On the Night Border

A Song Left Behind in the Aztakea Hills-2

“Nothing besides what I already told you,” I lied.

Impatience backlit Fenton’s eyes. “How about you take me up there into the hills and show me the place?”

I drank, long and slow, clinking ice gathering at my lips, freezing them a little, and then I set the glass down and shook my head.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I’ll pay you.”

“You want to hear about my wild night in the woods with Jack Kerouac and a bunch of badly dressed musicians? Fine. I’m happy to let you buy me drinks and listen to me talk until closing time. But I haven’t gone up in those woods since that night, and I see no need to change that.”

“So take me as close as you want and point me in the right direction. I’ll go the rest of the trail alone. You can tell me the story along the way.”

“What exactly are you looking for?”

“Not a thing. I’m listening. I’ll know it when I hear it.”

Fenton pulled money from his pocket and eased it across the bar, exposing enough from beneath his hand for me to see a hundred-dollar bill. Wide-eyed, I shook my head nervously.

“Put that away. Are you nuts?”

He did, clenching his jaw, mistaking my reaction for refusal when I only meant to spare Spence any possible embarrassment. Discreet fictions or not, people talked. Gossip about me and my lack of a wife cropped up now and then, very goddamn little of it even half true, but no need to grease the skids. Granted I’d downed three gin and tonics, but a hundred bucks and a night spent tramping around the woods appealed to me more than drinking myself numb again and fighting oil paint demons.

“Another round, then we’ll go,” I said. “Pay me outside.”

“Oh, sure, that’s fine.”

“I don’t know what you expect to find, though.”

“Like I said, I’ll know it when I hear it.” Relieved, Fenton waved for Spence to set us up once more. “Say, I’ve never read On the Road or The Subterraneans, and all those Kerouac books. Not my thing, I guess. What was he like?”

“Not what you might expect. Came here to escape his own legend. It’s like two Jacks existed. One walked barefoot through town, jingling nickels for beer in his pocket whenever his mother, Mémêre, tightened the purse strings to curb his drinking. The other, forever youthful and windswept, sped over ribbons of endless, dusty blacktop in cars piloted by a crazy saint. By the time he came here, though, that second Jack lived only in his books.

“The humble one, though? The one who tossed a football around the schoolyard on warm autumn days and wandered town in his slippers dragging groceries home in a beat-up, granny shopping basket? That’s the Jack I knew. He hung out in my studio, playing records and reading while I painted. A lot of nights we drank here. He really came to life in the bar with the bay men at the end of the day, some still gaffed in their hip-waders, stinking of fish and sea water, Jack jawing about this or that he’d done or seen zipping back and forth across the country until they bought him a beer to shut him up.

“Once he started, sheer joy poured out of him. He was mad to talk, just like he wrote about, and he spun stories like no one I’ve ever heard before or since. Never about books or writing or literature but about real life, and women, and working-day sweat, which he knew as well as any bay man washing brine from his lips with beer.”

“He drank a lot?”

I laughed. “When Mémêre held back his drinking money, he snuck a bottle of Canadian Club in here in a valise and sipped it in the men’s room. Spence found out and banned him from bringing in any kind of bag at all. That happened about a week before the Sultans came to town.”

I finished my fourth gin and tonic.

“Ready?”

“Lead the way.”

Fenton scattered a few more bills beside his half-touched bourbon. Spence flashed me a questioning eye, and I winked to let him know all was well. Then we waded through the crowd and the acrid smoke to the cool outdoors. A run to my apartment across the road garnered some flashlights. I guided Fenton toward the harbor, shimmering with scales of moonlight, and then along the road to the woods.

At the trailhead, I flicked on my light and handed the other to Fenton.

He gave me the hundred and asked, “Why didn’t you take this in the bar?”

“Spence is a friend. It might look bad for him if someone saw.”

“Look bad how? You push dope or something?”

“No, but I got a bit of an unearned reputation.”

Fenton looked my skinny frame up and down, filling in blanks. “I had a sense you might be queer when we shook hands.”

I glared at him. “You want me to take you into the hills or not?”

“Yes. Doesn’t matter to me which way you swing as long as you don’t swing it my way. I didn’t come here for that.”

“You got nothing to worry about there, Mister Math Whiz.”

I stamped up the first rise of the trail, putting distance between us, making Fenton work. I considered running into the dark and leaving the bastard on his own for thinking I sold myself to anyone who stood me a few drinks or that I sold myself at all. My desire for Gregory to return and put things back how they were ached inside me. I should’ve been home in his arms, streaks of paint on my face, a glass of cabernet on the table, and no worries about the frigid, black hills and empty shadows.

Christ, how lost and alone I felt to walk back to those hills. Right then, though, I wanted to get close to Jack and the good old days we’d had, when I’d still had Gregory.

My flashlight narrowed the path in a wash of dusty, ivory brightness. Leaves crunched underfoot, and branches scraped my legs. I tromped up the steepening incline, Fenton panting and wheezing to keep up. Away from town, the darkness called me, like the unwanted shadows slipping into my painting, like words written in old ink fading on yellowing paper, like a forgotten straight razor and a cold bed, all things meant for me whether I wanted them or not.

Fenton broke the quiet. “You were going to tell me about that night.”

“Right,” I said. “So Jack sat moping over his beer at Raker’s because Spence caught him with his whiskey, and Mémêre wouldn’t give him enough cash to drink how he liked. He lived with her most of his life, rushing off to see the world, always coming back to look after his mom, a good son for his all wildness. The Sultans came in, long hair, beards, beaded denim, paisley shirts and kerchiefs, psychedelic patches on their jean jackets, embroidered with angel wings on the back. Half the crowd about laughed beer through their noses at the sight of them. The other half wanted to kick their asses to the street, but Spence doesn’t tolerate any dust-ups. They wanted Jack. We gladly ran up their tab while they rambled on about ritualistic trance music that brought visions and raised consciousness to enlightenment about the universe. Jack dug it with his whole search for grace in the everyday world, feeling the beat of existence kick, but it didn’t interest me. They said they knew songs kind of like what you described. If played certain times in special places, the music unlocked new doors of the senses. They’d come from playing them up in Rhode Island in an abandoned house in Providence, then road-tripped down to Knicksport, chasing the next time and place. They figured it’d be groovy if we went with them.”

“You remember the songs?”

“No. I heard them only once, while drunk.”

We reached a plateau. From there the trail ascended steeper than before through a broken netting of tree branches and tangled brush. Sweat broke out all over me, chilling in the cold air. The town sounds barely reached us. I leaned against a tree. Fenton squatted on a fallen trunk.

“Another hundred yards, up inside that ring of pines.” I pointed to dense foliage above us on the trail. A melodic whistling tickled my ears for half a heartbeat then fell to the wind. “Hey, you hear that? Someone’s up there.”

“Who?” Fenton said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I didn’t hear anyone. Let’s keep moving.”

My head spun like an invisible whirlpool had sucked the breath from my body all at once. I gripped the tree.

“You okay?” Fenton asked.

The sensation left me as quickly as it had come, and with a gasp, I straightened, restored.

“Yeah, must have caught a chill.”

“Maybe I ought to go on alone from here.”

“No, I’ll come. The trail gets tricky.”

I couldn’t have let Fenton go on alone, not with the whisper of that music in my mind, tugging on me, and my unexpected need to reconnect with that moment in the past I’d shared with Jack. Wind rustled the sparse leaves and dry branches as we climbed. Stars danced in the sky, as if knocked out of place and frantic to find their proper positions, ants scurrying around a boot-smeared anthill. Whistling pipe music flitted across my ears, gone as quickly as it came. I hesitated, gazing at the shadowed pines and birches atop the hill.

“What?” Fenton asked.

“Nothing. Keep going.”

The air cooled and seemed to congeal as we neared the top, leaving a coppery, electric taste under my tongue. The wild drumbeat of my heart filled my chest. I wondered what world we’d stepped into when we walked out of Raker’s because it didn’t feel like mine anymore.

Nervous, I said, “This one night Jack got so drunk he laid down in the middle of Main Street, right on the double yellow line, and refused to get up again.”

“That right?” Apprehension in Fenton’s voice hinted he, too, sensed the change in the air.

“Five or six of us tried to get him on his feet, tried to lift him, but he resisted.”

“What happened?”

White birches, striped by peeling bark, filled my light like posts in an invisible fence.

“Gregory came down from our apartment, looked at Jack, and said, ‘Hey, Jack, does this mean you’re back on the road?’ Jack — always one for a good joke — cracked up, jumped to his feet, and we went on drinking — listen! You hear that windy sound?”

Fenton cupped his ear, trying to catch it, then shook his head.

“Oh. Well, this is the place,” I said.

Pine branches parted onto a pitch black clearing, where moonlight and starlight never reached earth. A figure in the clearing stood how I recalled Jack standing, legs wide, arms in motion, chin tilted upward as he spoke, and then it vaporized. Jack made words of the shadows, wrote them down, shoved them through my mail slot, and ran, back to motion, back to the road, fleeing or chasing as he had most of his life, leaving me with mere words to fill the cavities in my memory. Words too frightening to read. Except I did. I read them the day Jack left town, line for line, page after page, every one of them filling me with unvoiced screams and bitter laughter until blackness overcame me, and I woke up on the couch, Gregory holding my hand, all Jack’s words erased from my thoughts as if I believed I’d never seen them.

A lie I reinforced every day after that.

A monstrous lie from a monster unwanted by family, lover, or friend.

“I shouldn’t have come back here,” I said.