Assorted Fire Events: Stories

THE GESTURE HUNTER

I’M INTERESTED in how people go about their daily lives. You know, how they bide their time, what they fill all that time up with. Not the big motions but the little ones, I suppose: someone hanging clothes on an old-fashioned line, breaking with the convention of the gas dryer, the fluid motion of her arms lifting the sheets, a wooden pin between her teeth, the sway of the line, laden with windblown sheets, in relation to how she bends up to it in greeting; a guy at the gas station helping the full-service customers, his foot on the black slab of rubber bumper, leg jittering hard as he pumps, the car rising and falling gently while his oblivious eyes stay cocked to some lost point on the horizon and he plucks at the stains under the arms of his green sweatshirt. I’m a gesture hunter. I seize moments. I care fully about them.

It was one of those days typical to our town, which is along the Hudson, just twenty-odd miles up from the city. I mean that the day had settled into the town and the town into the day — clear and sunny with just an edge of cool to the wind, which ruffled the surface of the river white and was strong enough to cause a few waves to curl up but not really break. (Most of the waves on the Hudson have a certain pathetic quality: weak-lipped, shaky. So do the boats, working the strange wind patterns, mainly from the north, trying to buck the tidal currents, coming about and then landing in irons in mysteriously dead winds beneath the Tappan Zee Bridge; nothing fluid or graceful about any of it.) It’s odd that I can’t tell exactly if it’s the day coming into the town or the town coming into the day when I start out on these searches, especially in the morning — I start early sometimes — when the light is still low and silvery. But as I said, this was, it seemed, nothing but a typical day on all accounts, except that it was morning and I had started out rather early. I can’t say now that I felt at that moment — as I made my first slow sweep through the center of town, taking Broadway (doesn’t every town near the city have its own futile Broadway?), driving my usual five miles an hour — that I felt any sense of betrayal; I mean that I did not think the day had anything betraying in it destined for me. But days do that. A day can betray you. You invest in it and it gives something back you didn’t expect. I saw from the corner of my eyes a man leaving the police station; he had a slow, elderly walk — very much like mine — a pale yellow shirt, and one of those crushable canvas hats you might use for fishing; he was moving with his slow gait down the wheelchair ramp. Along the other side of the street, in front of one of the many antique shops (those scandalous resellers and repackagers of the past) that have given our town a place on the map, someone, lifting something, was halfway through the door. I saw just the back end of the man: his Wrangler jeans, his hip, and the edge of whatever he was carrying, dark oak maybe, and the buffed metal frame of the door. Nothing worth noting. A gesture, certainly, but not the kind I wanted. I needed the whole thing, united and graceful and, most of all, full of revelation, stark wonderful revelation; a young man carrying a table into a shop didn’t cut it. Ahead, the light was green; farther ahead, maybe a block or two, one of those big, bulky, stupid emerald four-wheel beasts that roam our streets.

Let me here just make some notes, add some things: you see this is near the end of the century and certain movements of small towns as I used to know them, as I knew them growing up, are waning. When I was a boy in Galva, Illinois, there were wakening gestures to a town. All towns had them. They were infused with grace. Mr. Bursell of the dry goods store would waken in his little apartment over his store — moving with the deliberate, uncaring slowness of a permanent bachelor, lifting the spilled flower of his blue dungarees around his waist, looping the belt slowly as he looked out his window, across the street where Ellen Barton was sweeping the sidewalk in front of her husband’s movie theater, The State. Ah, that gesture, the broom wedded to her arm and her arm to the broom and the swish motion, elbow bent, and the bits of ticket stub and tissue and popcorn being forced forward into the gutter. Her cool honey hair up in a clip. The bleached pleats of her skirt around her ankles. Bursell would study that movement for a moment, fingers on his belt, and then make his way downstairs, going out the front, so he could crank the awning open over his store to hold the morning sunlight (later in the afternoon he’d do the same in reverse), taking the worn wooden spool that steadied the bar with one hand while with the other he had to crank. His cranking would lead the awning, tart green and white stripes, to open gracefully — his work taking shape and form over his head. That’s how it used to be in a town that wasn’t betrayed yet by the onslaught that would eventually take so many of the finer gestures out of our hands; stolen from us, taken into the innards of so many machines.

We are the graceless and dumbfounded, insane with our own insatiable desire for another time and place and a sense of movement, we gesture hunters. One movement of a tongue over a dry lip will do for us; a women in the graveyard weeping at the foot of her husband’s grave, her navy blue skirt hiked up over her calves, and the flat worn soles of her shoes the color of dry sand — that’s just it, all we need, all we strive for in this world, nothing more or less. We have our modus operandi, our techniques, some preferring to await the passing of some perfect movement, to sit all day, day upon day, waiting. It’s a heartless means of searching, I think, to let the movement of the town go about you, but there are those, my fellows, who are content to work that way; and I say, go your way in peace. In town there are two such operators, though their intentions I have to doubt somewhat; their desires are not so pure as mine. With his hair gone and blotches of Vietnam — napalm, some say — purpling his scalp, Hank sits patiently, welded to a bench, but his searches are invalidated by his heaving sucks from a tall-boy, the paper sack tight around the top of the bag and wet from condensation. And there is an old hag nicknamed Boop — a la Betty — who smells of urine and wears stained nylon stockings and tattered dresses but doesn’t bring even the slightest glance from passerbys as she maintains her place on the bench in front of the ice-cream shop, making her sputtering, inane sounds, clucks and quacks and hisses and an occasional word or two, maybe searching or maybe not. It’s hard to know what to think of her, and I seldom do think of her if I can help it, but I do know that maybe at one time she was a gesture hunter, too, and went about it firmly and with all the good intentions one might expect. Long ago, when time was different and we were going about our business in town, she was the big realtor (and I, at the bank, the largest lender of funds). Then, as now, it was the duty of a realtor to bend and flex her personality to match those of a potential buyer, even going so far as to match him gesture for gesture when necessary: she might be standing in an inelegant little Cape Cod, with a bad roof of sagging rafters and a main beam ridden with termites, and still she’d have to throw her arms wide in one of those open embraces and take a deep chest-heaving breath of air as if it were the freshest in the world to match the gesture of the buyer, who, coming up from the city for a summer day of looking around, had happened into her office just to see what was available and, after seeing the Cape Cod, felt suddenly stunned by the idea of living in “the country.” So with Boop it was hard to know; she’d stolen so many gestures, hugged them to her, that maybe she was looking for one of her own that had become lost out there. That’s the basic nature of any of us hunters. We want above all to find what is rightfully ours.

Twice I’ve been consecrated by pure gestures — just twice if you discount the third incident. Once I took my late and long-lost son, Stevie, fishing up in Massachusetts; the Chesterfield River, rocky and hard-wading, day gone, faded, that blistering darkness pulling down midsummer slow over the water. We were holding out for the risers that were destined to come because there were spinners overhead, lowering themselves with the darkness like flecks of snow refusing to meet the earth. They were doing their copulation rite midair, and soon they would hit the water to lay their eggs. (I have not fished since that day, nor will I fish again.) Airfucks, we called them, one of those embarrassed dirty jokes between father and son that has a bitter taste now that he is gone and what was filthy between us is as dark as soot to my memory. It’s all memory, and perhaps that’s what makes the pain I caused him at that moment — just a sharp little barb in his wrist — stand out so acutely, and makes the gesture that followed his pain remain the cleansed and holy one (of the two), purified by time and memory and dust and all of that. He was working this deep oily pool that caught the night long before it fell, along a shale ledge, lounging his back against a large rock, casting and recasting while I worked my own pool along the other side. My backcast was caught by a single uprising of night breeze, the only one that night, as far as I recall, and to compensate I had to work my line sidelong, and then there was the sharp, startled sound of his voice cracking, returning to his child-voice, as I hooked him in the smooth white flesh of his wrist, not knowing I’d done so and thinking I was snagged, yanking thoughtlessly, just once, just once, but the pain I caused him is eternal and everlasting because and only because of his voice at that moment, mingled and mixed with the rabble of water over stone. You see, all this led up to the gesture pure and sweet, of his face, a large face, so much my face, smiling at the pain and flicking my fly back, swiping the blood from his wrist. Blood I couldn’t see and will never see. It was the flick and the smile, barely visible, maybe not visible at all to me in the falling darkness, shadow-laden, deep and brooding, the woods pressing in, the sides of the gorge seeming to swell up into the woods. I had caused him sudden and inexplicable pain, and he had flicked it off, a simple gesture that continued in one fluid motion to his cast and his line being laid out over that dark pool. Later, the trout rose to take his fly and spun him into that wonderful motion of working a fish, force against force — not a pure gesture (there were only two) but worth saving nonetheless. When I learned that my son had been killed in Vietnam, taken by pains that must have flowered and exploded from back to front, blood pluming out his chest where the bullet left, I imagined that flick of the wrist, and I smiled and vowed to worship it and perhaps one day equal it. I vowed to find just once more a motion as graceful, just once more, on the surface of this earth peopled by human souls going about their lives, to find a gesture that equaled that of my son in the stream a year and a half before he died, or that of his sweet little wet body in a tub, the scent of baby soap …

That day, now, returning to that day with the morning sky opening up and the white haze down near the edge of the river, having passed that man going into the antique store, the stoplight changing to amber, then red, with that strange slowness only I seem to notice. The police were on to me. They knew about my search and often pulled me over. There was nothing illicit in my circling route, down Broadway five or six blocks and then back around, close to the river, where the new housing developments hunched and cluttered. On some days I’d settle myself into the bench in front of the library to examine movements and gestures in a small quadrant: I’d see good things there occasionally, the passing motions and gestures of many, but rarely anything close to a pure gesture. Only once, almost, catching sight of two folks bedecked in khaki pants and matching navy polo shirts, working their way across the street with that retired stride you see up here, proud and purposeful lopes of the legs slightly bent and distorted by hidden pains and aberrations, bones brittle and weakening; these two were spry on their feet, and their gesture held me for weeks, sustained me in my search, filled my soul with bubbles of possibilities. She held him as they crossed, a light little clutch, her fine fingers curled around one of his, which one not mattering the least to me, because in a good gesture it is the gesture itself that demolishes and makes irrelevant the smaller details; the whole thing becomes a movement, a blemish, an act unto itself apart from the particulars. In the hopes of more, I thought about following them, but then I knew better. To hunt gestures you have to let them find you, blowing across the street like dead leaves: a man lingers over something in the window, his hands in his pockets in a particular way; a young child waves silently with a subdued manner to nothing at all as she passes in the back seat of a blue Chevy Nova, her eyes dogged and lonely.

That morning when the traffic light changed I made my way forward through the intersection, looking from one side to another, as is my habit. Just past the corner of Broadway and Elm, I felt that strange sensation one gets looking from a main street down a side street, a street leading down to the river, the haze of light as it bleeds from the water, the close proximity of the dusty brick walls, the loneliness that such side streets sing. Long ago, back in Illinois, I used to stop and pause at those places. It was as if the soul had lifted up from the town and left it a husk, empty and void. The breeze lifted ever so slightly the leaves of the one poplar in front of the library building, the benches empty. The police were behind me.

Did I say it was a strange day? Did I say the soul had lifted from the town, flung her wings over the confluences and diversions of the Hudson River? Did I say the dusty bones of the dead lay over the sidewalks like cleaned ash, the talc remains of chins and teeth and brows?

My search was going along fine as I passed the bookstore, where a mother pushed a stroller over the curb, working her elbows to get the front wheels up gently so as not to disturb the baby inside, a small white form floating amid blankets. Past her, at the bus stop, in front of the defunct playhouse, shredded posters quivering, two black women stood with that strange lonely anticipation I always see in those waiting for the bus to the George Washington Bridge: the hopelessness, their eyes gazing down the street with such longing. Past them, on the left-hand side, someone was hunched over, tying his laces with the slow deliberation of a child, as if learning the knot for the first time — certainly a fine gesture but over before I passed. He became a businessman in a long, lean, blue suit, straightening himself up, adjusting the fall of his pant cuffs, looking once to check his black polished oxfords.

To delineate the obvious, to consecrate that scene, the pure gesture, that before me appeared on the short narrow steps, three in all, leading into the front door of the funeral parlor, covered by the heavy shadows of the large pin oak growing out front: They were there out front of Olsen’s establishment. A man and a woman embraced by grief. Embracing. The man in a sports coat and blue jeans with that stooped expression, slightly bent beneath some gravitational weight of his own grief; the woman in a long violet dress tightening then loosening against her hips as the breeze rippled the fabric — those hips I’ll never forget, I suppose, jutting lightly against his own, as much a part of the embrace as anything. She bent and shifted with the great forces against her the way someone on the deck of a boat must adjust himself to a changing horizon — it was right there before me, the gyroscope of their pain holding the gesture, making it as pure as carved stone, petrified forever, the brass rails holding up the canopy overhead, green-and-white-striped. Suddenly a blinding purplish brilliance lit the front of the parlor afire. I was past. It was behind me. That beloved, graven gesture — near perfect — was gone, faded off into some infinite point along the lines of my life, dissolved by time and by the human movement. I felt then, acutely, and for the first time in years, the sorrow of my loss. I headed around the block, hoping the gesture would still be there when I returned. It was the kind of frail, stupid hope that can only betray. The man and the women by this time would have shifted into some other position. He’d be smoking cigarette against the brass rail; she’d have her neck bent as she studied the undersides of the leaves. Ah, the mutual sadness of loss, the dead and gone. I went around the block anyway.

By the time I returned, traffic was clogged and men and women with headset radios were guiding crowds. This time I saw the klieg lights set up on the side of the street opposite Olsen’s establishment, and the snaking electrical cables draped over the curbing, and the bored and lonely extras with their unreal eyes, chewing catered bagels from fold-up tables near the library. Down one dusty side street trailers were parked head to head. It was an impingement on my town’s soul, a final affront. The town had given itself over to the unreal. The unreal was stopping traffic, attracting gawkers. Gawkers were more concerned with the unreal than with their own lives. The work of my later life was coming to a head. Was I to be betrayed or to be a betrayer? Were there not obligations to the dead that had to be taken into consideration, punishments to be doled out? Was it not a crime to grieve, falsely grieve, and in that false bereavement to create what is essentially a perfect human gesture? What else was I to do? What choice did I have? I aimed. The wheel jittered under fingertips.

The curb offered up firm resistance, but my speed surmounted it. I struck the camera head-on. It lifted skyward, blocky and heavy. With a death, I made hallow the setting in which the perfect gesture took place.

And so you see my acts were not, as some have said, those of a madman. The police found no skid marks and drew their conclusions. The trial, as dictated by our fair Constitution, was quick and thorough. That third perfect gesture is there forever, where all gesture hunters keep these things, engraved on the rock of my eyelids like some ancient petroglyph. I can’t get rid of it no matter how false it was. For at least a few blocks it gave me back the sorrow that was rightfully mine.

I hadn’t planned in any manner to kill the director, despite the fact that death has come into my life in many ways and forms to take from me the one who provided me with the perfect gestures that, held still on the back of my eyelids, remain my salvation: my son’s gesture in the stream, the heavy wash of water against our waders, and that other one in which he was in the tub, gleaming sheens of water over his smooth baby belly, the pink whiteness of his pure skin and baby fat, the lifting of his tiny hands to splash water, not knowing perhaps that it was water at all but just a warm semblance of material wrapped around his body, because at that time his eyes were still new and hard-pressed to focus on anything and had that brown-black fuzziness of the unknowing. That was all it was, a simple splashing of another element while I sat with him on the rim of the blue tub. It seized me and sent me reeling, knowing full well that what I was seeing would never repeat itself and was certainly the most beautiful sight in the world. The water boiled up around his fist. The slick oily light slid off his skin. His smiling face looked up at me, and his tiny fleck of hair lay pasted to his scalp while my wife, behind me in the hall, softly folded a towel over her arm and outside the summer air moved, tainted with lavender.