Rocket Across Texas

    The yellow center stripe unrolls electric under a dead-grey sky.
    "When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse, out of the corner
     of my eye. I turned to look but it was gone, I cannot put my finger
     on it now, the child is grown, the dream is gone, and I...I have become
     comfortably numb...". * *
    Rocket across Texas, Highway 24, at 85 miles an hour.

    Some who survived the malestrom feel an overwhelming guilt
    when the names of the dead are read from the lists.
    Our names aren't on them, but there are other lists.

    I was a boy in this country, once, years ago. I knew these woods, these 
    rivers, these fields. My cousin, Grant, and I hunted sparrows here
    with Daisy air rifles, then later, squirrels with Remington, and Winchester.
    Later still, I hunted men with Colt, and fired howitzers named
    Little Moe and Wild Bill across nameless miles of jungle to explode 
    in perfect cataclysm on nameless people who must have been very 
    surprised as they died.

    Now I am back and something is missing, sucked out by the vampire of   
    the war. I'm looking for it.

    Every mile or so on these farm roads is a sharecropper's house, fallen in;
    the same faded color as the sky, sagging porch, shattered windows,
    ripped screens, cotton crops done in by acrylic, polyester, and 
    big-time agribusiness.  Time drifts loose here, like a derelict schooner,
    no future in it, moved to the city.  Grandfathers in aging pickups
    lift a hand from steering wheels in friendly salute. Howdy.
    Tired, old eyes look straight on, not at the gray, fallen farms.

    Spark's Theater in Cooper, 1952, showed movies for a quarter,
    Cokes for a dime, and popcorn for fifteen cents. One half dollar 
    thrilled little boys for a saturday afternoon.  Grant and I 
    saw Errol Flynn in a pirate movie, ran home barefoot,
    and were about to set sail on the bounding main of the fishpond
    in a #3 galvanized wash tub, armed the swords and flintlocks made
    from scrap lumber, when his mom caught us. A bath-towel on a 
    broomstick was the mailsail.

    Where did all that go?!  It all slid backward in time like the 
    highway that unzips behind me, releasing the past, like smoke.

    I can look in all the eyes and feel disconnected.  What was sucked
    out in VietNam was refilled with the knowledge of how to kill a man
    with a knife, the color of ChiCom tracer bullets, how to clean a
    bloodsmear off my glasses with my shirttail, the whisper that
    'incoming' makes just before it lands. Somewhere out here in these 
    woods, these rivers, these fields is the boy who went to war. 
    Most weekends, I try to find him.

    Getting close, now. Grant and I flew kites near here. We made them
    ourselves with paper and sticks, glue and string. On holidays
    we popped firecrackers that flashed and threw off shards of
    Chinese newspaper which revealed mysterious and magical writing as we
    carefully peeled them open.  How slowly time moves when you're 
    ten or twelve.  We could catch frogs, slay dragons, climb trees, 
    all in an afternoon; then sip our grandma's lemonade in the evening,
    under the streetlight where bats swooped in to catch moths on the 
    summer night. But... I have heard B-52's play an Arclight Sonata 
    with 500 pound bombs, seen the earth leap and ripple, felt the
    numbing concussions.

    Here it is, where the roadway crosses the river. I park the van
    at the roadside, pull on the boots, chamber a round in the rifle,
    pocket the little Beretta, and walk off into the woods...
    Later, this afternoon, all these actions will reverse. History
    will re-zip itself as I rocket across Texas, going the other way.

    I think I've made this trip often enough to finally see some difference.
    Maybe the void doesn't pull so hard now, maybe, I don't know...
    Maybe I'll make this trip forever...
    A pair of Cardinals lives in this grove, maybe I'll build a birdhouse
    and nail it up here.  Maybe I should build a lot birdhouses, somehow 
    I don't think it would be enough. I guess that I need to sit on this
    riverbank some more.  

    OK, I'll be back next Saturday.
    Turn the key, start the engine, heading back west toward the low, grey 
    clouds, showing a little rain, coming this way...