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TOM SPANBAUER is the author of the beloved classic The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for best fiction, and a “dazzlingly accomplished” novel, according to the Washington Post. His earlier novels are Faraway Places and In the City of Shy Hunters. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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Now Is the Hour

By Tom Spanbauer

Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright © 2007 Tom Spanbauer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618872640
Lonesome Traveler

Parmesan cheese.
My troubles all started with Parmesan cheese.
And they ended with Parmesan cheese.
My life up to now has been one big cheese cycle.
The first grade of Saint Joseph's School was the first Parmesan
cheese incident.
The last Parmesan cheese incident just happened, and what just
happened is the reason why I'm a free man out here on Highway 93, a flower
in my hair, hitchhiking to San Francisco.
It's all pretty clear now. Amazing how clear things can get at night
in the desert. The moon, a big silver dollar, so much light there's a shadow of
me across the pavement. A long shadow. My feet here on the gravel, my
head all the way over there on the center line.
George Serano told me once that you can tell how you feel by
how your shadow looks. Tonight in my shadow there's something about my
head and my shoulders, my arms too. The way my hair is sticking up, and
my T-shirt on my biceps, the daisy I picked in Twin Falls poking out the side
of my head. Something inside coming out that makes my shadow look, that
makes me look, I don't know, full, I guess.
Like this moon. Moon's so bright I can see the lines in the palm of
my hand. I can see my bloody, bit thumbnail. If I took my dick out, I could
see every aspect of it. My ass too. I ought to just pull my pants down right
here, one hundred and fifty miles north of Reno, Nevada, and show that big
old moon my big old moon.
Just my luck, some trucker would come along.
Just my luck.
And quiet.
Quiet as church. Not Mass or Our Mother of Perpetual Help
devotions, but quiet in the empty Saint Joseph's Church. The quiet of the
votive candle flame. The blue and red and yellow stained glass lying on the
pew. Close your eyes and take a breath. What you smell is Catholic: oiled
wood, beeswax, gold frankincense and myrrh.
The desert's even more quiet. The perfectly still sound of
everything alive. Even the pavement, its dark ribbon going over the edge of the
horizon, is alive. The horizon too, slow, sloping flat, every now and then an
outburst of lava rock making a jagged edge. Sagebrush a darker shade of
silver than the moon. Close your eyes here and take a breath, what you
smell is sagebrush and bitterroot, what you smell is everything that's
possible.
Two cigarettes ago, just as I sucked the yellow flame into the end
of my cigarette, a coyote yelled out a big old lonesome, but not a sound
since. Not even crickets or frogs. Just my tennis shoes scraping gravel. And
my breath.
Maybe there was a nuclear bomb, and now I'm the only person
who survived in the whole entire world.
That might not be so bad.
After seventeen years of breathing, I, Rigby John Klusener, do
hereby declare there sure as hell are a few I could live without.
Why else do you think I'm out here on Highway 93, my thumb
stuck out pointing to California?

What are you, six years old, in the first grade? There I was, six years old.
Sister Bertha had put me on the dumb side of the room. Over on the right
side near the cloakroom door in the back. Us dumb ones were supposed to
be doing something in our notebooks while Sister Bertha was flashing the
flash cards for the smart ones on the other side of the room. I knew every one
of the words she was flashing except for have, and that's only because
nobody'd shown me the v yet, plus I didn't know about the silent e. Anyway,
Sister Bertha catches me reading the flash cards, so she says my name out
loud. She says, Rigby John Klusener?
I stood up, of course, because I may not have known about v and
the silent e yet, but I sure as hell knew you had to stand up straight, away
from your desk, and say out loud and clear: Yes, Sister Bertha?
Sister Bertha was old and tiny. Holy Cross nun. The ones with the
big halo fan thing all the way around their head. My sis, Mary Margaret, had
Sister Bertha too in the first grade, and so had a bunch of my cousins. Sister
Bertha was so old, she could have been the first-grade teacher for my mom
and dad, even.
So Sister Bertha says, Rigby John, read these cards out loud.
I read them all out loud, all of them, no problem, that is except for
have, and when she told me that the v had the v sound, after she told me
about the silent e, and said the word love was the same way, she moved me
clear across the room to the smart side, up front, right by her desk.
Been there ever since, up front on the smart side, a whole room
away from dumb.
Maybe that's when Joe Scardino started to hate me. Because I
got to move up front. Because I went from dumb to smart in a matter of five
minutes. Plus, then I started helping Sister Bertha with extra things like
wiping the chalkboard clean and getting out of class to get the chalk dust out
of the erasers.
Probably didn't help.
Like there was the day Sister Bertha asked the class to point out
the color orange to her. There wasn't one student who raised his hand.
Maybe it was afternoon and everybody was sleepy. Maybe all the kids were
just so bored they couldn't dredge up the simple answer to the simple show-
me-the-color-orange question, I don't know. What I do know is that I
remember thinking I was surrounded by a room full of druts, so I raised my
hand, and when Sister Bertha called on me, I stood up straight, away from
my desk, and said, Orange is the color of an orange, Sister Bertha. And she
said, What color is that? She said, Show me where in the room you see the
color orange.
The way I think of it now, that day when I looked around the room,
everything was in black and white like on Ed Sullivan or Bonanza. I looked all
over the room, and there wasn't one stick of orange color anywhere on
anything. So I said, I have something orange in the cloakroom, Sister.
Which I didn't. I was lying through my teeth, which I think is the
only thing that separates the dumb from the smart. So Sister Bertha lets me
go into the cloakroom.
The door swung open into the cloakroom, and soon as that door
opened, the smell hit you. Bologna sandwiches, Wonder Bread, mayonnaise,
mustard, boiled eggs, ripe apples, and a kind of pee smell mixed in with wet
wool, and oranges.
I searched all over that room for an orange, inside every coat
pocket, inside lunch pails, brown bags, but not a single orange, orange rind,
or anything the color orange.
That's when I found it, and when I found it, I remember I swore to
God and went down on my knees.
It was a miracle. A true miracle. The inside lining of my winter
coat was orange. I slipped my coat on inside out, stood for a moment in front
of the cloakroom door, took a deep breath, then swung the door open.
Sister Bertha! I exclaimed. Here is the color orange!
The whole rest of the day I got to wear a gold star on my forehead.
Scardino must have hated that. I mean, I don't remember if he
hated it or not, but, looking back, it's amazing how clear things can get.
Something else I can see clearly now. That day when I went
looking for something believing I was going to find it and did. Nobody taught
me that. Sure as hell didn't get that from Mom or Dad or Sis or Sister Bertha.
Or the Pope. And it's got nothing to do with smart. Smart doesn't get you
beyond fear, doesn't...