More
real to him in each moment of their occurrence than his mother’s house in which
they were sustained, hallucinatory fits fill out with detail pooled and dredged
from a history both real and imagined; his mind’s sole intent its own
occupation, to counter the neglect of a physical host malnourished and
vegetative, its actual blood confused by infrequent near-sobriety. At any point
on that arc of consumption from stagnant drunk to involuntary withdrawal,
Brother Skunk was liable to back up into a mental outline of himself, elsewhere
and already in motion:
Skunk: dry heat so I’m thirsty, and drinking right
from out the bottle. Plus it doesn’t help at all, the displaced sand and dust
rising from beneath the impatient feet of all these people. Right from out the
bottle. I drop it back into my satchel and move myself inside the crowd,
tapping the brim of my hat at the factory ladies, wiping at lines of sweat that
grit my forehead also.
An immediate gunshot prompts a momentary
sound of high whinnying, the eruption of excited voices imploding to groans.
cogs (ensemble): God DAMMIT!
to one of which I lower my ear by way of
query.
The man takes my arm and points the
pinched flesh of a long finger at the centre of the crowd where between two
harnessed horses squats a smartly-dressed businessman wiping the back of his
cigar-holding hand across his mouth in short slow strokes.
cog: See that fella with the white beard
and the suit on him right there, see him, smoking the cigar now, kinda looks
like a lit log coming cross the spine of a waterfall, don’t it? That there’s
your Mr Levi, and that there tethered between them horses, that’s a pair of
your Mr Levi’s overalls, or was tethered, but the traces is wrong,
there’s somethin’ wrong there. And weren’t we all ready for this?
Mr Levi is, I’m being told, in attempt
at proclamation of his product’s durability, trying to have two horses not
pull them apart, and the overalls have certainly passed an initial test in that
it’s the actual straps of the traces as have given way, the snapped bands wound
up slunk around the animals’ back legs, while the trousers themselves remain
intact.
My shirt shifts and clings uncomfortable
at the skin of my shoulders, subject to the coursing sweat.
Mr Levi is busying himself with the
inner ring of bystanders, laughing with several men who respond to his request
with the unbuckling and handing over of their belts.
cog: Let’s hope them’s your
gee-dee belts, Mr Levi
in sudden deference to the factory
ladies present.
Two men in waistcoats and visors
accompany Mr Levi back into the clearing, one of whom takes from behind his ear
a nugget of chalkstick and, holding the belts this way and that as the other
now positions the broken traces against the horses’ flanks, marks up the
leather with numbers and the foreign-looking directives of his trade.
Fresh dung, sweat baked into its
clothing, and something sweet, a spice dried into the tips of my fingers, the
taste of it, of everything.
After saluting us with the embers of his
cigar, Mr Levi now leads the riveters through the parting crowd to the
building’s double-wide backdoor, on into this particular afternoon’s machine
silence.
Complementing the factory staff, it
feels like an assembly of damn near every single cowboy jobless in the wake of
last winter’s die-up: dozens of them talking, smoking, laughing, drinking from
flasks, the whole place busy with incident and the maybes prospect of romance,
or handouts. Sand irritates the curve of my ear.
I head for a group standing by the
smoking incinerator bins, over one of which has been erected a makeshift
trivet. The “Property of L.S. & Co.” wording now barely visible in paint
stencilled beneath the bright crust of corrosion cut with graffiti, and I purge
my breath in the scent of burning mesquite.
Coffee time.
A deal of beans shook out into the lid of their tin which I start to crack down and grind at with the butt of my pistol, grinding on until they're right and then the remnant from the tin itself tipped into my pocket to be replaced by the gritty brown powder.
I ask for cold water.
cog: Cold? We got boiling if you'd rather. You want boiling?
but I tell them I like to boil it in the can. I tell them it's habitual.
While I’m waiting I massage the lower
vertebrae of my spine. The travelling is literally wearing me down, and when I
look at these faces, I wonder about setting right down here in San Francisco, a
little community photographer operation, weddings and babies and such. I wonder
about finally getting these bones up off that buckboard, unshackling myself from
each night’s sleep in its stink.
The one glove necessary I root from the
satchel, retrieve my coffee and also, from a heaped plateful, a couple of
biscuits upon the biting at which prove themselves inedible tooth-looseners,
and are both pitched into the fire.
With the given that he had travelled
extensively up and down this coast, it suddenly occurs to me that any one of
these men gathered here might see in me some semblance of my brother Ellis,
some here maybe as even had a hand in his lynching; I tip my hat forward to
further shade my face and walk my coffee away, drinking gingerly at the brew as
a roar greets the re-appearance of Mr Levi, who shakes the newly-made braces in
the air, their fresh copper rivets catching the sun, and shouts
cog: Mr Jacob Davis!
the words thick with accent.
cogs (ensemble, raising glasses, mugs, smokes, hats): Jacob Davis!
cogs (ensemble, raising glasses, mugs, smokes, hats): Jacob Davis!
I assume Davis to be one of the two
assistants back to fit the ad hoc harness to the horses, which begins to take
some time. A creeping compulsion has me poring through face upon face, almost
desperate for the one as wears its recognition of what I have here beneath the
brim of my hat, and then I smell something, and turning my face into the smell
the sound of the second gunshot seems to explode from the surface of my skin.
Skunk: Jesus!
waking into the speaking of this single word, the space between each letter of which he can actually taste.
The eidolon fades, and here a real finger empurpled by its ligature of dental floss which curves out rigid with blood, its dammed veins’ crooked route amongst the skin, its nail tapping the bottle’s glass.
Skunk: Jesus!
waking into the speaking of this single word, the space between each letter of which he can actually taste.
The eidolon fades, and here a real finger empurpled by its ligature of dental floss which curves out rigid with blood, its dammed veins’ crooked route amongst the skin, its nail tapping the bottle’s glass.
Skunk
(drawling): I’m out of the label.
