Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

Where to the gold dream of any fruited plane?

I stepped in one moment to another. I got some goochy and visions. High feelings and plenty wrong with me. I had too much not good inside me, as well as you, maybe do? But listen to this: a good time was had by all. You turn me on? I mean, I had to find pussy, and get all the way into that. It had magic shot through and I was always drawn to the wild show I wasn't supposed to see. The way we talk in the world is gorgeous. I took a long axe and chopped off the arm of the worst fiend at the sticky bone stump while stoned. It was his serving arm. He would never play so beautifully again, nor dance with both arms in the high Arabian style. He would never play between the poles of good and evil with both arms in the fashion most have grown accustomed. It was for those Towers, I'd be happy to say, or for Country. Him speaking graciously of the days of freedom while his men gathered around him at the fire, drinking yak milk and praising terror and all the dark bandits of death and bombings, but I really did it because I was tired of him hotdogging around. He was almost entirely evil — but there was a miserable hope in him — which I likely hacked off or made stronger.

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The next thing, I'd feared I'd be AWOL and I went back to base wearing the skirt of sheep and screaming about the heavenly city lost while waving the hacked-off arm around. “I love and hate Indians because I had not the guts they had,” I tell the boys. “Still I long for Christ Jesus. I have lost too much of myself to badness I invented or found in myself, but I know what I know and what I believe! I just need more time with family and a better regiment of church and true love. And I finally mean to moan for how I long for Christ,” I say. “I had Him and lost Him like a disciple back in that old book, and you are not supposed to do what I have but what can I do but hope he's still with me after all I've done wrong without letting myself be evil, even? What is war? Uplift me Yaoosah!” Where was the arm? Nowhere! Just look at me next to all those men and women. They seemed to understand me, all green and shocked out from war dirty-faced and smoking and plus I lied when I said no one could shoot, they were all sharpshooters covered in death and anxiety. They were tough sons and daughters of bitches and bastards, and I was the fool kid with his heart out.

I guessed they guessed me a freed POW and the Colonel gives me a medal and sends me home with a letter explaining my condition to the general public and health care.

The Letter: Here is our man. H. Roc. We thought he was lost, but he is found. Let him go. Let him come home. He has no idea that he's perfectly stupid. He'll be fine. We'll keep everyone else stop-loss and make them sweat.

The Colonel

She is at the station. Julie, the old bat, her hair a long nest, one tit nosing out. Why, I'm not much better in sheep's leather and my top removed at the station. The buses pull in and idle nowhere. I have a bad banana and America has turned to Shitholeville. Everyone seems flat.

We make it back to the motel where we turn on the calm music. All the way back it was her driving and the sky. Inside our room, the president's a black boob on tv, who shoots people in secret, and I remember sex but it will fail me in the old ways. I don't want to try and make myself try again. Not with her. Not then. I have a cold drink. I taste cinnamon in my coke a cola.

The old California King still lives on, but we've been through the slop, Julie and I. Together and apart I and she have been through the world's puckered-in old butthole. There's a bird that makes a lot of noise out the window. I smell the sea faintly and feel sleepy, and out the window are pastel lights.

I drag Julie into the bath to clean us off from all the fictions. I guide her by her hand into the tub. I begin to fill the dry tub by turning the handle. We stand in the tub in our clothes getting wet. I remove Julie's blouse. I unbutton her buttons. I kiss her belly and her breast and her other breast. We hear the water on our skin. I'd like to say I can fool her and make her feel I care enough, but all she feels is that I care enough to try, even though I can't deliver what she needs, which is nothing, probably, but to get back to her own people wherever her family is, or find a different man.

I wash her. I kneel with her in the waters and I wash her back and shoulders. I get shy and she loves me and hates her man, which is and wasn't me. I wash under her arms. I wash her face, and keep the soap out of her eyes.

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I have this and that. I have gotten tired of myself. (You're going to miss me! I swear I'm not coming back for a good while. You're going to miss old Yours Truly out there all alone for a long time. Without Yours Truly with whom to talk.) I have an old RV on the road home, and Julie is hundreds of women that weren't for me, and I was hundreds of men that weren't for her.

I have this and that. A life of highs and lows of mania. Night and fear. A great land that is going away but still has a chance.

HALF A HANDwas that hand. Three fingers and a crust of dead stump, but what was there, there was plenty for a boy needing to become a man in the West. No, not boy, but the Kid; the real Apache man with the half hand called him Kid, though Kid's name it was not yet. Not earned, and not three fingers but two old fingers and a half thumb was that hand.

The rest missing, the bones cleaved, or fallen off, or what exactly did a Kid say once rattlesnake injected poison so long ago, that the rest of the hand was stolen off the old Apache man forever? What mattered was the desert, the call to count, and above all full lore of the West, Kid might get hold of and keep! If you could mount up and count, if you could beat that Apache who sent the guts out of you, once, you, Kid thought, meaning him, he, might count and have guts once and for the rest of his life might have them, and here he was at a desert ranch, horseracing the man with the half hand halved from rattlesnake hunting barehanded.

Kid was called to ride and count against the old Apache who the Kid called Corporal. All morning Kid had been going wrong. Out for guts with no guts. His horse a thing he forgets and should not forget. His speed, his gripping crop, his wheated mane in the dust. Sun of the desert's red and blonde. Sage, shadow of salt scrub, chaparral — racing through the cholla, saguaro, barrel and yucca and dust. Here in the dust and dirt of kicking deep in a gutless stance high above the arroyos, trying for full gallop to win. Here racing horses that tossed head and snorted in dayheat, Kid kicked and kicked harder to race fastest across the desert sand and stone out in the day's heats. Racing in the arroyos through the chaparral, the Kid on gelding which is the thing he has to have power over, but the gelding is how-many-times bigger than Kid, and the outcroppings, the shadscale, the vastness of the project overtakes his heart. He is to outrace a professional horseman, an Apache weathered hand with a half hand black-heeled and two fingers missing, lost from hunting rattlesnakes at night.

He is not any boy now but is the Kid. The sonofabitch with the hand, the Apache, he named him. His right hand was two thickly calloused fingers and a thumb bitten partly off — this was the right left on him. “A name!” Corporal said the first time they raced, “Can mean everything,” if you earn it. “Live for a living.” Show yourself to be worthy of naming. “Don't suck hind tit — mother's tit — rich tit.”

He can teach the Kid to sing from his guts, the Apache has sworn. To own them and make them work. Pick the rattlers up by hand. The West, the hand, Mother and leaving her forever back by the pool. Mountains to the distance in red and basalt. There is a church out there. Rattlers to look for tongue breathing. Boots smacked soles first before being put on. A church. A hovel out near the church where the Apache lives alone.