Westward Without Clementine

A Short Story

by Roy Blount, Jr.

SO IT WAS APRIL OF ‘69, my heart was young and full of Clementine, and what was I doing? Could it be that I was driving west without her? Already reduced to remembering?

Yes.

Could it be only, let’s see, forty-two hours since we met? She naked for political reasons, I rescuing her from the forces of order, including slavering dogs, and giving her what I had, my dirty softball shirt? And we ate ice-box pie, were sweet to a handicapped lady, discussed Henry Fonda and Ford Madox Ford, sang an old crypto-erotic hymn together (“I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses“), and fell in love?

Yes.

And she sprang me from jail, and our love grew, and she quit college and I left my job, and we, both of us, were driving away from the religion-ridden, Godforsaken town of Dingler. South Carolina, whence we were both, I thought, eager to escape—cruising off across America together, free as birds, right?

Right.

And then what happened?

She showed what she was made of, is what. Before I knew it, we were heading back toward Dingier, and she was going on about marriage (hey, I was as serious as she was, but) as if she and I were in perfect agreement. We weren’t.

Which is why she was back in Dingler and I was setting off again on our American journey, but alone. I didn’t even know how I could reach her except by calling the offices of her deeply irritating lawyer friend Milam and his jackleg partners Wormsig and Peet.

Breaking up is hard to do by yourself.

Why should the burden all be on me? And here is what I think is the worst thing I can confess: an element of me was thinking, Well, if she’s this intolerant of dissent, I’m well out of this.

I’d tried to get her to see my point of view. She’d gone all hunched and angular and unconducive to being hugged. Might as well have had quills out. Her eyes not the same.

I didn’t even feel like hugging her.

I was mad.

She must be crazy.

I was going to drive west. To Puyallup, Washington.

Where we’d said we were headed together.

I left my job for her! Okay, it was a bad newspaper, but it was a newspaper. How many other jobs are there whose purpose is to tell the unvarnished truth? Even if management wouldn’t let us tell any unvarnished truth, about anything interesting, we knew that we would, by God, if they would only let us. The only thing more American than a job like that is the open road.

If she’d just said something like, “Oh, I know you’ve got your heart set on traveling, but wouldn’t it be more exciting if we made history and love together,”or something.

I felt like hugging her.

Fifteen miles down the highway—JIM’S BAIT. JUST GOOD BAit. AND ORANGE DRINKS. AND SINKERS AND OATS. AND MOTHER’S OAFS— I was thinking, “Oh, Jeeesus.“

I called Milam’s number and Milam answered and I hung up.

Fifty miles down the highway—WELCOME TO BEATTIESVILLE. SEE THE BIGGEST CHAIR IN THE WORLD—I called again and no one answered.

I could see, rationally, that we weren’t meant for each other. Anybody that cold.

Sixty miles down the road I got the number of the only lawyer in Dingler named Peet and called him. No answer. Probably didn’t exist. What kind of asshole would practice law with people named Wormsig and Peet?

Eighty miles down the road I had lunch. At a snake farm that had a big hand-painted sign out front, a big snake saying to a little one with a mouthful, “Junior, stop chewing your food before you swallow it.”

The waitress said to a woman at one of the tables, “Did I think he was good-looking? I could eat his face.”

“Ooo, Zalie,” said the woman the waitress was talking to.

“But he ain’t ever going to be anything but passing through,” Zalie added.

“Well, now, how about Linton? Linton is around.”

“Around is right. But he is so needy-acting. Makes you want to go, ‘Ew.’”

“Oh, I know. Lalina come in like that all the time?”

“Yeyuh. She don’t know what to do withersef now. She’ll come in sevvle times a day. If she wants something she’ll nod when she comes in the door. If she don’t she’ll shake her head.”

“I didn’t hardly see no misery at all before I lost Luther. If I had to go through all that again, Zalie, I think I’d just completely go down.”

I called Wormsig. Milam’s voice answered. Milam probably was Wormsig and Peet.

“I’m trying to get ahold of Clementine Searcy,” I said.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“You know who the fuck this is, asshole,” I said.

“I’ll tell her that,” he said, and hung up.

I woke up that night in a motel bed shuddering. I couldn’t remember shuddering since I was five.

This wasn’t any way to go through life, meeting her naked, boom in love, boom broken up. Shuddering.

America and all her people lay ahead of me to be delved into. West up into the hills I sped, the ground swelling more and more voluptuously under the caress of my tires. No other traffic, just me and the country. A pair of deer ran, starting with a lurching scramble and then flowing swiftly and briefly into an abrupt but seemingly brakelcss stop; stopped to feed in someone’s garden, cropping for a moment perfectly camouflaged except for the twitch of their tails, then lurched again and flowed into the woods as I flowed around a bend and couid see a lake, soft-looking and luxuriously smooth. Its surface, only faintly and sparsely rippled, clung to the water level like a soft, dark-green muslin gown to a woman’s flank,

I had my typewriter. I recorded my observations. I wrote her letters. Explaining my position further. Telling her I didn’t think it ought to end this way. I didn’t tell her about shuddering. I wrote her a poem, which said in part,

Burma Shave. I didn’t send it. I didn’t want to be needy-acting. “Here is my projected itinerary,” I wrote her. “You could write me general delivery, these towns, and I would be sure to get it.”

No mail for me in Lovelady, Arkansas. I waited around a day in case.

In the Snake County New Era, a weekly paper, Mrs. Zinnia Appling (her byline includes the “Mrs.”) begins her report on the weeks goings-on in the locality of Poltsville as follows:

“The hills so green and the sky so blue, I can hardly think to write.”

I want to show that to Clementine so bad. But then I think, she probably wouldn’t want to be shown anything, even anything that nice, coming from me. My midsection contracts. I remember my uncle Gene telling me about being out in the woods hunting with a man who had heartburn and no water so he swallowed an AlkaSeltzer right down dry.

“He bowed up like a cut worm,” Uncle Gene said.

Lumpy’s Bait and Gifts, couple miles west of Lovelady.

Two old ladies seem to be in charge.

“Is somebody. . . named Lumpy?”

“That was my late husband,” says one of the old ladies. “He died of a fox bite.”

Don’t know what to say exactly. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Well, it was so many years ago.”

Long rectangular box on the floor, front half screened so you can see some cedar chips and a shed snakeskin, back half wood so you can’t see what’s up in there. A sign on it says, LIVE HARECOON.

“What’s a harecoon?”

“Just a little old ammal down in there,” says the lady behind the counter. “She’ll let it out for you. I don’t like to mess with it much. Something they found when they were clearing some land.”

Other lady finds me a RAZORBACKS FOR PEACE Tshirt, extra large, to send to C., and then bends down to let the harecoon out. She flips a latch on the box and wango! something furry jumps three feet through the air and lands at where my feet were when the wango started.

“Good Godomighty,” I yell, and I move a good two steps toward the door.

“Noisemaker didn’t work,” the lady says. “That’d’a really got you.” The harecoon is two coontails tied together with a piece of black velvet. The old lady fusses about with the box, resetting its mechanism.

“Somebody’s going to have a heart attack and sue you,” I say.

“I know it’s the truth. We’ve had it for two years though, and nobody has yet. Some ppl are so touchy, though, that it’s a wonder.”

Something I didn’t mention is what I said just before Clementine got out of the car in front of the MilamWormsig-Peet offices, in the rain, in her yellow dress, hunched over, looking more defenseless than was called for. “I . . . love . . . you,”I said, and the way I said it was, “I [I don’t know about you] love [if you even know the meaning of that word] you [even if you don’t have the simple decency to love me back].“

I guess that was pretty shitty, to say that to her like that. After she’d offered her life to me. But at the time . . . God damn.

“All this feeling can’t just go to waste” I thought to myself. Just then the tailgate on the truck in front of me fell open and I drove for the next two or three minutes through bursting watermelons.

NO MAIL FOR ME IN YELLOW DRESS, OKLAHOMA. I left a forwarding address.

Driving along on U.S. 183 west of Yellow Dress through the dark when I notice a white floppy shape by the side of the road. What looks like a head goes vwoop as I pass.

“A turkey,” I think. “A big old hurt white turkey.”

I have a lot of things in the car—postcards, three different kinds of hat, firecrackers, a bottle of moonshine I scored somewhere—and it’s all getting so messy that the last thing in the world I need to throw in on top of it is an injured turkey. Don’t have the facilities for a urkey. But I keep thinking about that turkey lying by the side of the cold road in the pitch-black dark out in the middle of Oklahoma. Hw do you know that a turkey isn’t really suffering, or that there’s nothing you can do for him? You don’t.

The least I can do is put him out of his misery in some way. So I turn around and drive back three or four miles to where he is and just as I see him again I also see a pickup with a trailer on behind, pulling up. I stop and get out, and when I emerge from the pickup’s headlights I see an old man in a cowboy hat run across the road through the wind and grab the turkey up. It flaps a little but he has it in hand. I run back to him. There’s a younger man in a red cap with carflaps with him. The wind is whipping us all around.

“Hey,” I yell. “I saw that turkey too.”

It may have passed through the old man’s head that I am trying to establish a prior claim. He and the younger man are scurrying around trying to secure the turkey in the back of the truck. The turkey resisting.

“Where you from?” the old man asks. The turkey gets away from the younger man, off onto the shoulder.

I tell him I’m from Georgia originally, but driving to Washington State now and seeing a little bit of the country along the way

Meanwhile, he is yelling at the younger man, “Grab him under the legs. Grab him under the legs!”

“I guess you got a place to keep a turkey!“ I shout.

“That’s right,” the old man says.

“What you reckon you’ll do with him?”

He looks at me a little funny and I think for a minute he’s going to say sarcastically, “Name him Eddie and keep him around for my grandkids,” but he just says to the younger man, “Here, put him in the trailer.”

“If nothing else, you can eat him,” I say.

“If nothing else,” the old man says.

“Well, I’m glad someone came along who can use him,” I say. They get back in their truck and drive off into the night, to where they live.

Wind still whipping.

I wouldn’t know what to do with an unprepared turkey. I also don’t know a soul within miles and miles and miles.

I need to meet somebody.

Beer-pool hall, just west of Caress, Oklahoma. Serving “red beer”—tomato juice in Coors. Graffiti in men’s room: “In case of an air raid. Jump in Stool. It’s Never Been Hit Yet.” And “We Dont Piss In Your Ash Trays So Please Dont Put Your Butts in Our Umil.”

One young gap-toothed bargirl (people used the word “girl” more back in those days, so sue me), Linda. Older blonde married one, Emmer Lou. Emmer Lou, two middle-aged women, and middle-aged man talking: “It’ll take all the hair off your tongue, now, but it’s the best thing in the world for toothache.” Then they get to talking about how sick it makes them to have to put their bridgework back in in the morning, which is a bit too much for me. Emmer Lou says tomorrow’s her birthday. “Are you going to celebrate?”

“Is a bear’s breath strong?”

The gap-toothed bargirl, who’s big in the beam but amiableand sensuous-looking, is talking to one of two youngish guys. “You mean a triangular?” she asks him. “Okay, you run get us a motel room in Greenup. And hurry back!”

Then the local beautician comes in. I say local beautician because when the gap-toothed girl says something to her she says, “I got a seven, a seven-thirty, and an eight o’clock. I’ll do you at night, though.” Beautician looks like a Hollywood version of a too-much small-town girl. Big sweeping shock of black hair, great big high boobs, and as tight a pair of pale-blue Levi’s as could be molded to and halfway up inside a figuratively but by no means literally out-of-sight behind. (Prurient? Okay, prurient.) She’s come in with her husband, who has slightly thinning blond hair frizzed up in front and a yellow ribbed cardigan sweater and bell-bottom pants on, and looks overmatched (as though there’s no way of his ever dissembling his wanting her every minute whether she wants him or not and he’s worried about whether he can live up to her demands whenever they come), and their roughly eightand nine-year-old son and daughter, who keep picking on each other. The husband is the one who keeps telling them to stop. The whole family goes to shooting pool, and she seems full of herself but also content (but then why does he look so fazed?).

The guy who went off to get a motel room in Greenup returns. He and his friend (who’s been talking to the gaptoothed girl) play two games of pool, then the girl announces, “I’m going to go get drunk,” and they all three leave.

Emmer Lou’s telling the other end of the bar that she bought a little girl’s dress the other day. “You can’t wear no little girl’s dress,” one of the middle-aged women says. “As a top over slacks,” she explains.

I don’t meet any of these people.

NO MAIL IN GRAND WASH, TEXAS. HARD OF HER. Mean of her. I called the law offices and got Wormsig.

“Listen, Wormsig,” I said. “Do you like Milam?”

“Do I like . . . Milam?”

“Okay, listen. Does Clementine come in there?”

“Yep.”

“Look. Would you talk to her for me? Would you ask her how I can get in touch with her?“

“You would like me to represent you in this matter?”

“Represent. . . Okay, okay.”

“My fee is fifty dollars an hour. So far you owe me for five minutes.”

So, hell, I wired him fifty, and waited there in Grand Wash for a phone call. The next afternoon. Collect—I’d had to put down a deposit with the motelkeeper, who said, “There’s so many rogues around. There’s more rogues than good people.”

Wormsig: “Her attorney says she doesn’t want to have any more communications with you because they are getting worse and worse, to the point of involving lawyers.”

“Great work, Wormsig. How many minutes did that take?”

“You have three more.”

“Go shit in your hat, give it a careful little flip, and put it on.”

Bar in Pye, New Mexico, where also no mail.

“Talking to another guy who’s passing through. He used to run a bar of his own:

“Where I live you got to not only sweeten the po-lice but you got to sweeten the po-lice on time. I got a little behind with ‘em and first spot of trouble I had in my place, people selling pills, they come and throwed me in jail, I mean.

“Now, you don’t want to go to jail in a iron suit, much less shower shoes and running shorts. Which I was at the time. So I picked the first medium-sized old boy I saw in the tank there and went to hit him just as hard as I could in the face so as to show people, you know, but before I could do it he hit me! Flam.

“I said why’d you do that. He said, ‘I knew to do it. ‘Cause you’re the third old boy tonight to come in looking straight at me. The first one hit me right in the face as hard as he could.’

“So anyway I had made an acquaintance. He said he was in for simple battery and pointing a pistol at another. He said he didn’t want to go into it. But he said, ‘I’ll tell you one thing, if you knew the whole thing of it, there wadden a thing simple about it.’

“Idden anything simple about anything.”

If I set all this down, maybe something will add up.

Another thing I didn’t mention is that I started hitting myself in the head, there, in the car, when she wouldn’t discuss things.

Well I humped it all the way to Puyallup, by God. No mail.

Sitting in a coffee shop there, I begin to pick up some remarks about Shakespeare. Two seats down from me is a heavyset man in prominent white socks and a short blond crewcut, talking to a smaller dark-haired man (who never says a word) in glasses sitting next to him:

“. . .went through Hamlet, choosing parts and adding my interpretations, typed the whole thing out, and sent it to the Queen of England. Not a word. Not a damn word. So I sent it to the American Shakespeare Society. Not a word from them! It wunn’ve mattered if it was pro or con, if they had just acknowledged my effort. But nobody replied. It dunn make sense.

“You know my book is going to be out in two months. Sent it to every major publisher and they never even read it. Had to publish it at my own expense.

“And if anybody intelligent picks it up and reads it, and talks about it, and rumors start flying around, people will be going to the educated people with questions about it, and these people are going to have to read it. Because to understand the problem, you have to read the problem. And then if any man who’s recognized as a notable, in any major field, picks that book up and reads it, that starts the line of questioning.“

Friend silent through all this, as they eat their salads with Roquefort.

“Did I hear you say you’ve got a book coming out?” I ask him.

Friend looks away a little uneasily. The writer turns to me. Senses a kindred spirit perhaps. “Yes. Mostly philosophy. It’s taken me a long time, I started on it in 1961, but whenever you get into that controversial an area, it’s hard to get something accepted.”

“How is it controversial?”

“Well, the title of it is Censor Twain. It means ‘censor two.’ I’m cutting away both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Censoring both of them. Except for two small remanents. In the Old Testament, the first and greatest commandment. New Testament, all ol Christ’s teachings in the future tense. ‘Thou shalt. . . ‘I’ m taking those as the present American law.”

“How you find out these things?”

“It’s hard. There’s no way you can do it unless you have contact with angels.”

. . .

There, but for the lack of any very distinct idea of the grace of God, go I.

. . .

I never did write my book about driving around the country. Maybe I should have.

But it would have been about Clementine.

I DIDN’T MEET ANY WOMEN, TO SPEAK OF, EXCEPT ONE.

In Chihuahua, Arizona, where no mail awaits me, I take a look at Old Lon’s Trading Post.

In the window, cuspidors, with a sign: WILL OUTLAST 10 PLUGS OF STAR CHEWING TOBACCOOLD LON WILL BET $25 YOU CAN’T HIT THIS DEAD CENTER AT 20 PACES (NO SWEDES PLEASE). Pillboxes. Camel bells: 300 YEAR OLD CAMEL BELLS—PLAY THE GIRL CAMELS FAVORITE LOVE SONG—ALTHO THEY CALL YOU ONE HUMP HARRY, YOU’RE STILL MY FAVORITE DROMEDARY.

Another sign: DOESN’T OUR PRICES MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD ALL OVER? AND EVERYWHERE ELSE.

Inside, old Victrola with thick records, commodes, chifforobes, old shoes, harness hames, and the most alarming sight in some time:

A dress dummy, from the knees up, dressed in a policeman’s uniform with a card saying, DON’T SAY “OINK” TO ME stuck to the shirt. Staring straight ahead, but one of his skinny, jerry-built arms (the other is hanging limply down) is poised to hit over the head, with a billy stick, this creature:

A dress form clothed in a long pinkish gauzy-skirted tutu and around the neck a red bandanna, and above that one of those monkey’s heads carved out of a coconut, and on top of the head—at about the point the club, if it ever descended, would strike—sits a bunchy, raggedy, voluminous blue bow-ribbon. And jammed on top of that is a coonskin cap. American humor!

I hear some odd breathing-habit noises, and then I see, concealed by this assemblage, in a small circle of light cast by a reading lamp, at a round table, intently working the Jumble puzzle in The Arizona Republic, a roundish man with short white hair. Presumably old Lon.

To me, when I finally locate him, he says only, “Good morning, nnnng-hm. Halley?'

“Excuse me?”

“There a word, wollery? Lowley, with a E? Six letters. Ptoop’toop’too, Leyowl?”

“Yellow,” I say after a minute. You meet all kinds of people on the road. I never knew anybody to work the jumble aloud.

“Awwwwm.”

The policeman dummy and the monkey-head dummy are both looking straight ahead out into the store, not even noticing each other, apparently, but covered by the same amount of dust.

A tired-looking but attractive woman in her twenties comes in. She’s carrying a big case with a handle. When old Lon says, “Good morning, mmmmmn-hng,” she looks at me. I point toward him. She sees the cop and the demon and is taken aback, and looks back at me—why does she need this?

“No, no,” I say, still pointing. Then she sees Old Lon.

“erorf?” he says.

“He’s working the Jumble,” I say. Why do I always feel that I have to explain things?

She sets the case on the table and opens it to reveal a big set of silver, looks like service for eight or ten, with all the big serving spoons. Folds the case out into three velvet-lined racks. The silver has all slid down out of the slots and she begins to slip each piece back into place. Smooth silver into smooth velvet, slip slip slip.

Old Lon looks over from his table. “That’s nice silver, rrrr-nga,” he says. “Frover?”

“Yes, and it’s never been used.” she says. “Needless to say, I’m desperate for money.”

“Ain’t none of us set to retire right away,” Old Lon says. “Nnnnnng-nmf, mf, mf, verorf?”

“I know it’s the truth,” she says. “I’m trying to get my marriage back together and make a go of it, and I’m hav - ing a time of it.” Still slipping silv er back into slots.

“Looks like they’d make those so the silver would stav in place,” I say.

She gives me an even look. “Well, I guess they didn’t count on people carr’n it around much.“

“Vorfer. Wonder how much you’d need to realize,” Old Lon says. “Rrrn-nf ”

“Fervor,”I say.

“I’m asking a hundred and fifty dollars.” Finishes slipping last piece in. Smoothly, with feeling.

“Well, that looks like the nicest silver I’ve ever had brought in here, a-hnnnng.”

“Thank you.”

“But I just can’t handle it. Nf. Nf. I’m known pr’marily for furncher and guns. People know I don’t deal in this and they don’t come in for it. Fffff.”

“I’d even take a hundred and twenty-five for it.“

“If you had time to advertise it on the radio, you could get more for it,” he says. “Nn’n’nie. Sherto.”

“I know I could. But I just don’t have that time right now.”

“Ethros. N’rff, you try the pawnshop down the street?”

“Well, he sounded crooked over the phone.”

“Horset. Say nn’y what?”

“Throes.”

“I talked to him on the phone, and he sounded kind of...“

“Wellll, nnng, either the pawnshop or Roe’s Trading Post, down the street.”

“I tried Roe, and he sent me down here.”

“Well, that’s Roe for you, p’tf.”

“Well, okay,” she says equably, with some unforced spirit. She closes the case and as she goes through the door with it you can hear all the silver sliding to the bottom again. She leaves.

I head for the door myself and the policeman’s limp arm gives a jerk! This weird, lifeless appendage dances.

Old Lon is pulling a string that leads from his chair to this slack, stupid, abjectly undirected limb. UFfff that’s what makes a body’s heart jump, “ he says. “Hoooon see, you might ‘spect to see the club arm . . .”