Clifford Brumley never really notices the blowy body of noise from the central heating until it cycles off, dropping his office at Wyrick and Wyrick CPAs into a different kind of silence. He looks from his paperwork to the wall clock. Before he crosses the street to Sandwich Jerry’s and his window booth facing Wyrick and Wyrick he needs to make headway on these documents from Marge Homebuilders. He’d thought Marge Thompson’s quarterly activity completed, but she wheeled by this morning in her business Humvee and said her guy just found this other stuff: a small mountain of receipts, statements, handwritten payroll notes, a child’s sketch of a cell phone, and the kind of grocery lists Clifford once found shocking. He’s told Marge what he can and can’t use, but she sends everything. Over a tinny swell of strings he hears her jingle: When you are thinking about building, Build it Marge.
When the telephone rings, Clifford jerks. Jeez Louise. Someday one of these dumb frights will finish him, the big seize. He shuffles his papers into neater stacks in case someone named Wyrick can see through the telephone.
“Wyrick and Wyrick, this is Clifford.”
“Cliff Brumley?” A young man’s voice. Far away and sure of himself.
“This is Clifford Brumley.”
“You grew up in Steelville, Missouri?”
Clifford’s face points away from the phone. “Who is this?”
“Cliff, my name is Tucker Jerden. I run Prole Miner’s Daughter.”
“The what and the what?”
“Prole Miner’s Daughter. We’re a high traffic web magazine devoted to music and music culture, and we also produce records and events, that kind of thing.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t internet much . . .”
“Nah, that’s cool, I hear you. Good man. Hey, listen . . .”
“ . . . are you calling about taxes?”
“No. Hey, listen, tell me, are you the same Cliff Brumley who played on Wilson Reagan’s record Either Raygun Or?”
Central heating cycles back; the building seems briefly to lift and groan before settling, a wheezy exhalation of dry heat. Nothing this kid says makes any sense except Wilson Reagan, and that’s like a gone dream emerging.
When he gets off the phone Clifford’s forgotten Marge, lunch. After scanning the hallway—at the far end Bill and Guy’s windowed offices spilling sunlight, at the other Nan quietly manning reception—he softly shuts his door. He doesn’t usually spend time surfing, as they say, the web, but he knows how to engine search. He enters “Wilson Reagan.” Jucker or Terden or whoever was right; many websites feature stories about Wilson. Gracelessland calls him “The Missing Link Between Folk, Punk, and the Apocalypse,” and The Blank Regeneration identifies him “Wilson Reagan, King of Pain.” The texts exist in a world other than Clifford’s, constructed of a different language and history. The references mean little but the gist is that people have discovered and are celebrating two lost records Wilson made some thirty years ago in the early 1980s.
In some of these conjectured histories Clifford sees his name. Wilson’s second record, Either Raygun Or, is said to list a single credit: “The Cliff Brumley—guitar, car, honey slide.” Vertigo tugs Clifford’s throat. He glances over his shoulder to check the door.
Clicking forward, he finds a story on Prole Miner’s Daughter—part of an ongoing series called “Looking for Reagan, Reagan, and Our Soul”—about finding and calling “Cliff Brumley, Wilson’s onetime sideman, a dampened, sad-sounding man who, perhaps paradoxically, seems more confused than anyone about the fate of the Wilson Reagan.” Come on, really? Dizziness blooms down Clifford’s belly; his hands, numb, are not his.
Clifford met Wilson summer after senior year of high school when Wilson moved from St. Louis to Steelville, the little town where Clifford grew up. Wilson’s mom had died, and there was no dad or something, so he came to stay in his aunt’s basement. Though it happened before he could remember precisely, Clifford’s mom had also died, so this was something they shared. They ran into each other at Buck’s Diner, where both washed dishes. Clifford was supposed to be saving money before leaving at summer’s end to attend college on the far side of Missouri, near Kansas City. He wanted out of Steelville, and Bluesteed’s Northwest State seemed far as he could get without better grades, money, or burning creativity. His yearning was a permanent but dim fever. His dad, born-again preacher at First Baptist, often said things like God was disappointed in him, suspicious, waiting for Clifford to man up, seek salvation. He didn’t have friends; given the options as he understood them in Steelville—jocks, drunk idiots, farmers, hunters—he preferred solitude. But Wilson Reagan wasn’t like anyone in town. He wasn’t like anyone anywhere.
For one thing, Wilson wore a large silver safety pin through two permanent holes high in his left cheek. Not at work, of course, because Buck would have never hired him. It’s a wonder Buck hired him at all, but there Wilson was, bandage on his face, laughing with a large mouth of gapped teeth in the hot steam billowing from the water sprayer and steel sinks. He seemed a little older than Clifford—18? 19? Even older? It was difficult to say—and he had done such work in other kitchens. On Clifford’s first day, Wilson showed him how to “hit all that nasty shit with the hot water, boom, boom, just fucking blast it, Cliff, let the mechanism’s natural force do all the work.” Clifford marveled at the things that came from Wilson’s mouth, things he couldn’t say: “Those motherfuckers in the overalls at the counter just finished stringing some poor guy from a tree, I guarantee you.” “I don’t know who these pigs are kidding—they should just start with seconds and thirds and dessert and get it over with.” “I thought church was Sunday? Lunch out there is like a silent death march.”
Clifford felt considered by Wilson.
“The Cliff, eh? I can tell you got the secrets.” Wilson, face damp, grinned at him. “You are obviously Steelville’s Evil Genius.”
Clifford smiled, leaned against the sink, looked at the soapy water.
At the end of that first shift together, crossing downtown Steelville’s main square, Wilson pushed his greasy hair into jagged spikes. He stripped his T-shirt to reveal a bone-skinny body covered in pale bluish tattoos—skull and crossbones, dynamite, spirals. Clifford tried not to stare. He found himself mimicking Wilson’s lanky looseness. Out of the blue Wilson asked if he wanted to be in a band. Clifford’s dad expected him home to help serve food and coffee at a meeting of the church elders, but he didn’t want to go. “I don’t know how to play anything.”
Wilson cackled as he stuck the safety pin through the holes in his cheek. He wrapped his scratched arm around Clifford’s neck. His closeness, skin to skin, their pungent secret. “It’s better if you don’t know how.”
Central heating cycles on and off and Marge Homebuilders’ tax structure stays un-built as Clifford sits hunched before his PC clicking links. He learns Wilson Reagan’s first album was Gateway to the Waste, made in 1982 when Wilson was “the angry front-man for short-lived St. Louis punk band The Disabilities.” The tiny label Bait & Tackle Records “pressed a limited run of one hundred vinyl straight into oblivion.” Today they sell for thousands of dollars. A website named Star Spangled Bummer—who are these people and how do they do what they do?—calls Gateway to the Waste “undoubtedly the best album you never heard.” According to Hammerhead Shirk, the song “Beached Boy” is, “in an alternate, better universe, the biggest, truest hit of all time.” In an article titled “The Other Reagan: An 80s Revolution That Should Have Been,” Tucker Jerden writes, “Within a milieu where loud and local boy-centric punk bands were blooming like weeds, Wilson Reagan and The Disabilities had their own thing going: hard, political, funny, and, dare I say, literary.”
Gateway to the Waste has nine songs but the running time is only eighteen minutes, seventeen seconds. The song titles make Clifford laugh:
- Beached Boy
- How the Waste Was One
- Fuck David Crosby
- Hard (To Be A Human Being)
- Wallpaper on the Radio
- Dept. of Child Murderers
- Vice President Jim Crow
- Lose One For The Gipper
- Oh Hinckley
Clifford plays “Beached Boy” and then jumps to turn down his computer. The music is loud and abrasive. He winces toward the closed door. But Wilson’s jagged tenor sounds unmistakable, familiar. Clifford leans into it. Wilson shouts:
We are all, we are all
going—
Brian Wilsons to the ball.
Good god, we are all
gone.
Gateway to the Waste and The Disabilities would have occurred before Wilson moved to Steelville in 1983, but Clifford can’t remember him ever mentioning them. When Clifford began hanging out with him in his aunt’s damp basement, Wilson was recording stuff on some kind of bulky tape machine, but Clifford never thought they were making anything particular. He didn’t consider them a real band because the stuff didn’t seem like music. It was just noise. But, according to the internet, they were working on Either Raygun Or, Wilson’s second and last known album, which only existed on cassette tapes copied and passed slowly from listener to listener into infamy. A blogger named Johnny Crappleseed says it is “the broken home’s first home recording,” while Charlatan Romance deems it “an anachronistic DIY tape-on-tape monster.”
Tucker Jerden calls Either Raygun Or “the work of someone trying to flee convention or status quo or imprisonment and find something else, maybe freedom, maybe truth. A singular mix of political protest, punk guitar riffs, vocal and sub-vocal yowling, spoken word, avant-garde sound collage, formal experiments, unadulterated enigma, and authentic psychedelia, Either Raygun Or remains its own holy language.” Unlike the first record’s brevity, this one lasts two hours. On the outside it comprises two 60-minute cassettes, on the inside a bottomless journey. The track listing:
- Scream
- Untitled
There are competing tales, and claims of credit, as to the discovery of the original Either Raygun Or tapes: found on a thrift-store shelf; purchased unknowingly in an estate sale lot; left on the shelf of a local library; mailed to Brian Wilson but intercepted by a sticky fingered mail carrier; tied to a rock and thrown at the White House. Many listeners have attributed mystical qualities to the work, saying they heard things emanating from the dense layers of sound, voices or messages so personal, so pointed and specific, only they could know.
Nobody knows what happened to Wilson Reagan, where he is now or even if he’s still alive. Some folks pray he made more music, others say he better not have. Many people are searching for him. Which is why Tucker Jerden tracked down and called Clifford. He would love to produce deluxe reissues of both Gateway to the Waste and Either Raygun Or, and release any other work Wilson may have buried. Tucker’s biggest dream, he says, is for Wilson to come out of hiding or wherever he is and play shows, which Tucker would be stoked to promote. “It would amount to the biggest coup in rock and roll history. Maybe finally, thank god, the end of rock and roll.” He wants to know if Clifford knows Wilson’s whereabouts.
But Clifford doesn’t know.
In the basement that summer, Wilson had a couple electric guitars and amplifiers but he also used random things to make sound, like a vacuum, power tools, hammer, breaking glass. Along with his tape recorder he had several large boxes of tapes. Seemingly thousands of tapes, they were also scattered and piled across the stained concrete floor. He was layering sounds: sound effects, TV and radio shows, interviews, field recordings, all kinds of found sounds. Clifford asked Wilson if he had made the recordings himself but he said no, he only made a few of them. He said the tapes were “the sound of every thing, the worlds we’ve unconsciously inherited.” Clifford loved that.
“Where’d you get it all?” he asked.
“I stole it,” Wilson said. “The only honest economic exchange left to us.”
Clifford spent long wide-awake nights with Wilson. Laughing, banging and breaking stuff, responding to Wilson’s wild calls. Most nights his dad was out of town on church business, because he hated Wilson from the first. In fact, after hearing stories around town about this crazy new guy, his dad forbade Clifford to see Wilson. But Clifford, for the first time, disobeyed dad. He and Wilson ran to the basement after Buck’s closed. Wilson smoked cigarette after cigarette, Clifford stayed dizzy on borrowed drags. Wilson had his guitars fixed in a way that Clifford could just put his finger straight across the strings and move back and forth on the neck. Wilson taught Clifford how, and he started to get to where he could keep a rhythmic fusillade going. When he closed his eyes, the pressure coming from the amplifiers made his face feel good. The sounds were living things wriggling around with them in the low dark room.
Wilson would lie on the floor spread like a starfish when he played back the recordings they made. Clifford, to be honest, kind of found the stuff unlistenable. Or maybe it frightened him. Certainly the tape with the screaming scared the hell out of him. The worst thing Clifford ever heard. It wasn’t jarring like Wilson’s barks and howls; it was pure horror and it broke the night, broke Clifford.
“Where’d you get this? Whose scream is it?”
Wilson shook his head, lit another cigarette, rubbed his eyes with grimy fingers. “It’s the world’s worst kept secret.”
With Wilson, Clifford rocketed between joy and discomfort, mindlessness and apprehension. He worried they were disturbing Wilson’s aunt upstairs, but she never came downstairs and Wilson never talked about her. Just like he never talked about his mom’s death except once when he said Ronald Reagan killed her, and then later, when he became too terrifying to handle, he accused Clifford of killing her.
Clifford bends to his small speakers and listens at lowest volume to the scream. It is the same guttural plaint from that 1983 basement, but what he hears now newly horrifies him: the tormented cells and fibers of a particular human being. Someone wailing. Suffering. Pleading. No words, just anguished syllables. Clifford aches and shakes at the recognition of another’s terror. But he cannot stop listening. Hoping for pain’s release? An end? Trying to discern something? There are moments wherein the screamer seems to be a woman, man, child, or many people in one. Then, from below, which Clifford can’t remember, other noises blend: bright strings, organ, voices in harmonic melody. It’s the Beach Boys! Their sunny vibrato somehow merges with the scream, and each gives the other additional shape and complexity. Clifford feels he’s entering an almost physical space, filled with an arrangement of others he can’t quite discern but who assume definition as he figures. The singing of the Wilsons coalesces:
When you are thinking
oh, when you are
thinking
about building and thinking
build it Marge.
Clifford shudders as the Marge Homebuilder jingle surfaces in the 30-year old recording. He feels displaced, too open, the shapes of others moving toward him, but then, as in answer, pleasure warms him, the sense of puzzle completing, another voice coming, familiar and imploring, “Cliff? Cliff?” He’s home in his room, his father has grounded him, named him a terrible name, and he’s been crying, when he hears the high rasp outside his window calling, “Where’s our Evil Genius?” He no longer feels his body beneath him and he begins to fall. No, he lifts, he’s got this, he is lifting . . .
“Clifford!”
He’s yanked back terribly. The office is all fluorescence, perilous becoming. He bangs many knees against the desk as he stiffens and lurches twistingly to find in his open door Bill and Guy Wyrick, their eyes wide, mouths moving.
“Clifford, what are you doing?”
“What the hell are you listening to?”
Clifford struggles to respond. Bill and Guy step toward him as one, and behind them now he registers Nan, peering, her palsied hands shaking at her chest. She says, “Who is that? Who is that?”
The scream continues. Clifford hears his colleagues hearing it and he shuts off his computer. “Sorry. Geez. I don’t know,” he stammers. “Some kind of dang computer virus . . .”
Bill, his eyebrows moving up and down, says, “I’m sure we don’t need to remind you we have clients coming into the office throughout the day?”
“No,” Clifford says with his automatic little chuckle. “Believe me . . .”
“You didn’t answer when we knocked,” Guy says. “And you’re flush now. You sure you’re okay?”
Though he’s the same age as Bill and Guy, long past 40, dreading 50, they’ve always assumed both professional and personal authority. But whatever, Clifford does his job. And right now he wants only to return to Wilson Reagan, to keep reading, looking, listening. “Yes, it’s true,” he says. “I might have a little bug today. And then I kind of got buried in the Marge stuff here. You know how it is.” Clifford shakes his head at his paperwork, the accountant’s tasks forever incomplete.
Bill and Guy wince skeptically. “Let’s keep the door open and the movies off, okay?”
“Of course. Sorry.”
Once Bill and Guy leave the room, Nan hangs around with a sheepish look. “Clifford, this is going to sound so strange, but whatever you were listening to just now? Those horrible noises? I swear I heard my sister calling me?”
Clifford blinks, electric tickles in his belly.
“And she’s been dead twenty years?”
Clifford treads anxiously across the afternoon, a breathless piece of his mind building the fuck out of Marge Homebuilders, then Jakespeare’s Pizza, Eagle Bird Security Systems, Shop and Gas, and Gramaley-Armageddon Chevrolet—the pride of Bluesteed all, each death marcher’s books on the up and up. He never planned to spend his life here. Early on he thought he would enjoy being an hour outside Kansas City, go to shows, see art and plays, whatever they did, but it turns out we’re an hour and never away. And Steelville’s even farther. The only time he’s gone home was three years ago, his dad’s funeral, an affair as silent and grim as their relationship. Yet he was shook by the absence of friends to Stan Brumley, even associates, anyone coming round to consider the old man, see him off. He put in all those years at First Baptist only to be replaced by a young man who preached the shiny new prosperity gospel Stan loathed.
When Clifford was in town did he drive past Blue Creek, the sagging bungalow where Wilson lived with his invisible aunt? Has he made any attempt in three decades to reach Wilson? No, no.
At 5:00pm when the Wyricks leave, Clifford stands, nods goodbye, chuckles. “I just got a little bit more I want to knock out,” he says, “before heading home.” He then slips Nan a piece of paper that says “Wilson Reagan—Either Raygun Or.” For the first time, Nan leans in and hugs him. He smells her puckery breath mints, her cats. She whispers, “God bless you,” and without thinking he says the same thing back.
Alone in the office, finally, he resumes where he left off, opening minimized windows, turning up the volume.
Only one image of Wilson Reagan exists. A video. Recorded late summer 1983 in the KYC 33 public access studio of Springfield, Missouri, for a show called Lloyd Pound’s Local Round Up. Wilson sings one song, which his fans call “Oh Bloody.” The song, they say, is unlike anything else in Wilson’s known work.
Clifford was there.
Almost there.
The day they broke up.
Come August, Clifford needed to leave for college. His dad threatened to cut him off if he didn’t go. It wasn’t much money; it was all the money, left for Clifford by his mom. He wasn’t sure the old man could even do that, but he did everything else, so probably. As Clifford got scalded over the dishes at Buck’s, he worried this would be his last chance to get out of Steelville. Northwest State was six hours away but it might as well have been another planet. Meanwhile, Wilson “booked them a gig” at the public access TV studio. Clifford had just gotten a car—a beaten Buick with no AC or radio his dad bought from his money—so Wilson drafted him to drive. Clifford had increasingly found himself unmoored around Wilson, overwhelmed—he didn’t know how to be around him—so he secretly decided this trip would be it.
On the long drive to Springfield, torrid humidity blasting them through the windows, Wilson, who seemed always to know every unspoken thing, tore into Clifford.
“What are you ‘majoring’ in? Is that the lingo?” The spikes of Wilson’s hair had collapsed in a greasy nest. He wore a ripped t-shirt on which he’d scrawled numerous concentric black circles, what might have been a target, or a black hole.
Clifford didn’t want to say. “Business. Or maybe accounting, I guess.”
Wilson spat. “Jesus Christ, Cliff. Really? The only business is murder. You’re going to spend your life counting their bodies?”
“I don’t really have to know right now,” Clifford said, shrinking. “I’m just . . .”
“That’s exactly what they want!” Wilson shouted. “For nobody to know! Meanwhile you’re factory meat and shit being ground up to feed umpteen generations of wet-mouthed oligarchs!”
Wilson’s mania ratcheted. He screamed about Nazis and Republicans, Ronald Reagan and fascists and murderers. He called Clifford “the repressed white poster boy for the Gipper Youth, the Poloshirts.” He said, “I can’t imagine the hell this is all arcing toward. They won, Cliff, and nobody knows it. We’re trapped in their television show and at the end we get to watch ourselves die. Can’t you see that?” His vitriol veered crazier and crazier. He claimed Clifford put his dad away, “locked him up with the others for this life and the next.” But the terrible peak came when he started pounding the dashboard and accused Clifford of killing his mom: “I was right there in the bedroom, Cliff, remember? I fell and hit my head and still I heard everything you did to her!” Clifford dizzied and cried, tried to hold the steering wheel. He didn’t understand any of this. Wilson unrecognizable. The devil. When they somehow reached the KYC 33 studio, Wilson came around the car and charged Clifford. Enraged, he pinned Clifford, started punching him. Hard. Over and over again. Clifford panicked, couldn’t get away. He thought he might die by Wilson’s hands. But then he got his arms up and he ripped the safety pin from Wilson’s cheek. Wilson fell away clutching the sudden gushing wound. Clifford jumped in his car and drove away fast as he could, Wilson’s face receding in the rearview mirror, looking after him, contorting.
Clifford never saw Wilson after that.
The KYC 33 video is grainy. A low-resolution upload of a dub many generations reduplicated from the half-inch original. Lines like EKG readings slide across the image, jagging up and down with audio squelches. The beginning warps into being, a wet smudge pulled from noisy static: Wilson Reagan in extreme close-up, the red gash on his cheek inky and damp. Wilson is near, too near one might say, his face filling the entire frame—blackheads and pores a field of caves, lips purpled, skin greasy slick—but he is also at remove, as though below dirty water, an impressionist image conjured by magnets and magic out of time and shadows. He is real but not, which is to say he is real as anything.
This song—what is this? Clifford can’t remember hearing it or anything similar from Wilson.
The verse rides three chords, and Wilson cries as he sings. He does not acknowledge the camera but stares down and away as the song emanates from him, from his guts and glands, the ragged tips of his hair, his dirty fingers. When the long initial close-up dissolves into wider camera two we see Wilson perches on a stool, his body wrapped around the acoustic guitar he strums in rhythmic, circular figures, the song’s pattern repeating again and again but then slowly, subtly transforming, a thing coming into being, filling form as it forms.
Tonight I hold you, Wilson sings, strumming, and then a chord change, I hold you in my arms, time and chord stretching again, until another change, Oh . . . reaching, and then . . . Beloved, back to the root, and the cycle re-beginning. Wilson repeats this verse numerous times, hypnotic, but at some point another amazing thing happens: a lifting shift into a new three-chord sequence, two new stanzas, which, because of the spell long cast, ring your chest:
And you
don’t
have to wait
Oh
precious
strength
And we return, yearning:
Tonight I hold you
I hold you in my arms
Oh Beloved
It sounds like beloved, and it must be, but it also sounds like bloody, one of many enigmas buried in these seemingly simple repetitions and lyrics culled from the hunched guts of Wilson and voiced like prayer, viscerally, as if he’s building the song before him from the reconstituted matter of life. Hopeless and hope. Pained Wilson. Ill and filthy. Living Wilson. Humming, vibrating.
Oh God.
The urge-to in every thing.
The song ends, Wilson looking away. Sudden squelching cut to black and silence.
Clifford scoots closer. Replays the video.
Every time he sees something different, hears something different. Someone different.
“It’s wonderful,” he would have said if there were somebody.
Clifford breathes in the cold dark of his car in the Wyrick and Wyrick parking lot. Dawn is only hours away and then he’s supposed to be back at work. Something came to him in transmission, maybe memory: papers and pieces of mail in Wilson Reagan’s basement that bore another name: John Milton Talmadge. At the time Clifford figured he’d stolen someone’s mail, didn’t want to ask. But that’s why no one today can find him: he is not Reagan Wilson. Clifford clutches a piece of paper, a scribbled address and directions. With access to IRS records, it was not difficult to find a likely John Milton Talmadge’s last reported residence: Bigton, Missouri, south of Springfield. Has to be him.
But for what? Why?
Shouldn’t Wilson know he’s been heard? Shouldn’t Clifford deliver him unto Tucker Jerden and the rest? Wouldn’t Wilson be happy?
Bigton is a six-hour drive from Bluesteed. How did Wilson end up there? When Clifford drove away from KYC 33 thirty-two years ago did Wilson just sing that song before disinterested cameras and then drift south, washing up in the thick oaks of the Ozarks? Who cleaned the gashed wound of Wilson’s face?
For whom did Wilson write that song?
Clifford starts the car, turns on the heater. He needs to go home. Sleep it off. Approach everything tomorrow with a level head. Clifford turns on the radio. Static. Tuned to nowhere. When was the last time he listened to the radio? In high school he had a few tapes. Just stuff people in Missouri were listening to: John Cougar Mellencamps, REO Speedwagon, Fleetwood Mac. Normal music. He can’t remember individual songs but he knows them when he hears them in the grocery store or wherever. When he first started at Wyrick and Wyrick, if they were out of the office, he’d sometimes listen at his desk to a little radio. Where’d that radio go?
With Wilson Reagan he made music. Or something.
Clifford buttons the car radio past static. How amazing would it be to find Wilson on the radio right now? He really needs to hear that song again. But instead another song emerges: Neil Young:
Old man,
look at my life,
I’m a lot like you were
Goddamnit. They got in an argument about this.
Too early one morning, Wilson popped by Clifford’s house, opening the back door and coming in unannounced, shiny eyed and wide awake, and thank God Clifford’s dad wasn’t home. Wilson asked what he had to listen to, started digging around in his tapes:
“‘Old Man’?” Wilson said, laughing, holding up the Neil Young. “Are you kidding me? The Cliff isn’t even 18. He is the world’s fresh and welcome change.”
“I like that song,” Clifford said.
Wilson threw the tape across the room, banged it in the trash. “You don’t know what you like.”
Clifford couldn’t answer.
“If you’re going to listen to hoary young Neil at least let me show you the good shit. The best is the noise shit and the live shit. The haunts.”
That night in his basement Wilson devised a ritual. He made a bunch of goopy sweet stuff and put it on pieces of toast and told Cliff to eat up. Wilson put on a Neil Young tape. This is the real shit, Cliff. A bootleg. The best one ever. The show was inscrutable, just Neil playing alone somewhere, songs Clifford had never heard. Neil’s voice crawled disembodied from the speakers, came to live with them, filling the stretched basement with shadows and secrets. He’s telling all the old men and all the hearts of gold to go fuck themselves. Wilson circled the stereo, saying, See? See?, but Clifford could not see. Nor could he move. Neil started a long story about honey slides, something one can make with marijuana and honey, and, well, lo and behold, That’s what you ate, Cliff, Wilson up somewhere near the ceiling, Wilson laughing, How’s the slide, Cliff?, and Cliff felt like everything was on top of him and his father was just outside the basement, knocking and knocking, trying to look in, and at some point a song came on about killing celebrities and Wilson said, Neil Young was buddies with Charles Manson, and That’s what we should do . . .
“What’s what we should do?”
“Come down out of the hills and kill some people.”
“ . . . ”
“Hey, Cliff, man, I’m just joking . . . ”
Wilson knelt next to Clifford in the dark, his smell theirs, close, the night’s thick river bottom, Clifford breathing it, curling into it.
But for real, Cliff, I met David Crosby. I’m sure you like him too. I went to his show at Mississippi Nights, an embarrassing little gig if you think about it, and I snuck backstage where he was holed up by himself smoking crack. We started talking and he took a liking to me, petting me and giving me cigarettes and booze, and then we went walking down by the oily river, out on the farthest dark edge of St. Louis. Crosby wouldn’t shut about his swollen self and finally I just let him have it, I told him I only come out tonight to get up in his greasy face like this and let him know what a curly fat pig he is and how dare he come cooing and creeping on everybody for decades of their lives like he’s some kind of something-something bullshit when he’s clearly a void-eyed monster, a howling bone chipper of consumer capitalism and manufactured nostalgia spraying blood and chunks and guts at the audience, and you’re never going to believe this, Cliff, but it’s true: David Crosby started apologizing and crying and saying I was dead right, and then and there he gave me three thousand dollars cash out of his pocket and he upped and got out of St. Louis. And that’s how I bought all this gear. With David Crosby’s ill-gotten gains. What I’m trying to say is there’s a way out for us, Cliff, there has to be.
Just past dawn, the Ozark sky bleeding from the shadowed hills amaranth and blue and close enough to smear, Clifford drives into Bigton, Missouri. The town feels a lot like Steelville: ramshackle neighborhoods of clapboard and brick houses, parking lots and uneven streets of cracked asphalt and concrete, shuttered businesses, warehouses, solitary convenience stores, and a bunch of old, seemingly abandoned churches. The only signs of people are flickering dim lights in small windows or the occasional car trembling past with a trail of exhaust. Fear numbs Clifford’s chest, his feet and hands. His face is eroding, his eyes sinking.
John Milton Talmadge’s address is within a complex of squat redbrick apartment buildings. Public assistance housing. The Pallisades. It’s spelled wrong, Clifford thinks. Cats scatter when he parks and gets out of the car. Outside the warm interior, he shivers in the morning chill. Winter’s wetter here than Bluesteed, heavier. Cold mist squats. Bare trees scratch in the wind. He grabs his coat from the back seat, pulls it over his shoulders. Rapid breaths crystallizing before him, he searches the identical units like a watched interloper until he finds the right door. It’s number 109; the wooden numbers are missing but their outlines remain, dusty in the diffuse light. Clifford knocks, waits. In a neighboring apartment a TV plays: a car peels out, someone shouting after it; gunshots and sirens; police procedurals at the bare neck of day. More cats hang around the edges of the buildings. They consider Clifford and flit away.
He should leave.
He knocks again.
Quick movement stirs the window curtain; somebody looking then gone. Cliff knocks again but in a tiny way, leaning close to the door.
“Wilson?”
Clifford jumps at a voice behind the door: “Who is it?”
“Cliff Brumley. From Steelville.”
“You got the wrong person.”
Could he have the wrong person? He pushes air from his nose.
“Is this the Wilson Reagan who used to live in Steelville? I worked at Buck’s washing dishes with you and I played in your band.”
“That’s not funny.”
A lengthening silence. Cliff another wet stain on this sidewalk.
But then the door opens and out peers Wilson. Skinny, wrinkled, compact. Yellowed eyes under a shock of dirty grey hair. The scar on his cheek a dim discolored continent among others. He holds a long-ashed cigarette behind him, wobbles on his feet.
“Did you know my aunt?”
“No. I played in your band.”
“I never had no band,” he says. “Why do you keep coming here?”
Wilson wears a patched coat. Cliff realizes his apartment is colder than outside.
“A bunch of your stuff is online.”
“Who’s in charge of that?”
“Of what?”
“The on line.”
“I don’t know.”
Wilson’s eyes brighten. He swipes his nose with a damp coat sleeve. Seems like he’s either going to laugh or get angry.
“People are looking for you,” Cliff continues.
“Show it to me.”
“You got a computer?”
“No.”
“Well . . .”
“We could go to Mean Tug’s and look but he ain’t got a computer either.”
Cliff and Wilson walk a bunch of blocks toward the public library. Under cloudy light the morning only grows colder, grayer. Out the side of his eye, Cliff keeps looking at Wilson. He’s branched and scraggly like these naked winter trees. He’s still a fast, determined walker, and Cliff pushes to keep up. He asks if Cliff has any cigarettes, so they stop at a Minit Mart. He asks if Cliff has any money. Cliff waits outside, shoulders hunched, hands pushed in pockets. A truck chugs by, three men in stocking caps and flannels leaning forward, off to work or wherever. This will be the first non-holiday weekday Cliff can remember that he hasn’t shown to work. He should call Bill Wyrick, or at least Nan, and check in, make something up.
No. Morning blanket. Wrap it around you. When Wilson scoots out the store he’s slipping a small liquor bottle in his back pocket, tearing into an already crumpled pack of smokes.
The woman at the library’s front desk seems to know Wilson. Thick white braids of hair frame her wrinkled face. When they enter, she checks behind her to offices or something, but then she smiles at Wilson. She shifts a suspicious gaze to Cliff.
“What can I help you with today?”
Wilson whistles three melodic notes, knocks twice on the counter, and shuffles toward the computer kiosks. She tries to hide a smile. Cliff nods thanks. He pulls a chair up next to Wilson before an ancient computer.
“Do you go on the internet, Wilson?”
“Only to check my stocks.”
“Oh, what’s in your portfolio?”
“Oxycontin and Yo-Yos, my boy. Gold teeth. My guy buys for Jimmy Carter’s brother.”
Cliff laughs. Wilson is still funny. But then he flicks a cigarette between his lips.
“Wilson, you’re not supposed to?”
“What?”
“Smoke.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re inside? The library?”
“They don’t care.”
He pats a sequence of pockets until he finds a lighter. He lights the cigarette, crosses his leg at the knee, and leans closer to the computer. Cliff looks behind them to the librarian, but she smokes a cigarette too. Taking a drag over her open book, she glances sidewise at Cliff then away. Nobody else in the library. Nobody else in the world.
Reaching over Wilson, who smells musty, Cliff goes online to find the KYC 33 video. He imagines taking a picture of the two of them like this and sending it to Tucker Jerden. Everyone would love that.
He locates the video and clicks play. The Wilson Reagan who appears onscreen now looks as old as the one next to Cliff. His eyes are intentionless when the song comes out: Tonight I hold you. Without thinking, Cliff sings along in harmony: I hold you in my arms. He’s never sung before; he just finds it: Oh Beloved. But suddenly Wilson growls and shoves back from the kiosk. As he stands, he kicks his chair across the floor.
The librarian shouts, “Wilson, no!”
“Turn it off,” Wilson says.
“What?” Cliff says.
“Turn it off. Did you do this?”
“Wilson, that’s the most beautiful song anybody ever made.”
Wilson’s body tightens. His face gathers into pointed glare. He’s going to hit me, Cliff thinks. But Wilson turns. He strides quickly past the librarian, who tries to grab him, and he darts out the library doors. Behind him, from the computer, Cliff hears the prayer of that old song: Oh . . . stretching out, wavering, changing . . . precious strength.
Cliff hurries after Wilson, but the librarian comes from behind the desk, stops him.
“Sir?”
“Huh?”
“Is he taking his pills?”
“His what?”
“His medication. He needs that. I can tell he’s not right today.”
Cliff fumbles. He’s simultaneously embarrassed and afraid. “Look, I’m sorry, I’m just here real quick from out of town, I don’t know . . .”
“But you can help him can’t you?”
Her nametag says Lidia and despite a tremor in her lower left cheek her face and eyes are wide open, imploring. “If you come back to the library sometime there are things of his here I can show you.”
Outside, Wilson has already traveled a couple blocks. Even hustling, Cliff cannot gain ground. He’s not had this much activity in a long time. Ever. His heart thuds, shadows rim his eyes. Whale gray clouds loom just overhead. The temperature plummets. He smells snow coming? Hurry. The slight figure slips around a corner, disappears.
He fears Wilson will lock the apartment and they’ll have to start all over again but when he arrives the door sits wide open.
Slumped in a peeling vinyl recliner beside the window, Wilson sucks on a cigarette. “Cliff,” he says. “You’re late.”
“Wilson, where are your pills?”
Wilson shakes his head. “Shit.”
Cliff crosses to the kitchen, opens cabinets. Empty save spider webs and dust. He checks the drawers and the knob of one comes off in his hand. Finally, in a silverware basin with mouse turds, he finds a prescription pill bottle: Clozapine. The name reads Talmadge, John. Only a few pills left. Cliff reads the dosage instructions. He shakes out a pill, finds a glass in the sink, and fills it with water. He takes pill and water to Wilson.
“Here you go.”
Wilson’s eyes angle upward, pale yellow in the window light, expanding and contracting. Cliff doesn’t think Wilson will comply but then he says, “Okay.” His fingertips brush Cliff’s hand, cool and dry. He washes down the pill.
Cliff sits at the only other available space, a folding chair at a card table between the living room and the kitchen areas. Bills and other unopened envelopes litter the table. He sees the heating unit on the wall and goes to it. He turns the dial. Nothing happens. “That don’t work,” Wilson says.
“That’s okay.” Cliff raises the collar on his coat, resumes his seat. Wilson shifts in his chair, sighs.
“Cliff, you mind if we just sit here a little bit and don’t say anything?”
“I don’t mind.”
