Lost Pages from The Open Curtain
Lost Pages from The Open Curtain
I.
As far as I have been able to ascertain—and at this point my understanding of Rudd grows temporarily dim—he travelled the first few miles on foot. Just as he had done as a boy, he passed the cemetery his father was buried in, his feet beginning to ache as he walked out along State Route 89, along the shoulder where the gravel was fine, almost powdery. Hardly himself, but this time no policeman to pick him up and direct him along his way. It must have taken two, perhaps three, hours to walk to Springville, coming over the hill and down past the drive-in, past the grocery store, the town hall, and then back out of town again, the houses thinning into gardens and then to larger fields. A gradual curve and a run upslope to the four sorry streets of Mapleton, then more fields, only fields for a time. And then, walking or hitching rides as he could, a trudge up into the mountains, perhaps staying for as long as he could on the dirt road that ran beside the river and then scrambling up the hillside to the highway above. Slowly winding up the mountain, turning right and downslope to level ground and past the remnants of Thistle, flooded out several years before when the dam burst: houses still visible at the bottom of the water, the hillside a slide of mud, the bark stripped off the older trees. An old Cadillac smashed athwart a now-dead oak. Past nearby farms and ranches, through Birdseye and Fairview, Mount Pleasant and other misnomers. Then Ephraim—college town, county seat, more turkeys living there than humans (even counting the human dead)—sleeping one night or perhaps two or perhaps none at all in the tall dry grass edging the road’s shoulder. Drinking alkaline-heavy water from horsepumps or Rainbirds, or from the river when there was a river, or from the bathroom taps of gas stations. Food as he could beg it or fruit stolen from orchards or plain and simple fasting, The Lord’s Gift of Hunger, as his mother used to call it before she decided she was done being his mother.
It makes a good enough story, explains enough that we can go on. Yet perhaps it happened another way. Perhaps it was plain and easy, with little hardship—picked up almost immediately by a Snow college student just finished with a weekend spent with her boyfriend in Provo, coming back to Ephraim for Monday’s classes, alone or with friends, in a white Ford van, in a red Dodge Mustang, fill in the details.
Or perhaps a trucker—though less common on Route 89 than I-5, there were still a few, and a few surely willing to risk giving a ride to a young and potentially deranged man.
Or more likely a farmer or a rancher, a series of ranchers or farmers, each one willing to give Rudd a lift down the road to the end of their spread, either for the temporary company or because they were cautious about letting anyone walk the edge of their land. Perhaps to the end of their acreage or even farther, far enough to find a cup of coffee, if he, Mormon but not Mormon, was drinking coffee by that time. And then more walking, seven dusty miles from Ephraim to Manti.
In Manti, the Mormon temple on the town’s edge, but also, in the middle of town, a polygamist splinter group in a downtown storefront, Church of the Firstborn, an eagle with widespread wings painted in gold on the window glass. Here, there are scattered memories, like emblems, some of them perhaps even real, gaps between. Knowing Rudd, knowing in particular Rudd’s fascination for his self-murdered bigamous father, I can imagine a sojourn for a time in Manti, among the Firstborn, perhaps living closely with them, groomed for participation in their enterprise—though as a rule, they’re much keener on recruiting women. He is given a room in the back of someone’s house, allowed to sleep in the garage, allowed a few weeks on someone’s couch in exchange for helping with the garden or reslatting the shed out back. A job is arranged for him—perhaps shoveling manure at the turkey farms seven miles North, back in Ephraim. He commutes each day with a passel of polygamists in the wooden slat-sided bed of an old Chevy. He is encouraged to stay, a daughter is offered to entice him into the faith and either he accepts and then reneges or never accepts at all. But in any case, he soon gives all up and is moving South again, down toward Mexico, in search of his half-brother.
I could make all that up, generate a life around it, provide dramatic moments, show development, suggest changeand by so doing work around to some sort of epiphany and ultimately salvation, make from the raw material that is Rudd a moral tale that seems relevant and significant. It would be a good story, but it would have nothing to do with the truth. The truth is, Rudd is, for more than a few months, largely absent from himself. He just simply isn’t there, is only occasionally present to a degree which will engrave itself upon his memory. But for the most part, his memory retains no more than a series of scattered objects, detached from their worlds. Only seldom is there a cohesive instance, a cohesive day. From which one might gather that Rudd is in fact falling apart. When in fact the opposite is the case. He is just beginning to come together again.
I’ll tell it like he would want me to do, tell it not too far slant from how the story has been told so far. Which is to say, as if objectively, but cycled through a skull, the supposed neutrality hardly neutral at all, hardly even a conceit. What one sees is not always what is there, but what the skull perceives. Reality is subsidiary to perception. I will give his bits and pieces, forgo the attempts to postulate between the gaps, offer his version of the world. For who am I to do otherwise?
II.
Consciousness came back to him in fits and starts, a knowledge that he was coming some time before an awareness of the world around him. He was, he came to realize, in some sort of small terminal, in a small waiting room, the walls of a white plaster streaked with dust. He felt groggy. In one of his hands was a filthy paper sleeve. There was blood on the back of his knuckles and his clothing was rank with sweat. He parted the sleeve to find a bus ticket tucked inside. Price, UT, it said, under point of origin, El Paso, TX under destination.
He stood and stumbled the perimeter of the waiting room until he found a bathroom. Inside, he regarded his face in the polished tin sheet that served as a mirror, saw a man that looked for all intents and purposes like a bearded version of himself, despite pocks in the tin whorling the face.
He washed the blood off the back of his hands, washed his face as well. The hair on his chin and jaw felt strange. Taking off his shirt, he splashed water onto his chest, his arms, dried himself with paper towels. He blocked the drain with a wadded paper towel, washed his shirt as best he could with the powdered soap from the dispenser. Wringing the shirt out, he flapped it about in the air to dry.
Eventually, he put the damp shirt back on, went back into the waiting room. There was a ticket window in one wall, a middle-aged woman in it, hair dyed a pale yellow. She was reading a paperback, her glasses on a chain.
“Excuse me,” he said to her. “Can you tell, is this Texas?”
“You already asked me that,” she said, without looking up. “It’s not.”
“Could you tell me then, is this Price?”
“You already asked me that too.”
He stood looking at her. “I did?” he said.
“A while ago,” she said. She tucked her index finger between the pages, folded the book closed around it. She looked at him over the top rim of her glasses, head still bent down. “You don’t remember?”
“I don’t remember what you told me.”
“Look, mister,” she said, “first you come buy a ticket off me and then ten minutes later you’re back to ask what town this is? When you just bought the damn ticket? And then ten minutes after that you’re back asking the same question all over again? What’s wrong with you?”
“So, this is Price, is it?”
“I want you to go sit in your chair,” she said, rising from her own chair and bringing her face closer to the glass. “Go back over and sit and wait for the bus to come. I don’t want you coming over here again.”
He went back to where he had been sitting. There was, he realized, a canvas bag under the seat. Pulling it out, he placed it on the chair next to him. Perhaps it was his, he thought. He looked around to see if anyone was watching him. Nobody was. He unzipped it.
Inside, a pile of clothing he did not recognize as his own. A wristwatch, which he took out and put on his wrist. His driver’s license, which he put in his pants pocket. An eelskin wallet, empty, the lining torn out of it. A new road map of Mexico. I’m going to Mexico, apparently, Rudd thought. Lael is there. At the bottom of the bag, a loose wedding ring, a single solitaire—Lyndi, he remembered, Where’s Lyndi?
#
Zipping the bag back up, he went to the pay phone, picked up the receiver. He searched his pockets for change, found none. He dialed collect.
“Lyndi,” he said, when she accepted charges. “Hi. Why aren’t you here?”
“I want you to tell me where you are,” said Lyndi evenly.
He looked around at the blank walls of the waiting room. There were no signs. There was a bus now outside, its driver standing beside it, lighting a cigarette. He could hear faintly, he now realized, the throb of its engine through the door. “Price, I think.”
“Price,” she said. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said, still looking at the bus. He could not tell where it was going. He looked at his wristwatch but the time didn’t seem right to him. He looked at the station clock, above the ticket window, and found that it gave a different time entirely.
“Listen to me, Rudd,” she said. “Rudd? Where have you been the last months?”
“Has it been months?” he said. “That long?”
“There’s something I need to ask you,” she said. “Something serious. Not over the phone. I need you to come home. Do you think you can do that?”
He did not know what she was talking about. How had it been to be married to her, he wondered, and why had he left? There was something wrong with him, she was saying, which might be true, but how would she know what and then what to do about it?
Was he still there? she was asking. Was he?
“No,” he said.
“No?” she said. “No what?”
“I can’t come there,” he said. He watched the driver finish his cigarette, blunt the butt against the sole of his shoe. He stretched, then climbed up the stairs and into the bus.
“Why not?” said Lyndi.
“I’m out of money.”
“Are you calling because you’re out of money?” she asked. “Stay there,” she said. “I’ll send someone to get you.”
“Lyndi,” he said, staring at the bus. “I have to go. Lael’s waiting.”
“What?” she said, her voice shrill. “Lael? Rudd, where are you going?”
He let the receiver fall and shouldering the bag went out the waiting room doors, into the blare of sun beyond.
#
The land was drying up, the soil grown sandy. He pressed his forehead against the bus window, felt at once the air conditioning blowing up alongside the window and the way the glass was heated by the sun outside. He saw two small white crosses to the side of the road, almost hidden in sage. The unfurled tread of a tire, flopped atop the corrugated strip of blacktop meant to awaken drivers drifting off the road. Posts topped with white and yellow reflectors, metal, holes all the way up. Mile markers, telephone poles. The corrugated strip gone and replaced by fine gravel a yard wide, soon taken over by weeds. He licked his lips. Frequent high winds, a sign read. A running plainwire fence, two barbed topwires. He followed the fence mentally, its regular rhythm, until suddenly it turned a right angle and veered away, uphill.
They stopped at a rest area and he got out, looked at the map, listened to the weather report (hot, dry) coming from a hidden speaker. He went into the bathroom, was confronted by a burnished steel mirror with three bulletholes in it, flies turning on its surface. He heard the bus start outside, hurried to climb aboard, made his way down the aisle, squeezing past a smiling man and back into his seat. They started back up, slowly merging onto the highway.
A small metal silo with the roof punched in, the word Sioux on the side. Fuel 24 Hours. A tumbledown, abandoned barn. A just harvested field, bare except for circles of uncut grain around a series of telephone poles cutting diagonally across the field. A Volvo, passing on the right, on the shoulder, with two bikes on its roof. A twenty-foot Pace Arrow pulling a Subaru. Tractor-trailers of all kinds. The road creased with drizzle-lines of tar, to fill old cracks. The blur of an empty antifreeze jug, left half-crushed on the roadside. Giant wheeled watering machines, some straight lines of pipe with wheels between, others anchored in the middle to turn an acres-wide circle. Hay covered in billowing white plastic, a ramshackle plank fence, Next Exit 7 Miles, a distant radio tower.
He closed his eyes, slowly opening them again to follow the dip and rise of the telephone wires outside. The man in the seat next to him reached out, touched his arm.
“Can I ask what you’re looking at?” the man asked.
Rudd squirmed around in his seat. The man was heavy-set and slightly puffy, his hair slicked back, his cheeks full and cherubic. He was wearing a shirt with pearl buttons, the word Repent embroidered over one of the pockets.
“Do you want the window?” asked Rudd.
The man shook his head. “Just desert, right?”
Rudd nodded.
The man nodded back, stuck his hand out. It took Rudd a moment to realize the man intended for him to shake it. “Bud,” said the man. “Bud Henry.”
“Rudd,” said Rudd.
“Where are you heading?” Bud asked.
Rudd took out his ticket, looked at it. “It says El Paso.”
“El Paso’s home,” said Budd. “I’m just back from the minister’s conference.”
It took a minute to register. Rudd nodded, nervously smiled.
“We got drunk on the spirit,” Bud volunteered. “We were weaving about feeling His power. He’s like electricity.”
“I grew up Mormon myself,” said Rudd.
The man grinned eagerly, smiled. “We’re all God’s children, more or less. Do you mind if I ask a question or so, Rod?”
“Umm,” said Rudd.
“Rodney, do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior?”
“Who?”
“If you have to ask, it means the answer is no. Rodney, I want to share something with you.”
“—No,” Rudd said quickly. “I mean, I do have one. I’m just a little hard of hearing.”
Bud broke into smiles. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s just beautiful. Will you pray with me, brother?”
“Pray with you?”
The man started to bow his head, reached out for Rudd’s hand.
“Come on,” the man said. “I can teach you. Don’t be shy.”
“I’m praying to Jesus right now,” Rudd claimed. “I’m always praying to him in my heart. I don’t need to pray aloud. My whole life is a prayer.”
“Let’s shout our thanks to the Lord,” said the man, forcibly taking Rudd’s hand. “Let’s shout it out.”
“But I don’t want to shout it out,” said Rudd, and when the man began with his Praise Jesus and his Holy Jesus and Strike me Lord, Rudd turned to face the window again. His face felt hot and he realized he was sweating. It was like being in Church again, but worse—in Church there was none of this hard sell, no loud shoutings. But like Church there was a script. If you didn’t say the lines they wanted you to say, the script went on as if you had said them anyway.