IT'S - Chapter 7

"Poet in Residence" - (Bob Blair)

Raindrops fell like fat apostrophes from the sullen October clouds over Rusk, Texas. The usual room was ready at the State Hospital, and the usual group of inmates were gathered. There were 15 or 20 patients, all female, none under 50 years of age, all nodding in the same drugged way, and all guilty, or at least convicted, of assault or murder.

Bob Blair, Poet in Residence at Piney Woods State College, was met at the security gate by a grim-faced woman of indeterminate age. She shook his hand and led him off to do his duty. Blair had three main jobs as Poet in Residence: to "teach" Creative Writing (the absurdity of which he embraced wholeheartedly); to edit the poetry section of the campus literary magazine; and to give readings at the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

The nurse, or administrator, or guard -- she had a stethoscope, a clipboard, and a .38 Police Special -- gave the standard introduction: "We are so fortunate that Bob Blair, from the College, has come to read his poetry for us. Mr. Blair?"

She left the room. A few inmates applauded; a couple even looked in the general direction of the dais.

Blair sometimes read his own poems at the hospital, but the patients seemed to fall asleep even faster on those occasions. That day he started with John Masefield's "The Passing Strange."

"Out of the earth to rest or range
Perpetual in perpetual change,
The unknown passing through the strange."

"Not a sentence!" It was a voice that combined the worst of a hiss and a screech. Bob looked up, but could not see who had spoken. The room seemed to have grown and faded. He could see the first two rows of chairs, but beyond that was a gloom.

Maybe Masefield was too vague to start with. Blair decided to try Edmund Blunden's "The Survival."

"To-day's house makes to-morrow's road;
I knew these heaps of stone
When they were walls of grace and might . . . 

"Over-hyphenization!" came the same awful voice. "How did she know about those hyphens?" he wondered. He still could not see the speaker, but something about her voice chilled him. Back in the gloom appeared two pale yellow lights. The disconcerted poet decided to try a piece that sometimes held the attention of a few patients, the unfinished epic "Orpheus in Corsicana," by a former inmate of that very institution:

"'Look in Hell, its farther West'
Said the fat third-baseman."

"Got you!" screamed the voice as a dark shape hurtled toward the front of the room. The pale yellow lights became glowing, lantern eyes, the only discernible feature of its grey face. Blair screamed unintelligibly and threw up his hands to protect himself. Just then the nurse-guard opened the door. Light poured into the room, and when Blair looked up, the room had regained its former dimensions. The shape was gone.

"Well, Mr. Blair, I see you are adding some dramatics to your readings," she said. "Isn't that special, Ladies? But time's up now. Thank you ever so much, Mr. Blair. We'll look forward to seeing you next time, won't we, group?" The group didn't respond. They were all asleep.

Driving out through the hospital gates, Blair wondered if he had had a flashback. He had been off that kind of recreational chemical for a long time. But the whole eerie scene was uncomfortably familiar to him. As he drove past the Pentacostal Church, he saw a sign. He shuddered. It seemed a premonition. In capitals, it read "ITS LATER THEN YOU THINK."

Instead of going home or to the college, Bob went to his meditation spot, a pulloff overlooking the sawmill. He sat behind the wheel of his Ford pickup, watching the men -- boys, really -- stack the wet lumber. "Pulling green chain," it's called. The raw timbers come straight off the saw. An inspector grades them as they go by, flipping each board so he can count the knots and other flaws. He marks the grade with a thick grease pencil, and the boys stack by grade.

Bob vaguely remembered that this was his job once. Jerking one- and two-inch slabs of wood, some thirty feet long, off the chain and onto a growing pile on the platform below. He was glad he wasn't the lout at the end of the chain: that position gets all the low-quality wood, and that's about all they cut around Rusk. The yellow pine grows so fast in the wet forests of East Texas that a twenty-year-old stand is ready for harvest. Of course, it's soft and knotty, but it's cheap. The kid at the end of the chain was shiny with sweat already. His shirt was off, probably in violation of several OSHA rules, but he smoothly guided the pitchy wood from chain to pile, letting gravity do as much work as it would.

Blair put his hand in his pocket and felt the letter he had received that morning. It was dated Monday, two days ago, postmarked San Saba, Texas, and it was addressed to him at the college. The envelope was neatly lettered in violet-black India ink. The script was unaffected, but somehow elegant. Bob would have known the sender from that writing, even if his name was not clearly inscribed in the upper left-hand corner: W. Eller. Bill Eller, his friend in childhood and in the Army, whom he had not seen since they were both privates. Bob had some fond memories of E2 Eller.

Blair saw now that the kid was managing three stacks at the low end of the chain. The kid looked like he was doing fairly well. A short, fat man with a cigar came up to the stacks, looked for a minute, and started yelling. The boy shrugged his shoulders. The chain came to a stop and the grader came down the ramp, yelling at the fat man. There seemed to be some disagreement about the grading. The fat man pointed to the boy, then to a stack of timbers, obviously indicating that the boy should move them; the grader, a tall man with a bad complexion, put his hand on the boy's arm to stop him, looked at the boards for a minute, then pointed in the opposite direction. The two men yelled some more.

Some one must have won. The boy jumped off the ramp and picked up a plank to move it to a new pile. As he turned, the end of the board caught the fat man flush in the face, smashing the cigar across his nose. The grader bent over double, laughing. The boy, startled by the sudden arrest of his load, turned the other direction and caught the taller man flush across the buttocks, knocking him into the mud below the chain.

Eller's letter was short and to the point.

"Must see you.
Immediately.
She's back."

Blair reached a conclusion at the same time the grader's face reached the mud. He wasn't sure who "She" was; he wasn't sure if he really wanted to see E2 Eller again; but he was sure he had to go to San Saba. He gunned the truck and headed for the highway.

Blair drove until he was numb. Driving west from Rusk, you travel through thick pine forest that gradually gives way to rolling pasture land and then to black-dirt cotton fields. In October, the cotton plants are bare of leaves, and the countryside is as black and white as a Baptist preacher's world view.

It was hot. When he finally got out of cotton country around Temple, Blair was ready for a break and a beer. The first place he saw was in Harley Heights, near Killeen. The sign said "Harv's Place."

Parked in front of Harv's were 14 motorcycles, most of them chopped. In a more normal state of mind, Bob might have avoided a bar where 20 chain-wielding, ass-kicking bikers had been drinking for four hours; but then, maybe not. He went inside.

Bob expected the sullen glances from the bikers inside. He expected the growled "Wadda ya want?" from the bartender. What he didn't expect was the somber, almost funereal mood of the crowd. No one was playing pool; no one was punching the juke box; no one was beating the pulp out of no one else. Twenty bikers sat hunched over their beers, silent.

Blair got his beer and sat down. A chunky biker dressed in leather and chain got up and limped towards him. "Hey, Asshole, you want to hear a story?" he asked politely. Blair nodded and motioned to a chair across the table. The biker sat on the table and leaned over him.

"What you see here is not what we are, Gink," he said. "We are The Wackers, the toughest, most obnoxious and worst-behaved gang in this part of the state. Why, normally we'd have cut your ears off just for coming in here with a haircut."

"I appreciate your restraint," Blair answered. "Why do you say you are less than what you were?"

"Because we seen her, Man. We seen her and .  . . and. . . . 

"Bull, Bull, your language!" yelled several of the bikers at the bar, with voices that sounded close to panic.

The big biker gulped. "I mean, 'we have seen her,' of course," he said meekly. "She's horrible. She rides the biggest bike I've ever seen (You don't suppose, she minds contractions, do you?), and she's death on it.

"We were driving back from the lake: a little fishing, a little terrorizing, you know, a fun afternoon. I had just said to Elspeth, my old lady, 'Hey, gimmeya beer' when I heard the roar of her pipes. Her bike seemed to float above the road as she closed on us and pulled up beside me. She looked me in the eye, and man, I ain't -- I mean, I've never seen anything like it; it was like looking into two fishbowls full of cat pi--. I mean, urine. The next thing I knew I was flying through the air and Elspeth was trying to get control of the bike. I landed on top of Mikey's bike, and that caused a chain reaction. Every bike except one crashed into a heap. Only Bobo didn't crash--. I think it's because he never talks. Anyway, we're all laying (or is it lying? .".". help me out here)." His voice took on a panicky whine.

"It's 'lying.'"

"Yeah, we were all lying there and we hear this voice. It sounds like death, but it says so clearly I'll never forget, 'Bad syntax, bad vocabulary, bad language. You'll be punished for it. Oh, yes, you'll be punished.'"

His eyes held the poet's in an Ancient Mariner lock. In the biker's eyes, Blair saw terror. In Blair's eyes, the biker saw. . . .

"You ain't on her good side, either, are you?" he said, cringing as he realized his solecism.

"I don't know what your talking about," said Bob, too quickly. The bar went dark as if someone had turned out the few lights. A hoarse whisper came out of the biker's mouth. It wasn't his voice at all.

"If you had written that, you would have spelled it wrong, wouldn't you?" said the whisper.

"Uh, I don't know. Maybe. Until I proofed it. What gives?"

"We don't like that," came the whisper again. The biker's eyes were taking on a strange amber glow. "We don't like that at all."

He lunged at the poet.

Blair was on his feet and out the bar before he could think to ask who "we" were. His truck was on Highway 190 and five miles down the road before he drew an even breath, and it was another 40 miles before he quit looking in the rearview for yellow-eyed bikers.

When Bob finally reached San Saba, he found that Bill Eller lived outside town on a pecan plantation along the San Saba River. The road went from paved to graded to dirt to muddy track before Blair found the house nestled among century-old pecans.

Bill saw the truck and came out to meet it. He shoved a beer into Blair's left hand, shook his right, and said, "Get back in the truck. We're going to Missoula."

Bill grabbed two suitcases from the porch and swung them into the back of the truck. "But, Bill, I've been driving all day," whined Blair.

"No sweat. I'll drive. Get in." Bob resisted to the extent of taking the time to relieve his bladder at the side of the house, but three minutes after arriving at Eller Plantations, he was leaving it.

When they reached the relatively smooth pavement of the San Angelo highway, Bill started to talk. "Things are starting to happen around me again."

"Around me, too," Bob said.

"To pay for the plantation, I do contract work for IBM in Austin," Bill continued. "A few weeks ago a manager sent me a PROFS note. It said 'Your doing real well. Keep up the good work.'"

"The next day he was pushed by an unseen force into the back of a big mainframe computer. Thousands of amps of high-voltage current unexplainably arced through his body, vaporizing his skin and making it puff like smoke out of the holes in his white shirt. Then printed-circuit boards started flying out of the machine at high speed, imbedding themselves in the still jerking body of this poor man. Mercifully, a board caught him on the forehead, splitting his head open and ending his misery. I think his only sin was that PROFS note."

"What's a PROFS note?"

"Bob, some things are too ugly to talk about."

Then Bill told a long story about his hired man, a good ol' boy who never finished fourth grade, who worked hard and mainly stayed out of trouble. The story involved several repetitions of the phrase "We got us some pecans this year, Boss!" and a particularly grisly accident in which a mechanical pecan picker, run amuck, plucked every appendage from the hired man's body. It started with his ears and nose, and didn't stop until all his toes were gone.

"But why are we going to Missoula?" Blair asked when he had recovered from the story. By that time they were near Borger in the Panhandle. "I've haven't been back there since we were boys."

"Because I think that's where She is," said Bill. "Don't you? Don't you remember that night at the sawmill? You and me and Charlie Russo decided to have a club meeting at the mill after second shift. They didn't run a third shift then. It was cold. Snow was falling. The three of us were in the saw house and there was a sign. It said 'Careful its slick.' You and I laughed; Charlie looked at the sign, and walked, like a zombie, to the edge of the log chain. He slipped on ice and fell into the mill pond. God, don't you remember? He fell on a snag. It pierced his heart."

Suddenly Bob did remember. And he knew that there was much, much more yet to remember. "Yes, I can see it like it was yesterday. The ice and snow and Charlie's heart's blood leaking into the water."

"Then, you agree we need to go to Missoula?" asked Bill.

"I'm not sure," Blair answered.

They were both exhausted from the driving and from the memories, and they pulled over to the side of the road, somewhere in the Panhandle, to rest. In the morning they took off again, towards Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.

When they reached the Colorado border, Blair took over the driving. Bill sat on the passenger side and started into a six-pack of Coors. They kept their thoughts to themselves. Just north of Denver they saw the turnoff for Boulder and Longmont. "Hey, isn't that where you moved when you left Missoula?" Bill asked.

"Yeah, it was Boulder. My dad got a job there. It's funny, but I don't really remember very much about it."

"I know," said Bill. "It seemed funny to me in the Army when you didn't talk much about what it was like here. Of course, we didn't talk much about Missoula, either, did we?"

"Bill," Bob said. "I don't think the answer is in Missoula. I think the answer is here."

"Oh, hell, Bob. Don't you remember Charlie? Charlie with a stick through his heart. . . ?" Bill was into the second six-pack.

Even though it was afternoon, the day became dark. The sky took on a somber hue that flooded the flat landscape in dim yellow light. The truck was alone on the four-lane.

"Bobby, I'm cold," said Bill.

"Me, too, Billy, real cold."

Then they saw the lights. Two yellow points. The points grew to marbles, then began to take on definition. "Hey, Bobby. Remember our old club motto?" asked Bill. "Remember? 'You better learn to smoke and drink, because its later then you think!' Remember? 'Because its later then you think.' Wasn't it a gas, Bobby? Wasn't it. . . ?"

"Shut up, Billy!" Bob yelled. "Don't say that!"

"Why not?" Those were Bill Eller's last words. The yellow lights were on top of them, and objects were hitting the windshield. A couple of the things broke through the glass and landed on the seat. They were shining, polished rocks, identical in size and shape. They were rock apostrophes.

Bob picked one up to show it to Bill, but when he looked at him, Bob knew Bill would never see anything again. One of the stones had hit his forehead, piercing the skull. It left a gory hole in the exact shape of an apostrophe.

Bob panicked. He stopped the truck and ran as far and as fast as he could down the road. When he came back to his senses, he was sitting at the side of the highway. A beat-up farm truck stopped. The driver didn't speak English, and Bob somehow felt safe with him. In broken Spanish, Blair asked if the man were going to Boulder, and if he would drop him near Danny Culberson's house.

Table of Contents - Chapter 6 - Top of Page - Chapter 8 -
Off The Wall - Callahan's Saloon