Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 1.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Atrocious red outhouses are whimsical mistakes.

That one thought, a single fragmentary notion, seemed to flare up with internal phosphorescence, as if in the wake of a boat on a darkly seething subconscious nighttime sea.  It dangled there for a fleeting instant in his sentient awareness, briefly elevated by chance and shorn of context before, firefly-quick, it lost itself again among the frenzied, undifferentiated throng of ideas sequestered in the depths below.

Mnemonic devices for review, Max Bainbridge thought.  Whatever it takes.  Practice makes perfect.

He sat perfectly still with an unreadable face, leaning slightly to his right so he could better gaze through the scratchy port.  The plane had leveled out.  He felt the slowing as flaps grabbed invisible air.

His jumbled and crowded mind was reverberant, making instantaneous cross-connections.  It was like, he thought, a vortex of bats fluffing hundreds upon hundreds of whispery thin, leathery wings beyond the yawning mouth of a murky cave.  Facts and ideas, approximations, themes, calculations, estimations, conceptual aggregations, opinions and proofs, all of it whirring and riffling continuously behind his eyes.  Always trying obsessively to assimilate. . . .everything.  Produce a unified, consistent whole.

He glanced over as the stewardess in her navy blue vest passed forward down the aisle, hands touching the backs of each seat, casting glimpses left and right.  Perfectly manicured nails painted flat red-brown.  The color of old blood.  Tall, in her mid-forties, with curled and pressed blonde hair.  Facelift? he wondered.  Checking seatbelts and trays.

He turned back to the window, reflecting on the bulk of the stray items he'd learned, as yet untabulated, particulars, misconceptions, intellectual constructions.  A figment, a fragment, wonder where the money went.  Specifics and generalizations, frank guesswork.  Picturing all these threads weaving together and fraying apart in continuous psychic ferment.  How to explain it to anyone?  To put it into words was a challenge.

Words.  Convenient handles for elusive concepts.  Language functions as a kind of filter that safeguards us from direct experience, he thought.  A barrier we can't help imposing.  When we can describe a thing in words we can no longer see it for what it is.  The world's reduced to whatever we desire it to be.  That's why we're creatures of unreasonable expectancy.  Reality never lives up to our expectations.

The captain's detached, equanimous voice filled the cabin.  Preparing for our final descent.  Estimated time of arrival.  Thank you for flying.

Ultimately the words we use lock us all together into interactive systems of social expectation that's accepted as sensible and necessary.  Sanity by acclamation, by mob resolve.  Because the mob believes and embraces the words, not the objects that the words once represented.  Words sever us from reality as birth separates us from continuity with our biological heritage.  It's a pinching off process that isolates soul-sized blobs of free-floating consciousness in a hostile universe, tossing defenseless Hansels and Gretels into the deep dark woods with hungry witches all around, wolves howling, white birds pecking up their bread crumbs.  Consummate isolation.

Above him the air conditioning hissed away, forgotten.  Those around him were now clearing their throats, and conversation was beginning to taper off, just as it always did during this part of a flight.  Following an unwritten script.  A behavior of quiet expectancy setting in.

That's why we so desperately reach out for the other, for empathy.  Sharing.  That's the loneliness which we strive desperately to rectify, but we never fully succeed.  Telltale signs of bellybutton scars remain, mumble-whispering the taboo mystery of embryonic growth, little kidney bean fetus within mother's womb.  The physical proof that connects all human beings though we be apart.  One thing one organism we are, no matter the sentimental stories from birth to death of single individuals.  Like a semiautonomous colonial reef of coral, building and extending down the centuries.

Through the sun's changing glare he regarded a patchwork of open farm fields and brown, chocolaty-muddy river bends.  It looked sunny and warm out there.  Not at all like the white-on-white snowfields surrounding Denver.  In Colorado the snow had obliterated any sign of the Chatfield Reservoir, an impounding of the South Platte.  His first chance of glimpsing the Mississippi waterways on this trip had been scotched, but here was the Missouri.  Big Muddy.

The Platte enters the Missouri above the Iowa border.  And the Little Platte on the opposite bank, not far from the airport.

The plane banked and dropped lower over the Kansas City plains in a small fluster of turbulence.

Almost there.  Almost there.

Jayhawkers and bushwhackers had once duked it out around these low hills, trafficking back and forth below the eastern bend in the river.  The Missouri imposed no further barrier there.

The river deflected bushwhacker traffic to the south, he thought.  Landscape features channel water, and history, too.

The thinner Kansas River puckered its lips here, a tributary kissing the grander, wilder ribbon just a few miles from the heart of the old city.  Twelfth and Vine.

Words shackle us, distort our understanding, if we believe them without examining their hidden assumptions.  Influence our behavior.  Guiding violent men across the Kansas-Missouri border, sneaking, quiet, quiet.  Down dark violet starry desolate canyons frosted in creamy low moonlight.  Quantrill's men, or Lane's counter-raiders.  Or like now, on the Mexico border.  Coyotes, or packing mules.  Swallowing balloons or thin-membrane condoms.  Never venture out without your raincoat, Don advised a long time ago.  Sage advice.

I could tell Carroll about Jim Lane and the jayhawkers, but he could only tell me how the Jayhawks became Big Twelve champions and NCAA top seed.

They were still taxiing on the Denver tarmac when Max had felt the first irrefutable sign:  the distinctive painful irritation in his throat.  He'd recognized it immediately.

Common cold.

His body teemed with stowaways, clandestine virus particles that were suddenly bursting forth, punching their way through endothelial membranes.  The painful burning steady during the second leg of the flight.  Made him thirsty.  The inflammatory response was underway.  Mortar rounds of interferon and histamine exchanged, thrust, counterthrust, parry, riposte.  Attackers and defenders.  Escalation.

Not so different from the struggle for Kansas.  Slave state or free?  Sentiments stirred up by wealthy firebrands, pro-slavery Missourians rushing across the border to throw the vote.  Atchison.  Invasion of Kansas Territory by both Missourians and New England abolitionists sponsored by the Emigrant Aid Society.  Opposing combatants pouring troops into the peaceful green and yellow interior where the buffalo roam.  Racing headlong into bloodthirsty confrontation.

Now boiled down to a few trite, lifeless sentences consigned to dull high school history books, once it had been a matter of dazzling light and heat.

I'll bet Jerusalem John could tell a tale if only he were here.  Set the record straight.  Imagine him on a plane.  But instead ‑‑ only mild puffs of dust from a graveyard past.  Just look around you.  See any lingering repercussions?  Not unless you've learned how to open your eyes.  Memorizing names and dates long enough for final exams.  Over a million died, swamping previous records.  An historic discontinuity that reduced the status of preceding chronicles to a kind of feeble, quaint fantasy.  But search out the darkness of your mind or soul.  World War II spit out the bones of sixty or seventy million ‑‑ six times as many Jews alone as the rupture between North and South ‑‑ and who dwells on that?  Nothing to be done about it so just forget.  Ledgers stuffed with pages and pages of horrific spreadsheets that make the Civil War seem a sweet, sentimental melody.  And all those spindly white limbs stacked in high piles.  Soiled stripped flannels with greasy stains.  Bergen-Belsen.  Ohrdruf.  Dachau cattle cars.  Or Greek fire poured out of the sky over Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  But history always swallows its own tail, doesn't it.  Tale.  The decades grow grainy and blur and fade out.  Out with the old, in with the new, bring me a beer, it's time for the game.  Feeble human memory be the death of us all.

Down out of the sky came the plane, and soon his feet were on solid ground.  The predictable noises and motion of airport terminals engulfed him.  Distances grew closer, more real and immediate.  He thoughts narrowed accordingly, turning to baggage carousels and rotating green lights and escalators and exits.  Overhead security announcements broadcast.  Do not leave your luggage unattended.  People streaming all around, a river of humanity sloshing in both directions.

Like partisans near Westport.  Bidirectional flow.

It was unexpectedly chilly when he went outside to catch the shuttle.  The warm, sunny panorama as seen from the air had deceived him.  He was glad he'd worn his jacket and a hat on the plane.

In less than an hour he'd picked up the rental.  In the parking lot Max hooked up the GPS and then headed north.  With happiness he felt the velocity of forward progression.

On the way!

A few smatterings of icy snow still filled in the shadows of the low roadside hillocks.  No snow had been visible from the air.  Hadn't he left all that in the Rockies?  The patches would be gone within a day, he supposed.

He was here.  Here!  It was almost beyond belief.  He squeezed the steering wheel.

All his urgent planning of the last few weeks was finally giving way to the adrenalin of the road.  The past had become the present.  Now time could be neither wasted nor rushed.

It had come together so rapidly, demanding utmost care.  Years of abstract imaginings were beginning to come to life before his eyes.  To see the topography, the very lay of the land.  Land of heroes and martyrs and dreams.  The passing minutes did not dribble away the way they usually did but were coherent and clear.  He was completely aware of moving through time and place, trying to match it to an internal map.  He wanted to memorize every detail sliding by outside the car.  Could he?  He could try.

He passed through Platte City.  It little resembled the Platte City of his imagination.  A different world from the mid-1800s.  But he had no time for Platte City.  He crossed the bridge over a little river.  What was. . . ?  The Little Platte, of course, he realized.  Upstream on this river, five miles outside of St Joseph, a train had derailed. . . .But that was for later.

He turned left.

Here!