They say that drowning victims’ lives flash through their heads. Here, with William Clark Henderson frozen in the processional, my thoughts, sunk in revelations, sought answers, found none. Were there families worldwide with similar thoughts, plans, dreams locked in mirror-image flesh? Was there a genetic plot to seize the future? Would a day dawn when these unseen, unrecognized fathers, brothers, nephews, cousins rose as rulers? Or was this just God’s ghost and spirit, his Providence, his unfathomable Will? Were we all identical seeds hurled forth in wide broadcasts so as not to collide?
Were we then in some broad and incalculable fashion, brother to wolves, birds, and antelope, all inked, spotted, colored the same, year on year and generation on generation back as far as minds could see? To what purpose? To economize on genes and chromosomes? Why? Would the faces of this Family, grown apart, vanish by 2001? Or would the replicas increase to envelop all cousined flesh? Or was it just a miracle of mere existence, misunderstood by two stunned fools shouting across blind generations on a summer’s graduation day?
All this, all this exploded light dark, light dark across my gaze.
“What’s going on?” the other me repeated.
For the line of young men and women was almost gone, quitting a scene where two idiots raved with two similar voices.
I said something, quietly, which he could not hear. When this is done, I thought, I must tear up the pictures, burn the notes. To continue this way, with old annuals, lost faces: madness! Trash it all, I thought. Now.
The young man’s mouth trembled. I read his lips.
“What did you just say?” he asked.
“Nothing changes,” I whispered.
Then, louder:
“Nothing changes!”
I waited to hear Kipling’s words to that song of great sadness: “Lord God of old, be with us yet. Lest we forget.”
Lest we forget.
When I saw the diploma go into the hands of William Clark Henderson—
I backed off, weeping, and ran.
That Old Dog Lying in the Dust
They say that Mexicali has changed. They say it has many people and more lights and the nights are not so long there anymore and the days are better.
But I will not go see.
For I remember Mexicali when it was small and alone and like an old dog lying out in the dust in the middle of the road. And if you drove up and honked it just lay there and twitched its tail and smiled with its rusty brown eyes.
But most of all I remember a lost-and-gone one-ring Mexican circus.
In the late summer of 1945, with the war ending beyond the world somewhere, and tires and gas rationed, a friend called to ask if I would like to ramble down past the Salton Sea to Calexico.
We headed south in a beat-up Model A which steamed and seeped brown rust-water when we stopped in the late hot afternoon to skinny-dip in the cool irrigation canals that make the desert green along the Mexican border. That night we drove across into Mexico and ate cold watermelon in one of those palm-fringed outdoor stands where whole families gather happy and loud and spitting black seeds.
We strolled the unlit border town, barefoot, treading the soft brown talcum dust of its unpaved summer roads.
The warm dust blew us around a corner. The little one-ring Mexican circus lay there: an old tent full of moth holes and half-sewn wounds, propped up from within by an ancient set of dinosaur bones.
Two bands played.
One was a Victrola which hissed “La Cucaracha” from two black funeral horns buried high in the trees.
The second band was mortal flesh. It consisted of a bass-drummer who slammed his drum as if killing his wife, a tuba player sunk and crushed in brass coils, a trumpeter with a pint of sour saliva in his horn, and a trap-drummer whose effervescent palsy enabled him to gunshot everyone: musicians quick or musicians dead. Their mouth-to-mouth breathing brought forth “La Raspa.”
To both calamities, my friend and I crossed the warm night-wind street, a thousand crickets frolicking at our pants cuffs.
The ticket-seller raved into his wet microphone. Volcanoes of clowns, camels, trapeze acrobats waited just inside to fall upon us! Think!
We thought. In a mob of young, old, well-dressed, poor, we hustled to buy tickets. At the entrance a tiny lady with great white piano-teeth fried tacos and tore tickets. Under her faded shawl, starlight spangled. I knew that soon she would shed her moth wings to become a butterfly, eh? She saw my face guess this. She laughed. She tore a taco in half, handed it to me, laughed again.