Notes on Dimensional Time [The Trial of Jim Dandy][Chapter 5, Part 1]

[Notes on Dimensional Time]
The Trial of Jim Dandy
Chapter Five [Part 1]

Daddy taught me that Freedom is immaterial that a person has to materialize before he or she de-materializes, which is to say, goes dust to dust. Daddy didn’t use those words, like “immaterial.” He showed me, by example, and anybody else nearby paying strict attention. At the foot of his dying bed, him stretched out like the ancient Scottish Highland warrior he was, arms crossed over his invisible long blade’s hilt, chin thrown back to calmly grimace against the pain, eyes bright and lucid, I witnessed the strength with which a free man faces the Reaper, in the twilight of a life lived richly. Once a Highlander lays himself down for the End the way Daddy did, Hell and high water won’t move him. He’s done, and it’s crying time. At the very end, while the nurses and orderlies were wheeling him to the hospital, he shouted, “I’m dyin’!” like he was shouting, “VICTORY!” - in the same way our ancestors cried, “Fear eile air son Eachainn!” at Inverkeithing.

So in my bleak hour on the docket, my Freedom in jeopardy, I recalled the lesson of another for Hector. Daddy would be here, I thought, which is truly immaterial, the reassurance of a shade of memory, in the offices of the Law, fighting for liberty, with words. Abstraction upon and within nothing but air and space, bracketed by time and uncertain matter, devised as walls of stone to fool the eye and crush the body, if not the soul. A Highlander has one default defense strategy: to charge screaming and naked or painted blue into the bayonets and spears; not, mind you, a sound modern policy, since the invention of the repeating or fast-loading rifle. Still, as a last resort and even a good finale, it can at times, do. Skillful means, as the Dalai Lama might call it, might be better in the meantime. Ops-mind was also a legacy of Daddy, a first battalion Green Beret, trained in the arts of infiltration and subterfuge, assassination, concealment, survival in harsh conditions, concerted troop movement, asymmetrical or irregular actions, heavy arms, paratrooping and so on. Daddy, a doctor, could perform battlefield medicine, too. Chop them down, then sew them up! Diplomacy is a dimensional pursuit, and in the smoke and chaos of war, which is failed diplomacy, it’s good practice to treat the enemy as one of your own, since hopefully, after you kick his ass, he will be. Otherwise, resentments are sure to fester, and before you can say, “Didgeridoo!” you’ll be crossed once more.

My people aren’t known for stoicism in the telling of tales of courage. Daddy was proud, though, of his post-service mummery, since “A Green Beret tells no tales, until ten years after he’s put in the soil, and even then, only with the proper permissions.” Poetry was beyond Daddy, despite his love of the Protestant choir. Reformation, negation, deformation and restraint are the atmospherics displacing the past for a contemporary soldier, whose memoir as a genre is suited only to generals who migrate to politics and employ ghost writers. At the moment, I’m standing crooked on the survival side of the narrative pyramid, where the static is a warrant for the mortal’s erasure. The distance between the butt-end of a shoulder-gun and an endless brig is a fine line of demarcation in these rules of engagement. We, my friend, are bound to progress, even as the net is contrived to fall on our backs.

Daddy took his stories of dread and danger with him across the Milky Way, on the thin raft pushed into that sea of vast darkness by loved ones and well-wishers, aflame, awash in song and sweet lamentation. Not a milky virgin on board for company, for Daddy was a staunch Belie’er, and no pagan he. Nullity and naught, a fine send-off to escape the mortal coil and to shed that thin cloak. What should one gather on the shores of departures, considering a fate for which we all are destined? Well, I suppose, the raft of our secrets is rightly consigned to sink under the tides with all that attaches to our transits, solo or collective. The wind will blow, the waves will crash, and the night will fall on each man’s dream. Only a voice of remembrance or a painting in a cave can slow the arc of disappearance. I have no truck with it, since the age of 3 or 4, when in a slumber I died under the treads of a tank. I awoke, and like most bad-dream-afflicted kids, sought the solace of my Mother’s embrace. I found her in the living room, smoking, watching a Hitchcock movie on the television, maybe the Birds or Psycho? My recollection of the exchange Mom and I shared that night grows dimmer with each year’s span, and in honesty I put no faith nor credit in my catalog of the experience, if such it is. So, that’s that, and more or less, was the gist of Mom’s consolation. What’s real and what’s not is distinguishable, and no point worrying otherwise. The TV was scarier than my dreams anyway.

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The engine of a car parked across El Camino Way, when I slipped out the bar entrance, after my brawl with Bortsch, turned over and idled. I hadn’t quite managed to make out the sedan’s shadowy occupants, but in my adrenalized state, my occupations were immediate, and my boots were cutting a path for the hills. The car lights never lit, but the coal of a cigar did in the auto’s interior, behind the steering wheel, and another on the passenger side. A not unseasonable chill supported the assessment these might be stoners gathered round the car heater, a regular feature of the New Mexican bar, even in summer. Seven thousand feet and climbing, even July can be frosty. A good buzz and a dashboard heater in a big steel American motorcar, a bottle and some chums, many a fine fiesta have fostered.

My echoing steps led me to the mountains beyond the city lights, as frequently they did, past the barking hounds, past the dormant vehicles, adobe abodes and compounds of such. The goats, pigs, burros and chickens and whatever else stirred did so un-startled by me, mostly. I passed an old man strolling Acequia Madre, and we greeted each other in Spanish without adjusting our paces.  Later, as I left the pavement for the dirt of the arroyos I thought I heard rubber on gravel behind me. I thought of this later, as I reached the pines and rested, gazing on the twinkling electric lights of cozy Santa Fe, below the typically spectacular skies. Beyond the southern edges of the town, the glow of Albuquerque lit the clouds fifty or sixty miles from my perch, clear as day, but colored different. The perfect air filled my lungs, free even of the lovely perfume of burning red cedar in the fireplaces below, smoke spiraling out the tin roof chimneys, little tubes with hats.

I lit a cigarette and smoked.