William Vollmann - The Atlas

Now he too would disappear. He was going to travel to the world's edge (which lies in Canada), and he was happy.

They came to a wide, still, blue-gray lake, a river with tree-islands perfectly oval like lily-pads. His joy was strong and wide like the ferns around the trunks of birches. Those ferns resembled immense pale green lichens. Every place seemed a luscious place to spend a summer or a life, remote and serene like those sticks almost sunken in weedy water. There was no flaw in this landscape, because it was full of nature and loneliness.

'Tis purty in here, he heard a boy say. All the trees an' stuff.

His joy deepened like black bogs and black pools in the grass.

Clouds of pale leaves and dark needles swirled by. Sumacs, buttercups, ferns, dandelions gone to seed, grand beech trees, two chrysanthemums in a pot on the topmost strand of a barbed wire fence, forget-me-nots, daisies, reddish boulders gaping out of the softness in the little towns where washing hung between spruce trees like sails too bright and perfect for the whitish plain of water — it was all home even though he'd never seen it before.

The people that are in the sleepers are really nice, but the people that work there are snooty, a little girl said.

The train curved like a silver river.

They were playing cards in the observation car, making fans of their red-backed cards, passing and bidding and drinking Molson in cans as they rode high over so many rock-lipped black pools in the moss, all those ancient folks doing crossword puzzles and showing off pocket knives and laughing and saying: We all gonna get old sometime, but not yet! and everyone happy. — What's trumps? Hearts is trumps.

He remembered Mount Aetna's broad white fang floating in blueness:

Dead trees among the live ones, long blonde grass on the knolls between pools, every now and then a bird winging off the marsh; these things scraped away the last of his unhappiness, which fell into a birch gorge at sunset, into the brown water-mirror of nowhere nothing far below. Thinking he saw some creature in the water, he remembered his friend Joe, who'd said: And the dream was, I was swimming in the Connecticut River with my first love. This girl was a virgin. We were both virgins when we got it on. And her name was Janny and she had long red hair in a ponytail. We were swimming underwater. I remember the sunlight and the trees. We were swimming underwater, and things were green and then the water was so clear. Swimming underwater, and all the sudden I hear a voice — a voice! I say, how can I hear a voice? I'm underwater, I'm underwater! And the voice kept saying: Joe, Joe, Joe! And I realized that I was gonna drown! I didn't wanna hear that voice; someone's shakin' me: Joe, Joe, Joe! It's chow time! And just then they show up with the cornmeal and the beans, and I'm back with bars in front of me! And I say, Oh, no! I'm gonna go back to that place! 'Cause beans and cornmeal, it's the same meal every day. You know, it wasn't anything to wake up to. On my birthday, somebody else gave me their beans. Back in jail again. Nothin' to do but race the cockroaches. Oh, you catch 'em, you shake 'em hard, and you put 'em on the edge of the bed. You race 'em for cigarettes. The stupid cockroaches wouldn't have a sense of direction. You'd have a finish line, but they wouldn't know where the finish line was! They'd just take off anywhere. But you'd just take their legs off, an' influence their direction! I mean, that was if you wanted to win the cigarettes! You'd have a limited quantity of cigarettes; you had top cigarettes, and you'd roll 'em real good; that's one thing I learned in jail, it's to roll 'em, roll a damned neat cigarette. We had plenty of time to do it, so we'd roll 'em real good, tight, tuck 'em all in. It wasn't like nowadays, when they give everybody like ten cigarettes a day. We had ten cigarettes a week, so you'd save that cigarette, an' you'd use it for barter, and you'd use it for favors. Trade it for some cornbread. So the cockroaches… I had one cockroach; it didn't last too long after I pulled its legs off. Most of em got away, though. At nighttime you'd catch 'em. They'd run across your chest. It was real hot at night. You'd sleep like this, with your arms folded. And they'd come out of the bed. They'd run across your chest at night. You'd catch 'em, wrap 'em up, save 'em till morning. The toilet paper was a stiff type toilet paper, a manuscript type toilet paper. I mean it wasn't very good for wiping your ass, but you could write on it. It was the brown paper people used to wipe their hands on. So we wrapped 'em in clothes, stuck 'em in the pockets of your clothes. I had this one G.I. jacket with buttons on it, it was really worn out. I was the Omega Man. I had a button with the omega sign for resistance; I was resisting the draft. . Yeah, I was drafted. I gave 'em a lot of shit. I was 4-F. I'd joined the Marines when I was seventeen, wanted to go and kill some Commies. Even lied about my age. But I got in trouble sitting on the bench when the big black sergeant called my name and I couldn't hear. He'd been sayin' it for a few minutes. I said oh shit. I was the only one left. Get over there! So the lieutenant talks to me, he says: I'm sorry, son, you're just too deaf. He says: You can't pass the hearing test; you flunked all the hearing tests. Well, I was real sad and everything. I went out and said to myself: Well, what are you going to do, kid? I told all my friends: Well, I'm not going. They all shouted: You lucky bastard! — Well, after that I went to college, and in college I got it straight. I had history professors, radical history professors. I realized the whole thing was a scam and I got pretty pissed off. Then we were real wild. We went wild and made a lot of shit, made a lot of noise because we wanted to hit 'em where it hurt, in the pocketbook. So I got a couple of banks, would trash the street just to make a scene, you know, because my buddies and civilians were dying in Vietnam; everything was all injustice , like in Nazi Germany. You had to do something! Can't just go to school and get your degree, you know what I mean? — I didn't burn down any buildings, just threw a trash can through a bank window. Trash can was on fire, too! The police came and charged us. We backed up, threw some bricks and botdes and stuff. The police charged again. Then they caught a guy I was with and they beat the shit out of him and backed off and I went to pick him up and all the sudden I felt the darned presence and I look up, and they all got their pig masks on and they said something to me: budufdudufuu! so I says: Fuck you, pig! so they smashed my glasses, split my head open, and I started running down the street and one cop came up behind and hit me on the back with his baton: whop! I got away, and some Harvard students pulled me into the dorm and they stitched me up. One guy starts to stitch me up, and he says: No, no, let me do it, I'm a third-year man! They were arguin' over who was gonna stitch me up. I went to school the next day. Both my eyes were black and I had a split-open head and the newspapers were saying: 15,000 RIOT IN HARVARD SQUARE, so all the teachers knew what I was at. I was one of the movement heavies. Twice in two weeks I got a chokehold from the authorities. So I did that for awhile, and then I started hitchhiking. Had to eat, so I'd sell my blood — oh, many times. You get into town, you sleep in the park, you'd be the first one to get up in the morning, six-o'-clock, go to Peak Load or Manpower. If they didn't call you out that day you had to do something to get money. It wasn't like those spoiled brats they got nowadays or the homeless people. You had to find money. The only way to do it was through work or sell your blood or jerk off sell your sperm. Oh, you find out. I saw it in Oakland. In fact, I did it in Greece twice in one week. I did it in Utah, I did it in Atlanta; it's just something to do for five or ten bucks. There's nothing to it. Two times in one month, that's too much. You almost pass out from selling your blood twice in a row. Selling your blood isn't much. It's just you get five, ten bucks, you know. But that's a lot of money if you're on the road. Five dollars is really a liberator. Well, now it would be more like twenty dollars. But let me tell you about five dollars. You got five dollars, you can take fifty cents of that, walk around town, find a day-old bakery. You get a loaf of bread for twenty-five cents. And then you're all set. Tie that to your belt, stick the rest of the money in your shoe, keep your change in your pocket, put the three dollars in your shoe, put it between your big toe and your little toe; you're all set, you can sleep anywhere; no one bothers you, as long as you take your shoes off at night, put 'em under your head, use 'em as a pillow, wrap your shirt around 'em. It's a typical thing to do. That's if you're sleeping in a boxcar with other bums around. I wasn't that desperate then, either. Look, if you're hitchhiking around, come into a town, get there early enough, it's a freak town like Denver or Salt Lake City or something, you sleep in the park in a dugout or some baseball park or something, at the first light you get up, and the night before you've looked in the phone book to find out where the Peak Loads and the Manpowers are. Labor pool. So you're first on line in the morning, even though the regulars they're gonna get the jobs. 'Cause you gotta get the job, gotta get that ten bucks, twelve bucks, whatever. Hell, day-old bread only costs a nickel. You just wrap it up, tie it to your belt and hitchhike, hop a freight train or something, and you have a day-old bread on your belt and you're all set for days. Bread and water, that's fine. Cigarettes would be good, too. And then go to sleep, dream good dreams. Everywhere I went, though, I remembered swimming underwater with my first love, and waking up in that lousy jail to find it was just a dream.