Thomas Bernhard

On The Mountain

Thomas Bernhard

Yes

[1]

There was the sound of metal. The clack-bang-clang of metal meeting metal, abruptly, that was the sound, somewhere behind him. Metal, the word sang in his mind and he saw it, grey shiny hard stuff, the noise it left behind. Silently he spelled the word for his eyes, then said it aloud for his ears. It seemed like gibberish, but he could see it, hear it, the tart smell and tang to his tongue. The way his fingers felt. There was the sound of metal, he remembered. Behind him. He knew what it was, yet had no idea what it meant.

The sound of metal echoes, hinting, going fainter.

His legs moved and made him proud. He watched the way they went back and forth with admiration. He admired his legs, and how his legs gave strength to each other by admiring one another. On either side of him were large flat spaces with things sticking up, and nearby the poking up stuff walked by real fast. Plants, fields, he was walking past.

Plants are things that stand up from the ground. The ground that is not molded stone, he thought, watching the passing of the beneath his feet. Fake stone, he decided. Dirt, that was it, that ground out there was dirt, lumpy and dug up. The plants formed fields. Jungles of tall green things. There were places at a distance where the ground went up and he could see more fields, far and small and showing how the plants stood one after the next, side by side by wide.

He was walking along the side of a road. He knew it was a road because he did know that that was a road, a wide strip like this is called a road. Made of dirt or gravel, concrete or asphalt, those were the things known as roads. He guessed the width as four or five times lying down what he stood up. You'd hardly consider the vast stretch a strip, except the distance to that in front of you and in back as well, well, the road that just goes on forever either way, until the ground swoops up and swallows it or it hits the horizon and falls off. Birds swoop down to get something to swallow, this he knew, startling himself by saying, "The earth is round."

The sounds he made were birds. The roads don't go away, they go around. They're not strips, they're bands, rings on round fingers. There's no way to prove any of this. The horizon edge is a mirage. Because you never get there doesn't disprove its existence. At the end of everything is vague perfection, he sensed briefly. He startled himself, "I think a pool of potable water and a grouping of palm trees is a more plausible trick."

He liked that he could open his mouth and make noise. The sounds were otherwise senseless to him. His wrists ached and pulsed. Metal was past. His arms were so light they floated, he had to push them down. That made them flapping, thrusting him down the road hopping and skipping, like a bird but not going up. He looked above to the blue and wondered how the birds felt, what they did and saw and what they thought of it. The way they soared through blue air and looked way down to where things were tiny. Did they think enough to have opinions on their actions? The birds did not bother to waste much of their time walking along the road. They mostly flew or perched, freeing around or at good rest. All that seemed right, the birds so familiar, the way they sat and talked, then winged away waving. He didn't need to hold one to know that birds are soft and warm.

Birds and metal met together, but he couldn't say how. The sky opened up very scary. The dark fast flecks made him feel safe, rooting him like the gravel underfoot, but the blue he knew, he knew the blue of the sky and to be the sky, the blue was too deep. It made the top of his head want to come off, ooze into the scary blue. He snapped down straight ahead, something inside him had him sucking air vast and fast, swelling his body up big, his legs wings not beating the right way, shoving him only forward. He stumbled along, even more dizzy, the plants ahead of him passed back before he could see them. There was nothing in pursuit, no matter how often he glanced behind. The air pawed his face as he swept past, swiping at his flung hair. Everything moved in relation to him instead of him to it. The road went away even though it never went away. There was the sound of singing.

He slowed down, legs aching and too full of air, thinking, this is as close as I get to birds. Once he was walking again, things stayed the same for very long. He could make his feet switch from making the hard road sound to making the crunchy gravel sound. If he moved even further towards the gully between him and the fields, there was just the rustle of long dry grass. He liked that best, but the slant was awkward to walk, one leg never straightening out, the other always testing bottom. The ditches made no sense, but that didn't stop them from being there. He walked where he had one foot on the gravel, the other on the grass. The rolling hip hop was nice, the rhythm soothing. He saw again the blue above, the swirling confusion of specks, when his foot slipped and he was running stumbling fast down. The wind was all in his face crazy and wild. When he hit the bottom of the ditch, he thought, I've slipped. His legs kept him up the opposite bank, a last little effort to hop atop, thinking, I'm tumbling. He walked a way to calm down, then jumped and raced and wound up shaky-kneed back at the roadside. Standing still, the air was the same, meek against his smile slow and wide. Laughing, he turned and did it again, laughing and laughing, again and again, laughing until he collapsed over on the side of the road from the no air of laughter.

There was the something that was nothing until it had to become a something, the breeze away melting distant trees. Louder, he thought it was the way the plants in the fields talked close up. The more and more made him be on the other side, hid away among the fields. It was the sound of fast and hard through air. A whooshing that didn't break for breath, a wind driven ever closer, louder, more metallic. He stayed hunched down in the crops, nervously picking at fibers, stroking stalks. There was no doubt to his mind that there was a car approaching, but he wasn't sure just what all that entailed. Amazed he was how a purring smudge all the way away so quickly became larger and louder, colored red and roaring. The air smelled bad fast, the burning stench rolling a wind, rustling the plants, leaving everything hazy and unanswered as the big red blur went tiny again. The car left pebbles dancing on the roadbed. The rushing was a false promise of true breeze, the way the air can stink heavily of a rain that never falls. Tasting the air, he recognized the metallic tang.

Somehow, he thought it safest to stay where he squatted. The dirt under his feet filled his nose with comfort while the crops seemed to cradle him, rocking on the balls of his feet.

The car, he remembered, was red. He had the impression that it was old and worn. There was a window and it was open. It carried the head of another person, identified only as having shoulder-length darkish hair blowing wildly.

Thoughts were silent, and in the quiet he could hear a caw of crows, in a field so distant they were barely occasional specks on the horizon. A humming long arose to sink away again. Another car, going another road several miles out of sight. A bird cried right around, loud to make his head turn but never found. Sound and all slid away until he was left standing staring straight up into the sky. What he heard was barely there, a murmur deafening at its source but by his distance no much more than a sort of moaning in his bones. There was nothing for him to see where his ears led his eyes. When he squinted and pretended, he could almost see what it was as it traveled the sky, the invisible thing parting the blue cleaved into the line of a puffy white wake.

He was watching a jet, that much he knew. What a jet looked like he could fairly well see imagined, would doubtless recognize come nose-to-nose. But as to what one actually was he could guess only that it was neither a bird nor a car, though strangely a little bit of both.

Soon the jet was all the way away, gone bisecting the sky over the other side of the world. He shifted his haunches, bouncing a few times, but otherwise didn't move much. For a long time he watched the long thin plume widen and waver, finally erased from horizon to horizon too slowly to be really seen. Just as the sky was becoming all blue again it began slipping into deeper hues, soiled with a splash of pink along one side. He knew that night was coming, which meant darkness would fall fairly complete. Standing up tall he stretched a good lot, thought about walking, then sat back down on his heels. It was a curious note he took, something obvious he hadn't quite happened to notice, the fact being he could either remain where he was or else continue walking down the side of the road. It wasn't that the sparse choice seemed unnatural, what exhausted him was the way none of it had any meaning. He was too tired to see any sense in moving on, too relaxed to even feel like standing up again.

Darkness and silence gathered all around, hunched as his shoulders, dangling like his arms. None of it was absolute. In a fraction of the time it took to disappear the world was once more showing its face. Up above, in the sky, blue gone black yielded to a mad spattering of tiny lights, their brightness evidenced by the ravages of distance. Gradually he could make out his own form, and then that of the plants surrounding him. The emptiness in his ears soon filled them, a dull pulsating rush he eventually identified as an echo from inside his body. Once he knew that, he could shunt it aside, strip it away. He breathed, hoarse and sweet, forgotten. What he heard was a slight sort of crunching, maddening and perplexing, a wisp on the horizon. He gagged on a sickly burp, realizing he was listening to the crops beside him actually audibly growing. He wasn't sure why the thought was so terrifying. The questions around him wove a fabric of chain mail; the weight of wearing it made him sleepy.

The plants smelled good, that was reassuring.

At some point he woke up long enough to be confused. He had no memory of toppling, but there he was, lying on his side at an incline, resting atop a nest of crushed crops. The position was altogether not all that uncomfortable, as he found himself still holding it when the fields were first beginning to lighten.

[2]

Water was everywhere. All the tiny lights had melted into the black, blending the sky back to blue. He woke slowly, pretending he wasn't, trying to deny he was. But with an itch, the heaviness of his soaked clothing kept him from returning sound asleep. He dozed then popped back up, over and again, scratching, repeatedly, flailing at the dampness surrounding him. He thought maybe the wetness of the ground around was the overflow off him, until he stretched, his limbs knocking the stalks of the surrounding plants, their waving arms showering him with old rain. Apparently, sometime after dark, before light, everything secretes drops of water, even stones. Metal, he remembered, sheds water like a dull man a revealing dream. Small dots left adding up to nothing.

The ground was spongy but not at all soft. Though it yielded slightly now from the moisture, it felt just as hard as when he'd first found himself lying down. Maybe even worse given the ache of hours in his still bones, the knotted petrification of muscles gone unmoved, cramped into stone. His body seemed to be not floating but blotting, the sensation only adding to his unease.

Flexing a hand his fingers closed and tore up a clump of dirt. It seemed strangely too precious to just drop. Not knowing what else to do he brought it over to his face. The fistful was loamy and dark, he saw, and smelled new, good deep and rich, meaning, he realized, just words describing nothing. He crammed the load into his mouth and chewed, dribbles of grit spilling out the corners murky with spit. His teeth locked at the main taste of metal. He spat it all out as best he could, swallowing the pasty remainder just to make it go away. After pushing himself to his feet, he stood around licking all the leaves he could reach, hoping to help his tongue forget the foulness lingering there. He gave up, knowing there was no water enough to make it stop. Turning and looking, he saw the way out back to the edge of the field.

There seemed no reason now to linger. The plants apparently did stay, never leaving, each one calling its little plot of ground home. But he had two legs which could move. The longer he stood still, the more he worried his feet might sink deeper into the spongy soil, until, maybe, he too became planted, giving up all freedom of motion save to sway a little bit if there happened to be a breeze.

Before he could leave the field, the field had to leave him. Something stressed the importance of this fact. If he looked too much like he'd risen from the field, perhaps improperly escaped it, he might be somehow forced to return to the field and indeed wind up planted. He brushed off the clinging clumps of leaves and sticks and dirt from his body, hoping the unrelenting stains and smears wouldn't much matter. The dampness, he knew, he would carry until it departed of its own accord. He examined the places where his skin was broken and flowed swollen red, other rivers tired and dried to a crusty brown. What they were or meant he didn't know.

The road could be seen peering down any one of the rows. As he remembered, the rows to the road were too narrow to pass through untouched. He strode away, pushing through the plants, elbowing them aside, feeling sinister in his strength, sorrowful each time he heard a stalk crack.

He stopped and stood still hid, just inside the field's edge, well camouflaged with grime. The road lay out there, flat and empty as he could see. He watched it, neither alertly nor inattentively. The road, false rock, wasn't any different, any more alien than the plants at his shoulders, same as the field across the way, the few trees clumped here and around, the ridges of the small swellings further back, above the several birds soundlessly breaking up the empty flatness of the early sky. However foreign, everything was familiar, was what was seen, and what he saw seemed perfectly right to his eyes.

There wasn't enough of a breeze to make the plants shout, but a slight murmuring was going on between them. Other small sounds came to his ear, emphasizing how quiet it was all around him. He knew the first noise as a car, recognizing the long moan, the slow low roar growing from well away, a dull lull in a dip, then getting louder again cresting the rise.

Closer and closer it was metal-metal, the mix in of metal making sound, striking, rumbling bumping, the drawn out clang-clanking of metal dragging. The car rolling by, rubber zipping on asphalt, a loose tailpipe clunking, bouncing at bumps, throwing a trail of sparks, lit like a shooting star's tail.

He wasn't sure if it was the exact same car as last he'd seen, that other car. What was the color? and was a shock of dark hair waving out the window? The rush left him so breathless he hadn't the time to take notice before the car was but sound just another memory.

Eventually he closed his mouth, striking teeth to make a noise. His hair begged for more gustiness. Arms dangling, legs quavering, he stood there, weaving slightly, doing the plant dance by himself.

Metal was in his mouth. Creeping to his teeth an upside down tongue tickling his palate, the metal was in his mouth, crawled up his throat coughing. He gasped and hacked. Where before had just been wizened and empty, he now bowed and bent, doubling over all of a sudden, strangely stabbed by his innards. The metal read hunger, he knew that for a fact. The inside workings of things all slick and warm red, they ran like clockwork. On this one could depend.

All around him he decided was somehow edible. It was all tall stalks spouting leaves, which seemed just wrong for eating. Towards the bottom sprouted long hard pods encased in leaves. He broke one off and began peeling away the tight leaves, letting each one drop to his feet where they soon built a pale green mound on the blackish ground. Having to unwrap so many leaves seemed to imply that whatever was concealed must be worth the guarding. Eventually there were no more leaves, just a bunch of sticky threads to be torn off. The underneath was rows of pale yellow bumps. He didn't know quite what to do with it now. The unveiling and color made him think what the shape suggested, that eating it was done by inserting the narrow end in the mouth and biting off a piece. His teeth barely made some bumps pop, then stopped. The food seemed to have a huge impossibly hard core. Jaw still clenched he yanked it out, scraping off twin paths through the nubs, leaving little bits of skin and liquid and pulp in his mouth. With both hands he broke the piece in half. Most of the inside was a big bone, the small bumps growing densely all around it. He scraped off some more, then turned his hand, gnawing them off lengthwise in rows. The way they grew did seem to be the way they were meant to be eaten. Even so, if the stemmy inside hadn't been so unappealing as to be beyond prime consideration, he would have wondered if the bumps weren't yet another covering to be rid of in quest of the plant's best. Chewing on them was not pleasant. He swallowed what he had, but didn't have any interest in seconds. The taste was that of dirt, a pasty dirt the more he chewed.

Low loud sounds echoed inside him, gurgles and burbles. What he ate only fanned the sharp pains. He wasn't too surprised to hear himself say, "I'm really hungry."

That alone made it important enough that he leave and get going. The imperative sailed him across the gully, taking him down and up the ditch, sending him stumbling gasping to the gravel roadside.

"Corn tastes good cooked," he remembered, chasing down the road.

[3]

Even the sun was the same.

The day looked clean but felt grimy.

The air-prodding of metal was still behind him, the slam slagging of met metals making and keeping a breeze reaching up to tickle his neck. The smell of the stuff never quite going away. His hair felt like wire, his fingers thick skewers. Inside his head sat a cube of oily boiler plate. The bones of his legs were shiny rods or beams gleaming.

It was a fresh day, but it unfolded rumpled like a piece of discarded foil.

His legs continued swinging, fascinatedly. They took him long step after step without being told, or at least reminded. He was not at all certain he actually controlled which way they led him. He couldn't see why he would have decided to go in this or that or any particular direction.

He came to one of those places he remembered coming upon before, where the road suddenly and nonsensically crossed another road. It was impossible to decide which of the three ways to go, or whether to take the fourth and simply turn back. As always before, unpaused, his feet continued their straight ahead, not waiting around for the end of the story.

The crossing was in the behind world, the road ahead no different from what it always was. The road remained lined by fields of the same big tall plants. The surrounding land tumbling up here and there, tilting, showing big lone trees made small by distance, underscored yet diminished, islands in the sea fields, and then again sometimes revealing the horizon lines of trees on far further, furtive ridges.

His legs did obey enough that if he wanted to quit walking they did. When his legs didn't move, all of him stopped. That did make sense. But he wondered why when the birds quit flapping their wings, they instead soared.

He continued walking onward, forward, everything about the day the same as the day before, including the sound of metal. Wire fencing hummed in the breeze, sheets screeched and thundered as loose siding, while cast steel screamed with momentum. Howling and roaring, snaps and squeaks, the twisting grind of metal defacing metal.

Gradually the land began to sink, the fields growing stunted, giving up to weedy mud. The fields swallowed by flotsam flashed swamp. Pools of dark water sat shallow and black. On much of the surface grew a bubbling muck too green a glow to be real. He saw then nearly instantly startled several statuesque birds that would have seemed to defy flight until they didn't, launching themselves up up into the air like miracles happening everyday. Crippled trees grew tiny, scrawny and stunted, drooping limbs, keeling to their knees.

The sensation genesised. There was the rush and hush of motion, there was movement and sound. The air held a taste of metal. He wasn't surprised by the eventual sight, gathering at the facing roadway's horizon. The moment arrived when the pickup was large and passing by. Heads hung out the open windows, making sounds like the wind.

"Eat this! you faggot."

"Get back in your field, you fucking scarecrow!"

A thrown bag hit hard on his head, a wad of soft paper speeding. He fetched and examined the missile. Inside a metal backed paper wrap was a scrap of sandwich, tucked into a cardboard container of a few golden brown thin things, crumpled and splotched with runny red. The smell stated eat me and live, ignore me and die.

[4]

He stopped still, stuck standing in the dust and the mud. The ache in his legs was unprintable, a pathetic melody, lingering. Having considered the notions of food and shelter, he took a look around. There was the pavement of roadway and the pavement of parking lots, which joined in a spray of concrete shot to gravel. Grey rose the structures, lending him no hint or clue. It was hard for him to decide that he was in nearly a town. Signs identified functions. He faced a roadhouse, liquor store, drug store, quick store with gas pumps and a little modern brick squat at the far end of the strip that seen from that angle seemed unadorned thus unnamed. He walked down that way and found it to be called a post office. All the while, behind him, across the road, ditch down from the shoulder, there hung an immense curtain of a woods-worthy thicket of swampy trees growing like grass. About a quarter mile further down the road, on his side, before a final bend, a stone structure stood at the edge of fields, likely a last marker of civilization as such. Circling back to his starting point, he found himself roving all light-headed and cranky, wanting to eat, wanting to sleep, deciding how best to obtain any of that. Passing the bar, he broke stride right over to the slits of front windows; the glass was too thick and smoky to say a thing. He huddled hunched wondering what to do. First he looked at the buildings, then he turned across to the trees. The road went on its ways all grey. Every car going by was full of interest. Before him, high on a pole, sat an internally lit plastic sign all big and white, ink blackened with a weathered blot and the letters still lightly reading the titular Prospector, underscored by the smudged words steaks and drinks.

"Beef and Beer," he intoned, trying to prime his tongue for real talk. The other trick, he quickly taught himself, was to turn the knob and then press on the door. The door proved tough, heavy and bulky, but it closed itself behind him with surprising quiet. He waited patiently for his eyes to adjust to the dimness all around. He was adjusting to the native conditions, he thought, having a keen sensation that he was a visitor from another planet. Pausing to stand and adapt, breathing in the carbon monoxide atmosphere, converting the oxygen and spitting out chunks of coal.

He didn't know what to think. Still blind in his eyes, his ears were big with the sounds of two angry voices, in apparent argument to judge from the cadence of call and response. The first thing he could clearly make out was a small square of glowing blue hovering midair a ways away. The blue grew more colors, which took on shapes, sometimes reminding him of tiny people. The shouting noises were surely coming from there. Something seemed familiar about it. All that came to mind was a single statement, a simple sentence, read in mind like a memorized line: the television is always turned on too loud.

He thought on that a minute, then asked, "How do you make the sound go down?"

"Duh, you turn the knob, dumbass."

Turning his head, he located the voice. In front of him was a chest high counter made of very dark wood, lined with round seat things set on poles. Behind that were rows of bottles, mirrors, low lit little signs lush with words and warm colors. Sandwiched in between were two men, images of a backwards mirror, the one man older, shorter, fatter, better dressed and more powerful, the other not. It seemed important to him to note that everything was now quiet and both the men were staring at him. The way they both had expressions chiseled into their faces, the way they were half-men sliding back and forth across along a straight line, the way they were like mountains down at the horizon, shifting back and forth topped with big heads. The low lumpy one said, "And in case you didn't notice, the sound's already off."

He looked them back, then cocked his head and laughed, tapping a finger to point at them, nodding, smile spreading, "Yea, puppet theater."

"That's right," the tall thin man shouted at the short fat one, "but I done cut all your fucking strings, you hear me man? Jerk your hands all you want. But I'm through dancing for you!"

The short man shuddered, then swiveled from the tall one, glaring down at him from the up-on-stage, "So what's your room for a beef anyway, buddy? Since you ain't even bought one fucking beer yet!"

"So you do sell beef and beer?"

"Fuck right!"

He was obviously talking to the man in charge of something. "I'm interested in a meal and a place to sleep, possibly for more than a night, and I'm willing to do any work to earn my keep."

The tall man reached his hands behind him, fiddling for a few seconds. He pulled off the full length apron, then slung it with gusto. It caught on a tap handle and dropped on the bar an unimpressive lump trailing ties. He then clapped a hand on the counter, the other on the old man's closest shoulder.

He watched amazed as the tall man sprung, pushed off, and vaulted easily over the bar and stools. The man nodded to him, "My old job's open now," then returning to the lonely little mountain left, "so you better hire the poor fucking sucker before he gets away." The door flushed in a tankful of fresh bright air before finally swinging shut with a tiny tired grunt.

After a long pause he decided the door probably wouldn't be thrown open anytime soon, that that man was gone for good. He tilted back to watch the other man. The old man was still the mountain man, the half-man at rest center stage, stately and symmetrical as a moosehead over a mantle. Not that he had any idea why the head of a moose would be hanging on a wall, but that was exactly what he saw.

"Déjà vu," he whispered a forgotten mantra, watching the moose eyeballs, the terror as their glare slowly swiveled from the door on to him.

A hand snapped out and the old man was palming a ball of crumpled apron, tie strings dangling, his fingers kneading the soft white cloth in a way that made him remember bakeries. "Bread," he said.

Fast move, light blur, his arms shot up on their own, and he found himself draped with the exploding apron. The sound of wind whipped cloth, a flag fast flapping, half a second long then gone, lingering many more, an echo of brittle silence. There was a moan, the wooden sigh of an old floor. Then the man was shouting, that was his guess. He looked over at the television just to make sure. On it was a picture of miniature trees that were probably very quiet. All the loud noises didn't seem to say anything until a certain cadence set in, and he realized that the old man was screaming, "Hey you! Yea you! Hey you! Yea you! Hey! Yea you! I mean you!" which didn't really make any more sense than the gibberish.

"You what?" he asked. "You who?"

"Yoo-hoo, you!" the man yelled back. "I don't pay for shit, but the food's free, and I'll find you a place to flop for the night, if you last that long. So, you! Either drop the apron and run, or come here and shut the fuck up."

He walked to the bar, halted by the stools. There was no way to join the old man completely. If he could fly, he wouldn't be here.

"Okay, we got that straightened out. Next up is this is my place, I'm the boss, and my name's Motts. What's your name anyway?"

The question was like the apron, flying. This time he thought to duck his head. He stared down, trying to figure out the correct answer. All he could think of was how what he saw was this section of a length of darkened wood, mostly flat but scallop-rimmed on the horizontal edges. Against the hazy luster was the fleshy starfish he suddenly thought of as his own hand. Laid out, at a different angle, from the other side of the bar was another hand, a Motts hand, a hand that, the five points aside, didn't resemble his at all. Beside and between their odd pairing of hands was a small gold oblong package containing, as best he could tell, a fair supply of long white tiny tubes of something. In the dim light he could make out the largest print on the package. The way the words sounded made him think of names. "Benson," he replied.

"Benson what?"

"Benson Hedges."

"Nahhh. No way. You're kidding. Really? That coincidental or what? If you're like my smokes, then at least you got some kinda class, not that I can vouch how much."

Motts put both his hands on the bar, fumbling with the golden package. At length the man managed to place one of the white tubes, wrinkled and bent, between his lips of all places. It bobbed in his mouth as he continued speaking. "Benson, hmmm, ain't that a funny nigger on television that sounds like he goes back to the pilgrims or something, but your name's Benjy, that's it, like a little jew boy or that rat dog movie star."

Motts handed him one of the cylinders out of the gold pack. At least he now knew enough to place it jutting out, clamped by his lips. He heard Motts say, "Benjy, you're a black english jew who thinks he's a dog. Haw haw haw. Roll over and beg, haw haw haw."

He didn't understand what was so funny. Right as he'd decided that maybe he should pretend to laugh, Motts stopped laughing. The silence was thick and awful, disturbed by low repetitious and unidentifiable noises that just seemed to make the otherwise quiet worse. Something flickering caught the corner of his eye. It was the television going crazy, flashing back and forth between a small number of people dressed alike moving across a green field and a whole bunch of people crammed together in stands, mouths open and arms in the air. A large dark board speckled with little round lights appeared, the dots first making several rows of small numbers, then in a blink they spelled HANK!!! "No," he said not knowing why, "but you can call me Hank."

Nodding an okay, Motts hung his head to follow his hand dropped down fumbling for something. Abruptly his arm coiled then swung out, across the bar, aiming for his face.

He flinched. The hand shriveled to fist stopped inches short of assault, holding, bearing, an amazingly small flame almost igniting his nose. The stick in his mouth was now on fire, and he watched awestruck as Motts reached back and lit his own. He watched then imitated Motts as he reached a V of fingers up to the smoke, pulling it away from his lips. The man then breathed out as if he had a fire going within. He saw Motts kept putting the burning stick back into his mouth and then breathing in. All that gave him was a mouthful of nasty smoke. With a few more tries, he figured out to take the smoke past the mouth, all the way deep down inside. This was one of the main smells of the room, he realized. The idea of choosing to inhale smoke seemed crazy, except to make this smell. It made his head feel like it was floating far higher than his neck could possibly reach. Plus for some reason it made the front of his pants swell. And feel good.

Before he could acclimate to these new sensations he was somehow behind the bar and being pushed through a swinging door. This new room was small and bright and full of shiny objects; the shock of it provided further disorientation. Famished as he was, he staggered forward, constantly just catching himself from near collapse.

"Whoa boy! We better feed you now. Looks like next person through the door might set off a breeze like to topple you. Anyone ever tell you you look like a scarecrow what lost your job? Hey Darryl, Darryl, you back here?"

"In here, getting some shit," a voice called from a small room further in.

"Come here, I'm talking to you!"

A man popped into its doorway, blocking the view of rows of cans on shelves. "What?"

"Welcome to the new Duane."

"What happened to the old Duane?"

"His legs got restless. He took the long hike. Now how about fixing this boy a burger and fries before he dies. Render us some gratitude so he'll have to last out 'til closing."

"I'm busy Motts, you do it."

"Darryl. I'd sure hate to have to run the grill tonight while you're elbow up in suds."

"Shit, Motts. Why don't you squeeze my balls a little harder if it makes you feel so good? If my wallet wasn't so empty, my legs might feel the need of a little stretching themselves."

"Boy, take note: there's a good man for you."

"I thought my name was Hank."

"C'mon boy, while it's cooking I'll show you the ropes."

The ropes were actually sinks, three of them. The first was to be fairly hot and soapy wash water, the second a very hot rinse, with the final scalding bleach disinfectant. He learned the routine, only to have Motts add, "But that's not the way we do things around here. After you scrape the plates into the garbage, use the first sink to rinse and stack. Wash in the middle one. Last is straight hot water. Fuck the bleach. The first way is for if someone from the Health Department shows up. Then you better have the sinks the way they want them real fast or your ass is on the road. Get it? You'll get the dirty shit loaded up over here. Look around and you'll see where stuff goes when it's clean and dry. When things get hopping, it gets pretty crazy around here, so you gotta pay attention. Supply and demand. A stack of platters ready to go don't do a damn bit of good if there ain't a clean fork in the house. That's rule number one. Two is you do anything anyone tells you to do, unless I've told you different. Then you tell them to piss off. And right now I'm telling you to eat your dinner and get ready to go. There's an easy hour ahead, then it's blast-off."

The fries were much better than the few he'd had thrown at him earlier. The burger could have been a slab of drying mud between a pair of flat rocks and still he would have swooned.

[5]

He made the dishes get clean. The way he'd been told to he did. Saving the glasses for after he'd changed the water, letting the flatware collect. As he got the hang of the routine, the waitresses started bringing him back bus trays more frequently. Brimming over and spilling, flinging food scraps at him. The faster they ran them back, the more they shouted, "Why aren't there any goddamn glasses? Shee-yit, where are all the fucking forks!?"

Finally one of the younger waitresses came around the counter to the sinks, wearing and bearing a pasty sort of look mixing pity and disgust. He turned to face her. She stood right in front of him, so close he had to lean slightly back over the sinks to keep the points in her shirt from poking into him. She stared at him not unpleasantly but in a way that could turn ugly quickly. Her head lifted at a lilt, chin angled out. Her lips tensed and pouted, eyebrows reaching before she gently stated, "Glasses." She gave a small, decisive nod.

"You can run a batch through dirty water as long as it's not too gross. In a pinch. Always stop and never let the clean glasses get less than two rows. If you keep finding yourself with no clean glasses and filthy water, you're an idiot and I'll get you fired."

She paused to catch his eyes, holding them for emphasis, then nearly tumbled him into the water fetching something around him. "Here. You take one of these empty sour cream buckets, clean it out real good like this," she did, turning his body with hers, cramming them both in over the first sink. And then, "Fill it sudsy hot, scalding, and throw in all the silver to soak. In a pinch, you hardly have to touch them after that. You can wipe a few clean with a towel. But then again, don't be an idiot."

He waited for more, wondering if he wished she might touch him again or not.

She ended it, backing away, "Okay? Got it? Good. Have fun."

Unlike the other women, the pantyhose she wore were white. Her legs came out of the same high black skirt like that. Somehow that seemed to mean something, he thought. Like metal heated hot enough to white, but not quite glowing orange. The sight of white legs slamming metal.

But the work was too fast to think much of that. He knew to grow and grew to know, figuring how to keep demands supplied. She whispered in his ear once, "Platters," learning him to keep track.

The glasses, submerged, grated against the sink bottom, a medley of cracked bells. Breaking a glass in the water was the stupidest thing to do. The sink would have to be drained immediately and cleared of shards, the lost time making it impossible to ever catch up.

The scattering clatter, muted, of metal scratching metal. The knives and forks and spoons shot down through the big steel boxes of water, bouncing off the sides with rattling clumps, scrambling clunks coming to rest among the rest littering the bottom. The muffled etchings sounded like memory.

He was just beginning to wonder what would happen if he couldn't keep up much longer, when almost abruptly the pace slowed. It stayed busy but not bad. On the sinkside counter, the tower of bus tubs went down until after awhile he was finishing them faster than they came. Two of the waitresses took plates of food to a table right outside the kitchen where they sat down and ate. They switched with the other two and then the first pair put on their coats and left. At some point one of the other two was gone, after they'd cleaned up some parts of the kitchen. The last one wound up sitting out at the bar smoking, filling a clear glass gold from a brown bottle. Right when he was standing around with nothing to do, thinking perhaps the ordeal was over, everyone in the kitchen erupted in a clamor, a merger of the birth of noise and metal. Within minutes they had buried his sinks in a mountain of filth, metal containers and implements caked with baked on burnt slop.

Finally done, the sinks scoured and rinsed, he stood lank limp and empty, as though he had died but'd been too busy to notice until precisely that moment. He was alone in the kitchen. His instructions had run out. He brought his hands up to view, turning them back to front and forth. They were hardly recognizable as objects belonging to his body. His hands looked like two ruined sandwiches, or a pair of flounder long drowned. The smell he realized was his smell was as if he'd absorbed every sour odor that'd touched his way.

The swinging door from the bar slammed open against the side of the ice machine. A load of premature cubes crashed into the nearly empty bin. Motts wavered on in, keeping the door banging wide, then leaving it to come weaving on over to the sinks.

"Sooo, yur til live," Motts swung and clamped a hand hard on his shoulder, giving a squeeze to break bone. His words stank like scorched metal.

"Ehhy, you ain ate yet?" Motts nodded, his face like a cliff crashing into the sea followed immediately by the film of it run backwards. "Don wur, getchur setup." An eyelid drooped so rheumily it had to be a deliberate wink.

Motts turned his head towards the swinging door, "Ehurl. Earl! Gitcher ass inner!"

Earl appeared, annoyed. "What?"

Thrashing an arm, "Makem pitzer."

"But everything's put away."

"Makem cheesen."

"Oh for chrissakes! I'm done for the night."

A bell unmuffled, Motts boomed, striking clear with the clarity of thunder, "The goddamn ovens are still on, you little shit. If you're off the clock, you're off the fucking payroll!"

A little later he was sitting at the waitress' table with a flat round hot thing to eat. It was dinner for one. What he could see of the dining area was empty, and where he sat was around the bend from sight of the rest of the bar. The pizza was delicious until it was gone. Then it was a memory painful for being in the past tense, like not knowing what to do once all the dishes were clean. The ashtray held a not very used cigarette, a pack of matches beside them off-center on the table. With that exhausted, extinguished, again he was done and didn't know what to do about it. This time Motts didn't come around, not until much later. After he'd ducked over into the dark of the semi-private party room, which was lined with long soft benches where he slept awaiting the rousing hand of Motts.

The waking light was little but warm, reflective surfaces adding a lazy glow. The shaking was rough, the voice lost to every language but the clash of metal, the scraping low to screeching high.

He stumbled ahead of Motts to the back of the restaurant, prodded in the right direction. Darkness followed them, switches clicked, greeting them as the service door opened out then locked behind them. The building was ringed with shadow from a feeble light atop a tall pole over by the liquor store's dumpster next door. The back lot here was a bunch of old gravel worn down to mud, with several shaky looking outbuildings at the far edge. These looked constructed of tones, as if the far light was extinguished their walls would collapse, or take wing.

Just down the steps onto the shadowed gravel Motts turned them immediately to another door, a padlocked shack built onto the rear. Metal jingled against itself, then rustled, the plaintive cry as the door swung ajar. Motts pushed the door wide and ushered him in, then left. He was alone as his eyes adjusted to the deeper dark, distinguishing the glitter as not stars but wooden cases of glass bottles stacked to the rafters. Motts returned and threw in a couple of ruined tablecloths.

"You sleep here," Motts nodded, stating a savage grace, while slowly closing the door between them.

He was enveloped in absolute black, hearing all the more keenly the rasp of the hasp, the lock snapped shut.

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