Chapter One

The air around here was wetter than what Sam was used to. It made everything more fecund, ranker. The basement where Sam lived was full of moist beetles and crickets, unassuming roommates which made the place smell like a green salad. There would've been specimens of the local golden cockroaches, too, but he ate out conscientiously, never brought anything edible into his basement. He had calluses in strange patterns on his fingers from emptying his de-humidifier three times a day.

It was like the jungles of Oaxaca. The noxiousness and the fertility welled up from deep inside of everything. Sometimes an atmospheric condition called "drizzle" prevailed: little bubbles of water would be suspended everywhere. You could see them and feel them on your puckering skin. Under the streetlights would be solid green columns of grasshoppers and God knows what other million kinds of bugs, drinking themselves into a floating stupor, all of them alien to a former desert/mountain dweller like Sam.

His mom, who'd once done a little time around here during the dust bowl days, pitied him for "living so aridly."

And they had all the birds Audubon leers about in junior high students' ears: meadowlarks, blue jays, cardinals. There'd been a recent irruption of seagulls, too. Sam must've brought them from the Beehive State. They lived at the dump, congregating in millions of white rings around the dead animal pit, looking like ping pong balls. They screeched a welcome when Sam tooled by to dump the quarter-pounder-with-cheese boxes from the passenger seat, on those rare occasions when he had to prepare himself and the car for a date.

A large percentage of the local kids seemed to have terminally bad complexions. Late teen infection had seeped into the bloodstream, osmosed by the water vapors, coaxed inward by the unusual preponderance of fast-food outlets which sprouted up in the jungly air as lushly as the breadbasket crops.

Sam became an aimless cruiser among such people, in such a climate. And he soon found that if the car cruised for more than five minutes in any direction, this town quickly thinned out and he wound up in farmers' fields. They grew popcorn and hedge balls, also millet for pet canaries, all fertilized by sweet-smelling mutagens that made the dew bead up and roll away in copper-colored pellets.

Such a place easily sank into November. And in no time at all, Ronald Reagan became our president-elect.

* * * *

In the spring Sam found himself halfheartedly materializing in a neighborhood bar for youngsters. There was nothing else he could do. Inside his stomach was freezing, and he was laughing too much.

Emboldened by the beer puddles, the Future Farmers of America flipped him the inevitable shit: the incalculable weight of his eight years' seniority, his extra layer of gut, his tendency to sermonize rather than conversationalize. He looked to Shannon, a regular French/Irish A-plus girl, for moral support. Inaccessible, Blithe Shannon is what Sam wanted to whisper in her ear: bestow an epithet on her, lay claim on her. (This was the first time since late grade school that he'd gotten drunk on 3.2 beer--the humidity, must be the humidity.)

Shannon kindly distracted her flip coevals' attention away from him by showing everybody how she could pop all her knuckles but one. She kept using the word dipwad, her little breasts pointing straight up, erupting like Mount Saint etc.

The song on the loudspeakers was on that unhip Sam had never heard. It went,

Hoo-yah, hoo-yah
ugly mommy, ugly baby,
I always say.
Hoo-yah, hoo-yah
ugly mommy, oo-gly baby,
hoo-yah, hoo-yah
I always say,
I always say...

The kids all agreed on something serious that Sam missed in this blast of synthesized rock. Something about Iran. Or welfare fraud. Or being overrun.

That did it. Sam lumbered to his feet and began a loud, beery lament. He was cutting in on the conversation, trampling it flat, causing the social process to take an unnatural twist--but that was his proper function under these circumstances. He was their elder.

"I want the Thunderbird wine," he moaned, "the blankets, the folk singers, when I was eighteen; the cheap green Mexican dope-smoke over Sonny Terry and Browny What's-his-name; I want my little Jewish prep school friends who burned money outside the Fugs concert; I want the communists, the sideburns--they weren't allowed enough time to play themselves out! Synthetic death! Contrived death!"

Sam grabbed Shannon's sweet little shoulder and breathed down through her giggles. "Let me ignore the meaningless night, the senate's shift right, the fall of Birch Bayh. There's something strong, something I'm drowning in, and I don't know what it is--"

Even as he moaned these things, he knew that the old standby New Left nostalgia was not located anywhere near the true source of his anxieties. Still he went on for a while.

Sam was large: closer to seven feet than to six-and-a-half feet. He weighed over 300 pounds, a bit of it unreclaimed chubbiness. But, with his padded-shoulder jacket concealing the few extra rolls of secular humanist and emphasizing the undeniably powerful pectorals, he looked pretty terrifying.

Immediately he had cross words with the bouncer, in his black and silver vest. The bouncer considered Sam a challenge. Sam considered the bouncer an ache in his drunken heart. You could tell this bristly functionary was a little shaky: he said, "Fut the shuck up." It was clear, though, that the shakiness was not caused by mere Sam. It was a habitual shakiness. These professionally violent sorts of guys were always like that. They meted out defeat on such a regular basis that they were always on the lookout for their own. They expected it to come from the most unlikely, the chubbiest of parties. The shakier the violent guy, the more dangerous.

Sam did not hesitate to fut the shuck up. But, of course, to save face in front of the youngsters, he took the first opportunity to prance along behind the bouncer, mimicking his walk.

This behavior elicited a strange reaction from the post-pubescent regulars: shocked silence and stares. After staring back at them for a few minutes, Sam figured out what the problem was. They were taken aback not so much by the silliness of the aging clown in their midst, nor even by his apparent suicidal urges as he galumphed inches away from the bouncer's buffalo-sized dorsal muscles. The kids seemed put out by something that could only be defined as Sam's breach of decorum: one simply did not do such a thing. Sam somehow understood this, even though, back in his bar-hopping days, nobody knew the meaning of the word decorum.

And Shannon whispered Sam's name and address to the bouncer.

* * * *

This particular bouncer was fairly standard equipment for a bar in these parts. Former middleweight world-class kick boxer; still had the scars from the time he knocked Chuck Norris out of the ring (or vice-versa, or something); able to leap out from behind the bar in a single bound and alight in the middle of any altercation that might be developing in the place. He had all kinds of profound oriental discipline, a contemporary one-man army. The Avenger. The Exterminator. A Soldier of Misfortune.

But, according to Shannon, who knew about these things, when the oriental discipline guys gave him his ninth-degree black belt they forgot to make sure the bouncer's emotions were disciplined, too, which they weren't. He was not a spiritual guy who did watercolors. He was crazy, a literal killer, apparently. He would bounce a whole tableful of people just because among them sat a girl who may or may not have given him a teasing glance on the street once. And all the while he'd be itching to smash any boys in the group. "Just touch me first, touch me first," he'd sometimes mumble, almost pleading.

He terrified the young customers, but they kept coming around for more. He was a high priest to them; they seemed to need his nightly chastisement.

And Sam had deftly chosen this shaven-headed, leather-sheathed, silver-riveted person for walk-mocking. Sam wasn't used to having to be careful whom he mocked. These kinds of bloody guys didn't exist back home among the Mormons. If they came slinking around they were quickly shot or hanged. Someone giant like Sam--even in his indifferent shape--had a free ticket to bully anybody back home.

But not anymore, here among the farmers of the Resurgent Right. Shannon let him know in no uncertain terms: he'd blown it this time.

"Bouncy's got your number," she trembled.

There was apparently no question in Shannon's sweet mind that Sam had witnessed her sharing his vital stats with Bouncy. She assumed he'd watched her whispering up into the hideous cauliflower ear. This close to Dodge City, this soon after the senate's shift right, it was assumed that when one big man flipped another big man some shit, it was a challenge to a showdown. Shannon hadn't been being mean or bloodthirsty: she'd just been helping to speed along a process of deep tradition.

So Sam took advantage of his heroic position and took her out on an aimless car cruise. He pretended that a communion with nature was his deep and spiritual, quasi-Asiatic way to prepare for a fight.

He was eight years older than the little freshperson, but she was the native, and the female, so he let her tell him which way to turn. And she showed him the Western Kansas that non-natives never see: the flat, unfamous, unhip far-Western Kansas, as far removed from jazzy Kansas City as from chic Aspen and Boulder; the desolate Kansas that might as well be equally forlorn far-Eastern Colorado.

They cut across fields by way of gravel roads to an ancient willowy graveyard where casualties of the Oregon Trail were ostensibly buried. "Cholera," said Shannon, "and if we dug them up even today, we'd catch cholera, too, because cholera germs don't die. Eeeeew, gross, huh?" And she wrinkled her nose.

She obviously knew how effective that wrinkling would be on Sam. She seemed to sense that her giant mentor didn't require much more sexual sophistication than what could be seen on "Leave It to Beaver" reruns.

Promiscuous, casual sex, as practiced by youngsters Shannon's age, is a sin because it threatens to disrupt the social hierarchy. It allows some people to see right through certain others at a glance. The transparent people are the ones with unsatisfactory sex lives, the twitchy mockable ones with the extra energy and sublimated frustration that prompt them to set up social orders, to define what sin will be.

Almost 2000 years ago the great Harlot of Babylon stood sneering knowingly at Saint John the Divine. She knew at a glance that the prophet was a jackoff. She could've mimicked his walk and mannerisms to a tee, could've done so with excruciating accuracy without ever having seen them man. All she would've needed to peg his sexuality with humiliating accuracy would've been a second-hand description of the scraggly beard, the baggy old clothes, the scuffed sandals.

But, really, on second thought, sweet little Shannon was not the Whore of Babylon. She was not scarlet and gold and purple; she was sweet and little and all light brown. It was just Sam's ill-considered, facile, sour-grapes misogyny that made the image of the Whore of Babylon spring momentarily to his mind, that's all. Though, something from the New Testament would be a nice image for someone so nicely Catholic and Irish as Shanny. Sam had even heard that Shanny and her big sister constituted the renegade portion of an otherwise virulently Old Testament-style Protestant clan.

So they drove some more, through so-called "mountains"--more like piles of dirt, at least compared to the first mighty upsurges, from the glass-flat western surfaces behind Sam's padded shoulder, of the huge Rocky Mountains. Hip Colorado slunk up among those mountains; while down and back east here it was all flat and Kansas-like, Kansoid. Kanorado is what people called it.

Up in the foothills of those giant mountains he had a congenital Marxist pal, name of Axelrad, Sam's own little prep school buddy. Axelrad was on sabbatical from the University of Chicago or someplace, and hiding with a bunch of other weird academic types behind a duck blind, doing archaeological or anthropological stuff, or something. (Peeping out at whom or what?) Sam was about due to bring wine to Axelrad, to appease his long-term conscience. He had tormented the boy in high school, so he must bring him wine for the rest of their lives.

In the meantime, Sam was preparing spiritually for the big showdown with the bouncer. Shannon was showing him America's Largest Oak Tree. "Championchip," she said, winging a root beer can at it. And they drove past her foul-mouthed uncle's popcorn farm. "Popcorn's m'life," she said, mimicking her uncle's orking hick voice. "What a dipwad."

They went gathering arrowheads in the sole remaining virgin forest between the Rockies and the Mississippi River. Sam whistled the Gymnopedies softly--a regular date. Shannon was being nice to the condemned man. She let him lift her up bodily onto a rock so they could hug chin-to-shoulder in the fully frontal, fully human way. They kissed each other in the oblique Kanorado light, and kissed once again. One bona-fide regular date, and Sam was on foot now, exercising.

"I've got the energy inside me," he told himself. "All I need is to touch it off somehow."

But the sight of tilled fields stretching eastward clear to the curvature of the planet began to take a strangely terrifying effect on Sam, and he squeezed his small disciple until she squeaked. The clouds were too white, too high up and too huge. Two of them managed to span the mountainless sky, and Sam felt dizzy as if he were at the bottom of a skyscraper looking up, imagining the whole works teetering in the wind.

They could just barely hear the tornado/air raid siren receiving its monthly workout at the convent in the purple foothills of Cheyenne Mountain, where Shanny's big sister Poly-something lived.

Shannon said, "I think he'll come at you straight on. He's not a chicken shit. He won't shoot you in the back or anything, probably."