The Vocabulary of Guns

65.

What’s the difference between a coon ass and a dumb ass? Answer: the Sabine River. I don’t know where I heard that joke. I can’t really remember jokes. Freud has a whole subset for people like me who pathologically forget jokes. Our brains don’t remember the story, or perhaps the imprint of the joke isn’t made unless we turn around and tell it again. Here’s another one. A rare monkey is being transferred from the LSU Biology Lab to the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans. A special, air conditioned truck is required to transfer the monkey but it breaks down halfway to New Orleans. The driver waves down Mr. Boudreaux who happens to be on his way to the Big Easy to kick up his heels. They put the monkey cage on the front seat and Boudreaux takes off. Meanwhile the driver waits and waits. Hours pass. He looks up and sees Mr. Boudreaux’s truck coming back down the highway with the monkey riding in the front seat. The driver steps out in the road and waves down Mr. Boudreaux. ‘What re you doing?’ says the driver.’ I told you to take this monkey to the Audubon zoo!’ ‘Man, I did,’ says Mr. Boudreaux in his soft Cajun drawl. ‘And we had such a good time, now we’re goin’ to Astroworld.’

Texas on all sides. Dark as a motherfucker. And big. You can tell how vast it is the instant you cross the Sabine. The sky is wider; the range between rows of trees is greater, the service roads that parallel the Interstate are better than the Interstate itself in Louisiana. I am leaving a poor state and entering a rich one. Drive friendly, says a huge billboard. The Texas way! Sure will. My driving will be impeccable. It won’t be what I do behind the wheel that will be of concern. Hopefully. Hopefully. I can’t spend time rehearsing what I’ll do. Be like the ninja. Be present. Take four deep breaths. On the last exhale and do what must be done. You may only have one moment to do the deed. When that moment is at its ripest point, it must be seized. Not before or not too late. All is ripeness. So take it easy, coolio. Fiddle with the radio and pick up some conjunto and some country, lots and lots of country and commercials and so screw it, relax into the wheel and the bucket seat and remember to remember your first joke ever. Or rather it was a dirty song. How did it go? Not last night but the night before, twenty-four nigg-That’s about as far as you got before your stepmother cut you off. She was driving the old Ford Galaxy through Dinky Town in Minneapolis. You were heading home. Your friend and you sat in the backseat, a roguish boy, king of the first grade. It was he who had taught you that song. ‘Gabriel, where did you hear that?’ said your stepmother, looking at you in the rearview mirror. Your friend, king of first grade fidgeted next to you, sensing danger. You ratted him out on the nonce. Your stepmother looked at the king of first grade and said, ‘We don’t use that word in our house.’ No, you did not. That’s about as pissed as your father ever got. That night he said to your first grade ears, ‘I’d rather you said motherfucker than say that word.’ Not that you had many opportunities to say motherfucker. It was the point of the matter. How he loathed and despised that word.

‘That’s right,’ says the Junkman, the old Negro, stomped to death and thrown in the bayou and he must now and forever be known as the Junkman, simply in honor of the old black man my father cheated out of money for the copper drainpipes. It is he, the murdered man, my father’s murdered man and so my murdered man as well and he’s here, riding shotgun, a mystic life-force helping me commit capital murder and then escape across state lines. He’s s specter, nearly silent, but he’s my sage, my Virgil and he’ll be here for me as long as he can, as long as I believe in him and the obligation that he represents. He says it again. He says, ‘That’s right. Your daddy didn’t cotton to none of that racist mess. He didn’t have no use for all that white power stuff. He saw the worst people in charge of the best people holding down the poorest people. He saw all that and he didn’t see no need to run off to Vietnam or join the Peace Corps. He decided to educate his mind. His mind, he knew was a terrible thing to taste. And he didn’t want that for himself. Of course, he owe it all to Mrs. Courvillion. You know that right?’

“Right,” I say as the signs pass me by, mileage to Beaumont and Houston and El Paso, ones and tens and hundreds of miles away.

‘You know she taught your daddy to read,’ says the Junkman, shifting in his seat, titling his head forward a little, touching the brim of his porkpie hat. ‘You mind if I smoke? Cool.’ He lights a cigarette, cracks the window. His entire mien is like my father’s, like a slouchy black version of my old man, captured in his moment of interruption, his life severed at the age of 48. ‘She’s the one that held him back in the 3^rd grade. You remember that right?’

“Sure,” I say, recalling dimly the relief I felt when I passed 3^rd grade, indeed excelled (except for math) in all my subjects. I had heard my father’s voice when he described the humiliation of staying behind, of having his dumminess exposed to the world.

‘Yep, she sat him in that desk and said, Bennie you are going to learn how to read. And he did. You know he started out the year dumb as a box of rocks and by the end of third grade he was reading Tolstoy.’

“That’s not true.”

‘Hell yeah,’ says the Junkman, ashing out the window. ‘Warren Peas. He wrote a whole e'say about that dude.’

I ignore the Junkman, allowing him and his cigarette to fade from my mind. It’s true what he says, what his hallucination says. No need to dwell on the ramifications of his arrival. Clearly I’m losing my motherfucking mind. That’s fine. That’s cool. The road still rises up to meet me. I’m still a coonass on the warpath of a couple dumbasses. I have the huevos and the brain power to get it done. A nod of the head to Mrs. Courvillion, dead perhaps or really old and long retired, the school teacher that taught my papa to read and therefore allowed him to read his way right out from under their noses, all of them, all the rednecks who used terms like ‘nigger lover’ and the like, she allowed my father to Tolstoy and Keats and Yeats and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky and Samuel Fuckin’ Beckett his ass outta Washington, Louisiana and out into the world to beget me and raise me on the vocabulary of guns so that I could go, go, go, and do, do, do this thing that must needs be done. Thank you, Mrs. Courvillion for helping create the killer in me, a force of vengeance, the Nemesis.