Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“Uh-oh,” said Sandro.

“I left that same night. I’d never driven an E-type Jaguar before, and I had to stop and get different shoes because my goddamn sneakers were too bulky or puffy or something to handle the tight little Jaguar pedals. Twice I almost drove off the road because I couldn’t get to the brake adequately. The pedals on that car were so close together they were designed for like Italian driving moccasins. You know, really supple kidskin leather. Buttery little shoes that barely have a sole, just a faint slip of leather, so you can feel every nuance of the accelerator and clutch. Professional dance slippers would have been best. I couldn’t find any of those. Nothing even close. I was at a truck stop in Maryland. They had key chains with crabs in sunglasses. Stun guns. Packages of tube socks, which everyone knows are for the truckers, for no-mess masturbation while driving. They didn’t have any Italian shoes. I bought women’s bedroom slippers, Dearfoams, size thirteen. After I slit the heel they fit me perfect. I was ripping down I-85 in Oppler’s E-type with his rabbits in the back, wearing my Dearfoams, and somehow managed not to get pulled over. I felt like Mario Andretti. I understand that Reno here set a record and dazzled the Italians, but let’s not forget Ronnie’s death race through Texas. Wasting people. Like the two fruitcakes in a souped-up Monte Carlo who tried to overtake me. Later I almost hit an armadillo. I drove all night. Got to Port Arthur in the late afternoon. Horrible place, by the way. Big, squat refineries, air that smells of burning tires. Snakes dangling from the trees, trying to stay cool, I guess. And dead ones, flat paddles of jerky fused to the road. In the middle of the gravel drive into the property was a giant lizard eating a baguette, one of those really cheap and fluffy grocery store baguettes. Sickening, this lizard tearing off hunks of bread and devouring them. I park, and Oppler comes out of his studio and starts limping toward the car, I guess his leg was asleep or something. He’s calling to those rabbits like they know their names and are going to be happy to see him. I’m thinking, isn’t he amazed by how quickly I got here? Isn’t he going to at least mention it? I was redlining his Jaguar. I pissed in a Dr Pepper bottle. When it was full I pissed in a potato chips bag. I broke the law. Gave up a night’s sleep. Forwent the tube socks at the truck stop.”

“Incredible self-control,” Sandro said.

“All in the name of doing Saul a favor. I mean, you try to help a person. He opens the car door and leans in the back and makes this sound. A wailing. High-pitched.”

“Oh, no,” Sandro said, and put his hands over his face, feigning a brace for disaster.

“Yeah, that’s right. Those goddamn rabbits were dead.”

“You forgot to check on them.”

“My job was transport. And I didn’t hear any complaints from back there. But I had the windows down and there was a lot of truck traffic — especially on the 10. I don’t know what happened. They just… died.”

“That’s why you’re wearing those sunglasses,” Sandro said. “The guilt is doing you in. Did you give them any water, Ronnie?”

“No, I did not give them any water . Listen, if he’d wanted a night nurse he should have called one. He called me. And there I was, in this hellacious armpit of the gulf and Saul is not speaking to me. He refuses to come out of his living quarters. He’s got these black drag queens working around the property, feeding chickens, running his tea tray. They look like football players. Local Texas high school football players, in nightgowns. Biddy and Pumpkin Ray. They don’t serve me any tea. Just dirty looks for killing Saul’s rabbits. I figured I’d get a quick night’s catch-up and leave at the crack of dawn. Put his car back and pretend the whole thing never happened. I was in the guest cottage and had to listen to birds screeching and chirping all night. Apparently it was mating season for something called the ovenbird. All night long I heard this teacher teacher teacher. Teacher teacher teacher. I was fantasizing about calling the sheriff and getting these ovenbirds hauled away in a paddy wagon. I got up in the morning, shook the scorpions out of my boots, opened the cottage door, and there was a rooster, staring me down. It was tall. I could tell what it was thinking: You’re my size . An unusually tall rooster and it would not let me pass. It lunged and all I could do to save myself was grab something from a nearby lumber pile and swing. I ended up having to go for broke. Double down. Thing just would not let up. Saul came out in his pajamas. Didn’t say a word. Just picked up the dead rooster and started plucking. Then he lit barbecue coals. All very methodical, as if it had been in the plans from the beginning that I kill this rooster and we eat it, and that’s what we did. I killed it, he cooked it, we ate it. Seemed like he wasn’t mad at me anymore. Thing tasted like rubber bands.”

Sandro beamed. Ronnie made him happy. He loved these stories. They were part of Ronnie’s artistic genius, even if Sandro didn’t always like Ronnie’s actual art, which was sometimes thin, he felt. Too flatly ironic, the magazine images he collected, slogans and slickness and advertising reformulated for camp effect. Sandro’s favorite piece of Ronnie’s was a blithe declaration Ronnie once made that he hoped to photograph every living person. Sandro said it was Ronnie’s best work and something on the level of a poem: a gesture with no possible rebuttal. It didn’t matter that it was never made. That it was unmakeable was its brilliance.

“Let me ask you something,” Sandro said. “How many scorpions were in your boots?”

“Just one. Drunk. Waddled under a bush and went back to sleep.”

It was my turn to report on my trip. I left out the part where the man tells me I won’t look as good in a body bag. He’d meant to shame me and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of shaming me again, in front of my friends. I also left out the part about the invitation to go to Italy in the spring. I told them about Stretch, and the wind knocking me sideways, and how I ended up driving the Spirit of Italy .

“To Stretch,” Ronnie said, holding up his slivovitz. “Poor guy is probably waiting for you now. He’ll wait for years. He’ll tell everyone, this girl came through town—”

“All right, all right,” Sandro said.

Ronnie smiled at him. “Jeal-ouseee, is there no cure,” he sang. “How exciting that Sandro and Stretch are going to have a log pull. A hay-bale-tossing contest. A proper duel.”

“We’ve moved on from Stretch,” Sandro said.

It hadn’t occurred to me that a guy living in a motel would make Sandro jealous. I was touched.

Giddle hadn’t gone anywhere. Only to Coney Island. “But it felt far away,” she said. “The far-awayness tugs at you as you rumble out there on the F train. You finally reach Coney Island and think, I’ll never see home again. I went several days in a row. It was like taking tiny vacations to Europe.”

“Place is a nightmare,” Ronnie said. “It’s nothing like Europe. It’s awful to go there even once.”

“Once is good,” Sandro said. “Maybe once a year, even.”

Sandro had taken me there in winter, just after we met. All the rides were chained down. Guard dogs barked at us, mean and lonely, behind fences. We’d walked out on the beach, which was covered with snow. The moon was out and full, and the waves pushed glowing white piles of snow up onto the shore. We’d gone to a Russian restaurant farther down Brighton Beach Avenue. The waiter set down a bottle of vodka frozen in a block of ice. Sandro ordered caviars and creamed salads and steaks like it was our wedding night. The restaurant was darkly lit, with a spinning mirrored ball and a tuxedoed Bulgarian entertainer playing a mellotron. There was a party of Russians on the dance floor. They gave off a feeling of hysterical doom as they danced, the men circling a woman in a short sweater dress who looked eight months pregnant. Later, they all returned to their table and took turns pouring vodka down one another’s throats. Sandro and I stumbled out late, our minds cold and hazed with winter vodka, snowflakes in our hair. Sandro said he loved me. The way he kissed the snow from my eyelashes, wrapped me in his warmth, I believed him.