Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

Slipping inside the can, I loop up the bow and unfold my folding arrow from a bag. I am stalking like the boy I once was in the woods, but am outside the restroom in the restaurant on the carpet barefoot as a barefoot man. I'm squeezing my legs together around a bottle and I'm squeezing my guts and I know how far I will go, which is all the way, or at least for the leg. Inside my pants is fruited hooch. It is for Julie for after I kill the Indian, or pop him in one leg, one of them, of his two, whatever! There is only liquor and darkness, and the things of the world I wish still held the light but do not. I hid behind a vinyl booth.

Her man sat down and I drew the bow back and rose up on one knee. I hefted over a booth back and steady handed I let it rip. My fart releases itself and I cough and choke and one evil spirit released from me, and do I feel better? Less even though I aimed for the savage's lower parts, the arrow gores his brain and he flops back in his booth screwing up at the air, humping up to death. Julie curses my name, by the wrong name, and spits on the carpet, and the people eat and we get out. Only, where is the Ponderosa?

We kiss with our bodies and mouths.

I pushing into her in the parking lot bushes by the curb down in the mulch and cigarette discards and chewing gum chewed balls and her pushing back. Pulling back while she's grunting, “You sonofabitch,” she says, pants and panties around her ankles, “Human,” she moans, bees in her hair, I sense — buzzing. “Anyhow, time is running, ruining you like we all could have guessed,” she goes. “You've never had any love and when you find love, too old, who even cares if you'll be fine. You're irrelevant.” I looked down at Julie and one of her two eyes had nearly popped out, she'd grown yellow skinned and horrible and humping her I come to grips with what I'm doing wrong. Right as I'm about to let myself squirm, I pulled out and took myself mean-groined to a U.S. recruiting station, and signed up to the Afghan mountains because I had no idea and was scared to go to jail for the Indian's murder, if I murdered anyone? Who knows what was what anymore? No one. I had lost track of which side of the tracks I was ever on, in terms of the sound mind. I didn't know when the last time I had really truly seen Julie was anyhow? That all had or hadn't happened? And what was left in or of America? I was going to the army.

I had camo and a beltpack — and a commercial plane ride to the Mid-East. I'm in it and up and there's no getting off the ride. No retreat! the recording on my headphones repeats. No surrender! “I hear you!” I shouted on the plane. I didn't know how loud since I was wearing earphones.

After Air America, I was on my way to kill with a gun and my eagle knife strung across my chest. Yes, I have always known luck. I still don't see like a person, but I feel many fine things such as when I see poor people having small fires by a lake, or a child in happy slowedness, or quickness. Music, too, often affects me. A stone building built in the old fashion in a desert makes me feel patriotic and I at times see the sky correctly. It's amazing how much you can surmount and keep going once it's too late.

On the main service road, over there, with our boys, fire fired up. You'd think that in a war men can shoot clean, but they cannot, Lord. The women either. Everyone is missing everyone. In the fallout of some blown-apart office building I see silver tears coming from my forehead. Then the helicopters come like the drums of the Injuns, and I am shaking and praying to sky. Dragons appear, only not dragons, fierce little Apaches, great compact brown Boeing bastards — weaponized shit-hawks from McDonnell Douglas and GE, bearing down into the field with their mounted 30 mm Cal M23 °Chain Guns and wingtips loaded with HELLFIREs and other firework-named explosives. Do I have to tell you what they were shooting for? Not Yours Truly. Not the boys and girls beside me. So who? Could anyone see anyone? Give me a joke. With the winds kicked up by those bastards’ blades like crosses spinning from on high, the winds anyhow, the trash and rubble and dust. Any woman or kid or mankind in cotton and headdress, any herder, any group carrying a video camera, any box not yet blown to smithereens, they were shooting to shit.

Look, to be young and/or to be kind is to be left open to evil, maybe? Or maybe only if you're partly kind only?

To be evil is to be old and lonesome or should be.

There was once a time when it was all beautiful. Now where is that? I used to hum with love, when I got transcendent or in the right mix.

I walked off toward the mountains, leaving the shooting.

Hubudabis found me and took me farther into the mountains to their caves with rugs and fans and refrigerators run off generators and showed me how to smoke opium, though obvious, it's got great flavor and took the world away as good as pussy ever had. All those old poems about roses just meant pussy and what did they really mean but woman is our great double-sided enthusiasm. That after war or toil, woman is the only respite — and I hope men are so for women but doubt it, and wonder how come? Being a man is tricky, but surely less so than being a woman, I've heard. Being a man now, or a woman now, that's not really the way things are going. It's just about being a person. Sexless. Mainly. And calm.

I decided to get free and start loving. I was going to get clear, aside from the opium scenario. These Hubudabis played great music on record players and they wore cotton and danced with their children. I have always wanted to be everyone else, but have had to be me for so long as to watch others. I'd hope to be evil and done with it all but am afraid of Hell and nurture within me also a great hope for my true heavenly union with Christ and family. This is no joke or hyperholy. I got into dancing and moving around really lightly and in subtle rhythms. There were perfect birds.

Sleeping in caves, I was seeing jungle cats and women with long feet and hairy limbs and I took to dressing only in my knife and long sheep-leather skirt and my hair grew out and I took to the gooch of local girls, whose names I couldn't remember — by gooch I mean roses. Little kisses for rose and rose alike. I walked with a wild man's dance and never switched my clothes. Oh, they thought I was something else. Inside caves the Hubudabis banged on things and made music and burned fires. They loved country music songs from the old gentleman outlaws and I knew every word sometimes and other times made shit up and mumbled. I loved it there with those fine people. Some days or nights the worst fiends in the land came through and played a sort of ball outside on the sand or sat by the fires and drank yak tea. One of the worst had this beautiful overhand spinning serve and he could place that white ball anywhere he pointed his sultanic nose.

The slap of the ball in the sun I enjoyed, and too lusted after their abilities on the court. I played fairly well, sure, but with my vision I often biffed the closest saves.

I got clearer.

Now the yellow men from the East from Asia from who knows where the Hubudabis were not — but were — I felt — beings who trotted out of the first global dawn in Africa. People stepping clean out of the sheer pages of bibles. Curly-headed people — only the evil ones were forcing themselves into the party, as far as I could tell. The good ones paraded around in the sun and floated and swam to the sky.

I got sick off yak milk or gooch — or the opium getting to me at nights. I'd sweat and see the wound inside the world's deep belly. Everything moving each time I opened my eyes, but also a loving community. Deer with blue dots on their foreheads. I only wanted my youth back so I might waste it again — Oh, America, what was Katharine Lee Bates onto anyway?