transnational
Issue #7
Spring 2012
1 Cover Art –
5 Events
6 Fiction – “The One in
Burning Blue” by Nels Hanson
7 Poetry – “In Search
Of” by Howie Good
8 About Us
Dear Reader,
This is where I write something nice about how exciting it is that
I’m introducing the seventh issue, and what a lucky number that is, what a
wonderful spring it’s going to be in our little corner of the literary world,
and something about what literature and the literary world, the literary life,
means to all of us, and either a more professional picture of myself or just a
photograph that is representative of the season without being too self-centered
(like kids running through the town of Santa Cruz la Laguna in Guatemala
between me and the volcano, but nothing that implies the way this picture is is the way the world is because this is the only world that
matters, because it’s a big world out there and we can only see part of it at a
time), and then I’ll write something meant to be inspiring about writing or art
or what trans means and what transnational entails, something about crossing
borders, about that which is beyond the nation, about bringing together people
from different places, creating a space for intersection perhaps, and then
we’ll see what transpires. Warmest,
– Christina Phelps
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz,
is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite
Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me
of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous
print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love Dagger from Right Hand Pointing.
Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher, and
contract writer/editor. He graduated
from UC Santa Cruz and the University of Montana, and his fiction received the
San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award. His stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior
Review, Southeast Review, Long Story, Short Story, Starry Night
Review, and other journals. “Now the
River's in You,” a 2010 story which appeared in Ruminate Magazine, was nominated for a
Pushcart Prize. Hanson lives with his
wife, Vicki, on the Central Coast of California.
3.21.2012 – trans
lit mag begins transmitting issue #7, “transnational.”
The One in Burning Blue
by Nels Hanson
After Jodie threw the vase of roses and the window of the recording
studio shattered I went out drinking, brooding about Marlene Black blaming
Jodie for Johnny Black’s murder—
About Jodie firing Johnny and his band and me standing by and letting
her do it, so that sooner or later he’d meet ring-nosed rapper Eddie Rat, who
wore the coonskin cap and aimed the flintlock—
I had bad thoughts about the Wheeler Sisters, I thought Jodie might do
something to make them quit if she couldn’t cut them loose too—
When Jodie let people go they got killed, or went crazy like Red Stampley and imagined they were World War II generals or
Roy Rogers and started phoning in the wee hours, or like Hank quit playing
music and tried to sell real estate in Vegas.
Their widows dressed in black and burst into make-up on the Donny
Williams Show, on their anniversaries announced the murder of their husbands
and threw wedding cakes at the culprit, the red-haired, cold and beautiful
First Lady of Country and the latest darling of the Republican Party:
“You murdered Johnny! You murdered us!”
I tried but I couldn’t remember which Wheeler I’d hugged briefly last
week in the closet off the studio, Helen, Wanda or Charlene, the one who’d
kissed me hard and then whispered, “I
love you, Travis.”
I thought of that old TV show, “To Tell The
Truth.”
“I kissed Buck Cole last week.”
“I kissed Buck Cole last week.”
“I kissed Buck Cole last
week.”
Each sister wore green and held a blood-smeared yellow rose like a pink
slip. Two of the contestants were imposters. All of them smiled.
I stayed out late, until I figured Jodie had gone to bed and wouldn’t be
waiting when I staggered home to our Nashville castle. If she got lonely, she could call George or
Laura – Jodie’s thrown vase and Jerry’s cut hand had shaken me and everyone
around us.
Flesh was cut, twice, first Johnny Black and now Jerry. I had a feeling something else, something
bigger, was coming, that it was already rolling
through the night like a semi on its way, pushing a wall of air in front of it.
I was waiting for it to arrive, whatever it was, I was listening for it
and not budging, even if what was coming meant the end of the Coles. The truth was I was getting tired of being
Buck Cole, the creator of “Travis Jackson” and the President’s wayward phone
buddy as well as Jodie’s verbal punching bag.
That night in Mom’s Tavern I sat with the studio crew, including Jerry
with his newly bandaged hand. He’d come
in straight from the hospital. Everyone
was joking and laughing and flirting with the barmaids, trying to let off the
steam Jodie had boiled up when she’d thrown the heavy jar of yellow roses –
just before Travis Jackson called and she’d shouted, “I’ll have the FBI onto to you, whoever you are! The President’s going to hear about this!” and
then smashed the phone.
The CD was done. After I’d left
the studio strewn with glass and blood and petals and plastic Jodie had okayed
“Lightning Strikes” and when Harlan called at Mom’s I’d decided to let it go.
I didn’t care anymore about walking the fiery sea or swimming the frozen
land, the friend you finally meet wearing clothes of burning blue, or that the
awful end was only the start of something true . . .
I’d really liked that song, I’d thought it was something special and
new, something really my own, in a modest way a turn in direction away from our
fans’ stock expectations of the Coles and “Travis Jackson” and now I’d kissed
it goodbye to stop the fight with Jodie.
I’d said the tempo was off and there was too much treble and she said
the Wheelers sounded like blue jays raiding a nest.
Like Gore, I’d conceded the election.
Pretty soon someone, maybe it was Greg Stills, asked about the ranch and
then Travis Jackson.
“Yeah, tell us another TJ story.”
“Did Travis catch the rattler with the gold wedding ring around it? Like an hourglass, Travis said? I’d pay to see that.”
“Naw, he chopped off his head. Killed him for his
jewelry.”
They’d seen my fiasco on the Donny Williams Show. I knew they were partly making fun but I couldn’t
talk about Travis any time Jodie was around so I started in, seeing everything
very clearly.
Travis could spin a story, and next time I’d ask him more about Tex, the
cowboy who rode the steer instead of a horse, the tale Jodie had interrupted – “Whoever you are, the FBI’s going to get
you!” – when she’d
grabbed the phone and broke it like the window and the vase of roses.
George B. in the Oval Office would probably have liked it. “Travis Jackson lives!” he’d exclaim, like
the million bumper stickers said. “Damn
right!”
“One time Travis was prospecting for gold along a rocky butte,” I began,
“when he found a cave leading back into the mountain. He got off his horse and climbed back
inside. Pretty soon he comes to this
dark chamber.
“He lifts the lantern and there’s two
skeletons, one an Indian still wearing a deerskin vest, the other a grizzly
she-bear, white teeth and claws. The man
and grizzly were hugging one another, the skeleton hand still holding a stone
knife between the bear’s ribs.
“‘Can you imagine,’ Travis says to me, ‘what that scene must have been
like, when that brave crawled in there out of the lightning and thunder with
his skin bag of firewood? And there they
were, like dancers, still wrestling like their fight would go on for a thousand
years—’”
“Travis Jackson lives!” someone yelled.
Somebody dropped a quarter in the jukebox and the song came on, like
accompaniment:
“Travis Jackson was a friend of mine
Cowboy-bred but out of time.
The
West is going, going, gone
You
can hear it fade when you hear his song.”
“There he is,” Walt said. “Right on cue.”
“Maybe he’s here,” Larry said. He
pretended to look around, over his shoulder, then under the table.
“No,” Jerry said. “He’s in
there.” He nodded at the bottle on the
table.
“Where is he really, Buck?” Walt said. He didn’t laugh with the others at Jerry’s
joke.
“He’s in here,” I said quietly to Walt.
I touched my shirt pocket.
Walt winked. “That’s right.”
Slim Frye walked in with his sideburns and white Stetson and everybody
gathered around.
Frye looked over at me, grinning that he’d known Jodie before I did, and
I got up to leave.
He liked the idea that he’d put Jodie out of the red Porsche on the
desert road, that day I’d come along and found her and taken her to the ranch
where the green grass grew in the bowl of mountains – after swimming the
underground river we’d made love while the horses grazed and I never thought of
the cave where the skeletons waited like Adam and Eve—
“Oh yeah,” I heard him say, “that’s ole Buck
Cole, Jodie Johnson’s ole man, the ‘Travis Jackson Special.’”
“You need a ride home?” Walt asked.
I shook my head.
“You going to take some time off, now that we
wrapped it up?”
“I think I will.”
“You and Jodie going somewhere?
You got the tour coming up.”
“I don’t know what we’ll do.”
Walt held open the door and I went out onto the sidewalk lit green and
red and sudden blinding white by the neons and the
headlights of passing tourists, the eager white faces at the windows hoping for
a glimpse of their favorite stars.
“You all right to drive?”
“I can drive,” I said. “It’s
living that’s hard.”
Walt pointed his finger at me.
“You’ve got a line on that,” Walt said.
“That’s the dirty little secret.”
“So long, Walt.”
“I’ll see you, Buck. Take
care. Get yourself some peace.”
I half thought of heading out West but let the on ramp go by and went
out into the wooded estates of the rich and famous. Johnny Cash’s light was still on but Waylon
and Jessie Colter had gone to bed.
I drove through the opened gate and waved to Witt in the kiosk and
parked in the drive. The house was
locked and dark and I stumbled up the brick sidewalk to the back.
I tried to get a hold of Travis but again he didn’t pick up the phone at
the ranch in Nevada. The phone rang and
rang and I imagined him sound asleep as the leaves of the cottonwood rattled
and the cool night breeze blew at the window.
In the barn and across the wide pasture – where the cold river came up
from underground – the horses and white face cattle were dreaming, as I lay
down on the empty bed in the guesthouse and for an hour heard the floating
machine with a mind of its own bump the blue tile edges of the pool.
I only talked to Travis when he called me.
In the morning Jodie was waiting for me in the living room as I walked
in wearing fresh black, my usual uniform, Jodie had picked out – “It worked for Johnny Cash and Waylon—”
From her now-the-world-has-ended look I knew she’d heard the story about
the grizzly in the cave, from a third party, she was holding it back for spare
ammo.
Sitting in her chair and swinging her leg like clockwork she started
right in and twice I thought she talked over a mike in the studio and started
to get up to turn down the volume.
Although I didn’t agree with the way she set things out, I could see the
picture pretty clearly from her point of view, like morning sun through a pine
forest from a passing train.
Even with the headache I knew that I must have sounded like a broken
record, that I’d succeeded in making a public spectacle of myself. My talking jags about Travis had become an
open joke among the band and then the wider Nashville crowd.
(At Mom’s, Slim Frye, Jodie’s ex-something, had himself a good laugh at
Travis’ expense, I remembered.)
I had diminished my personal dignity and then my authority with the
music, I’d become a painful and flamboyant embarrassment to Jodie, caused her
to lose her composure and threaten to fire the Wheeler Sisters for group
fornication with her husband, scream and throw a glass vase at drunken Buck
Cole and hit and injure an innocent bystander.
Like my recent performance on the Donny Williams Show – after telling
Travis’ story of the baby snake stuck in the lost wedding ring and how it grew
8 feet long, four feet on either side of its hourglass waist, I’d tripped and
fallen in a hail of flashbulbs—
The broken window and the roses would be a stain on the President, when it
was twisted and hit the papers, undercut him with his family-values supporters,
after the Bushes had been nothing but kind and generous to two simple
entertainers.
G and L were the real adults taking the weight of the world on their
shoulders with no help from any stimulants.
They were grown-ups, the parents, and had to be crystal clear. Hadn’t George taken time out from running
America to pray with me over the phone, tell me that together we could beat the
drinking?
It was public knowledge now that Buck Cole was obsessed and alcoholic,
unfit for the friendship of presidents or anyone else, and it was well within
the realm of honest speculation that the best and safest place for him was the
locked ward of a mental clinic, before he did something more to hurt the White
House with his mania that a made-up character in a song was his real-life best
friend.
I shouldn’t be wearing black but hospital pajamas.
I knew I was over the line, but the crux of the difficulty was that the
line had been blurred for quite a while and anyway I didn’t much care about the
line anymore or about my dignity or Jodie’s shame that was red as her trademark
dresses, about “Lightning Strikes” or anyone who cared about or believed in the
Bushes or anything else.
Travis was my friend and in the whole wide world that was the only solid
thing I had to hang on to.
It was Sunday and Jodie and I were at swords’ points again.
Now she stood at the French windows, smoking, staring out at the
pool. I lay sprawled in the big white
leather chair, wearing my sunglasses and fighting the hangover.
“What time did you get back last night?”
“You know you have it down to the minute.”
“Three a.m.”
I didn’t answer.
“I heard you were going on about the bad old days.”
“They don’t seem so bad. And
what’s the thing with Jerry? Is he your
spy or something? Or do you have access
now to the FBI?”
“You told the story about the bear.”
“It’s a harmless story. No
murders, no rapes.”
But I felt a pang of guilt.
It was a terrible story, worse than the laundered version I’d told in
the bar, saying it was a brave instead of a squaw. For a second I heard her scream entwined with
the grizzly’s furious roar, echoing in the cave.
“I hate those stories.”
“You weren’t there last night. I
didn’t think you’d mind.”
Jodie walked to the coffee table and stubbed out her cigarette in a
fancy glass ashtray.
“I don’t think it’s funny.”
“It’s not funny. Just like it wasn’t funny when you locked me out the other night.”
She was silent.
“And I didn’t think it was funny when you called me a liar on Donny
Williams.”
“But it was a lie! It’s all
lies!” She was upset again. “You promised not to get started – I don’t
want to hear about Travis Jackson anymore.”
“Why do you care so much about him?”
“I hate him worse than the drinking.
Except he is the drinking.”
Jodie pulled a cigarette from a pack, then
threw it down.
"You’ve got me smoking again.”
“Laura got you smoking again.”
She didn’t hear me, beginning to pace in her red pants suit.
“All that’s in the past.
It’s dead. We’ve got a tour to
do.”
“The past is never dead.”
“Don’t talk like one of your songs—”
I jumped to my feet.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, don’t be childish.”
“Childish, hell. You used to
like my songs pretty well. As far as I
remember, ‘Travis Jackson’ did all right—”
“You want to go back with Johnny’s band, because Marlene threw the cake
and made the papers? Go back with them
and go nowhere? You think I dumped
Johnny for fun?”
“Johnny’s dead. He was killed by
a punk named Eddie Rat, trying to get him to sign a contract. The great Johnny Black, working as a gofer
for Columbia—”
“I know he’s dead. I’m sorry, but
it’s true. That’s what I mean about the
past.”
“That’s not it.”
“I saw a break and we had to take it.”
She sat down on the sofa, dropping her head in her hands.
“I didn’t know he’d get killed.
Do you think I’d have fired him if I’d known what would happen? It’s Harlan’s fault as much as mine—”
“Look, Jodie, this isn’t any good.”
“What isn’t?”
“I don’t know whether it’s being
cooped up together or something else. It
used to be we could spend weeks in three rooms in the middle of 5,000 acres 40
miles from Country Corners. Now we’re
having trouble living in the same city.
I’m falling down and you’re throwing things, phones and roses. Maybe we need a break from each other.”
She shook her head without looking up.
“Well, what then?”
Jodie lifted her face. She was
crying.
“Come on now, what can we do?
Let’s don’t give in to this.”
"Let’s fly out to Reno early.
Alone.” She looked up, nearly
begging.
“How’s that going to help?”
“We’ll give the guys some time off.
We can have a second honeymoon.”
“A working honeymoon?”
“We can have at least three days free,” she answered quickly. “A change will do us good. No rehearsing. No interviews. Just the two of us. Like before.
Like at the ranch, when you took me there—”
“That was a while ago.”
“Can’t you remember?” She tilted
her head, looking away at the floor. “I
can,” she said. “I’ll never forget.”
I sat down beside her.
“Remember, swimming the underground river that morning, after you saved
me from that jerk in the Porsche?”
“I don’t want things to get out of control,” I said.
“It was terrible when we split up.”
She wiped at her eyes.
“I was losing my mind.”
“So was I, Buck.”
“Two months apart were two months too many.”
Jodie smiled through her tears.
“You wrote some good songs while you were grieving,” she said. “Just as good as ‘Travis
Jackson.’”
“The grieving and drinking got a little mixed up. I want to cut that short too.”
I realized I meant it. Again I
saw the snow drift past the frozen window of the ranch house before she’d come
back Christmas Day. It was strange –
Jodie was the one who’d re-titled the song “Travis Jackson,” that first night
at the ranch when she sang it to me.
“Buck—”
Jodie gripped my wrist.
“You get out to Reno, get some mountain air in your lungs— You watch, in a
week you’ll write a whole slew of songs.
Just like that—”
She snapped her fingers.
“They’ll come easy. You know
yourself, that’s the way the best ones always do.”
She put her arms around me and kissed my lips.
She reminded us that all we had was each other. Jodie never saw her brother or sister and I
had no siblings.
Both sets of parents, hers and mine, were dead.
In a way, we were orphans who had saved one another. Each of us was precious. We were each other’s angel.
“Isn’t that right? I told Laura
and she said it was true.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “We’ll hold
on tight.”
At the time, all of this made sense.
After all, Jodie went on, jumping to her feet and beginning to walk up
and down the room again, creative people had their ups and downs, it went with
the territory.
If you wanted to fly, you had to burn a little now and then, didn’t you,
dare the flames to capture the fire?
Just like our new song, “Lightning Strikes.”
Angels didn’t have time to waste moaning about a bent feather or singed
wing. They were angels and had too much
to do, she said.
“We’re angels?” I couldn’t help
but smile. “Have you told Donny
Williams?”
Jodie giggled and leaned down, pretending to pick up dropped pinions and
stick them back into her wings. She flapped each arm
gently, testing, one and then the other, and flew around the room.
“We’re angels, Buck, angels!” she sang, as she laughed and beat her
graceful wings. “Honky-tonk
angels!”
Then she stopped and came running.
From three feet she jumped in the air and I caught her and when she
whispered in my ear I carried her down the hall to bed.
I’d get rid of the old monogrammed cufflinks she was always after me to
throw out.
When we got to Nevada, I wouldn’t go near the ranch north of Country
Corners.
“Promise?”
“Okay,” I whispered back.
“What about you-know-who?”
I’d never ever mention Travis Jackson one more single time or his
underground river.
“Oh, I love you Buck—”
“You too, Jodie—”
Now everything was all right again, I thought, just like in “Lightning
Strikes”:
Then you walk the fiery sea
And you swim the
frozen land
Until
you lose your way
And
you find a place to stand.
That’s
where you meet a friend
In clothes of burning blue—
What
you thought was just the end
Is
the start of something true.
I’d forgotten that Jodie wore red and Travis only blue denim before he
wore black.
In Search Of
by Howie Good
1
We were friends before we were a
couple, but unreliable narrators before we were either. When I opened the door, I found a small
Midwestern city, suicidal and dimly lit. I couldn’t explain it, not even with complex
equations. We agreed to act as if these
were things that mattered.
2
I came to a fence and climbed over it
and then realized I had forgotten my bag on the other side. There was nothing in the bag I actually
needed. I was traveling to a faraway
country, where the word for rain was more real than the rain itself.
3
A fluttery bird spoke up. It’s what happens sometimes. The sky brightened, but only for an instant.
trans lit mag is a continually-expanding quarterly name-changing online
literary magazine. Submission guidelines can be found here on our blog, where you can also find past issues. Find us on Facebook and Twitter.
Editor
Christina Phelps
Poetry Editor
Elana Seplow
Email
translitmag@gmail.com