You gonna join me? he asked.
You bet. Im starving.
Then here you go, he said as he handed back the bag with the intoxicatingly fragrant Arabian sandwich.
How bout a swig?
No thanks, Ive got to be up at the crack of dawn.
So what? remarked the Hero, One sip of whisky wont kill you, believe me Dont worry, youll be up tomorrow morning and off like a shot!
I obediently pressed the bottle to my lips. I immediately felt a glowing warmth inside me, although to that point I had not even felt cold. The kebab was delicious. The fire crackled comfortingly. The planets had aligned.
Suddenly, sitting there in the woods, I came to the realization that wolves (and in general all animals) must be so much freer and happier than people, who were forced to look out at the world through the tiny windows of their stuffy little rooms and hardly experienced the wonders of the nature around them.
We sat in silence for a minute or two. I was the first to break it.
Thanks for giving me this day, Hero. Thank you for the miracle.
Miracle?! the old bum tore himself away from the bottle, turning toward me with a surprised look on his face, What the hell do mean miracle? Who do you think I am, Mother Teresa? Here have another drink, itll help clear your mind
He reached the bottle out toward me, and I took a large swallow. Then, not taking my eyes off the fire blazing in the barrel, a second
A miracle! angrily muttered the American Hero, The hell you say!
And so we continued to converse with our mouths stuffed with kebabs and bourbon, but somehow managed to understand each other perfectly.
I rubbed your button for luck! Get it, for luck!? And luck and miracles are different things, Stevie-boy. Completely different, dont mix em up
I thought of Annie and felt a pang in my heart, as if I had been stabbed by a long, twisted thorn.
Im afraid that just luck wont be enough for me Hero, I need a miracle
Dont give a shit what you need! he said, finishing the last bite of the kebab. He scooted his creaking old crate closer to the fire, and threw the bag from the food into the barrel. Sorry, but I dont work miracles. And, in general, I would advise you to stay well away from them. Now luck, thats a different story altogether, Lady Luck has never caused anyone any trouble. Give me a drink, would ya
Here, I said handing him the bottle, And how is a miracle any different from luck?
The American Hero took his time to answer. First he took a long pull on the bottle, and slowly screwed the cap back on, and then he lit up a cigarette from a wrinkled old pack and took a long drag with discernable pleasure.
Well, at the very least, for a miracle you have to pay a very high price, he said, at last, slowly and thoughtfully.
I felt the effect of the whisky, even though I had only drunk a little, just a few sips. In addition, following my thoughts about Annie, a tidal wave of memories and emotions came crashing down, somehow penetrating the thick forest cover around me. The main emotion I felt was anger- anger at the whole world. Then all at once my anger dissipated and I felt like a little child- unjustly wronged and thrown into a world of strange adults, who were evil and unfair. I was not even surprised to find tears in my eyes, for at that moment I was seven, not twenty-seven, so to cry was not even the least bit shameful.
The American Hero just sat there smoking silently, staring into the fire.
Why dont you ever talk about yourself, Hero? I asked him praying that he would not notice my tears.
Whats the point? he said not even turning around. God already knows the whole story, and everyone else has enough of their own problems
If you want, I can tell you my life story? I offered, sniffing my nose.
No, I dont want, sighed the Hero, but you are going to tell it to me anyway, so you might as well get started and wistfully threw his cigarette butt into the fiery barrel.
* * *
I was born in Benningville, Oklahoma. This sounds crazy even to me now, but that is the Gods honest truth. The funniest thing is that I never felt unhappy in this little town of identical houses with white picket fences. Childhood doesnt know that somewhere, a thousand miles away, there is another world, so it is happy with what it has.
For his whole life from the day he graduated high school until the day he died, my father worked as a mechanic at the electric power substation. My mother sent him off to work every day with a tender smile and a big sandwich in a rough brown paper bag.
Benningville was the kind of town where everyone knew each other and would say hello when they passed each other on the streets. Until I was ten I called Sheriff Powell Uncle Jack, just like all the other kids. Nobody locked their doors. On Sunday mornings it was a ghost town everyone was at church, even the sheriff and his deputies, fat Doctor Butler and his nurses too.
By a unanimous decision of the City Council we had no cable TV, we just had eight, as I remember them now, of the most boring and conservative TV channels in the entire United States of America. Computers were only allowed to be used in school during Computer Science lessons.
There was no crime in Benningville (I personally cant remember even one fight, except for a few dust-ups between the kids on the school playground). No one cheated on their husbands or wives. No one ever voted against Mayor Daniel Sutton, a kind, thin man who rode to work on his bicycle.
On the weekend every back yard had a barbeque, and the whole town smelled of grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. The Fourth of July and Christmas were celebrated with such dogmatic fervor year after year that everyone was afraid to change anything and make a fatal mistake.
The whole town turned out for every one of the high schools basketball games and I remember that the people who lived nearby would bring their own chairs so that no one would have to stand.
All the weddings and the funerals also looked the same. People in Benningville only died of old age. They only married once. No one ever got divorced.
I dont even remember that anyone had a strange name. My father was called John, and my mother Marsha. In my class we had 4 Johnsons, 3 Jacksons, 3 Browns and 2 Wrights (including me).
So that is how it was in this little place on our great big planet, where the electrical mechanic John Wright and his wife, the homemaker Marsha, bestowed the gift of life upon me.
Now matured by the barbed insults of the world, I understood that only childhood could paint my town with the patriarchal and sunny colors of America in the 1960s. And that in Benningville, just like anywhere else, there were probably fights and affairs, divorces and robberies, some people, mostly likely, were into drugs, others were into porn and didnt care less about church services on Sunday. Nevertheless, it remained in my memory as a ridiculous and theatrical little patch of Earth, on which people were born only to grow up, get married, have children, mow the lawn, and die.
But, oh how I remember the day that the whole world changed! It was Friday. Honking loudly and crazily, a sparkling automobile without a top screeched to a halt outside of our house. Out of it climbed a shapely woman with a shock of fiery red hair, who stretched out and cracked her back, then reached out her hand and flicked her thin black cigarette with a golden tip right into the middle of the road (I was aghast (I froze if in Benningville we sometimes saw women who smoked, they did it much differently usually off to the side, quietly, and a bit shy.) Her jeans were stretched so tightly over her legs that she looked like she was naked. The spiked heels on her fire-engine red pumps were as long as pencils. Huge dark glasses hid her eyes. Her nails were long and the same shade of red as her shoes.