Desolation Angels Read Free

fly—welkin moon wrung salt upon the tides of come-on night, swing on the meadow shoulder, roll the boulder of Buddha over the pink partitioned west Pacific fog mow—O tiny tiny tiny human hope, O molded cracking thee mirror thee shook pa t n a watalaka—and more to go—
    Ping.
    7
    Every night at 8 the lookouts on all the different mountaintops in the Mount Baker National Forest have a bull session over their radios—I have my own Packmaster set and turn it on, and listen.
    It’s a big event in the loneliness—
    â€œHe asked if you was goin to sleep, Chuck.”
    â€œYou know what he does Chuck when he goes out on patrol?—he finds a nice shady spot and just goes to sleep.”
    â€œDid you say Louise?”
    â€œâ€”I doant knaow—”
    â€œâ€”Well I only got three weeks to wait—”
    â€œâ€”right on 99—”
    â€œSay Ted?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œHow do you keep your oven hot for makin those, ah, muffins?”
    â€œOh just keep the fire hot—”
    â€œThey only got one road that ah zigzags all over creation—”
    â€œYeh well I hope so—I’ll be there waitin anyway.”
    Bzzzzz bzgg radio—long silence of pensive young lookouts—
    â€œWell is your buddy gonna come up here and pick you up?”
    â€œHey Dick—Hey Studebaker—”
    â€œJust keep pourin wood in it, that’s all, it stays hot—”
    â€œAre you still gonna pay him the same thing as you did ah pay him comin out?”
    â€œâ€”Yeah but ah three four trips in three hours?”
    My life is a vast and insane legend reaching everywhere without beginning or ending, like the Void—like Samsara—A thousand memories come like tics all day perturbing my vital mind with almost muscular spasms of clarity and recall—Singing in a false limey accent to Loch Lomond as I heat my evening coffee in cold rose dusk, I immediately think of that time in 1942 in Nova Scotia when our seedy ship put in from Greenland for a night’s shore leave, Fall, pines, cold dusk and then dawn sun, over the radio from wartime America the faint voice of Dinah Shore singing, and how we got drunk, how we slipped and fell, how the joy welled up in my heart and exploded fuming into the night that I was back to my beloved America almost—the cold dog dawn—
    Almost simultaneously, just because I’m changing my pants, or that is putting on an extra pair for the howling night, I think of the marvelous sex fantasy of earlier in the day when I’m reading a cowboy story about the outlaw kidnapping the girl and having her all alone on the train (except for one old woman) who (the old woman now in my daydream sleeps on the bench while ole hard hombre me outlaw pushes the blonde into the men’s compartment; at gun point, and she wont respond but scratch) (natch) (she loves an honest killer and I’m old Erdaway Molière the murderous sneering Texan who slit bulls in El Paso and held up the stage to shoot holes in people only)—I get her on the seat and kneel and start to work, French postcard style, till I’ve got her eyes closed and mouth open until she cant stand it and loves this lovin outlaw so she by her own wild willin volition jumps to kneel and works, then when I’m ready turns while the old lady sleeps and the train rattles on—“Most delightful my dear” I’m saying to myself in Desolation Peak and as if to Bull Hubbard, using his way of speech, and as if to amuse him, as if he’s here, and I hear Bull saying “Dont act effeminate Jack” as he seriously told me in 1953 when I had started joking with him in his effeminate manner routine “On you it dont look good Jack” and here I am wishing I could be in London with Bull tonight—
    And the new moon, brown, sinks early yonder by Baker River dark.
    My life is a vast inconsequential epic with a thousand and a