Day Out of Days Read Free Page B

that’s so irritating? Something nasal in the treble clef. King is asking some hotshot woman reporter if it’s true that she got a face-lift because a rival news network had offered her a better position if she improved her looks. She confesses that she went along with this proposition and doesn’t regret it one bit. She likes her new face, her new career. He turns the water back on. He spits in the sink, rinses, and turns the faucet off. A semi roars down Highway 40, right outside the window.He goes back to the TV; changes channels searching for the bin Laden story but finds nothing but daytime talk shows, soap operas, cooking shows, Christian gospel shows, shows featuring pathetic victims of their own bad judgment, weeping and shameful screaming shows, repentance shows, violent cartoon shows, NASCAR shows, pornography shows, Spanish-language melodramas with gorgeous Mexican women in catfights shedding real tears, gay wrestling shows, knife collectors’ auction shows, cheap-jewelry shows, Bible history shows, fat-people shows, diet shows, dog grooming shows, big-game shows with Cape buffalo being blown away on Texas ranches and crashing into the Brazos, motocross shows with spectacular wipeouts, flying burning metal in slow motion, windsurfing wrecks, deliberate car crashes into buildings and brick walls, gas fires blazing but nothing at all about a mysterious tall figure dressed as a woman riding a donkey across the Hindu Kush—the most wanted man on the face of the earth. It makes him want to quit show business altogether.

Duarte
    Didn’t we once have a freak show in Duarte? Wagons and rings. Right out on Highway 66 where the aqueduct begins. I remember the deep elephant smell. Peanuts in shells. The Petrified Man. Fat people poking him with pins. Only his eyes moved. The Two-Headed Calf. (Always a standby.) Bearded Lady Midget. Fetus in a Bottle. Human. Suspended. Drifting in strings of gooey yellow. Everything is coming back to me now. In Spanish.
    Didn’t we once have a Gypsy consultant in our linoleum kitchen? Is that what we called her? No. Couldn’t have been. My dad believed in her, though. Before God. Before Mary. Poring through glossy High Desert brochures. Salton Sea. Preposterous mock-ups of golf courses seen through the irrigated mist of Rain Bird sprinklers. Jerry Lewis and Sinatra were supposed to appear. Him chain-smoking Old Golds. Shaking from whiskey. On the edge of which desert, he wanted to know. He got it confused with the Painted one. She couldn’t say. Wouldn’t. Why be so mysterious, I wondered. It’s only land. Her pink bandana. Sulfur smell. Rubbing sage oil into her bony wrists and all the turquoise braceletsclacking like teeth. That was her, all right. Whatever we called her. Watching her through an open door collect her burro hobbled out in the orchard, chewing rotten avocados, pissing a hole in the dried-up leaves.
    Wasn’t there once a tall gray piano player too? Gentle. He came in a bright blue suit, haircut like a Fuller brush; played “Camptown Ladies” all through the night of Great-Aunt Gracie’s death then later hanged himself in a Pasadena garage alongside his Chrysler sedan. I remember that now. Told stories of how Gracie was quite the Grande Dame; dated John Philip Sousa back in the day; seduced a Lumber Baron with her Blue Plate Special and captured hawks on weekends down in the Arroyo Seco. Everything’s coming back to me now. In tiny pieces.

One Night in the Long-Ago
    What happened, now? Are you telling me that this whole history of catastrophes is the result of one night in the long-ago?
    That’s what I understand.
    The father came home late and smashed every window in the house with a claw hammer? Is that it?
    That’s what I heard.
    Ripped the front door off its hinges and then set fire to the backyard?
    So the story goes.
    The son then snuck out one of the broken windows, under cover of dawn, with a few books in a paper sack?
    So they say.
    Stepping over the