Novel excerpt from All the World Before Them
1970
And so it was that on the morning after commencement—a grand affair in spite of a campus deserted by all but graduating seniors and parents, a day marked
for him by the storm-toss of surprise at winning the Distinguished Student Award in English and anxiety over what was to come—Jamie found himself standing in front of his packed-to-the-gills Galaxie saying good-bye to his subdued father and weepy mother, telling them not to worry, he’d be back soon, just wanted to take a little trip as a sort of graduation present to himself, might never get another chance like this in his life—two weeks on the road utterly alone, utterly free, before he settled down. No one mentioned the draft.
His father shuffled uneasily, a hand occasionally drifting toward Marie’s shoulder, then dropping to his side again, confusion written on his sun-worn, care-worn face. “So where you heading?” he asked to shift the focus from his wife’s crying.
Before Jamie could respond, his mother blurted, “I just don’t see why you have to go right now. Why not come home first—for a few days, at least?”
Ignoring her plea, he met his father’s helpless gaze. “Not sure. Probably Florida.” South was definitely not what he would choose, and he needed to disappear without their knowing where.
“Florida!” his mother blurted. “That far?” She shook her head, turning away, but Jamie could see her slip this revelation into her one-more-thing-to-worry- about file.
Silence hung in the air. “I guess I better get on the road,” Jamie finally ventured.
His father jerked to attention. “Well, send us a postcard from the Everglades, okay?” Trying as always for lightness in the last minutes of parting. “Don’t let the gators get ya!”
Jamie patted his back pocket. “Got it covered. I’m packin’ gator spray.”
Adam smiled, then fished a roll of bills from his pants pocket and held it out. “Consider this a graduation present.” Jamie unrolled the wad and saw five
$100 bills.
“Whoa! What’d you do, sell the farm?”
His father grinned. “Don’t spend it all in one place. It’s from your mother, too.” Jamie turned, and Marie, crying openly, wrapped him in a hug, telling him to come home soon so she could throw a graduation party. “Thanks, Mom,” he said, fighting against a sudden swell in his throat. He extracted himself, shook hands with his father, and crawled into the car’s breathtakingly hot front seat. Starting the engine, he gave a thumbs-up and eased away down the deserted street, feeling suddenly, surprisingly, sad and alone, not daring to check his parents’ shrinking images in the rearview mirror—just lifting his hand blindly out the window to return the waves he knew they’d be offering.
Ten minutes later, he was gliding onto the expressway toward Chicago, his mind a jumble, relieved at being released into himself and yet wishing suddenly that he could go home, head back up this same freeway toward Minnesota like every other summer. The future had caught up with him faster than he had imagined. If only he’d used his time better, living instead of wasting so many idle hours. All my life seems a preparation for something that never happens. This from Yeats, whose life seemed filled to overflowing with poetry, theater, art, politics. If someone like Yeats could say that, what then about his own life? What kind of life could you hope for when you gave up your name, your identity, your whole past?
If he had known when he set out what lay ahead of him, that he would be on the run for five years, eyes flicking into his rearview mirror, watching for cops or government agents and fighting the fear jumping in his stomach, Jamie might well have turned around, gone home, and done his duty like so many others in those times. But heading west on I-80, with the temperature in the black car rising as he crossed into Nebraska, he wouldn’t have admitted to himself that his motives had much to do at all with flight. He saw himself instead as a man on a quest, free at last from the burdens and responsibilities that chained most men down, ready for a life of experience.
Of course, untempered as he was in those days, that quest was born of other people’s thoughts, other people’s words—all in a swirling stew and rising randomly on a fragile line of association as if they might suggest some shape to the chaos, then disappearing again into the miasma of his undisciplined thoughts. Bits of the Beats and ancient philosophers and anti-war activists, lyrics from rock songs, passages from Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, Kazantzakis’s Zorba, and, of course, lines from his beloved Romantics, especially Blake, that revolutionary prone to crazy, golden visions. “Bring me my Bow of burning gold:/ Bring me my Arrows of desire,” he sang as he drove under high, rolling cumulus against a blue, blue sky above the Nebraska plains, “Bring my Spear: O clouds unfold!/ Bring me my Chariot of fire!” And over the hot wind whipping through the open window of his car, “I will not cease from Mental Fight,/ Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:/ Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green & pleasant land.” A call to mental revolution. Changing a country, a whole world, in a long, slow battle for vision fought one mind at a time—that would be his task. He’d left his past and now was free to carry on his own mental fight—not getting stuck, not falling into the habitual round that made you sit up one day and wonder where your life went. If you were moving, on the road, free, you were bound to change—and that couldn’t be anything but good, right?
He aimed for a commune he’d been invited to by a woman at UW, up in the wooded mountains outside Estes Park. Far off the grid, no possibility of chance encounters with police, the perfect place to hide out, and Katy had hinted at a real relationship if he happened her way. But it didn’t take long for the commune to wear as thin as the High Country air. The former pig-tailed honor student and UW cheerleader Katherine Bollas from small-town Vermont had transformed into unwashed, wild-haired, peasant-dressed Sunflower, clearly more interested in the commune’s leader, a skinny guy with matted dreads and bad B.O., than in a draft dodger intent on revolution. And crammed in a longhouse with twenty people perpetually lost in clouds of marijuana smoke and endless, headtripping talk about Ram Dass and the beauty of organic tomatoes struck Jamie as surprisingly like dorm life—though without walls to blunt the sounds of lovemaking in the dark and with less beer.
He lasted two weeks, then bid a surprised Sunflower farewell. “You’re leaving so soon?” she asked, sounding hurt. “We need a farmer like you in the garden!”
“Sorry, but I’ve got to keep moving.” She gave him the kiss he’d dreamed about when she had invited him, and his resolve momentarily wavered. But he ended by crawling into his Galaxie and heading south down the long, mountain road, grateful to be feeling the past slide farther away with each mile. From here on, nobody would know him. He’d be free of his former life and his former self. Completely free.
Hoping to lose himself in the desert after the commune and disappointment with Sunflower, Jamie headed south. In a small, dry-as-dust town not far from Artesia, New Mexico, he struck up a conversation at a gas station with an old, grizzled coot—name of Buck Shurson—who, as it turned out, had just been told he was dying of cancer and was working on repairs to his place so he could sell it. “No kids to leave it to,” he told Jamie over beers on the station’s rickety front porch. His eyes, gray as dimes, narrowed against the bright sun as he studied the sage and yucca stretching to the empty horizon. “All gone to Tucson and Phoenix to get respectable jobs.” The way he said the word “respectable,” like he’d swallowed the tailpiece of a lizard, told Jamie all he needed to know about the relationships between father and sons in that family. “Just need the house and sheds fixed up enough so’s I can leave my wife something when I’m gone,” he went on, as matter-of-factly as if he were speaking about someone else’s fate. Maybe it was the old man’s resemblance to his neighbor back home, Lamar
Barnes, that made Jamie ask the old man if he could use some help. “Well, I reckon I could,” he said. “You ain’t on the run from the law or like that, is you?” Taken aback, Jamie laughed the question off without answering. If Buck saw the truth in his eyes, he didn’t let on. “Wouldn’t matter to me, one way or t’other. Anyways, can’t pay much.”
“Don’t need much,” Jamie said. “Just gas money to get me west to LA.”
Buck’s expression turned sour. “LA! Why the hell you wanna go there? Ain’t nothin’ in California but a buncha weirdo no-counts. Be good riddance when the Big One comes and the whole damn state slides into the ocean, far as I’m concerned.”
Before Jamie could manufacture an answer, Buck took a slug of his beer, then spat it in a long stream into the dust at the foot of the porch. “God damn rat piss’s gone warm already.” He pulled himself up, slammed through the screen door into the station, and returned with two cold ones, which Jamie took to mean he’d been hired. Buck asked him his name, and Jamie, who’d tried his middle name, Ernest, in Colorado but could never remember to answer to it, decided the simpler, the better. “Bill. Bill Jones.”
Buck swigged from the bottle and let out with a deep belch. “Well, okay then, Mr. Bill Jones. Give you two bucks an hour, roof over your head, and all the burritos you can pack away. Deal?” He leaned over and stuck out a thin, callused hand.
Jamie took it, feeling the bones in the narrow fist. “Deal.”
Buck’s place turned out to be the worst excuse for a house he’d ever seen (even worse than Lamar’s!), a low-slung adobe, not much more than a shack. Two dollars an hour wasn’t much, but there was no question of giving the government its share—Buck had no truck with the “gov’mint,” and he’d hired enough illegals over the years that he didn’t give a good goddamn about green cards or social security cards either. His wife, Juanita, a short, tired-looking Mexican woman with long, glistening, black hair, set Jamie up in their sons’ old room, and together she and Buck kept him in food and stories for nearly four months while he learned how to mix adobe, cut sage without surprising a rattler, keep an eye out for scorpions when the work continued after sundown—lessons his years on the farm back in Minnesota had never come close to teaching him. Buck, who seemed to be going downhill by the day, sat hunched in the shade of the porch giving directions, rising only occasionally, pain etched in his craggy features, to give a pointer or show exactly where he wanted the muck slapped on a wall. The old man never said just what kind of cancer he had, and Jamie, figuring that it had to come out eventually, decided to bide his time.
Then, just when the tiny house had nearly moved beyond shack status to presentable and they were laying out plans for the two broken-down sheds, Juanita came into Jamie’s room one night and shook him awake. “Buck’s having a spell,” she murmured tightly. “Can’t get out of bed.” Jamie rushed in to find the old man curled in a ball holding his stomach, looking incredibly small in the tangled sheets. After considerable coaxing, Buck consented to let Jamie carry him out to the car, and with Jamie driving and Juanita whispering to Buck in Spanish as she held his head in her lap, the three of them set out on a mad dash down bumpy dirt roads to the Carlsbad hospital.
At the ER, Jamie helped Buck get checked in, then settled onto a chair next to Juanita in the small, empty waiting room. With nothing but Boy’s Life and Reader’s Digest to read, he spent most of his time trying to keep his mind off Buck by studying the pattern in the wallpaper of the waiting room, a repeated desert scene of a single cactus under which a cowboy perpetually cooked coffee over a fire.
Sometime near dawn, a young, pasty-faced intern with an incongruous New York accent emerged to tell them that Buck was more comfortable now and wanted to see them. “How’s he doing?” Jamie asked, rising and taking Juanita’s arm. The intern ran a hand through his curls, brow furrowing, and began fiddling with the stethoscope draped around his neck. “We won’t know until the tests come back later today.” Juanita’s dark eyes flashed fear.
“Well, what’s your best guess?” he asked.
The intern shuffled and cleared his throat. “I don’t make guesses. But to be honest, it doesn’t look good.” He paused, staring at Jamie as if to pass a message. “The nurse’ll take you. Don’t stay too long.” He spun and disappeared down the hall.
In the ER, Buck lay in a light, paisley hospital gown, tethered to machines and an I.V. bag by cords and tubes, appearing small, almost childlike, without the battered hat, cowboy boots, studded shirt, and worn jeans that Jamie had always seen him in. Juanita let out with a little gasp at the sight, and Buck opened his eyes, smiling weakly. She leaned over and gave him a kiss on his white forehead, and the intimacy of it made Jamie wish that he’d stayed in the waiting room. But as she lifted from the ghostly figure in the bed, Buck waved Jamie to his side. “C’mere.”
Hesitantly, Jamie moved closer as Buck told his wife, “Bring me my pants.” She did as asked and then moved alongside Jamie at the bed. “Get my wallet,” Buck told her, “and take out whatever’s in it.” She slid a fat, battered wallet from the back pocket. “How much’s in there?” he asked. She drew out a wad of bills that surprised Jamie with its thickness and counted silently. “Three hundred fourteen dollars,” she announced.
“Take ten out,” he said to her, then waved in Jamie’s direction, “and give the rest to the kid.” She peeled off two fives and offered the rest to Jamie, who stared at the wad without taking it.
“What are you doing?” he asked, turning to the old man.
Buck’s voice was low but firm. “Take it, and I’ll tell you.” Jamie reluctantly took the money, and Buck waved his wife toward the door. “Girl, you go outside for a bit, okay? The men got something to discuss.” The fear back in her eyes, Juanita nodded and walked out the door without saying a word. “Look,” Buck said when she was gone, “I ain’t sure how much I owe you, but that ought to cover it. She don’t know it yet,” he flicked his chin toward the door, “but looks to me like I ain’t gonna get outta this place. And even if’n I do, the work’s as done as it’s gonna be ’fore I croak.”
“Aw, Buck, you shouldn’t talk like—”
Buck stopped him with a shaky, raised palm. “Don’t even say it. I ain’t got no time for games.” He dropped his hand onto the sheet as if exhausted by the effort. “Look, nobody’s kiddin’ theirselves here. I about reached the end a the road. I want you to take this here money so’s these goddamn snake doctors don’t get it. And then hightail it outta town fast as you can git.” He fixed Jamie narrowly. “I ain’t sure what you’re up to, kid, but I don’t give a good goddamn. Ya give me a hand, did good work, and I owe ya more than that there money. Least I can do is get ya outta here ’fore they come ’round askin’ all sorts a stuff that ain’t their business nohow. We’ll be fine here—fine as we can be, anyway. Sell the house, set the wife up, then sit back, see what happens. My guess is I ain’t got long, and the sooner we get about it, the better.”
Stunned, Jamie stared at the money in his hand and then back at Buck, who flicked his chin toward the door again. “You go on now. Get on out to the home place, throw all your junk in that piece-a-shit car a yours, and hit the road.”
Jamie nodded and pocketed the money, feeling a swell of regret at having to leave this old man who’d taken him in with no questions asked. But he knew better than Buck that it would never do for him to stay and wait out the old man’s passing. Anything that might draw attention would be dangerous. He stared down at the thin figure in the thin gown. “Buck,” he started to say, “you been awful good to me, more than fair—”
But Buck raised that narrow palm at him again. “No need for speeches,” he said sharply. “You done your work like a man. Now I got some work to do ain’t no man can help me with. That’s the facts.” He dropped his hand onto the sheet and closed his eyes, gritting his teeth as if warding off some unseen enemy. “Listen, son. Life ain’t any longer than a spit in the desert. Don’t get to the end of it and wish’t you done something else other than what you did.” A long moment passed, the silence broken only by the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor next to the bed. Then, Buck opened his eyes again and smiled, revealing teeth twisted and darkened by tobacco juice. “Now, go on outta here. And send her in, will ya?”
“Thanks, Buck,” was all Jamie could manage. “Good luck to ya, kid.”
Two hours later, after picking up his gear and racing west toward Arizona, Jamie pulled the car off to the side of the road in the wide desert and got out. Leaving the engine running, he walked through the blasting heat toward an outcropping of red rock the size and shape of a locomotive. Leaning over, he spat on a low, flat spot near one end, watching the spit bubble and shift, turn rapidly smaller, then finally disappear. In a matter of seconds, he couldn’t even see the mark. He raised brimming eyes to the clear sky, the blazing sun leaping and sliding through his tears. “Lord,” he said out loud, “watch over the soul of Buck Shurson. Give him strength to do his work. And me to do mine.” Then, he turned on his heel and in a minute was back in the car, heading west again.
Randall Albers is Professor/Chair Emeritus of Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Former board president of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, he founded the long-running Story Week Festival of Writers in Chicago, received a Columbia College Teaching Excellence Award, was a visiting professor at Bath Spa University and at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and has taught in Florence and Rome. Fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, Writer’s Digest, F magazine, Brevity, Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck, and elsewhere. Two chapters from All the World Before Them have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.