Calling Newton Feeney (excerpt)

PART TWO

Newton Feeny, stately and plump, not unlike Buck Mulligan, rose and surveyed his kingdom through a picture window in his study. The landscape was vaguely Martian with the exception of some scrub and brush which added accents of army surplus green and burnt umber to the chalky and rolling grounds.

Feeny learned recently through a DNA test (he mailed in a tube of his spit) that 47% of those known to share some strands of his genetic map, did not drink instant coffee. Feeny was proud of that fact yet here he sat, with a glazed jelly donut look, spooning Nescafe into a cup of cold water. It was clumpy and did not mix well but he strained the clumps through his teeth as he drank. He liked the instant assimilation of caffeine in his system no matter how it tasted. Later in the day he would promote himself to a hot cup.

Two thirds into the draft of his latest novel, Feeny dropped into his chair behind his writing desk. He stared at the shelf of books on his wall which included his own novels, some of which had been translated into other languages. This included a one-of-a-kind edition of The Square Root of Fruit which a zealous fan translated into Esperanto.

Feeny knew no Esperanto nor did he wish to.

Sometimes his fan base scared him. Thus the remote location on a hill in New Mexico, in a house the same color as the surrounding arid land. From a distance you’d have to squint to find it. If you were looking for his abode you’d never notice it unless you caught a brief glint of light, a shard flashing for a millisecond before vanishing – a signal which might attract an eye to his domain and make you look and see what…

His desk was of an earlier era, the type you might see in an Edward Hopper painting. Solid as hell. Feeny thought it would have survived the atomic testing at Los Alamos. Broad and heavy, it was conjured from some variety of hard wood and over the years had acquired a dark tan any Midwesterner would envy.

Atop the desk was a jar with some pencils, a half ream of white bond paper and his Olivetti type writer. He relished the feeling of pressure as his fingers pressed down on the keys. The clacking sound pleased him. Laptops seemed to him as rendering any work of art tainted with the artificiality of the present tech era. It gave everything a mass-produced cheapness. If Melville had written Moby Dick on a word processor, we’d be talking a whole new ball game. He was convinced of that.

He began to type. It felt as if this might be his last novel. He was getting old, 69, and the words didn’t come very easily anymore. He stopped to wonder, did they ever come easily? Of course not. In any case it didn’t seem easier. He was running out of things to say. . A writer was allotted only so many words. Feeny couldn’t see himself not writing. He envisioned himself keeling over his Olivetti one day. He was fine with that. He wondered what his last word would be.

The problem with death is that it stops everything. Paradoxically it was also a comforting stop. He supposed it depended on how close to the end you were. He didn’t believe in an afterlife and that was a comfort to him most of the time. Eternity is a long time, even in heaven. Even longer in hell. He would find out eventually. He would keep typing until then.

The road below, far down from the hill on which he perched, was usually empty. The random car or truck passing by was probably lost he surmised. Sometimes the emptiness of the road made him suspect he was the last man alive. He lived alone with a dog named Riddley who supplied all the conversation he needed. The dog was a good listener. He understood. Dogs were sentient beings, they would inherit the earth.

“Last man on the planet,” Feeny scribbled on a piece of scrap paper, “idea for a novel.” It struck him then that he would never stop writing, even if he was reduced to making childlike scribbles on the page. His last effort a meandering line.

Feeny just topped 280 lbs on the scale. A tattoo he had when he was in Vietnam, years back when he was just a sliver of his present self, had expanded into an unidentifiable, blueish mess, as if bruised from buckshot. A tattooist in Saigon rendered a perfect likeness of Rimbaud’s face, modeled on a picture from the only book Feeny brought with him to this “humidity crazed bug fest,” Rimbaud’s Season in Hell. The pain of the needled was dulled by the local marijuana, laced with weak opium. He felt fine.

For the last decade he tried to write about his wife, Tag Humble-Feeny, who died on American Airlines flight no. 11, 2001. What were the chances of that happening, he asked himself everyday since that hell wrought morning. What were the chances? Apparently good. He received her last text when she was in the air, not long before the crash.

“Guess who I’m sitting next to?”

He had no idea of course.

Feeny didn’t find out until some days later, maybe it was weeks or months, when amongst other bits of death trivia the airline provided a seating chart of the flight. Tag was seated next to Berintha “Berry” Berenson-Perkins which meant nothing to him until he Googled the name some time later during a moment of death-angst mourning. Everything happened in increments back then and here was one more. “Berry” Berenson-Perkins was a photographer, widow of the actor Anthony Perkins, mother of the musician Elvis Perkins.

Guess who I’m sitting next to?

Would it be the widow of the late actor Anthony Perkins?

Why yes, how did you know?

He imagined their conversation, their last words. Were they somehow aware of their destiny? Did they know the North Trade Tower was in their flight path?

Did they feel any pain?

Probably not. That one factoid probably prevented him from losing his mind. It was a painless, merciful death. It had to be.

Feeny experienced moments of terror in Nam, mostly from encounters with snakes and the general claustrophobia of being in the jungle. He knew how time slowed down in those situations. A movie would run through his head of the plane disintegrating in slow motion as it became one with the tower. Seconds transformed into minutes, maybe even hours. He knew time was elastic, was a funny thing like and egg of Silly Putty.

It didn’t help that he suffered from exploding head syndrome, a scenario in which he would wake in the night to a loud noise. Not a real noise though it sounded like one, but a sound inside his head. The noise differed at times but always woke him.

His doctor acknowledged it that this was a somewhat rare condition but confirmed that it was indeed “a thing”. He offered Feeny Xanax. Feeny hated pills. He’d live with the bang.

The bang reminded him of Billy the Kid whom he’d been thinking of writing a novel about. The combination of putting words on a page and researching the subject might help him live past the death in his life. It was the senselessness that haunted him now. Many deaths had a senseless aspect to them but this was his own. It was personal. It was his death to cultivate and live with. If he could. Sometimes the weight felt heavier every day. Fucking fucking.

Feeny’s truck was covered in a gauze of dust, as if it were evolving into a defense of protective coloring. He wasn’t sure of its original color anymore. It sat mostly unused, waiting for its next mission which was usually a beer and milk run into town. It was a thirty-five minute drive into the store along his empty road, long enough to blow the dust off to begin to let it resettle the next day all over again.

He drove a Ford pick-up, year unknown or rather, forgotten. He used to know, could probably find it etched somewhere on the truck body. It seemed that since the death of his wife, the details of his life kept floating away, little chunks of the glacier loosened by climate change. He forgot how many pounds of air his tire took and the size of his engine. It didn’t matter. The wheels turned and delivered him to where he was going.

It was another clear day. The sky was a large shingle of blue nailed atop the earth’s surface. The ground was solid beneath his feet. He stepped into his truck, turned the key and was off.

Understanding evil was a bitch. Or maybe he was overthinking the subject. The hijackers who killed his wife, all 81 passengers and 11 crew members had their reasons.

They had Allah in mind and thought they would end up in heaven with a bevy of virgins. That sounds like a lot of work. Beware of what you wish for.

They should have read the God Letter.

Matter is neither created nor destroyed. In the case of the hijackers, they simply changed form into a charred mess that was eventually bulldozed and dumped in a pit somewhere in NJ. That’s where their trail ended, Feeny was certain of. If he was wrong and there was an afterlife, he hoped theirs would be in hell, forced to reread the Satanic Verses for eternity.

Now Billy the Kid, Mr. William Bonney, this was something different. The boy was misunderstood. His reputation, whether exaggerated or not, plagued him to the end of his short life. His persona was wide spread and this was 100 years before social media. Ben Hur author, Governor Lew Wallace, denied Billy the pardon he applied for.

Being a Christian man, he would have no part of forgiveness. Picture Billy, having barely stepped into adulthood, trying to erase his larger-than-life antics which were no longer him. His pardon would come in a dark room on the wrong side of a sheriff’s pistol.

The big picture, the link between violence, genocide and other terrorsims of the old west, could be connected straight to 9/11 Feeny thought. A paradigm of violence that when looked at from a distance, might provide a clue to at least deciphering the madness which was the 21st century. Feeny sensed a novel, maybe a sequel to his God Letter book. Writing the Kid as a Nietszchian anti-hero, preaching God is dead while robbing banks and rustling cattle. He liked the idea and was content to flush it out while finishing the tome he was working on now. Save him from empty nest syndrome when he finished his present work. He had a plan. And plans made him happy.

Unseen dust filtered through his truck’s cooling system and gritted on his teeth. He bent to turn off the radio, some Eagles song about some far away hotel. He punched in his destination on the GPS on his phone and made sure to bring the Milk Bones for Riddley. The Truck lurched forward, as having been rudely awakened, to the destination at hand.

His estimated drive time was one hour and twenty minutes plus change, adding time for roadside stops to take a piss. His goal was Fort Sumner, the small town where Biily The Kid was tried and convicted by the barrel of a gun. He hoped to soak in his aura, surely Billy left something behind, even after all these years. It was only mid-morning and he would be there by noon. Authenticity is what he strove for. He wanted to be authentic when he wrote about this. Readers could smell fake inches from a printed page. Feeny did a quick scan of every novel he’d written with his bullshit detector and they all seemed to pass. At least as far as he could remember.

He drove the next few miles in silence, casting side-long glances at Riddley, his 65 lb Aussie male dog as if he expected him to converse. Riddley’s silence prompted him to speak.

“You know, I don’t think anyone ever dies, do you?”

Riddley looked out the window, happy, tongue wagging and dripping saliva.

“I thought so. I mean is Shakespeare dead. No. Not really. I mean I probably wouldn’t know him if I saw him on the street, not that I’m looking for him. But he is so omnipotent that I wouldn’t call him dead. You know?”

Pregnant pause.

“I don’t think Tag is dead. No, not really. Neither is Billy. I mean we won’t see either of them walk through the door but here they are, stuck to us like a one-sided peanut butter sandwich. Vivid as the sun in the Sahara.

Riddley offered a look.

“Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God.”

He paused for effect.

“Wordsworth.”

The truck sighed and bounced. Maybe the shocks need replaced. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the roads needed fixed. Maybe his ass was more sensitive as the years piled on.

“That’s bullshit. Glory is the last trail we leave on this planet unless it’s littered with beer cans. More like trails of carnage. Maybe Wordsworth was on laudanum when he wrote that. All those guys were junkies. Coleridge, Shelly. I bet they never took a shit.”

Feeny flipped on the radio.

One of these nights

One of these crazy old nights…

He flipped it off. “What’s with the Eagles? One of them die?”

There is no silence like the contemplative silence of a road trip, especially on the back roads of New Mexico. The only punctuation and footnotes were the occasional thump of a pot hole or scratching from Riddley. The absence of sound was a tangible presence, forcing him into his own thoughts.

Perhaps that is what he enjoyed most about such trips, the confrontation of whatever you may call it, the lexicon of darkness, in his case. That, mixed with the dodging the ballet of roadside varmints, had a calming effect on his blood pressure.

Once upon a time Feeny had gone to AA. There was talk about his drinking. It was especially hard when he returned from Nam. He didn’t pay it much mind but he went to put Tag’s fears to rest. The graph didn’t take and now he wished it had and saved Tag all that anxiety. In his short tenure he learned you couldn’t run from your troubles, what they called a geographical cure. Your demons possess you and travel gratis with you wherever you go.

He looked in the rearview, imagining he saw his wife, pictured her growing smaller and smaller as he drove but it didn’t work. She would always be riding shotgun, with her hand on the doorknob, a slight criticism about his driving about to escape her lips.

Riddley seemed to read his thoughts. Dogs could do that. Knew his ailments before he did. Allowed him to believe he could spend the rest of his life without another human being, living out his days with a single dog.

Big dog, I know you know how to bark…

Can’t escape the past. Billy the Kid learned that. Best to just make peace with it.

Feeny struggled to make his thoughts known to Riddley and hoped on some level that the dog already knew.

Fort Summner has slightly more citizens than its area code. Nine hundred plus, give or take a few tumbleweeds. Riddley poked his snout out the window and inhaled the village, calculating molecules of dust mixed with atoms of bone and scents of sage and iron.

Fenny’s senses were less acute as he pulled in front to the Billy the Kid Museum and put his truck in park. This seemed to be where the action was. He opened his door and stepped outside and waited for something to sink in. Nothing happened so he quit, figuring he was forcing the issue. He wondered if Billy’s aura had been blanketed by commercialism. Most likely. Still. It was there beneath the layers, lodged in a dark room lit by gunfire. You just had to dig for it.

The street was empty save for a fat white man who appeared be eating ice-cream out of a bowl. He sat under the awning of a gift shop, content, spooning his life away. Riddley was spooked. The town was more like a movie prop. Newton sensed an unreality which made the Kid seem even further away, the result of a local legend pile driven into the sub stratum, a worn out retread of a town running on fumes.

“No tours this month but if you want, I can give you one.”

Feeny turned to see a wizened old man, stroking his short white beard while standing on the porch of The Billy The Kid Museum. He was thin enough to waiver slightly as he stood, almost as if he were a mirage that might dissipate at any moment.

Feeny paused. Momentarily puzzled. He wondered if he had fallen through a rabbit hole. Riddley jumped from the cab, undecided about the whole situation.

“You mean like a no tour tour?” Feeny squinted. “Or what?”

“Something like that. Yet another inexplicable twist of the west, been a slow week. Even the Kid would be ansty. Name’s Karl. Bring the dog inside.”

Riddley heard “dog” and was alert.

They stepped into a bright room, illuminated by windows on all sides, a few incandescent lights hanging overhead. Shiny objects and artifacts came at them from all directions. Holsters, hats, boots, maps and pistols. There was much to be considered. “Feels like the Old West in here,” Feeny said dumbly.

“That’s the idea,” said Karl. “Relics from a bygone era. Mostly.”

Feeny scanned the displays. Riddley caught several scents.

“Over here we have items particular to the kid. Some were on his persons when he was caught.”

“You mean murdered,” interjected Feeny. He felt a sudden closeness to the Kid. “Tried and punished in the flash of a gun-shot by a cowardly Sherriff.”

“Well, that’s how they operated back then. They had a different yardstick. Mostly.”

“I don’t know that much has changed,” said Feeny. “Mostly.”

Karl walked them over to a glass case. He lifted the lid of the case and handed Feeny a boot. He was surprised by the lack of security.

“One of the kid’s boots.”

Feeny stepped back.

“I’m allowed to just hold it?”

“Sure, why not? Just don’t try it on.”

Feeny held it, turned it and looked inside. Riddley gave it a sniff and seemed troubled. Dogs know things.

“Small feet,” said Feeny.

“Small feet, big legend.”

Feeny handed it back.

“He wasn’t even all that wild,” said Karl. “Just a kid going through his delinquent phase, maybe a tad more than others.”

“He wanted a pardon. I know that much. Didn’t get it. Maybe his wild days were coming to an end.”

“Could be,” said Karl. “I guess we will never know.”

The displays farmed out to fringe attachments to the Kid. Styles and weaponry of the times, artifacts of the Lincoln County war, daguerreotypes of his cohorts. Personal items of the Kid’s killer, Sheriff Pat Garrett.

Feeny wanted to be a cowboy when he was a kid. His bedroom stank of cap guns. Of the Injuns he killed. They lurked in the corners of his room, in his closet, under the bed. His floor was a swampy mess of sticky Injun blood. He was the Sheriff of his own bedroom.

He knew better as he grew older and shipped out to Nam. Maybe the white man was the bad guy, how did that happen?

In late youth he had an epiphany that he’d been rooting for the wrong team. By the time he shipped back home he was certain of it. He began to see a panorama of what Americans did in the name of Jesus and country and it wasn’t always good. He thought the Kid must have sensed this too, way back before social media, that something was running amok. As far as Feeny knew, the kid had never killed an Injun and if he did, it was not because he was in Injun but simply in his way. The Kid was an equal opportunity killer. And who was Feeny to judge? He’d killed a few Gooks. Well, maybe not face to face but indirectly, setting off some mortars, spraying bullets into the jungle just in case. He probably killed some snakes in the process and now he wished he hadn’t done that either.

Did the terrorists who flew into the Towers, Pentagon and crashed into the fields of Pennsylvania, know that, like the Kid, something was wrong with America? How did we look from their side? Who can stop us? How did killing his wife help? The same way it helped us by killing civilians in Iraq?

Quien es?

Feeny waved his arms in the air by his sides. I’m alive, he thought, and can wave my arms in the air.

Karl gave him a look. Riddley seemed bored. You can only look at so many hats and pistols though it was nice to hold the Kid’s boot.

Feeny was disappointed that he failed to retrieve an aura from the boot. Nothing but an old musky smell. It was probably just a doppelganger boot for fools like him who thought they were connecting to a real piece of Western history. Who knew? It was nice to think you had an actual artifact.

“Just when do you think evil began?” asked Feeny. Karl paused. “Now that’s one I don’t get on my tours too often. But I reckon I can’t say seeing as how I wasn’t born when it happened. I’ll venture a guess though, call it an uneducated one, that it was as soon as nab crawled out of the sea and stood on two legs if not sooner. Man contains it, always has, always will until he does himself in. It’s keeping me in business presently.”

“It just seems, I don’t know, as though there should be some reason, something finite. A pattern. Why the chain of violence? We have the power to stop it any time we wish to. I know it sounds like something out of a 60s war protester’s mouth but it’s gone on too fucking long.” Feeny was breaking a sweat. Riddley uttered a low whine.

“I reckon we’re just bored, you know? We do things to distract us from thinking about death. Getting married, working 9 to 5, it’s all about not thinking about death.”

Feeny nodded, feeling like an idiot. After writing six novels he felt as stupid as he did in high school. I’ve learned nothing. I might as well be drinking PBR in Tom’s Bait Shop & Bar.

“Is that what you think drove the Kid, even as he was chasing death?”

Karl pinched his chin, suspended in thought.

“Oh probably, on some level. Our demons are personal and vary person to person. The Kid had his for sure but we can only judge from afar you know?Something was whipping his ass. His seemed a special brand.”

“OK but what about the 9/11 hijackers? They didn’t fear death, they flew right into it.”

“That’s out my league,” Karl said,” but I would call that stupid. They ain’t going to find seven virgins. Hell, one’s bad enough, can’t imagine seven. That’s just crazy.”

“But they seemed to know something, or thought they did, that life was out of balance.”

“And they made it a hell of a lot worse.”

“If only the Kid was on that plane…”

“What plane?”

“Nothing.”

Feeny and Riddley scouted a few more artifacts but he really wasn’t looking and Riddley wasn’t even sniffing. His mind was racing like an abused Greyhound, he was looking but saw nothing. He felt he was a wisp of a thought by some wandering, ancient Chinese philosopher, scraping his words on the side of some mountain for future pilgrims to read.

“All this to sum up a man and an era and I still feel like it’s an old, half-remembered John Ford movie I watched when I was twelve.” He tapped three times on the glass case.

Feeny began to think backwards. He wanted to trace innocence. He remembered when he was ten because he thought, next year, I will be out of childhood glory.

Was he innocent then? If he was and he probably wasn’t, the world certainly wasn’t. He was born unto a vast ball crawling with guilt which soaked into every pore on the planet. Occasionally there was a flower that was innocent and then it faded, as if repelled by an overwhelming barrage of rancid morals. When guilt was the norm, wasn’t everything normal?

“Like the philosopher said, ‘we need to be truthful about truthfulness’ but that leaves me nowhere so…”

Karl shook his head. “I gave up on the big questions long ago. That’s why I settled on the kid. Just a finite slice of history. A snapshot in time.”

“Well yeah, I suppose.”

Outside, Feeny stood in a dry wind. The dust tickled his nose and the sun made him squint. There were faraway sounds indicating some sort of civilization, maybe cars, voices, industrial noise, but nothing was in sight. Only the large bald white man still eating his ice cream, was the only other being around.

Strangely, Feeny felt closer to the kid out on the street than he did in the cramped museum. There was something freewheeling about an empty town. Maybe it was the hint of possibility, that an infinite choice of events could take place right here and now and Feeny thought this could happen.

An event out of infinity. You name it. Maybe an alternate string theory reality would play out and he would see Nietzsche having a whiskey with the Kid at a sidewalk café. He tried to imagine their conversation, assuming they shared a common tongue:

Nietzsche: How do you like your whiskey?

The Kid: Anyway I can get it.