UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
______, 20 _____
I,______, hereby submit this as part of the requirements for the degree of:
______in: ______It is entitled: ______
Approved by: ______THE BEAR BRYANT FUNERAL TRAIN
A dissertation submitted to the
Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.)
In the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the college of Arts and Sciences
2001
by
William Bradley Vice
B.A., University of Alabama, 1994 M.A., University of Tennessee, 1997
Committee Chair: Josip Novakovich
Abstract
The Bear Bryant Funeral Train is an original work of fiction that also contains a scholarly analysis of the British novelist Wyndham Lewis, entitled Wyndham Lewis and the Time Cult. Within the scholarly portion of this dissertation, the author examines several “swerves” in the writings of both psychoanalytic and structural critics in regards to Lewis’ depiction of self and race, especially within the little read novel The Apes of God. The author’s own collection of short fiction is broken into two parts: Stalin and Other Children's Stories and The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. In part one the author attempts to marry existentialism with imagism in hopes of using vivid images to encapsulate man’s complicated relationship to history. In the second section, all stories are set in the author’s hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. These intertwining stories attempt to reconcile the seemingly incompatible movements of Southern regionalism and international postmodernism by using the famous college football coach Bear Bryant as their subject. Acknowledgments:
The stories in this collection appeared in the following publications: “Stalin” in Hayden’s Ferry Review, “Mojo Farmer” in The Georgia Review, “Artifacts” in The Southern Review, and “Drunk at the Zoo” in The Greensboro Review. “Mojo Farmer” was reprinted in the New Stories from the South, 1997 anthology published by Algonquin Press.
The author would like to acknowledge his appreciation for those friends and teachers who helped make this book possible: Tim Parrish, Ted Solotaroff, Allen Wier, Kent Nelson, Josip Novakovich, Erin McGraw, Andrew Hudgins, Tom LeClair, Jim Schiff, John Drury, Don Bogen, Will Allison, Dick, Lois, and Gilda Rosenthal, and the entire faculty and staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference past and present (especially Wyatt Prunty, Pinckney Benedict, Barry Hannah, Claire Messud, Cheri Peters, Phil Stephens, Greg Williamson, Danny Anderson, Leah Stewart, Leigh Ann Couch, Liz Van Hoose, and Ron Briggs.)
Very special thanks goes to my wife, Juliana Gray Vice, without whose love and support I would be totally lost. Thanks also to my family, both the Vice and Dyer clans, and friends old and new: Scott Hamner, Lance and Sharon Hopenwasser, Ricky Groshong, Mike Everton, Jim Murphy, Brad Quinn, Lynn Shaffer, Michele Griegel, Ann McClellan, Cate Marvin, and Shawn Sturgeon. Thanks most of all to my father and mother, Leon and Dot Vice, for all they’ve done.
Shout out to Tom Franklin, Elwood Reid, and all the SOB’s and DOB’s. Dedication
This book is dedicated to my father, William Leon Vice, the man who gave me the two things I needed to write: discipline and love. Table of Contents
Wydham Lewis and the Time Cult
The Politics of Personality /2 The Unreadable Wydham Lewis /20
The Bear Bryant Funeral Train
Stalin / 53 Mojo Farmer / 70 Lotus Garden / 77 Artifacts / 79 Drunk at the Zoo / 95 Little Strangers /115 The Music of Strong Drink /126 Chickensnake /127 Tuscaloosa Knights 1935 /145 Report From Junction /165 Demopolis /186 The Bear Bryant Funeral Train /218
1 Wyndham Lewis and the Time Cult
Wyndham Lewis and the Politics of Personality
For much of the twentieth-century Wyndham Lewis has been virtually ignored by scholars of high modernism who prefer to examine the careers of his contemporaries: Pound, Stein, Joyce, Eliot, etc. Not only was Lewis's Blast group
(of which Pound himself was a member) one of the early voices of vorticism,
Lewis was also one of the century's most prolific authors who proved himself adept in every genre from the novel, to philosophy, to political analysis.
Wyndham Lewis was at once a scholar and an artist of the first rank, a self- fashioned Renaissance man equally skilled in sculpture and painting as in the belles lettres. But if Lewis has been excluded from the modernist pantheon, he has no one to blame but himself. Lewis's 1927 book, Time and Western Man, is an insightful philosophical and cultural critique, but ultimately proves to be a gross over-simplification of the issues that define modernism, reducing the most complicated relationships between history, politics, philosophy, and aesthetics into the inadequate binary oppositions: space vs. time. Lewis aligns himself with the former and his peers with the latter, and prompts the reader on every occasion to choose between the two.
While it is difficult to accept Lewis's black/white portrait of modernism, it would be fair to say that modernism, from its very origins, is compromised of a dualistic rationality. Two thinkers, Nietzsche and Bergson, are instrumental in delineating the boundaries that will define modernism. Both choose to frame
2 reality into general categories of flux and chaos. In Friederich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, the author contends that there is an epic struggle between two opposing forces, which he identifies as the Apollonian and the Dionysian. For
Nietzsche reality consists of the arbitrary human need to order which is represented by the Greek god of light and plastic arts Apollo, and the natural universe's tendency to remove order, to dissipate structure, personified as
Dionysius, god of music and intoxication. For Nietzsche each significant epoch of civilization is little more than children's sand castles washed away by the sea, and then rebuilt the next epoch by another group of children. The sea is the ultimate
Dionysian reality, and the sand castles man's Apollonian attempt to impose order.
The primacy of Dionysian flux leads Nietzsche also to assert that not only are all systems of government and religions illusions, but so are the concepts of a unified self, logic, and all scientific causal relations.
Though Nietzche is rarely mentioned in Time and Western Man, his depiction of existence as "power struggle" has a formative influence on Wyndham
Lewis. Nietzsche says that the only time the Dionysian and the Apollonian forces have come to rest in concordance is in the Greek art of tragedy. According to
Nietzsche tragedy ends because of the pre-scientific rationality of Socrates, who
Nietzsche sees as a "type of theoretical man" devoid of any Dionysian music.
English critic Toby Avard Foshay identifies Nietzsche as Lewis's "silent antagonist" as well as the "foundational intellectual influence on Lewis's early career" (Foshay 60). Lewis attempts to invert the value that Nietzsche places
3 upon Dionysian music by choosing "Socrates as a model" in an "attempt to turn
Nietzsche's call for a revaluation of values against him" (Foshay 60).
Foshay sees Lewis's early involvement with the Blast group and vorticism, and later his essay "Physic of the Not-Self," as an attempt to locate the unified self in the deep structure of personality, in other words an attempt to find a vorticist- self. After the dissolution of the Blast group, Lewis becomes disillusioned with
the idea of pure form, pure abstraction. Because of this Lewis, like Nietzsche,
abandons the possibility of a unified self.
. . . the ground of supposed uniqueness and authenticity is an
illusion. The self becomes the locus of an aporia, a contradiction in terms.
It is a self that in its dependence upon other as "Not-Self," is equally a self
and a not self; or rather neither in an absolute sense. (Foshay 53)
The not-self Foshay refers to describes Lewis's belief that identity is formed by a
physical negation. Subjects negate objects in order to carve out a self; self is not
table, self is not chair, self is not other, not even former representations of the self.
Therefore the self/not self is perpetually changing, relocating the center of
personality. It requires a physical, plastic image to tell it what it is not. This
accounts for Lewis's privileging of the plastic arts over music. Even though Lewis
claims in Book II of Time and Western Man in the chapter entitled "Spatialization
and Concreteness" that he "knows nothing" of music, there is much evidence that
Lewis associates the very nature of music as Dionysian force capable of
dissolving the self.
4 You move round the statue, but it is always there in its entirety before you:
Whereas the piece of music moves through you as it were . . .When you
are half-way through the piece of music, or it is half-way through you, if
you did not remember what you had just heard you would be in the
position of a clockticking away its minutes, all the other ticks except the
present one no longer existing: so it would be with the notes. You have to
live the music in some sense,in contrast with your response to the statue.
(Lewis 175)
Lewis prefers the Apollonian representation of the statue because it give the self/not self a solid surface to negate, a springboard to give it a boundary. The major purpose of Time and Western Man is to prove that man is a creature of limitations, confined and manipulated not only by the dictum of geometry and physics but the stratification of society as well. It is modernism's failure, and particularly the failure of those labeled the"time cult" to recognize these boundaries. It is the music-listening subject, at once clock and metronome, that deludes itself into believing it is more than it really is, more powerful than it really is. This ignorance is not only foolish but dangerous.
The head villain of the "Time Cult," according to Time and Western Man, is none other than French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson is by no means a silent antagonist. Bergson's theory of radical empiricism identifies man as existing in a dual reality not unlike that of Nietzsche. Bergson's division between the
5 cerebral and psychic modes of perception might be loosely analogous to
Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian forces. The cerebral like the Apollonian is
the mode of order, strict chronology, and mathematical abstraction. The cerebral
refers to a world ordered by bus schedules and dinner bells, a world that exists
only for its own perpetuation at the expense of the self. The psychic, like the
Dionysian, refers to man's ability to tune into a world in flux. In this mode subject
and object merge as subject becomes lost in a flood of sensory impression often
referred to as duree. Also similar to Nietzsche, Bergson privileges the category of
flux, claiming that it is only through duree that man can discover a true self
uninhibited by society's constructivism. Only through duree will man be able to
act as his own master, in a manner that gives expression to a true self. Bergson
formulates this maxim in his seminal book, Matter and Memory: "perception is master of space in the exact measure in which action is master of time" (Bergson
45).
This maxim becomes the credo of many major modernists, and this is especially true for the novels of Joyce, Stein, and Woolf, whose first person narratives and stream of consciousness technique assert the primacy of the subject. Lewis objected to this musicalization of the subject deluded into thinking that duree could empower it to master "space." Duree merely isolates the subject within the confines of its own psychology. At the same time Lewis attacks duree he also wages war on "action."
According to Lewis action by its very nature is "dionysiac and dynamical"
(Bergson 21). In Time and Western Man's short chapter entitled "The Romance of
6 Action" Lewis makes it clear that a "man-of-action" is either stupid or malignant.
Of all of Lewis's contemporaries Ernest Hemingway is the only other writer that
the author condescends to calling "admirable" (this may be the reason he is only
mentioned once in Time and Western Man). Lewis qualifies this by saying that he
finds Hemingway's dynamic heroes stupid, equipped with the mental capacity of
an "ox." He only likes his writing because Hemingway understands how to use
space properly.
If the man-of-action is above bovine intelligence then he must be down
right evil, usually personified by a corporate wallstreet raider, one of those for
whom "time is money." In "Physics of the Not-Self" the man-of-action is
portrayed as a maker of million dollar deals. In the back of his black shiny car he
buys "bombs" and "canisters of poison gas" (Lewis 3). Later in Time and Western
Man, Lewis asserts that the woes begun in "August 1914," and even the last "half century of propaganda of violence or of action" are a direct result of Bergson's
"creative evolution," a philosophy that Lewis claims is as "darwinian as was the
'Will to Power' of Nietzsche" (Lewis 209).
Because action is dynamic it requires an antagonist. It took "two or more
opposites" to make World War I, and any other potential conflict requires the
same. Lewis prefers to physically withdraw from a world full of potential
enemies. "The intellects works alone," says Lewis, "solitarinesss of thought, this
is the prime condition for intellectual success" (Lewis 21). Free of the wave of
Bergsonian sensation found out in the streets, the solitary intellect is free for
reflection, free from destructive impulses. Bergsonian duree not only prompts
7 man to becomes a creature of pure sensation, it deludes us into believing that man
has the ability to rise above his condition of being spatially and to some extent
socially bound. Bergson gives permission for man to be either a dumb ox or a
wolf of pure self-interest, while at the same time blinding him to "common
sense."
What I am concerned with here, first of all, is not whether the time-
philosophy that overshadows all the contemporary thought is viable as a
system of abstract truth, but if in its applications it helps or destroys our
human arts. With that is involved, of course, the very fundamental
question of whether we should set out to transcend our human condition
(as formerly Nietzsche and Bergson claim that we should); or whether we
should translate into human terms the whole of our datum. My standpoint
is that we are creatures of a certain kind, with no indication that a radical
change is imminent; and that the most pretentious of our present prophets
is unable to do more than promise 'an eternity of intoxication' to those who
follow him into less physical, more 'cosmic' regions; proposals made with
at least equal eloquence by the contemporaries of Plato. (Lewis 112)
Of course, Plato and Socrates are Lewis's artistic models because they recognize the importance of spatial concreteness, and the need for the artist to be withdrawn from sensation and self-interest. (Throughout Time and Western Man Lewis declares that Bergsonian duree and the unconscious are states equivalent to what
Plato refers to as the 'mob of the senses' because a man is only an individual when he is conscious.) Plato also represents a political ideal. Lewis implies that action
8 began the first world war, and the subsequent "revolutions" and "revolutionary simpletons" that mark the turn of the century.
In Lewis's sixth Chapter in Time and Western Man, aptly entitled
"Revolutionary Simpletons," Lewis's cultural critique takes on an overtly political tone that will circulate throughout the remainder of the text. For Lewis the
"revolutionary simpleton" or the "unorthodox red" is really nothing more than a
"sex-snob, schoolboy, curate or spinster" looking for "wicked or blood-curdling exploits and adventures" (Lewis 27). In short the revolutionary simpleton "is, in a word, a romantic" which is the opposite of "the Tory simpleton" who is fascinated with "tradition" rather than sensation. (Lewis 27).
Although the text does not mention him by name, it is more than likely this political critique of "romanticism" and "tradition" echoes the early modernist writing of T.E. Hulme. In fact, even as much as Nietzsche, Hulme is the "silent" antagonist and foundational thinker behind Lewis's aesthetic. According to critic
Daniel Schenker, Hulme was first to popularize the words "concrete" and "object" long before imagists like Pound began to speak of the "direct treatment of the thing" in poetry (Schenker 122). Hulme would eventually give up his role as a critic of poetry to examine the plastic art, because it was "matter" that stood
"between God and the individual" (Schenker 122).
According to Michael Levinson the early apologists for modernism, like
Hulme and Ford, were intensely concerned with using literary advancement to free the individual from "moral and political entanglements." Of course, freedom depended solely on the "adequacy" of the "personality." In fact, Lewis's original
9 title for Time and Western Man was The Politics of Personality to emphasize the dangers he saw in socially-constructed individuals. Ironically, Hulme used
Bergson in his early work to defend against what he saw as the faceless shadow of science, a force Hulme thought was threatening to erase the importance of art.
Even though Bergson's philosophy seems by its very nature incompatible with the neo-classical revival that Hulme envisioned, he found it a useful tool to combat automatonization. Hulme contains within himself most of the major tenets of modernism that the new generation of moderns go to war over.
In 1914 not only did the world go to war, but the moderns also began to do battle. Michael Levinson in his book Genealogy of Modernism says that the split broke down along these lines:
. . . two extreme formulations, so prevalent during the Vorticist spring
and summer of 1914, mark a culmination of the major lines we have
followed: the increasingly radical egoism and the similarly extreme
formalism. On one side the representative figures have been Pater, Sterner,
Upward and Ford, who, despite divergences in detail, shared a
fundamental outlook: each offered a skeptical critique of traditional beliefs
and institutions, and a renewal through retreat to the self the existing order
criticized from the standpoint of the ego. On the other side stood
Worringer, Husserl, Lasserre, Maurras, G.E Moore and Lewis, all denying
the ultimacy of the human subject and insisting on the autonomy of art,
logic, politics and ethics, whose laws were independent of human will and
10 whose values were intrinsic-- the existing order criticized from the
standpoint of object truth and objective value. (Levinson 132-3)
The former groups of artists and thinkers display all the failings of the "time cult." They were content to retreat into the self at the expense of the real world, while Lewis among the latter recognizes a need to aestheticize the political in order to carve out a quiet niche for the artist to contemplate.
It is clear after reading Time and Western Man that Lewis has adopted
Hulme's distinction between the political definitions of romanticism and classicism, as well as Hulme's recognition that the individual must see himself as subservient to a physical reality. But at the same time Lewis jettisons Hulme's love for Bergson, Catholicism, and Nietzsche. For Hulme, there were "two kinds of classicism": static and dynamic. Hulme compares Nietzsche to Shakespeare who "is the classic in motion." For Lewis Nietzsche is dynamic, Dionysianism is romantic. Lewis insinuates the action that Nietzsche inspires is exactly the kind of revolutionary behavior that Hulme despised.
Lewis also adopts Hulme's pessimism concerning any group identity. To be an Englishman, or an aristocrat, or a Jew, is to be less than an individual.
Groups of people have neither the inclination nor the ability to improve themselves. Persona for the Romans indicated a person was of free status; other people were only things, res, machines. Like Yeats, Lewis believed that to be free one must adopt a persona, literally a mask, like the enemy, in order to be an individual. In 1932, with the rise of Hilter just around the corner, Lewis's rhetoric began to take a Machiavellian tone. Here are a few passages from the book of that
11 year, The Art of Being Ruled: "In the mass people wish to be automata." "The mass of men ask nothing better than to be puppets." "Men find their greatest happiness in type life" (Wagner 35). Critic Geoffrey Wagner states that,
throughout his work" he [Lewis] holds to the notion that "the main body
of humanity is composed of "things," idiotic units who have no desire to
feel deeply or think clearly, "hallucinated automata," he calls them larvae,
performing mice, stereotypes produced by similar environments and
education. (Wagner 34)
Wagner goes on to say that this pessimism attracted Lewis to "Hulme's insistence on the doctrine of original sin" even though he could not bring himself to believe in God (Wagner 35).
Understanding this, it may be less surprising that the fifth chapter of Time and Western Man, entitled "Art Movements and the Mass Idea," concerns itself mostly with western democracy and its "more primitive relative, communism"
(Lewis 26). No "artist can ever love democracy," claims Lewis; it is a musical doctrine, its people are too likely to be caught up in either the crescendo of millennialism or the Zeitgeist. Lewis also claims that all consciously political art is bad, and all "revolutionary" or "rebel" art is unconsciously political, and thus, bad and stupid. Like politics the art world is musical because it is concerned with
"movements" rather than individuals. No collective or committee has ever produced great art, only those who are "privileged and free, as Plato was, who initiates or proposes, and plans out, such further ambitious advances for our race.
The rest follow" (Lewis 25).
12 For Lewis the "time cult" is the art world at its political worst. He focuses his analysis on three notorious time villains: Pound, Stein and Joyce. Lewis confesses to having allowed Pound to "attach himself to the Blast group," and even goes so far as to say that few of Pound's earlier poems were even worthwhile. But at present Pound the lyric poet "has become a mere musician"
(Lewis 41). Pound's fascination with "tradition" is really no more admirable than
"Marinetti and his futurism." Then Lewis confesses that he made his decision to break with Pound when he heard that Pound had become a collaborator with "Big
Business" and turned "revolutionary" by helping to organize factory workers that could possibly be in the "armament line." Regardless, it is clear that Pound's new purpose, as of 1927, was to conduct the "harmony of industry" (Lewis 42).
Pound's troubadour persona is nothing more than a servile attempt to simultaneously appeal to tradition and fashion. Pound is a man "in love with the past" and because of this he is enslaved by it.
As opposed to Pound's fascination with "tradition," Gertrude Stein is a
"time child," a writer whose whole artistic project is little more than temporal babble. Lewis indulges the reader with a paragraph's worth of parody to prove that he is savvy enough to understand Stein's theory of composition, but then accuses her of being a fraud, of not really believing in her own theory. By explaining her composition in the same manner as her composition, Stein is
"making a claim . . . making believe that it is impossible for her to write in any other way" (Lewis 50).
13 Lewis makes short work of Stein. He is saving his strength for the artistic
strong man of the time cult. Chapter sixteen: "An Analysis of the Mind of James
Joyce" is easily three times the length of any other chapter in the book. It takes
Lewis only a couple of paragraphs to say that Dubliners is an unremarkable first
book of stories. And he takes about six to assert that Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man is "stiff" book, the "hero is trying to be a gentleman in the Oxford
manner" (Lewis 98). The problem with Stephen Dedalus, (or maybe it is the
problem with James Joyce) is "personality." Rather than finding a persona, like
the enemy, Joyce has chosen to use the text as his mirror. Lewis reads both
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses as nothing more than autobiography:
A highly personal day-dream, culminating in a phantasmagoria of the pure
dream- order, is the result of Ulysses. It is a masterpiece of romantic art:
and its romance is of the sort imposed by the 'time' philosophy.
Whimsical, but like much romantic art, it is founded on the framework of
classical antiquity--about which the author is very romantic indeed.
(Lewis 109)
Calling Ulysses a masterpiece of "romantic" art is a back-handed compliment if there ever were one. Lewis might as well have called it a masterpiece of excrement.
Lewis is afraid to call Joyce a bad writer. He admits that Joyce is a "pure craftsman" as an artist, but a craftsman lacking "inventive intelligence." Joyce is an "executant" of reality; he possesses "no special point of view." Lewis sees
14 Joyce as merely a mimetic mouthpiece speaking the world back to itself, and he finds this lack of ironic distance dangerous. When the artist chooses to merely reflect the world, rather than shape it for himself, even a "craftsman is susceptible and unprotected" (Lewis 90).
Of course, irony is Lewis's favorite weapon. How strange that he cannot detect it in others. To accuse James Joyce of completely lacking irony is an almost laughable misreading of Ulysses, and arguably a misreading of Portrait as well. It is a convenient misprision, however, for Lewis's attack of the time cult. A
Joyce stripped of irony becomes a perfect example of how a Bergsonian narcissist can become "stagnant," a socially constructed nervous tic or spasm of a highly
"conventional and fixed order." If it were true that Joyce lacked irony then it might be a valid criticism that Joyce is a perpetual "young man embalmed" in
Dublin (Lewis 92).
David Ayers's recent book, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man, is a useful tool for contextualizing Lewis's whole career. It is also very useful in synthesizing the more important work of Lewis's critics. It does a particularly good job in connecting Frederick Jameson's molar and molecular duality concerning Lewis's novels and Geoffrey Wagner's more traditional critique of Lewis's opinions concerning classicism and romanticism. The molar, like the spatial concretness of classical art, gives the self space in which it can stabilize itself. Within the space provided by this edifice of the classical, Lewis's multiple selves become
"strategies, 'adopting and adapting' Jameson's terminology, to punctuate and puncture history" (Ayers 90). The classical for Lewis has more to do with anti-
15 Bergsonian "common sense, and chronological time" rather than historical or
literary tradition. So within the confines of free space the Lewis self/not self is
just another
. . . self/world duality which now serves explicitly the function
of freeing the self from history. The self Lewis would have as an observer
above or outside the world, attempting, in Jameson's phrase, to think its
way behind history, and able only to produce a diachronic model which
turns out in reality to be synchronic, denying real change in favor of
history now seen as a variable balancing of eternal forces. (Ayers 90)
Using Jameson's Marxism and Form, Ayers suggests that Lewis's desire to create a self free from time is a result of contemporary historical theories of progress.
This progressivist history is the result of a "cultural illness" that festers as a result of greed and self-interested "political intent." Hence Lewis's distaste for the musical movements, democratic millennialism and the Zeitgeist (Ayers 82).
Ayers seems to have an almost Jamesonian respect for Lewis as political
critic. But Ayers takes issue with Lewis's more mean-spirited cultural
observations. Not only are Lewis's conspiracy theories concerning Jewish control
of capitalist society often in bad taste, they are often too serious to be funny.
Perceptively, Ayers recognizes that Lewis is the literary father of Thomas
Pynchon and William S. Burroughs whose conspiracy theories vacillate between
"irony and deadly seriousness" (Ayers 87). But according to Ayers there is far too
little irony in this particular aspect of Lewis's prose. In this sense, Lewis is guilty
of the very crime he accused Joyce of committing.
16 Furthermore, Ayers accuses Lewis's burlesque of his opponents to be childish, particularly his parody of Stein's composition. Of course Lewis's parody is just another attempt to negate one of the various not-selves, but Lewis's negation of Stein becomes less effective when compared to his own "radical verbal experimentalism and pastiche" prose (Ayers 87). One may chuckle when
Lewis says that Stein has a "mental stutter," but this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. There is no sentence in Time and Western Man that does not employ one of Lewis's buzz words: time, music, dream, romantic, revolution, dynamic,
Dionysian, etc. Even one of Lewis's biggest fans, Geoffrey Wagner, speaks of
Lewis's "monotony" in the repetition of a single point.
Ayers's greatest contribution to Wyndham Lewis scholarship is his analysis of Bergson's influence on Lewis's concept of the self. In short Ayers argues that Lewis's metaphysic is completely dependent upon Bergson's duality of action/consciousness. The body that acts on impulse is never fully conscious, never fully aware of its own subjectivity. There is a fundamental split, not between mind and body, but between instinct and intelligence. The former knows matter, the latter knows form. This makes it impossible for the intellect to ever fully understand intuition; "it can only know the manifestation of intuition in action through representation" (Ayers 19).
Self can only come to know the impulsive self as a symbol. Self will never be able to know itself in action, or as a non-spatial impulse. When we are conscious, cogitating, then we can at least understand the impulsive self through mimesis. So essentially, Lewis's project of negating the socially constructed,
17 impulsive, active not-self through artistic representation is a Bergsonian method
of recovering the self. Lewis rips the action/consciousness duality that Bergson
created and puts more space between them with the hard-edged neo-classical
irony and platonic contemplation. In a sense, Bergson's philosophy is fairly
misrepresented in Time and Western Man.
What Lewis really objects to about Bergson is his lack of pessimism. Like
Lewis and Hulme, Bergson wants to create a consciousness that will allow
individuals to be free from a mechanized world. Only Bergson wants to do it
without a necessarily Cartesian separation from the world, for he would rather
unify the subject with the objective "perceptual world" (Ayers 18). Since
Bergson considers the subject a non-spatial entity and free from automatonization,
it is allowed to meld with the objective world through duree. Anyone out on the
street is allowed to transcend his body and enlarge the self through sensation.
Ayers says that in Lewis's eye, "Bergson's true sin" is not that he refuses to
"detach the mind from world, renders the self mechanical and denies freedom
(though this is his constant claim)" (Ayers 18). But rather, Lewis sees Bergson as
opening up "Pandora's box," allowing for the once mechanical masses the ability
to create a true democracy of the vulgar. Time and Western Man's very purpose is to keep active selves at a distance from the platonic artist, who prefers to stand above the masses in an infinite regress of not-selves. While it may be true that the subject that experiences duree participates in narcissism, Lewis brags that the subject that chooses to negate the narcissistic self must do so at the expense of
18 "ethics" or even "love." Love and ethics are seamlessly bound with desire, and
Plato is clear that it is the philosopher's occupation to no longer desire.
Lastly, if it is true as Toby Foshay asserts that Lewis chose Plato as his ideal because of Lewis's "silent" antagonism with Nietzsche, then it is only fair to mention in conclusion that Nietzsche's "will to power" is far more complex than
Lewis would have us believe. Like quite a few moderns, Lewis's conception of
Nietzsche seems to be formed solely from Birth of Tragedy and his association with the cult of Wagner. Later in Nietzsche's career, he washes his hands of
Wagner. Nietzsche realigns his conception of the Dionysian and recants his call for the reawakening of a tragic age. Irony becomes as important for Nietzsche as it is for Lewis. It is worth pondering if Lewis's affinity for irony really comes from an admiration of Socrates as he claims, or from Nietzsche's prophecy that the Modern Age would be an era marked by irony. What is eternal return, but an infinite regress of lives, and is this similar infinite regress of self/not-self? Does
Lewis see himself as the fulfillment of the promise of irony, the true modern man, or does his over-simplification of the issues that define modernity justify his previous exclusion from the modernist pantheon?
19 The Unreadable Wyndham Lewis: Constructions of Race, Space, and Psychology Within the Fascist Avant-Garde
Cherish and develop, side by side, your six most constant indications of different personalities. You will then acquire the potentiality of six men. Leave your front door one day as B.: then next march down the street as E. . . . Never fall into the vulgarity of being or assuming yourself to be one ego. Each trench must have another behind it. Each single self—that you manage to be at any given time--must have five indifferent to it. You must have power of indifference five to one. All the greatest actions in the world have been five parts impersonal in the impulse of their origin. To follow this principle you need follow only your memory. You will avoid being the blind man of any moment. B will see what is hidden to D.
--From The Essential Wyndham Lewis
Race, Space, and the Time Cult
Within this investigation of Wydham Lewis’s career, I would like to explore a few troubling swerves that need to be addressed by Lewis’s scholars, whose writings since the author’s death have been rather anemic--that is, until the field was slightly reinvigorated by the 1979 publication of Fredric Jameson’s book
Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis: the Modernist as Fascist. In Fables of
Aggression, Jameson sought to use Lewis’s fiercely antagonistic, mechanized writing style as a sort of prose compass to point to historical fissures within pre- war modernism. Rather than using Lewis’s text as an opportunity to psychoanalyze the author’s rabid fascination with conflict and power struggle,
Jameson inverts Freud’s libidinal apparatus and fills up the interior categories of id-ego-superego with a kind of (inter)national allegory. Looking most carefully at
Lewis’s first novel, the 1919 version of Tarr, Jameson identifies certain character psychologies as being representative of their country of origin’s national
20 temperament. The id-bad artist, the brute sensualist Kriesler, becomes a
Germanic prototype of unbridled passion, a national identity incapable of self- reflection, while the passive, observant painter Tarr inhabits the favored ego-
England space. Using Jameson’s method of analysis, Wyndham Lewis’s protofascist venom is transformed to virtue. Even what Jameson describes as
Lewis’s “uglier misogynist fantasies” and “obsessive phobia against homosexuals” becomes a therapeutic confession, as Fables of Aggression lays all of Europe on the couch. Lewis’s brute protofacism becomes an interesting fever, symptomatic of a deeper infection within all of modernism. Only Jameson is afraid to really engage Lewis at his worst, and swerves from saying anything worthwhile about Lewis’s even more brutal anti-Semitism.
While it is understandable why Jameson would want to sidestep the issue of anti-Semitism at the same time he is arguing that the fascist imagination is worthy of study, Jameson makes his swerve in a rather underhanded manner. By extracting Lewis’s most ambitious (and most noticeably anti-Semitic) novel, The
Apes of God from his survey of Lewis’s career, Jameson is able to avoid any real engagement with questions of race. According to Jameson, he finds The Apes of
God “unreadable,” though he provides little qualifying information as to what aspect of the novel could deflect such a penetrating critic such as himself. Is it merely the fact that in The Apes of God, Lewis graduates from protofacist-fascist to full-fledged Blackshirt, or is there something else concerning Lewis that causes
Jameson to flinch? And so it is with the unreadable that I wish to begin my investigation into Lewis’s depiction of Jews, and most especially the Jewish
21 artist/writer Ratner—a character who operates in a kind of negative space within the framework of the narrative and represents the polar opposite of Lewis’s vision of the modern “genius.”
But first maybe we should ask, exactly what does Jameson find readable about Lewis’s previous novel Tarr that is absent in The Apes of God? Fables of
Aggression proposes that Tarr operates on two intertwining levels: the “Molar”— the overarching plot structure--and the “Molecular”—the sentence-level “brush stroke” construction. Jameson lumps this double helix configuration under the single heading of style, which he argues is the most interesting aspect of Lewis’s multi-faceted, spatialized prose. In The Apes of God, Lewis abandons the Parisian setting of Tarr, as well as its subject matter. Lewis gives up critiquing the bourgeoisie-bohemians that made up that city’s avant-garde art scene in favor of
London’s Bloomsbury smart-set, the affluent coterie of artists and thinkers with whom Lewis associated all that was wrong with modernism.
These are the apes of The Apes of God, degenerate shadow-artists who unfortunately have the money and power to control some of the production and nearly all of the consumption of art in England. Unlike in Paris, where Lewis enjoyed quite a bit of celebrity, his work was not well received after his return home to England. This Lewis blamed on Bloomsbury, which he saw as nothing less than a conspiracy to keep truly original art from prospering. The Apes of God is a rather bleak epic of resentment which has no Tarr, that is, no objective ego of self-reflection to serve as an exemplum. One would assume that if there is a Tarr in Lewis’s ape-filled London, the poor fellow is somewhere off-page,
22 impoverished and starving. The Apes of God is a Punch and Judy show populated entirely by id-apes. Maybe this is one of the reasons that the rather complex
Lewis molar-molecular trademark style is jettisoned along with Paris in favor of a narrative of totally flat Picaresque emplotment. The narrative follows the young
Irish “genius” Dan, a Candide-like figure who suffers terrible humiliation in the hands of apes, as he bounces from one Bloomsbury parlor to another. The book retains Lewis’s fingerprint fascination with mechanized humanity present in Tarr, but the spatialized sentence-level brushstrokes are formed more conventionally for easy reading. Does Jameson see this as an artistic pandering on Lewis’s part?
What other forces, personal or cultural, caused Wyndham Lewis’s style to undergo renovation, and why does this cause a problem for Jameson’s structural analysis?
To understand all this, we must first flush out what Lewis sees as the very foundation of modernism, the reconceptualization of time and space. Like abstract art, it is Lewis’s defamiliarizing prose style, in which people take on the characteristics of machines (and vice-versa) that initially catches the eye of uninitiated reader. To accurately understand how Lewis came by his expressive prose style, it is worth setting Lewis in contrast to the rest of the modernist pantheon, his initial friends and later rivals T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and especially
James Joyce, a group Lewis refers to in his 1926 book of criticism Time and
Western Man as the “Time Cult.” Unlike his Time Cult counterparts, Lewis was first and foremost a visual artist whose specialty in spatial composition led him to retool the very fabric of narrative in order to accomplish a visual effect, one for
23 which conventional narrative is simply unsuited—the representation of timeless
space.
In this sense, it would be fair to say that Lewis’s greatest influence in the
traditional sense was cubism and specifically Picasso, whose technique of scenic
decomposition Lewis transmutes to the page. Only Picasso did not go far enough.
Modern painting was revolutionary, but only on a miniature scale. Or as British
critic Toby Avard Fosay writes in his book Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde,
“Picasso, he [Lewis] says, is a technical wizard who plays on an immense range
of styles with unmatched dexterity, but whose pre-occupation with form is
trivialized by his lack of attention to content” (Foshay 11). Foshay later quotes
Lewis as saying, “There is no great communal or personal voice in the Western
World today, unless some new political hegemony supply it, for art to build on
and to which to relate itself” ( Foshay 11). The Parisian avant-garde was attractive
to Lewis because it appealed to his elitist aesthetics and emphasized “personality”
as the force by which great art was created-- that is to say, Lewis believed in
genius. But the avant-garde disappointed Lewis because few pre-war artists had
political ambition, except perhaps for Lewis’s Blast cohort Ezra Pound.
According to Foshay, Lewis desired to cultivate “politics of the intellect.”
This desire to be a political force as well as an aesthetic force is probably what drew him to the medium of writing in the first place. For if writing was unsuited to depict timeless space as cubism did so well, then painting was even less suited to political rhetoric, less capable of pointing back to an originating personality behind the art. Also Lewis’s hope that there might emerge some “great communal
24 or personal force in the Western World” is what later led Lewis to give “uncritical welcome to the stirrings of Nazism as a possibly constructive unifying hegemony” (Foshay 11). Because, as Peter Berger has pointed out, fascism is the aesthetizing of the political, the magnetic pull of Nazism was irresistible to a creature such as Lewis.
In contrast to his own experimental writing, Lewis deemed the experimental writing of the Time Cult as sheer, unreflective narcissism, expressions of self with no boundaries, political or otherwise. Lewis’s book of criticism Time and Western Man is a painstaking exploration of the Time Cult and the time philosophers that Lewis believes corrupted the early twentieth-century.
The rabble-rousing philosophies of Hegel, Marx, and Henri Bergson used the illusion of time to make people believe they could be liberated from their material conditions. Artists like Ezra Pound, “the man lost to history,” used time to escape from reality. Gertrude Stein is a “time-child” who babbles to herself in infantile isolation or “steins away,” as Lewis describes the writing of her musical prose.
But it is the time-music novels of James Joyce that really poses a threat to Lewis’s spatialized aesthetic.
“Analysis into the Mind of James Joyce” is the longest single chapter in
Time and Western Man, in which it takes Lewis over seventy pages to pronounce that, even though Joyce is an arch craftsman, his craft or “method in Ulysses imposes a softness, flabbiness and vagueness everywhere in its Bergsonian fluidity” (Lewis 103). The Apes of God is not only a firm Nazi political embrace,
25 but also a flat-out negation of Ulysses, as well as a rejection of the philosophies and the principles of design Joyce used in constructing his Time Cult masterpiece.
This insight is rather well explored in Scott W. Klein’s The Fictions of
James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monster of Nature and Design. To understand the evolution of Lewis’s prose style from Tarr to The Apes of God, as well as to understand the ways in which the Candide-like adventure experienced by Dan, the
Apes’s protagonist, unfolds, is to understand it as a parody of Ulysses; or as Klein puts it, “Dan’s exploration of the salons of Bloomsbury’s false artists under the tutelage of Horace Zagreus can be read as an anti-odyssey, a picaresque demolition of Joyces’s apparent assumption that knowledge can be gained through either quest or the communion of souls” (Klein 117). Lewis’s prose style evolution arises from a “technical inversion,” a total and complete “rejection of the interior monologue, replacement of the teleological quest with the picaresque, even the placement of Joyce [Dan] within the Apes of God . . .” becomes an object of parody (Klein 117).
In short, Lewis turns into a satirist, trading in his complex Dostoyevsky model of composition in for a rather bombastic Fielding/ Swift configuration.
Satire for Lewis was the outright denial of the Time Cult’s need to fill up the space between art and experience with the medium of psychology. The split style molar/molecular dichotomy Jameson uses to analyze Tarr could be an equally effective system for reading Joyce. The overarching mythic plot of Ulysses, combined with Bloom’s sentence-level brushstroke perceptions that connect him with the plot’s larger framework, differs little structurally from Tarr. The
26 molecular expressionism of Tarr is vastly different from Joyce’s molecular
impressionism, but the narrative strategy is much the same. It is for this reason
that Lewis renovates his style to an almost perfect flatness. Lewis’s style
renovation makes depth of perception nearly impossible and renders all of his
characters into caricatures, puppets rather than heroes. Lewis would later write in
his intellectual autobiography Rude Assignment that The Apes of God was his only
“pure satire.” And it is this “pure satire” that Lewis is offering up as competition
for European novelistic mastery.
Joyce parodies can be spotted throughout the text. His visage can be
recognized on several of Lewis’s puppets. Only Klein fails to mention one of the
most obvious, the Jewish writer Ratner, who also goes by the name James Julius.
As a structuralist Klein, like Jameson, is either unwilling to confront Lewis’s
depiction of Jews or, more likely, at least in Klein’s case, merely passes up the
opportunity. But by following Klein’s cue that we must read The Apes of God as an inversion of Ulysses, I think we must also read Ratner, a.k.a James Julius, and
Lewis’s Jewish characterization also as a satire of Joyce’s depiction of Jews.
Socratic Irony, Nietzsche, The Will to Satire, and Tragic Laughter
To understand Lewis’s life long relationship with satire, one must go even further back than Lewis’s novel Tarr to his vorticist literary debut, a closet drama entitled Enemy of the Stars. Enemy of the Stars contains no Jews, nor ape-like artists of any kind for that matter. It is by no means that topical. Enemy of the
Stars is a play that is as spare as a Greek tragedy, only set in the distant future
27 rather than the mythic past. It is what Toby Avard Foshay calls a “consciously vorticist work[;] Enemy of the Stars revolves, literally, figuratively, and conceptually” around the central character Arghol, a “foredoomed Prometheus” a
“propitiatory sacrifice” to the forces both “human (historical, temporal) and cosmic (eternal, spatial)” that threaten to overwhelm him (Foshay 26).
Arghol is of that “ancient race” the self. And the most powerful enemy the Vortex can produce to combat the self is Hanp, another version of future humanity. But instead of being a cold intellectual Prometheus, Hanp is a sensual man, driven unreflectively by his bodily lusts and desires; as Lewis says of Hanp in the play, his “black bourgeois aspirations undermine that virtuosity of self.”
Hanp is “a violent underdog” of the headless masses, while Arghol possesses the mask of personality. In the play, Arghol wears a “mask fitted with trumpets of the antique theater,” and it is worth mentioning that our word personality is derived from the Latin word persona, the technical name for such a mask. On the other hand Hanp is headless, to indicate his relationship to the faceless mob.
Of course Arghol and Hanp are really flip sides of the same coin, representative of the warring forces within each of us. This split within the self is the agon of Enemy of the Stars, a conflict that Foshay says is the war in the very heart of modernity: “The agon of modernity is not an objective contest, man measuring himself against the ideal of the gods in a struggle full of the pathos, the pity and fear, of tragic human limitations” (Foshay 29). And it is the agon of the split self, what Lewis would later come to call the not-self, that becomes the one consistent thematic concern throughout his career. Lewis recasts the roles of
28 Arghol and Hanp in Tarr as Tarr (good artist/self) and Kriesler (bad artist/not- self). But by the time Lewis begins to write The Apes of God, he is not satisfied to concentrate on a single agon, the self/not-self relationship. Lewis’s fictive world is populated literally with scores of battling selves and not-selves.
Before I go into an explanation of how Lewis uses these self-not/self relationships to constitute meaning within The Apes of God, I think it is necessary to do a little further excavation into Lewis’s influences and his understanding of modernity. It is no coincidence that the play Enemy of the Stars stylistically and thematically borrows from Greek tragedy, only it is a not-tragedy. It is a comedy of the most important sort, producing what Lewis would later call tragic laughter.
Tragic laughter is a laughter of knowing. It is the kind of laughter that is produced when at the end of Enemy of the Stars, the representative stooges Arghol and
Hanp struggle to exhaustion and then faint into a dead stalemate on the floor of the stage. This laughter is produced in a moment of tragic recognition or
Anagnorisis. For Aristotle Anagnorisis is the crucial point of any tragedy, the moment when the tragic hero understands his tragic flaw, and the audience understands that the hero’s flaw is their own. Only in Lewis’s not-tragedy
Anagnorisis produces no empathy, for there is no hero left standing on the stage to empathize with. Tragic laughter is that sort of recognition in which we spot our own stupidity or meanness in others and we end up laughing at ourselves as those characters act out our own worst impulses.
In “Physics of the Not-Self,” an essay written by Lewis shortly after the publication of his play, he aligns himself not with the plays of Sophocles, but
29 rather with he who called for the end of tragedy as an art form—Socrates. In
“Physics of the Not-Self” Lewis claims that Socrates’s “invitation to plunge into
the ‘soul,’ is the opposite of the plunge into Life suggested by Bergson” (Munton
201). In “Physics of the Not-Self” Lewis argues that most readers failed to
understand what he was trying to accomplish with Enemy of the Stars because all of modernity needs a healthy dose of “Socratic Irony” (Munton 203).
This is, of course, an inversion of Nietzsche’s call for a reawakening of tragedy in Birth of Tragedy. Conversely Lewis’s privileging of Arghol over Hanp is an inversion of Nietzsche’s valorization of the Dionysian over the Apollonian.
And in fact all of Lewis’s hierarchical dichotomies are inversions of similar
Nietzschean ones: space over time, plastic arts over music, self over not-self. It is an almost perfect Bloomian misprision, for Lewis rarely mentions the name
Nietzsche aloud; yet, Lewis flip-flops the entire Nietzschean apparatus without relinquishing the fascination with power struggle. One very good way to read
Lewis is to view his entire body of work and all his struggles with the Time Cult and Joyce as really a struggle against his Nieztschean influences. Nietzsche is the thinker Foshay calls Lewis’s “silent antagonist and foundational intellectual influence” (Foshay 42). And it is for this reason that Jameson asserts in Fables of
Aggression that all of Lewis’s villains take on the characteristics of Nieztchean supermen.
Laughter is not merely a sound to Lewis; it is an impersonal thing like a wall or stone, a thing that can help the self separate and cleave away from a not- self. Laughter acts as the opposite of Nieztschean music, which enlarges the self,
30 making the self feel infused with the very fabric of the universe. Laughter allows for one to stand outside oneself in almost scientific objectivity, and in this way satire functions as a social and political corrective, a kind of punitive artistic justice (much as Socratic dialogues attempt to satirize the hubris of the sophists and other Attic intellectuals). Shortly after the publication of The Apes of God in
1930, Lewis produced a short treatise entitled Satire and Fiction in order to explain what he had hoped to accomplish with his latest novel. “Laughter is the medium employed, certainly, but there is laughter and laughter and that of true satire as it were is a tragic laughter. . .”:
But satire is in reality nothing but the truth, in fact that of a Natural
Science. That objective, non-emotional truth of the scientific intelligence
sometimes takes on the exuberant sensuous quality of creative art: then it
is very apt to be called “satire” for it has been bent not so much upon
pleasing as upon being true. (Lewis 48)
This push to give art the objective authority of science is one common thread among Lewis’s contemporaries, especially T.S Eliot, who had similar fascist leanings. And it is also at this point in the high modern era that the practitioners of science began to categorize race and ethnicity in terms of scientific data. The stubborn Jew unwilling to convert suddenly becomes incapable of assimilation in to the mainstream European culture because of his blood. The very name
“Ratner” borrows from Nazi pseudo-science that characterizes Jews as a type of human pollution, public health threat, or parasite. Lewis hopes that The Apes of
God will act as a kind of artistic antibiotic, one that will purge the Jew and the
31 Time Cultists from the London art scene as well as all of Europe. European culture needed a purgative, a good stiff dose of cathartic tragic laughter.
The Greek Argos, Hellenism vs. Hebraism, Robots and Anti- Semitism
An anxiety of Nietzschean influence isn’t the only reason that Lewis might have been drawn to Plato and Socrates as models. For a moment it might be prudent to step outside the realm of Lewis criticism and attempt to grasp the larger cultural pressures at work within modernism. Since its inception the industrial revolution had produced an odd tension within European culture, a tension that pitted the newly recalibrated Christian work ethic fueling early capitalism against Europe’s more contemplative philosophical tradition.
According to Anson Rabinbach’s sweeping history of modern labor entitled The
Human Motor, all of Europe suffered a “deep ambivalence” because of the secularizing of the concept acedia, the monastic concept condemning sloth; the
“sin of acedia was transformed into the social proscription on idleness; its proper penance was not merely work but toil appropriate to one’s worldly status”
(Rabinbach 26). The upper classes were attacked as being dissolute, corrupted by their leisure time, to which many aristocrats turned to the Greeks for consolation:
The Greek word argos referred positively to one “who doesn’t work,” and
it is well known that Plato was contemptuous of physical labor because it
deformed both the soul and the body. With their renowned antipathy to
labor, the ancients upheld a kind of heroic idleness, a gift to poets from
gods. This form of idleness persisted as an aristocratic prerogative since
32 the Middle Ages, coexisting in an uncomfortable relation to the Christian
tradition, which condemned it. (Rabinbach 27)
The enlightenment had made a space for idleness; “for the philosophes the poet’s privileged leisure was not entirely dependent on court society and was thus permitted to attain exulted status” (Rabinbach 28). But this distinction between idleness and artistic leisure began to break down with the advent of the textile mills and the steam engine. The artists resisted, pleading that the rise of capitalism meant the loss of humanity. Think of Matthew Arnold’s argument that a poor murdered millgirl could have been saved from the abusive mechanical society, if only England embraced poetry instead of religion and rejected its Hebraic past in favor of its Hellenic one. No wonder the cover of Lewis’s first vorticist publication, the magazine aptly titled Blast, proclaimed that the 20th century was the. . . .END OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA.” This battle cry was his attempt to clear a space for art.
Lewis’s preference for Greek contemplative idleness over
Christian/Hebraic industry would have two other effects on Lewis’s satiric art works as well as his prose style. Because we can view Wyndham Lewis and
James Joyce as a veritable Arghol and Hanp, two battling prose style giants spawned from the same vortex, it maybe useful to co-opt some of the many Joyce cultural critiques in order to better understand their common circumstances. In
Neil R. Davison’s James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity,
Davison points out that both Nieztsche and Matthew Arnold saw Christianity as
33 the “last desperate flowering” of the ancient religion of the Jews. For Arnold it was Christianity’s stifling Hebraic tradition that was responsible for what he saw as the cultural stagnation of the British Empire. Hebraism for “Nietzsche had evolved into a spiritually paralyzed Christian Europe, and was thus at the center of the mal du siecle” (Davison 107).
Nieztsche saw Judaism as the very definition of his concept of resentiment or, as Davison describes it, “Judaism issues from a “slave mentality,’ and
Christianity is an outgrowth of the original Jewish hatred of their masters”
(Davison 122). In comparison the Greeks were free, but free mostly to suffer, which made them more sensitive and attuned to beauty and the will-to-power.
While both Arnold and Nietzsche relied on Jewish stereotypes to illustrate their message, it would be inappropriate to call either one of them anti-Semitic. Arnold defined Hebraism as strictness of conscience and Hellenism as spontaneity of conscience and merely moved that Europe would be better served with a more integrated dialectic of the two. Nietzsche said that the Jewish shrewdness and will to survive had made them the toughest people in Europe and actively encouraged intermarriage. Davison argues that Nieztsche’s rather contradicting stereotypes of
Jews as both quiet and intellectual as well as shrewd and tough becomes the intellectual foundation for Joyce’s decision to recast the role of Odysseus as
Bloom:
The “cunning Jews” as parallel to “the shrewdness” of Ulysses implies a
common resourcefulness of mind and strength of will. By combining the
Jewish stereotype and the classic hero, the negative representation of “the
34 Jew” as perniciously “cunning” is de-emphasized; cunning to Nieztsche is
a positive attribute, indeed is tantamount to “Jewish genius.” This
“shrewdness” opposes the anti-Semitic of “the Jew” as intrinsically
inclined to cheat, lie, steal, and even murder in hopes of usurping the
Christian state power. (Davison 121)
Of course to Lewis “the Jew” by definition is something other than the hero; the
Jew is the not-hero, and as in most of his other not-selves Ratner is a most
Nietzschean villain. Lewis prefers to rely not only on social stereotypes of Jews, but also on stock English literary conventions that make it easy for readers to decode the word Jew as automatically meaning corrupt or degenerate. Later revisionist readings of Nietzsche by other protofacsist thinkers like Otto
Weininger (one of Lewis’s favorites) also misrepresented Nieztsches’s
Platonic/Hebrew confluence. Nietzsche maintained that the Greeks thought of sin as something external, something outside of themselves, and therefore to them sin had a masculine quality. While on the other hand, the Jews had internalized sin and to them sin was something feminine. Weininger amended this by saying that the Jews were a feminized race; “the Jews manifest a negative kind of masculinity, and second, this “Jewish” lack of masculine traits can be found in those who are not Jewish but who display such “feminized” attitudes and behaviors” (Davison 143). And it is for this reason that Weininger considered the
Jew to be nothing less than an “inferior group as well as an inferior ‘Platonic state’” (Davison 143). Lewis substitutes this feminized Jew in the position of hero
35 in The Apes of God; the character of Ratner is a platonically degenerate,
feminized not-hero.
The second style innovation that we can trace to back to Lewis’s affinity
for the “Greek argos” is his depiction of characters as mindless dolls, robots, or automata. For the Greek philosopher, to be doing meant not to be thinking.
Lewis’s bourgeois-bohemian aversion to labor and his disdain for the values of industrial capitalism led him to practically invent a fictional convention that would soon be commonplace—man as dehumanized soulless machine. If we may return a moment to Anson Rabinbach’s The Human Motor, Rabinbach asserts that before the industrial revolution the idea of a human machine often became associated with the Enlightenment notion of human perfectibility, that “the human body was essentially a watchspring with unique self winding properties” It was a
“quintessential perpetuum mobile or self-moving machine,” but as the nineteenth- century wore out the robot became symbolic of a general fatigue, the human motor pushed beyond capacity (Rabinbach 51). As a satirist Lewis began his depiction of humans as automata in defiance of early behaviorist thinkers. But soon his view of human nature grew more pessimistic, as if his own fiction changed his mind. By the writing of The Apes of God all of Lewis’s characters are depicted as socially constructed bundles of nervous twitches. In a sense all of the characters within The Apes of God are Hanp-like not-selves, robbed of psychology. It was almost as if Swift had somehow convinced himself of the virtue of cannibalism. “The theoretic truth that the time-philosophy affirms is a mechanistic one,” claims Lewis in Time and Western Man:
36 It is the conception of an aged intelligence, grown mechanical and living
upon routine and memory, essentially; its tendency, in its characteristic
working, is infallibly to transform the living into a machine, with a small,
unascertained margin of freedom. It is the fruit, of course of the Puritan
Mind, born in the nineteenth-century upon the desolate principles
promoted by the too mechanized life of the European. (Lewis 94)
Like Rabinbach, Lewis is very aware of the cultural forces and social circumstances that constituted modernity, and his fiction is a reflection of the limited “margin of freedom” he thought modernism could allow.
Style the Not-Psychology, the Split-Man, The Chinese Box Effect
Up to this point in my analysis of Wyndham Lewis’s structural critics I have called attention to what I have come to think of as “swerves” in the work of
Foshay, Klein, and Jameson. Each chooses a fruitful avenue of exploration, but they refuse to follow these to the inevitable questions concerning depictions of race within Lewis’s work. And one might very well ask, why should structuralists, as structuralists, concern themselves with such matters? And maybe one might add, who does explore concepts of race within Lewis’s writing?
Most of the critics who deal with race in Lewis’s work follow psychoanalytic models, which are unfortunately doomed to failure because Lewis’s narrative and structural strategies create a veritable funhouse of distorted selves to deflect
Freudian analysis. Freud was, of course, for Lewis another of the Time Cult ringleaders.
37 While it might have been possible to read the character Tarr or possibly
even the futurist Arghol with a certain amount of authorial referentiality because
of the single self/not-self relationship that serves as the focus of plot in their
respective works, to read The Apes of God in such a manner is to send the critic on a snipe hunt. As I have said before, there is not one character within the pages of The Apes of God that anyone could safely identify as functioning as Lewis’s secret ego. In fact, the novel is constructed precisely to entice the reader into such a fool’s errand, only to thwart the scavenger hunt by the novel’s ending. This is hard to accept because the settings and circumstances of both Tarr and The Apes
of God pretend to be, frankly, autobiographical. But to proceed to read these texts
as Lewis-shadow history is sheer folly.
The Apes of God organizes itself through various levels of platonic
degeneration. Just as the not-self is an inferior version of the self, the true artist
finds his polar opposite in the Bloomsbury Apes, dabblers and philistines
responsible for holding the art world economically hostage. Ratner, as one of the
most ferocious of these “active” apes, is a degenerate writer. We are told that he
has not only written a mammoth bestseller, but he also makes a large sum of
money scribbling pornography as well as feuilletonism (gossip) for newspapers.
Julius Ratner is not Ratner’s real name. It is an alias, only one of the dozen or so
other names he has manufactured for himself. He is at once, “’Joo’ during his
early days in Whitechapel, that had been spelt in joke, by some grim hearty,
“Jew”—but disarming winsome plain British “Jimmie” was preferred by him”
(Lewis 143). Here is a short catalogue of just a few of the many names that are
38 attached to Ratner in The Apes of God: Joo, Jew, Jimjulio, Jimmie, Jimmie Julius,
Juliojim, and so on. This musical mixture of Ratner’s names is an obvious parody of Joyce’s musical prose style applied to his own name. Ratner’s degenerate writings are Lewis’s commentary on his archrival’s accomplishments.
Ratner’s foil is Horace Zagreus. Zagreus claims to be the emissary of the twentieth-century’s greatest, yet unrecognized, genius, an entity known only as
Pierpoint. Pierpoint remains off-stage for the whole of the novel, leaving us in the dark as to whether Pierpoint is a true genius or not. (Perhaps Pierpoint is Lewis’s secret ego, who knows.) Zagreus possesses a document actually written by the uncelebrated genius. This document comes in the form of a letter addressed to
Zagreus. In the chapter entitled “The Encyclical,” Zagreus gives this letter to the young Irish poet Dan Boylen (another Joyce parody), who despite having only published one poem in a newspaper Zagreus deems a genius. The letter Zagreus gives Dan is Pierpoint’s brief dissertation concerning the nature of the art world,
Bloomsbury, and “the Apes of God proper.”
It is as regards this second category of amateurs, these productive
“apes,” that I may be useful to you. I can point them out to you, and find
means for you to be among them—appreciate the truth of what I have
described, and draw your own conclusions. In a little artificial world of
carefully fostered self-esteem I will show you a Pseudo-Proust. (Lewis
122)
Zagreus claims that if Dan will give himself over to Zagreus’s care, he will tutor the boy as Pierpoint has tutored him. He will show the young “genius” how to
39 harness his talent as well as how to spot an ape. Dan, in love with the idea of being a genius, puts himself in Zagreus’s hands despite several warnings from his friends that Zagreus is a homosexual looking to seduce him.
For the rest of this anti-odyssey, Dan and Zagreus travel through the streets of London crashing into several Bloomsbury art parlors and socialite parties, and meet several colorful apes along the way. The Zagreus/Dan relationship becomes a simulacrum of the Bloom/ Stephen relationship or even the Virgil/Dante relationship with London acting a veritable hell. With each subsequent party, Dan is increasingly feminized and humiliated. (In the chapter entitled “The Ape Flagellate” he is even spanked by a group of angry lesbians.)
One of the first apes that Zagreus and Dan encounter together is Ratner, who joins their adventure, reconfiguring the master/pupil relationship. With the addition of
Ratner, the novel becomes a Socratic dialogue with Ratner playing the part of the sophist. Of course this relationship is a simulacrum as well, hinted at when Dan, after being thrown out of a cocktail party, says wistfully to Zagreus, “I wish I knew Pierpoint.”
Zagreus appeared much taken aback—he caught his breath. Then
looking a little askance at his pupil he said, “That’s impossible. But you
wouldn’t get on—I will tell you all about Pierpoint—I am his Plato.”
And the bronzed albino left his disciple laughing—saying “I am his
Plato!” (Lewis 316).
Zagreus is not only a homosexual, we are told, but an albino, an unreadable signifier, pointing back not to Pierpoint as Plato does to Socrates but toward his
40 own hidden designs on Dan. Here Zagreus’s laughter is a prime example of tragic laughter, a laughter that instills pity and fear. Unfortunately, Dan isn’t clever enough to get the joke.
This simulacrum of the Socratic dialectic shows how impossible it is to impose a psychoanalytic reading on this text. For even though it seem that
Zagreus holds many of the same opinions as the author, he no more refers back to the author than he does to Pierpoint. And in fact, Lewis, as the epigraph at the beginning of this paper shows, believed in fragmenting one’s personality in order to prevent the very blindness that Freud thought only psychoanalysis could heal.
For a modernist, Lewis had a rather postmodern understanding of the self. For
Lewis the self was a series of Chinese boxes, each containing another within.
Each box contained a false bottom; none of them sturdy enough to hold unified ego. Each leads to another box. Hugh Kenner even once said that he thought the author Wyndham Lewis was just an “amanuensis” to some other unknown entity.
The Freud Defense, The Jewish Conspiracy, Diffuse Anxiety, The Play
This does not stop several scholars from trying to account for Lewis’s personality through rather conventional psychoanalytic readings of his fiction.
Take Andre Freud Loewenstein’s study of misogyny and anti-Semitism. Her book
Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women is an otherwise comprehensive study of the works of Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene. Loathsome Jews and
Engulfing Women contains a much-needed examination of the connections between Lewis’s textual rage against both women and Jews, but her conclusions
41 contain an almost willfully naïve reading of The Apes of God. For example,
Loewenstein spends a great amount of time describing the ill treatment Lewis dished out to his numerous lovers and mistresses and especially his wife, who
Loewenstein paints as little more than a foolish domestic servant.
Loewenstein selects a section of the novel in which the homosexual
Matthew Plunket seeks advice from the “jewish witch doctor” Dr. Frumpfsusan.
These are representational parodies of English novelist Lytton Strachey and
Sigmund Freud respectively. This is the marital advice the preposterous analyst gives to his equally preposterous patient, advice that Loewenstein presents as being representative of Lewis’s own opinions as evidenced by his biography:
In choosing a friend, ascend a step. In choosing a wife, descend a step.
When Froggie-would-wooing-go, when Froggie is you, my dear boy, he
must step down, as many steps as are beneath him—even unto the last! To
be Frank with yourself, Matthew . . . an animated doll is all . . .you can
really hope to take on. (83)
Does it matter that this admittedly misogynistic marital advice is being given to a homosexual? Or that the advice is being voiced by the practitioner of a profession
Lewis would have despised? Even though Loewenstein is fully aware that Lewis thought of psychoanalysis as nothing less “than a Jewish spy network with an uncanny means of gaining knowledge, which could and would reveal secret unpleasant truths about people,” Loewenstein reads no ironic disjunction between
Dr. Frumpfsusans’s opinions on women and the author’s inner thoughts and feelings (Loewenstein 176). Loewenstein explains away the context of this
42 passage by saying that Lewis “projected his own masochism” onto
Dr.Frumpsusan (Loewenstein 177). It is a problematic reading at best, one in which Loewenstein asserts a “secret unpleasant truth” about Lewis, using the very system of reading he is calling into question. One might as well say that Swift wrote about Houynhyhyms because he projected his own masochism on to horses, or that Gravity’s Rainbow’s Tyrone Slothrop is paranoid because so is Thomas
Pynchon. These statements may be true, but not because their books provide us access to the author’s deepest interior thoughts.
In another part of Loewenstein’s biographical field research she describes
Lewis’s intense secrecy, his unwillingness to give out his phone number, his habit of occupying scores of flats and safehouses to prevent detection from anyone who wished to keep tabs on him. In a similar fashion, The Apes of God is a text that refuses to announce the location of its author. Lewis is always hiding behind the margins of his complex structural apparatus; every time we kick down the door of one of his flats, we find a persona, a masked puppet, a jerking, jingling not-self, filling the room with tragic laughter. Like Jameson, Loewenstein singles out one of Lewis’s texts to ultimately ignore from her survey, giving only the briefest synopsis of it because it is “unreadable.”
Despite rave reviews by his famous friends, Tarr only sold six hundred
copies, perhaps because, as a work of fiction, it is decidedly unreadable.
The characters in the book are as lifeless and unlikeable as those in all of
Lewis’s fiction, and the plot is overshadowed by Lewis’s sexist and
violent philosophizing. (Loewenstein 169)
43 If these qualities really made Tarr unreadable for Loewenstein then she would not have been able to stomach the rest of Lewis’s oeuvre. No, more likely it is Tarr’s experimental spatially oriented, avant-garde prose that makes it unreadable to her, just as it is the bombastic, anti-Semitic yet rather ordinary prose that makes The
Apes of God unreadable to Fredric Jameson. To appropriately understand Lewis’s depiction of Ratner, we must remember the cubist technique of scenic decomposition that Lewis so much admired in Picasso. In the Pound Era, Hugh
Kenner reminds us that for the cubist “man is a still life” (Kenner 234). And it is by thinking of Ratner as a still life that we will be able to provide not only a structural reading, but possibly a psychoanalytic reading of “the Jew” within The
Apes of God.
Ratner is introduced in The Apes of God chapter entitled “The Split-Man.”
Ratner arises from a night of passionate fornication and examines himself in the mirror before he begins the day’s writing:
Ratner faced Juliojim in the glass; he gazed at this sphinx, which he
called self, or rather what others called that, not Ratner—at all events it
stood there whatever it was. Impossible to question it. Anything but that
could be interrogated, but one’s self, from that one could get no answer,
even for Julius it was a sort of ape-like hideous alien . . . . Such as it was
that in which Ratner believed—a rat caught in his own trap, for he was
cowed and dull, he was attached to the fortunes of the rat self . . . .
(Lewis 154)
44 Here we see the structures of self being pulled apart between this world and the mirror world. Like a cubist painter, Lewis drops Ratner’s composite self into a centrifuge which spits little bits of self around the room. The lines of demarcation are defamiliarized. A piece of the unknowable sphinx-like Ratner remains in the mirror, while the ignorant, unquestioning JimJulio is separated on the outside.
Ratner is a rat caught in his own trap of narcissism; he is limited by his inability to stand objectively outside himself, to examine himself as if he were another. As if in a Joycean/Bergsonian mediation, Ratner’s overwhelming sense of ego floods the room.
Ratner’s existence as a split-man not only denies him a knowable self, but also assures group affiliation: Jews, Apes, Time Cultists, anything but an individual artist. Ratner’s split identity allows him to exist simultaneously at several places and times under a plethora of assumed names but never simply as himself. This makes Ratner representative of the all-pervasive Jewish conspiracy.
For instance, the Jewish conspiracy is responsible for all of Ratner’s success as writer:
Julius Ratner kept a highbrow bookshop, a certain Mr. R. was able to sell
his friend Joo’s books—and because as well Jimjulius was a publisher, Joo
was luckily in a position to publish his particular pal Ratner’s novels and
his poems—and on account of the fortunate fact that J. Ranter & Co. was
the Publishers and distributors of a small high-brow review called simply
Man X . . . (Lewis 150)
45 Lewis catalogues the vast “interplay of business” and “literary power complexes” for another whole page. And it is not just bad publishing for which Ratner is responsible, but also bad politics—Marxism. Ratner also poses a public health threat. There is little Ratner likes to do better than brag about having had a venereal disease to cover up his otherwise embarrassing femininity. Ratner, as card-carrying Bolshevik, Jew, and Time Cultist, is responsible for all that is corrupt and degenerate within London, England, and greater Europe.
If we are to have a psychoanaylytic reading of Wyndham Lewis then let it be a reading of paranoia. Following close on the heels of Jameson, David Ayers is one of the few Lewis critics interested in reconciling psychoanalysis with larger historical forces at work within modernism. In his book Wyndham Lewis and
Western Man, Ayers refers to several actual psychoanalytic case studies done in the early part of the century that drew connections between the “diffuse anxiety” of clinical paranoia and anti-Semitism. Ayers begins his argument by attacking
Jameson for being a bad cultural historian. According Ayers, Jameson has “no proper conception of Nazi doctrine” and is also guilty of failing to situate Lewis within the development of fascism; this “neglect of the European inter-war context blinds” Jameson “to the centrality of antisemitism in Lewis’s work”
(Ayers 35). Since psychoanalysis gives us “a hint . . .into the nature of unconscious mechanisms which lead to the formation, in the individual or the mass,” of the “‘libidinal apparatus’ of antisemtism,” we should be able to map out what role anti-Semtism has to play in the larger European psyche (Ayers 34 ).
46 Ayers continues a brief study of Nazi pessimism concerning language and the power of the media. The fascist suspicion of the “essentially deterministic view of the media” created an “unpalatable elitism” which caused a widespread movement among intellectuals like Lewis and Adorno to flee from popular culture. What Jameson identifies as aggression in Lewis’s work, Ayers relabels clinical “diffuse anxiety.” It is this “diffuse anxiety” that causes Lewis’s obsession with identity, not only with his own “politics of personality” but also with establishing a Jewish identity so he could separate himself from the other. In my opinion, it is the elitism caused by this “diffuse anxiety” that was responsible for Lewis’s affinity for his avant-garde aesthetics, Plato, and the Greek argos.
And so in this sense, we can say that Lewis’s defamiliarizing prose points to a certain cultural angst, a fear that would evolve into a virulent anti-Semitism within the The Apes of God. Again following Jameson’s lead, it is better to think of this anxiety as anxiety within modernism itself rather than a particular fear resident inside one author.
Even though Ratner is an insidious member of both the Jewish conspiracy and the Time Cult, he has no real power on his own. The sturdy albino Horace
Zagreus bests the effeminate, groveling Ratner time after time. All of their dialogues end in Zagreus’s favor, and it even seems that Zagreus enjoys keeping
Ratner around as sort of amusing pet, an ape on a leash. Zagreus’s relationship with Ratner frightens the young “genius” Dan who is too busy fretting about apes to realize that he is the only one being humiliated more often than Ratner. At the end of The Apes of God, Zagreus, Dan, and Ratner’s anti-odyssey ends with the
47 biggest, grandest Bloomsbury party of the year, Lord Osmund’s Lenten party, a
carnivalesque costume ball. Dan is feminized totally when Zagreus forces him to
come in drag. Strangely by the end of the party, Zagreus becomes lost in the
crowd. Dan disappears as well after becoming flailing drunk with his first taste of
alcohol. In stereotypical Irish fashion Dan is extracted from the plot when it is
shown he cannot hold his liquor. Attention is now focused on Ratner and a new
character. Ratner has been left alone with Starr-Smith, a Welshman dressed as
fascist Blackshirt who takes over Zagreus’s role as ape-tamer.
Later we find out that Zagreus has sold Dan down the river by taking on a
new protégé, another party-goer, the young Jew Archie Margolin. Zagreus has
further sold out by agreeing to marry one of the party’s hosts, the wealthy
dowager ape-patron Fredigonne, because the homosexual albino is terribly in
debt. Thereby Zagreus becomes fully recognizable as one of Lewis’s not-selves,
just like the rest of the apes in The Apes of God. In the penultimate section of
Lord Osmund’s party, Part XXII entitled The Play, Lewis again recasts the role of
Arghol and Hamp in Enemy of the Stars. Since Zagreus turns out to be just another not-self, an ape in sheep’s clothing, presumably now Starr-Smith is the real hero of the book. After all, he is in every way the strongarm fascist that Lewis so admires. Starr-Smith is aggressive and possess great strength of personality.
Like other Lewis heroes from previous books, his hyphenated name seems to indicate that, unlike Ratner the split-man who is split all over time and space, that
Starr-Smith is consciously split. Within him must reside both a self and a not-self;
48 therefore he must possess objectivity, reason, and an understanding of Socratic irony that Lewis described in “Physics of the Not-Self.”
But his objectivity cannot prevent him from flying into a passionate rage when Ratner’s jibes becomes too much for him. As if pre-programmed to attack laughable Jews, Starr-Smith turns Lord Osmund’s carnivalesque Lenten Party into a brawl when the Blackshirt tackles Ratner to the floor and begins to pummel him. The novel climaxes with an eruption of tragic laughter:
. . . Ratner was simply turning tippet and the pogromed animal of another
day came out, and the grinning face was frankly used as bait to the
Blackshirted ruffian, to draw blood—an auto-blood letting—he ogled the
other inviting a good stiff blow and the Blackshirt felt it being drawn out
of him by that hypnotic fish-eye . . . (Lewis 596)
Upon first reading this passage, the contemporary reader may very well think that not only is Starr-Smith Lewis’s hero, but that he represents Lewis at his very worst. Here it is, the glorification of violence and strongarm might. Until we realize that it is Starr-Smith who has been cast as the role of Hanp, the marauding sensualist bent on the destruction of the self, and is it Ratner who must defend himself from the black creature spawned by the vortex. By no means does Ratner inhabit the category of self; his “hypnotic fish-eye” is a clear indication that the anti-Semitic “libidinal apparatus” is still well in place. But now the hypnotized
Starr-Smith also inhabits the category of not-self. His robotic violence is clear evidence that that he has abandoned reason as well as personality. The mask, this time, is on Hanp, who has used the mask’s “grinning face” for bait, even though
49 he is too blind to know why his mask is grinning. Starr-Smith has been turned on, automated, by the Jew. The Blackshirt becomes a violent puppet, incapable of doing anything but batting about other puppets. This is the true danger of The Jew and The Time Cult, their ability to cause even the most stalwart self to lose all of its definition, whether it be in literature or in real life. This is the base of Lewis’s diffuse paranoia, a fear that he is being robbed of personality by the very contempt that keeps him separate from the rest of modernity. With the automation of Starr-Smith, the real Lewis has escaped through the last false bottom within the novel’s Chinese box construction, once again eluding us by fleeing into the unreadable margins of the text.
50 Works Cited
Ayers, David. Wyndham Lewis and Western Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1991
Davison, Neil R. James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and “The Jew” in Modernist Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Foshay, Toby Avard. Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde: The Politics of the Intellect. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.
Jameson, Fredric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of Californian Press, 1979.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Klein, Scott W. The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Lewis, Wyndham. The Apes of God. New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1932.
Lewis, Wyndham. Tarr: The 1918 Version. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1996.
Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993.
Loewenstein, Andrea Freud. Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women. New York: New York University Press, 1993.
Munton, Alan. Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays. Manchester: Carcanet, 1979.
Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Harpercollins, 1990.
Schenker, Daniel. Wyandham Lewis: Religion and Modernism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992.
51
Part I Stalin and Other Children’s Stories
He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. ----Albert Camus, The Plauge
The morning glory Just another thing that will Never be my friend. --Basho
52 Stalin
All the old diseases are coming back to us. That’s what my dad says. It’s on CNN. Right now the 153 passengers of Southwestern Flight 003, Albuquerque to Oahu, are in danger. Not from rotten fuel lines, nor faulty landing gear, but from the air itself.
A passenger of flight 003 was hospitalized in Oahu just a few hours ago and was diagnosed with pneumonic plague. Pneumonic plague is caused by the yersina pestis bacillus, which is also the cause of the better-known bubonic plague, both of which are still found in remote pockets of the New Mexico and
Arizona deserts. Pneumonic plague resides in the lungs, can be transmitted through the air, and needs no blood carrier such as parasites to spread. The disease is particularly dangerous aboard airplanes because of the 757’s ventilation system, which continually recirculates air through the cabin.
A diagram of the inside of the plane appears behind the Asian anchorwoman. Blue stick figures representing passengers are surrounded by red swirling arrows representing waves of contaminated air. These passengers and anyone they have come in contact with should seek medical attention. . . .
The big brother of the Black Plague loose—the implications are nothing short of medieval. I know. I know better than anyone. I am getting my Ph.D. in early English history. State school, no money to speak of, but the history is the
53 same. Plague. A lot of good nursery rhymes came out of that disease. Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, upstairs, downstairs—in 1348, a third of the English population fell down. They, too, thought the plague was in the air.
They called the bad air “miasma.” They wore garlic around their necks and kept the petals of sweet-smelling flowers in their pockets to protect them.
“Yesterday,” my dad says, “they closed a school up your way. Five students and one of the teachers had TB. That’s something I thought I’d never see again, not in my lifetime. But, God, the plague.”
Dad is a retired history teacher himself. He used to be a principal but administration got to be too much for him. He just took early retirement this year.
Leukemia. A school is no place to be weak or distracted. Schools are full of danger, and my dad understands the perils of education. That’s why I’m home, just off a plane myself thirty hours ago. He’s got his first round of chemo tomorrow.
For the first eight years of my life my dad’s favorite book was Nikita
Khrushchev’s memoirs, Khrushchev Remembers. He read it more than twenty times. Dad was not big on books. He read every word of the newspaper, and subscribed to Progressive Farmer, but Khrushchev Remembers was the only book that ever captured his imagination. Once, when I was in the first grade, Dad was reading it again, sitting forward in his easy chair. My mother was out. The TV was off, the house was completely quiet. I hated to disturb him, he looked so important reading his book, thick and black like a Bible. But I asked, “Daddy, why are you always reading that book?”
54 Dad put his arm around me, as if he were going to whisper something in my ear, as if he were going to tell me a secret. Instead, he asked me, “Do you know who Nikita Khrushchev was?”
“Yes,” I said, “a leader of Russia.” I don’t know where I had heard of him; TV, I guess. I pictured his smooth jowls. To me he seemed the very opposite of Santa Claus, unsmiling in his gray suit.
“Yes,” my dad said, “a leader of Russia. Well, when I was your age—no, older—Khrushchev said he was going to steal our children away from us. He said, ‘your children will sit on my knee.’”
I had forgotten that ever happened until a few months ago when my mother called to give me the news. My father, David Philby, was a good teacher, principal, and Little League baseball coach. He has a solid heart. He’s a gardener; he watches out for weeds and grows fine watermelons. He is a deacon in his church, but a quiet Baptist. He loves his wife and the children he taught, and I think he especially liked his shortstops. But when I was seven years old and my father was principal of my school, I thought that was his cover; that he was a
Russian mole, a secret agent just pretending. After all, he read strange books about the forces of history by men with names like Khrushchev and Lenin. My dad was born in 1939, and remembered Stalin perfectly—the Red Army overcoat, the strongman mustache—Stalin was one of the people from the past he spoke of with great clarity, as if he were an old uncle, or a grandfather I never knew.
Now I’m back home with my mother, in the kitchen, and my dad is channel surfing in the living room. He wants to find one of those nature shows,
55 Lions of the Serengeti or The Secret Life of Bats. But on every channel it’s either news or history. After the third circuit he gives up and turns to me again. “Do you ever think about Sissy Lynn?”
“No, not really,” I lie.
“I’ve asked a couple of doctors about her mouth. They say it could have been gonorrhea.” He touches his fingers to his lips. “It could have been gonorrhea in her mouth.”
Sometimes evil little fantasies pop into my brain. Like one time at
Christmas I walked into an antique shop to buy a present for my mom. She collects elegant platters, china, fine things for the table. She has a gift for arranging silverware. She is the kind of person who notices the heraldry of butter knives.
I was just about to pick up a cup from an ancient tea set, but instead I saw myself pushing over its shelf. All these delicate cups and saucers shatter on the floor. And it doesn’t end there because that shelf is standing next to another shelf holding a collection of Prague crystal, next to a shelf holding china dolls with real human hair. Before I know it all these shelves holding the world’s most prized possessions go down like dominoes. The world lies wasted at my feet, and all because of one mean, irrational act. It is all because of me.
There is a silent movie inside my head that shows awful things. It shows me pushing blind children in front of cars. It shows me swerving to hit dogs on the side of the road. Once it showed me hitting a pregnant woman right in the
56 stomach with a gloved fist. She keeps mouthing the word “why” over and over again.
“No reason,” I say. But there is never a sound.
That one really upset me. For a long time after that I felt this black fish finning me in the stomach. It makes me wonder if I’m a bad person.
Every year at Walker Elementary, the school I thought my father owned, a nurse came to check our class for lice. She always brought a number two pencil.
It may have been a different nurse from year to year, I don’t remember, but I do remember that up until the fourth grade I liked the nurse’s visit very much. I see the nurse now as very slim, young. She is not really grown up, yet so much older that I ever thought I would be. Now she is just this airy evanescent creature to me, an angel working the room with a bright yellow pencil. And for a moment that angel paid special attention to me.
I laid my head down on my desk and closed my eyes. Then one of her cool hands was on my neck, and the other stroked my hair with the pencil. It made me feel light. I knew if I were older I could ask her on a date, and she might say yes, because she knew, she knew better than anybody, that I washed behind my ears. She knew the soap my mother bought was lilac-scented. If I were older I might kiss her.
In the fourth grade, everything changed. The nurse was not young. She was not pretty. She was a corpse. There was nothing but a mass of varicose veins in her hose. Her thin hair exposed her gray scalp. From the instant she entered
57 the room I was aware of the sharp bones trying to work their way out of her skin.
Her clavicle pointed out of the neck of her uniform like a finger.
When the teacher introduced her to the class, the nurse said, “Hump.” Her lips moved of their own volition. She looked like a bitter old horse, and she held her pencil like a sword. Her name was Nurse Ramsey.
She started her way around the room. The way she held the pencil was barbarous, all five white fingers wrapped around it. One after the other, the kids on my row dropped their faces into their arms: Scott Hamner, Mike Everton,
Juliana Gray, Ricky Groshong, Krista Horrocks, Sissy Lynn. It looked as if they were catching their own heads after she had lopped them off. And then the movie began. Inside my head the unending reel, Nurse Ramsey held me to the desk with one crow-like hand and rammed the pencil inside my ear with the other, over and over.
With every replay I zoom in closer on the deep aperture of the ear. Soon I see down the waxy canal. I see the spidery cilia. I know the real name of the eardrum, the timpanic membrane. Tissue-thin, it shakes with every vibration.
Then it is speared by the lead of the pencil. Deeper into the underlying cavity.
The three small bones of the middle ear, I can see them hugging one another. I know their names too, the incus, the malleus, the stapes—destruction. They, too, are wiped out of existence. Deeper into the inner ear—what had the textbook called it?—the internal ear, the inner portion of the ear, consisting of a bony labyrinth that is composed of a vestibule, semicircular canals and the cochlea. . . .
58 By the time Nurse Ramsey got to my desk I was deaf in my right ear.
There was only a hollow din in it, as if I were under water, as if it were filled with blood.
But sometimes things turn out to be much worse than I ever could imagine.
“Lice.” My mother said it as if the word itself were filthy. She glared at me as if I were possessed of an unclean spirit.
“Lice,” she said, “is for trash. How did you get lice?” I was angry. I started to tell her exactly where I got lice, and exactly whose fault it was. But my father was standing over the both of us, and as I opened my mouth he gave me a look.
I had gotten this look before. After school Dad always wanted me to play catch. I was never a good baseball player. I was big and lumbering, no coordination, no real talent for the game. My fingers never fit into the glove right, my pinky cramped and twisted. I couldn’t make a pocket to save my life.
“All you need is a little practice,” he said.
I never had the courage to say, “I don’t want to practice. I don’t want to play.” Instead I slapped at the ball, dodged it. During practice one afternoon Dad broke my nose with a fast pitch. He was tired of my playing with no heart. He said, “I am going to throw this ball as hard as I can, and no matter what, you are going to catch it.” Within seconds my father’s whole body was in motion, his right arm whirling through the air like a windmill. I never saw the ball.
59 I dropped to the grass, blood and snot everywhere. Dad brought me a wet cloth to wipe up with. He kept apologizing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I was crying. He was crying, but after a while he got tired of feeling guilty. He got tired of me being a baby. “That’s enough, Will, suck it up.” Dad’s lips pressed in at the corners in disgust. His eyes rolled sidelong.
Suck it up, the look said. So I just dug my heels into the kitchen linoleum and waited for the bomb. My mother was about to come down on me hard. She pinched my arm. “Who? Who was it?” I dared not betray my father at that moment. I would not give up Sissy Lynn.
I had sat next to Sissy Lynn for two months of that school year. She was new to Walker, and she was shy because she had no teeth. Everyone asked her why, but she never talked.
Some people are born with tails, some with webbed feet. A few are born with their hearts on the outside of their chests and live. Many people are born without wisdom teeth. Sissy Lynn didn’t have any teeth at all.
My dad sat me beside her in the front row. I was strategically placed there to wall her off from the rest of the class. I never had the guts to ask about her teeth myself; my dad would’ve killed me, and what’s more, I had better manners.
But sometimes the questions got by me. Quiet whispers floated past, “Hey, what happened to your teeth?” Then she would start to cry. After a while kids asked the questions just to see if they could make her cry.
She was a sad creature, an animal that wanted to be a little girl. Pale skin, freckles, waxy yellow hair. She was too skinny. She brought cornbread for
60 lunch, and sometimes fruit. She mashed up the cornbread in her carton of milk, which she opened from both ends to make a bowl. She ate with a spoon. I knew only old people who did that, but they used buttermilk. She also used the spoon to hollow out apples, and she ate the shavings a teaspoon at a time. Sometimes she brought baby food. Creamed turkey. Creamed carrots. She cried most often at lunch.
I tried to talk to her, but she ignored me. That made me angry. Here I was, the only kid trying to be nice, and she wouldn’t even look at me. That made me want to ask her, “Hey, who stole your teeth?” But I didn’t. And I am glad I didn’t, because if I had ever been cruel to her I don’t think I could live with myself now.
She was not altogether unpretty as long as she remembered to keep her mouth shut, and that was perhaps the real reason she never spoke. I tried to pretend she was an ugly duckling. Maybe she would grow up to have pearly, straight teeth. But deep down I was disgusted by her. She was unwashed. She smelled like sour milk. And she was content to sit in sullen silence.
Every afternoon for two months I asked my father to move me away from her. He refused. Once he asked, “Don’t you feel sorry for her? What if you were like her? What if you didn’t have any teeth?”
“I’d kill myself,” I said.
“Don’t be dramatic,” my dad said.
Then Sissy gave me lice. Even though I wouldn’t tell my mom who had given it to me, I thought she was right. Lice was for trash.
61 “We need to shave his head, don’t we?” Mom was irrational when it came to dirt, germs, uncleanliness. Like most mothers, she couldn’t stand a mess.
“No.” Dad rolled his eyes. “I brought this from the dispensary.” He held up a carton of delousing shampoo. He put his hand on my shoulder and we left my mother sulking in the kitchen.
I was overwhelmed by a sucking resentment for my father. This was his fault. He made me sit by Sissy, just because I was his son. It was his mistake.
But when we got into the bathroom he whispered, “I am sorry this had to happen.” The apology cut into me and bled most of the bad feelings out. But I didn’t say, “Okay, Dad, it’s all right.” If I had, maybe things would have been better between us for the rest of our lives. But I just shrugged.
Then my mother burst in without knocking. “Take off your clothes. I have to clean them. Everything. Your underwear, too.” I blushed but did it. She snatched them up and left the room.
The shampoo was red and smelled like iodine. I knelt over the sink and
Dad lathered it into my head. My scalp tingled, my eyes burned. Inside the box there was a small comb. Dad raked translucent little corpses into the sink. Some were still clinging tightly to fallen hairs. I wanted to crush them with my fingers.
I wanted to feel them pop under my thumb like pimples. Instead, water took them down the drain. My scalp was on fire.
After Dad was sure my head was clean, he pointed at my genitals. “We better get down there too.” He would not let me do it myself. He said he had to
62 be sure. I closed my eyes and held my breath as he lathered my crotch. The burn was unbearable.
Then the phone rang. Mom usually answered the phone first, but after a couple of rings Dad went to get it. I got a towel and dried myself off. Then a shadow flickered across the wall through the venetian blinds over the commode.
The shadows danced on the wall behind me like a grass skirt. I put my towel around my waist and stood on the seat of the toilet, hooked a finger in the blinds and pulled them apart.
My mother stood in our backyard beside the barbecue grill, a can of lighter fluid in her hand. She was burning my clothes, not just the ones I had worn that day, but all of the clothes I had worn to school that year. All the new shorts, all the knit shirts, the blue, blue bluejeans, all burning in a pile on the ground. It looked like she was burning my whole class.
Then my father shouted something very strange. “The brute, the brute.”
From the next room, “The goddamn brute.”
Brute, an odd word for my father to use. Two summers ago, when I got the news that my father was sick, I checked out two books from the library: the fifteenth edition of the Merck Manual, and a copy of Khrushchev Remembers in hardback, published by Little Brown and Company, 1970. I know now that brute was not my father’s word, but Khrushchev’s.
I have learned a lot about Khrushchev, his rise to power, his words. In his speeches he often quoted Pushkin and Zola. Khrushchev was the son of a miner,
63 and he himself was a pipe fitter for most of his youth, but an early party member.
Dissatisfied with his lack of education, he applied to the Industrial Academy to learn metallurgy at the age of 35. From there he became party president of the
University, then a member of the Politburo. By 1935 he was in absolute control of the Moscow Regional and City Party Organization—he controlled all public works. Khrushchev was rebuilding the city for communism; he personally oversaw the construction of the Moscow Metro and made the trains run on time.
But by 1936 his main job was security. It was his duty to make Moscow safe for
Stalin. 1936 was a year of terrible purge. It was said by Khrushchev’s superiors that he was a man who was not afraid to get mud on his boots.
I know Khrushchev’s role in the Inner Circle, the select group of sycophants with whom Stalin surrounded himself. I can list their names: Beria,
Bulganin, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Mikoyan, Molotov, Voloshilov. None of them predicted Khrushchev would one day rule over them.
Most of all, I know how Khrushchev saw Stalin. Stalin was desperately afraid of being alone. Loneliness—that was Stalin’s disease. He kept the Inner
Circle close to him, not just because he didn’t trust them, but because he needed them. Stalin and the Inner Circle worked together, drank together, ate together, vacationed together. They watched Charlie Chaplin movies together, they celebrated children’s birthdays and wedding anniversaries together, they did everything but sleep together. Since Stalin suffered from insomnia, no one slept.
There were just catnaps between madness, and slowly, the loneliness crept into everyone, not just the Inner Circle, but Stalin’s family, too. I know Stalin’s
64 family, his wife, his sons, his daughter. Most of all, I know what kind of father
Stalin was.
In the chapter entitled “Svetlanka” there is a photograph of Stalin and his
little girl. She has freckles and a devilish smile. She is holding what looks to be a
bouquet of black flowers. Stalin has his arm around her. He is holding her very
close.
Khrushchev begins: Stalin’s character was brutish, and his temper was harsh; but his brutishness didn’t always imply malice toward people to whom he acted so rudely. His was an inborn brutishness. Khrushchev tells of Stalin’s love
to see those around him dance. Dancing amused him, in the army, the Politburo,
the Inner Circle, and most of all his daughter, Svetlana. Svetlanka was her name
in the diminutive, Stalin’s term of affection for her. Stalin had invited the Inner
Circle to celebrate the new year at his dacha in the last year of Stalin’s life. My
dad would have been thirteen.
There was Georgian folk music playing on the victrola and everyone was
drinking, dancing, having a good time. Mikoyan was the best dancer, and he did
the lezghinka, a Caucasian folk dance. Bulganin had done some dancing in his
time as well. When I dance, I don’t move my feet, says Khrushchev, I dance like a
cow on ice. . . . Stalin danced too. He shuffled around with his arms spread out.
It was evident that Stalin had never danced before.
Just then Stalin spied his little girl. Svetlanka was not dancing. She was
sitting down exhausted. Stalin said, “Well, go on, Svetlanka, dance! You’re the hostess, so dance!”
65 The girl declined. “I have already danced, Papa, I’m tired.” Her father grabbed her by the hair, dragged her to the dance floor and shook her by the scalp until her legs began to move about. Her face was red. Embarrassed, she cried.
He loved her, but he used to express these feelings of love in a beastly way. His was the tenderness of a cat for a mouse. . . . He behaved brutishly not because he wanted to cause Svetlanka pain. No, his behavior toward her was really an expression of affection, but in a perverse, brutish form peculiar to him.
Stalin’s wife committed suicide. His sons hated him. Svetlanka died a bitter alcoholic, exiled from the Soviet Union. Stalin was a terrible father.
Mr. Lynn came to pick up Sissy from my dad’s office only a few minutes after he took me home to clean the lice from my hair. Mr. Lynn signed the register, put Sissy in a rusty Continental and drove away. But Mr. Lynn never went home. Neither one of them was ever seen again. Sissy’s mother went hysterical. She called our house again and again to beg for help—then to curse my father, to tell him it was his fault, to tell him he was going to hell. Losing
Sissy almost killed my dad. He resigned as principal at the end of the year and got a job teaching American history at a junior high school, where the children were older. He quit administration. He said he wanted his summers off to garden.
Last night was the first time Dad and I have ever talked about Sissy Lynn.
I am certain now she is dead. If history has taught me anything, it is that some are born dead, without hope. The stars were against her. She should never have been born at all. Dad doesn’t think this way. He blames himself.
66 He thinks he could have done more. He thinks if he could have saved her, he could have saved the rest: the runaways, suicides, drownings, the one shot to death in a robbery, the one beaten to death after a football game, even the one who dropped dead of a heart attack in gym. He’d been slim, athletic, doomed.
Most were car accidents. Last night, Dad told me, all in all, he had lost fifteen of them in twenty-six years. He knows their names, he can recite them in alphabetical order as if calling the roll.
Dad told me the social workers had been onto the Lynns, and had already threatened to take Sissy away. The lice would have been the last straw. He should have called the social workers before he called the Lynns, but he didn’t.
He wanted to take me home and wash my hair.
Brute. My dad used that word for Sissy’s father. Now, when I imagine
Mr. Lynn coming to steal his daughter, the old sepia-tone monster movie plays inside my head. I see Stalin, his overcoat full of pestilence, plague, full of all the diseases of the Old World; he waltzes into my father’s office and signs the register. Stalin strokes Sissy’s lousy yellow hair and kisses her dark, hollow mouth. His mustache smells of quicklime. He takes Sissy by the hand, dances her down the steps of Walker Elementary and drives her away in his rusty
Continental.
Afternoon, in the car, and now I’m driving. I turn on the air. Dad is beside me, Mom in the back seat. We are heading for the hospital. Nobody feels like talking, so I have the radio on.
67 Over three hundred bodies have been found in a mass grave in Bosnia.
Most of the passengers of Flight 003 have been sequestered and quarantined.
Three boarded planes for Asia, two for Tokyo, one for Hong Kong. Seven are still unaccounted for.
Dad is looking out the car window. Offhandedly, he asks me to swing by his school before we go to the hospital. Not Walker, but the junior high school he has taught at for the last seventeen years.
My mother says we will be late. I don’t care; what could that matter.
Through the rear view I take a glimpse at her, still handsome and well kept. She has a smooth, brave face, not a hair out of place. What is important now is warding off fear. Decorum, punctuality, order—these are things that ward off fear.
When we pass the school, kids are waiting in crooked lines for their buses to arrive. Others are ducking into cars. Who is watching them? Dad once told me, “When I was a kid I was only afraid of two things—the Russians and polio.
We thought communism was infectious, because we actually believed in the domino theory and that scared us. But polio was much worse. Nobody knew anything about it. My parents wouldn’t let me go swimming. They thought you could catch it in the water. They just. . . .” He shook his head. “They just didn’t know.”
Caution singles out my father from most other men I have met in my life.
When I was in the first grade he used to watch me so carefully it scared me.
That’s why I thought he was a spy. At noon, he stalked the perimeter of the
68 lunchroom counting heads, compiling information. In the afternoon, when the last yellow buses had pulled out, my dad stayed behind looking for the left book, the lost backpack, the dead drop containing typhoid, diptheria, polio. Dad is looking far out the window. In the first line there is a tiny blond girl who says,
“Hey, there goes Mr. Philby.”
Dad waves. He looks as if he may cry. At first, this does not touch me, but makes me angry. A bad movie begins, the one where I get back at him for being my father. The one where he is crying like a child, and I say, “Suck it up,
Dad.” But I start thinking about the Merck Manual. I never looked up leukemia.
What happens when your own blood turns against you? I don’t know. I don’t want to know.
In the rearview I see a row of sulphur-yellow buses pull in behind us, stop, and open their doors. Still waving goodbye, the blond girl leads the crooked line of children into the bus’s interior and disappears. And then another, and another, and another.
69 Mojo Farmer
Mr. Tibby watches the dark field for the creatures with shiny eyes that come to feed off the garden. From his bedroom window he looks over the shoulder of a naked scarecrow to the feathers of young corn waiting to shoot into stalks. Rooted loosely in the ground are tendrils of purple hull peas squirming with potential. Moonlight glints off pie tins hanging from the stick arms of his scarecrow. They hang still. Their strings point straight into the earth as if gravity were magnified by heat.
Even in the middle of a dry spell, Tibby keeps his garden clean as a family plot, tidy as death itself. In the cool of every morning he rises to make his field immaculate. In the gleam of sunrise he beheads violet morning glories and nut grass. He unearths coffee weed from under runners and shakes the precious dirt out of the roots so it is not wasted on the intruder. Gardening is ruthless work, making way for the struggle of young runners and tommy toe tomatoes.
Today Tibby rises especially early, since before work there is ritual. He pulls a large trunk, painted red and laced with rotting leather, from under the bed.
He opens it and fingers the contents, feeling his way through the inventory. A
Bible held together only by a rubber band holds four hundred and seventy-two dollars among the pages of Acts.
70 Tibby, tall and lean, now kneels on the warped floor of his small house.
Item by item, he accounts for flowers pressed in between the pages of a tattered hymnal, delicate petals of rose and spider lily. A shortbread cookie tin holds a sewing kit with fifty-seven needles sunk into a fabric tomato pincushion and assorted patches and thread. There are hunting trophies: squirrels’ tails, rabbits’ feet, even a beaver pelt with the hot scent of mold. In a cigar box lies his father’s yellowing ivory straight razor. An envelope holds his children’s baby teeth. At the bottom of it all is a wedding-ring quilt, a patchwork of vibrant colors filled with interlocking circles. He unfolds it and removes a book of home recipes buried inside. Both were gifts from his mother. The quilt was a wedding present.
The book came much later.
Finding all in order, Tibby selects a jar of dirty marbles—a collection he had started after the last of his nine children had departed for town—most of them found in the gravel road leading up to his mailbox. He tosses it carefully onto the mattress. From the cookie tin he selects a palm-sized sewing square and pins it to the left breast of his T-shirt with one of the needles. A spool lands on the bed next. He seals the trunk with a lock of braided hair and shoves it back under the bed.
He hugs the bedpost and pulls himself onto the bed. His legs are numb as a sausage. He has to spend a full ten minutes rubbing them, every nerve buzzing with the sting of blood. The fruit jar of marbles jiggles as he rises to his feet, still holding onto the post.
71 Across from the bed stands a pale green chiffarobe with glass onion knobs. Tibby looks for himself in the mirror on its left door, but weak moonlight won’t bring him into perspective. There is only the shimmy of his dark hands, never steady, in the corner of the pane. When the feeling returns to his legs, he opens the wardrobe. Inside are his wife’s faded gingham dresses, hanging like unburied ghosts waiting in line for a chance to fly out. Tibby runs his hand down the hem of the one on the far left. The airy touch of cotton and the sweet decay of the rotting marigolds on the floor of the chiffarobe preserve Dell in his mind.
It is only when Tibby is in Dell’s closet that he remembers having been young. He has opened the door often to touch her clothes. He imagines how each dress would look if Dell were inside it, how it would cling to her thighs in the summer and fold about the knee. Her legs had been delicate and strong, like those of a deer, or even a slim young mule. And like a well-loved mule she was happy in hard work. She was proud when her fingers brushed and braided her children’s hair, and she was content in the smell of cornmeal and tea cakes that filled her kitchen. But she was also happy in the heat of the field, and never more so than when plucking horned green tobacco worms from growing tomato vines.
He sighs to think back further, to when Dell’s dress made a mystery out of her legs. Tibby smiles to remember his fat mama laughing at him every time he came to supper, love-starved to the bone. With snuff under the blanket of her thick lower lip, she would chuckle like she had never wanted for anything. Mama had whispered in his ear, loud so his father could hear, “Don’t worry, baby,
72 Mama’s got a recipe for every little thing.” Charming Dell was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Tibby holds the dress up to his neck and smooths it over his belly as if sizing it in the mirror. His stomach pokes through the fabric. He squeezes the sag of his left breast as if trying to separate it from his thin torso. His chest aches.
An hour later Tibby has prepared and eaten a breakfast of eggs, buttered toast, sorghum, and coffee. The buckled linoleum floor has been swept, and he washes the dishes with Dell’s frayed apron on. Feeling the kitchen is squared away, he spreads newspaper out on the kitchen table, then walks through the living room and out of the house. There is still no hint of the sun. The stars are just pinholes in a dark curtain.
The nest of cats living under the house is restless. Country cats are feral and tame all at once. More than twenty of them live under his house, and many are in heat. They walk as if on piano wire. They smell of blood and urine. Tibby keeps them all in petting condition. The ones with milk still in their teats are the most affectionate; the others walk coy circles around him as he discards scraps.
Tibby picks up a young tabby. Her eyes are wide and bright as a surprised possum’s. He runs his finger over the cat’s chin and down her back. He lifts her by the scruff of the neck, takes her into his arms. She lets him rest his palm on the top of her head, and Tibby firmly snaps her neck.
Careful not to break her ribs, he splits the cat open with his pocketknife and removes every organ but the heart. Tibby takes her back into the house and
73 lays her on the newsprint-covered table. From the refrigerator he removes a
Tupperware bowl filled with chilled flowers and stuffs her ribcage with dandelions, pink hibiscus, and the navels of black-eyed Susans. He spices the corpse with gingerroot, rubs fresh dillweed into her heart. With fishing line he stitches her from belly to throat. Then, carefully, he places her in the space between his T-shirt and overalls. Tibby holds her still next to his belly with his left hand; he cradles the fruit jar of marbles with his right. Dell’s cotton dress is flung over his shoulder. A spade is waiting for him as he makes his way to the garden.
Tibby’s heart is a treasure map inked with the secret graves of young cats and the fragile bones of birds. Even an occasional possum or woodchuck has come to rest warmly under the bed of his garden. He steps politely over every unmarked tomb. Only the formless scarecrow made of mildewed hay and gunny sacks keeps watch in the glint of dangling tins.
Tibby gently removes the stuffed cat from his belly and places her in between the rows of young corn with his children’s marbles. The earth is loose and dry, no more than sand and iron ore before a rain. He digs a hole. The bones of his hand tingle, the flesh on his fingers feels like gloves. His yellowing T-shirt and the red quilting patch over his left breast are soaked in sweat. When he closes his eyes, he feels the lids pulse like drum skins.
Tibby has a vision for this field. The tomatoes will crawl lively in their cages, producing huge roses of Big Boys and Whoppers well into August. Soon cabbages will thicken with elastic leaves, and greedy pea vines will lick every
74 inch of available soil. Right here, the tongues of this young corn will shoot into green soldiers hiding gold and silver. The roots will twist into the spiced flesh of this cat, sucking the marrow from her ribs and holding her safe with a wooden fist.
The sun rises behind Tibby. Soon the cat has a thick mound of red dirt on top of her. Tibby knows that when the rain seeps into the earth, it will find this garden rich.
He approaches the scarecrow. Lumpy bats of hay make up its stomach and torso. Tibby makes an incision into the canvas bosom of the make-believe man. He punches his fist inside the hole and digs out a handful of damp hay, then fills the void with his children’s marbles. He removes the red square from his T- shirt and uses it to patch up the wound. Then he robes the scarecrow in the dress, slitting open the back of the dress and sewing it together around the newly sexed scarecrow. She has an air of secrecy, is mute as the tubers he pushes into the earth in March. Her lips are stitched shut.
Tibby kneels down and folds his hands to pray. He asks for the clouds to gather and the winds to blow up for a long slow rain. A good rain will wash away the telltale scent of the dead cat and make the pie tins titter. He hugs the scarecrow for support, finding it hard to rise. Slowly Tibby’s hands walk up the scarecrow’s body. Although the sun has not yet cleared the horizon, Tibby feels it bearing down on him. Despite this, he is sure the rain clouds will come, so he will return to the house and lie down—just as soon as he gets back the feeling in his legs.
75 Still embracing the scarecrow, Tibby whispers to the side of her stuffed head. He speaks to her of children and grandchildren, of holidays, seasons, and the happenings of the year. He tells her his dream for the garden. He leaves her to watch over it, confident she will frighten off any mangy stray that would dare to dig up her sweet-smelling cat.
76 Lotus Garden
I have brought you to your favorite place, the Lotus Garden, where the dining room smells of sesame oil and the same jasmine tea that your aunts drink.
Joss sticks burn into the bar to bring the lucky, and the paper lanterns that line the walls lead us to a booth in the back. The flames bow to you as you walk by. Even light is humbled by your plum black hair. The caged jade parakeets in the corner coo and sigh at you, hoping you will sigh back.
Here there is no English, none on the menus, none is spoken by the ancient
waitress. There is no English but the English between us, except for the placemats
and their brief description of the Zodiac, the endless zoo of years. But you taught
me how to recognize the Chinese characters for dumpling and duck. Those lines
are as familiar to me as the mascara on your lashes. I trace them in my napkin. All
night you have had the half moon of uncertainty in your mouth, the dim candles
of doubt behind your eyes. No matter, I always choose from the menu with my
eyes closed. I like the surprise. Remember the time they brought me steamed crab
wrapped in lotus leaf, remember the platter of salted chicken feet? Whatever I
ask for, your face maintains the same uneven smile.
“The best soothsayers are also learned astrologers and cartographers,” you
say. “In Hong Kong it is very important to map out everything. Newlyweds
consult a wise man to draw up the foundation of their home to make sure it does
not lie on the dragon’s back--in case of earthquakes.” I know by now that
77 earthquake is a Chinese metaphor for rash behavior, the result of impropriety, impiety, carelessness.
My stomach quakes. I am starved for dim sum, sweet and sour shrimp, happy family. I focus my chi. I am the ox. Calm, Patient. You are the rat.
Intelligent. Charming. We are not incompatible. During the long slow meal I ask for the Cantonese word for: wife, mother, children.
Your mascara is heroic, mouth fixed, curved, like an elegant blade of grass. Our waitress envies this mouth, its ability to whisper and yet be understood, to give decorous commands. We are her favorite customers. She looks as if she has lived a thousand wise lives. She has learned to read the signs; she knows when the patrons ache for rice and when they wish to be alone. The evening portends well. Business was plentiful, the food good, and my water glass is half full. Even though it is near close the old woman will grant us some extra time to savor this--the moment before she brings us our fortune.
78 Artifacts
It seems Margaret has been in the kitchen since the beginning of time.
Since sunlight she’s been cooking—kneading dough for bread, chopping, slicing, measuring out her day on the big oak counter next to the stove. Every few minutes she stops and scribbles ideas on a yellow pad with a grease pencil. The manuscript for Margaret’s second book, Voyages of the Dinner Table, is due in
Birmingham in two days. The book is a kind of gastronomic history with some new creations thrown in, and she is trying to make sure the recipes are perfect before they reach Ann H. Hardy, her editor.
Margaret can prepare nine recipes at once, but it makes her feel more like a juggler than a cook: moving from notebook to cutting board, board to skillet, to oven and back to the cutting board again. By the end of the month the book will have traveled from the desk of Ann H. Hardy into the test kitchens of Southern
Progress Publications, where eight highly trained home economists will work in secret to weed out any dishes they find overcomplicated, irreproducible, or
“esoteric.” That was the word Ann H. Hardy used to describe five entrees that didn’t make the final cut for The Ashevillian, Margaret’s first book.
But Margaret isn’t worried about tests now; she’s put the corporate kitchens out of her mind. She is summoning all her powers to prepare one of the most “esoteric” dishes in the new book.
79 She is going to make Chocolate Duck.
She begins by pouring two cups of red wine and two cups of beef stock into a saucepan, then waits for the mix to simmer. While she waits, she pours herself a glass of wine. Wine is something of a hobby for her husband, Dan. He had the carpenter make a rack that stretches all the way around the kitchen, just shy of the ceiling, atop Margaret’s cabinets; he got the idea from a magazine. The rack accommodates over two hundred bottles of wine, cheap Merlots and Cab
Sauvs from South America and the Sonoma Valley mostly; a couple of the
Italians are worth something. Sometimes she wonders if keeping them here is a good idea: they’re too high, and exposed to heat. Dan likes the look of them, though. He says they look like soldiers, all lined up like that.
The dark smell of warm beef and wine makes Margaret think of blood. It reminds her of the Victorian ladies in their corsets and petticoats who used to stroll to the slaughterhouse every afternoon for a fresh glass of it. In the nineteenth century, doctors told housewives that drinking blood staved off consumption. The glass of wine stays on the counter.
Margaret would not have made a very good Victorian. There is something too equestrian about the way she moves through the kitchen. She doesn’t bake bread so much as command it to rise and brown.
Margaret comes from a long line of good cooks. She gets her talent from her mother, and her grandmother before her, who came to Asheville to work in a big hotel’s kitchen after World War I. Margaret also got her curly black hair from her mother’s side of the family; she has not cut it short like most women in their
80 forties. Dan likes this. He likes the fact that his wife looks ten years younger than most of his friends’ wives, or at least he used to notice things like that.
Right now Dan is with his mistress—his new car—a used Jaguar with fifty thousand miles on the odometer. He spends most of his free time driving recklessly around the neighborhood, trying not to run over the ducks that wander off the nearby golf course into the road. Dan and Margaret’s house is just off
Charlotte Street, across from the eighth hole. The country club is well-to-do, and known for its aquatic fowl: mallards, geese, even five or six stately swans with clipped wings that swim on the ponds amid all that immaculate green. Dan has given up golf for the car. Before the Jag, he drove an Accord to the office and back, but last week he gave Margaret the Honda as an early anniversary present and bought himself the Jag. He goes for a drive every day after work, most of the time without a word for her before he leaves.
Margaret pulls out a long, sharp knife and slices open a plastic bag of dried figs. She begins to halve the fruit. They look like mummified lips; with each cut an ancient, lurid smile creeps out at her.
She pauses, the knife poised an inch above the cutting board. Today is her twenty-third wedding anniversary, and just now she is caught in a moment of reflection. Reading with her fingers the cuneiform of the wooden board, an artifact passed down from mother to daughter, Margaret moves back in time. She sees the spice caravans of Mesopotamia, the cradle of the dinner table— serpentine lines curving between the Tigris and Euphrates. Camels heavy-laden
81 with saffron and thyme are sailing through the desert toward her and the other anxious wives waiting on the edge of Ur.
Sometimes Margaret wanders the Attic fish markets, far from the philosophers. She knows what they do not—logic breaks down on an empty stomach. Bearded men pry into the secrets of the heavens, but not one of them has invented a philosophy to teach us how to eat well. Prostitutes are moonlighting by the wharf, selling raw, bleeding tuna. The girls’ complexions remind Margaret of spoiled oysters.
When Margaret daydreams, she never becomes someone else; rather, she recasts herself in similar roles in various settings. In Athens she is an aristocrat, her husband a powerful rhetorician. His funeral oration for their son has left the citizens numbed and dazed with grief. The entire city-state is in mourning. Not far from the market, merchant ships are slipping into the distance like old friends.
The cold blue Aegean crashes on the coast.
Margaret and Dan’s son, John, died four summers ago, drowned in the undertow off Cape Hatteras, where they had built a cabin in Rodanthe. John was only a few feet away, waving at his mother, when he was swept away. It took five days for the water to bring him back like a damaged letter, his body found by renters in the aftermath of a nor’easter. Waiting through the storm to look for
John had been hard enough, but when he was found and Margaret wasn’t allowed to see him, she became hysterical. The seventy-mile-per-hour winds and the violent surf had made the body endure terrible things. Dan had to force Margaret into the car to get off the island. She tasted sand all the way home.
82 “Damn.” Margaret reprimands herself for not paying attention. She adjusts the gas under the wine, which has slipped from simmer into boil. The flames retract like cat’s claws. Margaret smiles; she loves this stove. Gas allows for more precision than electric. The stove has a nineteenth-century cast iron design, but the features are pure twenty-first: built-in griddle, two ovens, wok rings, six burners. Each burner is shaped like a star—eight radial fingers instead of the old, round eye. They provide even heat under the entire pan for fast searing or delicate simmering. The liquid settles. She places the figs in the pan—they blossom. Margaret preheats the oven.
In a few moments she makes her way to the refrigerator and fetches the duck. It has already been decapitated, plucked, and placed in a mesh net.
Margaret makes short work of the net with a knife. Then she takes two bowls from the cabinet. One she fills with flour. Next to the stove are glass jars filled with staples: bulk peppercorns, sugar, salt. She pours peppercorns into the
Turkish coffee grinder. It is old, nobody knows how old; it’s one of the items that made the trip across the Atlantic with Margaret’s grandmother, all the way from
Santorini, a Greek island in the Cyclades. The grinder is over a foot tall and made of solid brass; it is heavy with family mythology. Like the cutting board, it was given to her when she married. It is strong enough to crush bones into flour.
Margaret grinds out four tablespoons of pepper.
The salt is low, so she reaches back into the cabinet. There is a little girl on the package, holding an umbrella in one hand and a cylinder of salt in the other. Margaret pours an equal amount of salt into the pepper bowl and then fills
83 the glass container. Before she puts the salt away she examines the package again. Inside the little girl’s hands is another little girl, presumably holding salt.
Margaret gets drunk trying to count all the little girls who live in her cabinet.
The duck’s flesh is smooth, ugly, discolored like a newborn baby. Its cavity is filled with rich fat. After dusting her right hand with flour, she spends about ten minutes ripping this out with her fingers. While she does this, she tries to imagine how the recipe will look in print.
Chocolate Duck
Dinner for two
2 cups beef stock or canned beef broth
2 cups dry red wine
1 sixteen-ounce package of dried figs, halved
1 five- to seven-pound duck
1 orange, halved
1 large yellow onion, chopped
4 tbsp. salt
4tbsp. pepper
4 bay leaves
6 tablespoons Armagnac or Hennessy cognac
84 3 tablespoons butter
3 ounces Ghirardelli or other quality semisweet chocolate, halved
Ducks were the first domesticated fowl. The Chinese kept them in little huts, like henhouses, over four thousand years ago. Maybe because of the birds’ long history of domesticity, the Chinese say that eating duck keeps lovers faithful.
There are recipes for roast duck in both the Ancient Greek cooking guide The
Deipnosophist, “The Banquette of the Wise,” and in many of the household records of the Egyptian pharaohs. But it is in the medieval Forme of Curey that we find the definitive method. Duck should be stuffed with sweets: apples, raisins, prunes, quince, figs, sugar, and/or honey are all excellent ingredients for accenting the meat’s rich flavor.
After the invention of the printing press, the Forme of Curey and other cooking guides were second only to the Bible in popularity. Newer editions of the guide had additional instructions if royalty were going to be at table. If serving duck to the king, a host might want to shred orange rind over the bird’s skin, then pour a jigger or two of brandy on the platter and set it aflame.
Of course, they didn’t have chocolate in the Dark Ages, which is one of the reasons they were dark. . . .
“Well, there’ve been projects like this before,” Ann H. Hardy had said on the phone a few months earlier. “Of course we’ll give it a shot, but The
85 Ashevillian had regionalism on its side, and that’s really Southern Progress’s
bread and butter.”
The Ashevillian was written in a matter of days soon after Margaret
finished college. She entered UNC-Asheville after John died; Shakespeare
seemed cheaper than psychoanalysis. She took twenty-one hours every semester
and went summers. After graduation, she wrote poems filled with handsome
drowned boys. At night John appeared to her in dreams, with his fair hair and wet
blue eyes, dripping in his funeral suit. He described the grand civilizations under
the ocean they could have seen together had she only caught his hand in time.
She would write this all down in the morning, but when she was done her
handwriting looked frail and pathetic. She never showed anyone.
Dan took to staying up drinking wine and brandy until long after his wife
went to bed. He looked like Dan, acted like Dan, same big arms and shy smiles,
but he ignored her. She persuaded him to come to bed early once, but when he
complied it was as if John’s corpse were under the sheets with them. Now Dan
wanders around the house at odd hours of the night like a ghost, bumping into
furniture.
She saw the ad in Southern Living for a first cookbook contest, and decided to write down the old recipes and her mother’s stories about the wild life she’d led in Asheville. Margaret wrote about the time George Patton stayed in the hotel and showed her mother his ivory-handled .45s, and about Scott Fitzgerald’s long nights at the bar when he came to visit Zelda in the loony bin. At the time,
Asheville Asylum was one of the best in America; it occupied a nineteenth-
86 century cobblestone mansion only a mile from Charlotte Street. The hotel and restaurant business was nothing if not interesting, but Margaret had never liked it much. Her mother was rarely home (her father died before she was born), and she was often alone.
The Ashevillian won the $1,000 prize and sold 10,000 copies in the
Southeast alone. It was going into paperback, and the publisher gave her a
$12,000 advance and a two-book deal. The first book had been easy, just a matter of putting onto paper things she’d known all her life; but Voyages of the Dinner
Table she had researched like a term paper. It was exhausting, and she had to write with the additional burden of knowing that her editor wasn’t overly enthusiastic about it.
Margaret cleans the duck fat from under her fingernails with a toothpick.
In the back of Voyages she has compiled a Did You Know? list. Margaret never met a fact she didn’t like. Fact #31: Witches were said to smear cooked baby fat on their broomhandles to give them the power of flight. Fact #32: In the sixteenth century, tobacco was often called the “dry drink” and was served after dinner in place of alcohol. Margaret finds herself fatigued and wanting a cigarette, a habit she refuses to give up—there no longer seems to be a reason. But she will have to hold out until she gets the duck in the oven.
She begins massaging the mixture of salt and pepper into the bird’s flesh, inside and out. She’s a bit disgusted by the slickness on her hands, and she stops to wash them with steaming water and dishwashing liquid, but they won’t come
87 clean. She scrubs until it feels as if the meat will fall away from the bones, but
her fingers are still sticky. She gives up.
She goes to the refrigerator again and takes out an onion and an orange.
The orange is like its own little world, perfectly round, a reliable fact like the
speed of light. Margaret remembers a lot of tidbits from high school. The Earth
is approximately twenty-five thousand miles in circumference; to find the
circumference of a circle, multiply the radius squared by pi. Margaret divides the
orange at its equator. It falls apart. The problem with facts is that they are
meaningless in and of themselves. A fact that stands alone is devoid of value; you
have to understand everything to make one fact worth something. You always
have to keep asking yourself why.
Margaret massages the duck with half of the orange. Dan is out there, on the road. He’s wearing his aviator shades. The top is down. Maybe he’s fighting his way up Black Mountain, or trying to find a long straightaway so he can get the
Jag up to eighty, ninety, one hundred. He might even be risking his life trying to hug the sheer curves between here and Knoxville. That’s where he went yesterday. Lately he has been taking the car farther and farther, as if he were an explorer preparing for a long expedition, testing the ship, testing his own endurance. Margaret milks the orange for its last drop of juice.
She puts the other hemisphere of orange inside the cavity of the duck. The fruit’s puckered navel reminds her of maternity. She can recall every storybook she ever read to John. She finds it hard to remember what she did with herself before he was born. Dan had been a successful architect in Asheville for years
88 before John’s birth. They moved to Knoxville while Dan studied at the
University of Tennessee, and she’d put him through school by waiting tables. She hated the work; he worshiped her for it because he knew it was a sacrifice, all those loveless soups and entrees meant for strangers. It made her feel like her mother, alone and sucking up to the public for tips.
Anonymity—that was one of the real difficulties in writing a cookbook.
How do you cook for someone you’ve never shaken hands with, much less kissed or made love to? How do you put yourself into your food? That is the question.
The Knoxville ordeal was soon over, and Dan got a good job. He designed the two-story Tudor they live in now with the massive kitchen just for her, the big house Margaret always wanted. And for a time this was enough.
Then came motherhood, which was frightening—not just the physicality of it, the moods, the cravings, the nausea (sometimes she still feels phantom pains of John’s skull pushing into her spine), but the awesome, holy responsibility of it all. Baby John warmed her heart when he nursed, but at the same time that blind, gnawing mouth made her fear for her life. And when he slept, he slept so quietly.
Children always seem like little strangers when they’re sleeping, and this made
Margaret feel like a pretender as a mother. She told Dan this once, and he laughed at her, but that was before the undertow. Even now Margaret doesn’t think of John as dead. It seems more like he’s asleep in another room of the house.
Through all this, neither Dan nor Margaret has ever mentioned divorce, and this has given her a little hope, though she can tell there’s something sad and
89 dangerous growing inside her husband, waiting to manifest itself. Something that stems from never having had the opportunity to say goodbye to their son, to weep over his body, to touch his little hand inside the coffin. Their lives are like the cabin in Rodanthe, which just sits there by the edge of the cold ocean, boarded up and haunted, waiting for the next hurricane.
Five months ago, the country club called. The greenskeeper ordered
Margaret to come pick up her husband, who was drunk and causing a disturbance.
Dan had clubbed a swan to death with a pitching wedge. By the time Margaret made it around the block, Dan had disappeared. Margaret didn’t try to offer an explanation, and the greenskeeper didn’t ask for one. He’d seen a lot of the world, and was a man not without pity. “Please, ma’am,” he said. “Please, ma’am. We can’t have this. Keep him at home, whatever you have to do; don’t let him come back. If he comes back, we’ll have to press charges.”
While Margaret minces the onion, she ponders the Middle Ages. Castles, cathedrals, flowing tapestries, knights fighting dragons. John used to tell her he thought a dragon lived inside Black Mountain. The dragon must be very old now, his ancient scales aching. He wishes a knight would come along and kill him; it would be indecorous to die of old age. Only he is afraid there are no knights left.
Even as a girl Margaret appreciated fine things, maybe because her mother never had many. Crystal, china, elegant platters—Margaret has a gift for pageantry, has mastered the art of arrangement. Always after setting the table she is overwhelmed by the heraldry of knives.
90 Tonight, after dinner, Dan and Margaret are going to a play. They are
benefactors of the UNC-A theater, and they receive season tickets. Tonight’s
performance is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of her favorites—the fairies are so courtly; the confusion is so well-framed. But it’s getting late, and Dan still isn’t back.
Margaret wonders to what extent her life with Dan has been staged.
Mother, father, wife, husband: the family cast just roles for halfhearted actors.
After they built the golf course even the house didn’t seem real; the country club turned the neighborhood into an amusement park. But Dan was happy because it increased the property values. Margaret thinks about all her friends who got divorced and moved west. Strangers live in their houses. Zelda Fitzgerald’s grand asylum was turned into a real-estate office. It seems to Margaret, at forty- three, that even real estate isn’t very real anymore. In a way even John seems like an actor playing a corpse. For a moment she sees his body laid out across the kitchen table, surrounded by silver, his hands crossed under the candles.
Margaret puts the onion inside the duck with the orange and adds four bay leaves. The onion’s vapor will make the duck succulent; the orange’s sugar will caramelize and sweeten the onion. Margaret punctures the duck’s flesh with a skewer and puts it in the oven. Everything is almost ready. Richard II’s
Compound Sallet, garnished with rose petals and marigolds, chills in the fridge, and Beauvillier’s Seventeenth-Century Cheese Soufflé is on the counter. Cream almond pastries, darloy, or maids in waiting are for dessert. In ten minutes Dan will either walk through the door with flowers or he won’t come back at all. She
91 sees his car smoldering on the side of the road, safety glass shattered like teeth around Dan’s dead body. She wonders what she would do with his clothes.
Margaret drinks a glass of wine and smokes. The smoke makes her feel sad. She feels like Liz Taylor or Veronica Lake in an old movie; she can only picture herself in sepia tones.
All that’s left are the figs, cognac, and chocolate. The sauce has reduced to only a cup or so. Margaret pushes the movie out of her head and goes back to work. Over the sink she strains out the figs, which will be served on the side; she saves the rich liquid, returns it to the pan and pours in another glass of wine.
With a wooden spoon she rubs the pan to deglaze the caramelized sugar on the sides. She walks into the living room, where Dan keeps the Hennessy behind the bar. This is what he drinks when he’s up late. He thinks that just because it’s expensive, he is a connoisseur and not a drunk.
She goes back into the kitchen and pours six tablespoons into the sauce.
Then she adds butter and flour to make it thicken. Now the final touch: the chocolate, semisweet gourmet chocolate. She eats a square. It makes her feel rich and bitter. The foil glimmers. Margaret picks up her knife to halve the wafers of chocolate before she adds them to the sauce. She is going to split the squares down the middle. On the cutting board she holds one between her forefinger and thumb.
Ahhh! the sorrow of a sliced thumb. Blood spills into the grooves of the board. In a strange way Margaret likes this, to have a little blood flow reminds her she’s still alive. The cut is deep. There is blood on her apron and on her
92 dress. Blood glints on the foil. She sucks her thumb, and her mouth fills with
copper.
She balls her fist and squeezes blood into the sauce. “For salt,” she says
aloud, and then begins to stir in the chocolate. When it has melted, the pan takes
on rare depth. She is trying to find her image in the liquid. Instead she sees the
Jag. Dan is driving toward the ocean, accelerating toward Hatteras, the
abandoned cabin, and the undertow. She knows she should be running for the
bathroom—for gauze, a towel, something—but she doesn’t. The whole universe swirls about the blue flames of the stove.
By the time she picks up the legal pad and the grease pencil, she has already composed the recipe in her head. She writes with purpose, knows as the pencil graces the page that the prose is succinct, clear, flawless. She will show them; before she is done she will show the interns and strangers in the test kitchen a recipe fit for kings. She will give them the recipe for swan.
This has been simmering in her head for a while, ever since Dan brought home the great white swan he slaughtered. It was a long time before he came back to the house that day. Margaret sat in the kitchen for hours, waiting. She was horrified when he lurched in cradling the enormous bird. The greenskeeper hadn’t told her that Dan wouldn’t let it go, that he’d been holding it all the time they were on the phone.
When Dan walked in, there was blood on his shirt, and somehow there was even blood in his hair. He sat down on the floor like a little kid with the bird in his lap and wept. Margaret knelt beside him and cried too. The swan’s beak
93 was crushed; its broken neck dangled straight down. It had bright eyes. She had not known swans were so large. Then she made a mistake; she tried to take it away from him. For a long time they struggled on the floor. But he held on, clutching the bird to his chest with his big arms, refusing to give it up. In the end there was just no way Margaret could take it away from him, and there was just no way he was letting go of the dead thing between them.
94 Drunk at the Zoo
It is the smells Jim remembers first when he remembers Prague: boiled cabbage in the halls of his apartment building, the yeast of pilsners, the fumes of unrefined petroleum that accompanied the boxy, Eastern-European sedans. He remembers the immaculately clean streets and the gray morning mist that seemed to attach itself to the overcoats of the people walking to work. In the evenings, it was hard to pass the doorway of a restaurant or bar without being momentarily captivated by the sounds of discordant jazz. Jazz, Jim later decided, must be the very music of the city, but somehow it was also the music of being alone. He told himself he had come to Prague to teach English, but really he came to the city to have adventure and fall in love. Now, looking back on it all, he knew those things only happened in Cary Grant movies.
Upon arrival he had developed a slight crush on one of his students,
Tereza, and a relationship developed. He taught English as a second language in the night school of Charles University and his students were of all ages, business men and house wives. Tereza was different, she was twenty. They took long walks through the city holding hands. At night they might have a tryst at the
Charles Bridge. There they enjoyed the display of lights that reflected off the
Vlatva river’s black water. Or they might simply admire the myriad street performers and musicians who made the bridge their home. Jim and Tereza fell out of love at a puppet show. It was all Jim’s fault, there was no getting around it.
95 After Tereza had stormed away in tears, Jim found himself wanting to purchase one of the puppetmaster’s scary marionettes to commemorate the occasion, either the wicked king or the mad Rasputin doll, a totem to remind him what he was like on the inside. But after some time staring over the bridge into the black water under the lights, Jim decided that he should not make this whole affair any more serious than it really was.
Before their fight, there had been seven or eight children gathered around the puppetmaster and if one hadn’t know any better Tereza would have been mistaken for one of them. She laughed as they did, and she was not much taller, and her body was so thin she had to wear boy’s jeans. Her ass was tragic and her cowboy boots were in bad shape too. The boots were made out of rattlesnake leather and held together by black electrical tape. Tereza could tell Jim was looking her over again, inspecting, but she pretended not to notice.
Tereza’s skinny bottom was narrow like a boy’s and Jim had grown to hate it. Her chest was something only a cartographer could love. Jim thought of himself as only semi-handsome, like a side-kick in an action picture. But even so, with only a month left before he returned to the states, Jim had begun to feel he had settled for something. He recognized the limitations concerning his own personality. He knew he was selfish and glib, and he had admitted as much to
Tereza on several occasions. But Jim was greedy for beauty. What kind of woman did he deserve, Jim asked himself? Tereza was a wonderful girl. Why didn’t he find her attractive? Tereza was like a step-daughter in a fairy tale; he could see the
96 princess under the ash smudges. But when her prince comes I will be off the page, he told himself.
Strangely he found himself titillated by the amorous puppets. When the silly Duchess bent over to pick up a dropped scarf, her glittered gown rode up her fine wooden legs. The wicked baron with the black cape and painted-on mustache rushed up behind her. Judging by the reaction of the crowd the Baron must have said something bawdy. Tereza laughed too. At least her mouth was still pretty.
Then Tereza turned to Jim and said, “Rolfe says if I sleep with him, he will buy me a new pair.” She drew attention to her boots by standing on her tiptoes like a ballerina. Rolfe was the director of the tiny film company Tereza wrote scripts for, he was fat and middle aged and all around unsavory. Jim couldn’t believe Tereza would even consider letting the old perv do it.
“Do you think it would be worth it?” Tereza was looking through him, as if in the middle of a daydream. Jim suspected this was a ploy. She wanted him to ask her to move to the States with him. At the very least she required a show of jealousy. Better yet he should probably beg for the privilege of buying her new boots.
Jim gave her a smirk. “I don’t know, Tereza,” he saidl, nonchalant,
“winter is almost over.”
It came out harder than he meant it. Tereza looked stunned. Jim was going home soon. Why couldn’t he be nice to her? Why did it have to end bitterly?
Tereza’s face grew cold. She set her jaw. Then looking as if she were about to cry, she ran off the bridge in her worn-out boots. Jim, of course, felt awful but did
97 not run after her. “Time to grow up,” he said under his breath. When she reached the end of the bridge he knew she was gone forever. Tereza was guilty of a certain romanticism that he found unforgivable. She still slept with dolls, for
God’s sake. All of her friends took turns abusing her because she idealized life.
Contrary to Jim’s previous opinion, he wasn’t better than anybody else.
The puppetmaster moved the naughty puppet couple to an imaginary palace where he caused a whole tiny ballroom to dance: kings, queens, fairies, a bear dressed in Prussian soldier’s uniform. The puppetmaster’s wife provided the music, and somehow the woman managed to play several instruments at once: fife, cymbals, drums. Her face looked sad and tired amidst the jingle. It must be hard to be the puppetmaster’s wife, thought Jim.
The music made all the dancers levitate and waltz on air. They reminded
Jim of Tereza’s friends, a merry troupe of pornographers whose bodies were lithe and limber, and at times it seemed they too defied gravity. He liked them all immensely, except for Rolfe, the only one Jim had never seen naked. Tereza wrote scripts for them in English, Italian, German. Tereza knew six different languages and could write something coherently dirty in every one of them. When
Tereza became lonely or bored it was her habit to sign up for language lessons at the university, preferably one she already knew. If she liked the instructor she told him so, day one. In class she would nod in comprehension at his little jokes and look ponderous if the lecture took on a serious air. In a week or so, she would ask him if he would like to come over to her apartment and read her poems or view her vast collection of Pez dispensers.
98 Of course, Jim had agreed to go out with her. His life in Prague was lonely, and none of the other instructors liked him because he didn’t have the proper degree to teach English as a second language. They whispered that he had gotten the job through a family connection. For their first date, Jim and Tereza went to a vegetarian restaurant run by Buddhist monks with shaved heads and yellow-orange cassocks. Tereza’s appetite pleased them. She wolfed down her rice, and the monks smiled and brought more. At the end of the meal Jim was surprised to find there was no bill. Tereza explained to him that the monks only required a donation according to a patron’s means. Jim fumbled the conversion table and left twice as much money as intended. Maybe Tereza took this as a sign of generosity and decided to seduce him.
When they arrived at Tereza’s apartment, Jim was genuinely touched by the depth of her poverty. It was hard to believe the apartment wasn’t a squat.
Tereza had no real furniture, only a mattress and a TV set, both of which rested on a buckled linoleum floor. It was as if someone had ordered her to live in a kitchen.
“It’s a studio,” Tereza said with a smile. Stacks of library books surrounded the mattress and several rag dolls with stitched lips lay on the blue quilt. Open notebooks containing columns of verse written in an unidentifiable language rested next to them. An army of Pez stood at attention inside a glass case atop the television, with Batman and Santa Claus in the lead. “My penpal in
California sends them to me.” Tereza reached into her purse and pulled out a Pez dispenser shaped like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. She popped one of the
99 pieces of candy under her tongue and replaced the Tin Man into the glass case with the rest of his Pez brethren. “I always keep one with me for luck.”
As it turned out, Tereza had penpals strewn across the globe, over twenty of them, at least one on every continent, even a Russian soldier who wrote from an ice station in Antarctica. She asked about Jim’s home, and he told her how he had grown up in the midwest, and his uncles farmed corn in giant grids of land.
His parents wanted him to study law like his father. Jim had promised them he would do this at his father’s alma mater instead of the fancy private school they had sent him to as an undergrad, if they would allow him a year abroad.
“Haven’t you ever been to California?” asked Tereza.
“No. That is as far from my home as Paris is from here.”
But he admitted, yes, he would like to go see the old Universal Studios and visit the walk of fame. Jim’s favorite movie was Lawrence of Arabia. Jim wondered if anyone had ever gotten around to offering Peter O’ Toole his own star. For a long time they talked about the movies, which Tereza referred to as cinema. Tereza told Jim her dream of writing scripts for Hollywood. Jim gave her a dismissive look, but then felt bad for doing so. Truth was, he had all the sensibilities of an artist, but none of the substance. He lacked that special blend of ignorance and confidence that makes failure an impossibility, and it made him self-conscious when he detected it in others.
Tereza told him about working for the small German film company and all the glamorous stars that fit their mouths around her words. Jim couldn’t help but be a little impressed. “The most beautiful is Illena,” said Tereza. She began to
100 describe some of her favorite pictures with Illena as the star. For instance in
Teacher’s Pet, Illena had captured perfectly the sad and lonely life of a teenager
in love with one of her instructors, and in Love Paint, Illena deftly portrayed a
struggling artist who used her own body for a canvas. It wasn’t long before Jim
realized exactly what kind of cinema Tereza helped to make.
“Oh,” he said. “You will be famous.” He wondered if his shock was
transparent, or if he was able to mask his embarrassment with a modicum of cool.
He began to ask himself a series of questions --Who in the hell does this for a
living? How can I get out of here? God, why didn’t I pay attention when I stepped
out of the metro?
“Illena’s leading man is Gregor,” said Tereza. “He used to be an Olympic
skier, but something fell through when the Communists pulled out.”
“That’s too bad,” said Jim.
“Gregor says he is not sad. He is very talented. He says he is saving up his
money, and one day he is going to buy all of Rolfe’s cameras and make his own
movies. He studied cinematography at the University.”
There was a pause. Jim could not think of a single suave thing to say.
“Do you wish to watch a film?” asked Tereza.
There was something attractive about the way this elfish girl spoke
English. Do you wish to watch a film? Charming. The question sounded so portentous, laden with amorous significance. Jim felt curiosity devouring his trepidation. What a wonderfully sordid girl. Yes, for the first time ever--
101 something wild. This night might be worth sharing with his friends over a beer when he got home.
“Do you wish to watch one of our films?” she asked again.
“Yes,” said Jim. His voice sounded strange to him.
Tereza looked happy, turned off the light, turned on the TV and the VCR.
The TV was old and had to warm up. Waiting through the electric hum for the colors to become visible was almost unbearable. As the movie began Tereza seized his hand, and Jim felt wonderfully sick like he was on his first date in junior high. Tereza had picked out a movie the troupe had shot in English. The title was full of innuendo and she knew every word of dialogue by heart. She whispered the words quietly as Illena and Gregor flirted, then louder as the stars faced-off and stripped. Illena had the good looks of a vamp on a soap opera, with bleached blond hair, pink flesh, and a high bosom. There was something almost tragic in the way the dark, brooding Gregor demanded his satisfaction. Through the beginning it was hard for Jim to suppress his laughter: the false pathos, the phonetic recitations of the lines; it was sexual Kung Fu, silly and stupid,-- until there was no more talk and the real action began. Then all Jim could do was sit in the dark in stunned silence. The acting was beautiful. It was like watching leopards fuck.
Jim and Tereza went on seeing each other for a few weeks. She took him to museums and cathedrals. He took her to dance clubs and fancy restaurants which seemed cheap to him. When they got bored with museums and churches,
102 they developed a game of blind man’s bluff on the trams. Jim would get them lost deep in the industrial core of the city and Tereza would get them back to the
Charles Bridge, or her apartment. She was a sweet girl and Jim enjoyed going out with her and watching movies, real movies, English ones with Czech subtitles.
Jim enjoyed sitting with her in the dark, holding hands, thinking about that first night together.
When they returned to Tereza’s apartment, the sex was pleasant. But he knew that nothing serious was to come of her because she had a tendency to talk too much and that rattled his nerves. Usually he could alleviate the tension with cheap Czech beer and vodka. It was not uncommon for him to get falling down drunk at the end of the evening, a thing he could easily do for under three
American dollars. And when he did, it was nice to have Tereza there to pick him up off the floor, and tuck him in bed with the dolls. When Jim woke up the next morning with his hangover, he seemed to ache a little less knowing Tereza had slept in the crook of his arm.
Still, something about the relationship was going stale, and Jim was on the edge of calling the whole thing off, when one day Tereza invited him to Melnick.
Melnick was a little town half an hour’s bus ride from Prague, with another famous cathedral and scenic view of the Vlatva. Rolfe had decided to shoot a movie in a historical chalet not far from the cathedral. In the fourteenth century part of the chalet had housed one of the oldest printing presses in Europe. In medieval times the Bohemian government raised money by printing banned books in foreign languages and smuggling them into France, Italy, Germany. The bus
103 ride was pleasant. It was one of the first warm days of spring, when the air is cool to breathe, but the sunshine is warm to touch. There were buds of red and pink flowers on the roadside. Jim wondered if the flowers were primrose or poppies, or were these flowers indigenous only to Eastern Europe? He asked Tereza, but she didn’t know. For the first spring day, she had decided to wear a short blue dress that matched her eyes. It too was decorated with little red flowers.
When Jim and Tereza arrived, they found the entire cast standing outside the locked doors of the chalet. There had been some trouble concerning a permit.
Rolfe had to cancel the shoot.
“The Castle wants another fucking bribe,” announced Rolfe in German.
Tereza had to translate everything for Jim. It was one of the many times Jim reproached himself for not bothering to learn another language. For years there had only been East German tourists in Prague, so all the Czechs spoke a little
German, the way everyone else in Europe speaks a little English. Rolfe could speak English, but didn’t bother. Tereza tried to introduce them. Rolfe only said danke, but declined to shake hands. He was actually wearing a black turtleneck and a director’s lens around his neck. He looked to be exactly what he was, a failed art student, a refugee from the Berlin coffeehouses, a pretentious gopher.
Rolfe let loose a little more rapid fire German toward the cast, then jumped into his shiny silver Mercedes and was gone.
“It seems we have the day off,” said Tereza. The troupe was cheerful, happy to have the opportunity to relax and restore their energy. At first Jim was disappointed, but when Tereza introduced him to the cast he felt another emotion.
104 Formerly he had assumed the troupe would be too busy making their movie to pay him any mind, but quickly disappointment turned to embarrassed fear. How does one interact with people who do these things to one another for a living? Illena made him feel at ease, standing over him like an Amazon and leaning down to give him a warm hug. She smelled like baby powder, and when she embraced Jim her breasts pressed into him like two cinderblocks. Jim blushed, reminded of a baby-sitter on whom he had once had a crush.
“She isn’t shy,” Tereza giggled. Then she introduced Jim to Gregor, who seemed even more muscular than in the movie. Gregor extended his hand like a regular guy, and after the shake offered Jim a cigarette which Jim accepted. There were four other cast members: a pair of feline looking twins named Gretchen and
Sabina, a quiet young man named Peter who was also a saxophone player, and a clean shaven dwarf called Bobo wearing a leather jacket. Jim did not remember seeing Bobo in the film that Tereza had showed him, and Jim wondered if he would be here now had Tereza mentioned that Rolfe occasionally liked to film naked midgets.
Peter and the dwarf were roommates. Jim said danke to them all, because suddenly he couldn’t recall the Czech word for good morning, which he later remembered was dirve jitro. How could he forget dirve jitro? The only other word of Czech he knew was pivo the word for beer. There was a span of two or three minutes when the conversation moved completely into Czech, and away from Jim. Soon it was just Bobo speaking, and the others listening in a circle
105 around him. The talking ended when Illena began to clap her hands and squeal with glee.
“She wants to go to the zoo,” Tereza said to Jim.
Later in Gregor’s car, Tereza explained in full. Bobo and Peter had a good friend who used to play jazz with them, a trumpeter who could triple tongue notes, only the poor fellow got himself married and felt he needed a more steady line of work. Now this trumpet player was working as an administrator for the
Prague Zoo and had invited Bobo and Peter to come by and visit, and bring anybody they liked for free. Peter was going to go back to his apartment with the twins, call the trumpeter, and retrieve his and Bobo’s instruments.
“Bobo plays too?”
“Clarinet a little,” said Tereza. “But he is not so good as the other two.
Anyway we are all going to meet at the zoo.” While Tereza was telling Jim all this, Gregor had stepped out of the car claiming he needed to make certain that the van with all the camera equipment was locked, or Rolfe would have their hides.
Before Gregor returned Bobo had claimed shotgun, and began chatting with
Tereza. Bobo reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a large silver flask, took a sip, and offered it to Jim.
“What is it?” he asked.
Tereza asked Bobo and then giggled, “It is grog.”
“Grog?” asked Jim again. Wasn’t that something pirates drank?
“It’s rum with hot tea and spices,” said Tereza. “Bobo says he brewed it up this morning.”
106 Jim looked at his watch. It was a quarter till nine.
“Go ahead,” said Tereza, “live a little.”
Jim took the silver flask from the dwarf’s hand and tipped it up into the air. There was a hot-cold burn down in his lungs when he was finished. It felt like he had swallowed a piece of peppermint candy whole. Then Gregor came back, with a black camera case in his hand. Gregor asked everyone if they were ready to go and they nodded. As Gregor cranked up the car, Jim felt a tiny explosion detonate behind his left ear, sending shock waves of well-being and good-will through his entire body. All the way back to the city he cuddled Tereza in the back of the car, resting his hand on her skinny knee slightly underneath her short dress. Another sip or two of grog and he snuggled fiercely on her shoulder.
Twenty minutes later the car was back on the outskirts of Prague. Jim was flying high. As he stepped out of the car and into the parking lot, the very sight of the zoo filled him with drunk wonder. It seemed to have been constructed either by a James Bond villain or the brothers Grimm. It was built into the side of a mountain, with all the really large animals like the elephants and rhinos at the base and the bird sanctuary at the top. In between, on terraces, were all the other animals: panthers, dingoes, llamas. On the penultimate level the zoo kept the aquatic animals, polar bears, fat sleek seals nosing colored balls and bowling pins.
But the most amazing thing about the zoo was the ski lift, which for a few additional kopecks would fly you over the animals as many times as you liked.
On his return trips down the mountain, Jim flew over eagles in tall green cages,
107 then over the shimmering fans of peacocks. The polar bear lived on a cement platform much too small for him and the little pool in which he bathed was full of dingy water. The polar bear seemed to be the zoo’s most miserable inhabitant, hot, panting, unable to hide from the prying eyes of his visitors. Over the course of the day Jim probably flew over the zoo a dozen times. Every trip on the ski lift was an emotional roller coaster, each moment of progress Jim vacillated between the ecstasy of stunning plumage and the desperate majesty of caged lions. When the lift approached the bottom, it began to level exactly as it passed near the enclosure of the meditative giraffes. Later in the day, after Jim had made several trips, it occurred to him that if he were to extend his arm as far as he could, his fingertips might momentarily find their way over the fence and meet a giraffe’s strong, black tongue.
Upon their arrival, the zoo’s administrator met them in the parking lot, greeted everyone and gave Bobo a hug. He waved them through the gate and led the troupe into his small office. There was a desk with an intercom speaker and a banker’s lamp weighing down scattered papers. An old-fashion hi-fi system and a stack of vinyl records rested on an end table. The administrator told them to wait and left. He returned with not only Peter and the twins, but also entertainment and refreshments. In one hand he held a silver plated trumpet and in the other a serving tray with a pot of steaming hot coffee and a bottle of chilled vodka. The vodka had a vague yellow tinge to it.
108 Gregor began uncasing his camera. Jim recognized it as an old super-8 video, the kind his father used to document family vacations. Gregor asked Illena to pour him a cup of coffee because he wanted to keep his eyes sharp to film.
Sabina and Gretchen took coffee too. Illena and Tereza took a shot each of cold vodka. Because Jim was already tipsy he poured himself a cup of coffee. He drank it, felt himself begin to sober; then started in on the vodka, deciding it would be more fun if the caffeine and the alcohol were allowed to do battle for his soul.
After some talk the musicians began to tune their instruments, and the rest of the troupe decided to tour the zoo. At 10:30 in the morning the zoo was almost completely abandoned except for a few animal keepers, the man who ran the ski lift, and one bored looking mother with an infant in a stroller. Jim wondered if
American zoos were this empty on weekday mornings. For over an hour they hiked up and down the mountain, the twins waving hello to Gregor’s camera while standing in front of the two-humped camels. Illena and Tereza gave Jim a kiss on each cheek in front a jealous-looking silverbacked gorilla. Every twenty minutes or so they would take a ride on the ski lift, and it was here sitting completely still in mid-air, that Jim would listen to how the black coffee made his heart jump up against his chest.
Periodically the troupe would go back to the administrator’s office for more refreshments. Each time Jim would drink another cup of coffee, a sip or two of vodka, and listen as Peter, Bobo, and the trumpeter played aching blue jazz.
109 Each time Jim returned, the music became drunker and more ineffably sad. At some point he stayed to listen for too long and felt himself about to cry.
But Tereza saved him by saying, “Jim, look outside, you have to see this.”
He did as he was told and was greeted with the sight of Illena riding the ski lift completely naked, blond hair blowing in the wind. She was sitting up and down, then sticking out her pink behind, touching herself, posing for Gregor who was on the ground, down on one knee, aiming the super-8 like an erotic ray-gun. The zoo possessed a few more patrons now. A crowd had gathered around Gregor, cheering and clapping their hands. Even the woman with the baby was filled with awe.
“Wow,” said Jim.
“She said she wanted to be closer to the sunshine.” said Tereza. “She is such a showoff.”
Jim’s only response to this was again to say, “Wow.” But really he was thinking, if Gregor doesn’t make a copy of the movie no one back home will believe this ever happened.
After that things started to get blurry, time began to fold in on itself, condensing into syncopated points and then expanding back out again, like rich jazz notes with long black pauses between them. Sometime in the early afternoon
Jim passed out.
He woke up on a couch in the administrator’s office, alone. It was almost dark and he was cotton mouthed, still drunk, heart pounding. For no reason that
110 he could remember he was afraid. Had he embarrassed himself? Had he embarrassed Tereza? Surely, he had been no worse than the rest. He remembered that Illena had taken off all her clothes and everyone had found it charming. Then later, hadn’t the trumpet player become so intoxicated that he threw his horn down on the floor, and began to scream passionately into the intercom on his desk? Tereza had explained to Jim what the man was saying, but all Jim could remember was something about the trumpeter apologizing to the animals. Bobo’s little legs had shaken violently during this, then the little fellow fell out of his chair. He began to weep, unable to right himself until his friend Peter picked him up and hugged him. At the time Jim could not decipher if Bobo was upset because the trumpeter was screaming, or if there was something else wrong, something concerning his clarinet playing or his height. Peter had held Bobo to his chest and patted him on the back like a baby, tears running down the dwarf’s clean shaven cheeks. After Bobo had cried himself calm, the trumpet player broke the silence by putting a record on the hi-fi. He set the speakers next to his intercom and blasted A Love Supreme all over the zoo.
Jim spent a long time lying on the couch, attempting to piece together the rest of the afternoon. But the only other memory he could produce involved kissing Tereza someplace dark, putting his hands all over her skinny body. There were large leathery spots of darkness moving behind her. This shifting darkness had frightened him, frightened him so badly that he said something, something he had heard frightened people say a thousand times in the movies but no one ever really meant.
111 “I love you,” he told Tereza and knew immediately it was a lie. But he
couldn’t remember why he had said it other than he was scared.
“I love you too, Jimmy,” Tereza had said back, pleased, grateful even. She
pressed him up against what felt like a cool wall of obsidian and gave him a soft
kiss. There was the taste of cherry sugared pez, and he thought they might make
love right there in the dark. But everything after that was erased.
Jim stood up from the couch, unable to suppress the urge to flee. He had to
get out of this place. But as soon as he took his first step, he realized he was in no
condition to run anywhere. His legs buckled and he had to help himself up by
holding on to the administrator’s desk. When Jim righted himself, he found a note
next to the zoo keeper’s dented trumpet.
Jim, Gone to get dinner. Be back soon. Love, Tereza
He studied the note for almost a full minute, attempting to interpret
whether the word love on the note referred to their declaration, or was it merely the kind of love that always appears on notes. Only a short time ago Jim had decided he should end his relationship with Tereza before something like this happened, now it was too late. He stepped out of the office and discovered the place he had perjured himself--the bat house. Jim remembered tiny vampires lapping blood from a stainless steel bowl, now he remembered the enormous fox- bats hanging upside down, wings crossed, watching as Tereza put her tongue in
112 his mouth. It all came back to him, like Tereza’s old TV set warming up, distorted images refining themselves to an old horror flick.
It was night now in the deserted zoo. The ski lift was dead; the carts rocked back and forth in a gentle breeze. Jim felt no desire to run away anymore, his flight instincts subdued by a kind of hopeless reason. It simply wasn’t possible for him to find his way home without Tereza. Navigating the industrial sector by himself would be foolish, even sober. Jim was trapped in the zoo, unable to leave yet tortured by an uncontrollable need to move. He felt the need to be alone in a high place. So he began to walk up the mountain trail, still drunk, but with the hangover coming on fast. When he reached the top he vomited.
Looking up from the ground still holding his stomach, Jim spotted something that made him laugh out loud. Between the eagles and the cormorants, the Prague Zoo had seen fit to acquire a North American turkey buzzard. It blinked at Jim on its perch as if he were the one on display. With its slick feathers and scabby head, the buzzard was a creature completely devoid of beauty. Under its perch were dozens of small bones in the dirt, one of them a tiny skull.
“I can’t believe I’ve come all this way just to find you,” Jim said to the buzzard and laughed. The buzzard didn’t say anything back. It just sat there looking like a ravished monk intent on maintaining his vow of silence. Jim wondered what it would be like to have the bird stand over his corpse, say grace, then nuzzle its beak into his throat or one of his eyes. There would be a kind of glory in this, escaping the world bit by bit through the gullet of a scavenger.
113 Jim wanted to stay up high with the birds for awhile and think, but turned away no longer able to bear the buzzard’s glare. It was getting cold now. From this height Jim thought he could see car lights moving down in the parking lot.
There was a sound, like the slamming of doors that echoed through the empty zoo. But he could not be sure, it could have been one of the elephants stamping its feet. He turned around and started down the trail trying not to fall, hoping no one would be waiting for him when he got back.
114 Little Strangers
Lately I come home from work tired and even before the sun goes down
I’m in bed, asleep. When I get like this, preferring to hide under the covers rather than meet the world, my fiancée Patty calls it “the sleeping sickness,” as if I were once an explorer of darkest Africa who had been bitten by a tsetse fly and now, every so often, must suffer recurring bouts of fevered unconsciousness.
I sleep and I sleep, and I dream, dream of drowning in the dark, black water of a swamp, or of being locked outside my house during a snowstorm and freezing to death. I look through the window of the living room and find a warm pink fire glowing in the fireplace. Sometimes I dream that I’m hitchhiking drunk down some anonymous highway in the desert, or that I’m in my car being chased by these silent blue lights, either police officers with their sirens off or an alien space craft hovering low to the ground. When I was young I used to dream of tall women like Patty standing naked behind opaque shower doors, covered in the shadow of their long wet hair. Or I would dream of giving slow kisses to strange, elfish girls in the middle of a dark wood. But now it’s mostly drowning. When I wake up in the mornings, I don’t feel like going back to the elementary school. I don’t feel like being the teacher any more. Teachers have responsibilities, too many, and now we have a new one.
Don’t touch anybody.
We have been warned repeatedly about touching the children, and I have to be extra careful because I am young and unmarried. It’s awkward when children cry, not to pat them on the shoulder. It seems inhuman to ignore them. I
115 think they will become like the Russian orphans I read about in an article on overseas adoption that Patty gave me. Many of the babies in the large orphanages have lost the ability to cry. No matter what is wrong with them they remain silent because they know if they cry no one will run to pick them up.
The new rules make me feel removed from the kids. They are little strangers. But the administration has been clear about the dangers of litigation.
The world is not as it once was. Even the smallest child will scream “I’ll sue you” if you try to hush them. We don’t spank anymore. There is no touching of any kind. Not even through another object, especially not through something as substantial as a piece of wood. My teachers used to hit me with hairbrushes and belts, with long thick paddles with their names carved into the handles. This is not so solid a world. Now it’s all vicious paperwork and milk cartons.
When I was a kid my first love had an odd, pretty name like Josephine or
Anastasia, and pitch-black lashes. She let me hold the gecko she brought to show and tell. She wrote our initials in chalk on the sidewalk, but two weeks later when
I was no longer smitten with her a rain came and washed the chalk away. I distinctly remember our teacher, Ms. Brannigan, hugging her before she went back home to live with her father. Everyone loved the cool smell of mentholated tobacco on our teacher’s fingers.
Even the women won’t touch the children now. It’s killing the women.
Most of them are mothers or grandmothers, and it seems unnatural to them not to hug the kids when they have fallen down and begin to cry. And it’s even harder on Patty, who will never be a mother at all.
116 She told me in the lounge over coffee the other day that one of her students had messed his pants in the bathroom and she was afraid to wash him.
“Warren told me it was an emergency, but I had to put my head in Mrs.
Jenkins room to tell her I was leaving my class unsupervised so she would keep an eye on them. So when I came back we walked down the hall together toward the boys’ room. But the last few steps he started to run ahead of me, and then he was in the bathroom. But as soon as the door shut I heard him crying. I was scared even to go in then, but I did. When I found him he had his pants down, but there was . . . you know, shit all over him. I started to clean him up, but I remembered a story on the news about a woman who lost her job for the exact same thing.”
“So what did you do?”
“What could I do, Greg? I told the secretary to go into the bathroom with
Warren. And then I broke into Mr. Mallard’s office and asked him what I should do. He told me he would have to get the mother on the phone. She works.
And . . .”
Patty gave a little sob.
“She works as a paralegal and it took her twenty minutes to get on the phone.”
“You left him standing with his pants down for twenty minutes?” I didn’t say that the right way. Patty felt bad enough already.
“Well, what else could I do?” Then she really started cry.
117 “Nothing, Patty,” I said, but it was too late. I thought about putting my
arm around her, but I didn’t want anyone to walk in on us there, sitting alone in
the lounge.
Patty is freckled and pretty. Tall, and a little plump, or she used to be.
Patty was in a bad car accident that crushed her pelvis two years ago, and it put
her in a coma for a week. Now Patty is held together by a complex framework of
steel and plastic. The ball-and-socket joints that attach her legs to her hips are
reinforced with a flexible plastic made to imitate cartilage. There is so much steel
in the arches of Patty’s pelvis, she sets off the metal detectors installed in the
doorjambs of the school’s entrance. When she finally returned to work, she had to
get a key from the janitor so she could let herself in the back of the building. It’s a
minor miracle she is alive. Firemen had to cut her out of her little Subaru with the
Hurst tool, the jaws of life. Judging from the sight of her later in the hospital, she
must have looked like bloody hell coiled up in inside the wreck. The steering
wheel cracked most of her ribs. Her body melded with the interior of the car, and
made something like a soap impression of the dashboard. The first week in the
hospital, before she regained consciousness, I used to sit in her room and hold her
hand and I’d watch old horror movies on channel 21 while the respirator helped
her breathe. Ten o’clock, drive-in-theater would show It Came from Outer Space,
X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes, and The Invisible Man. After awhile I sort of came to think of Patty, hooked up to all those tubes and monitors, as some kind of mad
118 scientist’s failed experiment, a mixture of advanced technology and human tragedy. Patty Cyborg: part woman, part clock radio.
We had been going out since I started teaching, way before the accident, but I didn’t know I loved her until she was almost killed. I asked her to marry me in the hospital. In fact, I was suffering from the sleeping sickness then, but Patty’s accident woke me up. I helped her learn to walk again. I drove her to her physical therapist and cooked for her and she got used to depending on me. I used to push her hard. I would make her walk to me before I would kiss her. The doctors told me that if she fell with her crutches that I shouldn’t help her up. They told me to make her do everything on her own. She needed to be independent from me. But they were wrong; I should have helped her more. At the time I thought I was being cruel to be kind. I can see now that I used to get a little thrill seeing her struggle on the floor to get up. She still limps a little.
But the limp doesn’t stop her from lifting dumbbells in front of the mirror in her bedroom every morning. She walks around the track of the junior high in the afternoons. Her back is as strong and as smooth as fiberglass. She is getting in condition. She says, “Mothers have to be fit.” She wants a husband who wants kids, even though she can’t have any. I don’t want them. I’ve grown terrified of them. But Patty does. Her desire is grander than all that metal inside her hips weighing her down.
Nobody likes me teaching third grade. I upset the mothers; they don’t like it that I’m not in administration or coaching junior varsity football up at the junior
119 high. Principal Mallard, the only other man in our school, does both. But I can see him for what he is, a cold-blooded bully who likes being the biggest kid on the playground. Mallard likes to give speeches about discipline before faculty meetings, but he doesn’t follow his own rules. He manhandles the children. One of his favorite things to do is to sneak up on some poor kid talking too loud in the lunch room and grab him by the neck, until he goes quiet and stiff like a cat. I have seen him do this a number of times and I can’t help but think that one day he is going to leave a thumbprint bruise on one of them or pinch a nerve, and then it will be his turn to face the lawyers.
But nobody ever sues. The mothers love him because he’s tall and has faded athletic good looks, and some remember when he was a big football star at the University. The job of assistant principal is opening up next year for the first time in a decade, and I’ll have to take it and be his second in command or I’m out of here.
About once a week Mallard calls me into his office during my prep period and gives me an update as to how the application process is going. “It looks good for you, Greg. The board is really behind you on this.” And then he waits to see if
I’m going to act grateful.
It’s all I can do to say, “That’s terrific, Mr. Mallard. I’m ready for a change,” even though I’m not. I know at least a handful of the women who can do the job better. But nobody would tolerate me if they knew I actually wanted to teach third grade and it wasn’t just some means to a promotion. At the last PTA meeting I overheard one woman ask Mallard, “What does a man want a job like
120 that for anyway?” Mallard just shrugged his shoulders and they began to flirt and commiserate in their disgust.
She was one of those lean, nervous mothers. She looked like a starved bird. Her daughter, Tammy, is ten and in the fifth grade. The other girls in the fifth grade wear makeup and earrings and “shouldn’t there be a stricter dress code? Aren’t dresses and slacks more appropriate?” She wants a new dress code so everyone will dress up their kids the way she dresses Tammy, who, in her corduroy blazer and penny loafers, has become the mockery of the fifth grade.
What do I want a job like this for anyway? Actually, it’s a good question. I don’t really know. I am tall and clumsy. My hands are too large for typing. I don’t believe in insurance. Maybe I should have been a cop. Once I wanted to be a good citizen. When I decided to go back to school to get my teaching certification, I thought I was getting into a line of work where I might be in the position to help somebody. I wanted to surround myself with people who had not yet been kicked around enough by the world to make them mean and bitter. I would teach them to multiply and write in cursive, and they would in turn teach me to be a better person. I guess I thought I could regain my innocence by being around children.
But now I see that kids, because they are small and weak, get kicked around a lot more than other people. They are innocent, but it is an awful kind of innocence because much of the time they are happy even though their parents beat them, and starve them, and stick their fingers in their underwear.
School has turned me into lean worrier, too. I live on coffee, which makes me nervous and yet cannot prevent me from suffering from the sleeping sickness.
121 Sometimes I wake up nauseous, the blue light still following me into the waking world.
They fired Mrs. Dannon last year because her husband was arrested for possession of marijuana. Yes, there will be litigation. As far as I can tell I haven’t done anything wrong, and yet I am still afraid someone is going to accuse me of being a criminal. The only skeleton in my closet is a stack of dirty magazines I keep in my bedroom between stacks of other old magazines. Still I am afraid I will be in a car accident like Patty, or be found strangled on the side of the road, and when they come to clean out my closet they will say, “So this was what the sick bastard was all about.” Lately I have the feeling that when they bury me, the only people who will come to the funeral will be a few close relatives, people I haven’t talked to in years.
I don’t even look at them any more, the dirty magazines. I stopped when I found one of my first students had become a centerfold. She was wearing cherry red lipstick and was bent over a stool to expose her anus and vulva. I remember that when she was eight she was really good at long division. Her turn-ons are hot tubs and elevators. But I can’t bring myself to throw the pornography away. It’s become a kind of evidence.
Patty has asked that I come over for dinner tonight. I expect the worst.
When she lets me into her apartment I smell trouble. She’s cooking pork chops, which are my favorite. This is my last meal. I know it because Patty doesn’t eat red meat any more, only fish and asparagus and baked potatoes with no butter or
122 sour cream. She has no use for me anymore; we will be friends at the end of these pork chops.
“Have you been feeling okay, Greg? You look exhausted,” she asks me halfway through the meal. She is motherly even now. She doesn’t want to hurt me.
The television is on but the volume is down real low. The tube is old and its hum drowns out the dialogue. The cable is running a Frankenstein marathon.
Boris Karloff is just about to drown his playmate, the little village girl, in the river. Soon the yellow flowers she had just picked will be floating downstream.
Then the villagers will come.
Instead of answering Patty I ask, “Have you ever read the book?”
“What?”
I point to the television. “Frankenstein.”
“Not since college.”
“It ends very differently from the movie,” I say. “At the end of the book the monster realizes that he is not fit to live with the rest of mankind, so he exiles himself to the Arctic where only he can live. The last thing that happens is that the boat carrying the narrator pulls away from the iceberg and leaves the monster stranded.”
“Greg, I think . . .”
I don’t want to give her a chance to say it. I don’t want to give her the opening.
123 “Did I ever tell you that when I was in the second grade a little girl in my class was killed?"
“No.”
“Yeah, when I was in the second grade this cute little girl from Martinique moved into my school. She spoke French and English and I was really in love with her. She had long brown hair and black eyes. I can see her face, but I just can’t remember her name. What was her name? What was her name?” I realize that I am slapping myself in the head when Patty’s face goes kind of gray. This thin, pale Patty doesn’t look real to me. She is a Xerox copy of Patty. She is just a carbon of Patty.
“Anyway, after a few weeks of her being in my second grade class I was so in love with her I asked her to marry me. She said yes. But I had to break it off.
You know, she got too clingy. I guess I took up all her time. She wrote our initials on the sidewalk one day, GB loves . . . whoever. But I wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment, so I had to break it off. And then he killed her.”
“Who killed her?”
“I don’t know. All I know is she told me she was going back to
Martinique, and they found her the next day in the woods behind her house. You know, back then they really didn’t publicize all the gory details like they do now.
Nobody talked about it, especially to me. Lately I’ve been having these dreams about her. See, I am in the woods out behind my parents’ backyard when I find her. She is still a little girl but I am the teacher. She is naked and bruised, and my whole class is standing around her body, except they are not really children,
124 they’re these horrific lizards dressed like children. And that’s when they start ripping her apart.”
Patty is silent. But she is struggling, struggling to say something.
Struggling like a rabbit caught in a wire, but I won’t make things any easier on her, even now. She wants to say the right thing. As kind and as good as she is,
Patty doesn’t understand that this is what being a wife and mother is all about.
She doesn’t understand that families are filled with these moments, moments where nothing you can say can make a difference. The thin robot woman just sits there and blinks at me dumbly. I can’t bear to look at her looking at me.
On my plate the pork chops are getting cold and a little of the grease is beginning to congeal. In the movie world the villagers have gathered with their torches and black pitchforks, and the monster is running back toward the castle, scared and angry.
125 The Music of Strong Drink
When my father was alive he loved two things: the violin and single malt scotch. If I gave him a record, he could tell me if it were Handel or Haydn, just by looking at the grooves. If I gave him a glass of scotch, he could identify the location of its distillery by the aroma, by the traces of heather or peat. By the way it watered the eye.
My father pored over scores the way most people read novels. The music in my head is better, he’d say, then drink to violent crescendo. Sometimes he selected fine malts and assigned them each a note. Say Glenkinchie for F or
Glenmorangie for G and drink himself a symphony.
Many mornings I found him passed out on the mahogany bar in his study over the pages to Mozart’s Requiem, or Schubert’s 8th, over something sad and unfinished.
126 Chickensnake
Somehow the chickensnake had managed to climb up the twenty-foot steel pole and into one of the hollowed-out gourds the farmers had hung there as birdhouses for purple martins. Now the snake was coiled up around an empty nest, hugging it as if to keep it warm. Only the chickensnakes’s head stuck out into the world, as if the snake itself were frozen in the process of hatching from the shell of an egg, but every so often it would taste the air with its tongue to show it was still alive. The snake had lowered the clear membranes across its eyes and had puffed the glistening scales along the back of its neck to catch the last of the fleeting sunlight. Being deaf, the snake paid no mind to the flock of fussy birds screeching about its head, somersaulting left and right, swooping towards the snake’s slightly upturned nose yet never daring to touch it. For the first time ever, the chickensnake was on top of the world looking down.
Below, Hazel Trull was backing the three-quarter-ton truck up to the mouth of the old barn when he noticed the martins. “Look over there,” Haze said to his father, pointing to the storm of birds turning circles around their homes.
Haze’s daddy stepped out of the passenger side, “I wonder what they’re so upset about?”
The martins weren’t mere pets or yard decoration. Like the cats that miced the barn, they earned their keep. One martin could eat its body weight in mosquitoes in a single day, and often picked off tobacco worms and cut worms that devoured the tomatoes and corn. But it was hard not to feel a certain gratitude
127 toward the martins’ beauty. When the sunlight caught them just right their black feathers took on a purple sheen, like fresh transmission fluid or wine. Haze and his daddy walked to the back of the barn to get a closer look.
It was August and Haze’s daddy was wearing a long-sleeved workshirt to protect him from the nettles in the square bales of fescue the two were hauling out of the field. There had been a drought for much of the summer, and the bales were light, scraggly and coarse. Against his father’s warning, Haze had discarded his own long-sleeve shirt and White Mule workgloves in hopes of getting some relief from the near hundred degree heat. Now his bare arms were cut up and his hands blistered. He would have put them back on if his daddy weren’t so quick to say, I told you so. Ever since Wayne, Haze’s older brother, had died in the spring,
Haze’s father had been watching him like a new mother cow, never letting him out of his sight. No longer was Haze allowed to go walking in the woods alone or swimming with his friends down at the channel. When Haze’s daddy wasn’t farming, he was the Kennedy High School principal. When Haze entered the seventh grade next fall, it was going to be like baling hay all year long, one I told you so after another.
Without Wayne there to help out, Haze was having to do all the ground work himself. Drive the truck, hop out, throw a bale of hay into the bed, run around the other side, toss up another bale, get back behind the wheel and drive across another terrace, then start all over again. Haze’s daddy stood in the back of the truck silently stacking the bales into a tight pyramid, occasionally telling
Haze, you need to get a move-on, the sky’s going to open up on us. They were
128 racing the stormclouds already on the horizon. After a two-month drought, the weatherman had surprised everyone by predicting thunderstorms in the afternoon.
If the hay got wet out in the field, it would mildew and turn sorry when put into storage. Haze’s Uncle Poochie had said he was going to take a half-day off work to help out, but it was almost dinnertime and he was late.
Haze’s daddy was the first to spot the chickensnake. “I ain’t believing this,” he said, pointing toward one of the gourds on the right. “Look.” At the top of the pole, under the wheeling birds, was a crisscross of planks. Ten gray gourds hung from each plank, five on either side of the pole. With the last of the sun still shining bright it took a moment for Haze’s eyes to adjust, but then there is was— the evil-looking head of the snake protruding from the second gourd on the right.
“How do you reckon he got up there?” Haze asked.
“Climbed, I guess.”
“Can a snake climb straight up a steel pole? I would have thought it’d be too slick.” Haze knew that snakes used their scales for traction, but they needed something to grab on to. Haze had once seen a man on television lay a timber rattler down on a large pane of glass. The reptile had become helpless and just flopped around.
“Evidently, this ain’t your everyday snake.”
“Chickensnake?”
Haze’s daddy nodded. Chickensnakes were fond of creeping into barns and hen houses to eat eggs. A big one could swallow whole chicks. But there had been no chickens on the farm for years, not since Haze’s grandfather, Lonzo
129 Trull, passed away. He used to keep banty hens in one of the old mule stalls in the barn, but after he died Haze’s daddy sold the hens. “I’ve already seen the cats kill two little ones this year,” said Haze. “I wonder where they’re coming from?
There must be a bed of them around here someplace.”
“Yeah, well this must be the daddy. Go into the house and fetch your gun.”
Haze made his way across the gravel drive, onto the front porch, and then down into his parents’ bedroom. He took down the little .22 caliber Remington bolt action from the gun cabinet, then grabbed a handful of shells from a candy dish at the top of the case. Haze hadn’t touched the rifle in weeks, not since
Wayne had been shot in a hunting accident. Wayne was killed by Mr. Parker, a seventy-five-year-old neighbor who’d been a childhood friend of Haze’s grandfather, and so had always had an open invitation to hunt on their property.
Mr. Parker had shot Wayne in the face with a twelve-gauge shotgun at close range. Ten years ago the old man had become eligible to purchase a lifetime hunting license for $50.75, and no one had bothered to check up on him afterward. At the hearing, the old man had admitted he was “confused” when he shot Wayne, even though he understood that Wayne was not a deer or turkey. Mr.
Parker was a World War II veteran and was suffering from undiagnosed
Alzheimer’s, and there was no telling what kind of electrical storm had boomed through his brain when he killed Wayne.
Touching the Remington, once again Haze imagined how it must have happened. First he saw Wayne’s balloon-like face, the thick Coke-bottle glasses,
130 and baseball cap. His brother wasn’t handsome, but good-natured, pleasant.
Wayne is walking through a stand of loblolly pine, checking for beetles. Then out of the thicket comes Mr. Parker shouting in an almost foreign-sounding language.
Wayne is just about to say hello when the old man pulls the trigger. The pleasant, not-quiet-handsome face is erased by a tight pattern of buckshot. The nose, the cheeks, the brow, everything is a bloody mess, everything but the eyes. The soft parts of the eyes are protected by the glasses.
The doctor gave Wayne’s eyes to a little boy in Birmingham. Wayne had signed an organ donor card at college and hadn’t bothered to tell anyone. The donation had upset Haze’s parents, but it had given Wayne’s wife Loanne a certain amount of comfort. Occasionally she talked to the little boy on the phone.
Loanne was three months pregnant at Wayne’s funeral. And now Mr. Parker was in a nursing home, blissfully unaware he’d ever done any harm.
Holding the gun gingerly, for a moment Haze pictured himself carelessly pulling the trigger and shattering the windows in the bedroom. He thought how horrible it would be if he lost his mind and went outside and shot his father in the face.
Wayne died about a month after Haze’s birthday. Uncle Poochie had given
Haze the Remington as a present. Poochie was the Kennedy town constable and had all manner of firearms both in his home and in the tiny office he occupied in the courthouse. The day Poochie had given Haze the rifle, they had gone on a crow hunt together. Haze liked to listen to his Uncle Poochie talk about the places
131 he’d been overseas in the military or about what the farm was like thirty or forty years ago when his grandfather was running things and they raised cotton.
“You know when I was your age there used to be gypsies around here,” said Poochie as they stepped over the mill creek that separated Haze’s daddy’s property from his uncle’s. “They’d come in wagons and ask for work. Only they didn’t want to do anything hard like pick cotton. Gypsies always wanted to paint your barn or something.” Poochie was a tall, thin man, not nearly as big or strong as Haze’s daddy, but when he talked to Haze, it was to him and not at him. “They buried a baby around here somewheres. One of their women was pregnant and ready to deliver and so your Big Daddy told them that they could camp out here until it was born and the woman was ready to move. I think he half expected it was some sort of trick. But it wasn’t. There was a miscarriage. They buried it in the woods around here and that was the last we ever saw of them. There are a few
Indian graves around here too.”
“Indians?”
“Yeah buddy, before the government moved them out, this part of
Alabama was Choctaw territory.”
Poochie pulled a tiny cassette player out of his field jacket and pressed play. The tape inside began to screech and caw, and within moments a murder of crows spiraled above their heads. Poochie watched as Haze shouldered the
Remington and fired toward the treetops. One crow fell dead through the branches, but the others flapped away before Haze could reload and get another shot.
132 Later, Poochie tied a strand of baling twine around the dead crow’s feet and hung it up in a pecan tree next to his own house. “Look here, Haze,” said
Poochie, knotting the twine. “I know boys just want to go out and kill everything when they first get a gun, but you have to be careful. You can kill all the crows you want. They eat up everybody’s corn and run off songbirds. Jays are mean as shit too. You know what Big Daddy used to say about them?”
“No, what?”
“Every time he’d see a bluejay, he’d say, ‘Jays go to hell on Friday.’ So kill them, but don’t let me catch you shooting songbirds—no bluebirds, or mockingbirds, or whooperwills. They’re good luck and don’t do anybody any harm. Okay?”
“Okay. How long you going to leave that crow hanging there?”
“As long as it takes his friends to figure out they ain’t welcome here.”
Poochie reached back into his field jacket and handed Haze the cassette player.
“Kill as many as you can.”
Within a month Haze had hunted down over a dozen crows, and three or four of their oily, black-feathered corpses swung outside every window of the farm. It made Haze feel good to know he was protecting his family property, and it made him a little sad when the crows finally grew wise and refused to answer the call. By spring, Wayne was dead and Haze’s daddy wouldn’t let Haze go hunting any more. The crows returned. They bullied the bluebirds away from the yard and pecked kernels of silver queen Haze and his daddy had set out for roasting ears. Sometimes at night Haze would dream about Wayne’s funeral. In
133 the dream, the pallbearers would carry the heavy mahogany casket from the church to cemetery, except someone had planted towering rows of silver queen among the headstones. On the edge of the first row of corn was an open, bottomless grave. Just before the pallbearers lowered Wayne’s coffin into the pit, thousands of crows would rush out of the hole like bats out of a cave.
When Haze stepped out on the front porch with the rifle, he saw his daddy standing in the door of the old corn crib filing a hoe. Some years ago, when it became more convenient to buy feed corn from the grain elevator in Vernon, the crib was converted into a tool shed. Walking into the crib was like walking into a tiny museum of agriculture. Between the massive scaffolding of dirt dauber nests, the walls were decorated with four generations of tools: axes, crosscut saws,
Kaiser blades, cricket plows, can-hooks, obsolete tractor parts, and rotten leather mule skidders. Many of the tools, old and mysterious-looking, the boy couldn’t even guess the uses of.
By the time Haze had made it off the front porch, his father was walking back toward the barn. “Here.” Haze’s daddy offered the hoe to Haze with one hand and reached for the rifle with the other. “When I shoot him down, if he’s still moving around you get him with this.”
Haze held onto the gun. “Did you check on Loanne’s kittens when you were in the crib?”
Haze’s daddy looked up at the sky. “I don’t have time to worry about any damn cats right now.”
134 That morning at breakfast they had eaten only cold cereal because Haze’s mother was going to drive Loanne to the doctor for a checkup. Everybody was surprised and grateful when Loanne decided to live on the farm, and not move back in with her parents in Starkville. Haze’s mother had tried to get her to move into the house with them, but Loanne said she liked living in Wayne’s trailer while she attended nursing school.
Haze’s mother had refilled her cereal bowl with milk and handed it to
Haze. “Take this out to Whore Cat for me. I don’t want her to go out hunting for something and leave her new kittens alone. Loanne’s got her heart set on keeping those cats, and I don’t want anything to happen to them.”
“What does she want with kittens?” Haze had asked.
“Well, she says she wants to keep them in the Lonzo house to keep down on the mice.” Wayne’s trailer was only a few feet from the rundown house Haze’s grandfather had built before the depression. “But that’s just an excuse. Don’t you know she’s lonely down there all by herself? I bet she brings one of them into the trailer with her by the time the baby’s born.” Haze mother made a face. She didn’t think much of living with dogs or cats, but she was for anything that would make
Loanne content.
Haze had carried the bowl of milk to the back porch, where the cats often slept curled up in peach baskets, but Whore Cat was nowhere to be found. Whore
Cat was the oldest and wildest of the farm cats, and she earned her name by constantly dropping litters under the Trulls’ house. She was an ugly, skittish animal, an ill-patterned calico with pink wobbly teats that testified to her
135 countless pregnancies, but she was a fierce hunter who lived off mice, lizards, and the leftover cornbread the Trulls dumped in a hub cap next to the barn. Haze liked having the cats around the farm; the comings and goings of their quiet society made the place feel alive and slightly mysterious. The cats were always slithering in and out of the house’s cinderblock foundation, conducting secret meetings behind the chimney and under the living room floor.
Haze had eventually discovered the litter in the crib, lying on an oily T- shirt at the bottom of the ancient cornsheller. The cornsheller was a three-by-three cedar crate nailed to the wall like a trough. Attached to the right side of the cedar box was a crank that looked like an oversized sausage grinder. Before it was cost effective to buy feed grain by the truckload, a farmer would make a little at a time by feeding cobs of corn into the mouth of the crank and turning the handle. The teeth on the wheel inside gnawed off the kernels and left both the loose corn and the naked cob at the bottom of the crate.
Inside the empty crate, the kittens had been licked clean and looked like three glistening moles. What little fur they had was speckled yellow and orange, and he could see the pinkish gray flesh of their bellies expand and contract as they breathed. Whore Cat was gone, already on the prowl. She had moved the kittens into the crib for safe keeping, only Haze didn’t think the crib was all that safe.
Owls sometimes roosted in the rafters during the day. Thinking of Loanne, Haze had covered the cornsheller with a stray piece of roofing tin. He’d pushed it flush to the crank and promised himself he would keep an eye out for Whore Cat’s return so he could let her in to nurse. He’d left the bowl of milk on top of the tin,
136 and had promptly forgotten about the kittens until he saw his father sharpening the hoe in the doorway.
“Let me have the gun.”
“Can I try and hit it?”
“No, you best let me do this. I don’t want you cracking one of my birdhouses open.”
My birdhouses. Haze’s daddy made out like the whole farm belonged to him. “Come on, Daddy, please?”
Haze’s daddy rolled his eyes. “I am too tired and in too much of a hurry to argue with you. All I know is if you miss, I’m going to take that gun away from you for good.”
Haze blinked slowly and finally exchanged the rifle for the hoe. Just then
Poochie’s patrol car pulled into the drive, slinging gravel. The car door slammed.
“Yo, Floyd!”
“Over here on the backside, Pooch!” Haze and his daddy waited a moment as Poochie made his way around the barn. Haze was surprised to see him still in his uniform.
“Where you been, Pooch? The sky’s going to open up on us in an hour or so.”
Haze’s uncle held up his hand. “Hold up. Lois called me about an hour ago. There was a wreck after Loanne and her left the hospital. Lois is okay, but they’re having to operate on Loanne. You better get over there as quick as you can.”
137 Haze’s daddy looked at Haze, and then at the hay field. “Is it serious? I mean, the baby?”
Haze’s first thought was that somehow the wreck had damaged the baby’s eyes, and wasn’t it a shame that they had already given Wayne’s eyes away to that boy in Birmingham. Then he could see by the expression on his uncle’s face that it was more serious than that, and he thought about the dead gypsy baby’s lost grave in the bottoms of the mill creek.
“Look, Loanne’s momma and daddy are already driving to the hospital.
You better get over there too.”
By then Haze’s daddy looked pale and dizzy. He closed his eyes and shook his head and Haze thought he might swoon. Just looking at his father made
Haze feel queasy.
“What’s with the rifle?”
Haze’s daddy frowned and straightened. He pointed to the martin gourds where the exhausted birds were losing control of their circle. “Look up yonder,
Pooch.”
Poochie’s sharp eyes spotted the snake immediately. “God almighty.”
“I have to get it down before we can go.” Haze’s daddy shouldered the rifle and squinted. The rifle was too small for him, and Haze thought his father looked like an overgrown kid who had refused to give up a toy.
“You want my pistol?” Poochie unlatched the safety strap on his holster.
Haze’s daddy shook his head and there was a small ping from the
Remington. The martins scattered. The snake jerked its head back into the gourd,
138 leaving only about an inch of its belly poking out of the opening. “I hit it.” Haze’s
daddy’s face grew angry. “I just didn’t kill it.”
Haze wanted to say something smart like, boy—I sure hope you don’t crack one of my birdhouses, but knew better.
“There’s still a little of him sticking out, Floyd. You want me to take a
shot?” Haze’s daddy shook his head, shouldered the rifle again and fired. Grazed
again, this time the snake had had enough. In an instant the snake had tumbled out
of the birdhouse and unraveled itself in the air. Time stood still as the three men
marveled at it—the flying snake—four feet of airborne serpent sailing toward
them. Haze was shocked when the snake landed inches away from his boots and
began to crawl. The boy had forgotten all about the hoe in his hands.
“Kill it, son,” yelled Haze’s daddy.
Haze hopped two steps and struck at the snake’s head. The hoe blade
missed and the snake veered. By the time Haze had the handle up in the air again,
the snake was past him, headed for the barn. If the snake got under the barn, it
would get away for sure. It managed to get its head into the tall Johnson grass
next to barn’s corner when Poochie materialized, grabbed the snake by the tail
and lifted it up in the air. Constricting the massive muscles in its body, the
chickensnake curled upwards and bit deep into Poochie’s hand. Poochie cursed
and flung the snake away.
The snake hit Haze’s daddy square in the chest, and Haze was stunned to
hear his father scream. The boy was tempted to laugh, but realized if he did, he
might scream too. But Haze’s daddy quickly stamped his foot down on the middle
139 of the twisting snake’s black and yellow body. The snake reared its head and opened its jaws to reveal a glistening pink mouth. It struck, first at Haze’s daddy’s steel-tipped boots and then at his denim-covered leg. “Come here and kill this damn thing!”
Haze rushed toward his father, holding the hoe like a spear. First he knocked the snake away from his father’s leg with the flat of the blade and then with a swift hack he beheaded the creature as easily as chopping off the head off a milk thistle or morning glory. The headless snake became electric, a self-knotting rope that tangled and untangled itself, spinning around and around in the shorn pasture.
“Damn things are nothing but nerves,” said Poochie holding his hand, blood dripping through his fingers. “See that yellow belly, chickensnake for sure.”
“Give me that.” Haze’s daddy reached for the hoe. He pressed the flat of the blade down on the writhing snake and pressed until the corpse was relatively still. Then he reached down and picked up the open tube of snake and began squeezing and massaging it with both hands. A yellow beak emerged, and then the whole head of a martin fledgling, its purple downy feathers slick with chyme.
It looked as if it could have been one of the snake’s own young. The fledgling fell to the ground near the snake’s severed head, then another and another.
“Three little bitties,” said Poochie wistfully.
“I could feel them under my foot when I stepped on him.” Still holding the snake in both hands Haze’s father began to weep, just for a moment. He offered the dead snake to Haze.
140 Haze took it, felt the dry scales slide around the reptile meat as he closed his hands around it. “What do you want me to do?”
“Nail it up on the barn, high, somewhere the cats can’t get to it. That’ll keep any more of the bastards from taking up around here.”
“What about the hay?”
Haze’s daddy shrugged his shoulders. The black stormclouds had closed in, as if the sun had decided to set early. “Let it get rained on, I guess. Hell, let it come a flood. That’s all I know to do.”
Haze nodded, walked his father and uncle to the patrol car, and even opened the door for his father. When his daddy slumped into the passenger’s side,
Haze had never seen his old man look more defeated, not even at Wayne’s funeral. Poochie hit the siren when they made it to the highway, and it gave Haze a quiet sense of relief. Finally he had a moment to himself.
Haze wondered if he could get the last load of hay off the truck before the rain hit. First he’d nail up the snake and then he’d at least try to get the hay into one of the mule stalls. Haze opened the crib door to look for a hammer when he was hit with the stench of spoiled milk. Whore Cat was standing on top of the cornsheller, and she had knocked the plastic cereal bowl Haze had left for her on the floor. The cat was mad and bleeding from a fight, maybe with another cat. Her right eye was filling up with pus. She hissed at Haze when he stepped into the doorway.
“Oh, God, cat, what have you been into?” Then Haze remembered the dead chickensnake he was holding in his hand. Haze dropped the snake outside
141 the door so it wouldn’t make the cat nervous. He continued to speak to Whore Cat in a hushed voice, and the more he talked the more she seemed to recognize him.
She began mewling, making it clear she wanted to get to the kittens and nurse-- who was fool enough to put this tin between me and my brood?
Haze picked up the cat and cradled her gently in his left arm, being careful not to hurt her swollen teats, which were damp with blood. Then Haze flipped off the tin with his right hand. He was just getting ready to place the mother cat in with her kittens when Whore Cat screamed and bit him. Haze dropped her to the floor. The kittens were no longer asleep on the oily T-shirt. In their place lay the chickensnake’s mate, curled up on the kittens’ bed. The sallow yellow swirls along its body were grossly distended. After such a large meal the snake was logy and could barely find the energy to open her eyes.
Haze stood there for what seemed like a long time before he puzzled it out, how the snake must have crawled through the cornsheller’s crank, dropped down on the blind kittens, and smothered them in their sleep. After she swallowed them, she had become too large to crawl past the crank’s teeth. Haze had set a perfect snake trap and used the kittens for bait.
Haze picked up a stray ax handle, but he couldn’t bring himself to crush the chickensnake’s head. What was he going to tell Loanne? What was he going to do with the snake after he killed it-- nail it up on the barn with the kittens still inside? Haze felt like one of the old tractor parts on the wall, useless, just taking up space. For the first time since Wayne’s funeral Haze was alone on the vast farm, and he didn’t know what to do. Behind him, Haze heard more mewling. He
142 turned. The dead chickensnake had drawn the attention of five or six of the cats from the barn, and one of the big tawny yellow ones was licking blood from the neck of the corpse. The cat looked up at Haze with blood on its nose, as if to say, get used to it. That’s when it started to rain. Heavy drops beat down on the crib, reminding Haze of the tin roof over his own head.
143 Part II The Bear Bryant Funeral Train
Like the little town of Germelshausen, that Gerst←cker wrote of, Tuscaloosa lives a life of its own—an enchanted life in an age other than ours. Mountains lowering from the north, stagnant marshes sleeping in the south shut it from the world. A malevolent landscape—lush and foreboding—broods over it bending its people to strange purposes. ----Carl Carmer, Stars Fell on Alabama
Years later, when I was telling James Johnson Sweeney of this solemn ride on the Haile Selassie Funeral Train, he was astonished that I had been aboard. --My God, what a train! He exclaimed. What a time! It is incredible now to remember the people who were on that train. James Joyce was there, I was there, ambassadors, professors from the Sorbonne and Oxford, at least one Chinese field marshal, and the entire staff of Le Prensa. -----Guy Davenport, “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train”
Finally the bear worked loose, and I got him again, and he got loose again, and he started acting pretty ornery. And when I looked up his muzzle was off. I felt this burning on the back of my ear, and when I touched it I got a handful of blood. . . . After the show was over I went around to get my money, but the man with the bear had flown the coop. All I got out of the whole thing was a nickname. -----Paul W. Bryant, Bear: The Hard Life and Good Times of Alabama’s Coach Bryant
144 Tuscaloosa Knights 1935
It began like an English fox hunt, three distant notes, high blasts on a
bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note. We heard them coming
long before we saw them.
“It’s the Ku Kluxers,” said Breece. “They’re having a parade tonight.
Going to burn a cross out at Riverside.” He leaned back in his porch chair and
swirled the ice in his drink, bourbon and sugar in a tall glass.
“Well, since there isn’t any ball game today, I want to go,” I said, teetering
dangerously on the porch rail. My skirt was too short and I guess I was giving
Breece a little bit of a peep show, but right then I didn’t really care. I’d finished
my bourbon and was waiting to be offered another. “Can anybody go, even a
Yankee carpetbagger like me?”
“Sure, Marla. Anybody can go. Question is, why would anybody want to?
Trust me, it ain’t nearly as fun as a ball game.” Breece folded the sports page of
The Atlanta Constitution he been carrying around for three days and used it as a
fan. We’d been talking about our train trip to Pasadena to watch our team, The
Crimson Tide, play Stanford in the ‘34 Rose Bowl and how we’d repeat the trip if
the Tide became SEC champs again. On the cover of The Constitution’s sports page was an x-ray photo, a picture of a broken fibula with a hairline fracture. Last
Saturday the Tide had bested Tennessee twenty-five to nothing and there was a
145 rumor that one of our injured players, a tight end from Arkansas, had asked to be
cut out of his cast so he could play. Nobody believed this, but the day after the
game the local papers ran a story saying it was true. Then the Constitution did an entire article on the kid. The headline read, Paul Bryant First Place In Courage.
Bryant was the “other end,” opposite of Don Hutson, our star receiver. Hutson and the quarterback Dixie Howell, “the human Howitzer from Hartsford,” made a powerful combination and in two short years the duo had become the princes of the South. But right now, for a brief moment, Tuscaloosa’s attention was focused on the superhuman Bryant. Breece had spent the last three days unfolding the paper like a map and telling anyone who would listen, If this Bryant kid heals, we go back to the Rose Bowl for sure.
It was almost the end of September and it seemed that I had spent the whole of the long, hot summer sitting here drunk on Breece’s front porch, planning our next trip to the coast.
Epp, Breece’s fiddler friend, had stopped by about an hour before and immediately began to play for our entertainment. He was sawing out a funny little tune he called “Possum Up a Gum Stump” when he was interrupted by the bugle.
Rather than pick up his tune, Epp decided to fiddle with Breece. “I’m surprised you ain’t out there with them.” Epp gave me a little wink. “Did your washer woman forget to starch your sheets in time?”
Epp was what people from this part of Alabama called a brag fiddler, which meant he could make a tidy sum showing off his talents at dances and fiddlers’ conventions. Breece and Epp got to be friends a few years ago when
146 Breece made his last run for the state legislature and hired Epp to play at his campaign fundraiser and barbeques. Sometimes Breece called Epp “Monkey” because once a judge at a fiddler’s convention had announced to the crowd, Epp
Brown can do more with a fiddle than a monkey can with goobers. Epp not only played well, but he also did acrobatic tricks with his instrument. He could play behind his back and between his legs and even fling the fiddle high up in the air, catch it, and begin playing again without missing a beat.
“Monkey, you know damn well I don’t have anything to do with those goat ropers.” Breece reached into the ice bucket and then let one lone cube slide down the side of his tall glass.
I picked up my own glass off the banister and shook it, letting the empty ice jingle. “I thought you once told me your granddaddy was a big muckty-muck in the Klan, a grand titan, or grand poobah or something. I thought you said he was with General Forrest in Tennessee when he started the whole thing up.”
Breece poured liquor into my glass and then lit up a Picayune cigarette. “I did. My granddaddy was boss of the real Klan in north Alabama when there was a reason for it. This club you got here now isn’t got any more to do with the real
Klan than the Boy Scouts.”
Breece came from a long line of handsome, hard-living politicians with a reputation for getting into scrapes. His grandfather was a Civil War hero who had ridden with the Alabama Rifles, Forrest’s crack cavalry. At the tail end of reconstruction he managed to use his war hero status to win a bid for congress.
Breece’s father had gone a step further than his old man and managed to bully,
147 bribe, and cajole himself all the way to the senate. Late in his career Breece’s
father had bludgeoned another senator with a silver-headed walking stick on the
senate floor for publicly stating, I’m afraid the honorable gentleman from
Alabama lacks a moral compass. Even Breece himself already had a legendary
reputation as a brawler. When Breece was twenty, he suffered a year-long
suspension from the University of Alabama for being the first student in a decade
to break the rule against dueling. He put a rival SGA member in the hospital with
a cap- and-ball Colt. It was rumored he frequently asked the other state senators in
Montgomery to “step outside” if they voted against him, as if the rotunda were
just another roadhouse tavern where men gathered to drink and smoke. It was
hard to believe he was forty.
Brecce possessed a sort of vapid bravery that I suppose I admired. He was
very different from my husband John, who was a doctor and a scientist and above
all a stranger here like me. John was from the Hudson Valley and I was from the
city, but somehow we got on with Breece. We had met at the Riverside Country
Club where the small-town Brahmin played golf and tennis, but Breece was the
only native who would have anything to do with us outside the club. John once
told Breece, “You are the only person in this godforsaken town who doesn’t make
us feel like we’re from Timbuktu.” Breece only smiled and said we could repay
him by not attempting to convince him that “New York is simply fascinating.” I
guess in a weird way our friendship was all part of his ambition to be a little
bigger than his hometown.
148 For almost two years now John had been a physician at Bryce’s, the state hospital for the insane, and he said it was as good an institution as Bellevue or even any of the private institutions he had toured in Switzerland as a medical student. The hospital had been built by a Dr. Peter Bryce well before the Civil
War, and he designed the exterior as if it were a Jeffersonian mansion, complete with Doric columns and gold-leaf cupola. Dr. Bryce obtained a land grant from the University and laid the foundation adjacent to campus. Since 1846 people had come to Tuscaloosa from all over the country to crack up.
Only a few of John’s patients were really dangerous, so for the most part
Bryce’s was a low-security institution. The inmates were forever slipping over the fence onto campus and lecturing to the air as if they were absent-minded professors. If an inmate escaped, John never fretted; he just sent a few orderlies to the dorm cafeterias, where the lost soul would inevitably appear hungry, searching for pork and grits. John spent all his time experimenting on the mad, hooking them up to electrodes and giving them high-voltage jolts or cold-water ablutions in hopes of shocking them into their right minds. He loved to tap their knees with a tiny hammer and time reflexes, writing down all his scientific observations in his little green ledger. Lately it seemed John preferred the company of the loonies to me. He had left me on Breece’s porch an hour before to turn sun lamps on one of his new patients, an attempted suicide. Even though it seemed farfetched to me, John had become convinced that intense light could help cure depressives. I was thinking of going to keep him company when Breece offered me a drink.
149 “Better watch your step.” Epp wasn’t done ribbing Breece. “Them boys in the pointy hats may not care for you stealing their votes. Or maybe they might object to you sneaking into the girls’ dorm and toting off the homecoming queen in your car again.”
“What homecoming queen?” I pretended to be scandalized.
“Before your time, sugar.” Breece reached over and gave me a flirty pinch on the knee.
“You heard they already strung up one college boy for squeezin’ on his honey in the back of his car down by the river,” said Epp.
Breece raised his fists in mock combat. “I’d kill a few of them before they even touched me with one of their ropes, by God. The sight of all that white trash under the sheets gets me hot enough to shit fire.” That was another thing I liked about Breece; he didn’t hold anything back because I was a woman. You could tell if Breece counted you among his friends because his tongue became blunt and vulgar when you were in his confidence. Maybe this was because as a politician he was obliged to tell polite lies to everyone else.
“Look at those bastards.” Breece stood up and pointed out over the hedge.
Underneath the towering elms, three horsemen robed in white rode down the middle of Queen City Avenue. As they passed, bright moonlight glistened off the magnolia trees, surrounding them in a misty halo. One of the horsemen raised his hood and blasted the same four mighty notes on the bugle again. Behind the troika stretched a long watery line of white figures marching side by side like an army of ghosts, their shapeless garments shimmering in the night.
150 “Come along to the street,” said Breece. “I want to show you something.”
Epp and I followed our host down the walk. “Look,” Breece pointed at the
Klansmen again. “Can you see their shoes? Invisible empire, my ass. I know every one of them sum’bitches. Every one.”
Moving at the hems of the white robes were pants legs and shoes, hundreds of shoes. One pair of button-ups with terrycloth tops, another heavy- laced pair splashed with mud, canvas sneakers, congress gaiters—even a green pair with knobby toes swung past.
Breece turned to Epp. “Only Bobby Pate would have bad enough taste to wear green shoes.” Epp giggled.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Just some fool that clerks down at the courthouse. And there’s his boss ”
Breece raised his voice, “the honorable Judge Hugo.”
More shoes passed.
“That one will be teaching Sunday school tomorrow morning.” Breece slapped Epp on the back and howled. Epp started playing the funeral march on his fiddle and Breece started to shuffle his feet back and forth.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Cloggin,’” said Breece. “I always dance when I’m having a good time.”
We laughed until it felt like our laughter was dangerous, like it might grow loud enough to rip us apart. A few of the hooded figures turned our way, and I could only imagine what their faces looked like, glaring at us through those hollow eyeholes. At the very end of the long row of shoes there was a worn pair
151 of saddle Oxfords, and above them the sheets were all twisted and out of whack.
The left shoe was stepping gingerly forward; the uncertain right shoe dragged behind it in a dead limp.
All of a sudden Breece quit laughing. “I reckon I know who that is.” I was just about to ask who when Breece turned his back on the street. “Let’s go finish our drinks and then when Puddin’ gets back with the car, if you still have a mind, we’ll have a look at their damned cross.”
About half an hour after the parade passed Breece’s front yard,
Puddin’tame, Breece’s Negro driver, pulled up to the house in Breece’s black convertible. He was visibly shaken and it took some doing to coax him out of the car.
“Did you see them, boss?”
“Yeah, Pud. We saw them.”
As Puddin’ told it he had just finished loading up the car with groceries when the nightriders passed. Puddin’ was the last customer before the clerk had locked the door to Abernathy’s Grocery so he couldn’t go back inside. He hid on the floorboard, kneeling under the steering wheel, praying that nobody would spy him there. He was so scared that he stayed there for a whole hour, long after the sounds of the parade had died away. Abernathy’s Grocery was only five blocks away from Breece’s house.
152 “Go take the goodies into the kitchen for Odetta, Pud. Have her fix you some coffee. You might ought to spend the night with us tonight. I don’t know if you want to go home in all this.”
Puddin’ nodded and headed for the kitchen door on the side of the house, his arms full of paper sacks. He turned around when we started piling into the car.
“Now where y’all going?”
“Miss Marla wants to see them burn that cross, Pud. You want to come too?” Epp and Breece giggled. We were all pretty tight by then.
“No thank you, sir,” replied Puddin,’ biting down hard on the word sir.
“Why do you want to take Miss Marla out into such as that? You know something bad is bound to happen.”
“Don’t worry about me, Puddin’, I’m a big girl,” I said, waving goodbye to him.
Puddin’ just shook his head. “Ain’t nobody big enough to be out with those crazy fools.” Then he turned his back on us as if we were already dead, disappearing around the side of the house without another word.
Breece shook his head and smiled. Then he reached across me to open the glove box. His shoulder brushed against my chest as he fiddled with the latch. In the glove box was an ugly black revolver. Breece never went anywhere without a pistol or two. He had even brought a few in his suitcase when we went on our train trip to the Rose Bowl. Breece removed the revolver from the glove compartment. He opened the chamber and quickly snapped it shut again. Then he
153 looked up at me with a lewd grin. “Check. Just in case we smell some snakes on the side of the road.”
Within a few minutes we were driving down University Boulevard. We drove past the edge of campus and turned left at Bryce’s, then right again toward the glowing light that was growing in the northern sky. As we passed the beautiful asylum with its white columns and expansive lawn, I looked up into the second story to see if I could see John in his office. Bright light poured out of the windows as it did the rest of the second floor, filled with the beams of the sunlamps, I guessed. I imagined John, sitting in his white coat, smoking a cigar, and writing down the number of times one of his patients had blinked in the glare of the hard light.
For some reason several of the inmates had been allowed out into the front yard, maybe three dozen or so, and I wondered if John were incorporating moonlight into his study as well. The inmates were in their bedclothes, thin cotton gowns, and all of them were looking up at the sky with a somnambulent gaze, as if they were expecting a lunar eclipse or a fireworks display. A few clasped the tall wrought-iron gate that enclosed the hospital, but none of them waved at
Breece’s car as they would have during the daytime. They did not seem to notice our passing at all. For the millionth time I wondered why John was so fascinated with these poor creatures, why he had exiled us to this little country town that seemed to be inhabited solely by football fans and failed suicides. Something
154 about the asylum and the lights made me a little afraid, and before I knew it my
fingers made their way into Breece’s free hand.
He looked at me in a sort of pleasant mocking way and asked me to reach
down and hand him his flask, which he had wrapped up in the crumpled sports
page of The Constitution. We passed the flask around and kept drinking all the way along the heavily wooded road until we came to a clearing next to the Black
Warrior River. Down by the river bank there was a huge weeping willow, its body arched across the water. A mound of red Alabama clay had been packed up in front of it and a tall cross more than ten feet high filled the night with orange flame. It shined over a huge murmuring crowd of people. A few of the people near the edge of the crowd held their hands in the air to shield their faces from the flames’ heat.
It was like the grand bonfire the university built every year on the quadrangle for its homecoming pep rallies. I remembered the way Dixie Howell and Don Hutson had addressed the crowd last year and the way the crowd cheered, waving their shakers in the air. Looking down at the sport’s page, I thought about the lame Bryant kid, wanting to play the game so badly he’d gone onto the field with a broken leg. First Place in Courage—hell, they ought to give him a medal, either that or send him to visit John at the hospital. I wondered if
Bryant would address the homecoming crowd this year.
A few yards from the cross, there was a small platform with a microphone.
Before the platform stood a line of white-robed men, each helping to hold a long banner that read Tuscaloosa Knights of the KKK. Hundreds of cars had already
155 parked, grill to bumper, and whole families sat atop the hoods or stood on the running boards. Some frat boys had brought dates and the boys held hands with their sweethearts through the handles of their picnic baskets. Crowded down close to the platform, in front of the arc of Klansmen holding the banner, was a huge crowd of men, whistling and applauding. Before Breece killed the engine, he turned back to Epp and said, “I got a bet for you, Monkey. I got a silver dollar that says the keynote speaker’s going to be that Bryant kid. That’s just the kind of stunt these muckrakers would pull, pandering to the fans. What do you think?”
“No bet.” Epp shook his head.
“I’ll take you up on that action,” I said. “I don’t think the kid would do it.”
“You might be surprised what a poor kid like that would do if you wave a little money or a little tail in his face.”
I stuck out my hand. We shook.
Just as we had made our wager, the lame Klansman limped up the platform and stood at the microphone. I cursed.
But then came the voice, the booming voice, rich and powerful, spilling in waves over the crowd. I have to admit, at that moment I was spellbound: the hooded army, the ghostly speaker, the burning cross, the dark crowd silhouetted by the soft green branches of the bent willow tree and the black sheen of the river reflecting the firelight.
“Why?” shouted the speaker. “Why do you suffer? Because of the Papist dictatorship in Rome. Because the Pope has minions right here in these United
156 States, and is at this very minute planning to overthrow our democratic government. Do you want to wake up one morning to find a Dago priest in the
White House? Do you know what he plans to do right here in Alabama? He’s got it all worked out. He’s going to give Alabama over to a nigger cardinal!”
The men under the masks and the men in the crowd began to growl.
Suddenly I noticed that some of them were carrying lead pipes, others waved baseball bats and ax handles, and at least one of them had a rope dangling from the sleeves of his robe.
“Are the people of Alabama—in whom flows the purest Anglo-Saxon blood—going to stand for this humiliation? How will we face the challenge of the beast in Rome? By banding together in noble communion. We will fight to the last drop, together, my white Protestant brothers, for the honor and virtue of
Southern womanhood, for freedom from oppression. We must band together to fight the devilish plot of foreign potentates.”
Epp leaned over my shoulder and whispered, “I think you’re going to win.
That ain’t no grunt football player talking.”
Breece told us to hush, but at that point I didn’t care about the bet. The spell was broken by the word “nigger;” which made me think of Puddin’ and how scared he had been when we dragged him out of the car. “I don’t believe this,” I said holding my stomach. All the liquor and sugar had not settled well.
“What, the part about the Pope? Of course not. It’s just muckraking nonsense.” Breece was staring at the speaker, still trying to determine his identity.
157 “That’s not what I mean, Breece, and you know it. You better get me out of here.”
“You’re the one that wanted to come and get educated. Wait a second, I bet this guy is hell on Darwin.”
Just as Breece mentioned Darwin, the orator removed his mask and spread his arms outward as if he were attempting to embrace the crowd. It wasn’t the football player, but I could tell by the look on Breece and Epp’s faces it was somebody they knew.
“Godalmighty,” cried Epp.
“Oh, that poor devil,” whispered Breece.
“Who?”
Breece shook his head.
“That’s Breece’s brother, Dunwoody,” said Epp.
“Brother my ass. That boy’s a wood’s coat. A little indiscretion my daddy had. This means old Wood’s going to run against me this year, just like he did in school. He took off the mask so all the voters could get a gander at him.
Goddamn. Well, that’s all right. I’ll show him. When the time comes, I’ll show him good.” I could see the wheels turning behind Breece’s eyes, calculating some private vengeance.
“Stamp it out!” roared Dunwoody. “Stamp out the worship of graven images just as we have stamped out the immorality and licentiousness in parked automobiles along our country roads, and the shameless nude sunbathing in this
158 lovely spot right here.” Dunwoody pointed to the ground and the crowd sent out a riotous cheer.
“What kind of fool would want to do away with nude sunbathing?” Breece was flirting with me again, but I was no longer in the mood.
“I want to go home.”
Epp gave me a sympathetic look. “Come on,” he said to Breece “She don’t look too swift.”
“So go.”
“Breece, please, honey. Take me out of here.”
Breece looked at me crossways, annoyed.
“Please,” I said again. That was all I could think to say.
On the way home, wheeling down River Road, Breece hit a man in a white gown with his convertible. Like a deer terrified by the headlights, this gaunt little fellow flung himself out of the woods and tried to cross the road in a mad dash.
Breece slammed on the brakes and swerved, but the man in white was impossible to avoid.
“Look out,” I said and grabbed Breece’s arm, but it was too late. The man flipped up on the hood and the next thing I knew I had a lap full of glass. His robe flooded with jagged streaks of blood, but this didn’t slow him down in the least.
He bounded off the hood and continued to run back toward the river.
The three of us sat there in stunned silence until Breece finally asked, “Is everyone okay?”
159 “Check back here, boss,” said Epp, after he had located his fiddle.
“Nothing broken. Nothing thrown.” Epp plucked his fiddle strings and adjusted the tuning. “How about you?”
“Yes, I’m okay,” I said. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel sick or queasy anymore; I was high on fear.
Breece got out of the car to see if there was any damage. The hood was bent to hell, and the swerve had caused the left front tire to blow out. “Shit. It looks like we’re going to have to hoof it back into town. I wonder why that fellow was in such a hurry? You reckon he just realized he was late for the cross burning?”
By now Epp was lovingly stroking the bow across the strings of his devil’s box, listening intently. When he was satisfied that the instrument was sound, he turned to Breece. “Who do you reckon we hit?”
“I don’t rightly know. That boy not only lost his hood but his shoes to boot. What kind of sorry-ass Klansman can’t scare up a pair of shoes?”
It took me a second to figure it out, but as I thought of John working late into the night with his light experiments, I realized something must be terribly wrong. “He wasn’t in the Klan. That was one of John’s patients. He must have slipped over the gate and gotten loose.”
No sooner had I said this than there was another one, this time a woman with wild hair, her breasts bounding up and down inside the white linen of her bedclothes. Two men followed her, both of them screaming with glee like boys released early from school.
160 “Oh Lord God.” Breece pointed down the road into the darkness. I couldn’t make out what he was pointing at, but I could hear it. Footsteps. Not the orderly march of the Klansmen, but a sound like the wild rush of animals’ hooves.
“Get back in the car.”
By then we could see them, almost forty inmates running wildly toward us, their eyes glowing in the headlights. Running together, their bodies looked to be joined into a single white monster, a hydra of madness. The three of us dove back into the injured Ford as the herd of loons ran past. Some moaned in otherworldly agony; others squealed and chattered like jungle birds.
After they passed, Breece and Epp started to chuckle again. Their laughter made me want to slap them sober. But when we got out and surveyed what had just passed us by, neither of them had the guts to joke. As the mob ran further into the distance, it was pretty clear they were running toward the orange light on the horizon, toward the burning cross illuminating the sky.
“My God, what’s going to happen when they hit the river?” wondered
Epp.
Breece shook his head. “Dunwoody’s got his bunch pretty keyed up. They will probably decide to get rough.”
I imagined all of John’s patients bloody and bruised by the baseball bats and pipes, the incomprehensible look of terror on their faces as the Klansmen strung them up in the tall oaks that lined the river. “We got to go find John. John will know what to do.” But then it occurred to me that if John weren’t hurt or
161 dead, he’d be out looking for his patients. “What if he chases after them? What if he goes to the rally and gets hurt?”
I turned and started to run back toward the river, but Breece caught me by the wrist and before I knew it, his arms were around me. I buried my face in his shoulder. “John’s going to be all right, Marla.”
“We have to find him.”
“Hush,” he said, and lifted my face up to his. “It’d be foolish to wander in the dark. I’ll try to fix the flat.”
I was still crying a little when Epp raised his fiddle and started into his monkey routine to try to cheer me up, but I just shook my head at him. I was too scared to find it amusing. He settled down and quietly played “Flop-Eared Mule,”
I guess to ease his own nerves, while Breece went to work with the spare. It was slow going for Breece in the dark. I didn’t want to get in the way, so I just sat in the grass at the side of the road thinking about John and how only a few months ago we made love in the sleeper car the afternoon we arrived in Pasadena for the
Rose Bowl. Later, at our hotel, Breece had called us down to the lobby to meet his friend Johnny Mack Brown, a movie star cowboy in the talkies. Breece had met
Johnny Mack when Johnny was an All-American for the Tide in the twenties.
Brown had a blond starlet on his arm, and we had gone out to dinner at a fancy nightclub. We ate steak, drank champagne, and during dessert Breece and Johnny
Mack sang the Alabama fight song.
When the meal was over, we went back to the hotel and Breece presented
Johnny Mack with a gift, a large mason jar full of clear liquid. Bet you ain’t had
162 anything like this for a while, have you, boy? Breece said, patting the square- jawed cowboy on the back. Johnny Mac just grinned, unscrewed the top, and sniffed deeply. The room filled with a sickly-sweet smell, like fresh berries mixed with turpentine. The jar was passed around. I had been living in Bama long enough to be accustomed to shine, but John as a rule never touched the stuff at home. He and the starlet had passed out by two o’ clock. We thought it would be a riot to leave them together, in the bed, stripped naked. By the time we had their clothes off, Breece and Johnny Mack Brown were just beginning to roll. Breece showed us the pistols in his suitcase, and sunrise found the three of us out in the
California desert somewhere, shooting blind drunk at lizards. At one point I remember unloading one of Breece’s pearl-handled revolvers into a bare dune for no reason at all, just to hear the bang, bang, bang, and I thought to myself, if someone doesn’t end up dead, this will be the best night of my life. No one died, and the next day the Tide beat Stanford 29 to 13.
By now, Breece had the car up on the jack and Epp had moved on to “Hell
Among the Yearlings.”
“Hey, Breece,” I said. “I’ll let you keep your silver dollar if you’ll tell me the truth. You shot him, didn’t you? That’s why Dunwoody’s a gimp. He was the boy you fought in school.”
Breece didn’t say anything. He just looked at me as if to say, Marla, darling, whatever it is that’s between you and me, it has simply got to end. And then he wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve, lit up another Picayune, and
163 nodded. When he finished the cigarette, Breece went back to work without a word.
Epp grew quiet too. The woods filled with the sound of crickets, tree frogs, and whippoorwills. It was something I never could get used to, how the woods around Tuscaloosa were so alive at night with sound. Epp came to sit next to me. We listened to the enigmatic music of the woods together and watched as the bright orange light burned in the distance. After a while the screaming crickets and katydids reminded me of the terrible cries the loonies had made as they ran past. I wondered, if there were violence and the Tuscaloosa Knights did decide to lynch John’s patients, would we be close enough to the river to hear them scream?
164 Report from Junction
It’s late in the afternoon as Dennis Schaffer rides up to his Uncle
Pleasant’s feed store on his roan gelding, only to find that the old man has already left for the hospital in New Braunfels to visit his sick wife. Dennis doesn’t much care for filling in at the feed store. The public life of a merchant doesn’t appeal to him. He prefers the solitary existence of working cattle on his father’s ranch, or the excitement of playing football on the weekends. At the store means he gets locked into a pointless conversations; he’s at the mercy of any son-of-a-bitch with three dollars for a bag of Ripsnorter sweetfeed.
Dennis lives in the part of West Texas between San Marcos and Houston known as German country. The year is 1954 and all of Texas is four years into a six-year drought that has caused everything that was once green to turn brown, curl up, and blow away. The only vegetation that remains is a few mesquite trees, honey locust, and oceans of short cactus. Dennis will be a sophomore at Texas
A&M before he will see it rain on his home again. That same year, the Aggies will win their first Southwestern Conference championship. But right now Dennis is beginning his last year of high school, and the Aggies are historic losers. Even so, rumor has it that things are about to change for A&M. The newspapers
165 reported last week that the new head coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant, is determined to
institute an extreme brand of “blood and thunder” discipline.
Under the cover of night, Bryant has driven his new team deep into the
desert to a place called Junction where the team has been housed in abandoned
military barracks. The players practice all day in a field of sand drawn off in chalk
lines, and they tackle one another atop jagged rocks and prickly pears. Denied
water for hours at a time, the team continues to run and block and tackle, no
matter what the boys carry on with sprained knees, dislocated shoulders, broken
noses, broken ribs. According to the newspaper, there is hardly a whole man
among them.
The syndicated columnist for The Houston Post uses words like “bone-
crushing” and “inhumane.” He describes the players as “bloody” and “mangled”
and compares them to soldiers on the Bataan death march or to concentration-
camp victims. Two days ago, one of the players, Bill Schroeder, a tackle from
Lockhart, fell out with heatstroke and almost died of a heart attack. Pushed
beyond their endurance, other members of the team have simply fled, sneaking
out of the oven-like quonset huts in the middle of the night in order to hitchhike
away. Every day The Post reporter gives an update on the gruesome situation and publishes a list of names, the quitters. Out of a hundred and eleven players, the team has been reduced to around forty, and still the practices continue. Dennis vows to himself that next year, when his time comes to ride out into the desert, his name will not be printed in such a list. By the time he finishes spring training under this new slave-driving coach, his daddy’s ranch will have gone under and
166 maybe his uncle’s feed store too. His aunt April will probably be dead and maybe his family will have moved away from their home in German Country forever. At any rate, Dennis will not quit because he will have nothing to come back to.
T-Willy, Uncle Pleas’s World War I buddy, walks out from the shadowy doorway onto the porch of the feed store as Dennis ties his horse to one of the support beams. “Dennis, where in the heck have you been? Pleas was expecting you an hour ago.”
Dennis isn’t in the mood to be talked down to, especially by the likes of T-
Willy. Dennis has spent the entire morning riding fence and he’s tired and disgusted. He goes about the business of unsaddling the roan without so much as a hello. Besides, Dennis has always been a little suspicious of T-Willy, partly because the old man’s a half-breed: part German, part Mexican. But mostly
Dennis dislikes T-Willy because he’s never seen the old man do a hard day’s work. He just sits here in the feed store with the fans on him, drinking whiskey, smoking cigarettes, and playing checkers with Pleas, living off the skinny tit of a soldier’s pension.
“You know I’m too down in my back to load up anybody’s truck. I don’t even know how to open up that cash register in there.”
“Everybody pays with credit anyway,” says Dennis as he unbuckles the belly strap on the roan. “Has anybody been in today?”
“Not since Pleas left.”
“Well then, it hasn’t been a problem, now has it?”
167 “You worried Pleas. That’s the damn problem. He doesn’t need any more of that.”
Dennis lays the saddle on the railing of the porch and then drapes a froth- soaked blanket matted with horsehair next to it. There is a saddle-shaped sweat outline on the gelding’s back that is already beginning to evaporate in the sun.
Dennis takes his father’s .45 caliber service revolver out of his jeans, and places it in the saddle bag in exchange for a pick, which he will use to clean the rocks and dung out of the horse’s hoof. Every morning for the last two years, Dennis has risen well before sunrise, put on his work clothes and a baseball cap, saddled up the roan, and ridden five or ten miles around the perimeter of his daddy’s property. He carries the .45 in order to put water-starved cattle out of their misery.
He has killed dozens since the beginning of the long cruel summer, so many that he has begun to think of himself as the ranch’s executioner, a kind of resident death angel bringing peace to all the wretched animals the land will not support.
But the job is getting to him.
Last week was the worst of it. Riding across the northeast corner of the ranch, Dennis spotted a pack of turkey buzzards wheeling in the cloudless morning light. He figured they were circling more dead cattle. But as he came closer he could see that the prostrate head of one of his daddy’s pole Herefords was still moving, beating itself senseless in the dust. Dennis kicked the gelding and charged up to a gruesome sight—the buzzards were not feasting on the cow, but on a calf in mid-birth. They had devoured everything from the eyes to the midsection, and the poor mama was still trying to push the rest of her savaged calf
168 out of her belly. One of the vicious birds had managed to slip its ugly red head in between the calf and her womb, and it bobbed up and down, ripping at her insides. Dennis drew the pistol and shot the buzzard and two others. The reports sent the rest flying.
“Take off, you sons a bitches!” screamed Dennis, pointing the empty gun up in the air. Then he got off the horse, looked down at the jagged remains of the calf and retched.
Dennis replays the bloody scene with the buzzards over and over in his brain as he lifts up the leg of the roan and scrapes debris out of the V-shaped groove in its hoof.
“Goddamn” says T-Willy. “I do believe this drought is rougher than the one in the thirties. If it don’t rain soon ever rancher from Austin to New Mexico will be broke.”
“You reckon?” asks Dennis, rolling his eyes. Now that Dennis is here to keep an eye on the store, he wishes the old man would go away. Dennis knows as well as anyone what’s going to happen to the ranchers from Austin to New
Mexico. It will be only a matter of months before his own daddy goes under, and when enough people like Dennis’s daddy go broke, then his uncle’s feed store will go broke, and then the banks will take everything.
The very day Dennis had put the pole Herford out of her misery, he returned home from his morning ride to eat breakfast. Instead of eating, Dennis only poured himself a cup of coffee and then went to sit outside on the front porch to drink it. His father had risen from the kitchen table where he was picking at a
169 mixture of eggs and hog brains and followed his son. Dennis hesitated only a moment before he told his father the story of the buzzards’ monstrous attack on the calf.
“I want you to know something, Denny. Something no one else knows yet.
When you move off to College Station in the spring, I’m selling everything but the goats.” Dennis’s father seized his shoulder so hard the boy almost dropped his coffee cup. “You’re old enough to be on your own now, Denny. Don’t screw up your scholarship, son, because from here on out you’re going to have to be responsible for yourself.” Then his father had lowered his gaze. “I’m sorry, I had to say that.”
Dennis keeps his back to T-Willy as his grooms the gelding. He doesn’t need a shiftless old man to tell him about hard times. “Why don’t you try giving your mouth a rest for a little while.”
“Dennis, I’ll swan,” says T-Willy, scratching his curly black head in wonder. “You are the aggravatinist thing I ever run across.” He sits down in a rocking chair. “I hope somebody pops that fresh mouth of yours for you when you go off to school next year.” The old man starts rolling a cigarette. It’s not a pretty sight. First he takes his teeth out and sets them down in his lap. After he’s rolled up the tobacco, his wormy tongue peeks out of its toothless cave to seal the paper.
Dennis hates the idea of getting old. He runs his left hand up the buttons of his chambray work shirt and scratches his stomach, which is flat and hard. But there is a little black pit of fear resting under the muscles even though his only physical imperfection is a missing pinkie finger, which had been crushed and then
170 amputated when he was a kid. Missing a finger doesn’t really hinder him any.
Sometimes he can even get away with using the jagged little nub to gouge his opponents on the football field.
Dennis is tough and mean, but a bit of a runt. Because he works so hard on the farm he can’t keep on weight. At 165 he is really too light to play college ball;
A&M was one of the only major universities that would offer him a scholarship.
Jess Neely at Rice made him an offer as well, but the ties and jackets the students must wear to class are expensive. As a military institute, Texas A&M provides the uniforms. But if the news reports from Junction are true, he will most likely get bounced around pretty good when it comes his turn to practice in the desert, and he is nervous that he has made the wrong decision. There will never be one moment where he will have the luxury of backing down from a fight, or even the chance to rise leisurely from a pile-up. He must never allow himself to dog it, even just a little, when running the gassers or playing bull-in-the-ring. Dennis must positively shine with hustle and aggression if he hopes to win a position, or he will find himself riding the pine in the fall and maybe lose the chance to renew his scholarship.
“You have to act like a banty rooster.” This is what his father, who is fond of cockfighting and boxing metaphors, tells him. “Half the size, but twice as mean. That’s you, Denny.” Sometimes before a tough game Dennis likes to hop himself up on white cross and bennies, cheap trucker speed that makes his brain itch and his teeth ache, but the pills keep him immune to fatigue or pain. This afternoon, he is so tired from working on the ranch he wishes he had something
171 with a little pep to keep him going. But then Dennis remembers that T-Willy usually carries more soothing medicine.
“T-Willy, you got your bottle on you?”
T-Willy looks sideways, like he’s thinking about holding a grudge, but then he grins, reaches into his overall’s and hands the kid the bottle. “Take it easy on that stuff.”
Dennis takes a mighty swig from the bottle. It doesn’t taste like whiskey, more like sweet wine, but still hot and strong like liquor. “Damn, what is this?”
“They call it peach beer. It’s brandy made with peach peels. My cousin sent it to me from Georgia. Ain’t it smooth?”
Dennis grunts, takes another slug.
“Here, you best give that back. Here comes your uncle. He’ll have my hide if he knows I’m getting you drunk.”
Dennis hands the bottle back as he spies a green Ford speeding toward the feed mart from Zorn. But it’s going much too fast to be Dennis’s uncle, such a cautious driver he rarely gets above fifty. As the truck comes closer to the store,
Dennis can see that it is similar to his uncle’s but much newer; even through all the dust, the chrome trim glimmers and shines. T-Willy finishes his cigarette and replaces his teeth.
Finally the truck pulls into the drive, runs right up next to the roan and parks. Right off Dennis is sore at the driver, who doesn’t think enough of his horse to park a few yards away. If the roan weren’t gelded, it might have gotten nervous and reared up and possibly fallen over and hurt itself, or more likely it
172 could have kicked the shit out of the shiny new truck and split a hoof. But the roan is tired too, so it simply shakes its back legs and nickers. Dennis doesn’t recognize the driver, which means he must be from pretty far off. When he steps out, Dennis sees that he’s a big man, well over six feet and thick in the middle. He wears an expensive Stetson, a red mustache, and a denim work shirt that is altogether too clean. A little blond girl in pigtails, no more than seven and wearing brown overalls, jumps out of the passenger side. When Dennis sees the little girl, he hides his left hand, the one with the missing finger, in the pocket of his jeans. The wind shifts, and even before the stranger finishes slamming the door of his truck, Dennis can smells that they have brought something with them, something that has been in the sun too long.
T-Willy, delighted to see the little girl, hunkers down in his chair and says,
“Hey there, cowgirl, who you got there with you?”
“My daddy,” she says with an adult seriousness, then moves behind her father so she is difficult to see.
The man with the red mustache gives T-Willy an apologetic look and then turns to Dennis. “Pleas ain’t here, is he?”
“Nope.” Dennis shakes his head. “He’s in New Braunfels.”
The stranger seems disappointed. “Would you mind coming over here and looking at something for me?”
Dennis and T-Willy exchange looks, then Dennis nods and walks to the back of the truck. The man lowers the tailgate, frowning. On top of a bed of canvas fertilizer sacks lies a newborn Red Angus bull no more than a day or two
173 old, and by the looks of it he’s spent a considerable amount of that time suffering out in the heat. He hasn’t yet been licked clean. Dried afterbirth has crusted around his eyes and nostrils; the hide is matted with dried blood. The nose is dull and pink, and already there are flies gathering around him, lighting near his eyes, in the folds of his nostrils, and on the umbilical cord. He is so tiny and slick, he looks more like an orphaned fawn than a calf. The bull breathes slowly, dehydrated, too weak even to lift its head.
The little girl jumps on top of the back wheel and stands on her tiptoes so she can peer over into the bed. She smiles at Dennis. “His name is Chester.”
The father turns to Dennis. “I can’t figure why its momma don’t want him.
I guess it just happens that way sometimes.”
“Lack of water,” offers T-Willy. “It does things to their head. Makes cows plumb crazy. Or it might have been her first one and she didn’t know what to do with it. That happens too.”
“Look, my cousin’s the cattleman, but he left town this morning. I just found this little fellow laying out near some brush not far from the house. I don’t really know what to do with him. Somebody told me you can buy powdered milk here. Is that true?”
Dennis nods, walks back up the porch into the dark doorway of the store and is almost bowled over by the rich smell of corn, oats, and molasses. He moves past stacks of crushed hay and cracked-corn feed, past the protein pellets and a pyramid of red salt blocks, all the way to the back of the store to where a few fifty-pound bags of powdered milk are stacked. Dennis selects one marked
174 colostrum, the first milk a cow gives after birth, a thin yellowish fluid full of
minerals. The other bags are marked foremilk, the white milk. Both the powdered colostrum and the foremilk are old.
Since the drought, most people don’t bother trying to save one individual calf. Dennis shoulders the sack of colostrum and grabs a liter milk bottle off the shelf. The milk bottle is equipped with a long, vulgar-looking three-inch nipple that resembles a little boy’s penis, pink and stiff. While Dennis is working in the back, he can barely make out the conversation T-Willy is having with the little girl’s father. The man’s name is something or other Dougan or Cougan, and he is an oilman, an executive, from San Marcos. But his relations live here in German
Country. Walking back toward the doorway, Dennis clearly hears the oilman say,
“My cousin Bill wants me to buy in on his ranch, so I came to check the place out.”
Dennis finds himself wishing his father had some rich cousins, but his relatives are no different from himself, third-or-fourth generation Krauts, here from the time when Texas was still a part of Mexico.
Before Dennis can get back outside, T-Willy starts running his mouth about Aunt April, gossiping about her diabetic stroke, her blindness, how in all likelihood the doctors will have to amputate her legs--things he shouldn’t speak about with strangers, with anyone. When he gets out the door Dennis interrupts the conversation. “Here you go.” He throws powdered milk onto the tailgate and sets the milk bottle on top of it.
175 “Mr. Cougan here is thinking about buying into Bill Goerhing’s operation.
They’re cousins,” says T-Willy.
“Is that so?” says Dennis. “You want me to show you how this works?”
“I’d appreciate that.” Cougan tips his hat, cowboy style.
The little girl, still standing on the Ford’s back tire, starts bouncing up and down rocking the bed of the truck. She’s so excited even Dennis can’t help but smirk. The poor girl must have lived all her life in the city.
Dennis pulls the drawstring on the calf’s milk and then steps up into the truck, seizes the tiny bull by the ears, and drags him to the tailgate. Cougan’s daughter jumps off her tire and runs to the back of the truck so she can watch what is about to take place. Dennis unscrews the nipple atop the giant baby bottle and scoops about a cup of formula into the thick glass.
“What happened to your finger?” Cougan’s daughter is staring at the nub on his left hand.
“Damn, Katharine, that ain’t polite.”
For the first time all day, Dennis laughs. “That’s okay. She’s just curious.
When I was in junior high, I was helping the band director move a piano down some stairs and into the auditorium. When we got near the bottom, the thing tumped over on my hand. Squished it good. That’s when I decided it would be less dangerous playing football.”
“Football?” Cougan’s eyes brighten. “You Dennis Schaffer?”
Dennis nods.
“You gonna be a redshirt Aggie next fall?”
176 “Yep.”
“Shoot, boy, I hope you’re ready for one tough season. I hear that Bryant fellow works his players into the ground. He did it at Kentucky too. That’s why the Aggies got him. But from the way people talk, shit, he’ll be lucky if he don’t end up killing somebody. I read in the newspaper he’s run off all but thirty-six men. You know, that boy from Lockhart is still in the hospital. If Bryant don’t take those boys home soon, he won’t have enough players left to field a team.”
“Can we feed Chester now?” asks Katharine, impatient.
Dennis hands the milk bottle full of yellow powder to Katharine. “There’s a bathroom inside the store. Go past the cash register, past the horse tack and harness, and turn right. Can you fill this up with hot water for me?”
Katharine says she can.
“Run the tap ‘til it gets real hot, okay?” Dennis turns to Cougan. “Do you still have that newspaper on you?”
Cougan retrieves the local paper from the cab and hands it to Dennis.
Dennis turns to the sports section and scans the headlines until he finds the one entitled REPORT FROM JUNCTION by Micky Herskowitz. The article recounts yet another hellish practice, a day full of blood and sand. At one point,
Herskowitz describes a confrontation between Bryant and the father of Bill
Schroeder, the heat-stroke victim from Lockhart. His parents had come to collect their son from the Junction infirmary. Because of his weak heart they have demanded that Schroeder never play another down of football. The article ends with a brief interview with the coach, in which Bryant’s only comment on the
177 matter is to say, “If a boy is a quitter, I want to find out about it now, not in the fourth quarter.” Then comes the list of names. Schroeder’s is among them and this makes Dennis angry. If the boy had died on the practice field, would the papers have called him a quitter then, too? Dennis lowers the paper and looks down at the bloody, flop-eared calf shivering in the sun, drawing flies.
He picks up the long pink nipple and pinches the tip. A tiny hole opens up through the thick rubber. “Those bastards at whatever factory makes these things, should be shot. You leave it like this and the poor calf just winds up sucking air.
Hey T-Willy, you got your pocket knife on you?”
“Um-um.”
“Toss it here.”
Dennis catches the knife with his left hand and flicks open the blade.
Cougan watches him curiously as Dennis slashes a little X into the top of the nipple and then inserts the tip of the blade into the tiny hole, coring it out. When
Katharine returns, Dennis takes the bottle from her, caps it, and shakes vigorously. Sitting down next to the calf, Dennis grabs the bull by the neck and allows some of the colostrum to dribble onto the calf’s tongue. Blackish placenta smears across his shirt as he slips the nipple into the calf’s mouth. The calf gags, regurgitates the milk into Dennis’s lap. Soaked, Dennis smells like a mixture of chalk and eggs. He curses.
“You think he’s too far gone?” asks Cougan.
“Nope. He just don’t know how to suck yet. He’ll get a taste for it in a second.”
178 Dennis dribbles more of the milk into the calf’s mouth. Instead of trying to make the calf nurse the bottle, Dennis massages the calf’s throat, forcing it to swallow. He does this three times, and after the third attempt the calf gives a guttural smack as the milk slides down. Dennis puts the little bull in a headlock in order to keep his head elevated, and this time the calf offers a blind attack on the nipple, eventually sucking it down.
When Dennis was a kid, before powdered milk and baby bottles made for livestock, if a momma cow ever abandoned her calf, Dennis’s grandfather would milk another cow, mix that milk with a raw egg, and pour the enriched liquid into a drenching bottle with a kitchen funnel. A drenching bottle looked like a wine bottle but with a much longer neck. The old man would have Dennis tie the calf’s neck with a rope and throw it over a rafter or beam in order to elevate the calf’s head. Then his grandfather would stick the long glass neck of the drenching bottle into the calf’s mouth and down his throat, forcing him to swallow the thick milk.
It makes Dennis feel good to think about the days when his grandfather was still around and everything was glistening and green as far as the eye could see. Dennis hugs the nursing calf in the headlock for quite a while. The little bull rubs its body up against the boy as he daydreams. Eventually the calf finds strength enough bob its head a little, as if it were punching its mother’s udder.
Dennis grins, pulls the bottle away from him. Katharine looks at him in amazement. “Can I feed him?”
“Sure,” Dennis says, and tells her father to put her up on the tailgate.
Dennis hands her the bottle. Milk drips near her feet as Dennis picks up the calf
179 and holds its face up to the streaming nipple. Dennis starts to tell the little girl to hold the bottle up high so the calf doesn’t have any problem swallowing, then he feels something move through his fingers. He looks down to find several translucent worms, less than a quarter of an inch long, working their way through the caked-up corner of the calf’s right eye. Dennis pulls the calf away from the nipple, flips it on its side, and brushes the eyes clean just in time to spot more maggots boil up from the pink sores behind the eyelashes.
“Oh, hell.”
“What’s the matter?” asks Cougan.
“Man, your bull here’s got the screwworms.” Even when things were green, screwworms had always been a problem for newborns. Screwworms were the larva of blue-bellied blowflies that lay their eggs in the wounded flesh of living animals. Some of the worms had probably already burrowed deep into the body of the calf, and soon they would screw themselves into the vital organs and suck the life right out of him. In fact, with worms that close to its head, the maggots would most likely screw themselves into the bull’s brain and drive him completely mad before they exited back through the eyes. Dennis has never seen flies blow into the eyes before, though he has heard they can blow into the interior of the nose. Usually the flies like to lay their eggs in the navel of a newborn. This could be easily treated by mixing kerosene and lard into a balm and applying it to the stomach. The kerosene would kill the worms and the lard would hold the chemical solution in place. But Dennis quickly concludes that putting kerosene on the sores around the eyes would surely blind the calf.
180 “Look, uh, Mr. Cougan.” Dennis weighs his words carefully, not wanting to upset the little girl. “You best leave Chester here with me. It’ll probably be better if I take care of him myself.”
“But Daddy, you promised. You promised I could take care of him,” the girl begs. “We need to take Chester back to Uncle Bill’s with us. Please.”
Cougan’s eyes dart back and forth between Dennis and his daughter.
“Actually son, she’s right. It ain’t my calf to leave. It’s my cousin’s. He’ll know what to do with him.”
T-Willy attempts to intercede on Dennis’s behalf. “I don’t think you understand what the boy here is saying here. That calf is in a lot of pain. It ain’t going to get much better.”
Cougan’s eyes are fixed on Katharine, who is on the verge of tears.
Dennis lays the calf’s head down on the tailgate to rest. “I’m telling you he’s done for. There ain’t no sense in dragging it out.”
That does it. Katharine’s face goes down in her hands and she sobs.
Cougan puts his arm around her and cuts Dennis an evil look. “Well son, why don’t you let me be the judge of that.” Then he whispers down to his daughter, “It’s all right honey. We’ll take Chester home to Uncle Bill.” Cougan cuddles the little girl, gently presses her face into the swell of his broad stomach.
Dennis glances at the calf. The poor creature is shaking in pain, unable even to lick the yellow regurgitated milk off its nose. Dennis turns his back to the rich oilman’s weeping daughter, her tears the only stain on his crisp clean shirt.
“Why you silly son of a bitch.”
181 Katharine stops crying. T-Willy winces. Cougan’s fatherly expression of paternal sympathy shatters. “Katharine, get in the truck.” She knows better than to argue. She slowly climbs down off the tailgate and lets herself into the Ford.
Cougan waits until she closes the door. “Now, why don’t you get off my truck, you little shit.”
Dennis knows as soon as he steps off the tailgate, the oilman will swing at him. So he moves back in the truck and in an athletic flash he bounds over the right side of the truck, hoping the roan won’t decide to kick him as he flies through the air. The horse nickers and pulls back against its bridle as it did when
Cougan drove up.
Already Cougan is stalking around the truck, fists balled for action. “Look son, I’m going to show you not to cuss me in front of my girl.” T-Willy puts a hand on Cougan’s shoulder in an effort to calm him, but Cougan bats it down, knocking thin old man to the ground. This gives Dennis just the time he needs to make it to the saddle bags and draw the .45. Cougan’s eyes go flat with fear and hate as the boy turns the gun on him. For just a moment Dennis prays the man will keep coming. Dennis would love to shoot Cougan in his fat gut, watch all that good food and smugness spill onto the dirt. How much different could it be than easing the dumb suffering of a steer mad for water or a fevered calf with worms itching through its brain? He’s done it dozens of times--the quick flicker of the hammer, the mark of the dime-sized hole, and then a little peace for everyone. All the past there ever was, all the future there is ever going to be, meet at this place and fold into one single moment—the pulling of the trigger. Dennis is exhilarated
182 by the fact that he suddenly has the power to change his life and keeps the gun leveled as he tries to figure out if he should.
Jail, thinks Dennis, might even be a relief: no hellish football camps out in the desert, no land auctions to witness. No winners, no losers, just a small dark cell with plenty of cool water to drink. But then Dennis’s mind turns back to the ugly turkey buzzards eating the calf, picking and picking their way through life.
The murderous moment slips away from him.
Apparently Cougan has surmised that Dennis isn’t going to shoot him. He continues to advance. Cougan’s face is puffy and red with hate, and Dennis wonders if he will still go to jail if he doesn’t shoot the oilman but dies of a heart attack instead. Dennis decides to bluff--cocks the hammer and yells something he heard in a roadhouse once when one of his friends wanted to scare a big Yankee from Cleveland out of a fight. “Mr. Cougan, I’m just a little old country boy. But
I’ll clue you, I’m mean as hell.” As soon as the words leave his mouth, they seem stupid and frail, the threat of a hick and Cougan is coming on as if he has heard nothing at all.
Dennis can only think of one thing to do. He swings the gun away from
Cougan and points it toward the child in the truck.
“No!” cries Cougan. He stops long enough to look at his daughter.
Katherine’s face is pressed in horror against the glass windshield of the Ford.
The little girl doesn’t have sense enough to duck under the dash. Instead she screams, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”
183 “No, please.” The sight of his frightened daughter takes all the fight out of
Cougan. He backs down, slides his body flush with the hood of the truck, and slowly makes a retreat to the other side. Dennis follows him halfway, keeping the gun pointed at the little girl until he reaches the steps of the porch. T-Willy has managed to get inside the feed store, and is peering out of the dark window.
Cougan opens the door of the Ford. “This ain’t over. I’ll kill you for this,” he says. Dennis directs the barrel of the gun back toward the oilman and keeps the gun on him in case he has a pistol of his own under the seat of the truck or in the glove box. But now Dennis is pretty sure Cougan won’t risk any shooting with his daughter next to him in the cab. He pushes his little girl down under the seat and peels out in reverse, his ruddy face receding into a cloud of dust, but he floods the engine, and the truck stalls. Dennis raises the .45 again.
After two or three tries, Cougan manages to turn the engine over. The
Ford lurches forward, violently flinging the little bull off the tailgate and onto the ground. The bottle shatters. The calf is too weak to cry out and lands in the dirt with a thud, as if it were already dead. Seeing this, rage wells up in Dennis all over again and he is tempted to try to shoot out the truck’s tires, but a little voice inside his head tells him to leave well enough alone. T-Willy come back out onto the porch and they watch together as the green Ford disappears into a point, a line of powdered milk runs all the way to the highway.
“Dennis, I’m afraid you’re out of your damn mind,” says T-Willy as he turns his back and starts walking toward the calf. It lies lifeless, like a blown-out tire next to the road.
184 “You reckon?” asks Dennis, swinging the cocked gun in the direction of the old man. T-Willy puts up his hands. They stay that way for a second or two, then Dennis unloads four rounds, not into the old man, but into the calf, two in its belly, two in the skull. As he lowers the gun, Dennis feels a wave of regret wash over him. He is sorry that he pointed the gun at his uncle’s friend, and thinking about pointing the gun at the little girl makes him sick with cowardice. He’s even sorry he had to kill the calf with the screwworms twisting in his eyes. But mostly
Dennis feels sorry for himself, because he knows that for all this trouble, his life hasn’t changed a bit, and in the morning, he will have to get up out of bed and put on his work clothes and saddle the roan, and the whole thing will start over again.
185 Demopolis
The first thing I recall is Donna leaning over the bar, her long red hair fallen all around her empty shot glasses of vodka and sugared lemon wedges. She wasn’t wearing her band uniform, as I had always imagined she would be when we inevitably met again, the one full of crimson and glitter. Instead she was wearing a simple black skirt and a cotton blouse half-unbuttoned for summer. For the last four years Donna had marched for our alma mater, the University of
Alabama, and its Million Dollar Band. Since high school I had kept an eye out for her on game day Saturdays and pep rallies. Two seasons in, Donna had been promoted to drum major and our football team, the Crimson Tide, was undefeated. The band was hell on their rendition of the “Imperial March” from
Star Wars, and at night games when they played “Stars Fell on Alabama,” the crowd would sing the words.
I watched three shots of cold clear liquid slide down Donna’s lovely throat before I summoned up the courage to take her by the hand and say, “You may not remember me, ma’am, but my name is Fogg, Phileas Fogg.” I was right. She didn’t recognize me at first. But then there was a moment when I must have materialized, an apparition come out of the mist to haunt her.
It was a hundred degrees outside and hotter in the bar’s interior with the smell of sweat and beer. The bar, Egan’s, was so small and so loud it seemed that time did not flow in the same way as it did in the outside world. The Christmas lights that had hung around Egan’s door flashed back at me in Donna’s eyes. A
186 little crust of sugar clung to her mouth when she started to giggle. Then I could see she was being swept back, lifted up on a memory as surely as if she’d stepped into the rattan basket of a hot air balloon.
I asked how she’d been.
“Fine,” she said. But I could tell right off it wasn’t true, and I figured we might have to lie to one another for a while. Later she admitted that graduating from the University had almost killed her, being forced to give up marching and all. “I played flute for the Tuscaloosa Symphony for a while, but it only performs six times a year and I can’t make enough to live. They’re all a bunch of snobs anyway,” Donna sighed. “I got all my horns packed up in the car right now. I’m going back to Demopolis and visit my mom.”
Back in high school Donna had been something of a rebel. Her father,
Jeeter Brown, had been an All American for the Tide in the early seventies and had tragically died on the gridiron playing pro ball for the New Orleans Saints.
After that you could say there was a lack of filial guidance. Donna, herself, had nothing to do with football. At seventeen she preferred to run around with grown men—construction workers, marijuana farmers—it was even rumored that there had been an affair with our school band director, Mr. Maxim, a short guy with a kind of Bolshevik goatee. I figured for someone like her, returning home was nothing short of crying uncle. Later I found out Donna had recently had an affair with the symphony’s guest conductor, a fifty-year-old German. Only he had a hausfrau waiting for him back in Bonn. When it was all over he didn’t even bother to say goodbye.
187 I told her about myself, how I was still writing things down, still thinking I might want to write and travel. I was working as a waiter trying to save up cash to go to Prague or Budapest, maybe find work teaching. I told her that I thought of her often and wrote poems about her blue pickup.
“It’s gone,” Donna said wistfully. “One night me and this fellow drove all the way to Gulf Shores, and on the trip home we flipped it coming through
Belshazzar Swamp. We crawled out, walked almost all the way to the Tombigbee
River before we found a phone. By the time we got back with the highway department, the truck was gone, sucked under.”
“That wouldn’t be the first thing to get lost out in the swamp.” I had grown up on that side of the river, in the boondocks, where the really scary rednecks lived. Those were my people. I was one of them.
“Who knows? Maybe I was just too tight to remember where I left it.”
“Some good old boys probably found it, winched it out and towed it off before you even knew what happened.”
I offered to show Donna the little book of Keats that I had stolen from the
Demopolis High School Library after her graduation. It had been her constant companion the three weeks we dated and the first book of poems I really took seriously. “My apartment is just across the street. Do you want to see it? The book, I mean?”
She smiled and changed the subject. “Do you still watch Jimmy Rogers on the TV?” I had to admit, of course, I did. Jimmy Rogers was Demopolis’s one and only tycoon. For years he had managed several hedge funds and hosted a weekly
188 TV show on the money channel. He had an honorary Ph.D. in economics from
Columbia University and lived in New York, which to the folks in Demopolis is kind of like saying, I live on the sun. Rogers collected vintage motorcycles and had a pilot license for anything that could fly: airplanes, helicopters, gliders, ultralights. Every year he came back home to give the keynote address to our high school’s graduating class. When someone from your hometown is in the movies or on TV, it makes you feel that your life is not limited to the short space between the swamps on the east end of town and the river.
Donna smiled at me. “Not even twenty-five years old and already we are monsters for it.”
“It?” I asked.
“Nostalgia.”
When I was a junior in high school, Donna Brown was Demopolis High’s most unlikely valedictorian, a martial beauty in the school band, and the closest thing I had to an everyday hero. I used to hide under the bleachers in the summer and watch her march around in her short shorts. She had long, strong legs, and they gave her the look of a girl who was going someplace. On graduation night,
Donna concluded her farewell address by ordering the graduating seniors to go forth and prosper. Then our seniors exited the auditorium in their solemn caps and gowns, the grainy sound of “Pomp and Circumstance” blaring behind us in Dolby.
We drifted past the slag parking lot into the football stadium where Jimmy Rogers gave his keynote speech, floating a hundred feet above the ground, aloft in a quarter-million cubic foot balloon whose space age silver dazzled us in the
189 stadium lights. Rogers had dubbed his balloon the Phileas Fogg after the globetrotting Jules Verne character. When Jimmy finished his speech, the crowd was in high spirits and began to wave their football shakers in the air. With a pair of ceremonial hedge clippers, the homecoming queen cut the nylon cord that grounded the Phileas Fogg to the fifty-yard line. From the stands, the band began to trumpet something by Sousa, blowing the Phileas Fogg toward the Atlantic
Ocean. Eight months later Jimmy Rogers had bested Stephen Fawcett and Richard
Branson and that whole coterie of entrepreneurial balloonists and was written down in Guinness as the first man to circumnavigate the globe in such a contraption.
“Did it really happen?” I asked Donna. “It wasn’t just something I dreamed up?” She shook her head, assured me that if it was a dream, the whole town had dreamed it together. I wanted to ask her the same question about something else that had happened that night, something just between us. Did
Donna remember wrestling away my virginity in the back of her truck? But neither one of us had been raised to be frank.
For a couple of hours Donna and I sat on our barstools and reminisced, getting drunker and drunker. Sometime during the night I attempted to reach for my beer and found I could not because Donna was holding my hand.
This is not the beginning of the story, only the first thing that comes to mind. You must forgive me if what I am about to tell you follows no strict chronology. The mechanisms that operate our inner lives seldom record things the
190 way atomic clocks or history books mark them. If you want history, I must begin with my name—my real name is William Gaultier, like the fashion designer, only where I am from it is pronounced Gal-tare. And I think I am dying. My lungs are riddled with antibiotic-resistant TB and avian lung inflammation. Even as I write this, in the isolation ward of the Marengo County Hospital, negative pressure room 2112, I must sit very, very still, or I may agitate my condition, rupture the frail alveoli of my lungs and cough up blood all over this story.
My mother was raised hard-shell Baptist and my father was a non- practicing Catholic, and old-fashioned country sorry to boot. Even with my little education, I am not much better. Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you that Billy Gaultier can’t help you hammer together your deck, or paint your house, or play an F chord on the guitar that sounds anything close to music. My daddy, Lonnie, on the other hand, had potential and could have made something of himself. He was a genius with a welding rod and deft with the acetylene torch.
He used to construct cattle trailers over at the Demopolis Iron Works across the
Tombigbee River before he walked out on my mother. I don’t think I could even figure out how to give you a jump if your car has left you stalled out on the side of the road. After my father abandoned us, I spent most of my childhood sickly, reading boys’ adventure stories, then later history and finally poetry. I can’t help but think that if I had been less dreamy as a child all this would have come out differently. If there had been one ounce of anything practical in me, I wouldn’t be so afraid. Every person I see waving at me for help on the shoulder of the road fills me with deep biblical shame as I pass them by.
191 I blame this lack of vocation on my daddy’s people, who are descended from French snobs. After Napoleon received his final ass-whipping in Belgium, a worthless band of the Emperor’s officers decided it would be a fine idea to move to the Americas. Naturally it was decided that they should become agrarians, gentleman planters; not of cotton, or tobacco, or even indigo, but—get this— olives. And when these French officers resigned their commissions, they called themselves the Vine and Olive Company.
The VOC settled on the banks of the Tombigbee River, just missing
Alabama’s fertile black belt, and decided to construct their colony in one of the swampiest parts of the Old Southwest before the Louisiana Purchase. The
Frenchmen christened the town Demopolis because they thought it was going to be a regular Athenian city-state. After the autumn rains hit, the VOC was done for, this time beaten by blighted olive branches rather than Prussian swords. Many of the ex-officers returned to the battlefields of Europe as rank mercenaries.
Those who remained transformed themselves into an arrogant band of white trash, a people as hollow and insubstantial as tumbleweed. So you see, I have it in the blood—sorriness.
I don’t really remember leaving Egan’s the night of our reunion, but when
I woke up the next morning Donna was there beside me in my tiny bed. Both of us were still in our sweaty, rumpled, smoke-filled clothes from the night before and the cases of half a dozen band instruments were stacked up on the floor at our feet. Still, I have to admit, I was more than just a little pleased with myself, and I
192 became even more pleased when Donna accepted my invitation to stay with me until I saved up enough money to leave the country.
I lived in a squalid shoebox called Cobblestone Courts located on
University Boulevard, directly across from Egan’s, The Booth, The Tusk, and several other rowdy college bars. Twenty years ago the apartments had been a
Holiday Inn, but it had become too dilapidated to rent out to people with options.
So refrigerators and stoves were installed in the motel rooms and they were leased out as “efficiency apartments.” A gaunt half-dead gay couple terribly afflicted with AIDS lived next door to me, and I could hear their awful hacking and spitting through the walls. My other neighbors were decorous Asians and recovering drug addicts, mostly. The complex was infested with all manner of vermin. The air was moldy and miasmic. But in the light of romance I could see what Donna was saying. It was all right there in front of me—the broken couch,
Donna’s flute case lying open on the slick carpet, the ghostly rime on the ancient
Frigidare, the inexplicable sense that everything is connected, that Donna and I belonged together.
“This futon is holy,” Donna said playfully. She rolled over on top of me, pinning me down with her pelvis. I could feel the mattress fold up around us, and it seemed as if the rest of the apartment would follow. “It’s all like Christmas morning,” said Donna. Then she pursed her lips as if she were about to play me, blowing a steady stream of fresh air into my mouth.
I didn’t know what to say, so I yanked down the ex libre copy of Keats from atop the head board and attempted to witch her with a little poetry. I turned
193 to one of the love poems, “Ode to Fanny,” even though I already knew it by heart, but just before the first word could leap from my tongue the phone rang.
“We’ll let the machine get it,” I said.
It was my mother. The message was short and simple, “Billy, your father is home from prison. He wants to talk to you, call home.”
That’s was when I realized two things: one, I had to get out of Alabama and two, I had to convince Donna to come with me.
A few weeks after that I found myself at the open door of my own apartment, well past midnight, exhausted from my job waiting tables. At the time
I thought I had some sort of summer cold I couldn’t shake.
I found Donna sitting cross-legged on the floor in some kind of meditative trance. She was surrounded by blank leaves of sheet music and all of her instruments—her flute, her piccolo, her French horn coiled like a giant snail in its black velvet case. There were freckles of blood on Donna’s forehead and drops of it were pooling on the brass saxophone cradled in her lap. A lock of Donna’s glorious red hair was caught in the keys. Instead of sucking the reed, her embouchure was wrapped around a few loose strands of hair that looked as if they were growing from deep within her throat. After I closed the door, she snapped out of her dream-state and began to hack and cough. I rushed over to her, put my arms around her and hooked a finger in the foul wet stuff, trying to get it out of her mouth. When I had fished out the last strand, Donna began to weep violently, saying, “Billy, I don’t care if your father is a bad man. You have to see him.”
194 Earlier that day Donna and I had had our first fight. At this time, we had been living together for about a month and fall classes were about to begin. Since the Million Dollar Band had to march without her, Donna had enrolled in the
Department of Education in order to get a teaching certificate. Her old teacher,
Mr. Maxim, was in the hospital, terminally ill, in the last stages of bone cancer.
He had been recommending to the school board that Donna should get the job ever since she graduated college. One of Donna’s older brothers, Peter, was vice- principal of Demopolis High now, and he had told Donna he could hold the job open for her if she hurried with the degree. The idea appealed to her, picking up where Mr. Maxim had left off, and little by little she began to hint that it might be a good idea for me to have a teaching certificate, too.
After roughly a month with Donna, I was still in love with her as much as ever. Even though I had been building her up as a mythical creature in my imagination for the last five years, having her in my living room day-in and day- out did nothing to change the way I felt. Only this was a strange and moody love.
Despite my impulse to spend every waking minute with her, I put in a lot of extra time at work which left me exhausted. Even when I was at home, Donna and I could go a long time without speaking, which made me think she was put out with me for some inscrutable reason. Donna was an inward, meditative person. She could sit for hours on the bed in her T-shirt and panties holding her flute over a notebook that lay on the bedspread. She’d play a series of odd notes and then
195 write something down, then began playing again. Sometimes she was composing music; sometimes she wrote letters to friends I didn’t know.
Ultimately Donna didn’t want me to go to Europe. I had casually suggested several times that she was welcome to come with me, but she’d always give me some lame excuse like, “I wouldn’t know what to do with all my horns.”
“Maybe you could bring a couple of them on the plane and have the rest shipped later after we find out where to live. I was thinking we would find an apartment near Budapest University, walking distance from the Danube, only cleaner than this one, better.”
“Billy, I just wouldn’t know what to do there.”
The fight occurred in the afternoon before I left for the dinner crowd.
Donna was sitting on the bed in her usual position, only this time she was running scales and painting her toenails red. Finally she stopped hinting around and came right out with it, “Hey, Billy, have you ever though about being a teacher too?
You’d be good at it. You have patience and understanding.”
I pretended to think seriously for a moment, then shook my head, “I don’t think that would be the right thing to do.”
“What else are you going to do with a degree in literature? What are you going to be when you grow up?”
I snatched the flute from her hands and held it up like a scepter, “Rich.”
Donna rolled her eyes, reclaimed her instrument and inspected the mouthpiece to see if I had ruined the tuning. Donna’s late father, the football hero, had been rich. And Donna’s mother had become even richer when she collected
196 on the huge insurance policy after his gridiron tragedy. Because of Donna’s lofty manner and her preference for being alone, she was often accused of snobbery by other kids in Demopolis. This snobbery was traced back to her daddy’s wealth.
“Just because people have money doesn’t mean they don’t have problems.
Do you think if I had a whole lot of money I--”
“Would be living here in this rathole with me?”
“Billy, that’s not what I was going to say.”
I counted to ten, which made me feel rational and poignant. “Did I ever tell you that when I was a kid, I actually got to meet Jimmy Rogers? He was first cousins with my fifth grade teacher, Ms. St. Claire, and she brought him for show and tell one day. This was right after he made all that money on the Viennese stock market and donated a million dollars to the school. Anyway, Ms. St. Claire brought us all out to the playground so Jimmy Rogers could show us one of his new motorcycles he’d bought at an auction in New York.”
I remember all of this perfectly, Rogers still young, not tall, but handsome in a stiff banker’s way. Barely thirty and already a millionaire twenty times over.
He had blue eyes and wore a pinstriped suit with a yellow bow tie and stood next to a motorcycle that was as black and shiny as a black widow spider.
“‘Kids, this here,’” I said, doing my best impersonation of Rogers’s highbrow Demopolese accent, “‘is a Vincent Black Lightning 1952. And there are less than a hundred of them in the world.’ Then Rogers proceeded to give every single one of us a ride around the schoolyard. Later I asked Ms. St. Claire if I could be Jimmy Rogers when I grew up. She said, ‘Honey you can be anything
197 you want.’” She might as well have said I could grow up to be Bear Bryant or
Jesus Christ. “And that was the first time I realized I don’t have to rot my whole life away in Demopolis. I wanted to leave right then and not come back until I was famous.”
“They would sue him if he tried a stunt like that with the motorcycle today. What if one of those kids had fallen off and got hurt?” Donna was looking at me like I was a complete fool. “So, what now? You’re going to fly to Budapest, make millions in the Hungarian Stock Market and buy fancy motorcycles?”
“No, Donna.” I was feeling exasperated and short of breath. “I just want to go and look around, you know, consider the possibilities.”
“And you’re not just running away from your daddy?”
That one stopped me cold. “Hell yes, I’m running away from my daddy.
You know what kind of person he is.” My father was a slim, handsome brute, a furious dandy who had little trouble keeping himself in liquor and shoe polish. If insulted, Daddy would attack with the nearest weapon handy, be it pistol, pool cue, or pine knot. He’d been to Vietnam as a marine and, despite his slight stature, he knew how to maim and dismember. For this he was awarded the Silver Star.
He used to terrorize my mother, sneaking up on her in the kitchen and slapping her around when he caught her pouring his Old Granddad down the sink. I’d stand there paralyzed with fear, watching through the bars of a chair until Mom would either pass out or fake unconsciousness. Then Daddy would wink at me over her body and grin as if we were in cahoots.
198 “I am not having thing one to do with Lonnie Gaultier,” I informed
Donna.
Everyone in our town could tell you about my family, a shiftless clan of bootleggers and thieves. According to my mother, Daddy had once been different than the rest of his people, polite, chivalrous, the kind of man who would open a car door for a lady. When he returned home from the war in the jungle something changed in him. The war awoke not valor, as it does in some men, but cruelty, pettiness, and spite. In other words, it brought out his true nature. Shortly after the war I was born, and shortly afterwards Daddy began to despise honest labor.
He loved to gamble, preferably over the corpses of vicious dogs. For many years between the time of his departure from our home and his incarceration in the
Marengo County prison, he and his shiftless brothers ran a traveling dog fight in the remote parts of Belshazzar Swamp. When the whole clan got caught (the year
I moved to Tuscaloosa and Cobblestone Courts), I heard rumors that the Gaultier brothers orchestrated bare-knuckle cockfights among the inmates and made money off the guards and cons alike.
“The man is evil,” I told Donna. “You know, when I was a kid, right before Daddy left, he took to keeping pitbulls locked up in these 2x2 cement cells out in the woods behind our house. He starved them. Rubbed Tabasco on their tongues and in their eyes. Once when Daddy was getting ready for a fight, he tied his champion to a treadmill with a choke chain and made him run for hours. By the time Daddy took him off that thing the dog was ready to shit blood. His paws
199 looked like hamburger. See, that’s how you win fights. Every one of those dogs
was half-crazy with torture before he ever threw them into one of those pits.”
Donna considered this a moment. “Why didn’t your mother divorce?”
“I don’t know. I used to ask her that all the time. All she’d ever say was, I
wasn’t raised to leave no husband. She’s Old Testament about everything. She always said he’d come back. You know the day Daddy left, he broke her nose with a coffee pot?”
“What for?”
“As I recall he said his coffee was cold. After that he knew if he stuck around any longer he was going to end up going to jail for killing her.”
“So what did he do to you?”
“That’s just it. He never did anything to me. Nothing. I was eight when he took off. I came home from school one day and all the dogs were loaded up in these makeshift cages he welded together in his shop.”
Hop up in the back of that truck and hand me those tools, Daddy had said
to me when I stepped off the bus. He was standing at the mouth of his workshop
wearing blue Liberty overalls, his welding visor tilted back on his head. He was
lighting a cigarette with his acetylene torch. The gravel underneath his boots was
sanded with droplets of molten iron and flux.
About once a month Daddy brought home supplies that he had borrowed
from the Demopolis Iron Works. Only this time the unused portion of the day’s
stolen welding rods, iron girders, and other paraphernalia of the trade were
stacked neatly in the back left corner of the truck, right next to one of those caged
200 dogs. There were five of them, shaking and screaming, jamming their muzzles
through the bars to drool and bark. Well hurry up. I turned to look at Daddy, who was smiling with his thin blue lips. But I am sure the smile ended when I got my foot up on the tailgate and the yowling pit closest to me hit his cage with skull- cracking fury. I lost my balance and fell, knocking over a tank of compressed oxygen in the process. It rolled off the tailgate, dropped three and a half feet, hit the gravel, and took another bounce before it steadied itself.
“Daddy just stood there blinking, not believing we weren’t dead. Then he rushed up to the truck and I thought, uh-oh, here it comes, after all this time—the fist, the belt, the back of the hand, something—you know what he did?”
“What?”
“He hugged me. Hugged me for all he was worth. Then he told me he needed to go away for awhile.” What I didn’t tell Donna was what Daddy said to me as he hugged me. What he whispered in my ear. You are the sorriest goddamn fellow I ever seen, and with that I knew we were bound. “I personally had been waiting for something to blow up all day,” I said.
“What for?”
“Well, at that point my mother had been in the hospital since I went to school. You know when he hit her it happened so fast. One minute I was eating my Fruit Loops and the next Momma was swimming in a pool of blood and
Folgers.” She was such a small woman, black hair and blue eyes. She loved my father, or at least the man he was. My mother wasn’t anything like Donna, who was so tall and fierce. I wanted Donna to feel sorry for me and stay with me
201 forever. “I never tried to stop him if that’s what you want to hear,” I said. “I wasn’t like one of those kids on Oprah.”
Donna gave me a look, a mix of sympathy and disgust. “Poor, Billy. You baby. At least you still have a daddy.” At the time I thought it was a pretty snotty thing to say, even if she was my valedictorian.
So this was all roiling through my brain as I helped my lover to the bed, blood-matted strands of hair sticking to her cheeks. Resting her head on the pillow, she turned away from me. I went to the bathroom to get a damp washcloth to wet her face. When I returned she had quieted down. I daubed her forehead and finally asked, “Donna, what the hell is going on?”
“ I have a . . .disorder. Trichonilphila. When I get stressed, I eat my hair. I don’t know I’m doing it. It just happens. I thought I’d beat it, but I guess not.” I wanted to laugh, I had never heard of anything so strange. Donna was looking more peaceful now, like a tired child.
“The entire stadium heard the crack when my daddy’s spine snapped. It was like somebody set off an M-80 under the pile-up. He was on the field for so long. The crowd was quiet. It was almost twenty minutes before the chopper came to airlift him off the field. A hundred thousand strangers stood there praying and holding hands. It was just like graduation when Jimmy Rogers went up in the balloon, only everybody was quiet and frightened. Later when he died in the hospital, I heard my momma cuss him for leaving her. ‘Goddamn you, Jeeter
Brown,’ she said. And the doctors and the nurses had to drag her away to keep her
202 from beating his body. I never understood that, beating a corpse. That’s a horrible thing for a kid to hear, you know. For months afterward I couldn’t sleep, I’d just sit in the dark, scared, squeezing my teddy bear, sucking on one of my braids.
Soon I got to be like one of those girls you read about with bulimia. They sneak down to the kitchen at midnight in the dark to eat a stick of butter like a candy bar—I could suck on my hair for hours. One night I had a dream that Daddy was in the room watching me sleep. I woke up screaming. My stomach hurt. I had a fever. At first they thought my appendix had burst, but really there was a big clump of hair that had solidified in my stomach. The doctors had to pump it out.”
Then Donna closed her eyes.
“He was here again tonight, Billy. He was right here in this room with me.”
I put my hand on her stomach. “Donna, I don’t want to leave you. I want to stay here with you and go to school, be a teacher like you.”
At this she smiled, “No, I changed my mind. We can’t stay here. I’ll go with you. I will follow you any place you want. Only, do something for me before we leave.”
“Anything?”
“See your daddy.”
“Okay,” I said.
Then she rolled over and went to sleep. I moved back to the front of the apartment and put her instruments away in their cases. I tried to straighten her papers on the floor, plucked thirty or so curly red hairs off the carpet and waited
203 to see if the ghost of Jeeter Brown were going to reappear. Looking down at the pages in my hands, I saw that Donna’s new composition was entitled “Fanfare for
Maxim” and then I understood. Donna’s mentor, another father of sorts, and most likely one of her lovers, was dead.
I felt something dislodge itself from my lungs. Something thick and wet and terrible burned its way through my chest. I coughed a sharp cough, almost like a sneeze, and before I could cover my mouth there it was, the tell-tale blood in the sputum, a powder-fine spray of rust colored snot dusting the title page of
Donna’s score.
We did not drive down to Demopolis for Mr. Maxim’s funeral. In fact,
Donna never mentioned his death to me, though I did notice the obituary in the
Birmingham Post-Herald. He had a widow and children, he came from
Pennsylvania. They held a memorial service in the school cafeteria and it was attended by several generations of band members who paid their respects, but not
Donna. Suddenly it became more important for Donna that we get out of the country. I tried to explain to her that I couldn’t afford to break the lease on the apartment. I didn’t even know where we were going to stay our first night in
Europe. Airfare would eat up a lot of the money I’d saved. I only had enough to keep us fed for a few months. Then Donna uttered the magic words, “Don’t worry. I have a trust.” And this made me happy on two counts: one, it didn’t look like economics was going to stand in the way of us leaving together, and two, she
204 really had been living with me in the ruined motel because she wanted to. I called the travel agent. We’d fly out of Birmingham in three days.
Donna wanted to come to my house and meet my folks, but I told her that seeing Daddy for the first time was something I had to do alone. She took this with a silent nod.
I called my mother and told her I wanted to come home. She gave a sigh of gratitude, “Oh, thank goodness, Lonnie will be so pleased.”
“Momma, is he treating you all right?”
“He’s a changed man, Billy. Well, in some ways he’s changed and in others he’s still your father, but he wants to see you so badly. He wants to be your daddy again.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
The next day we loaded up the suitcases and the horns, and abandoned the apartment to the rats and palmetto bugs.
The car trip to Demopolis was cheerful. We chattered like schoolgirls, clearly because we were both scared out of our minds. Not only did we not know where we would be sleeping in three days, but the realization was setting in that we didn’t really know each other all that well either. Was Donna really crazy or just high strung? I mean, after fifteen years of pulling out her hair, how psychologically damaged was she? Donna had put her hair up in a baseball cap to hide the damage. Halfway home she bought a pack of cigarettes, saying smoking would give her fingers something to do. I didn’t know she ever smoked. I wondered if she picked up the habit every time one of her sugar daddies keeled
205 over. Besides Maxim and the symphony conductor, exactly how many lovers had she had? How often did her imagination conjure up Jeeter? All I knew for sure was that I was totally infatuated with the most beautiful girl to ever conduct the
Million Dollar Band. And then I began to wonder about me, my own flaws. How long would it be before I let Donna down and did something worthy of my name, something wretched and unforgivable?
In high school, I was a loner bookworm of the highest caliber. I was in love with Donna because everyone in school had decided to shun her. Like I said, many of the girls thought Donna was stuck up, not only because she was rich, but also because they said Donna thought she was too pretty to wear makeup.
Demopolis High School decorum demanded that all girls be painted with doleful blue eye shadow and have a cobra-like coiffure that fanned up at least three inches from the scalp.
“Flat-headed bitch,” a freckled-faced girl, Pauline Minnefield, yelled at
Donna one bright clear morning. We were in the glass hall, a part of the school so named because that side of the building was filled with windows that allowed sunshine to spill across our lockers. Pauline was one of those distaff Tom
Sawyers that all the boys think are such a hoot. I don’t know exactly what the row was over, but you had to figure it was band- related. Mr. Maxim had already taken his leave of absence. At the time, it was rumored that he was being investigated, suspended because of his relationship with Donna, but his cancer diagnosis killed
206 much of the gossip. Anyway, the substitutes were given strict orders to stand back and let Donna do all the directing, so this incurred some resentment.
Pauline reached into Donna’s open locker and scattered notebooks and tampons across the hall for the whole school to trample. I was ashamed for
Pauline because, already, I knew that it was precisely this kind of childhood meanness that comes back to haunt you in your dreams. Donna was too big to fight her, but I guess everybody saw this as just another manifestation of Donna’s high opinion of herself.
I ran over to Donna thinking to myself, Billy, show this woman a little chivalry. When I knelt down to help Donna order the mess on the floor, I could see she was holding back tears. I wanted to reach out and touch her face, but I knew better. Then I saw the battered copy of Keats lying on the floor.
It was only a month before Donna’s graduation, and I decided right there and then it was too late to do anything about this crush. I picked up the book and handed it back to her with both hands.
“Thank you,” she said. I could feel the leering eyes of the school on us.
She ran into the girls’ room, leaving me kneeling in the middle of a ringing bell.
Donna called me on the phone later that night. “Billy, do you think what they are saying about me is true? Do you think I am a slut?”
One had to admit that Donna did take on the sophisticated look of a paramour when Maxim was near. But really a relationship like that was almost inconceivable to me.
207 “It doesn’t matter what I think or anybody else. When you leave here you don’t ever have to see any of these people again.”
“There was a breathy pause over the receiver. “Meet me.”
“Okay.”
When Donna and I arrived in Demopolis, we drove out to the old high school where Donna’s brother Peter was waiting for us in the front office. He was tall and massive like his father, with the family’s red hair, and I began to wonder if my handshake would be sufficient assurance that I could take care of his sister.
Donna’s mother and mine lived on opposite sides of town, so the plan was for me to drop Donna off at school with Peter. Then I would drive back that night after I had finished with my family reunion. I was willing to see Daddy, but I wasn’t going to sleep under the same roof with him. Besides, Donna and I had to be up early to drive back to the airport.
Donna’s brother pretended to smile during our introduction, that is, until
Donna pronounced my last name. Then he withdrew his hand from the stiff three- pump shake he was giving me.
I wondered if Jeeter would have done the same thing if he were alive?
There was even a photograph of Jeeter hanging on the wall, running sideways in one of those quaint, formal football poses, a blowup of a University of Alabama year book pic. Under him was a little brass plaque that read “Franklin Hayes
‘Jeeter’ Brown: All American.” There were other photos too, maybe fifteen or
208 twenty of the school’s most distinguished graduates: a newscaster from
Birmingham, a radio deejay, a few judges and state senators. Of course there was a picture of Jimmy Rogers, waving down from the basket of the Phileas Fogg.
And right next to him was a picture of my daddy saluting the camera in his dress blues, silver star pinned to his breast. His plaque read “Lonzo Francis Gaultier:
War Hero.” He couldn’t have been more than twenty. In the photograph, the eyelashes are almost girlish, his complexion pale. What was that in the corner of his smile, in his thin blue lips? His mouth seemed to be the very edge of ruin. I had to admit we favored.
After about the tenth knock on the front door, I figured my mother must be around the back, maybe bringing my daddy a drink of water as she used to in the old days. I could hear my father’s electric welder humming away behind the house. I let myself in with the key and found mother lying on the floor—face shattered, blood pooling up round her head.
I called an ambulance, already knowing it was too late.
We lived miles out in the swamp. I figured I had just enough time to kill my old man before the paramedics arrived. I walked over to the fireplace and removed the slightly bent poker. Then I walked out of the tiny house’s kitchen door into the carport. From under the awning I could see the bright light of the welder shining out from the darkness of my father’s shop. This light can scorch the retina out of your eyes. As a child I used to play a game with myself to see
209 how close I could come to looking at the light without staring at it directly and blinding myself, a sort of solitary game of chicken.
Backed into the mouth of the shop was Daddy’s old black Dodge. Inside the bed were five tiger-striped puppies, little pits, in a cardboard box. They had that silly puppy look of sheer glee, tongues hanging out. They had no idea what they would grow up to become. The puppies toddled over one another toward me.
My father’s workshop was a real man’s sanctuary, a no-frills rectangle with a corrugated tin roof, tarpaper walls, and a single raw light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Completely unused for the last fifteen years, it was as solemn and ghostly as the antechamber of a pyramid. In the right corner was a large sign, hand-painted, bearing the message, The 11th Commandment: He that messeth up, shall cleaneth up. I found Daddy crouched over the long pieces of iron he would use to shape the final cage.
Daddy had on his welder’s mask with the alien-green glass that shielded the eyes. The welder was shaped like an old radio. It was rusted with disuse, but it still hummed like an apiary full of enormous bees. There was a dial on the front of the welder like the face of a clock that allowed one to adjust the voltage between
60 and 225. For a moment I imagined what it would be like for the ghostly workman before me to rise, set the dial full to the right, reach out with his smoldering rod, touch my forehead and galvanize my brain.
For a brief eternity, I stood there in the open door and watched him cobble the iron together, thinking it would be so easy to sink the poker into his head, smash him where the mask exposed the back of his skull. Finally he realized there
210 was an intruder at the door, and he stood up holding the jaws of the welding rod in one hand and the triangular hammer used to chip away excess metal with the other. He released the welder’s jaws and a half-burned rod tinkled to the floor, smoldering. When the moment came neither one of us uttered a word.
The man behind the mask stood still. Over the drone of the welder I could hear the yipping pups. In a rush of anger I pushed over one of the ancient acetylene tanks, assuming after all these years of decompression it would be empty. It came crashing down, the valve head spinning off into space.
I rushed him, swinging madly, managing only to shatter the light bulb.
Everything went black. My opponent moved in close and I felt a fist penetrate my stomach. I fell flat on the floor. Then something even harder came down on my back—a two-by-four or a steel-toed boot. I entered a dream world of pain, a country with no borders. I felt my body being turned over and then Daddy was on top of me, pinning me down like a rapist, crushing the breath out of me with his thighs. I was too stunned to wonder how he was managing to do all this with the mask still on. When Daddy was sure I was done in, he stood over me. Then he opened up one of the old tanks still connected to the acetylene torch, mixing the gases into an even stream. He reached in his pocket for the flint—then swoosh, out curled a long tongue of flame. Daddy turned up the oxygen until the flame was white, almost clear. Then he held it close to my cheek.
“Careful,” he whispered, “You have to be very, very careful when you play in here.”
211 It sounded as if he were speaking under water. He raised the mask to reveal a face that was smooth and beautiful, completely unchanged by time, untouched by the strain of close quarters or gray bare walls. Sorriness. It had done well for him. The only difference between Daddy now and Daddy fifteen years ago was a series of tattoos. On his neck was emblazoned a tiny ink black swastika and on his cheeks were a series of blue tiger stripes, lines that gave him the look of a Maori headhunter.
I called out to him, “Lonnie . . .” But I didn’t have enough wind in me to finish.
“Shhh,” he pressed a finger to his lips. Then he moved the torch closer to my face and gave me a long soulful look, reckoning what kind of man I’d become, or maybe just trying to find the French in my features. We stayed that way a long time, until I started coughing blood.
The next thing I knew, I was lying in the back of the old Dodge with the sun in my eyes and a thick mass of blood covering the front of my shirt. Little warm tongues were licking my face. The puppies had tipped over their box. One of them was clamped down hard on my ear with her powerful little jaws. There was a sharp chemical smell in the air. I tried to sit up, partially immobilized by puppies. The truck had been moved, pulled up to the front yard. Just as I managed to free an arm, I heard the strike of the welding rod, the sound that it makes when it kisses metal and begins its work. There was a blinding flash of light. I sat up, just in time to watch the whole world explode.
212 I covered my face and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw it was not the whole world that had exploded, but only my father’s workshop, which had folded in on itself like a house of cards. Black debris rained over the yard and
I could hear the ambulance sirens, maybe a mile away and coming fast.
I found myself in a hospital bed. A doctor and a burly-looking male nurse dressed in blue were standing over me.
“Where’s my mother?” I asked, groggy.
There was a hesitation that confirmed all my worst fears. “I’m sorry, Mr.
Gaultier, she suffered a massive head trauma—“
“What happened to the dogs?”
The doctor and the nurse exchanged looks.
“Do you know anything about any dogs?” the doctor asked the nurse.
“Nawp.”
I got hysterical. I started screaming, “They were in the back of the truck with me! They were in the back of the truck!” But not only were there no dogs to be found, neither was there any black Dodge.
“The paramedics found you in your house, next to your mother,” said the doctor, trying to be rational. But I wasn’t listening. I was screaming. The nurse sank a needle in the IV next to my bed.
Just before the drugs sent me back to the darkness, I figured it out, “He’s still out there. Don’t you understand. He faked it, he wasn’t in the explosion.”
“Who exploded?” asked the male nurse.
213 When the drugs wore off, I found myself in the room where I now live,
2112, one of the hospital’s negative pressure rooms, which is sealed like a prison.
There are bars on the windows. There is an alarm on the door. All the air is pumped through a filtered ventilator. Nobody comes or goes without a doctor’s consent.
This time when I woke up Donna was standing over me holding my hand.
She was wearing a surgical mask over her mouth and a wide-brimmed sun hat.
She looked like a bandit.
“Where am I?”
“Quarantine,” she said. “Billy, we’re in trouble.” And that’s when I found out about the tuberculosis. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. “They asked me to take some blood tests right after you came in yesterday. But it looks like they are going to let me go. I didn’t catch it from you.”
Weeks later they traced the disease back to Cobblestone Courts. Many of the long time residents had contracted it: the drug addicts, the AIDS patients, the frugal Asians living four to a room. A few days after my incarceration here at the hospital, a squad of epidemiologists from Montgomery laid siege on the old
Holiday Inn and carted off the infected. A couple of months later Cobblestone was torn down. I read about it in the paper and saved the photograph they printed of the wrecking ball smashing into my side of the building. It was strange because right next to that was an article about Jimmy Rogers. He’d set another world record. This time it was driving a motorcycle all the way around the world.
214 Funny, I thought that one would have already been done. I saved the photograph
of him too. In the picture Jimmy’s head is shaved and he is wearing his aviator
shades and his savaged riding leathers. Jimmy Rogers must have known what he
wanted to be a long time ago.
“Damn it, Billy.” Donna’s face was angry. “You were the only one where
it didn’t have to be . . .ugly. We could have been happy together. We could have
been normal like everybody else." I thought she might hit me, and thought of the
way she had described her mother beating her father’s corpse.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Donna was trembling. A tear of blood rolled down
from under her hat. Over her shoulder I noticed the clock on the wall. Our plane
was just about to take off.
“I’m sorry.” There was nothing else to say.
The night Jimmy Rogers departed in the grand balloon known as the
Phileas Fogg all those years ago, I had my last date with Donna before she was to leave for the University of Alabama and the Million Dollar Band. We rode out through the dirt roads, through the swamps of Belshazzar in her blue Ford, away from the fanfare and the crowd, hoping we could find a secluded spot to be alone.
As she drove through the backwoods only a few miles away from my home, I found myself dreaming about the future.
We pulled the truck over on the shoulder, next to one of the little wooden
bridges deep in the swamp’s heart, and there we made love in the back of her
215 truck. I ran my fingers through her hair and held it in my fist. Afterward we lay on our backs and created our own constellations.
“Look at them all,” she said. “Have you ever made yourself dizzy trying to count them?”
“No,” I said. And then I tried, and numbers began to swell in my head. All of a sudden I was very aware of the wall of sound pressing into us, the crushing music of the crickets, and the katydids, and the riotous frogs calling out to us from underneath the bridge.
“You want to go for a swim?” asked Donna, ungluing herself from me.
“In there? I don’t know, it’s awful snaky.”
“Come on. Don’t be a pussy.”
Donna jumped out of the bed of the truck, naked and white. She walked to the edge of the bridge and leaned over the handrail. I started to say more about the dangers of moccasins, but she seemed transfixed by the water.
“Billy, come here. You have to see this. There’s a flashlight under the seat, bring it.” I did as I was told and walked behind her. I wanted to put my arm around her, but I was afraid. When I finally did touch her back with my left hand and she didn’t move away, every part of me was flooded with power and joy. I pointed the strong beam of light over the handrail. It revealed the corpses of twelve enormous dogs on the shoal, their throats ripped out, their intestines strewn out from their bellies. Two other dogs floated in the shallow black water with a bleach bottle and some bits of trash. The dead eyes sent the beam blazing back to us.
216 I was frozen naked in those dead gleaming eyes. Now as I write these words down, here and now, in room 2112, quarantine ward, Marengo County
Hospital, I can’t help but think to myself—well, there it is, my wrecked childhood, floating down there in the reeds and the cattails.
217 The Bear Bryant Funeral Train
Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed . . .Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross! --Newspaper article, Pomerania, Germany, mid-1930’s
Bryant always told his quarterbacks that if they had five yards of running room, take it, even if a receiver was open downfield. “Someone in the stands with a rifle might shoot the receiver,” he said. -- The Legend of Bear Bryant, Micky Herskowitz
Today one of the secretaries brought out a little white cake with candles and my name written on it. Then she got over the intercom and led the whole
Vance Mercedes factory in a rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The song, like my retirement, was a bit forced. But some of my engineering friends brought gifts. “How about this!” cried Doogie Sims, brandishing a stainless steel
Sabatier meat cleaver high in the air. I pretended to cringe in fear, then we laughed. Cleve Weathers brought me a bottle of Laugavulin Scotch with a red bow tied to the cork. “I thought they’d have to drag you out of the labs in a body bag.” Everyone laughed.
Some of the other boys chipped in on a titanium ratchet set; the guys on the assembly line got together and framed a poster of the 1933 Crimson Tide team
218 at the Rose Bowl, the one with the dapper young Paul Bryant standing in the third row. These were gifts tailored to my enthusiasms.
“Gee guys, I don’t know what to say.” Handshakes went all round. In one of them a new guy, Uva, a kid with a metallurgy degree from Hamburg, slipped me something, a small disk. He gave me a wink as I slipped it in my pocket.
Here is a secret about the future. One day we will live in our cars. One set of keys for both home and automobile. I know because I design them: cars, buses, the shadowy tractor-trailers that hover for a mile or two in your blind spot and inexplicably disappear. I design them to run, not only on electricity and polonium, but on dreams, moods, states-of-mind. I pay special attention to spatial relations, ergonomics, the marriage of mood and structure.
My cars make you feel like you’re driving a cathedral.
Picture this. It begins on a cold day in my hometown, Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, near the banks of the Black Warrior River. It is cold even for January, an unnatural mechanical cold. There is a thin rime of black ice on the roads and the air carries with it the bitter freon chill of an old refrigerator running itself into a state of absolute despair. As the mute rhetoric of the super-8 reveals, the Bear
Bryant Funeral Train is over ten miles long and at its maximum width spans the latitude of eight lumbering Pace Arrow recreation vehicles. The sixty-mile stretch of road is literally packed with mourners. For those of you too young to remember, the setting is the year nineteen hundred and eighty-three, in the old
219 petrol age—anno domini as we used to say in school, when I was but a lad of nine.
The trouble all started a couple of months ago when my boss Hans called me into his office. By then most of the work on the funeral train was done.
“Sorry, Sonny,” said Hans. “But it’s time for the old dead to make room for the new dead.”
I have spent most of my life working as an engineer for Daimler-Chrysler in the Vance factory on the edge of Tuscaloosa. When I first began working here fresh out of college, we made SUV’s, the M-class, and later on the more eco- friendly hydrogen cell M-80 and M-81 models. I’ve made a lot of money for the
Germans over the years. But when Hans told me it was time for me to fade, I didn’t kick. I had a multimillion dollar 401K filled with company stock, and it was clear Hans had troubles.
“Hans . . .you don’t think it was me, do you?” There had been some recent problems with corporate theft. Designs for the new solar tractors had turned up missing. And on top of that, someone was tampering with top secret files from the
CAD labs. Heads had to roll. “You know it’s those bastards at Disney again?” I said.
Hans was a little pink man with pale blue eyes and a white crew cut that gave one the impression he had been bred for the express purpose of a laboratory experiment. “Shhhh.” Hans held his fingers to his lips. “The walls have mice.”
220 Really the cars are just part of my job. My real passion is for trains. I used to collect them, first electric model replicas like the Dixie Flyer and the Silver
Eagle Express, then the digital choo-choos I downloaded into the wallpaper of my workstation. In college, I took a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Alabama, and when I got the job here at the Vance factory I was sent to
Germany for six months to be trained in their new interdisciplinary psychic architecture program. There we learned how to use the CAD graphics systems to sculpt new automotive designs. We used digital trains all the time to rearrange information in artistic ways. One of our first assignments was to take a medieval diagram of the great chain of being, lay it on its side and rearrange its links. You could let the whole story of creation unfold like a Mardi Gras parade: it was a grand march of ass-shaking seraphim and garden slugs, cabbages and kings, bears and men.
When I was very young, my parents did their parental duty and took me to
Orlando to visit Disney World, which for them was kind of like making a pilgrimage to Mecca. In those days, Orlando was the holy city of the middle class.
While waiting in line for tickets to Space Mountain, a man just getting off the ride had a heart attack. He wasn’t an old man, maybe forty, but even I noticed his face was kind of green as he lumbered out of the darkness of the subterranean roller coaster. I thought he was simply going to vomit as he staggered toward one of the overflowing garbage cans. His left arm fluttered up as he leaned on the trash barrel for support. Then all of a sudden, as if he had been gunned down by a
221 sniper, the man lurched forward and fell over, spilling discarded Cokes and funnel cakes everywhere.
When the paramedics arrived one of them examined the man. He turned to his partner and shouted, “Massive MI! What if he doesn’t make it?”
His partner was already rubbing the paddles of the defibrillator together.
“You know the rules. That can’t happen. Not inside the park.” Then they shocked him and the victim of the roller coaster’s body arched with electricity.
Around them a crowd had gathered.
Snow White and Goofy looked on in horror.
CAD is an acronym for computer-aided-drafting, and it is a friend to architects, engineers, and landscapers everywhere. In the seventeenth-century
Descartes developed analytic geometry, which holds that any point on a plane can be specified by a pair of numbers, what are now called coordinates. Points, lines, and arcs could be described by mathematical equations expressed in terms of X and Y. Then in the middle of the twentieth century, the American military funded the development of several guidance systems for rockets and other such weapons.
These guidance systems became the models for early computers built by IBM. In
1959 IBM and GM set out to build a series of computers that could help them design cars, and in 1961 engineers working on this collaborative project discovered how to create crosshairs on the monitor.
222 “It’s not just you, Sonny. We are changing all the personnel in the CAD labs. It’s become too dangerous for you there. You’re better off puttering around on a golf course.”
“I’m agoraphobic.”
“Don’t make this hard on me.”
Since the end of the second World War, the brass at Disney had held a grudge against the Germans. The Nazi propaganda machine had attacked Walt & company as products of a sick American society that glorified vermin, and Disney responded by funneling millions of entertainment dollars into the American war machine and providing American G.I.’s with Mickey Mouse wrist watches with which to synchronize their missions.
Daimler-Benz merged with Chrysler years ago, and now that Mercedes was as American as apple pie these grudges were no longer supposed to exist. But there were old men in smoke-filled rooms in Pomerania and Uruguay, kept alive with gene therapy and artificial hearts, whose memories stretched deep into the past. When Chrysler-Benz a few years ago bought out Anheuser-Busch, which owned Busch Gardens and Six-Flags, we were making it clear to Disney we were ready to compete with them on their own turf. Many people like me, adept at designing mood-altering rides, were set to work building theoretical roller- coasters, concepts for theme park attractions.
“Be honest, Hans, the mice are gunning for something in the psychic architecture office?”
“Are you still working on the Funeral Train project?”
223 I nodded. Then I remembered to say, “Yes.” In case Hans’s office was bugged. Somewhere out there those large ears were listening. Hans had a plan. A draw play.
“Kill it.”
For sure, the Bear Bryant Funeral Train surpassed the jangling military cavalcade that escorted Jeff Davis into the netherworld. The Davis Train started on the steps of the New Orleans City Hall and ended at his sarcophagus, which lay within the gates of the Metarie Cemetery. That was a mere four-mile procession. Many in the parade carried floral arrangements woven into images of cannons, Confederate battle flags, and sabers. But it was hot that summer and no matter how pretty the flowers, their sweet perfume could not hide the stench of
Davis’s putrefaction.
In the Bryant era, ours was a time less of pomp and circumstance and more of heroic joy. No longer did we live within the dispensation of the lost cause. When we put the old man Bryant into the ground, we did it in the epic spirit of Vikings.
The disk in my pocket turned out to be a simple video reel, a digitized translation of the original Mancewitz film. Since the Mannen Commission declassified a few years ago, I had probably seen it a hundred times: on the news, spliced into movies about conspiracy theories, run on a continuous loop at the
University of Alabama’s Dionysian homecoming pep rallies where one watched
224 the video on a huge screen placed between the Denny Chimes clock tower and a raging bonfire. These pep rallies had all the mystery and magic of a midnight book burning, the air charged with the smell of sweat, sex, and mentholated hash as we burned the visiting team’s mascot in effigy and watched the funeral procession of our greatest coach on the big screen. The kid knew that the
Mancewitz original was the template for the Funeral Train; now he wanted me to give him the finished story.
“What are you going to do when you retire?” Uva asked me in his dead, flat, perfect English.
Often in daydreams I have pondered what I would have done with my life if I didn’t spend all my time in the lab testing the structural integrity of the latest
DC hydrogen cells and solar tractors on my network station. “With my first pension check, I am going to put a down payment on a vintage Airstream trailer with a 300-semillon gas combustion engine and 1.7 gallon flush toilet, and follow the Crimson Tide to all the great cities of the SEC. I will visit the General
Neyland dogwood orchards of Knoxville, the celestial Huey P. Long Stadium in
Baton Rouge. I want to go to Georgia and see the obelisk of Bobby Dodd. Old fart kind of stuff.”
“You know you have other options.”
That’s when the kid laid it on me. The offer included wealth, nubile women, and asylum within the walls of the Magic Kingdom. He even hinted that immortality was not out of the question.
225 The crosshairs changed everything. All of a sudden it was possible to make countless modifications on a single design, whether it be on a car, house, assembly line, or a rose garden. By the end of the last century, we were capable of designing three-dimensional objects as well as knowing all the durable physical characteristics of such an object. One could build a virtual bridge on the computer and know exactly how much weight it could support, exactly how much wind resistance it could withstand, and so on.
This means we can design a car and never build an expensive prototype, just press a button and send it directly into mass production. On the other hand, it’s now also cost- effective to make customized cars specifically tailored for your personality, your lifestyle, your idiosyncrasies. I can design that special car to make a stylish exit from your high school graduation, or that perfect pearly white land cruiser to get you from the wedding chapel to Niagara Falls. I can even design a car for when you leave this life. Think of it—a special hearse, just for you.
“My father cried,” I told Uva. “When I was invited to be part of the Bryant funeral, he was so proud.” Up until that time, my father had never had much use for me. I was what other children referred to in those days as a “sissy” and therefore a dire disappointment to the old man. I was a fastidious little blue-eyed snot with precious blond curls. At the age of nine, all I wanted to do was play with my choo-choos. But it was my presence the Governor requested in the
226 funeral, and I was henceforth transformed in my father’s estimation. “The state needed children to act as mutes, like in a Dickens novel.” I was given a little black suit. It had crushed black velvet lapels and a top hat onto which a long black bow had been fixed to the band in the back. “The sleeves were too long, but I loved it.
A funeral makes you feel so dignified, especially when you’re a kid.”
There is a cut in the film. The film reopens. The lens focuses on a mighty team of mules, each standing twenty hands high. They have been exported from a farm in Chattanooga to pull a green cotton wagon behind the hooded Appalachian sin eaters. From the look of them these mules are monsters, ears flat, milky black- blue eyes, vapor pouring from their near- perfect round nostrils. The green cotton wagon contains several old women. Even though it’s freezing, they wave LO, I
KNOCK AT THE DOOR church fans in front of their faces.
It is now the lack of sound that captures it all so perfectly. The withered lips mouthing the Pha, Sew, La notes to “Amazing Grace.”
“Who are these women?” asks Uva.
“The wagon full of old women represents Bryant’s childhood among the hardworking and religious,” I say. “It is a little known fact that Bryant’s mother never attended any of his games because they were too worldly, not even when he played high school ball in Arkansas.”
“The train works on an allegorical level?”
“Allegorical, historical, anagogical, literal. They all collapse into one point at the end.”
227 “Ah, you would call this closure.”
“Something like that.”
It is the lack of music that makes these women beautiful. It is the same power exerted over us from ancient ruins or Roman statues with missing heads. I wish Uva were somewhere else, and I was alone in the cloister of the labs.
Silence. Sometimes I wish I could write a poem of nothing else.
For over a year now, the Funeral Train has played in a continuous loop on my CAD station. Downloaded and refined in the circuits, in some otherworldly distillation process, the train is in constant flux, always revising itself. I have loaded all the images from The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band album cover and added them into the matrix of randomly selected mourners.
“Up until 1983, Coach Bryant’s was the largest funeral procession the postbellum South has ever seen.”
“Bigger than Martin Luther King?
“Oh yes”
“Than Elvis?”
“Without a doubt.” What Uva failed to understand was this: Coach Bryant lived in the pre-merger era. He was a demagogue, and he carried a cult-of- personality aura similar to that of Hitler and Ghandi. “When he was alive, his very presence inspired . . . terror and joy.”
“As does the film.”
228 “Maybe. I think of the film more like Greek tragedy. A poetic recreation of the mythic past.”
“Pity and fear, then?”
“Maybe. Maybe just fear”
In the old days, no one in Tuscaloosa drove a Mercedes except for maybe a few divorce lawyers. These were dark times before the sports utility vehicle.
Tuscaloosa had no smiling, bilingual executives like Hans or Uva, no need for
Montessori daycare or art galleries. “In this town, up until the death of the Bear, all we needed was football to be happy.” I felt myself getting a little misty with nostalgia.
Oh how we had loved to watch our beautiful sons smash into one another, crushing knuckles and breaking ribs. We were fascinated with the elusive quality of youth. “And the cheerleaders, what angels,” I cried out, suddenly.
In my mind I summoned up a picture of a blond in a crimson skirt, a crimson A on her breast, her arms raised in victorious salute, pits shaved smooth as a pane of glass, and then I pictured what she might look like if inserted into the
Train.
Uva looked startled. “We wouldn’t use the Train to hurt anyone, you know. We want to use it to help us build a new coaster. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You don’t want Hans to kill it, do you?”
229 I thought about the man dying in the mouth of Space Mountain, the unholy crowd gawking around him, doing nothing, waiting for the paramedics to shock him back to life.
After the retirement party’s Cokes and cake, I went back to my cubicle where I proceeded to test the wind resistance on one of our new electromagnetically refrigerated transport trucks. Only I could hear Doogie Sims talking to the new kid, Uva, in whispers. I could tell there was a general sense of agreement in their murmurs. Was Doogie in on it? A double agent?
“Did you ask him if it were true, about the Funeral Train?”
“What?”
“You know he was there. When he was a kid.”
“At the funeral?”
“In the funeral,” said Doogie.
The film begins again on the steps of the First Methodist Church of
Tuscaloosa, with a group of stalwart looking pallbearers, former linemen, loading the mahogany coffin into a mammoth hearse with long black fins. There are little black curtains on the doors, and on the side a window unit air-conditioner. The
Bear had loved air conditioning.
“As I recall, there had been no elaborate funeral oration within the church before we buried him in Birmingham.” No eulogizing. No choir. Only a few tears and a little organ music that wafted from the corners of the packed church. Closed
230 circuit TV cameras recorded this part of the funeral, as many other mourners paid their respect at nearby churches and watched the service on wide screen TVs.
“Why bury him in Birmingham?”
“His wife, Mary Harmon, her family was from there.” But the real funeral wasn’t in Birmingham or in the church but outside on the streets. The eulogy was the unfolding parade itself, a living Bayeaux tapestry unfurled down University
Boulevard. A wreath was hung on the Cadillac’s back door as we began our long slow journey into the city.
Behind the hearse stands a congregation of Appalachian sin eaters in black cassocks. Like many Southern demagogues such as Wallace and Long, the Bear had a taste for strong drink and fast women. It was the job of the sin eaters to consume these paltry sins along with the more formidable transgressions caused by pride. The names of these sins have been written down on little slips of paper and baked in several pans of cornbread, which the sin eaters will feast upon as they commit Bryant’s body to the grave. These sin eaters are broad stout men, well-fed on the weakness of others.
“It was their job to carry us, all the little mutes, on their shoulders.”
Uva nods as if he understands what I am talking about. But how could he?
There is a cut in the super-8 and for a moment the terminal goes black.
The Bear Bryant Funeral Train moved with the quiet dignity displayed at all the great obsequies. Martin Luther King’s hundred thousand mourners in
231 Atlanta showed no more meet and humble reverence when they lowered their leader into the earth, than did the Bryant mourners. The Bryant procession was much bigger and more grand than even the glitzy, white Cadillac flotilla that carried Elvis through the chartered streets of Memphis. There were no food vendors or T-shirt salesmen in the Bryant Train. Certainly there were no florists along the highway, only the fans, nine hundred thousand of them holding signs that read “We miss you Coach.”
As a reporter from the Tuscaloosa News wrote the next day, “The Bear
Bryant funeral train was a cheerless tailgate party, with no food or libation to warm the crowd.”
The next car in the train tells how the Bear won his name. A grizzly, on loan from the Birmingham Zoo, sits next to a farm boy in overalls, who holds the bear firmly on a leash.
“Bryant earned his name in 1925 at the state fair when he agreed to wrestle a carnival bear. He was trying to win some money and impress a girl.”
“And he won?”
The grizzly rides its parade float calmly, almost sleepily, next to the serious farm boy.
“When it looked like the boy was going to beat the old, frazzled bear, the owner jerked off its muzzle and it mauled him.”
232 After the boy and bear comes the University of Alabama’s Million Dollar
Band.
“I think I remember them playing a New Orleans dirge.”
“Dirge?”
“A funeral song. Something they must have picked up from of their trips to the Sugar Bowl.”
The drum major is dressed as a voodoo priest, the faces of his band mates painted like skeletons. Then the parade floats decorated by the fraternities and sororities. Huge crepe paper elephants roll along the asphalt, each carrying flags reading “Roll Tide Roll” in their trunks.
Here comes the march of teams, car after car of aged football players, players from Maryland and Kentucky, players from Texas A&M. Finally the players from the Crimson Tide. Over forty teams in all, most of them wearing red jerseys. Those too fat to fit into their uniforms carry them under their arms.
Championship teams carry banners. So many of them pass by, after awhile it seems as if they are all the same team marching forward down the road, as well as backward through time, getting younger and younger as they progress forward.
It looks as if the super-8 is moving in both fast forward and reverse; the faces of the athletes glow with a sheen of ruined youth that has long since fallen away.
Behind them the majorettes twirl flaming batons. They seem to hover a millimeter or so above the spinning earth. Then come the fans in their vans, RV’s, and mobile homes.
233 Behind the parade of fans comes the motorcade of foreign ambassadors: parliamentarians from The Hague, senators from the Knesset, Politburo members.
There is a caravan of oil sheiks from Yemen with fine barbered beards and almond eyes. The choleric Soviet Prime Minister Andropov is there, clearly drunk, and so is the black- bearded writer Solzhenitsyn down from Vermont. Idi
Amin in a sky blue El Dorado convertible with leopard skin interior waves at the crowd. From the Sergeant Pepper crowd of mourners, only John Lennon and
Johnny Weismuller wave back.
The eldest son of Ho Chi Minh, Bien Pheu, rides near the end of the train.
He has come to America to research Civil War reenactments at Gettysburg and
Antietam, and has stumbled upon a most impressive ceremony.
I point Bien Pheu out to Uva. “When Ho died, his funeral was just like this.”
“Here on the caboose of the train,” I tell Uva, “is the greatest football fan in the world at the time. In his own country he was something of a God, where he was revered and worshiped.”
There is a look of recognition on Uva’s face. Then fear.
Of course Uva had offered me a bribe. Just as Hans had said he would.
And I accepted, just as Hans had instructed.
234 Several barbarous dwarves in Ray Ban sunglasses run alongside the last convertible, one hand held to the transistor radios in their ears. The car’s diplomatic flag flutters in the wind.
There is something majestic about it, even now, especially since I already know what is about to happen. Even Uva knows what is about to happen, though he hopes it will not.
Muddied sunlight reflects off the hood of the car, momentarily blinding the camera.
The massive dignified head tips to the side, his ears as big as satellite dishes; the unwavering plastic smile is now almost vertical. The official concubine can’t stop waving. She is not as solemn as the rest of the funeral train, in her polka dots and pink pillbox hat.
The camera shakes, turns sideways, rights itself.
The crowd scatters. The concubine clutches the string of pearls at her throat.
Did he scream behind the smile when the first bullet pierced his wrist and smashed into his pelvis?
Mothers fall on children.
Husbands on wives.
Aleister Crowley falls on top of the Vargas Girl.
235 Duck and cover.
The dwarves draw their Walthers, pointing them in all directions. Only there isn’t enough time to discern that the shots are coming from the clock tower, from the carillon on the quadrangle, Denny Chimes.
Another shot and the entire train begins to fall like a row of dominos toward the hearse, which by now is halfway to Birmingham.
It is rumored that at this time, the driver of the hearse hit his brakes and the Bear’s coffin spilled out the back door and slid along the slick black ice. The team of demonic mules attempted to run in different directions, toppling the old women out of the green cotton wagon and splitting the yoke apart.
“Halt!” Just at that moment, Hans’s security team bursts into the room.
Uva screams, “No please . . . I don’t know how . . .” But the captain of the guard smashes him in the face with a billy club, and the poor metallurgist falls to the ground like a rag doll. From this point on, things won’t go well for Uva.
The third slug from the bolt action is the head shot. This is the part that becomes more unbelievable each time I watch it. The massive mouse skull splits apart like a plaster cast, leaving exactly one half of the unwavering smile. I back up the film and call up the crosshairs on the monitor and lock the XY coordinates on the skull.
236 “Watch this,” I tell Hans. “I added a little fuck you here at the end.”
Hans beams. “Fine job, Sonny.” He pats me on the back.
I hit play as the security guards drag Uva’s limp body into the elevator. I am hoping to pinpoint the very instant that everything changes. Everything that came before this moment must be reconfigured in our imagination as leading up to this event. Everything that happens after can only be perceived as a result of this taking place.
The mouse’s skull splits apart again. Neither of us can turn away.
The camera jerks back and to the left.
Back and to the left.
237