The Vocabulary of Guns

57.

Off the causeway now, you enter a landscape of willows, like miles of women combing their long tangled green hair. There’s enough moon to imagine you see colors but really the night is just brazen darkness made the more so by the cone of light that you travel in. Your glance may train on the backseat, wondering what apparitions will arise. The forces of good and evil are behind us, in front of us, in us, all around us. We are it and they are we. Our enemy is ourselves. Might I see the old black man back there, he with the pork pie hat and the dark suit? Yesterday morning, so long ago I could write a book about it, I saw his ephemeral figure shimmering as a reflection in the window of a car. His look, his mien, the way the light passed through him, the way he regarded me with a hopeful yet fatalistic look, as if to say, ‘Oh no. don’t be just like them.’ Them referring to the line of killers of which I was one. Them that lived by the gun and the vocabulary of such guns. Don’t be an Uncle; make that great-uncle Felix who shot down three men with his brand new shotgun. Don’t be a murderer, a killer, a man without sleep, damned forever to pursuer Macbethian visions. And I understood now who he was and why he’d arrived. He was the phantom of the old man my father had seen stomped to death, the phantom of the man who was dragged/carried, bloody and repellant down to the bayou and cast in the mud-brown waters to be borne on into mamma night, food for critters and eye sockets for the endless God. He was warning me not to do something stupid like shoot Donald Jones dead. Even if I ran away I’d never get far. I couldn’t deprive myself of kin and country and join the Foreign Legion, erase myself from the family photo album like an Orwellian device. No, I needed to live, to do more, be more than just a hired gun. And the old man’s spirit had saved me then from totally bitching up my life. And so I wondered if he would turn up again and tell me to turn back, go home, stash the gun, take a nap, a long cool nap and wake refreshed and young and ready to carry on with the rest of my life. I expected him any minute. But maybe he wouldn’t show, or maybe he didn’t cross parish or state lines. No matter. I’d be ready to talk him down with a single look, or at least a listen. ‘Hear that?’ I’d say, turning down the radio. ‘Hear that sound bouncing around the car? Do you hear it? Gabriel. That’s what it is. It’s my name and it’s bouncing around the car like a wild piece of loose-leaf.’ But he’d shake his head, the dead old man, for even with his powers he couldn’t hear what only I could hear and what only I could know. So I’m not worried about anyone or anything, phantasmagorical or otherwise from stopping this exercise in Right and Wrong. I’ve got righteousness on my side, and certainly that must topple Right. Right?

The willows give way to hardwoods as the land begins to rise. Here and there a mighty white oak stands totem in its own field, dappled by the moon’s dead glow. Even the leafless trees, grey and barren, betray the majesty of the final plan, the big picture which we can barely glimpse and will never understand. Do you remember when you climbed such trees? When you lived only to scale those arboreal heights, to be the kid who went highest and therefore saw more. Is it still in you? Will it be the compelling mechanism that will send you down corridors of druggy good times and meetings with LSD Jesus? Maybe. Maybe the childish Good Time Charlie will fight forever to dominate the brain. When Saturdays had nothing to do with guns and ammo and hunched over the killing wheel. No, Saturdays were spent mowing lawns for five bucks each all day in the New Orleans sun, baked and brain fried by sundown and then you washed all your grass-eaten clothes including your tennis shoes and then showered off the day’s dirt tan and put on clean jeans and a velour shirt and your now clean sneakers and caught a ride to the mall and walked around looking at girls and the Farah Fawcet poster at Spencer’s. You didn’t know shit from shinola and how good it was. You talked knowingly about first base and second and girls who went all the way. You stood at the rail of the ice skating rink in the heart of the Plaza shopping mall and watched fine-rumped women in short skirts swim by. You ate an ice cream cone, sneered at the mall cops, stole a book from B. Dalton’s. You lived in fantasy and dreams and the world of tomorrow. And 13 seems so long ago it might have happened to a different boy. What would you tell him, oh sagacious 17 year old? Stay away from girls? Do more pushups? Study your math? Run away to the circus? Run away to the world? No, nothing really. Already I can see that every step I’m taking is the one I was made to make. Altering a single filament of time would shatter the whole mechanism, obliterate the dream.

A sign for the Sunshine Bridge. A detour from your journey to Baton Rouge and beyond if you have the time and well worth it for the Sunshine Bridge is a monument to man’s need to make a dollar before the last moo cow comes home. Built for no reason in a place that doesn’t require its presence and won’t for twenty years if ever by which time the bridge, though barely used, will be defunct from an engineering point of view. It is a simple cast iron bridge over the Father of Waters. My father took me to see it as a boy. One truck trundled across in the twenty minutes we observed it. Off-ramps end in open fields abruptly. The sea-blue paint has rusted under the sun. Traffic on the river passes underneath carefully, the great bridgeposts a menace no less dolorous than Scylla and Charibdes. My father may have said something salubrious about greasy pockets and kickbacks, all of it an ode to Governor Jimmy ‘You Are My Sunshine’ Davis. Maybe. But what I imagined was how the bridge seemed to be a monument to my father himself. Grand, experimental, ahead of his time but somehow out of time as well. Functional, brilliant, sound but somehow unnecessary. And I knew I wanted more. Perhaps due to him I needed more, to be more. I couldn’t just be someone or something admired in a backhanded way for what I could have been. I needed to Be! And that’s the Sunshine Bridge. See it before you reach Baton Rouge. Eat crab gumbo on the River Road. Imagine from the crest of the levee what is, what was, what never was and what never could have been. It’s a beautiful, breathtaking view.