Shadowbahn(19)

“Did what on purpose?” says Zema.

“Mixed up the songs.”

“Of course he did it on purpose,” she answers, “how could he not do it on purpose?”

“Listen to this,” Parker says, ignoring his sister’s provocation for once and waving at the speakers in the car as the song changes. “Some Arab shit one minute, then old-school film noir themes, crazy-ass French electronica. If a song was called ‘The End,’ he’d put it at the beginning.”

“No way,” Zema protests. “That might make sense to someone. He’d put it in the middle.”

? ? ?

Parker says, “Right?”

“And not exactly in the middle,” says Zema.

“Of course not, that would actually be . . . geometric.”

“I hate geometry.”

“You think I didn’t f*cking hate geometry in school?”

“Just don’t mention geometry.”

“If Dad had a playlist of . . . twenty-seven songs, he’d put a song called ‘The End’ . . . eleventh.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, because eleven is . . . the first prime number in alphabetical order. Or something.”





the natural song


Zema asks, “Is that geometry?”

“I could never tell,” says Parker, “if he was just trying to be weird, or was weird naturally.”

“Naturally, naturally,” she assures him. “Do you think his books were weird too? Or were they the normal part of him . . . that got . . . crushed?”

Parker turns to her, more shocked than she’s seen him. “Crushed?”

“Watch the road,” she murmurs. Waltzing in the wonder of why we’re here. “Some old movie guy,” Parker nods at the song playing, “Dad liked those old movies, too.” He says a little sadly, “Drove me nuts.” Woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight. Maybe love is a tomb where you dance at night. In our rags of light all dressed to kill. Georgia-bootlegger sons on the radio, industrial Midwest dadaists and Montreal poets. “But then”—Parker jumps aloud from one thought to another midstream—“when you first came over from Ethiopia, he started again. For a while anyway. Late at night, after the rest of the family was asleep.”

“Started again?” asks Zema.

? ? ?

“Writing,” says Parker. “In secret.” Soho boho symbolists and Bakersfield death-row confessors and eccentrics singing Mojave blues. Detroit soulsters and Hollywood Boulevard saloon singers and old New Orleans jazz trumpeters. “This man invented twentieth-century music,” they can hear their father’s pronouncement, to which the teenage son would answer, “That’s great, Dad. We’re in the twenty-first century now.”

Zema settles back in her seat. Like her brother, she accepts that there’s nothing to do but plunge ahead in the black, hoping soon for a sliver of people-light or the glint of the sun. “If it was secret,” she says, “how did you know?”

“Know what?”

“The secret thing he was writing secretly.”

“It was not”—Parker considers his words—“a well-kept secret.”

“So what happened with this secret book?”

“He never fin—” Parker stops. “I don’t know.”

“That’s not what you started to say,” she points out. “Did you ever read it?” and he pauses so long before answering “No” that it’s almost not a pause but the end of something. Zema can’t be certain if it’s a confession or a lie. I remember how the darkness doubled. Creep the ether feather, Sue Egypt. ’Scuse me while I disappear.





final crossfade (Muleshoe)


The town they hit at daybreak is so small they pass through it, from one end to the other, in less than two minutes. Under a darkening gray sky at what might be, for all he knows, the last gas station in another night’s worth of desert, Parker pulls over to fill the tank. Zema gets out to use the bathroom. I know everyone wants rain, Parker worriedly examines the sky as he pumps the gas, but maybe not yet. Maybe let us first get out of wherever this is. Slipping a twenty-dollar bill under the plexiglas at the pay booth, he asks, “Where is this place?”

? ? ?

Ruptured territory or no, he’s learned that no one has any compunction about taking U.S. dollars, preferring them to whatever passes for Disunion currency. Behind the glass is a filament of a man only a few years older than Parker, almost six and a half feet tall and fifteen inches at his broadest point; the frames of his glasses are too big for his head, which nearly brushes the ceiling. “Muleshoe,” the man in the booth answers. His height makes him appear trapped. With his red hair, he looks like a match that’s been lit.





one road more


Parker says incredulously, “Muleshoe?” Realizing this sounds obnoxious, he adds, “Bound to rain sometime.”

“What makes you think so?” says the man in the booth, narrowing his eyes at Parker, who chews his lip. Behind the man, who is so thin that Parker can see most of the back wall, are a couple of old indistinguishable photos, a calendar five years old, a diploma in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology. Tacked up over the diploma is an old album cover of five guys in cowboy hats standing on a flat plain. Small white script at the bottom of the album reads More a legend than a band.