Читать книгу John Henry Days - Colson Whitehead - Страница 10

J. sits in the backseat of an American car of recent vintage. Jesus Christ hangs from the rearview mirror and shakes at every turn as if trying to wiggle His crucifix from the ground. Arnie apologizes again for being late to pick up J. at the airport.

J. says no problem. He looks out the back window and returns to his activity of the past ten minutes, a cool contemplation of the eighteen-wheeler chasing their rear bumper. A plastic sheet detailing the Confederate flag dominates the truck’s front grille. He can’t see the driver but he waves hello to the black window and turns. Around him the outlands of the city of Charleston, clumps of industrial parks and jumbo shopping centers and entire new species of parking lot, recede into the countryside. There is the problem of horizontal space. In the distance J. sees mountains, insurgent green lids peering over the rim of the world, whenever the smaller peaks the road cleaves through allow him to see that far. Did the settlers ever think they’d get past these slopes, J. asks himself. Cross an ocean, they make it this far into the land and worry that the whole place is like this: a concatenation of cliffs and banks, as if some hobgoblin roosting on the other side of the hills had shoved up the earth. Like a giant kicking a bunch of green carpet. Hearty folk, the mountain people.

“Do you mind if I take the back roads?” Arnie asks. He gestures at the lane ahead, the congealing traffic. “They close it up to one lane a couple of miles ahead. For construction. It might take the same time, but it won’t take longer.”

“You know the way,” J. answers. With a little luck, the monster vehicle behind them won’t follow. J. puts Arnie in his forties, paying alimony and owning his cab after years of scrimping, part of the far-flung fleet of New River Gorge Taxi. Fleet, as in two or three rheumy vehicles. Arnie’s straw hair thins and golden stubble sprouts from his chin. Eats what he catches. The interior of the car smells, not unpleasantly, of the better class of urinal cake.

“So,” Arnie clears his throat, “what are you, with the Post Office?”

“I’m a journalist.”

“Writing an article about the festival?”

“That’s right.”

Arnie asks him if he writes for newspapers and magazines and J. says yeah, even though this particular piece is for a new travel website. J. doesn’t feel like explaining the web; this guy probably thinks a laptop is some new kind of banjo. Lucien set it up. J. hasn’t worked for the web before but knew it was only a matter of time: new media is welfare for the middle class. A year ago the web didn’t exist, and now J. has several hitherto unemployable acquaintances who were now picking up steady paychecks because of it. Fewer people are home in the afternoon eager to discuss what transpires on talk shows and cartoons and this means people are working. It was only a matter of time before those errant corporate dollars blew his way. He attracts that kind of weather.

J. checks the receipt nook in his wallet again, just to make sure. He makes a concerted effort to enjoy the scenery. It is hard: all trees look alike to him. The route slips between the places the government blasted through, the hills, and the scarred rock faces stare at each other from the sides of the road, grim, still grudgeful after all these years at their sunderance. Water trickles down the rock from unknown springs, high up springs, who knows what, this is nature, down the slopes, across the roots of intrepid trees, and wets the rock faces like perspiration on the brow of a boxer. The driver is taking J. deep in. Off the interstate. He is being taken in. Lucien set the gig up when J. called and expressed his serious doubts as to whether he could place a story about a fucking stamp. It was mostly a philosophical problem; they don’t have to write about all the various events they attend, just enough to keep from looking like complete hacks. No one wants the game to be exposed, not the junketeers and not the p.r. folks who set the itineraries. Most of the time it is enough to pull out a notebook and scribble for appearance’s sake, in between passes at the hors d’oeuvres table. After a couple of years, J. has learned to only write up the events where the number of expenses and the dollar-per-word bounty make coasting prohibitive. There are never any repercussions. Publicists continue to greet him warmly and hand out press material that remains unopened, he carries away promotional items by the bushel, he eats and drinks his fill. He remains on the List.

But this stamp problem. This stamp gig was so unusual, J. put it to Lucien as a kind of challenge: who in the world would possibly care about this event? What magazine employed copy editors who could bear to touch a comma of such a piece, what newspaper had a readership that consisted entirely of drooling and defenseless shut-ins? They’d been in rough straits before, Lucien and his journalist allies, but always came through in the end if they had to, placed the piece about Ronald McDonald’s rap record (open-faced filet mignon burgers and chocolate margarita shakes at the press party), found the sympathetic editor who had column space for the plastic surgeon who specialized in Hollywood kindergartens (everyone who attended the press conference got a free estimate and a computer-generated hypothetical face to take home with them). But a postage stamp? It seemed ridiculous even by their degraded standards. In West Virginia yet. J. just wanted to know if the world had progressed to a point where such a thing was possible. He just wanted to know.

Lucien was calm and patient. He gave a little speech. He told J. to stick around his hotel room for a few minutes. A few minutes later the features editor of Time Warner’s travel website rang and said he was thinking of running a piece on the Talcott celebration and would J. be interested. Like that.

Now the road dives between peaks, past towns persistent beyond the defeat of founding father ambition. The speckling of quiet houses and rusted trucks draws itself from the muck and develops a culture and evolves into strip malls, bright knots of gas stations and fast food outlets, before collapsing again into a barbarism of shacks and rusted trucks. The strip malls are reaching for perfection. Each time they enter into the outlands of a new strip mall, J. wonders if this time the franchisees and maverick entrepreneurs will get it right, if this time the ratios are correct and density, placement, brand will configure a new and final product. One beautiful single product with acreage and registers, with multiple fire exits and convenient business hours. But each creation is botched and maladjusted, it will not play with the other kids or has a morbid disposition, and subsides, inevitably, into the silence of black country road. And soon the strip malls disappear altogether and J. will see a sign for a town, and one or two lone houses jammed into hillside accelerate into a cluster of abodes and then thin out again. Presently he’ll see the sign for the next town, all without ever passing what passes for a town in his definition. Not even a store beyond a gas station. He is confused.

Arnie says, “Nice and peaceful. Sure beats the city, huh?” Having assumed correctly that J. is not a son of the South.

“It certainly is green,” J. says.

“First time in West Virginia?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re going to like it,” Arnie assures. “‘The most northern of the southern, the most southern of the northern, the most western of the eastern, and the most eastern of the western.’ That’s what they say, and I can vouch for it. We’ve got everything here. Skiing in Beckley a good part of the year. If you get a chance over the weekend, you should check out the river. They have all sorts of white water rafting trips you can take.”

“I’m not much of a water person,” J. says. Which puts an end to the bumpkin patter for a while.

Content everlasting. The man at the website, sounded like a young guy, said they were looking for content. The website is set to launch in a few weeks. Eventually they want it to have a global aspect, but for the start they are focusing on gathering a lot of regional content. That way they pull in local advertisers, he explained. J. could hear computer keys tapping through the receiver. Time Warner is putting a lot of money into the launch, the man informed him. They want to make a big splash. He invited J. to the launch party, if J. was going to be in town. J. knew he was already invited; Time Warner is a mainstay of the List. All J. can think is content. It sounds so honest. Not stories, not articles, but content. Like it is a mineral. It is so honest of them.

Arnie and J. have been on small roads for over half an hour now, dancing along curved blacktop, past slide areas and deer crossings. The driver makes another attempt at conversation: “When I heard your name, I thought, Sutter, huh? Sounds like a Southern name.”

“Maybe my ancestors were owned down here at some point.”

“Maybe …?”Arnie meets J.’s eyes in the rearview mirror and chuckles. “That’s funny. You’re funny.” He starts to hum.

The light gives after a series of turns as the trees huddle together and snatch at the afternoon. There are no other cars on the road. Each time they clear one forbidding encroachment of hills, more livid peaks keep the car closed in. Arnie hums and taps his fingers on the steering wheel. This burp of paranoia: what if Caleb here is driving him up into the mountains, down to the creek, out to the lonesome spot where his family performs rituals. Boil him up in a pot, ritual sacrifice helps the crops grow. J. peers over the front seat waiting for the tree line to break. Taking the back roads indeed. After a few days the FBI will verify that he was on the flight to Yeager Airport, the woman in the window seat provides unenthusiastic affirmation, but after that no trail. Arnie’s cousin the local constable. Maybe not even after a few days. No one knows where he is any more than he does. His editor will just think he flaked out on the assignment. Notorious tendency of freelancers to disappear near a deadline. Boil him up in a pot while they watch wrestling on TV. He figures even the most remote shack has a TV these days. The cable carrier in this region serves a special clientele, entire public access shows devoted to dark meat recipes.

As a joke, J. almost says, “So what do you do around here for fun?” but thinks better of it. I’m a real city boy, J. thinks, I’m a real jaded fuck. Eventually they clear the woods, passing first an unattended stand of native arts and crafts that seems not to have been open for some time, then a gas station and garage with a rogues gallery of cars and pickups in its lot. Arnie says they are getting close.

Content is king, they say. Rape and pillage time for the junketeer willing to put in the time to make the contacts. A whole new scale.

“This is Hinton,” Arnie says. They had rounded a turn and now came across the biggest settlement in some time. Hinton is dropped down in the middle of a valley, a marble cupped by monstrous green hands. The car is separated from the town by the murky gray river that carved the valley; J. sees the low bridge that would have taken them into Hinton if they had turned left. A flat section of the town groups along the opposite bank, he spies a shopping center and above it the buildings inch up the mountain wall, thinning, a scattering of two- and three-story buildings that are probably the original town: old and distinguished structures. Arnie doesn’t turn left. Arnie takes him right, away and parallel from the town, down the road that creeps along the river. A strip of small establishments perch on this side of the bank, a souvenir taxidermy shop, the Coast to Coast motel. Herb’s Country Style promises chicken fried steak. Between the stores, J. can make out the other half of Hinton across the river, lurking among trees like a fugitive.

Arnie has stopped humming. “I usually only work Mondays and Tuesdays,” he says, “but the festival is paying us almost double what we usually get. You staying at the Motor Lodge?”

“I’m not sure. If that’s what they told you.”

“Well, they said the Motor Lodge, so that’s where I’m going to take you. If it turns out that’s not where you’re supposed to be, I’ll wait around and take you to wherever you’re supposed to be. How’s that sound? We can go to Saskatchewan, I don’t care.” Arnie is flexible, apparently. “I heard Ben Vereen was coming. Is that true?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I love Ben Vereen,” Arnie says. “This is shaping up to be some big party. Saying after a few years it could be bigger than the Nicholas County Spud and Splinter Festival. Good for the whole area.” Up ahead J. sees the river jump out of a gigantic dam in exuberant streams, like hair through a comb, but they veer away from it; Arnie turns left across a black bridge that takes them over the rolling water. “Talcott’s about ten miles on,” Arnie continues. “That’s where John Henry’s from. But we’re not going that far. Talcott’s pretty small, so I guess that’s why most of the stuff this weekend is being organized in Hinton. They’re like sisters.”

Past the bridge the road is unpopulated again. The road follows another branch of the river and J. looks down into tenebrous water. Trees march down right into the current and J. pictures a whole forest under the dark water, what existed before the dam raised the river. Maybe even a whole town sleeping under there. He wonders if the newspaper of the drowned town needs freelancers.

Arnie turns at a tall clapboard sign announcing the Talcott Motor Lodge. The sign has been recently repainted. He pulls up to the front door of the main building, a squat red structure with a tin roof. A statue of a railroad engineer tips its hat to all who pass.

“Here we are,” Arnie says.

J. asks for a receipt.