite beautiful in the night, with a light purple dress, earrings, and a hat. He was still irritated, though, about her explanation about the time. What bothered him most was the idea that it would always be like this, that every time they were to meet at seven, she’d get there at seven twenty-five, or whenever. He tried to enjoy the moment, and think of the things he admired about her. She was fashionable; she was clever. The streetlights gave her a regal bearing.
Jocelyn also enjoyed the evening, and being with Devin; he was well-dressed, handsome, smart, and sensitive to her pace. Unfortunately, it was here, in about the first block, that she first noticed a migraine headache coming on. This was almost always trouble, because there wasn’t much she could do about migraines. She blamed them on stress: stress from her job, stress from trying to look good, stress from just walking Manhattan streets, which was always somewhat of a risk. On this evening, she blamed Stan, who had intruded on her peace with his edge, and his general unhappiness with Daylight Savings Time. Here she actually agreed with him: that people’s universal acceptance of a ridiculous time custom caused all kinds of stress; but, his agitation, intruding on her latte, and on her experience with Devin, that must have triggered something.
Perhaps it was the anxiety generated by the musical itself. They arrived, got their tickets, and entered, still with barely enough time. Jocelyn glanced around and didn’t see anyone she knew. The musical was doing well; the auditorium was almost full.
The migraine really took off when the musical started. It’s not important how well it was performed, or what the plot line was, or how good the music was. It was well done; it was performed as well as could be expected; it set up an intense drama that was to unfold later in the evening. But the musical, with its actors and actresses reaching out emotionally to the audience, began to make Jocelyn feel hopelessly trapped in her seat. She still felt unresolved tension coming from Devin, even as he sat and tried to enjoy the performance. The characters, to her, all struck her as unreal, insincere, and exaggerated. Of course, that’s what actors and actresses do; they are in the business of being someone besides who they are. But on this evening, it bothered her greatly, and her migraine was escalating to the point where she could barely even listen to the words they said.
She calculated at one point that it had to be close to intermission. At intermission, she would simply have to excuse herself and go home. That was the problem with migraines – you couldn’t beat them. You could take medication, you could go home, you could withdraw from the world, but you couldn’t actually function, stay at a musical, understand and enjoy it. You just couldn’t. She’d have to make that clear to Devin.
When the intermission came, she did just that. Devin agreed to come out to the street to discuss it with her, if not call a cab. She urged him to let her go home. Much as she wanted to watch people, see what they were wearing, and analyze whether it worked or not, she couldn’t; her head was pounding. She explained to Devin how serious migraines were and how hopeless it was to try to fight them or to survive the evening. Devin, watching her, knew she was not lying. He was, above all, a gentleman, and would not only call a cab, but also pay for it. What could you do? He hadn’t decided yet whether to go back into the theater, after she was gone, and watch the rest of the performance; to him, the evening was about Jocelyn, not the musical, and he was somewhat adrift without her. He was suspended there, on the curb, in the night, his arm out in the hailing-a-cab position; she waited on the sidewalk. And just at that moment, Stan came walking up the street.
Stan stopped just long enough to find out what they were doing, and Devin, having told him, agreed to go along with Stan to another establishment, after the cab was hailed. He had nothing better to do; he’d decided that the musical was pointless without Jocelyn. He was not much invested in the musical’s idea of “The Midnight Hour.”
In the cab, Jocelyn looked through the hazy barrier between the back seat and the front, and asked the driver what he thought about Fall Back and Spring Forward. The driver had enough English to understand her, but he mumbled his reply so she really didn’t have much to go on. He apparently was going to simply work an extra hour like everyone else. Her migraine was already quite intense; she no longer cared about maintaining a conversation or watching the streets, besides making sure he was going the right route.. She was glad to notice that he knew where he was going, in taking her directly to her apartment.
At home she did what she usually did when she had a migraine: she buried herself in her bed, pillows over her, and tried to sleep. And she did, eventually, fall asleep, in spite of the migraine.
It was only later, through Laura, that she found out what had happened to Devin and Stan; they’d been beaten up in a bar. Devin was hurt a little less than Stan, but both were pretty bruised up, according to Laura. She didn’t really know the details; Stan had taken the hit, and was more seriously injured, while Devin, just standing behind him, had been knocked over and hit his head on the bar, had passed out for a while, or something like that.
Now the astute observer might ask several questions about the time; perhaps they had lost that very hour that by rights everyone else had just received. It was, apparently, around that time when bars close, and everyone gets a little edgy, that time when fights often happen. But remember, Jocelyn didn’t care, didn’t even think to ask about it. It was not even really part of her awareness. So for that reason, we’ll have to accept a lack of information.
She was, however, a little set back by the news. True, she had already given up on Devin. Things hadn’t worked, she had decided; if they did, it might have turned out differently. She tried to rationalize it. He was stupid to go off with Stan. You walk into a bar in Manhattan, you never know what will happen. Maybe he should have stuck with the musical, where at least the musical’s version of the Midnight Hour was inevitable, you had some idea how it would turn out, and it would be over, sometime in the elevens, spilling out onto the streets, with cabs all over the place. Instead he had gone to a bar, gotten in a fight, fallen back, lost an hour. What’s gone is gone, and you can’t relive it, you never get it back.
3-17
This was especially painful when her date, Devin, got angry at her for being at least twenty five minutes late at Starbucks; they were going to a musical that night, and he’d had maybe two or three coffees already, waiting for her. He assumed she did it deliberately, he said, since twenty minutes was about the line where a person doesn’t even have to keep waiting anymore. You couldn’t call or text? You didn’t know you were late? When you’re stood up fifteen, he said, you still wait a few more, but you’re already mad. When you’re stood up twenty, then you’re steaming mad and you might as well leave.
Well go ahead and leave, she finally suggested, flustered; she was embarassed at ber own irresponsibility, and admitted to him that she’d been doing this for years, couldn’t help it, and it was all her father’s fault. She was a flawed person, she realized, a good fashion designer, but a bad time manager, but she hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings or make him angry. She ordered a double latte as she told him this, because she figured if they were late for the musical, they might as well be a little more late, but somehow they should settle this before they walked in. She was genuinely apologetic. It all seemed kind of random to her. Fifteen minutes – was this some kind of cultural agreement? Was he mad because that’s what people do? She liked Devin; he was smart, good-looking, not worried about money, able to drive, not gay – all of those were good in Jocelyn’s book, judging men the way she did, being single in Manhattan. She knew him through a friend of hers, Laura, at work, and she’d said he was a nice guy. But, whatever his strengths, he couldn’t make her care about time. Time wasn’t even real. Fashion was real. Migraines were real. A double latte, that was real, or the mink on that woman’s shoulder, those were real. Time wasn’t real.
Devin, it seems, already had had at least three coffees, and he was agitated, though he tried not to show it. This fifteen-minute thing, it was what he’d learned, what he expected, it was the way he read it. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her when she said she didn’t care about time. Well, maybe he didn’t believe her. How could anyone not know they were fifteen minutes late? Or twenty or twenty five? And not text or call? In a world where everyone was pressed for time, where time was money, where making somebody wait was robbing them of precious minutes, especially here in New York, even if you didn’t care about money, it seems you’d at least notice that other people cared a lot. He, in fact, cared more than most people, and he was especially irritated that tonight was the end of Daylight Savings Time, when everyone, by misguided social agreement, set their clocks back one hour, for no good reason whatsoever, as far as he could figure. It was more than a pet peeve to him. He had researched Daylight Savings Time; he had written an article for a national magazine, and the essence of that article was that DST, as he called it, and the conversion to it, cost Americans millions a year in lost productivity. He became angry whenever he thought about it, and he was well aware that at midnight, well after the musical, wherever he ended up with Jocelyn, he’d be thinking about it. They’d get a free hour tonight, and give it back later in the spring; to him, it was an hour to complain about, even though no one was complaining in the fall, when it seemed like you could sleep in.
Jocelyn got her latte and turned to walk to the seat at the small table Devin had picked out and sat at. It was a delicate balancing act, bringing this latte to this table without spilling it, still all the while smiling at Devin and hoping his feelings weren’t too hurt, being forced to watch her with her latte, when he’d already had three coffees, and they were already late. At that moment, to Jocelyn, there was nobody else in that Starbucks, only Devin, nobody else counted, and she badly wanted Devin to forgive her and go on with the evening like it was not such a big deal to go along with your date’s random time schedule. She thought about her father, who had worked at the atomic clock in Boulder; he was a specialist in establishing the perfect conditions for that clock to be exactly precise, and when she’d asked him about it, he’d always give a scientific lecture on those conditions, what made clocks precise, and why atomic clocks were so much more precise than other clocks. It was his own special lecture, and much as she’d loved him – in most ways he was a great dad – in this respect, his scientific lecture would trigger a response in her, a response which made her deliberately ignore time, whenever she could.
Now Devin was involved in a conversation that had started well before Jocelyn arrived, with a guy named Stan – tall, thin, balding, intense, and by himself – and this conversation had to do with Fall Back and Spring Forward, the general name people used for gaining an hour in the Fall, and setting your time ahead again in the Spring. It was socially acceptable to bring it up, to complain about it, to resent changing one’s clocks, so this is what Stan had done, and when you say this to Devin, as he learned, you’re in for an earful. Devin was explaining how America lost billions because people couldn’t function as easily with an altered clock. He was the expert on how this hurt everyone, and could give you many reasons why even gaining an hour was bad. It upset people’s internal clocks. People were an hour late or early for church and other meetings, nationwide. Stan told him he could always move to Arizona, which, as a state, had rejected it, and refused to participate, but to Devin, that was ridiculous, you might as well move to Tahiti. Jocelyn, while walking and balancing her latte, watched them talk in their animated way. Just in the few minutes Jocelyn observed Stan, she observed an edge in him: he was looking for a fight. Or maybe he was looking to irritate someone. He didn’t seem like your average guy, having a coffee to unwind, or coming here for a few minutes to think.
Jocelyn settled her latte on the table and started drinking it, allowing this conversation to continue without interruption. She thought for a minute about the musical, Midnight Hour, which they were about to see, and which was being performed on this evening without any awareness, apparently, that they would be picking up that very hour, as 2:00 would simply turn into 1:00 in the middle of the night, and everyone would relive that hour. Devin was telling how in the history of DST, it was usually done at midnight, but had been changed to 2:00 for reasons of convenience. It was possible that this musical was based on an earlier show or movie by the same name; Devin wasn’t sure, but he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with Fall Back or Spring Forward; that was entirely a coincidence. To her, musicals, On-Broadway or Off-Broadway, were opportunities to watch how people were dressing: what they wore, how they wore it, how it fit on them, etc. Fashion was her world. If they were late, she would see less, as people would not be standing around; she’d have to rely on the intermission to actually watch people. This was more fun for her than the musical itself, and was what she’d looked forward to.
Eventually Devin tried to give Stan hints that their conversation was over, and that his date with Jocelyn was started. Jocelyn was almost done with their latte. The musical was about six blocks away, six blocks of busy Manhattan traffic. They could take a cab, but that was ridiculous; the weather was actually nice, and this was unusual for Manhattan, which was often pretty grim and cold in October. They agreed to walk, and set off.
The six blocks to the theater were along a busy street with signs, shops, businesses, and a large subway stop. Devin admired Jocelyn, proud to walk with her; she was quite beautiful in the night, with a light purple dress, earrings, and a hat. He was still irritated, though, about her explanation about the time. What bothered him most was the idea that it would always be like this, that every time they were to meet at seven, she’d get there at seven twenty-five, or whenever. He tried to enjoy the moment, and think of the things he admired about her. She was fashionable; she was clever. The streetlights gave her a regal bearing.
Jocelyn also enjoyed the evening, and being with Devin; he was well-dressed, handsome, smart, and sensitive to her pace. Unfortunately, it was here, in about the first block, that she first noticed a migraine headache coming on. This was almost always trouble, because there wasn’t much she could do about migraines. She blamed them on stress: stress from her job, stress from trying to look good, stress from just walking Manhattan streets, which was always somewhat of a risk. On this evening, she blamed Stan, who had intruded on her peace with his edge, and his general unhappiness with Daylight Savings Time. Here she actually agreed with him: that people’s universal acceptance of a ridiculous time custom caused all kinds of stress; but, his agitation, intruding on her latte, and on her experience with Devin, that must have triggered something.
Perhaps it was the anxiety generated by the musical itself. They arrived, got their tickets, and entered, still with barely enough time. Jocelyn glanced around and didn’t see anyone she knew. The musical was doing well; the auditorium was almost full.
The migraine really took off when the musical started. It’s not important how well it was performed, or what the plot line was, or how good the music was. It was well done; it was performed as well as could be expected; it set up an intense drama that was to unfold later in the evening. But the musical, with its actors and actresses reaching out emotionally to the audience, began to make Jocelyn feel hopelessly trapped in her seat. She still felt unresolved tension coming from Devin, even as he sat and tried to enjoy the performance. The characters, to her, all struck her as unreal, insincere, and exaggerated. Of course, that’s what actors and actresses do; they are in the business of being someone besides who they are. But on this evening, it bothered her greatly, and her migraine was escalating to the point where she could barely even listen to the words they said.
She calculated at one point that it had to be close to intermission. At intermission, she would simply have to excuse herself and go home. That was the problem with migraines – you couldn’t beat them. You could take medication, you could go home, you could withdraw from the world, but you couldn’t actually function, stay at a musical, understand and enjoy it. You just couldn’t. She’d have to make that clear to Devin.
When the intermission came, she did just that. Devin agreed to come out to the street to discuss it with her, if not call a cab. She urged him to let her go home. Much as she wanted to watch people, see what they were wearing, and analyze whether it worked or not, she couldn’t; her head was pounding. She explained to Devin how serious migraines were and how hopeless it was to try to fight them or to survive the evening. Devin, watching her, knew she was not lying. He was, above all, a gentleman, and would not only call a cab, but also pay for it. What could you do? He hadn’t decided yet whether to go back into the theater, after she was gone, and watch the rest of the performance; to him, the evening was about Jocelyn, not the musical, and he was somewhat adrift without her. He was suspended there, on the curb, in the night, his arm out in the hailing-a-cab position; she waited on the sidewalk. And just at that moment, Stan came walking up the street.
Stan stopped just long enough to find out what they were doing, and Devin, having told him, agreed to go along with Stan to another establishment, after the cab was hailed. He had nothing better to do; he’d decided that the musical was pointless without Jocelyn. He was not much invested in the musical’s idea of “The Midnight Hour.”
In the cab, Jocelyn looked through the hazy barrier between the back seat and the front, and asked the driver what he thought about Fall Back and Spring Forward. The driver had enough English to understand her, but he mumbled his reply so she really didn’t have much to go on. He apparently was going to simply work an extra hour like everyone else. Her migraine was already quite intense; she no longer cared about maintaining a conversation or watching the streets, besides making sure he was going the right route.. She was glad to notice that he knew where he was going, in taking her directly to her apartment.
At home she did what she usually did when she had a migraine: she buried herself in her bed, pillows over her, and tried to sleep. And she did, eventually, fall asleep, in spite of the migraine.
It was only later, through Laura, that she found out what had happened to Devin and Stan; they’d been beaten up in a bar. Devin was hurt a little less than Stan, but both were pretty bruised up, according to Laura. She didn’t really know the details; Stan had taken the hit, and was more seriously injured, while Devin, just standing behind him, had been knocked over and hit his head on the bar, had passed out for a while, or something like that.
Now the astute observer might ask several questions about the time; perhaps they had lost that very hour that by rights everyone else had just received. It was, apparently, around that time when bars close, and everyone gets a little edgy, that time when fights often happen. But remember, Jocelyn didn’t care, didn’t even think to ask about it. It was not even really part of her awareness. So for that reason, we’ll have to accept a lack of information.
She was, however, a little set back by the news. True, she had already given up on Devin. Things hadn’t worked, she had decided; if they did, it might have turned out differently. She tried to rationalize it. He was stupid to go off with Stan. You walk into a bar in Manhattan, you never know what will happen. Maybe he should have stuck with the musical, where at least the musical’s version of the Midnight Hour was inevitable, you had some idea how it would turn out, and it would be over, sometime in the elevens, spilling out onto the streets, with cabs all over the place. Instead he had gone to a bar, gotten in a fight, fallen back, lost an hour. What’s gone is gone, and you can’t relive it, you never get it back.
3-17
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