“He’s mean like nails,” I said, “but wise as the open sky.” I went further. “Last time I saw him, we were doing 105 in a dodge pickup with no windshield on it.”
“Huh. What’s his name?” asked Silas.
“Prince.
“Let’s go find him,” Silas said.
“Nah,” I said, testing him. “You’re full of shit. You’re stepping in it.”
“We leave tonight.”
Day 1. Highway 1, California. Silas drove with his cap cocked upwards, revealing a coating of caramelized sweat. I stared ahead at the swerving lines of the highway, content. I’d do anything for Silas. Loyalty lodged itself like a bullet in my chest.
Silas’ unkempt stubble struck two o’clock. He itched it with his scraggly, chewed fingernails, emitting a quiet screech like styrofoam rubbing together. My chest clenched, we said little. Words cracked apart the stillness like a spoon to a hard-boiled egg.
Shrubs, hot yellow sun. Ahead the curve sharpened into a sinister grin, as if to ask if were we expecting something other than this, the long yawning road.
“Prince laughs easily,” I said suddenly. “I never know what to say around that noble slab of a man.” Silas looked at me. “While we run around singing our rusty blues, Prince will find us. He’ll save us. We’ll stay up late playing Rummy. He’ll beam at us like we’re the only good ones left.” I blinked myself back to the road. Silas put his hand on his gut and burped.
“I never knew him too personally,” I went on. “He knows something, old bastard Prince. Some folks read philosophy when they want to know something, or hang upside down from trees. Lord knows one method’s damn near good as another. Me, I find Prince. I go to him like words on a page.”
Silas nodded, then poked me in my ribs and chuckled. I felt my face grow hot. I knew Silas took me for granted. If I ever spoke of it he’d give me the stiff upper lip. He’d stomp his steel toed boots on the ground and call me a little prick. I wish I’d had the affection for myself to throw up my hands and walk away. But my insides were mushy like stewed fruit when we took the road like this. I stayed.
I did not know where we were headed. Prince was our north star. My tummy rumbled, hungry like wildfire. I fed on Silas’ eyes, red from exhaustion and cut with the glint of diamonds, instead.
The quiet whipped through us like shirts on a line, and I moved around in my seat. Restless. My tongue lay in my mouth heavy like a piece of meat. My fingers clenched at the stale air, and we drove all night.
Day 2. Dry country. Outside the window, the dried grass crackled like flames rising from a wood stove.
“I can’t go no more,” I said.
Silas reached into the front pocket of his Levi’s and pulled out a linty sunflower seed. He popped it into his mouth and cracked it open with his teeth, spit at me, and missed.
“Come on dingus,” he said. “Stick to your seat.”
Silas called the shots, and I took heed. Fidgeting kept me busy in my chair. I wanted to pummel him, bossing me around like this. And I wanted to squeeze his thumb in my fist.
Day 3. Night. We stopped on the shoulder and slept, reclined in our seats. In the middle of the dead space just before the light, I snuck out and traipsed through the cold wet fields. Thin wispy blades swished against my tingling knee caps. I ached all day to get to this quiet place, where the thinking settled and the only thing to do was be. I could walk off the past and future like a bag of soiled shirts at the laundromat. I never wanted to wear so many clothes.
I wished to meld with Silas, to look out at the world through his bedroom window. Maybe he’d stand next to me, maybe not. That part didn’t matter so much. I first met him eating a cheeseburger at Diner 39 in town, tangy globs of mustard dribbling from his stubbly chin. He did not look up as I examined him, his mouth driving to the meat like a wrecking ball. I watched his teeth claw at his meal like it was a carcass in need of dressing still with its hair, twitching muscles and fur. I approached him and asked for a bite of his hamburger. He glanced at me like a lost puppy trying to following him home.
I hung on to our mergings. I carried the habit around like a sleeping bag in the middle of the day. I was lost without him. Bolts of him rusted to my sense of myself, drying up in the sun. While I felt the itch of something not quite right, an invisible finger scratching at the base of my skull, I could not run away. Another life lay dormant, scratching against the inside of my eyeballs, but I kept it ethereal, prevented it from prying its way out. Metaphor knits a thick sweater around the truth.
Day 4. The afternoon ride lulled me under into sleep, and I woke with a start. Silas sat frowning faithfully at the road.
Late that night, as Silas slept in the cab, I stepped again into the night. Under the stars my chest opened, free. Soft like the underbelly of a kitten, alone with the blackness hung above, riddled with its stars. During the day I waded through marshland, and nighttime gave me boots. The cold air brought me new skin like a molting snake. In the quiet I could not ignore a buzzing, a refrigerator hum inside my brain. An incessant itch. I never would say I was born in the wrong body. I just don’t like the one I’m in. Callous where it should be smooth. Right angles where there should be curves. Never knew some people fit so right until I saw Silas getting out of the town pool. His body a soliloquy, a persuasive speech. Made me hang my neck heavy as I stared at my own haunting frame. Who invented a body part that dangles? This, the burden of my birth.
Day 5. The scenery became a blank spot to peer at through the windshield. Dead space. At night our headlights moved the darkness, rearranged the truth. I felt safe there. Then daylight came, dizzy with the dark emerald spark of the ocean. We swerved across coastal border lands, interstices of familiar lands and untamed seas.
Day 6. Time grew heavy on the road. Like it meant nothing before, but now we kept tally marks, our stubborn feet stomping time. Can’t hold onto anything. I clutched my own slippery stories in my dumb fists. But as the dizzying reality of freedom sped by my window pane, I wanted to hold it. Keep it floating weightlessly like petals in a vase.
“Tell me more about Prince,” Silas said.
“Prince lived as wanderers do,” I explained. “Never could tell where he’d be. Used to cook me black beans in a tin can over a fire, outside his trailer in Happy Camp. North country. Thunderous tall trees. Sat around hearing about his travels in India, letting the stories talk to the stars, make music, unfold. Prince got out his old Gibson slide guitar, keeping time while I blew the harmonica. I kept up with him, or tried. Worried Man Blues, Frankie and Johnny. We whooped till the pale cheeks of dawn blushed crimson.”
“Shit,” Silas said. His dark eyes glowed.
“That night, Prince told me that home is when you’ve got a few rocks in your pocket and nowhere else to go. Next to him, I felt glad. He kicked his boots, smacked his sitting log with a whoop and a holler, hitting his palms together like they kept the blood in his wrists. He kept on singing, howling at the wolves. He got up, hopping and skipping around the fire, shirtless despite the chill of the night.
“He lapped up those flames, Prince did. Soaked up their warmth with his torso till his back glistened like a shadow boxer. Me, I simmered like water in a low-lit saucepan, hearing the coyotes and watching Prince blow his big bellows all night.”
Silas seemed encouraged by this. The wind outside whipped through me, crisp and hollow as a potato chip. I never knew how to do anything but run too fast, try too hard. It was a lot to keep everything inside. You never knew, maybe I could have been an artist instead of trailing somebody else’s hide.
When I was a boy I liked to watch fireworks. I wanted to be potential aflame. I’d change my name. Chet, I don’t know about that. The words sound like dry cereal in my mouth. Clunky. Maybe next time around I’ll be a seagull. Some fancy big bird like that. Fly around up there all day. If I gave you a mirror, could you play the part of what you saw? That’s what I did. Chet. Just a whole lot of fooling. That wasn’t me. I’m soft like the back belly of a hillside. An ancient sand dune. There’s flow to me, see. Lift, maybe, sometimes a little lace. Manhood, damned if I ever could rest easy in that place. Being a man felt like carrying around a bag of rocks. Pointy, undignified. What do you do with a a pile of rocks? Nowhere to put it. Lug it around, then.
Day 7. The truck broke down outside Ukiah. Day 8. The ignition stopped turning over in Willitz. After that, nothing but sagebrush and sorry excuses as tailgates rattled by. Day 9. We walked till our fingers puffed up like sausages, looking for help, and slept beneath the sage brush by the side of the road.
Day 10. We walked on. Silas took off his shirt in the sun, blowing thick funnels of hot oxygen out his nostrils and choking on the dry air like sand. I could feel his anger pressing on me, wetting me like moist clay. My chest seized, trying to find its place in my body, as if my torso was fragmented, suspended in midair. I fingered my throat. Everybody wants, crippled with what we might get. Corn colored lines led the obsidian stretch of asphalt into the distance. Horizon meant future. I longed to forget it. Consequences, regrets, words I knew myself by. Shame draws a landscape desolate and familiar.
Wanting poured out of me like soiled kitchen grease. Hot sun. Blank sky. The incandescent air between our bodies tugged at my long, thin fingers, lunging them after Silas’ bare waist. I become a hologram, watching it all shivering just above us. The truth of my desire was too painful to know.
Silas spun around, catching my fingers in his wrist. “Shit,” he breathed with effort, as my diaphragm shook. The air swam in my lungs and I fell forward, falling over his boots. Strands of sagebrush scratched at me as I fell to the earth. Silas grabbed me by the nape of my neck and forced my face into the dirt. I didn’t stop him.
“Where the hell is Prince?” he shouted at me, his ruddy face a few inches from mine. He kicked up dust clouds as he looked back at the asphalt, the rough old road.
I used to fall asleep next to the swirling eddies of the Eel river, under the fluttering leaves of the aspen trees. My daddy used to take me sometimes. He’d throw back his long blonde hair as his body snapped out of the water. He’d comb through it with his fingers by the banks. They used to call him Prince. I caught myself swirled around by an eddy one day. The tide pulled me in like ropes and carried me away. I was alone until my Daddy swam out to catch me. He carried me and dropped my small body on shore.
We all need something to carry us back to land when the current is too strong. I am saved by the magnitude of my wanting, the heavy trembling of earthquakes. Silas is the alchemist of my desire, with him I am real.
“Come on Silas.” I said. “Let’s go.”
Silas built ships. I plugged up the holes. We keep out the water with what we believe in.
ahundredlittlestories 