Nights on the Point

DEDICATION

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To the road.

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SPECIAL THANKS

The Whitefish would like to thank Robin Johnson, Tom White, and Ames Countryman for taking the time to take a look and Juan Carrizo for taking the ride.

The Red Herring would like to thank the real Nikki Rasor for her wonderful inspiration, of which she is probably not even aware.

CHAPTER 1

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Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure.

– Antonio Porchia

1994. A week ago Sunday, Nikki and Jack crossed the Thin Ruby Line that cuts maps and microchips and hearts: Going and not going.

They don't know it now, but there will be another line before it's over, not red like rubies, but clear and cold as Colorado air, and twice as wide as Texas – a line you can, of course, cross only once.

It has been raining all across the Mojave, a rare June rain that skitters on the sand, promising much, delivering nothing. It caught Jack and Nikki as they broke camp in Lake Havasu City at sundown, put out their fire and soaked their sleeping bags. They are on Route 40, heading west. Six days out of Newark, Delaware, already in trouble. Circling each other like dogs. 

Midnight.

The VW bus is a pale blue breadloaf, clinging to the rushing cocoon of its headlights. Odd shadows flit and flatten across the low hills, driven by the calculus of movement.

Nikki is driving, and her dark eyes flick to meet Jack's in the mirror. They stare at each other until the road forces her to pull away. The rumble of the Volkswagen makes talking to him impossible.

He lies back on the sleeping bags and starts singing softly, feeding his notes into a black plastic microphone as he takes in the stiff set of her shoulders, the death grip on the wheel.

Need some Blues for Nikki.

She is strung out, Jack thinks, and angry. She did not sleep last night. Sat looking out at the lake. And two nights before that. They will talk later. In Modesto, maybe.

She stares at the road. There is no context, just blackness and the yellow line. Her fingers are slippery on the steering wheel. She rubs her hands along the inside of her thigh, squeezing the hard muscles.

Jack is wrong about her, she is not strung out, she is trying to meditate. That's what's wrong. It isn't something you try to do, you just do it. She uses all the tricks: Relax, look at nothing. Belly breathing. But the sounds of the wind and the car, and Jack's sullen presence in the back crowd into her mind. The world is too much with us.

She has felt unnaturally tense ever since they left Newark. Not like her. Something intruding into her unconscious.

McGuire's image flashes through her mind, a small, dapper man in his ragged plaid shirt waving at them from beside his ancient Winnebago. And that patented, mile-wide McGuire smile. A low-maintenance friend, Jack called him. See him once a year and pick up the conversation right where you left off. It had been a good time. Noise and music and beer to cover up the feelings as they moved things out of the apartment, packed them in McGuire's basement.

And the three of them had talked a lot about this voyage of discovery. Jack and McGuire had joked and toyed with their shopworn philosophies and talked of adventure. They wove deep, beer-soaked metaphors around the arcing blue deaths of mosquitos in the electronic bug zapper as Nikki listened with a smile fixed on her face, all the while picturing an inner journey of serenity, fed by the cool vistas of the western landscape.

But now, somehow the karma was wrong. It wasn't Jack, really. She loved him, had chosen to go with him. It was a feeling that she was somehow moving away from him, couldn't reach back to him across the distance. It was sad and frightening at the same time. She felt guilt about it at first, but that was nonsense. She didn't want to go, but it was like an unstoppable tide carrying her. And tonight, out here on the desert, it is the strongest it has ever been.

Get a grip, girl. She pushes her hair back nervously, suddenly conscious of how hard she is pressing on the gas.

She looks out the window at the black rain and feels again as she had as a child; something is out there waiting.

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Jack turns the tape over and starts again: Observing, the observer. No. That's shit. Keep talking. Force the song to flow. Anything: Outside, staring at the inside of your heart. Just gotta drive, I'm. . .staying alive. He throws a melody against the newborn lyric, humming softly into the microphone.

Shit, sounds like Barry Manilow. He giggles, and realizes how far he has slipped. I knew Barry Manilow, Senator, and you're no Barry Manilow. You're no Ramblin' Jack Elliot either.

Or Jack Kerouac.

And Nikki Rasor is no Neal Cassidy.

He keys the mike again: Nikki doesn't want to stop in Modesto. Doesn't want to stop anywhere. Go into hyperdrive and shoot right off the planet. Maybe it's Weston she doesn't want to see. Risky territory there. They've talked about that one before. But isn't this thing all about taking risks?

She has a great big something on her mind and she's taking it out on the faithful VW. Her foot is jammed hard on the floor. The bus swooshes through Barstow at its top speed, a watery sixty. The town's lights recede. He rolls over on the bag and sighs. The American Balladeer at work.

Six days on the road and we won't make it home tonight. He tries for the hard, low Dave Dudley growl, nearly swallowing the cheap plastic mike as the bus arrows across the wet California desert. Now there was a singer with huevos.

Modesto by dawn. Wake up Weston. Sausage, eggs, hot sauce. A California breakfast.

A month ago the talk on the telephone was drunken and vigorous. Weston said, Do it. On the road, man. Gotta do it now or we're a fart in the maelstrom of history.

Southern Route. Steinbeck's road.

Fuckin' hippie Joads.

Gotta do it.

Nikki, too? Weston had sounded hopeful.

Especially Nikki. But Jack had wondered at the time. 

And now he is still not sure. He cracks the wing window by his elbow and feels the cold spray of the rain. He lights a cigarette and watches the smoke stream gather, curve down and disappear, sucked out into the darkness. He starts the recorder again: "Jim Deetz, the famous U.C. Berkeley archaeologist wrote a book called, In Small Things Remembered. It had to do with historical archaeology, digging up people's 'artifacts.' The point was that it was the small things that counted, that told the story. Later, Jim told me that the people who dig up our bones won't have much of a clue because of the mass confusion of the landfills, and the raping and repaving of the landscape. And what will be left of us, the rusty shell of a Volkswagen bus?" Depressing thoughts on the desert highway. Better leave the heavy prose to Weston, stick to the tunes.

More depressing thoughts intrude, however, and he keys the mike again: This artificial angst feels so good against the Tampax and tense necks world of reality. Great to worry about other shit, big literary shit. Hemingway and his Big Themes. Things we don't have to do anything about. And that makes me – what? A callow and shallow fellow?

He turns off the recorder and stows it away, torn between the need for sleep and another cigarette. He slides forward and starts rubbing Nikki's shoulders, her neck. She rolls her head from side to side, working out the tension. Could you close your window? is all she says.

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The Bear runs beside the bus a few yards out on the desert. His curved, white claws lift wistful spurts of gravel as he gallops. The rain goes right to work washing his tracks away.

Sixty miles an hour is easy for the Bear. A hundred would be easy, but at that speed, he knows the air would begin to hum in his muzzle, tickling the soft hairs there. It would make him sneeze.

Tonight, like all the others, he keeps pace with the bus. Ever since they crossed the Thin Ruby Line. He knows Jack and Nikki and all their problems, but his interest in them is not Bear-interest. He is their Companion. He has run with them since Newark, Delaware. He carries no answers with him, and no questions. He sees Jack rubbing Nikki's neck, but knows they do not see him. His fur is darkened by the rain. And the distance, in the human way of seeing, is very, very great.

The Bear feels something that might be a smile, but there is no Bear-smile on his face. For that would have a very different meaning. And he has no Bear-thoughts toward Jack and Nikki.

They have turned north now onto Highway 99, leaving the rain behind on the desert. In the moonlight, the Bear bounds effortlessly over the fences, glides through the trellised grape vines and across the onion fields. The going will not be so easy, he knows, for the migrant workers who come to toil through the deadly heat of summer, but by then he will be far away following Jack and Nikki, and, perhaps, their friend, Weston. The Bear knows much, but he does not have the big picture.

For now, he is a follower.

CHAPTER 2

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Weston waits, checking his watch. He checks it again. Impatient. And again. Not looking to see, just ready to leave. To light out for the territories. Huck Finn in heat.

Late as usual, he thinks. Predictable. Hope they like their eggs hard. He pulls a Coke from the refrigerator, removing the plastic noose and carefully cutting it into pieces.

Kyle Weston is on the back side of thirty and back on his own, as the song says. With energy to burn. And time to do it without distractions. Like the one who was still dodging reality back over there in Paradise.

It was time. That's why Jack's call was no surprise. Fate and high technology are two things Weston believes in.

Fate, he muses, recalling how fucked up they were, talking story down the long distance line.

Something is really fucking wrong with this country, Weston howled through the Rocky Mountain haze. 

Jack sang his response, ever the Nashville Dreamer:

"There's something happening here,

But you don't know what it is,

Do you Mr. Jones?"

Weston returned it in kind:

"We thought we could change the world,

With words like peace and freedom."

The laughter was immediate, not because the anger wasn't, more the instant recognition by the two old friends of the need they still had to distance themselves from the feelings. They could never get it said, it seemed, without helping themselves to other people's lines.

Has the country really gone lame, or are we just jerking off? A twisted paraphrase of novelist Thomas Sanchez.

The remembered words force a crooked smile as Weston imagines going lame because that was all he did these days.

The dialog had gone on that night, making Ma Bell a rich woman:

No, we're facing forty.

So buy a speedster or score a trophy wife, Jack said. 

No, something's really missing, you know. Something got lost along the way.

Why the instant conscience?

Because something didn't get done and I ain't gonna let 'em get away with it.

Some people want to change your oil. We just want to change your world. Jack laughs

We did it and we can goddamn sure as hell fix it. 

Maybe they'll bury us inside the Kremlin.

Behind the wall of jokes, Weston knew Jack the Jester agreed it was time to do something. That's why they were hitting the road. Because life was in the doing. It was time to start jonesin' around. To rage against a thousand points of light. Hope and Crosby on a mission from Hunter S. 

It was up to Weston the Shaman to show the way. The blood pumping into his 13-year-old stomach from a ruptured spleen qualified him. It was Jack's job to make sure they didn't get away with anything. His ability to maintain shifting perspectives in a fragmented world was the only qualification he needed. Nikki would keep the bulls from goring each other. And maybe, just maybe, they could build some bridges along the way that would last.

Nikki. Suddenly, he can smell her again, see the firelight play on her cheek. It's a warm summer's night and all the synapses start firing. Nikki, this earth woman, was mother, sister, mistress, and bride, the object of fantasies left unfulfilled and words left unsaid.

"If wishes were fast trains to Texas,

I'd ride and I'd ride how I'd ride."

But they were late. Weston wiped the crystal face of his watch. Compulsivo.

Weston didn't have to reel back the years too far to study the wreckage of his and Jack's previous collaborations. These priors included masquerading as Lennon and McCartney with a Hank Williams attitude and believing at one time they had something to say that someone might find worth reading at the beach. But when the smell of success got serious, they got drunk and the words got lost.

This time, he told himself, it would be different. This time the road would keep them honest.

They had never known the abyss, these fellow travelers. Their lives had been terminally safe, in spite of momentary descents into insanity. Which is what they were indulging when they first met. Costumed as carnies in a wicked roadshow that swept through the backwaters of the southwest and California. Weston was doing his writer thing, immersing himself in life and taking down notes. Jack was riding the two-backed beast so he could troubadour about it. Nikki signed on the first time in Sparks, tiring of a stint as a fandango dealer, being wallpaper for horny eyes. Weston and Jack were passing through on one of their sojourns to the desert, seeking signs and ancient runes. Weston went for the weather and the splendid isolation. Jack went in search of his history and in remembrance of things past. 

Weston didn't waste time these days looking over his shoulder. He'd done his time living in the rearview mirror. He'd lost a wife there and didn't intend to die there again.

Prowling the as-yet-unsettled-in rooms of his new home in the flatlands, he pauses to consider the reflection thrown back at him by the mirror. Staring, who does he see? The man there. A do-gooder? A vicaro? It is fashionable to care again. So, was this going to be just another arms-length experience like the wetlands piece, written from a safe distance, lashing out at everything and really doing nothing about anything? A rim shot in the dark meant to mean something? Or, was it, after all, the loneliness that was driving him with his eyes closed.

"Be good and you will be lonesome, 

Be lonesome and you will be free."

The words of the Parrothead pirate wearing a white sport coat and a pink crustacean rolled around his head, taunting him, challenging him. If you want to be alone, you'll be alone. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Shit or get off the pot. Enough said.

Weston always used music to mark out the times of his life. He remembered exactly who he was and what he was doing each time he heard a familiar melody or lyric. Just one more reason he and Jack seemed joined at the hip. And now it was time to test that joint again. 

The blue bus shoots the gap below the iron rainbow distinguishing this valley town from all the rest that run up and down the dusty monotony known as the Central Valley.

Let's roll.

Helluva way to say hello, Jack says.

You're late.

And hungry.

Save it for McMuck.

Slam dunk breakfast for three, my man, and generous contribution to the great porcelain god, Urrp.

Weston sits cross-legged on the back seat, already unlimbering his new laptop computer as the bus gets rolling. It's a prototype he scored from a buddy at Apple. Complete with keyboard and software that can recognize the scribblings from an electronic stylus. Very hush-hush, it's code-named Atlas. Weston makes his first experimental notes as Jack revs up and eases out onto Highway 99, but he scarcely