The Road Narrows As You Go by Lee Henderson Page B

time in the now. Hick must have been scared to die. To contemplate an end. He never wanted to, he told me so. He believed his dependence on comics kept him young, he would live forever. It was the two of us, we salvaged the lunchroom tables and picnic benches and YMCA cafeteria tables or should I say stole to make this forty-two-foot longtable. We built this beauty. We studied all the possible inking techniques for comics. Silkscreening for covers, and printmaking techniques, and we set up the plates in the spare bedroom for twelve-colour separation just to sell T-shirts of our own design. We learned how to take pictures with fully manual cameras and do all the steps to the darkroom process to develop our pictures in a darkroom we built in this house. I was there when he bought that stop-motion camera rig for thirteen dollars off the pawnbroker across the street from Berkeley. All the editing equipment he owns I helped him find. We self-taught each other animation. Now will someone get me some paper? Will one of you find me a pen or pencil? I feel so diabolically woozy I have to sit down and make a drawing.
    The guests all raised their glasses or smokes in a toast and drank, puffed, and watched as Jonjay found a place at the longtable.
    Patrick snapped up a pristine Pentel black ballpoint, Rachael found a stack of bristol board, Twyla poured a tall glass of water, and Mark wellrolled two joints. Biz massaged his shoulders.
    I’m beyond the brink, Jonjay said. I saw infinite horizons out there in the mountains. I spent the last three months with thousand-year-old trees. He pulled his hair and said, It’s the dead I’m afraid of. The dead who are revolting. Can anything be done with the dead? What did the tribes used to do when a guru or a shaman died? Can we at least eat the dead?
    He downed his glass of water and begged for another. Manila was right there with lemonade.
    What is this? Jonjay inspected the joint in his fingers, sniffed it up and down and thought that this wasn’t just the usual, it smelled distinctly of Hick’s B.O. We told him the bag was hiding in the laundry hamper with his dirties.
    Promise me you’ll never wash those or we’ll lose the last of his spirit, Jonjay said and took a plastic lighter from the table and ignited the joint and inhaled twice. Those clothes are infused with the reek of his unreal talents and it’s got deep into this grass. Damn. I feel his powers already as a I smoke, can’t you?
    Yes, we did in fact. Hick Elmdales’s presence was an unfathomable strength in the room that no one could argue with, a cloud of weedsmoke pressuring us to impress him, or the idea of him, the thought of his body there bearing down on our shoulders as we tried to stroke beauty out of ablank page. The expiring self penetrating through scented candles almost to a rank taste.
    Where have you been ? Wendy wanted to know.
    His pupils focused long enough to recognize Wendy. Was he angry? he asked her, and Wendy promised that no, Hick forgave him—how could you possibly know?
    But I did know, said Jonjay, that’s what’s so strange. For the past three months I was trekking and bouldering alone up and down in the White Mountains drawing and painting the bristlecone pines, he said. Alone and completely lost in the dry desert mountains, contemplating the multitudes, surrounded by ancient trees. I dreamed of city streets. Some of these bristlecone pines are thousands of years old. That’s why I went to see them. Then ten days ago I got a message to come back, something was the matter with Hick.
    What message, from who?
    From a bristlecone tree, Jonjay said, staring off into the distance of the white page in front of him as he started to draw, hand moving spontaneously over the paper, a tree, no, a crocodile with a clock in his mouth. I sat in front of this one bristlecone pine and I saw litter trapped in its lower branches, and when I reached over to grab it I saw