What I Assume

On the day he died Jack DeFazio stood and waited for a number to materialize, an idea to emerge from the dark recesses of the casino, a word to become flesh above a green table. Nothing. A few tokes of weed in the parking lot, a few free drinks from the waitress, a couple of whites from that trucker to stay awake, the dismal smoke and lights of the phony carnival, the arms jerking down like executioners’ chopping heads from necks; but not a blessed number or pattern, not the briefest flash of intuition or coincidence, and not a ghost of a chance to reclaim the seven thousand he’d lost with the twenty he had left.

Fifty-to-one on Andrew Jackson gets a G, but he was not about to drop his last twenty without some signal from the gods, not this late in the game. Twenty-eight-years-old but he felt much older, face sun-blasted from the cross-country road trip, webbed at the eyes, beard a tattered flag and hairline creeping back toward the crown of his head, and all he had was a bus ticket and Old Hickory, the Indian killer, in his wallet. He had neither home nor job nor car nor phone. The Leaves of Grass he’d found on the bus seat, the fat journal filled with his cryptic notes, smelled like the dirty clothes in his pack.

Old Town Retro-Reno, Nevada. 

Jack stood, rumpled denim coat tied around his waist, among good-looking young Republicans in neat khakis and red caps, trying to center his thoughts and almost falling asleep against a post. Money, he repeated to himself like a mantra: Money. He was about to give up the ghost when he felt her approach.

He felt her, the hairs on his arms felt her, before she rounded the corner of slots. A beautiful brown woman, petite with sad bruised Asian eyes that made him think of old souls; a woman-child of mixed race, oval face, café au lait skin, full lips, shorts hiked way higher than necessary, revealing a little butt-cheek. “Hey, would you help me, please? There’s this creep following me.”

His throat was constricted. “Okay?” he whispered. A slightly foreign accent. Was she Hispanic? Vietnamese? Black? Filipina? Certainly marginal. “What do you want?”

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Sorry?”

“Here. Harrah’s, Harold’s, Circus-Circus? I’m lost.”

He spanked the phony Doric column he’d been leaning against. “Caesar’s Palace. It’s all retro from the nineteen-fifties. Or the Roman Empire.” A forced laugh.

“Right, two thousand years ago.” She handed him a quarter, cupped her tiny hands around his. “One of the girls told me you’re good. Play it for me and we’ll share the Jackpot, fifty-fifty, hey?”

“I’m good?” Ah, he knew which girl: the waitress with the purple strobe braces, when he was on a streak. “Right, I’m Mr. Lucky. I’m the goddamn goose with the golden egg.” Slowly, he dropped the coin and pulled the lever. As the symbols spun and he visualized their alignment, he imagined that what he’d waited for was this woman’s dangerous, magical appearance, this exquisite woman with the pink eyelids. They could run away together. His heart drummed.

“Oh, my God!” she said. There were lights and buzzers, the sudden clinking of coins. “Oh, my God! We won!” A few redcaps nearby cheered and raised glasses.

“Hell, yes!” He pumped a fist before he read on the logo that a quarter jackpot made only seven dollars. “Cool!”

“You’re amazing! Play it again! All or nothing!” She bounced up and down as he returned the twenty-eight quarters to the machine and pulled the lever. Cherries and lemons.

“Oh, well.” She squeezed his arm. “It’s only money, right?”

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,” he said, “and…I forget how the rest of that goes.”

“And unto God the things that are God’s, pretty sure.”

Pretty sure. “Are you born-again?”

She held up a finger, as if to say Hold that thought, and told him to wait while she found the Ladies’, and he watched her weave through the slots, noted the way her creamy coffee-colored arms and legs swung. Poor waif in short shorts and baggy top, Magic across the shoulder blades. Quick-footed, but unsure of herself. Running scared. Probably high as a kite. Hopefully Born Again for some protection. He leaned against the column, closed his eyes, and imagined helping this dangerous woman get her feet on the ground. Find a way for them to live off the grid, away from the crosshairs. Her arm slipped around his elbow.

Her lips looked wet and sticky. She pulled him through the casino like he was her golden retriever, past the restaurants with the eternal flapjacks and Key Lime Pie, the bingo parlor, the green tables, a huge image of the PFL, with his sprayed tricorne hairdo and face, pointing into the distance. That same waitress flashed her dazzling purple strobe light smile as they headed for the doors.

The light nearly bowled him over, as did the desert wind rolling down the east scarp of the Sierra. “Dazzling and tremendous,” he whispered.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Oh. It’s from this book. Do you believe in, I don’t know, like omens or something?”

“Like signs and portents? Absolutely!”

“You know, weird coincidences? Shit like that?” He slipped his pack from his shoulder and reached into it. “This book. I don’t know, I’ve been traveling all over the country for months. So, I get off the bus to buy coffee in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, I can’t remember, Iowa or Ohio, and when I get back on this book is sitting on my seat.” He opened the battered poetry collection. “So, I wait to see if somebody put it there to claim that seat or something, but nobody comes, and we take off, and I start reading, and it’s just like coincidence after coincidence.”

“I do believe in shit like that. Where are you staying?”

“Like that sun, I was just reading this.”

She stroked his arm. “You gonna read me a poem, Baby?”

“Baby? Huh. Listen. Dazzling and tremendous, how quick the  sunrise would kill me,” he read softly, “if I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.”

“Huh.” She pointed past the colossal, vertical edge of the casino, at the blazing orb. “Well, it’s sunset. Not sunrise.”

He laughed. “Good point. I’ve completely lost track of time.”

“You got a room?” She yawned loudly and kept stroking his arm. “I am so tired, I need a place to lie down, you understand what I’m saying, just a bed to stretch out an hour, two hours. Where are you staying?”

“Why would you trust some bozo like me?”

She giggled and hopped from foot to foot. “It seems like I can trust you.”

“Are you some kind of hooker?”

“Fuck, no!”

“Sorry! You’re Evangelical, right? Well, I sold my car, and I don’t have a room. I’m on the fucking bus.”

She stopped hopping in the parking lot and scratched her leg with long fingernails. “You don’t have a room? I thought, you know, when somebody gets on a winning streak they give them a room, kind of slow them down, you understand what I’m saying?”

 “Yeah, I understand what you’re saying, but that’s not me. Baby. I’m just some bozo who has to get back on the bus. I have a limitless Patriot Pass from east to west. Me and a bunch of other bozos sleep in the Hound Hotel, zig-zagging milk runs through the country. I wish to hell I had a room.” He touched her face, and she gave him a quick kiss on the lips. “Jesus,” he said, “you’re so pretty. I mean, you’re like super model pretty.” They walked across the lot with arms around each other’s shoulders. “I have things to take care of in the Bay Area. I guess we’re just ships passing in the night. Will you be safe here?”

“The bus, hey, that’s not a bad idea, you can drink and not worry, right?”

“That’s true, that’s why a lot of us bozos are on the bus. Where are you staying?”

“You riding to the Bay? That’s where I’m from.”

“It’s not a bad ride. Four, five hours. Probably six with all the stops.”

“Mind if we ride together?”

“Of course not.” Except, when they came for the marginals, they might freeze him by association. “Of course, of course.”

They held hands like a romantic couple and squeezed past tourists with strained or intoxicated smiles, most of them wearing loyal red ballcaps. They stepped around other people with sullen and lost expressions. The glitter and temptation of the strip turned to tawdriness and regret the further they walked from the retro casinos to the downtown. The bus schedule flickered on a battered screen next to an enormous flag with the PFL’s face on it and the words, He loves America! Do you?

The sky was ablaze when he stepped back outside. Dazzling and tremendous. The woman was on her cell, leaning against the wall of the Liquor Barn across the street. Just as she stuck it in her tight back pocket, Jack heard the sighing of the bus brakes and a garbled message, a litany of towns and cities, the outposts of long-ago lost dreams, elusive gold mines and hellish railroad work camps where the Chinese were brutalized, the Mother Lode of California. She’s part Asian, he said to himself. Or Indian. She is some kind of Afro-Asiatic-Latina-Indigene something. Some mix of all the enslaved and victimized peoples of the Americas that a bozo like me shouldn’t mention to anybody, not even in his journal. And gorgeous. And about an inch from getting put in deep freeze.

The bus seats smelled like bus seats usually do, like the unguents people put on their heads and armpits and hemorrhoids. He gave her the window. “Calling home?”

“What?” Her eyebrows lowered.

“I just wondered if you were calling your family.”

“I called my sister. She’s gonna pick me up. Give you a ride if you need it. You got people waiting for you? Girlfriend?”

He pictured Jenna throwing her duffle bag onto her mom’s backseat. “Nope.”

“Guys like you usually have a girlfriend they don’t tell me about.” She snickered.

 “Ha! Not me. Used to.” Jenna sitting on his lap as they waited for the ferry, wind lifting her hair, dazzling sun on the bay. “I expect to catch another bus to a buddy’s couch in Berkeley.”

She dug into her purse for a bottle of brandy and passed it to him after taking a swig. Her hand rested on his leg. “You’ll do Ok. You got a method, right?”

“Method? Oh, you mean for gambling? No, I’ve got these occasional flashes of intuition, but it’s very hot and cold.”

“You hide your money so nobody pick-pockets you?” She giggled.

“I’ve never had it picked. I guess I’m just a lucky bastard.”

“That’s nice.” She shivered, and he gave her his coat and wrapped his arm around her. She fell asleep on his shoulder, and he opened the book to its beginning, which he’d read at least a dozen times:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Sometime later Jack closed the book and thought about Jenna. Was he too negative, like she would say, or too honest, like he would reply? Or really, just too stupid, as he often suspected: naïve, gullible. He felt certain that he was in love right now with this woman named Julie or Julia who slept in his arms. He placed a hand on Leaves of Grass like a man taking an oath. To Love.

He stared through the bus window at a hundred fog-shrouded battleships near Martinez. The Greyhound swayed through the darkness along the Sacramento River, very near Jack’s family’s old home; the girl’s apricot brandy breath and smoky hair filled his nostrils as he watched the hundred silhouettes rock in the brackish delta waters. He considered her profile and the ghostly armada, the mothball fleet, through the glister of sleep deprivation and too much booze and too many drugs and too many lost dreams to think about. It lent an odd detachment and precision to everything.

They passed the enormous pastel tanks, flaming pipes, and towering smokestacks of Standard Oil. There was a family legend about his great-grandfather who had worked there, a monolingual peasant and fisherman who’d come to America at age eighteen and become an engineer’s assistant by some miracle. A tatterdemalion kept alive by the fire of desperation and hope, who paved the way for the rest of the De Fazios. The refinery was their salvation, but it was a monstrous thing to behold at night, a city of Hell hidden around a bend of the San Francisco Bay. A few miles beyond it something graceful came into view, the mountain called the Sleeping Lady, Mount Tamalpais, in dim profile across the water.

Jack sensed that in his homecoming was an end of an old life, and a chill brushed the nape of his neck. Maybe this passage was meaningless, maybe a holy thing: the end of a journey peopled by a beautiful sleeping damsel, a mountain shaped like another woman asleep, the ghost ships of a past war, and a city of flames hidden in the backwaters of his family’s racial memory.

They dropped from the freeway into Oakland. The cabin lights came up, and when the bus stopped only the two of them got off. The driver told them that the station was closed. “The 51 will be along in about a half-hour.”

“The bus terminal is closed?” Jack had to repeat this to believe it.

“They always lock it this late at night for safety reasons.”

Jack watched the faces of a few of the other passengers, the baby-faced soldier, the young mother and her baby girl, regard them with curiosity as the bus pulled away. “Not for our safety.”

“My sister will be here any minute.” Her glossy hair and bare legs shone under the streetlamp. “She better hurry. This place is full of gangs and Scouts.”

He pictured the ICE Scouts with flak jackets and machine guns, masks covering their noses and mouths. Is it fate or dumb luck keeping us safe right now? As if in answer, a holo-meme above the Tribune Tower flashed the PFL’s figure swinging a club in Florida with the words, He Keeps Us Safe! Jack made the sign of the cross and sat with legs crossed on the scummy bus bench while she paced. A car pulled up to the curb.

    “Oh, my God,” she said, just above a whisper. “I think it is a gang! Jack, just do what they say.”

    It was a banana yellow crap-old Chrysler four-door, and the guys who stepped out of it wore red baseball caps turned backwards and baggy athletic shirts. “Just give us your fucking money,” one of the guys yelled, a skinny white kid with a shiny pistol. It looked like a toy. The car looked like a discarded energy drink. The kid who yelled this stepped and nearly stumbled out of the car.

    “Do what he says! Oh, my God, I can’t believe this!”

    “Hey.” Jack’s voice labored through the constricted passage of his throat. His hands, raised like a redcap Evangelist’s in rapture, trembled slightly. “We don’t want any problems.” He pulled his wallet out slowly and handed it to the driver, a man who seemed to be the leader, a scowling, silver-haired man in his sixties or seventies wearing a cardigan sweater like Mr. Rogers, along with the red cap turned forward. “Not much there,” Jack said, apologetically.

“What the fuck: Two bucks? Where’s the rest of it?”

“I lost it gambling. And I bought her a ticket.”

The first boy, a white kid with sunken eyes and, apparently, no hair, raised the pistol to the woman’s head. “Cough up the rest of it, man, or I’ll put a cap in her!”

“Give it to them, Jack!” she moaned. “Oh, my God!”

“No, no, no, there’s no need for that.”

“Hurry up, man!” another white boy said. This boy held a bat, and Jack noticed the white walls under the cap, the Doc Martens. Skinheads. He wondered why three skinhead kids were in a gang run by a middle-aged guy who looked like an angry Mr. Rogers.

“This guy is just some fucking shithole!” one of the skinheads said.

“Give them your money, Jack! Don’t anger them!”

Mr. Rogers shook his head. “Wait a minute, this is bullshit. Where’s your phone and cards, Bub?” Jack said he didn’t have any. “Fuck that. Everybody’s got plastic and buzz. Johnny, throw that bitch in the car until we get us a bankcard and PIN number. And Tim, toss all the shit out of his backpack. We ain’t got all night, Bub. We’re taking your bitch hostage unless you give us your stash, you understand?”

“Don’t hurt her, it’s not her fault, and she barely knows me.” He swallowed. “Please, just let her go. Her family’s coming for her. I’m sorry I don’t have any buzz or money or credit cards. I hate Facebook. I hate banks.”

“You hate Facebook and banks. Jesus, save us.” Jack heard a metallic click.

“It’s not her fault.”

“Fuck you, man.” Mr. Rogers didn’t say it anger. One of the boys emptied Jack’s knapsack, dug through the contents. “Take your old sneakers and socks off. Pull them old hippie cowboy pants down, too, and turn out the pockets. This is bullshit.”

Jack stepped out of his shoes and socks and yanked his pants down. Mr. Rogers frisked his crotch. At least three cars passed them, but nobody slowed or stopped.

“Where’s your fucking money?” The kid in the Doc Martens held the baseball bat in the air as if in the on-deck circle. “I’m ‘bout to bounce your head, shithole!”

“Don’t do that.” Jack’s legs were rocking on the sidewalk like a sailor’s at sea. He pulled his pants up.

“You want me to shoot him?” the pistol boy asked.  

“Hold on, Johnny, put that down, don’t get nervous,” the older man said. “This is some bullshit.”

“Listen, you need to let that woman go,” Jack said.

“Jack,” she yelled from the back door of the dented car, “please give ‘em the money so they don’t rape me!” She shrieked, and a young man slammed the door shut.

Mr. Rogers turned toward the car. His features caved in on themselves. “That is one dumb bitch,” he said in a soft voice.

Jack grabbed the baseball bat and tried to yank it out of the boy’s hands. It all happened slowly: he heard shouts, grunts, screams; he moved in a circle with the boy, like two kids in a tug of war, fighting over whose turn it was to step to the plate. The kid was strong, but he looked scared, and Jack felt, momentarily, the advantage of height. It was slow enough in his mind that he was conscious of the boy with the gun’s whereabouts and able to keep this other kid and the leader in the line of fire. Even when the other white boy started hitting and kicking him from the sides, he thought he had a chance. Then something struck his head and sent him rolling onto the bench.

It was hard to believe that the fluid pouring out of his face was blood because it gushed so freely. Jack rolled to his knees and saw the baseball bat coming from the right. Then it seemed the street rushed up to slam his back, and the circle of white boys caved in over him, shadow bodies with moon-like heads converging above him like the confluence of some odd, cosmological event.

Some time passed. Inert, bleeding, half of Jack was on the street, half not. His knees were on the sidewalk, head on San Pablo Avenue, blood stiff in his hair. His empty backpack, dirty underwear, Leaves of Grass, spiral journal, Fig Newtons and blue corn chips were littered along the length of the outer wall of the bus hangar. In Jack’s struck mind his body had become as light and empty as a paper sack. He felt the wind lift him into the air.

And so: through the night city he flew. Over Lake Merritt and the Kaiser Building and the West Oakland DMZ. Jack hovered above the bus terminal. Far below, folded over a curb and surrounded by the ruins of a backpack, was a man’s body.

It looked, vaguely, like his.

For a moment the moon-headed boys, Mr. Rogers, and even the woman circled the body before rushing back to the banana-colored crap car and screeching off together. A few others passed his body in cars and on foot. He could see them from some aerial viewpoint, floating on silent wings. A triathlete in scarlet spandex did a triple-jump over the squished fig bars. A taxi roared past. Then a young man, crossing the avenue a block north on his bicycle, stopped.

The young man was black, slender, with a headlamp on his helmet like a coal miner. Jack had a sense that several thoughts played through his mind, evident by his gesture of hesitation--I need to hurry home, that’s probably just a drunk, it’s none of my business, there could be a gang or an ICE Squad waiting to make me its next victim, there’s nothing I can do for him, anyway–but he approached Jack’s body.

“Jack.” A husky voice. He felt himself rise until the figures beside the terminal were too small to see among the tiny red and white lights of cars. He reached a cloud ceiling and was engulfed in its black mist. Then a small opening appeared, as at the end of a tunnel.

On the other side of the cloud tunnel was a gleaming castle, or an ostentatious mansion, set among dark, graceful trees. Jack could see a misty cliff and the round outlines of distant hills. A curve in a gravel road wound among oaks and spindly eucalyptus and stopped at an ornate gate. He thought this might be somewhere in the East Bay hills or it might be heaven, and it disappointed him that heaven would be so familiar: a tunnel, a mansion, a gate.

“Jack.”

A man was talking to him from behind the gate. A man with a ruggedly handsome face, with a husky, gentle Calabrese accent, spoke to him. I don’t understand you, Jack said or thought. Non capisco, old timer.

The man shooed at him with his arm. It was a gesture a coach would use to tell Jack to go deeper in the outfield for a good hitter. Back, go back.

This is bullshit, he could hear Mr. Rogers say.

He was back on the bus. He could smell the chemical toilet and diesel fumes, the Doritos breath of another bozo sleeping beside him in the dark. He could see the obese driver in a green alcove, altar-like, at the end. Was the driver God?

We’re all on this bus. Every atom belonging to me as much belongs to you.

He was falling, and he closed his eyes. It felt like he closed the eyes within his eyes and fell into an elemental and excruciating state of pain followed by joy. Joy made no sense, but there it was! And within that mixture of feelings, love for a woman who’d punked him, disappointment at seeing the old Italian father in cliché heaven, at seeing God as an old fatso driving a Greyhound, within that inexplicable joy and dream of hearing America singing through a corn-tasseled night on a bus in the heart of the country, somebody held him and with a beam of light on his head carried Jack’s broken body off the street.

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