Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

“It probably saved your life, and when you get right down to it, you’re sort of of that nonreleasing-under-tension mind-set yourself, aren’t you?”

This seemed pretty good for one in his condition. Taking heart, Ran did a chin-up toward the roof and freed himself, crashing earthward toward the passenger-side door and making his eventual escape through the sprung rear hatch. And there, on the culprit tree, as if at Ransom’s thought-command, was the sign he’d been looking for when he dozed off: Alafia: Authentic African Village As Seen on TV.

“Not bad for a nighttime carrier landing,” he said. “Especially given you were fast asleep…”

The truth was, despite his neck, despite his general soreness, like a boxer’s the day after the fight, Ran felt pretty much all right, even semi-hopeful, as he started down the rutted, sandy two-track into deep pine woods. Like a signal that fades in and out, the sense that he was on a journey came in strong again. So, maybe this wasn’t the end…. Who knew? The end could be a long way off. A damn long way! Maybe this was, in fact, his elusive, long-sought chance for a fresh start. Right here, right now. Why not?

“Who else gets to make that call but you?” Suddenly last night’s hypothesis seemed less far-fetched. Maybe, after all, the gods had granted an exception in his case and he was finally going to get his break. Within a quarter mile, Ran was feeling pretty goddamned great….

“This is how human beings are meant to live, isn’t it—going from adventure to adventure, fearlessly?” Eschewing Nemo now, cutting out the middleman, Ran carried on this conversation, mano a mano, with himself. “The modern world, the numbing safety of our days, toiling mindlessly like ants, for what? That’s what’s got us so fucked up.” He was figuring it out, knocking down the major ills like bowling pins, launched upon his bid to roll a straight 300 game. “Self-destruction? Hell, no. Hale, no!” said Ran, reverting to the old Killdeer accent. “Marcel Jones can kiss my ass.” What need for Nemo now? Ransom Hill was Nemo to himself!

“Are you one hell of a man?” He posed the query to the silent woods. “You are! You da man! You da man!” Addressing himself in the second person, he brayed his chant, ignoring his general soreness, ignoring the mask of crusted blood that lent a sense of immobility to one side of his face, ignoring, in fact, everything that did not accord with his hypothesis, a happy revenant, going down the road of life.

And now he came to an unmarked fork. “Two roads diverged…Hmm…” Ransom stroked his chin. “You don’t think you’re going to throw me with that lame trick, do you?” Shouting this, he pumped his fist at God, the Nemesis, whoever his unnamed interlocutor might be, then took the road-less-traveled-by and promptly came to a locked fence.

Only then, as he stopped and took brief stock, did Ran notice the stillness of the wood, the oppressive heat. It was like the sensual embrace of some inhuman force too old and powerful to defeat. Nature—the idea struck home in a flash.

“But, hey, goddamn it, aren’t I Nature, too?” asked Ransom, with a plaintive note. How had he forgotten this? “So what is this against?”

In the trees nearby, a bird he couldn’t see answered with a loud ca-raw. Wingbeats filled the air, like the sound of a soft helicopter prop, and as they faded, a brooding strangeness descended over everything. Staring up through foliage, he saw turkey vultures—there were three—in sky so blue it made Ran’s heart ache with longing for…what? eternity?

“What the hell are those things tracking?” he muttered. Then the idea struck. “Jesus! Me? Am I alive or not?” He took a beat. The question was not so obvious as it had once seemed. “I better be,” he said. “I better not be lying back there dead under that tree. This better not be some Ambrose Bierce, ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’–type stunt. It fucking better not.” He cast a frowning eye aloft on this.

He did feel a little strange, though, and when you got right down to the brass tacks, Ran wasn’t one-hundred-percent convinced he was alive, or even clear on how you tell. And once you lose that basic certainty…well, folks, to coin a phrase, it’s hard to put the egg back in that shell. But maybe he was treading on a higher plane—was this what the Buddhists meant? “Oh, what the fuck,” he said, losing patience with this train, “you have to go on the assumption, right?”

Following his own advice, he ignored the Keep Out sign and climbed the fence, and before too long at all he heard music in the distance: drums. In a junkyard on the left, an old panel station wagon had been abandoned, perhaps the very one the radical founders of Alafia had traveled south from Philly in, wheelless now and rusted out, covered with African graffiti. There were broken farm tools, busted-up appliances, shop jacks, and littered ax-and hammerheads. From a live oak limb, a monster block and tackle hung, trailing heavy chain. And in the midst of this, what made the place seem less a junkyard than a shrine, an enormous iron man, a king of iron surrounded by his iron swag. His head was made from a toothed gear that must have weighed three hundred pounds, and his iron shoes were covered with feathers, smeared and glued like the hatchet block in a farmhouse abattoir. His rusted pitchfork hand was raised forbiddingly.

“I come in peace,” said Ran, choosing to take the gesture as a welcome. He bowed low to the ground, and when he straightened up, there was a peacock in the tree, regarding him, a calm, impressive presence, and the sunlight touched its feathers, flowing down its wings and back like melted jewels, like a tumbling blue-green mountain stream.

Ca-raw, it said, and then it flew off down the white sand road—ca-raw, again. It disappeared around a