Where the Hell My Heart Went

Scott Reu

Prologue

“Some people drive to get somewhere. Others drive to get away from things. I think you’re just driving because you don’t know how to do anything else,” said Jim. He was sitting in the passenger seat of my pickup, chain smoking, and staring out the open window as we cruised west down the AK-1. He sighed deep, and the smoke from his exhale mingled with the midnight air. I shifted into fifth.

“Well, I think you’re gonna have to walk the rest of the way to Anchorage if you don’t shut up,” I said, as dryly as I could. I accelerated. No cops for miles around. I didn’t own much in the world: a trunk full of clothes, a silver pocket watch that grandpa won in a poker game, and the rusty, once-lime-green Chevy I was sitting in. But right at that moment, I owned that stretch of road. I pushed eighty.

“I’ve been thinking about Carolyn.” Jim looked so damned composed—not just then, but all the time, with that cigarette perpetually hanging from his damned stoic mug. I never could pull off that look—at my best, I looked like I was trying to look deep. I had the sort of visage that could not be enhanced by anything as simple as a cigarette. Besides, those things gave you cancer.

I was growing annoyed with his sporadic pseudo-pensive banter. It was impossible to tell exactly what linked together the cars on Jim’s train of thought; he was almost always either psychoanalyzing me or thinking about some girl from Southern Colorado. Me, I was redlining.

“Man, when was the last time you were even IN Colorado?” I spotted taillights on the horizon.

They were almost a hundred miles out, easy.

1: C8H18

“Shit, we’re out of petrol,” I growled. Jim had drifted off to sleep about half an hour back. He fidgeted in his seat and muttered something about the second star to the right and straight on ‘till morning. Great, I thought. I was driving, and my partner was just day-dreaming. I was going to need his help if I was going to have a chance at getting my petrol without having to pay. I put the truck in neutral and smacked Jim in the head.

Jim squirmed for a while before he finally gave in to the inevitability of his waking state. We had just gotten to the top of a hill, and the nearest town was only a couple of miles away. Our inertia would carry us in easily.

Life had never really been easy. Not in the dictionary definition of the word. But we got by; Jim and I had a good thing going. We went where we wanted to. We ate what we wanted to. We were free men. As near as I figured, if a man had charisma, he could get money. And all that there really was in the world for men was money. Well, money and women. But show me a man who claims to understand women, and I will show you a liar. Jim and I had money figured out.

We pulled up to the small town’s gas station. I opened the door with a clunky crunch. Jim got out and went inside. He was working his magic with the guy at the counter. I could hear the conversation in my head:

“Hey, man. Pump number 2. Regular. My buddy’s out there running it.”

“Alright. Anything else?”

“Give me a pack of smokes.”

“You got it.”

The gas started flowing. The clerk went to the back of the store to get Jim’s cigarettes. He came out, and Jim started fumbling around in his pockets.

“Man, my wallet’s in my truck. I’ll be right back. Oh—can I get another pack as well?”

“Yeah, man. Be right back.”

The clerk left the first pack of cigarettes on the counter. The gas pump clicked. Jim grabbed the cigarettes and ran out to the car. The engine turned over, and Jim jumped in the truck. I saw the bewildered teenage clerk in the rear-view mirror, probably unsure as to whether or not this incident would get him fired. That was his problem.

Open with a joke. Act a little nervous.

“It’s my first time reading.” Do a couple of Falknerian political poems, maybe throw in one of the love poems. It depends on how many women are in the audience. Jim and I learned to play the crowd. I was good at poetry. Jim was good at complicated thought. We ate philosophy-starved Alaskans for lunch.

When you live off sporadically-spaced fast food meals, tips from patrons at a coffee house are a decent living wage.

We were out of that nameless town by sunrise. Jim and I had a few twenties in the glove box—enough to keep us going for a week or so, the way we lived. The sky, heavy on the dead-flat horizon, was being drained of the night’s ink. I knew the pastel-blue color that must follow, but I was hoping for the night to linger just a little longer. But dawn went down to day. You can’t teach the sun anything. Jim shook himself out of sleep, licked his bearded chops, and pulled his ancient guitar from the back seat.

2: Thunderstorm

In Alaska, your sky is big. You can see a thunderstorm coming for miles. It’s almost never a surprise. The only question is whether you’re trying to outrun it or knowingly charging at it. This was the latter. Cumulonimbus clouds were staring me down in the western sky. Jim didn’t seem to notice at all. When you spend five years on the road with someone, conversations about the weather tend to evaporate.

Jim was making up a tune as he went along. I had no idea how he could do that. He looked up briefly to scan the horizon, and his strumming took a mournful pause. He put the guitar in the backseat and crushed out his cigarette. The cigarette butt flew out the window and got left somewhere on Highway 1.

I was born in the Santa Lucia Mountains in California. There’s a little town called Paraiso where a lot of my memories rest now. It’s rocky down there—not great for driving. But, then, most of the people who were born in Paraiso would die in Paraiso. Cars were truly unnecessary. A little town where everyone knows everyone else, where you can reach sweet, low-hanging oranges all the time and your biggest worry is over closing the screen door and taking care of you and yours—for some people, that’s heaven. But me, I’ve never had a mind for staying in one place too long. I’m never going to strike it rich, and I’ve long since given up trying. I don’t think ownership is a sin, I just don’t require many materials for the way I live. I’ve got clothes on my back and my beat-up Chevy. I’ve got a good traveling partner and guile enough to get what I need. Again, I’m not against owning things—not as a rule—but for me to ask for anything more would be greedy.

Not that it’s a terribly pressing matter, but you might be wondering how I met Jim. We were at school in Claremont. I know it’s hard to believe that a college-educated boy with small-town values would become an Alaskan hobo in increasing denial of his own anarcho-primitivism, but this is the truth. The first time I met Jim was on his birthday. On your birthday at Pomona College, you get thrown in a fountain. We dragged him, jovially kicking and screaming, into one of the campus fountains. He had not yet taken up smoking, but he was a much better guitarist back then. Maybe that’s only the indulgence of my memory. At any rate, he dragged his sopping self from the fountain, mumbling a line from King Lear about revenges and terrors of the earth. Jim always took everything so personally. He forgot the last two lines and I completed them for him. Wearily, he thrust out his hand his hand:

“Jim. I’m Jim. Majoring in Philosophy.”

“Nice to meet you, Jim. Happy Birthday.” I started walking back toward Frary Hall. Jim ran to catch up with me.

He called after me, “You got a name?”

I replied without turning around, “Yep.”

Jim was really confused at this point. “Can I know it?”

“Later. Lunch first.”

And over the next hour, Jim and I talked of Existentialism, of Nihilism, and, most importantly of all, of what we truly wanted from our lives.

“We only have a few measly years on this globe,” I said, “and I want to live those years without any regrets. I want to do whatever I want for the rest of my natural life.”

“Have you given any thought to what you want your life to mean?” Jim was being serious here. Half of the sentences uttered over that lunch had been jokes, and every one was uttered half-jokingly. We were testing the waters. But this, I could already tell, was a serious question.

“Yeah, but I’ve already decided that it doesn’t mean anything, which is why, as previously mentioned, I feel it’s my duty to myself to do whatever I want.” He looked at me sternly, the way an adult looks at a child who has recently blamed something on space aliens.

“Even if that is true, what do you want it to mean?” I sat a while in thought. I never answered that question. I eventually deflected and brought up the subject of the cute girl sitting directly behind Jim, but I guess I still don’t know what I want my life to mean. Maybe I just want to live forever so the question becomes irrelevant and does not imply that the answer will be featured in my eulogy.

At graduation, I realized that I had a degree in English Literature, which meant that I had better either get the credentials to teach English or learn to beg for spare change. As it happened, there was a third option. I think Jim felt a little apprehension toward the usefulness of his degree as well, and so I asked him if he wanted to come to Alaska with me. He did not demand details, or even more of an explanation than, “let’s go to Alaska.” He simply immediately agreed. This was what I had come to expect from Jim—quick decision-making and stubbornness which compared favorably with that of granite. We sold everything we owned and left three days later.

Let’s get back to the storm. The great black jellyfish cumulonimbus blotted out the sun. It sounds childish when you say it out loud, but I always loved those moments when something got between the sun and me. The sun is power—the symbol of permanent, glowing, shining strength. The sun influences our thoughts about god. If something puts you in the shade, even just for a moment, then the sun is powerless. How the mighty have fallen. Time seems to stop, and the daylight you thought you were headed for is interrupted by a behemoth cloud—an interloper who has defeated god. But maybe I’m reading too much into this.

I pulled the truck over. The dark of the storm was all around us at that moment. Ozone, sweet and dangerous, filled my nostrils. Jim got out his notepad and started writing down bits of poetry that would sell for $20 in a dozen crappy little cafes across Alaska. It is a sign of the decline of civilization that our most precious, our most delicious and intimate thoughts raise a cream that is worth about $20. But as long as it pays the bills, I figure civilization can take one more for the team. I pulled a tattered hard-cover first-edition East of Eden from the back seat. It came with the truck. I flipped to a page at random, and came across one of the commentaries on humanity that Steinbeck managed to slip in between narrative bits on the Hamiltons and the Trasks. Playfully, Steinbeck noted that Universal Good is permanent and immutable, while Universal Evil is always re-spawning—changing its face to something newer. I don’t know why he brought that up out of the blue, but I suppose that when you get to be as renowned as Steinbeck, you can write whatever you want to a certain extent.

I counted the time between lightning and thunder. It was an old boy scout trick. All the strikes were far enough away that I wasn’t worried for us. The rubber tires most likely insulated us from danger, anyway. Jim wrote poetry and I read Steinbeck until the storm passed. When the heavy rains subsided and the air got heavy and clear, I turned the engine over and we rolled back onto Highway 1.

3: Carolyn

Carolyn was dangerous. I knew this. Everyone else in the world knew this except my damned fool of a partner. Everyone smelled trouble on her except Jim. Jim had no guile. He could not manipulate his way out of a paper bag. And Carolyn knew that. She was in control of Jim and, indeed, everyone else to a certain degree. And though she pretended innocence, I could see in Carolyn’s eyes that she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew just how far everyone would go for her, and she used everyone as far as she was able to. Hell, she even manipulated me a few times. But the one sure way to evade her grasp was to get away from her. And away Jim and I did get—about 2,500 miles away.

But Jim was still in her grasp. His heart was a field mouse on an evening of full moon, and this woman was an owl. She calculated that because Jim was willing to do anything for a woman he loved, she could make Jim do anything. He would be the ultimate puppet for her. Not that Jim could see this—and who could blame him? If a man loves a woman—if he really loves her, and she kills defenseless orphans, the man will twist the story in his mind so that somehow the orphans deserved it. This is why I don’t bother with love anymore. Not that I ever thought my brothel charades were a substitute for love, but they were what I was looking for. I was young and needed a warm body to lie with, and I saw what love did to good men like Jim. I doubt you would have done any different.

Jim wrote Carolyn love poems and mailed them to Telluride whenever we stopped in a town. She may have gotten them, too, but we were on the move pretty constantly. We never had an address for her to write back to. And it strikes me that since Carolyn never loved Jim, she probably wouldn’t have even if she could have. She was one of those dark beauties. She had deep blue, sorrowful eyes and long, flowing black hair, and she always wore black. I won’t go so far as to say that the darkness inherent in her was a reflection on her heart, but it was one hell of a coincidence.

Carolyn had studied Linguistics aimlessly. I guess she had hoped to find her purpose in the midst of her studies and, failing at that, she completed her degree as a matter of course. She spoke a few words of more than twenty languages. She was born in California—in the San Fernando Valley. She went to school in Claremont with us. She moved to Colorado, and I still don’t know why. I was seldom sure of her motivation for doing anything, come to think of it. As a woman, she operated on a level entirely incomprehensible to men such as myself. But I knew what female operations looked like. This was different. Carolyn moved through the world like she was a chess player and everyone else was just a piece to be moved around. Her actions always reflected the fact that she was thinking a few moves ahead.

The romantic in me liked to think that I was in love with the open road—in love with my own freedom. The rest of me knew that was stupid and that I was still in love with (or at the very least trying to get over) Marie. She was a painter in New York City, and for a while we were crazy about each other. I never really figured out if I left her or if she left me, but the fact is that we parted about a year back and I hadn’t seen her or sent her a single letter since. She paid me back in kind. Marie was nothing like Carolyn—she was smart, sure, but she was completely without guile and drunk on her direction. She knew that she was going to be a painter in New York, and goddamn if it didn’t happen. And unlike Carolyn, Marie was fair-skinned and blonde. She had this way about her—though she rarely dressed in white, she always gave the impression that she was wearing white—that hiding beneath her dress were quiet, white wings. She was a terrible singer, but just looking at her or hearing her speak, you would think she would be an amazing soprano. She had indigo eyes that beckoned you to stare, and though she would accost you for staring, she loved that she was interesting—something to be stared at.

This all took place during a fight Jim and I had over about eighty dollars. We parted ways for a year or so and met wordlessly in Ohio when we were over our tempers. Jim never talked much about what he did, but I know that he stayed in Cleveland for most of the time we had spent apart. God knows why.

It was the long walks in the rain without an umbrella that did it (metaphorically and literally). It seemed as though Marie had so much warmth to share with the world, and as her boyfriend, I was made to take none of it for myself. Instead, my mind grew roots in the rain. I slept there, I ate there, I stagnated there, and I felt like I was dying there. She had issues of her own. She was looking for someone so damned specific. It would have to be a man with certain phrases, or a certain tone of voice. It would have to be a man with a dark soul to share. The number you have dialed does not exist.

So, we had our fight. We went our separate ways. I still love her, no matter what I want to believe. But that was a lot of miles ago. For the moment, I was content to drive up and down Alaska doing whatever suited my mind. That’s the way to live, if you can manage it.

4: Of Names

There is a cold pride that men owe to their family names. My father and his father and every man across the wire that is my paternal line has borne the name Lancaster. I have always thought that it sounded vaguely metallic. I love the way that it tastes and how the vowels play in it—the dominance of the “a” and the submission of the “e.” I love how rhythmic it sounds. I suppose that to the rest of you it must be as foreign and lowly as any other name, but it is a family heirloom of mine. It is a treasured possession and I have come to feel so strongly that it is mine alone that I refuse to share it with most anyone.

My middle name is Douglas. It is my father’s name, just as his middle name was my grandfather’s first name. This sort of naming is the seed of a legacy that my paternal ancestors have surreptitiously planted in their children. It is a way to preserve their name. It is more than a little vain, but I love it. My father is an honest man, and I am proud to have his name ensconced in my own.
The first man was named Adam. This is significant because of the time in which Adam lived—a time in which man was a free creature. Adam was unique in that he lived to see the end of this age. How fitting, then, that I, named Adam myself, was born into a time and place of control and rigid lines, and unceremoniously burst into an Eden of free living. I don’t know what that means, in terms of metaphor. Maybe I am the last man. I hope that I am not.

5: Shelter from the Storm

Jim and I got into Anchorage a little after two in the morning. Jim wanted to sleep and I wanted to drive alone, so we got a cheap motel room with two beds, roaches, and a space heater. I deposited Jim in these grim quarters and sped back down Highway 1.

A key is the physical construct to couple the concept of pure, unadulterated purpose.