Lovely Bones

We spilled out of the car eventually and the daylight flooded in. A girl with bottled red hair and miscellaneous piercings sat at a desk. She pointed to the price list and began to talk in a thick Spanish and a thin English version of international soundscape. We must have looked a sight but we handed money over and thanked her in return with body language. She picked up a phone and said a few quiet words into the mouth piece. Ernesto whispered a joke about oral sex as she got up and ushered us through a doorway. "Don't touch the bones" she said, "don't touch the bones."

Dead engines

For those of you who don't know, don't really know or really don't care; I can see dead engines. Ernesto, Claudia and the rest do not possess this twisted gift, I struggle with it, it's use and the inherent responsibilities of having this weight to myself. Sometimes I think that this pain will never end, then I wake up, with a start, sweating and realise that though I have been sleeping, perhaps for a very long time, none of this is a dream.

Roadkill Ford

Everything is everywhere at all times and matter cannot be destroyed, it is all on a journey to somewhere unspecific, we may for a time join it as it travels and as our paths run in parallel. This 1983 Ford Sierra is a reminder of...1983 I suppose.

Asleep/awake

I was asleep for most of the 36 hours that I’d been awake for and it seemed to have been dark for longer. We had swapped driving, thinking and sleeping duties eventually despite the fading light and the pressing need to get out of and through the country. I lost count of the artificial borders we crossed and recrossed but I had to eat something. The lights of a restaurant beckon and we stop, the rain water steaming on the bonnet in rainbow wisps as the doors slam.

Inside it’s warm, welcoming, slightly grimy and busy. Diners jostle for positions, glasses and cutlery play a rough musical accompaniment, the diners eat and talk. There is candle light and music, louder than it should be. There is a customer queue but it is reducing like an optical illusion. The waitress shows us an empty table and despite being cramped in the car the wooden benches are a comfortable relief. We order from the limited menu, steak. See wipes the table with a cloth and smiles.

Steak comes from cattle, cattle from fields, fields from farms, farms from the land, the land from the sea, the sea from the clouds, the clouds from the vapour, the vapour from the breath, the breath from the lungs, the lungs from the body, the body from the womb, the womb from the female, the female from the male, the male from the chip, the chip from the block, the block from the granite, the granite from the cliff, the cliff from the beach, the beach from the sand, the sand from the stone, the stone from the earth, the earth from the other, big earth, somewhere out beyond our understanding. That is the story of the steak that sustains us. The tomato and baked sweet potato that take up the remaining third of the plate have their own stories and creation theories, I cant repeat them here. We all need some mythology to sustain us on this long journey, e need to come from somewhere and be going somewhere else.

I cut into the dark, brooding steak creating a continental divide and took a mouthful of coffee. Ernesto was staring at his plate savouring the meal, smiling and chewing on the beef. He pointed his fork at me to make a point, “here the produce the best meat, the best, it what they do, the cattle men, we can learn, we can watch, we take our knowledge back to our ranch, one day.”

I don’t know so much about the steak, though it is pretty good, the right thing at the right time, I like eggs.

Coffee will help

I was enjoying this disastrous break with that permanent fixture and dog lead that is time. Studies and essays and the apology for early adult life were somewhere back in the tyre tracks, veiled with rain and pinned into the retrograde grey cityscape. My beloved, remote intelligentsia were propping up bars, flexing angle poise lamps and scribbling, they were drinking a fourteenth cup of coffee, watching pavement patterns and reading dull books. I was a passenger in a speeding car in a new conversation famine but I still could see them..

Claudia was lying on Ernesto’s bed, close to an exaggerated embryonic position in the dusky room. Eyes everywhere, looking for clues. His things were scattered around and she breathed in the remaining atoms of some testosterone cocktail that she sensed was hanging in the air. Each intake was like a sweet addictive overdose, each one an experience of something that she’d never admit to. She had rummaged in drawers and cupboards looking for tags and traces. She has found glossy pornography and tattered novels, penknives and family photographs, bills and receipts, coins and broken cigarette lighters. She settled for the pornography and thumbed across the tanned and shaven pages sensing more and less of him and some wild cloud of past appetites and sexuality. As the raindrops beat the time’s dry passage onto the wet window sill she slept but could find no dream. When she awoke he was still gone.

We are racking up ruthless smooth miles, dark towns and villages, road numbers and green signs, truckstops and the flotsam of traffic and animals pass by. We follow some vehicle for a while, a speeding taxi or empty truck, some other sports car or a white minibus cranked up to it’s limit. One by one they leave the road, turn right or left, are overtaken or just disappear backwards into their own lives and journeys. We however pursue the straightest and most direct road while those others, the non explorers peel away. The trip counter says 425 miles and we are running low on fuel.

The crumbling petrol station is glistening like a forgotten Christmas tree, the petals and balls and coloured masks reflect in the shop window festooned with adverts and notices. The pump sucks some life back into the car and pushes the needle back from E to F, back down the alphabet lined road. We buy sugary drinks that look to be doctored, suspicious, we pucker up and drink through straws and much chocolate that has escaped from silver paper. At the till nobody bothers with eye contact or talk, this night time rendezvous has no witnesses to it’s business. The CCTV captures images but fails to record, a habit that the local police have also acquired.

Claudia rubs her eyes, sits up and falls back on the bed unsure how much time has passed. Ernesto has flown like a ghost and the debris around her is all his fault. Seedy magazines and trash, she feels spiteful, remorseful, angry and frustrated. The coffee will help.

Save as a draft

And so on the 2nd August the dull and dreary descended upon us blanking out the endless tape worm that is the road. The future is reduced to light and shapes and spontaneous manoeuvres and reaction times. We can see only so far and every other driver is intent on blinding us and puts the fear of some dark God hard into our souls. It all feels strangely good, almost wholesome, wildly scary, like a fairground ride gone wrong but nobody wants to stop and dismount. I collect my thoughts nicely and then proceed to let them loose like freed pigeons escaping into a crazy race they don't even know they are competing in. We just drive, today, the first day.

Two days later

Two days later it was still raining but we had decided to go and we did. We took surprisingly little, a couple of backpacks stuffed with odd bits of clothing, sleeping bags, a crate of bottled beer (a gift) and odd tools, a petrol can and a water bottle. Ernesto did have a few books, a few note books and a stationary wallet. As for money there was a few hundred dollars between us, available for whatever use we might put it to. Ernesto likes the feel of paper in his hands, he tightly clutched the grey bills in one hand and a hardback notebook in another while trying to give his parents a farewell hug. Claudia was standing back a few yards kicking the step. She was wearing a wide brimmed hat and the rain was dripping onto it. Her eyes were down, deep in the brown muddy soup beneath her boots, she seemed engrossed in the dirt patterns and puddles. Ernesto but his belongings into the car and turned back and grabbed Claudia grinning first and then making faces. This time none of them worked on her however and she remained stuck in a loop of obvious disapproval.

It was about eight thirty as we headed out onto the wet highway driving south west, the sun somewhere behind us prodding the rear view mirror with occasional rays through the broken rain cloud. Ernesto was driving and I was doing little more than looking out of the window as we found ourselves some natural place in the rhythm of the early morning traffic. There is a pecking order in traffic that comes and goes, you fit in, you are edged out, you are leading, you are tail-gating, you are in some one’s way, you are barging your way through. In simple terms today I was just happy to be moving and I was clear that I didn’t want to travel against the clock, on time pressure and be here or there on any given or special day, I just wanted to explore. That state of a floating exploration is hard to get to and stay in , it’s some anti-human position of achieved equilibrium where your speed, your direction of travel and the experiences that you pick up are all in line, all relative and balanced and most importantly able to be enjoyed and understood. I was thinking that to people travelling together could never quite sustain that as one would certainly push one way, naturally. Perhaps then it is best to try to drift and ride on currents like in a canoe but without a paddle. Anybody would tell you that doing that is heading for some kind of disaster - at least we were moving.

Not like this

She isn’t like this, she’s less ethereal or perhaps more physical, some thing like that. A peculiar essay on a clutch of thoughts and imaginings that transcend the actual and become somehow more beautiful. Particularly when she’s not there, she’s more beautiful when she’s not there but when she’s here I can become speechless, for short periods because of that same thing. Confused and complicated. Of course she’s with someone else and rightly so, perhaps that pushes her into the untouchable ghost world. My ghost world and over the edge.

In my head I still live by rules, I live differently but there are rules, parallel rules that fluctuate between being extreme and unworkable and liberal and unnecessary. Claudia has now become caught up in this messy mesh of unworkable rules and she, not me has broken them and so is guilty. Such is the bizarre justice system in my ghost world, it is quite unjust, unfair and unpredictable. Tomorrow it may quite different. Tomorrow if we can put some road miles between ourselves, the ranch and Claudia then things will change, the fever would lift, the ghost world’s boundaries will adjust and the panorama beyond the wide windscreen will take over. That is how I see things.

I stood on the ranch porch watching the rain and listening to the drip symphony from the roof gutter and onto the wooden boards. Rivers of rain ran under the boardwalk into puddle lakes where more frogs sat looking at one another waiting on more rain drops, as if that was their sole purpose in life. The drops continued relentlessly, the frogs remained focused. Tomorrow the weather would clear, we’d pack up the car, say goodbyes, clear the mud, check the mirrors and go. Finally go.

Amphibians

I guessed that Ernesto, who I know clearly is head over heels for Claudia has, as a pre-trip measure cracked and asked her to marry him so that she can be occupied with whatever that means and that he has something to return to. I would have thought both these avenues were well covered already but perhaps things in their relationship are at a higher pitch than I appreciate. Claudia spoke a little more of the wedding and her family and then returned upstairs to prod Ernesto. I wanted us to finally get going, this stalled start and never ending ranch house summer had gone on too long.

Later that day the tyres arrived and after a struggle we fitted them and using a small tractor compressor got them fully inflated. The car looked fine and now sounded a bit better thanks to the repaired exhaust. I drove around the yard a few times and then as it was a hot afternoon sat back in the drivers seat with a beer and fell asleep. I awoke to a hammering sound, on the roof, on the bonnet, across the windscreen. Great plops of rain were battering the car, the sky was as dark as spilled pint of Guinness and was pouring down from horizon to horizon. The yard had turned to a mud slide and I could make just out hazy figures on the porch like me observing the passing storm. The frogs loved it, I could see two hopping between the pelting raindrops on the car bonnet, it was as if they slept in some damp corner and then the rain, when it came summoned them out to dance, hop and frolic in the wet. They wee a bright green, no match for the brown land and in the dry an easy meal for birds and rats, in the wet they owned the place. Everything has its time and place to rule however short or long, everything has its time. Every so often it does rain fish, toads, frogs or some other range of slimy creature and that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, mainly as cosmic coincidence. Today I just have two displaced frogs and a lot of rain.

I thought about the frogs, the rain and the car. The rain pounded down but I got out of the car at normal speed, not bending, shielding or covering my head, just getting wet. Then I walked slowly back to the ranch, it felt good.

We are all lost

Of course I took her bait and apologised to her, I’ve no real idea why I felt that an apology was called for, in fact I wandered if I was apologising for not killing myself and so putting an end to the journey Ernesto and I hoped to shortly undertake. She gave no indication of her feelings about the trip and carried on chatting in a bouncy way about her university course next year, about horses, about a trip to Europe and about her parents back in Buenos Aries. In this present mood she was actually quite exhausting to listen to and her constant chatter dulled her sexual potency a bit so I was at least able to keep up and nod in all the right places. As I listened sponge like it did strike me that Ernesto owed me for this, there he was asleep in some post sexual coma and I was providing the sounding board that allowed his silent recovery and the continuation of his potency. I became conscious that I was not listening to her, her lovely mouth was moving, her eyes darting and there were words hanging in the air…“so what do you think?” I shrugged and raised my arms to indicate I didn’t have an answer. “Well you must have a view about that!” she quickly came back at me.

“The wedding!” she cried, almost slapping my face with the power of her delivery, “we’re getting married, have you nothing to say about that?” I had a lot to say but first things first. “I’m sooo happy for you both, many congratulations!” and I leaned over and kissed her mouth. “Shh, of course nobody else knows so you’ve got to keep it quiet.” I was ready for that and put on my most serious expression. “you can rely upon me Claudia, for you and Ernesto I will keep these lips sealed.”

Mr Safe Driver

I decided to have an early breakfast and came into the dining area to find four of the ranch hands already drinking large amounts of coffee and swallowing smaller amounts of scrambled eggs. I got myself a hot drink and a plate of eggs and sat with them where a peculiar conversation was underway. They were discussing relative penis lengths but not in the usual size matters way, more in a “over time” way. There was a view held by some that a man grows older whilst his flaccid penis remains the same size (?) his erect penis loses length, or I suppose you would say potential length. This also applied to girth as far as I could tell. Two of the cow hands were certainly well into the their fifties and held the strongest views on this, the other two, both about forty were unbelievers. I wondered it was more of a perception thing, like worn machinery running a little loosely, weather leather that has stretched and lost its springiness or an old clock slipping seconds as the cogs wear out, or even a bit of memory failure where looking back things seemed different, more vital and err…bigger. The old hands would have none of that and laughed about God’s revenge on them apparently for their exploits in the years of wild youth and how they’d already lived too long and seen more than enough change. Too much change in the penile area it seemed.

They finished their meal leaving me to chase errant slabs of egg around the plate and sup the remaining grainy deposit from the bottom of the coffee cup. Since yesterday’s accident I had been busy with the repair, mostly on the phone or standing watching and hadn’t really seen any of the family or Claudia and Ernesto. They’d eaten alone last night I guessed and I had stayed out in the barn and then gone straight to bed. It was a pleasure then to see Claudia breeze into breakfast just as I finished clearing my plate. She was wearing a black skirt and white smock, clearly with nothing underneath the smock, her hair was wet brushed from the shower and she had that glow about her that woman have only at certain, mysterious times. It was a shame that the cowboys hadn’t stayed a few moments longer, they could have done a little more penis size research or data gathering as she breezed around the room, picking up breakfast items and without realizing it creating great flashes of electrical impulses in all directions for all comers (well only me at the moment). After watching her for about a minute I could feel the perspiration beads build up on my forehead and when she sat opposite me and pushed her plate forwards towards me and grinned, a big bubble of restrained energy suddenly rushed from my middle and was sticking in my throat. “Good morning.” she said looking me square in the eyes, her pupils like black diamonds, “another busy day for you Mr Safe Driver?”

Appetite suppressant

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but if for example you are doing nothing for example then that is a good example of a kind of non-example nothing doing object or as some might say nothing much happening. Nothing much was happening but then it was the middle of the night, I couldn’t seem to sleep and was holding in my head a headfull of agitated thoughts that collided like skiers in an avalanche. I felt my fists clench, disconnected as if called by some buried instinct to protect the conscious mind for the mental graffiti and raiding party sent out by the subconscious. Try as they might, my fists remained trapped in the physical and could subdue my wandering thoughts. Outside, through the window, somewhere across the grass lands I could hear a couple of wild dogs howling and fretting. My conscious mind caught onto their frequency and fully tuned in to the howls and varied spaces between howls. Those empty spaces seemed more important and meaningful than the howls themselves and they soothed like some cool lotion. Without trying to turn off my thoughts they turned off themselves thanks to that wild dog chorus. “I must be asleep” I thought, and promptly awoke, it was 7.30.

Smoking kills the appetite for food or to be more precise nicotine is an appetite suppressant. Fat, obese or corpulent smokers please note, you are doing something wrong. 4999.