We’re looking for Amos
Streets, black slick with fresh tar, our tires wear rivers into the surface as we go round and round and round. Down main street, up 6th, past Platz Park, pausing there to piss against the dark trees, left on 2nd, slowing way down as we slide past the high school, curl around the football field, follow the outskirts of town where the big houses glimmer, another left onto Charles, past the Kwik Star, right past the elementary and public pool, left through the North side of town, trailer park noises, dogs barking, firecrackers, back onto main street for another lap.
We’re looking for Amos
Detour. Looking for cars we know. Ryan driving. Tyler and Bones in back. Fart joke. Hick joke. Mom joke. Pull into the McDonalds parking lot, yellow death glow cutting clean through the night. Two red Camrys and a Mustang from the 90s parked in back. Nobody’s seen him. Everyone is frustrated. Everyone is annoyed. We count our money. Bones looks for quarters under the floor mat. Dollar menu plays like a worn-out jukebox. Try Luigi’s? Try Miller’s abandoned barn? Try City Park basketball courts? Try, try, try. Smell of dripping gas soaking into pavement. We peel out in different directions.
We’re looking for Amos
Basketball courts are empty. Air is still. Ryan calls Jennifer and pretends it’s about Amos. I wander from tree to tree, the only landmarks in the dark park. Each step in the grass feels treacherous. My feet hover over the unknown before coming down on uneven ground, letting my body react to the surprises in the terrain. Bones and Tyler flick their cans of Grizzly. Thwapp. Thwapp. Thwapp. I can feel the tobacco packing tight. The rhythm more familiar than Nirvana. They can open a bottle of Bud Lite with a bic lighter. Skills to put on their college applications.
We’re looking for Amos
What is Amos? We don’t ask who. Looking outside ourselves feels like trying to swallow an entire pie in one bite. We could choke on the moon if we started asking questions. Make it impossible to move. Questions lead to questions lead to questions lead to remembering we are specks upon specks upon specks upon specks. An invisible dot inside a slightly less invisible blue dot in an ocean of dark. The only thing keeping us from being flung into space is our weight. Our parents can’t stand us. Don’t care where we are. So, we keep looking for Amos.
We’re looking for Amos
Amos isn’t anywhere. Location is hard in this in-between place. Especially for someone so in-between as Amos. There are rumors about him. Mostly started by himself. He was kicked out of his community at 17. Burnt down a barn on Rumspringa after trying crystal. Put everything he could find inside himself until it exploded into arson. That was years ago. Maybe a decade. We all feel a little like ghosts in this dead town. He’s a weedhead now. Likes sipping on Mad Dog. The blue flavor. Cruises in his buggy real slow. Says there is so much to look at.
We’re looking for Amos
Clackedy clack. What a sound of joy. Horse hooves dribbling across the pavement, punctuating the vibrations of Amos’s boombox. Distance is impossible to tell. Noise travels forever without anything to catch it. The chorus becomes clearer. An old song that keeps repeating Hey! We want some pussy! Over and over. His Goodwill tape collection is legendary. We straighten up. We loosen up. I feel a tingle in my spine that comes with meeting Amos. He appears like a prince. Charles, his pony, pulling the buggy. Amos dyed his beard green. No reason why. A ripple of fire in his eyes.
We’re looking for Amos
You can’t just ask. Amos doesn’t like to feel used. He’s a person too. Even if he could use the cash. My fingers dribble down Charles’s muzzle. Careful keeping them out of his stony mouth. He nuzzles, pushing his heat against my hand. I feel his power and lean into him. We’re not pushing against each other but leaning together so hard I can’t tell who is holding whose weight. “What a beautiful night,” says Amos. And I notice it. Fresh cut grass. Cooling asphalt. Hot breeze carrying tastes across the fields. Maple leaves translating the breeze’s speech into whispers.
We’re looking for Amos
Basketball first. We don’t have a choice. It’s part of the ritual. Amos loves basketball. Used to play on a grass patch in his yard as a child. It sat right off the highway, and he’d shoot hoops at the basket his father nailed together, pausing to watch the cars drive by, faces blurring past, traveling at an infinite speed. He wears work boots and can’t dribble for shit but his jumper is silky smooth. Something that only comes from intense boredom. Two vs. two. Winners stay. Losers swap players. Charles watching us like he’s auditioning for a nativity scene.
We’re looking for Amos
Smoke break. Breath. Sweat slip-sliding down backs. Darkening pits. Amos has a deep smell like wet hay. We lick our lips while he loads a bowl. Cough. Spit. Cough. Pick a bud from the tip of my tongue. “What are you boys getting into tonight?” he asks. His accent guttural and distant. Tyler rambles off a booze list. Forgetting to make it seem like a coincidence that we found Amos here. One last game because Amos hates leaving on a loss. Pick and pop. Catch and shoot. Bang bang, we drop Bones and Ryan with my speed and his touch.
We’re looking for Amos
I ride along because somebody has to go. We don’t need small talk. We’ve done this 100 times, even if it is my first-time riding with him. It’s an eternal act. Sacred. We pass another buggy. Moving in slow motion. The driver nods, his eyes hard between the grey beard and tall hat. His blue shirt is the cleanest piece of fabric I’ve ever seen. The color pure like it’s from a children’s coloring book. Amos nods back. The orange slow-moving vehicle triangle shines in the lamps. “That used to be my cousin,” he says. “Pick out some new music.”
We’re looking for Amos
I can hear the world. Crickets singing. Traffic slowing. Far off aliens communicating through the fillings in my teeth. “I’m an owl,” says Amos. The world is spinning and spinning and spinning. Spitting us out in some new sector of the universe every moment. It’s pretty perfect we’re here together. Like the stars and galaxies and everything decided forever ago to create this moment and I can suddenly see their plan forming over the last millennia so I could find Amos and sit in this buggy with him like two prophets riding into town, hitching their pony at the Casey’s.
We’re looking for Amos
Cash in hand. Amos disappears into the sickly glow. He’s a cracked yellow under the fluorescents. His foreignness stark in this light. Even though he grew up 15 minutes away and has never left Fayette County, he stands in contrast to the world he moves through. A stranger to the language ringing in his ears. The potato chips on the shelf. The blue plastic Gatorade in the coolers. I feel, want to feel, his distance, but I blend seamlessly into this space. Look right. Talk right. Even though I want to burn it down for everything it claims to be.
We’re looking for Amos
Side roads. Angling around parked cars. Buggies aren’t built to live back here. Ryan’s parents are in Vegas. A little escape. I feel the width of each crack in the asphalt vibrate through my body. Back sore from this bench. Ass tender from the hard plank. Amos doesn’t seem to mind. Lights a bowl with the reins between his knees. Passes to me. Exhale into the stars like I’m a cloud maker, capable of rain. Pretend I have some power in shaping this yoke of a place. Can block out a bit of the world, even if it’s only beauty.
We’re looking for Amos
Outside Ryan’s. A big ugly thing that looks like it swallows people whole. Amos tells me, “Stars come out so we always have hope, always have something beyond the edges of our fingertips to reach for.” It’s heady. I’m in my head. Electricity rushing through my body. Buzzing my skin. My tongue is wet thinking about the white plastic sack of booze at my feet. My eyes are wider than my mouth, but I’ll try anyway. Try to shove every taste on the wind into my belly. Realizing I’m so hungry I could puke. Craving, craving, craving against the empty.
We’re looking for Amos
Amos invites himself in. Parks Charles in the yard, lead slung over a low oak branch. He moves heavy through the crowd. Caught in the hallway. Caught in the doorway. Caught in the wayway. Puts himself in the corner like the other lost bodies. Eyes up and then down into his red solo cup. Body builds confidence with every drink. With every CCR song. Ryan asks me why he’s still here. We all know but don’t want to say. Don’t want to think ahead. Don’t want to feel loneliness while we’re imagining how good everything will be once we escape.
We’re Looking for Amos
Find myself in the corner. Talking to the side of Amos’ face. Carvings and craters engrave his cheek. History as a constellation of scars. I’ve got to get out. I’ve got to escape. I’m not like this place. Drink. Speak. Drink. I am a mountain. Timelessly rising from the sea by the friction of two masses pushing against each other. My parents are tectonic plates. I don’t know where the things inside me come from. I don’t want to be one thing. I don’t want to be broken down into pieces. I am a mountain. Although I’ve never seen one.
We’re looking for Amos
I get the Mad Dog rush. The name is perfect. I want to howl at the moon. Feel its lunar pull curve the water in my body. Bend it into an arcing wave which crashes around inside me, over and over, receding and repeating, receding and remembering. No paths are new. No paths are short. Their bend lost in the horizon. That’s why we need the messages from the moon, to tell us what’s on the other side of the world. How bodies careen through other nighttimes. How toilets flush across the equator. A way to imagine being something new.
We’re looking for Amos
Face pressed to the window. Trying to feel the moon. Charles dragged himself loose, pulling the buggy through the neighbor’s garden. Over the rose bush. Over the zinnias. Over the ceramic gnome. He’s plucking young apples with his stony teeth. Pulling them free from the tree. A man with a shotgun comes out in his underwear. Eyes red. Fires into the air. Bang. Bang. Party freezes for each beat. Only the music doesn’t notice. Then everything restarts. Charles bolts from the garden. Buggy crashing behind. Banging into parked cars. Rocking back and forth. Fleeing into the dark. While sirens blare.
We’re looking for Amos
Decapitated by a clothesline while running from the cops. Shallow breaths. Trying to disappear. Heavy boot steps in the dark. Miss my limbs by inches. No dogs. Lucky. Flashlights pierce the night like glaring eyes, judging the wild spaces we create. I stop breathing. Different parts of my body begin to turn off. Shut down. My bones ache. My heart throbs. My blood cools. Sinking, sinking, I slide into the Earth, away from the police voices yelling commands at bodies disappearing into the night. Making rules for shooting stars. One last moment and I disappear, swallowed completely by the land.
Michael Harper teaches at Northern New Mexico College. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Fugue, The Los Angeles Review, and others.
Header photo by David L Arment, courtesy Shutterstock.
