How much longer until we’re there yet, again…but even after having reached the other shore, this heifer’s not too big into conversation — remind Him, not all of them are; no offense meant, if silently taken. Ben without blessing dismounts from its back, clumsily, insulted as much — which the heifer interprets as a sign now to switch. Upon its two hindlegs it hurls itself up on His own back, scarpimply, hairy itself, a huffy hump stooped. Ben gives a groan under its weight, it soon settles, tips, weaves lanes forsaken, grazed of their traffic, the heifer steadying itself with its hindquarters to hooves wrapped around waist, held by the bulge of His motherly hips. He walks on, trudges, a slipsy route down the untrafficked interstate shoulder — its pines and within them, the myriad, secret sandy paths linking graves: the trails and paths dug between Turnpike and Parkway, between Expressway and local — them highstepping over and around the thrown tires and trash, then, back to the blacktop, slowing up on the turns, yellowarrowed reflectors they dazzle the eye, the forehead’s headlight, holes of uprooted mile markers set for the occasional stumble, the sharp clovens of His burden digging a urinary sting into His kidneys, its hindquarters pried loose from their hold under the lungs at the ramps on and lost off He uses as turn signals, alerting with hair and hoof their presence to no one around. Though Ben’s carrying, the heifer still directs, navigates its own load, leads as always in its snouting of lefts, its horning out rights, though it seems not quite sure where they’re headed, exactly — suspicious, this transference of bestial blame, as if a sin offering to the subliminal…what He needs, what wants, where the feet feel to walk: how this is beginning to be familiar, intersections these interstices familial, then known. Route 70what. The Mall. Ellisburg, what’s it called, Ellisberg, King’s Highway. Names, and numbers, too, these codes born of area, the zip that doth zone; the network, its treelike ringings and reticulations of tar, the grid wide and open, the grin of the turns and the looparound smiles, even the smirk of oneways — all the sudden and happy logic of connectivity, of togetherness…a gathering, more communicative than most, not taken but granted. Now how it’s all that old comfort made cold, still loving if saddened, a family there for each other if lately forced empty, forlorn; feels as if there’s been a death in the immediate parenting, a hearthloss, a graving of home. You can take the boychick out of Joysey, but you can’t, forget it. Take Joysey out of, you know. Wishniak Hill it’s called, a city of no hills, only plain, the inexorable flat — and then, above that eponym of a hill that doesn’t exist, that fat, juicy Wishniak itself, a cherry beckoning, gleaming high and yet outwardly impotent, a stormy and fiery sun.
All that — with the unexpected on top.
Ben loses Himself to memory found, rediscovered…the trike on the lawn, the umbrellad heap of patio furniture, denuded rhododendrons amid an ashen pyre of cedar split fallen — hollycroft groves the sharp of their leaves scarring the wind, remember, too, the poisoning balm of their berries in season…it helps to forget mind more immediate, that and the kidneys and the spleenstrangled stomach, His raw arms and legs and the spine between that’s bent and begging there on its vertebral knees for realignment, a shvitz, perhaps, followed by a dip at the Development pool, Israel’s Sunday hour or so at the Rec Center and then the crack of the chiropractor who’d once bought down the block for his daughter: reverie, idyll, distracts, diverts, it’s all coming back to Him now — until a mensch emerges from a unit showhousey spacious, if a model dilapidated, or as yet unredone, then hobbles over to face Him, and His load, the hefted heifer.
My, how he’s aged.
No animals allowed, says the Gatekeeper, it’s policy, sorry, and he fingers thought at his newly grown beard, infested with nitpickings and lice.
We already have enough of our own.
He heaves the heifer up to His shoulders to better steady His stand, and the thing — it begins a graze at His hair as if mocking.
Not in front of strangers, you schmuck.
What about me?
What about you? is what the Gatekeeper asks, having quit scratching his pocks, taking from his mouth the cigarette, exhaling his last then snuffing it out with his fingers.
Nu, who — you have any ID?
Ben spits to the ground, just trying to fit in here; as for the heifer, it lows — which serves as a memory of the sirens.
Then you don’t belong here neither, he picks brunch or a grub from his moustache. Sorry, rules are rules. Now stop shtepping me. Tenks.
Tell you what, He says, I’ll give you my ride if you let me in: ten minutes, five, one, all I ask.
Hymn…scratching under shirt at his underarms, hot, picking with smoke-dark nails the hatching eggs of his louse, flicking them a scurry to the ice and the asphalt — you might seem familiar…
