Day Out of Days by Sam Shepard

Barbarian
and
The Green Hornet
while he chain-smoked Luckys and kept the hammer down on the Ghia. Every ten miles or so something in the comics would strike her as unbearably funny and she’d break into hysterical laughter and piss all over the bucket seat. Then she’d stack blankets, pillows, and old comic books under herself to sop things up, which elevated her way above the frame of the windshield, and her red hair lashed back so violently it seemed as though her head might get ripped right off and go tumbling down the highway. Every moment, in those days, had the potential for total annihilation.

Mean Green
    As soon as they saw the dead man’s face tacked to the back of the motel room door, they started whooping it up. I couldn’t believe it. Laughing and pointing right at it. All that time and trouble and there they were, hysterical, as though it were some sort of child’s attempt at inventing a toy. Humiliating, to say the least. “You don’t actually expect to get compensated for something like this, do you?” That’s what they told me. Right to my face. “Look at this—You can’t even recognize it as the same man.” That’s exactly what I’d been trying to explain to them all along and now they were throwing it back at me, as though it were
their
idea. I told them that if you skin a man’s face off, chances are it might go through all kinds of changes: shrinkage, disintegration around the edges, distortions of the mouth and eyeholes; even color—the skin tone—might be altered. For instance, a yellow man might easily become black or vice versa. You can never tell. But no, they didn’t want to hear about it, back then. All they were het up about was eliminating the target. Making him go away. Immediately, if not sooner. So I obliged them. Now they were trying to back out of the agreement altogether. I flat told them they had no idea who they were dealing with and if they weren’t very careful, some of their other little “projects” might start turning up mysteriously. Little remnants of appendages thrown randomly off the shoulder of Interstate 35, for instance. Or some piece of something from that grisly incident in Arkansas. You never know. All these little items might just suddenly jump up and bite them in the ass if they weren’t careful. Next morning, cash was under the door in a sealed manila envelope. No name, no nothing. Just pure sweet mean-green.

Poolside Musings
in Sunny L.A.
    In Cold Blood
has seen a lot of mileage lately. Are they now replaying old Robert Blake movies because he’s on trial for killing his wife and doing chicken imitations in court for the cameras? Why don’t we just bring back public lynchings and be done with it?
    These tiny birds—sparrows I guess you call them—keep flitting up on my table here, looking for crumbs. I have no crumbs and if I had them I wouldn’t allow wild birds to feed on them. I’m not in favor of turning wild things into pets. Spoiled birds. We don’t have birds anything like these back home, as you know. All our birds back home have some size and respect for human temper. How did fear and respect become synonymous? Whenever there’s a murder here, the suspect always says, “Maybe now they’ll show a little respect.”

Seminole, Texas
    bales and bales
of cotton
big as boxcars
flapping gray plastic sheeting
gangs and gangs
of crows
Christian radio
tungsten filaments
donuts and Texaco
pink donuts
and Texaco

the Road is not a Movie
no, it’s not
no, it’s not

Las Vegas, New Mexico
    It’s crisp December and the high mountain air has that sweet familiar scent of pine. Strings of tiny Christmas lights have just snapped on in the old Las Vegas Plaza, outlining the massive, leafless cottonwoods. Crows swoop down into the empty bandstand. I don’t know what they could be looking for. One sits on the bronze plaque commemorating Stephen Watts Kearny’s speech in August of 1846 when he climbed atop a pueblo here and addressed the entire