SNUFF (h.s.)

Chapter 32

The Way to Texas

Nora was smoking mapacho from her coco pipe made of Arapaima fish bone and stones. Harry had a hand-rolled under his shades rim and another hanging from his mouth. The radio was silent, cars were driving past them, they weren't talking. He felt a numb trembling on his sweating nape. Perhaps something was nagging away at him.

He recalled Nora bathing in the roman baths. The poolbed was tesselled lotuses, she was dressed as a countess daydreaming at her country house somewhere in an arcadian village. She was wearing her lavished peruke as white as her powdered face. She was sipping her bergamot tea from her painted fine china never being once bothered by the inhaling of H2O. Was it already tea time? He wondered and watched his shirt's frills waving like jellyfish around his arms. Three Foxhounds and three Dalmatians were sauntering her adorned hem and embroidered clogs. Mitsouko the iguana was resting between the Delft and Satsuma.

Nora had stretched her bare friskity feet on the dash. Her tootsies were always darker than her shoe soles, if she decided to wear something it was her laced sandals. In her blue films or at parties she wore boots, wedges, heels. Harry had tried to imitate her cruddy habit but he was a grungy native son himself to pass as a Mendocino kiddo.

At his place back in Roseville he had more dust and dried scattered paint than paintings. Well, what can you do? The job he'd come up with wanted the dough, and if it wasn't for the ditches he wouldn't have bouldered brushes, oilcloth threads, turps jars, half-made sketches of Nora at his atelier – well, a cubby at Sergio's place he called atelier. He hadn't painted for weeks but didn't consider it since he was occupied with important affairs. Serious affairs. Affairs with the opportunity to some prestige gain. He was making his mark. An apparent mark, wiser than a concrete star.

His hair was parted in the middle tied in the back of his neck scratching him. Knotted greasy strands were itching the behind of his ears. He was wearing his lilac shades to keep' em away from his mug. He'd left the hand-rolled burning, the ash was blown on his vest fringes or out the window.

The oily breeze was cool as Nora's hands are. He wasn't complaining. A changed life is what he goes for. He knew he'd part with habits he didn't want to change. Habits of no importance. Indifferent. Now, now he was occupied with serious affairs, at the very point. The wanderer's life is vital, the exploration is spectacular. They left behind two lines of smoke and disaster, two fiery and crimson lines. Don't look back. We aren't Nora and Harry. We are the Poetress and the Wanderer. More significant. Don't you dare look back.

Nora was drowsing with the coco pipe in her hand, once she stared with half-closed eyes, once she slept sucking tosh tokes. She was wearing a purple camel onesie she'd lost in the back of his trunk. Her bangs were flying over her eyes like the eagle's azure feathers on the high totem. He wished the wind was good enough for him, but she had reassured him there's an awaiting magnificence he couldn't deny. The world in California was indefinite, immense.

He leaned his head to look at the headliner. He encountered a blue space joined with two palm tree rows as a transparent Nora was dancing at the center. Her standing back seemed to crawl on a monoscopic flat sky and he's afar from her heart as he's from the stars. The ternary god exists in three dimensions simultaneously while Nora approaches the line where firing waves wreathe the sun – pressed, crushed, transformed to a flat string resembling a dot or the black circle of her eyes ascending into an eternal sphere. Harry struggles to explore terrified and eager those first three minutes of love.

His hunger never rests. He's felt the freedom she possesses, the intellectual liberation of blood. A trembling eternal oasis was at the core of the sun, he's speeding unchained. The clunker Caddy was hanging like a chicken's headless body. The white wheels hit the road they defined. He hadn't questioned the course of a straight road. That's the course, why wonder? No compass, no map or polar star. Their course is a fertile forest.