Percival Everett - Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Or you could have a taste waiting for me.

Touché. Or, as the French say, touchy.

It’s a circle, isn’t it? I suppose we must follow it, like ants on a pheromone trail. I suppose it is neither makeshift nor defect. The way we follow turns, in turns. But I’ve taken your conversational turn, haven’t I. Caused a flutter. Funny how easily knots get tied. There you are trotting back and counting lines, he said this and then he said that and then he said and what? Wait a minute. He said this and

You should visit more often.

I was in a particularly surly mood in that evening. I didn’t want to make the drive to Simi Valley the next morning. The mare that I thought was making progress regressed. And I found a rattler under a hay bale and I had to kill it. I always preferred to relocate them, but this one startled me and I reached out with the machete I used to cut the bale strings and whacked off his head before I knew what was happening. I made myself a boring yet somehow edible dinner and read myself into what passed for sleep for me.

The daylilies and zinnias and gerbera daisies are blooming, but the blooms are afreud to be anything but themselves, afreud they are mistaken. The author takes such shit. Probably better to be dead. The easy way out, which, by the way, is the same way in, is to privilege trope over meaning, heels over head, ass over teapot. Remember, you need a map even if you intend to misread. I feel no authorial anxiety and no real writer ever has.

The next morning, Juan came early and was feeding the horses when I got outside. I was glad. I had a bunch of paperwork to attend to before driving to Simi Valley. I watched as he tossed a couple of flakes of hay over the fence to the donkeys. He walked back toward me and said good morning.

I nodded. You’ll have to use the pickup to haul the manure trailer today. The tractor’s broken.

I know, he said. I think I can fix it.

That would be great. I looked at the clear sky. I noticed he was wearing a heavy jacket. Aren’t you hot?

He opened his coat and showed me a flak vest.

What’s that all about?

Protection, he said. They shot your horse, right?

I couldn’t argue with that.

I don’t want the last words I hear to be, I got me one.

I’ll be back this afternoon.

Juan nodded and left to work on the tractor.

I went back into the house and wrote checks to nearly everyone and anyone I could think of. I then put on my hat and started the boring and tedious drive to north of Los Angeles.

Back when we were knee high to knees Point Dume was treeless and wind beaten. It was a good place to throw ashes to the wind. Please remember that.

I followed the woman’s directions, because I follow directions well, and made my way along her dusty track of a driveway. An Appaloosa stood alone in a pasture of scattered patches of tall weeds. The yard was fairly neat but cluttered with ancient farm implements. A baling rake marked the middle of the circular drive. I parked, got out of my car, and walked up the door, knocked.

As soon as the door was opened I didn’t like these people. I felt bad not liking them, but the feeling was there immediately. Before they spoke even, the inside of their house, of their world, struck me as loud.

Loud enough I think at this point to make the point that maybe, though it pains me to say it, a certain Frenchman was correct about the nature of and the mission of the narrative of fiction or perhaps any narrative or, more accurately, the human desire, urge, push, to construct a followable, if not familiar, narrative, a story that has and makes or seems to make sense, a history that can be told and retold, a story that can be understood or thought to be understood, but there is no story after all, is there? is there? Every fool believes that if the coin has come up heads ten times in a row, it will more likely be tails this next time.

And what is this, you say say say, pull the taffy, play play play, the hounds in the attic, the sheep has a fin, and everyone waits to begin again. Blow snot from your left as you plug up your right, kill bugs with your bullets and turn off the light.

When First I Saw That Form Endearing

And all the details. Of rooms. Of meals. Of walks. Of gardens. Two sofas, facing each other, of worn, camel-colored leather, piping around the cushions the same color. Scratches and a small torn place on the side nearest the hearth. The coffee table, cherry wood, was once a dining table, but the legs were sawn off, very evenly, expertly, but the wooden floor was not true, so the pencils rolled off, two circles from sweating glasses, etched forever. All set on the hardwood floor, covered partially by the worn and generic Oriental rug, stressed and frayed to threads in places. Meatloaf made with brown sugar that you never liked but actually requested on occasion. The meat was too sweet and there was more sweetness added by the red sauce, possibly ketchup on top, but baked in, and yet it was still too dry. Mashed potatoes, the skins still on, lumpy and made with heavy cream. Corn bread, cooked in a pan, so it had to be cut into squares, with jalapeño peppers, baked hard on the edges. Green fried rice, almost crispy, with lots of scrambled egg. On white china, paper thin. And poppy-seed cake with a walnut filling, too sweet. With vanilla ice cream from a round tub. The tablecloth was robin’s-egg blue and too big for the table. The turn around the block past the round fountain in the yard at the corner; the gurgling of it dawned on you only when you were right on it, a big urn with a weak stream in the middle, spilling over the edge onto the ghosts of koi. The dark-purple irises that you were sorry you planted, though you loved to look at them, always needing to be divided, always being given away as gifts in paper bags saved from the market, the rhizomes lying there like bodies in a mass grave. The peonies of many colors, that you loved and everyone told you wouldn’t grow, but they did grow, but in a different place altogether. The morning-glory vine on the back fence, blue against the pink dawn sky. The hyacinth. The star jasmine, heady, crazy heady. Around the edges, purge and garlic planted to keep the gophers away, but you swore the gophers enjoyed the garlic. All the details. Everything in the details. Details, details, details. Of rooms, meals, walks, and gardens. Details telling us who we are, where we are, and why. Telling us everything. Telling us nothing. Because we live inside our heads. So much bullshit? In the middle of the middle of middle America. So much bullshit? In the details.

Deep, well past halfway, into the journey of my so-called life, I found myself in darkness, without you and you and you and you, a whole list of you, and stuck on this crooked trail, the straight one having been lost, and it is difficult to express how in this darkness, rough and stern, every turn presented a new fear, as bitter as death, but what I saw, what I saw there, out of slumber and wide awake in that dark place, was at the termination of some world and the beginning of another, a mountain maybe, a wind pressing against me, issued from some sea I could not see, and so I fled onward, recalling with every step that which none can leave behind, how lucky are the amnesiacs, when a panther addressed my presence and then a lion and then a love long lost, all three heads uplifted, but the last of them, she brought upon me much sadness, the kind that comes with fear, and she wept with me despite her hunger and we were cast back into some light, away from the cats, and while I was rushed back there was a man, whose silence seemed well practiced, and I yelled to him in that barren place to help me and he said that he was a poet and

Dad.

Yes?