Routes Read online

  Corn Dog is naturally wholesome. He remembers how Apple Jack McCool felt separate and out of place in his aunt’s house because he had to dress civilized, eat civilized, and sleep in a proper bed. But there were the good times, too, living in a polite house, as when a fresh apple pie, all sugar and spice, came out of his Aunt Sally’s oven. “Thanks, Whitman, but it’s all right, I can take it. Bake me until I’m done, Pop.”

  Hot Springs and Whitman take him to the ticket office and buy him a roundtrip, to the end of the line and back. “Kid,” says Hot Springs, “when you don’t know the way, look inside of yourself, I’ll be there.” Then they both kiss him goodbye and leave him penniless, standing at the station with an awkward roll of blankets, a packet of silver jewelry within them, waiting for the train.

  Riding the iron horse Corn Dog comes half circle from the style of life he lived in the spruce woods where all the trees and rocks and animals were his brothers. Golden as he is, the racially mixed boy is an underdog in white society. Whereas animals earn their daily bread with hunger, the average Freewayfarer does so with spite. The trainmen try to make the half-breed’s life hell. Even though his ticket is full fare they make him sit on his blanket roll with the coal stokers, there between the locomotive and the coal car. In a way he is happy to be relegated to the dusty bin away from the weird mineral oil and lime smells of the palefaces in the coaches. In the coal car he feels free to kick off his shoes, take off his jacket, loosen his tie and pull the starched collar from his neck. He makes friends with the coal tenders and doesn’t need anyone to twist his arm to do some stoking, anything that will get him back on his own two feet faster. The two stokers, Feeny and Mike, seem not to mind the noise, but the crunching chewing sound of the wheels on the rails make him squirm; and when the train stops, the shrill caterwaul, the high-pitched sounds of the brakes, make him grit his teeth and shake in a fit. Over and over he asks the Pop in his mind, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? When are we going to get there?”

  When the big brazen boy finally does get there he’s coated with black soot, the buttons of his jacket are mismatched, his shoes are on the wrong feet, his collar is half off and his tie is down the back of his neck.

  In the City by the Bay his amazement and discomfort increase. He never imagined the front of the world would look like this! The sorcerer’s apprentice is not the least bit street wise and his bewilderment leads him off the curb to stand out straight and tall amid the automotive machines that dash around the city. He has to dodge carloads of angry palefaces whose horns honk like geese, and a huge boat of a car, the size of an iron horse carriage, that has cables on its roof, travelling down the two metal rails he’s standing between.

  “Get out of the way, you savage brat. Do you want to get killed or something?” The motorman says to the errant pedestrian. “And take a bath while you’re at it.”

  It seems to the soot-faced young warrior that he has entered a war zone. “Now I see what you mean by the front, Pop,” he tells the Hot Springs in his mind. Then he lets loose, out with a loud war whoop and down with his itchy britches. He flashes his brazen boy ear of corn at the motorists, then picks up his bundle, and defying traffic coming in both directions, runs around the roadsters, bounds up the hood of one, leaps to the hard top of another and scuffs it up with his shoes. Before anyone can lay a hand on him he runs down the track, his moon out toward the cable car, jumps to the other side of the street and disappears into an alley.

  The Pop in his mind catches up with him on the side streets of the City by the Bay. “Kid, keep your ear under wraps, will you? Never show it on the streets.”

  Corn Dog takes the streets of least resistance and finds the bay at the bottom of the hill. According to his teacher’s instructions he will find uncle Virgil on the wharf, a place they say is as pretty as a post card. The gallery offers native craft to the tourists who frequent this picturesque spot where the fishermen bring in their cold catch from the Deep Blue Sea. Corn Dog, however, shudders when he passes a stout ship with huge steel spears and sharp blubber knives. In subsequent conversations with George, the moose told him what he heard from a pigeon family, reliable sources, that whales, the hugest animals on earth, once free out there in the sea to spout it up, are shot with spears, easily and quickly reduced into parts by the sharp white man, and melted down in heavy trying pots to make lamp oil. He thinks of how peacefully Yahoo went into the light, how his soul added to it, he wonders if the same is so for the souls of the murdered whales.

  At the end of the street he finds the Post Gallery. Virgil is an older man, bald with a white pockmarked face. He wears wire rim spectacles, bifocals, on his deep blue eyes.

  Any uncle of Whitman’s is an uncle of Corn Dog’s. “I’ve been expecting you, Corn Dog.” Virgil welcomes the boy, and receives the shipment of craft from him, the top blanket coal-dusted but the rest intact.

  He finds a letter wrapped around the smaller packet of Whitman’s jewelry.

  Dear Virg,

  Here is Corn Dog, the boy I told you about last year. Leave him out in the wild, in the depth of winter, the height of summer, for nine days, ninety, or nine hundred, I guarantee he can do it standing on his head. But fence him in for a nine hour work day and I’ll bet he’ll find his real limits. He talks a blue streak to the animals. That and three cents will get him on the trolley. I say to Whitman that there are two sides to every craft, let the Kid go out and earn a living, but, you know Whitman, he wants to be soft on the Kid. He thinks it’s all right for him to spend his whole life running around the woods barefoot, climbing trees, swimming in the river and reading story books. I say he’s going to need a little more character than that if he expects to survive, and with the slow way things are back here in these woods he’s never going to get the message until it’s too late. See that he does. Teach him the value of a dollar, will you? Hope to see you next spring.

  Love,

  Hot Springs

  Too Much Civilizing

  The crafts go to work. The bundle Corn Dog brought includes two blankets by him, eleven by Hot Springs, and from Whitman six turquoise inlaid silver bracelets, six necklaces to match, and fourteen rings. Virgil displays them all in the windows to the world.

  On Hot Springs’ advice Virgil tries to make the boy feel at home around the shop and acquaint him with the streets in the neighborhood, but he instantly sees what Hot Springs means. Corn Dog’s legs twitch in his trousers, itchy for a long run in a wide open space.

  The stir crazy sorcerer’s apprentice is wise enough to know that Virgil is not Whitman’s actual blood uncle, but some hierophant in the lodge, a dwelling which has extensions out of the spruce woods, and as such Virgil must be treated with respect, as a teacher, the same as he treats Pop when he goes on about anything and everything. The boy grins and bears the excruciating pains of self-consciousness every time his uncle has him wait on a customer. To be sure, Virgil puts Corn Dog through his paces as Hot Springs bid, but, every chance he gets, after work or when the store is not busy, whenever there are no lessons to be learned about the annoyances of modern life, like Whitman he leans Corn Dog away from the practical side of things, toward fairy tales. Like many a white man, Virgil’s own near death experience was from too much civilizing. As a boy he nearly died as a result of a smallpox vaccination that backfired. One foot in heaven’s door, the land he saw made real estate in this world seem pale indeed.

  At bedtime the boy can sit still for hours, a quiet body, listening to stories such as the goose that laid the golden egg or the quest for the king fisher’s dish. He looks forward to times when business is slow and Virgil expounds on the value of these myths.

  “What’s most important is finding the golden fleece in here,” Virgil points to the brazen boy’s chest. “How things come out, their appearance, is secondary.”

  Inner truth notwithstanding, Corn Dog is in need of redressing. Still showing signs of coal tar from his train ride, of threadbareness from his trolley dodging, and now
the restless way he pulls on them, fidgeting around the shop, the clothes Hot Springs and Whitman bought him in Zion are thoroughly in need of replacement.

  The trial by collar and tie is over. Virgil tells him to take his pick from around the Post, which has a selection of finely handmade Home of the Brave style clothing. If he sees anything he likes, he can have it.

  The son of Liberty Star, hardly the vain type, looks around the gallery and goes for peanuts. Hanging on a back hanger he finds an old pair of wool pants and a gray horsehair shirt to match, items which the humanitarian Virgil took as trade-in from an old brave who wanted a new look.

  “I was saving those for the poor house, Son. Come on, you can do better than that.” Virgil takes the boy by the hand and shows him a wrapper, an over-long sleeveless vest made out of the soft deep pile from the chest of the Golden State mountain ram, and some fine buckskin britches and soft boots.

  Corn Dog takes the wrapper and feels how soft it is on his shoulders. Virgil marvels at how the color brings out the gold in his smooth muscular chest.

  “Now the pants.”

  The boy is about to object to them on the grounds that an animal’s rights have been violated for the sake of human vanity and profit, but on second thought, the idea that uncle Virgil might put him back in the same scratchy pants and starchy collar his guardian sent him in, he reasons comfortable clothes as a necessity of life. The pants are snug, they hug his hips and thighs like a glove, but comfortably without squeezing at all. The legs stretch so he can move.

  On the inside he remains the same, naive, unphilosophical, introspective, in tune with animals, vegetables, minerals, spirits, symbols, fairy tales, other worlds, mysteries, everything but people. But on the outside, to anyone who sees him, he is the spitting image of one sweet sixteen-year-old buck looking for a good time.

  One day, while Virgil is out, Donald, an interior decorator, comes by the gallery to search for treasures to spruce up a town house. Corn Dog takes him to the rug department, and wants to show him some wall hangings, but Donald, waxing hot about the boy’s big chest, starts making small talk.

  “Virgil never told me he had an out-of-town nephew. What’s your name, big boy?”

  “Corn Dog.”

  “Delightful.”

  “Oh, and I’m not his real nephew, sir. I’m his nephew in philosophy.” The innocent underdog assumes everyone is in on the sorcery lodge.

  “Well, Corn Dog,” Donald says, running his fingers through the boy’s deep pile lapels, “the classical case is for students of philosophy to be lovers of wisdom first and their fellow men second. Why don’t you come on up to my place and see me sometime?”

  Corn Dog is splendid, but this is not to say that he is gay, as we suspect Pop and Whitman to be when they take themselves to their room and practice their secret handshakes and their magic bear hugs.

  Of course he has noticed the all-maleness of the lodge and wondered about it. He knows the love of Hot Springs, Whitman and now uncle Virgil is free of any sort of venereal itch, just as they all have seemed impartial to the direction of his own hankerings. When he taps his own horn he gets hungry for the female touch, a thing he hasn’t had since the old hens clucked over him when he was an infant. An awkward subject to discuss straightforwardly with Uncle Virgil, Corn Dog fares better with the Pop in his mind when he asks for enlightenment.

  “Kid, there’s nothing wrong with brotherly love, providing you’ve got the taste for it. In this lodge we don’t discriminate, you can be white, you can be gold, you can be blue. Whether you’re a ladies man or a red-blooded homosexual doesn’t matter either. It takes a good man to make a good woman and a good sorcerer has to be both. Now don’t stick around this Post waiting for them to come to you, you’ve got to go out if you want to meet some girls.”

  Corn Dog refuses Donald’s invitation and instead goes out to see what he can see. Right down the street from the gallery is Kane’s Top Hat Club, a jazzy night spot just off the wharf that attracts a dizzy young crowd, and plenty of girls who flaunt their scorn for conventional clothes and morals.

  The scene out in front of the club is hectic and makes him stand back and watch from the sidelines. Taxicabs and cars pull up and girls and boys emerge clicking their heels on the sidewalk and taking snorts of bathtub gin from silver flasks. In the bustle near the entrance he brushes shoulders with a pretty blond-haired girl wearing a loose red dress made out of fringy satin and sparkling beads, and an Indigen style head band with three feathers fixed into it. Her smile turns his nerves to jelly. The warrior is shy; he must summon all his courage to walk through the entrance, big frosted glass doors, with the image of a top hat and cane cut into them.

  He is so terrified that he is more relieved than disappointed when two big men stop him as he tries to go through the barway. “Hold it right there, Geronimo. We’re not so sure we like the looks of you. You look as if you might cause trouble. Besides there’s a three dollar minimum. Do you have any money in those tight pants of yours?”

  Corn Dog is lonely as a wolf and shy as a lamb. He is also penniless as a poor house mouse. He turns around and goes back out the way he came in.

  For a while he loiters around in the alley next to the club and talks to a couple of flat-chested girls his own age. Not too pretty or too bright, they flutter their false eyelashes, shake their beads at him, and want him to pay their way in. When he says he has no money they leave him alone, to sink back into the alley. He sits on the steps to the backstage door and listens to the band inside. There’s a window open in the kitchen and music pours through clear as a bell. The jazz he hears makes him feel close to the father he has never known. It resounds within him, winding lines that never repeat exactly but unravel with endless variation. The music gives his imagination free reins. The blues in his blood cry out like Liberty Star, oh, lonesome me.

  A shaman’s dreams come when he is widest awake. His present can be influenced by his future. A brief vision of a girl with a perfect face and figure crosses his mind. At the same time the sound of the music becomes porous and he hears faint echoes in the saxophone of the whistling and in the piano of the magnetic bells that called him in Zion. He closes his eyes and tries to concentrate, using techniques Pop taught him to bring the vision into focus, but as he goes to embrace the figure, kiss the face, he finds it recedes to infinity, the prescience becomes fractured, fragmented, out of whack.

  By the end of the summer all thirty-nine trinkets he brought are sold. The partners have netted three hundred and thirty-one dollars. It’s almost an even three-way split, that’s one ten for uncle Virgil, one ten for Hot Springs and Whitman, and one ten for Corn Dog.

  “Somebody’s share is one eleven,” says Virgil, and he tosses the single dollar bill to the boy.

  Since the day he threw the buck into the fire Corn Dog has seen only worn down old coins. Hot Springs, an Almighty Buck worshipper, was reluctant to trust him with paper money again, until he had the experience of earning it for himself. Now he once more sees the bill with the great white father on the front, his reward for a summer of tough work. This time he knows enough not to burn it, instead he turns it over and looks at the back. The etchings there capture his imagination more than the elevenfold tens.

  Virgil is extravagant and wants to take the boy out to eat at his favorite restaurant on the wharf, Al Dante’s. “Come on, son, put that money away and let’s go out to see how the other half eats.”

  Now that he has money Corn Dog can see what pockets are really for. Moreover his mind runs back to Hot Springs’ lecture about symbolism and the Almighty Dollar. Now that he is older, his understanding has matured, his appreciation for symbolism has ripened. He is surprised to find a love of money in his heart. On the way to the restaurant he cannot ignore the rapid pulse of the Freeway, the big Buck, beating there at his thighs, in his pocket. While waiting for the traffic light to change he takes the single dollar out and looks at it some more.

  “Don’t go showing your mon
ey on the street, Son. A man’s money should be as private as his personal parts. It’s in very poor taste to flaunt it in public.”

  In Al Dante’s Virgil grabs at the big basket of garlic bread and breaks into a bottle of red wine. Smelling food the inner Pop wakes up and joins him. But Corn Dog remains wrapped up in a purer form of energy. The gracefully engraved ticket that affords the staff of life compels him much more than the novelty of eating in a restaurant. And since Virgil forbade him to take it out, the money’s power has shot up from a simple flame burning a hole in his pocket to an all-engulfing inferno.

  “Son,” says Virgil, pointing to the appetizers on the tray, “don’t you want to taste these clams? They’re really good.”

  “I’m sure they are, Uncle, but I’d rather take the bill out and look at it again.”

  Virgil looks around. Everyone in the place seems to be absorbed in their food. He shrugs, “Sure, okay, so long as you don’t go showing it off.”

  Once again Corn Dog looks at the mysterious backside of the Buck. He can see where it says “the great seal” but he doesn’t see any resemblance to the sea mammals he sees sunning themselves on the rocks around the bay. Like the Almighty Buck, the Great Seal is a symbol not a varmint.

  “Pop, everyday I see more of what you mean when you say that the tongue of the paleface is forked.” He says to the Hot Springs within, but that inner well of wisdom wants no part of speech while there is food on the table. The Hot Springs within is too busy winding spaghetti around his fork, and adjusting the suction he needs to get more in his mouth to even hear him. Corn Dog must turn his question over to Uncle Virgil. “Uncle, here’s a pyramid with a single eye above it. Around it are some words I don’t understand.”

  “The words you don’t understand are Ancient Imperiano,” Virgil explains, “to make them seem extra official. Basically they say that Divine Providence has favored the building of the Freeway, and that this is the beginning of a new order of things, a system where power will be invested in the people. It’s not all smoke and mirrors. The founding fathers, those entrusted with the seal’s creation, knew something about the processes of illumination, as well as political revolution and human rights. They wrote the old adage ‘do to others as you would have them do to you’ into law in the Carte Blanche in plain Inklish. That and all the other official founding documents, including the unit of currency, are stamped with this emblem of government. Now, the pyramid symbolizes strong foundation and long standing-ness; the single eye above it represents the mind’s eye, individual and collective, free to judge what is worthwhile and what is not. At the same time it is a representation of Providence, the Divine Nature that looks out for all of us. What’s behind the dollar, taking care of you in this world is the eye of God. You notice the seal has two faces. Alongside the pyramid is an eagle with another message from the Eternal City in his beak.”