SWOLLEN DOOR TO HEAVEN'S RAIN

 

When Adolph arrives at the gates, the sign reads:  Eagles Nest County Re-adjustment Facility, Home for those Weary of the World. Adolph likes the epithet.  Weary.  There's a spring drizzle coming down with a clammy calm.  A little green-trap off the road to hell. It's all balky and slimeslender.  A foxhole with a tin lid.  The rain's tappity-tap drums a staccato rhythm.  Come on in, it says. Turn the other cheek from your hard place at the window.

    Adolph knows his first impressions are usually wrong.  The facility has a forlorn, cast about look to it, but it's such a backwater tidal of time and displacement that he is optimistic--- given that misfortune is so evenly divided that it is bound to leap up into the face whichever way he goes.  And what a place it is.  An airplane hangar.  An ellipsis of cinderblock and corrugated steel. One of those World War II Quonsets where an entire army sits around warming itself on potbelly coke.  The creosol thick as glue.  The concrete floors buffed to a cold shine.  You can still hear the boys in black-boots knotting themselves up in barrack's small talk.  Chubby pink faces more used to downy softness than this be-badged chrysalis of cast-iron Khaki and socks that itch.  Wake up my little warriors and fly away to the ends of the earth.  It's only blood and you are only turns on the awesome treadmill.

     The lobby is clean.  One desk.  Three wooden benches.  Kindly old lady, with Salvation Army cheeks, telling Adolph that he must wait for Mr. Kimmler to get back from lunch.  Adolph sits next to a pile of dog-eared National Geographics.  Maybe he can find a nice picture of a girl who hasn't been informed of the seemliness of shirts and bras.  The first copy has an article on Cambodia.  Nice place Cambodia.  And, as Adolph thumbs past peaceful oxen and rice paddies, rickshaw traffic jams, lush jungles of wormwood and laughing vine, he happens upon (you guessed it) a woman without a shirt, but no gonad-tropic bomb, this Khmer-Lou mother.  She's a near-miss as brown as toast on the next to last setting.  Breasts like distended sky-rockets. Why, she's a regular milk pod and the blue-black ducts are holding warmth and love, tight bundles of vascularity, on the keep for the baby, curled sleepily between her turgid bosoms.  She's got the Kipper, strapped in a sling, the small lips almost touching a nipple. Manna dreams the child.  Manna.  Manna.  And the dream is tender hooks from the child's brain and a tap, tap on the swollen door to heaven's rain   The Khmer-Lou woman dreams too.  Her eyes are red on brown from fatigue, yet Adolph can see the longing etched in her face and the drip of milk for her hill-top home.

     Where's the war Adolph wonders?  This dark Madonna-scene should have a head on a spike.  He looks at the magazine cover to check the date.  November, 1961.  The heads are still on necks.  Mother and child, the Cambodian people, have their statues of the Buddha to play with in 1961.  Now the Buddha is the charred roll of destiny.  More broken dreams flung in a rage.  The babies head?  What?  Adolph tosses down the magazine disgusted.

     Kimmler looks like he's been sleeping in a pile of burlap bags. One flap of his shirt has worked its way up and over the waistband of his pants.  Sort of a salmon seersucker suit, white shoes, white belt.  The social worker-type, kind, keen and sick to death of people with no sense of humor.  Adolph will have him eating out of his hand.  A good room please with Southern exposure.  A view of the directors' daughters sunning themselves on the roof.   Yes, make sure the sheets are clean   Crabapple pie would be nice.  Last place of employment? Before or after the fall?  Quill scratches on papyrus or ink in Eve's blood?  What's work to a poet, anyway?  Kimmler is pleased.  An intellectual.  Not much of that here.  Did you read?  Yes.  That's a good school.  A pity you didn't bring a manuscript.  What about the directors' daughters?  With or without shirts?

     Right above Kimmler's desk hangs a portrait of Emma Broom, the Facility's founder.  The evil in the dried pastiche is the first sign that Adolph's optimism might be misplaced.  The fierce old Bulldyke's skin is tightly bunned-up, a rip for a mouth and those eyes.  They are a hot-bed of villainy, following, tracking.  Hard hunter's eyes without a whip of pity for what's inside the bag of flesh.

     Kimmler is reluctant to carry on with the affairs at hand.  There are too many forms.  Boorish questions.  Fee schedules.  Medical history.  And Broom's nephew, Boise!  What a stickler for detail. That sty in the old Bulldyke's eye.  Why does he have to examine everything like he's sniffing dogshit?  "First the family history," says Kimmler, as he gives the pile of papers a disdainful shuffle.

     By now, Adolph's powers of concentration and band-aide of humor are in dire need of augmentation.  There's a loose shutter flapping in his head.  Details from every which way are cascading through random space and he can't select out the primaries from the bouillabaisses of minutia.  It's time to make a few mood adjustments.  "Which way to the convenience?" wonders Adolph aloud.

     Kimmler gestures towards a blue door, festooned with waterlillies and loons.  Adolph finds the farthest stall from the entryway and lowers his ass onto the cool porcelain throne.  Now the tricky part. He probes underneath his balls.  It's hard to find a place to start the tape.  It sticks to the hairs and takes up the skin like a stretch of taffy.  Ah!  There it is.  He pulls the tin loose from the tape. A bed of roses in the cozy under-garden.  Barbitals first to steady the nerves.  Don't want to get too blousy so far from the home place. Better take a yellow for verve.  Adolph accomplishes his mission and tucks the tin safely back.  He's taking it slow.  Sharp things at the vigilant-gate whittle at his heart.

     Suddenly  the door to the John bursts open.  A crane-necked suit and tie, with mantis-like arms, followed by a company of regulars in white smocks, sweeps in, pins Adolph in a corner and with clairvoyant accuracy, unbags the tin from beneath the balls.  There are chortles all around and a lot of good natured joking   All, of course, at Adolph's expense.  The crane-necked one is holding the tin in front of Adolph's face and shaking it like a dried gourd.  The fellow is obviously as happy as a dung-beetle on a pile of bird squeezings.  He's got him a Yankee drug-addict to draw and quarter.  The old Bulldyke will be proud of her dear nephew.  Maybe even give him a scratch behind the ears. "Shall I call the sheriff?" asks one of the regulars. "Darn tootin!" Boise hollars.  "Let's get this here drug-addict into Maudlin.  I wanna be there when they take him out back and string'em up." "You'll do no such thing Boise.  You let that boy go.  Right now. Hear!"

     It's Boise's sister Wes.  She's standing in the way of the regulars with long arms folded across her chest. "You want Emma to know you been peeking through your old spy-hole again.  Now you get on and take your little army with you.  Git!" Boise's white as a ghost.  Got his chin stabbed down in his shirt.  Like he's been caught whipping his pecker out back of the barn. The regulars file out of the room without even so much as a look at Boise's sister.  Don't want to be turned to stone.  Wes ain't no paperweight like Boise.  It takes Boise a little longer to retrieve his dignity.  He turns to Wes with his eyes in a squint, still white as chalk, and makes an obscene suckling noise with his chubby pink lips. "Cocksucker," he blurts out. Wes makes a move to get into Boise's face, but her brother retreats. Quick as bouser on the run from a razorback, he's out the door and gone.

     Adolph brushes his fingers along the soft skin of his throat.  He thinks about running straight out and down the road, but decides to get a look at his benefactor before he does anything rash.  Wes is a tall, red-headed beauty and her warm, serene smile is as friendly as gravy and biscuits.  Adolph feels the turn of elongated time.  Somehow, with a whoosh, the pitting blast of entropy has passed him by and this sweet piece of fine porcelain with the fragile look of new blown egg, his savior, has him atremble with gratitude.  Now her eyes and his lock together.  Silent electro-magnetic propagations waft in the air. He can almost feel the heartbeat of her young animal prowling reverberating like a timpani.  "Come along now before Boise finds the nerve.  I'll give you a ride into Louis town."

     Adolph is looking nervously around the smoothly tiled floor for his lost analgesics.  He is trying to do this without seeming obvious, but his eyes dart in searching sweeps which gives the impression that he has either lost an expensive gold cap or is extremely bashful. "God, I need a drink," he whispers.  The tin is clearly gone.  The trail leads to Boise who, in his haste to escape Wes, inadvertently pocketed the hideaway container, probably as evidence for the lynch mob, and is not predisposed, as far as Adolph can see, to cough it up without a continuation of the all to recent unpleasantness.  As the magnitude of this emergency dawns on Adolph (no drugs equals pain), there is a call-up of his dwindling reserves.  The weapon that he marshals for this occasion, his glib tongue, is receiving injections of adrenalin from its overdrawn stocks.  These being in an awful state due to the long arm of relentless bad luck, crisis after crisis, in whose strangle-hold Adolph has been for longer than he cares to remember.  He chokes back a dry lump with a cough and tries furiously to speak, but the halting sputters and low whispered words communicate nothing more to Wes than the deeply recondite introversion of her new found playmate.  She gives Adolph an encouraging tug and suggests that they go up to the county-line for a little snoot   No go.  He's paralyzed by the realization that unmedicated he will soon by undergoing deadly barbiturate withdrawal.  Finally, Adolph manages a series of feeble croaks and Wes, with the patience of a saint, gets the picture. "You need your medicine?"  Wes's crimson lips and green come-hither eyes flash as if the whole thing is a wild, wonderful joke. "Aw, you poor dear."

     Broom is informed by Boise (who has pointedly not mentioned those details that would cast him in an unglamorous light) of the amoral, degenerate with whom Wes is keeping company.  Broom's imposing stature, well over six feet and 200 solid pounds, and hard-nosed pugnacious expression are enough to make even the most stout-hearted quiver with trepidation.  The fifty year old stone-slab, cracked and creviced, tufts of blackish foliage dug deeply in, a jaw line like an eight pound sledge, trundles beside Boise, clopping like a horse, tapping her walking stick in foreshortened bops against the ground as she goes. An M60-Al tank, were it sentient, would think the imposing figure, created by Broom's rolling gait, to be its own mirror image, lumbering onto the field of battle, ready to crush beneath those formidable tracks anything with the stupidity to get in the way.  As the War-Machine reaches the place where Wes is being informed of Adolph's tragic loss, the door swings open to a silent, face to face, confrontation. Wes, representing the beleaguered poet, has an arm around the barely ambulatory Adolph and Boise, with one quick step backwards, wags behind his stead with passive-aggressive solemnity.  There is an imminent head-on Collision smoldering like a shorted electrical circuit.  The smell of ozone permeates the air.  Broom says nothing. Her hard glare is all the message anyone would need, but Wes has spent a lifetime managing this fierce old bulldyke and almost without thinking she grabs the moment. "Emma!  You're just in time.  Help me.  I don't know if I can hold him up anymore.  He's so weak.  Give me a hand Boise.  I think he's having a heart attack.  Boise, where's his medicine?  Quick! The little box.  The smaller tablets.  Hurry."

     Perfect.  The desired effect is produced with unbalancing speed. Boise, twit that he is, sucks in a gasp of horror and almost tears the pocket off his shirt while trying to break-out the tin.  Wes snatches it away from Boise with her free hand, pops the lid and, without the slightest idea of what she's giving Adolph, places a pill on his extended tongue.  There is a great commotion as the three, assisted by dumfounded Kimmler, hustle Adolph to the wooden bench with the National Geographic still open to the section on Cambodia.  Adolph is playing his part as if he had spent months rehearsing for it.  Huffing and puffing.  His coloration accurately simulating cardio-pulmonary distress.  Better than any Hollywood makeup artist could do,  even with long hours of tedious preparation.  Of course, Adolph has always done blue-green best.  The scene slows gradually and begins to lose some of its momentum and, trouper that Wes is, she takes the opportunity to extricate herself by pretending to rush Adolph to the hospital.  Of f they go.  Wes giggling hysterically.  Adolph Clutching his tin. "After that show, I need a drink myself.  Let's go' for 'a wallow at the Madline Bar."

     Adolph isn't one to refuse a drink, regardless of the circumstances.  After all, this woman just engineered a double-play in his behalf.  Besides, a drink would sure go a long way toward taking off the edge. The bar is just on the other side of the county-line, four miles.  Eagles Nest is bone-dry country.  A provincial sour-puss. Not a place for transient aliens who happen by.

 "I'd be on the end of a long, hot pole if it weren't for Uncle Zap.  That little prick Boise!  Been trying to turn Emma against me. Hates me because I go and come as I please.  Live up in Louistown with Uncle Zap.  Major Zap, that is.  That little prick Boise's my fraternal twin.  Would you believe it?  We may have crawled out of the same stewpot, but that's it.  Momma says I came first.  Kicked Boise in the head and breast-stroked to freedom, but when I took a sniff and realized I was gonna be ok, I tried to hold the door shut on that little prick for as long as I could.  Gave him a case of toxic anemia of the conch.  Bad blood up the snout from an unusually long toe-nail I was cultivating for just that purpose.  You don't think we look alike, do you?  I'd cut off my head and wrap it in butcher's paper if I did." Adolph does see a resemblance.  A slight puff beside the nose when she laughs.  "Naw!  Your face is the sweetest song I've ever seen.  Look at those freckles.  How they glitter like gold."  It's true too.  Wes could wink out of the cover of any fashion magazine she wanted.  It brings a lump to Adolph's throat to see that slender form slither just below its taut, jersey skin.  And the braided bandana around her ankle!  Adolph notices it right away. That tiny twist, riding the smooth brown foot, tucked in a perfect Iowa blue-sky sandal.  She has the right carriage to make flash bulbs pop.  Not to mention flesh bulbs dangling in the breeze.

     Adolph humors are starting to right themselves.  A wee marigold pressing out from the spinal cord.  The fields along the road to the Madline are alive with crickets.  Wes is making a great deal of noise about the beauty of nature.  The field-fiddles of a great symphonic orchestra.  They sound like un-oiled wheel bearings to Adolph's urban ear. "The Madline is just around the bend.  A lot of soldiers from the Fort hang there.  Neat green little boys reaching out.  Sometimes with bear paws of delight.  Got to watch yourself, though.  It's a violent world."

     Everybody in the place knows Wes and free drinks flow, dragging behind them the frisky tails and good backslappings of a stoop party on the slabs of New Hope.  Homeboy shudders.  Persona non gratis back in New Hope.  The city of lights.  He wonders if he'll ever make the high roll home or will it be expatriotism forever.  Feeling real gregarious, Adolph has already made four trips to the men's room to untuck the precious tin.  There's plenty of swell talk and the bar's collection of signs:  BEWARE TANK CROSSING, DO NOT READ THIS SIGN, OPEN BEFORE CLOSING, WOMAN'S LUBE, to divert Adolph from his natural tendency toward morbidity. Adolph is introduced to a soldier Wes liked a lot before she moved up to Louistown with Major Zap.  Sargeant Christian, she calls him. He's an intense, dark little fellow with a visible mean streak.  Likes to shoot sparrows for recreation.  Walking around Ft. Maudlin with a BB gun, he snuffs the creatures to improve his eye.  "You never know when the enemy will be back in your sites."  Adolph is fascinated with Christian's saturnine cold-bloodedness.  He's pumping the Sergeant for stories and getting an earful.  Not to mention, endearing himself to Christian who wants the world to know what's what. Adolph knows how to wheedle it out of a guy like Christian.  Take him and squeeze every bloody drop.  For closer examination.  Wes is watching the mangle rollers with their slow, flattening pace and even though she finds it amusing  she's the main attraction.  Center ring ladies and gentlemen.  Your attention please.  She crooks a finger and hardens their limp lassisitudes.