Robert Kostuck, "A Brief Guide to September 1980" (creative non-fiction, Pushcart Prize nominee 2021)

ROBERT KOSTUCK | A BRIEF GUIDE TO SEPTEMBER 1980

Not here, nor here, nor what ensues, but have a fog in them that I cannot look through. —Cymbeline

Launch

Hitch a ride up a winding in-need-of-grading eroded road into what appears as a mountain to my Midwest mind. Late afternoon storm clouds. The unknown driver grinds gears, crisscrosses ruts deep as shallow graves. We pass a stunted lake and earthen dam, switchbacks into the quintessence, glowering light of a late Neolithic childhood scratching ocher bison drawings on the surface of my heart. My sleeve. Sequential numbers drop away, illustrate the passage of days which I will not remember.

A dead trout next to a lake, crayfish scurry in cold water. Bright yellow columbine sway at a sharp hairpin turn: Wordsworth’s American cousin. Cicadalike rattlesnake buzz is a ‘haunting melody,’ and there are true-to-life cicadas scoring tree bark with their latent husks.

Late afternoon and looking down from the top of the mountain: a flock of turkey vultures wheel above the thin dry twigs of her wrists. She pulls herself up the juniper flank of this life. Honesty prevails; and that’s something worth having: honesty. Imagine pockets of dirt, pocket gophers, on a mountainside of decomposed granite, cactus, yucca and century plants, javelina and thirdhand stories of scruffy lions. Every new face in equal parts good and evil, riddled with riddles, evidence of currently unimaginable snow-melt erosion. Days click on like clocks, footsteps click, ashes fall into place, book pages flutter.

Bonfire, warm beer in aluminum casks, pungent odor of tobacco and marijuana. Handfuls of stars, identity of constellations and latitudes, lassitude in the warm August night—shift into a chill. Jab a fork in pine needle aroma, the edible scent of the high desert. People I’ve recently met give conflicting advice.

“I thought everything would be sand dunes in Arizona,” I say. No voice responds. The temperature drops a few more degrees. I’m unprepared, starting to shiver, dizzy.

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I’m buried under the sea of stars, misplaced constellations, fragmentary moon disappearing in the west. Obviously, they bear down: Ursa Minor, Ursa Major, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Polaris—ha ha, that’s north I think—but where is the town we left behind? Colder air—yes, gradations of cold exist in Arizona—pours down from higher up: tangy, sharp; consistently visible and wait! She leads me into a set-apart clearing in the trees, points straight up into the sky.

“There,” she says. “And another!”

“What are you—where—”

“The mountain air—so clear—you can see satellites from here.”

Breadbasket, bicycle, barn: dimly remembered sizes of Sputnik, Explorer. Something about reflected light in space, retrograde movement of planets, inert gases, Van Allen radiation belt, lines of magnetic polarity unseen, blurry telescope images distorted by pulsating convection cells. All that. I can only imagine the pulsed radio signals, beep beep, beep beep. A child not knowing any better would say: Twinkle twinkle little star. They’ve a trajectory and speed which cannot be mistaken for a meteor, rocket, UFO, or weather balloon. A blurry relationship spirals down from heaven. The heat tears off ceramic shield plates, antennae, radar dishes, camera lenses. Atmospheric friction fragments, infinitesimal confetti-like slivers of honesty and ecstatic delight fall like metallic snow, sprinkle sprinkle little star.

Shivering from the loss of something nameless: heart, family, sexual seedling, spyglass, chemistry laboratory, snow. Movement in the night sky, or, the ground beneath my feet. Breath condensed and remembered: echoes of that ‘ecstatic desire,’ false and unencumbered with the necessities of commitment. Pulsed radio signals explain how everything works, how everything fits together.

I stare hard, hours pass but time stands still for the first and only time: the night sky makes hundreds of circular arcs like an overexposed photograph. Rarified air steals my hours, ka-ching!, somewhere, they say, there is an accounting for the soul; I lick stamps and mail desert postal cards featuring generic endless vistas of pseudo-Monument Valley—reproduced here at two-for-the-price-of-one. Two-dimensional ‘game shows’, streets unchanged from the time of the railroads, Hoovervilles at the edge of awakening. Unseen Aurora Borealis hisses above tundra and taiga, here reduced to a whisper above my Ponderosa pine, scrub oak, quaking aspen. After years of Midwest snow and rain, cornfields, hay bales, sharp-angled roads following original township lines of the once Northwest Territory, now, placed thus: satellites careen above the unnamed mountain

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where Laurel flees, finally faithful to wanderlust and the call o’ the wild, true-to-her-word, taking the vivid and easily traveled roads which I do not and never will find steadfast or easy.

“Everything you say comes from books,” she says.

“I didn’t think you were listening,” I say. “Even when you’re not talking, I’m listening.” She disappears in cold mountain air.

Place my book down open-face in the dry loam, particles of pine sap stick to the leaves. Listen: high pressure at the leading edge of a storm. Cicadas freeze into silence. Unimagined fresh weather. Pole Star.

Ground Crew

Our temporary home—with separate guest cottage in the back, strangers—sags with its own memories—undefined pre-WWII neighborhood the size of a prairie dog town, a cylinder lawn mower that weighs sixty pounds, hollyhocks in woven wire corrals, sparklers on the fourth of July, summer baseball games in the park across the street. Mountain thunderstorms floods channeled into streets and gushing downhill, tearing up poorlypatched asphalt, curbed cars that might be abandoned, parted curtains, prying eyes. Laurel works at Super Carrot, a family-owned hippie-health food shop just as dusty as Woolworth’s or a generic five-and-dime. I’m escaping early-onset alcoholism, diluted drug addiction, and labor-intensive dead-end factory and foundry jobs in Wisconsin. The first new part time job is an on-call delivery van driver for a furniture distributor, ended after a couple of weeks.

A day unlike every other day: rain, muddy alleys, ex-capitol ‘city’ of Prescott, Arizona. We cross flooded Granite Creek on a dense rusted iron pipe. Laurel leads me on a zigzag through a town I do not recognize to a one-level brick apartment duplex on another one of those streets that looks older than anything I’ve ever seen before: crumbled concrete; torn, patched, and repatched asphalt; no-longer-reflective street signs—above, a sky more brown than blue. Yet everything looks new: curbs, sidewalks, street signs, traffic lights, pavement—seeing roads for the first time and wanting to and not wanting to walk down each one to a logical and unfortunately preordained conclusion.

People tamp resinous sage-colored leaves in a glass water pipe, which I decline.

“Enjoy,” says Laurel.

“Hey.” A stranger nods either at or to me. “Come and look.”

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An open patio, a cardboard box, a litter of puppies.

I’m entranced momentarily, but the narrow world draws me away. Scuffed dirt instead of green grass, another cinderblock wall, and at the base of the wall, a dead puppy.

A bleary-eyed omen, a brief life.

A shovel, a hole, newspaper wrapping, a grave.

Inside I slip an arm around Laurel.

“Wash your hands before you touch me.” Why dwell on the death of a new-born animal so soon after my arrival in a new town? One thousand eight hundred miles from what was once familiar and already I am lost and lacking fingerprints. Laurel does not let me touch her until I wash again and again at a kitchen sink.

A kitchen, a home, a way of life.

Dish soap equals happiness and yet another day unwinds.

A disconcerting lack of shadows in the middle of the day sends semaphore lingo from the ‘gut instinct’ to the brain but nothing happens. The immediate future—I shan’t say seduces—but definitely entices. Go up, young man.

Escape Velocity

Beyond the heartland, grass-fire smoke rising, quavery light seen from behind the window of an over-Mingus-Mountain bus. Yikes, its chalky-blue juniper berries littering every rill and cranny, decomposed granite, lifeline into the actual watershed. Broken glass, dribbled blood on the pavement, breath of tanned leather from a shop door, four-day-old slice of pie in the coffee shop.

High desert lessons come at dear prices. Payment is the relinquishment of preconceived beliefs which were never tested outside the laboratory. Here’s the test: it’s a maze with rodents and rotted milk products. I recall Harlequin diamonds against lazy forgotten cornfields.

I level a mountaintop and correctly position the telescope. What I expect: stars, planets, moons. Directly overhead something parses my leftover words: a tiny planetoid trailing a migration of heart-on-the-sleeve greeting card solipsism kitsch, rinsed and ready to spindry. Pulsed radio signals explain how everything works, how everything fits together. Soon enough it’s at the edge of sight, rocketing past Venus, Pluto, termination shock, heliopause, Oort Cloud, Alpha Centauri: it stutters, shudders, careens without a discernible rhythm; fails to arrive at the westward sunset rendezvous point.

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