Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories

High-Water Railers

THE PIER SHOOK UNDER HIS FEET, WRAPPED IN SOCKS AND SANDALS. He wore huge gabardine shorts and was blue-white in the legs. Yeah, our time’s about over, and I was counting the things I hadn’t done last night, things I regretted, sins of omission; omitted to sin, I mean, ha! He was going on. Lewis, ninety-one, had watched some four-foot square of water for three years. He was still intrigued by what the lake gave up. Storms had been rough through the late winter and spring. This was an oxbow lake. The flooding from the great continental river washed splendid oddities into the channel, some of them carnivorous, some of them simply bottom suckers of astounding girth, armored with scales of copper. Lewis shook with both palsy and wonder when fish this rare were dragged up or just spotted rolling.

His fine sea-size rig was cast out with a six-inch red and white bobber; two fathoms under was a hooked shrimp from a frozen bag he’d brought down. Lewis had a theory that with hurricanes — they’d had two just lately a hundred-fifty miles south — sea life pushed up into the high reaches of the river, then flooded even into this lake and Farte Cove. He considered himself an ichthyologist of minor parts and kept a notebook with responses to fish life in it. There were no entries or dates when he did not catch or witness interesting water life. Like a great many days in a man’s life, those days he’d just as soon did not occur at all. He wanted a lot of the exotic and a minimum of the ordinary.

Lewis turned and was deeply unimpressed by old Ulrich staggering onto the pier. This man featured himself a scientist or at least an aerocrat, though Lewis thought him a fraud afloat on a sea of wide misunderstanding. Ulrich was in the process of “studying” blue herons, loons and accipiters in flight and for some nagging reason was interested in the precise weight of everybody he met. He thought it happily significant that the old had lighter, hollower, more aerodynamic bones, such as birds had. Having been witness to the first German jet aircraft in the war, a specter he had never recovered from, he “drew on” this reflection time and again, apropos of almost zero, thought Lewis. Unfortunately, he had also been blown a goodly distance by Hurricane Camille in 1969. Ulrich was old then, but claimed also to be wiser in special “hurricane minutes” and inflicted this credential here and there, at any time, during his seminar at the end of the pier. There was no gainsaying the man with his “brief flight” and “hurricane minutes.” The body was preparing the elderly for the “flight of the soul,” said Ulrich. Why, he expected to weigh about thirty-five pounds when he died, just a bit of mortal coil dragged away protesting like a hare under an eagle.

Another annoyance to Lewis — who actually loved Ulrich; almost all the old loved each other at the end of the pier — was that Ulrich, eighty-nine, showed no signs of bad health even though he lit up one Kent after another. This, Ulrich attributed — wouldn’t it be — to a “scientific diet” such as that literally eaten by birds. The diet of birds was indicated come the senior years. A final annoyance was that Ulrich cherished the word acquit, as in “let me acquit myself” or “he acquitted himself well.” Though Lewis ignored this as often as possible, he wondered why Ulrich should think a person was perpetually on trial when he opened his mouth, especially given the blather that flew out Ulrich’s own. Ulrich, too, was interested in piscatorial life, though fish were “base and heavy,” mere “forage in the pastures of the deep.” Ignore, look away, pleaded Lewis to himself.

Many eutrophic lakes, their food chains unbalanced by man or nature, simply died. But this old oxbow had come back in the nineties. Bass, sunfish, perch, bluegill, gar, buffalo, carp, and now small alligators popped the surface. Big shad fled and recovered in shoals. Rare wading birds attended the shores and shallows. Hunted duck and geese veterans rested and paddled with only the great moccasins and turtles to fear. The water was a late-spring black, with sloughs going to tannin. Three unrecovered human bodies were somewhere out there, victims of March lightning. In a bad storm, the huge lake could imitate an inland sea, all three-foot whitecaps and evil sail-wrappers. It would also flood quickly and drive mink and nutria to the back roads, where one could make ladies’ coats from the roadkill.

Next, Sidney Farte, of the old cove family who owned the boat and bait house, came out, barely, humbled by shingles and roaring ulcers, giving a sniff of propriety to the pier, which he did not own but had watched for fifty-seven years through the replacement and repiling in the seventies. The man who’d had the benches and the rail fixed for the elderly was a kind man — Wooten — now dead and discussed only by that one inexorable trait of his, his kindness in little things and big. Nobody knew what experience had produced this saint, and his perfection attracted none of them, so terrible would be the strain, especially considering the fact that Wooten had not been stupid, not at all. Some said that he had been president of a small Baptist college, but for some reason nobody had ever directly put the question to him. There was a holy air about the man, no denying, that brooked none of your ordinary street questioning. Wooten never quoted anybody or any source. He spoke only for himself, and not very often. Such a man — well, even if something enormous and ugly had happened in his past, it would seem rude to know it. Wooten was a tiny man, maybe five-four, with snow-white hair that turned boyishly fore and aft in the wind. He stepped very softly. Next you knew, he was beside you, looking at what you were looking at in respectful quiet.

Ulrich had said that the lake was now Wooten’s college, but Wooten himself would never have expressed anything as pompous as that.

“The water looks so fresh and deep this morning!” Wooten would say, a curious sweet medicinal smell reaching you on his breath.

Sidney Farte did not care for his virtue, was made sullen by it, but did not dare attack “Cardinal Wooten” (as he called him under his breath) around the others. He was glad when the fellow passed on. Now Sidney could get back to the regular profanity of his observations. Sidney was having a bad time in his old age, but he rather adored his bad time. Also afflicted with serious deafness, he did not enjoy the reprieve from noise as other old people did, but hurled this way and that, certain that whispered conspiracies and revenges were afoot. The soreness in his chest predicted the weather, which Sidney inevitably pronounced rotten: tornadoes, more flooding and thunder, every kind of spiteful weather. A sunny day filled him with mild horror and suspicion. Sidney had endured lately a sorry, sorry thing, and all of them knew it. A male grandchild of his had won a scholarship to a mighty eastern university, Yale, and was the object of a four-year gloat by Sidney, who had no college. The young man upon graduation had come over to visit his grandfather for a week, at the end of which he pronounced Sidney “a poisonous, evil old man who ought to be ashamed of yourself.” This statement simply whacked Sidney flat to the ground. He was still trying to recover and was much more silent than in previous springs. Ulrich and Lewis both worried about him, used to his profanity as a sort of walking milieu against which they fished and breathed.

The other oldster of the core on the rail was late. This was Peter Wren, brother of the colonel who made Wake Island gallant against the Japanese and a chronic prevaricator whose lies were so gaudy and wrapped around they might have been a medieval tapestry of what almost or never happened. He had of course suborned the history of his brother and his constant perjuries held a real fear of the truth, lest the whole tissue of lies crumble when it came forward. It was getting where it seemed dangerous to risk even a simple declarative sentence about the weather or time of day, and Pete Wren was likely to misstate even that. “It’s really wanting to rain, you know. Must be near noon”—when the sky was full blue and the time was about ten, latest. People took him to be majorly misinformed, but it was not that: he lived in fear of rupture from the tangled web. So finally he came out with his expensive ultralight rig and crickets. Wren was a partisan of the bluegill, for which — it was heard — he held the state record, but he’d casually eaten the fish without registering it. He was breeding a special kind of mutant cricket in his wire keep that would take the record fish again. There were enormous bluegills in the lake, in fact, and even a liar could catch them. Wren had taken home a pound-and-a-quarter one late one evening, but he claimed it had interbred with a German trout and had disqualified itself.

“Morning, gents,” said Wren to the three at the rail. They waited for his maiden lie of the day. Something impossible about his sleep, perhaps.

“A car hit him and that queer just flew away,” he said.

“Say it again?” asked Lewis.

“Oh, I rented a video of Last Exit to Brooklyn last night. A queer ran out in the road, a car hit him, and that queer just flew straight up in the air away.”

“Could I see that?” asked Ulrich, intensely concerned with the flight of human beings.

“I might have lost the tape.”

“Already lost it, Wren?”

“It could be in there among my volumes of Shakespeare. I’ve got all ninety-five of his stories and plays. Given to me by my grandson, who just adores me.”

Though he meant nothing by it, Sidney Farte was insulted, recalling the anathema of his own grandson last spring. This began his day vilely, even lower.

“You diarrhea-mouth cocksucker,” he said.

“Here now, so early,” objected Lewis. A ninety-one-year-old man didn’t want to hear such filth announcing the day. That was the sort of thing they did in that vicious far-north horror, New York City. The saintly Wooten had established a certain spirit on the pier that was not recanted at his death. Sidney heard nothing beyond a direct blast in the ear, which Wren was determined to give him. He actually began feeling better now, recovering his purchase on the island of unconscious profanity that was his.

“Puts me in mind of Icarus,” said Ulrich.

“Like everything,” said Sidney. “Shit, I knew a rat once could fly. Throw that sumbitch cheese in the air. Shit in the air too.”

“You look thin today, Sidney. What’s your weight?” asked Ulrich, lighting another Kent.

He jumped into something running parallel in his brain: “Thing to do is wait out the pain. Most times it’ll pass of itself. Modern man has not let the body heal itself. The downfall was aspirin.”

“What in hell are you talking about?”

“Rock and roll kills a lot of men early. We know for a fact that the presence of rock and roll electrons in the air causes plane crashes. Some of that hip-hop stuff will take the wing right off your jumbo jet. Even makes cancer, too. They’re looking into it.”

“These people you say ‘looking into’ shit. Count ’em, it just about leaves only us on the pier that ain’t doing a survey.”

“It’s the age of high-priced nosiness all right,” said Lewis, whose bobber was going under as if a sucking thing were on. He let out an audible breath in sympathy. “Something’s on my shrimp, gentlemen.”

“I want to see this sea creature,” said Peter Wren, throat red with prevarication.

The huge bobber submerged and disappeared in the blackish green, down to legend they hoped, and the men hovered together into one set of eyes three hundred and twenty-three years old. The bobber came back up again, but Lewis raised the line and the shrimp was gone. Wren began rigging for bluegill, excited.

“A turtle or a gator’d bite shrimp,” said Sidney.

“I suspect sturgeon,” said Lewis. “They can breathe both salt and fresh. And they migrate long distances.”

“Your human being is made like the shark. If he quits moving and doing, he perishes,” said Ulrich.

“Now shark. I’ll eat any shark you catch raw,” said Wren. Though a liar, Wren was a man of some sartorial taste. He suddenly observed Ulrich with a jump. Ulrich wore a brown Eisenhower jacket over blue-striped polyester bell-bottom pants — something truly ghastly from the seventies, such as on a boulevarding pimp. Through a flashback of several connected untruths, Wren was visited by a haze of nausea, for everything wicked had happened to him in the seventies. He had lost his wife, his business; thieves had stolen his collection of guns. Music was provided by those skinny, filthy Lazaruses, the Rolling Stones. Carter had given away everything to the blacks and hippies; brought blue jeans to the White House. Every adult became a laughingstock and fool. Old Ulrich here was dressing right into the part. How Wren despised him now for his encyclopedic near-information. The world was in such a sorry state, it made a man lie sometimes to be sane. He tossed his line out grimly. Ulrich had ruined the fishing.

The lake, just alive, now seemed bright warm and dead, just a stretch of empty liquid at midmorning. A bad quality of light had suddenly come over. All of them felt it, like that mean gloom one feels after a pointless argument with one’s wife. Nobody spoke for thirty minutes, hearing the call of an unnamed flat accidie.

At last Lewis, back to his daybreaking thought about what he regretted having never done, his sin of omission, spoke. He asked the others what bothered them in this area. Lunchtime loomed — pleasant ritual of the hungry sun. More and more they talked about food, except for Sidney Farte, often too sick to eat.

“I guess what I missed most was having a significant pet,” said Lewis. “I was always talked out of them. Would be nice to have an old dog hearkening toward the end with me.”

“I guess I missed the Big Money,” said Ulrich. “That could have been sweet. Imagine the studies one could pursue. Perfecting one-man propulsion. I could have been the Howard Hughes of individual flight.”

“I wish I’d had a heart,” blurted Sidney Farte. “I didn’t even cry at my wife’s funeral. Knew I should, but I just couldn’t. My children looked long and expectant at me. Hell, I was like that as a little boy. Look on the worst things without a blink, eyes so dry they hurt. Something left out of me at birth. Begun lying ’cause there wasn’t nothing in true life that moved me.”

The confession was so astounding to the rest, who had known Farte for a decade and a half, that reply was occluded. His health must be sincerely bad. They all felt a surrender. Now noon, it became darkly clouded; something dangerous and honest seemed to be in the air. Peter Wren had a fish on, but was just ignoring it, reckoning on Sidney Farte. But it was Wren’s turn.

“That I could have sex with a child,” he said.

“My ugly God,” said Lewis.

“I mean a youngish girl, say fourteen. That she would adore me. I would be everything to her.”

Was he now adjusting himself to a public? they wondered. Or was he inwardly a vile old criminal, collecting photographs and near to wearing a garter belt? Fourteen was suddenly too legitimate, hardly a story at all. In their youth, fourteen was open season. There were many mothers at age fifteen, already going to fat. Four memories raked through the deep ashes of their desire.

“Shit, I had that,” said Sidney.

“Was she tight? Did she cavort for you?” asked Wren.

“Yes and yes. Couldn’t get enough. I tell you—”

“Shhh!” said Lewis.

Behind them, someone had lightly shaken the pier. In her tennis shoes, she had crept up unheard. The small vibration of the boards was all the warning Lewis had of her. She was right behind Sidney, attentive. It was Melanie, Wooten’s widow, the only woman ever to insist on coming among the men at the end of the pier. Farte despised having her near. The others could not quite decide. Something was always suspended when she came around. A sort of startled gentility set in, unbearable to Farte, like sudden envelopment by a church.

“We were talking horses, Mrs. Wooten,” said Lewis.

She’d brought them a snack of homemade sugar cookies. You could smell vanilla on her. She was an industrious person who had begun blowing glass animals after the death of her husband. That she came out there was somewhat aggressive, they felt, and she had begun talking a lot more since Wooten passed, finding a hobby and her tongue at about the same time.

“No, you weren’t talking horses. Don’t mind me, don’t you dare. I like man talk.”

“Cloudy noon,” Ulrich offered.

“Aren’t you going to pull your fish in?” the old lady asked Wren.

When he got the fish reeled in, they saw it was a Gaspergou, a frog-eyed crossbreed of bass and bream nobody had seen in ages. Everybody but the sulking Farte was fascinated.

“That’s your unlikely combination, a mutant, absolutely,” said Ulrich, “the predator and the predatee, crossbred. The eater and the eaten.” As Wren unhooked it and laid it out on the planks, Ulrich continued, in an excess of philosophy: “An anomaly of the food chain, hardly ever witnessed. We’ve got the aquatic equivalent of a fox and a chicken here, on your food chain. Reminds you of man himself. All our funereal devices are a denial of the food chain — our coffins, our pyres, our mausoleums, our pyramids. Pitifully declaring ourselves exempt from the food chain. Our arrogance. But we aren’t, we’re right in it. Nits, mites and worms will have us. Never you doubt it.”

They munched the sugar cookies and Ulrich was confident he had produced a deep silence with his gravity.

“I’m not that innocent, lads,” said Melanie Wooten. “I’ve cavorted. I was a looker, my skin they said seemed not to have any pores at all. Wootie was lucky. The man stayed grateful, all his life.”

“Is that what made him so kind?” asked Lewis.

He acknowledged, looking at her firmly for the first time, that she was no liar. Her skin was still fine for a woman in her seventies. There was a blonde glow to her. Her lips were full and bowed — quite beautiful, like a lady in films. The way she broke into life here toward the end he found admirable too. Many women of his generation remained huddled mice. You could not even imagine them straight in their coffins.

“I hope so,” said Melanie. “His gratitude. Without, I hope, sounding proud.”

“Not at all,” said Lewis. “Gratitude is what marks the higher being, doesn’t it?”

“But the thing came over him toward the end, which I’ve never much discussed. It came on just like diabetes. My love had nothing to do with it. In his seventies he turned gay. Isn’t that something? All those male students — he had a different infatuation every week. Poor Wootie. They fired him from the college. He couldn’t control himself.”

“What?” asked Sidney Farte, rather meanly. She knew the problem.

“He turned homosexual. Homosexual,” she emphasized, as if in a lecture to a pupil.

“Is it true?” asked Lewis.

They were not looking anywhere in particular, the others, when they noticed Lewis was weeping. He shook a little, and his long white face was drawn up in hurt.

“What is it?” Ulrich and Wren begged. “What’s wrong?”

“I want a dog. I want a dog. I get so lonely, nothing anybody can do about it,” Lewis cried out like a child.

“Well now, a dog can be had. Let’s be about getting you a dog,” said Ulrich.

“Certainly,” Melanie said, taking Lewis’s hand. “Did I upset you?”

“Just a dog,” Lewis sniffled.

“By all that pukes, get the man a dog,” said Sidney.

“That’s a dream you hardly have to defer,” said Wren. “That can be most painlessly had.”

They went back up the pier together, Melanie indicating the way to her station wagon. All in, they set out over to Vicksburg to find Lewis a dog.

Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other

THE OLD MAN OFF FORTY YEARS OF MORPHINE WAS FASCINATED BY guns. He was also a foe of dogs everywhere. They were too servile, too slavering, too helplessly pack-bent when not treacherous. The cat was the thing. Coots cut at the evening with his cane and wanted to “see a death” in the big city. He had been crazy for death these many years, writing about it and studying it in thick manuscripts. Many, hordes, died in his fictions. He dressed in a suit, often a three-piece, and looked to be a serious banker, with a Windsor knot in his tie. The scratch of the lower Midwest was in his voice. He was looking for a billiards parlor in Manhattan. In these blocks he had heard one rumored.

He knew of an afflicted man playing billiards — Latouche, ninety, a barely retired surgeon. The grofft was getting him. It was a rare Central American disease, making one hunt like a dog, bark and whine, the face becoming wolfish. The old man, Coots, despised the even older Latouche. There was just something, something — what? — about the man, perhaps his comfort, an obtuseness. And, sealing it, he owned a proud Hungarian sheepdog. The thing had gruesomely licked Coots at an underground firing range where he and Latouche shot their exotic weapons. It was their only similarity, this love of handguns. The old men would ardently blast away for hours, exchanging Italian, German, South African and Chinese pieces, barrels all heated up so that they would have made a pop of steam if tossed in water. Hunting and ordering correct calibers was a main part of their lives. Latouche was more the weapons technician, while Coots revered the history of each piece, or even more precisely, what kind of hole in what men in what time, entrance and exit; what probable suffering.

In Mexico once when he was young, Coots had shot his wife “inadvertently when the black thing was on me” as they were sporting around with the idea of William Tell, a glass on her head. Coots was drunk, but he insisted on “the black thing.” He believed in spells and even more in guns as he got old. He believed he could think spells on enemies and bring hideous luck to them, or so he wrote in his chilly fictions, where homicide and orgasm were inevitably concurrent and hundreds died in rages of lust and murder; a holocaust of young men perishing was always at least in the background, like wallpaper in a shrine. It was an ancient and beloved tyranny of the cosmos in which desirable bodies were given up religiously.

Coots, queer not gay, was an old-timer who hated “fairies” almost as much as women, or so he wrote. “Queens” were anathema, down there with the dreaded “cunts.” His manly Midwestern prose would scratch out at them. Physically he was a coward, and as he aged in the big city, his paranoia had a field day and became quite adorable to Coots cultists, who were always at him for interviews. His prose was no hoax. He wrote beautifully, especially when he was telling a straight clean story — something “linear.” But too much of this thirties stuff annoyed him and he was apt to launch off into his “genius”—spiteful incoherence, cut-up blather, free-floating time pirates corn-holing each other, etc. He was, though, dead accurate about the century often in this “shotgunning”—it seemed to thousands anyway — as only, perhaps, an old shy queer full of hate can be.

Coots had murdered nobody else (his wife’s accident had cost him a few days in a Mexican jail), but he was proud of the three dogs he had shot in a great city park one twilight, two German shepherds and a Rottweiler, just last year. Their hides were on the wall of the composing room in his “bunker,” a windowless warehouse apartment tremendously padlocked in a cheap nasty section of town. Coots had claimed an attack, and the young amanuensis with him (they were not lovers) did not deny it. There had been high adventure in secreting the gun, getting the animals back to the apartment in three separate taxis, and arranging for their skinning with a jubilant cultist now ten years on methedrine. The legend got out to everybody with whom the cultist had a beer, hundreds. Alcoholism was necessary to balance his speed habit, but nothing balanced his tongue. The story had all three animals, escaped from a wealthy high-altitude widow hag on Riverside Drive, tearing unprovoked at Coots’s legs, with the amanuensis sprawled in terror, and Coots fast-drawing a.44 from his Abercrombie & Fitch raincoat. Coots, swarmed by his interviewers and even by Time, demurred, but there were the three hides on the wall, head shots, no hole in the pelt. Of peculiar literary satisfaction was the fact that the methedrined skinner died a week later, as if taken off by a curse from the shy hermitic Coots.

Coots was now thinking he had successfully hexed Latouche, a man who at eighty-nine had never had a day of bad health, and now the grofft on him, horrible and unlucky. Latouche was of an almost alarming breed. He seemed never to have made a mistake. Neither with his surgery (famous), his wives (he had outlived two fine women devotedly in love with him), his clothes, his money, his charities (quiet and enormous), or his prosperous handsome doctor sons. At billiards he was a wizard and put away other wizards one fourth his age, some of them precocious millionaires of his pattern. The great violent, greedy and rude city had not put one line of worry on his face. He had been a gallant chief of surgery in World War II, at forty-one, with Patton’s racing Third Army, but could have been queer Hitler’s Aryan model. Even in his forties he seemed to be the one for whom Grable showed her amazing legs; he could have been her kiddish admirer and our hope for Over There, Lucky Strike thrust into sidelips with the dash of veteranship forced on him. Latouche could have ridden on sheer image, but insisted instead on Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, to emerge a surgeon, powerful before age thirty: athlete (impossible endurance, perfect fingers), intellectual (four ontological approaches named for him), and doting lover, amazingly of his beautiful wives alone. Also he had written about guns, and could outshoot Coots, who was almost twenty years younger.

After retirement, Latouche became a student of man, fresh as a ten-year-old. It was the one thing he’d neglected, mankind. He was making fast time, of course, as usual. His Hungarian sheepdog, his curly pal, was allowed everywhere, even restaurants. Latouche was that kind of darling. Folks loved to have him around and hear his voice, kind and modest, and he could have lived free on what people bought for and gave him. He lived in an apartment on Wall Street very near the waterfront, where men loaded and unloaded international goods. Because he was such a distinguished widower, emblem of a nobler time, the owners of the building allowed him to stay on the top floor in a building where everything else was business. With more dedication than others with telescopes, he began watching the men on the docks, studying the poor, the bitter, the disheveled, the union apes, some with bursting muscles, some gone all punk and crooked with labor. He might have seen Coots down there, with his young amanuensis dickering for morphine, heroin, hashish, opium, or just espresso, Player’s cigarettes, and Stolichnaya, with a man of trade. Dr. Latouche knew nothing much of drugs. He had never done much biochemistry. Fifty years ago he had quit cigarettes. His three cold martinis every evening, no matter where he was, were the only rise he required. He had been close to being an addict of surgery but why not? He did not like drugs, even when he prescribed them in small amounts. Dr. Latouche had never even had a real headache. In his medicine cabinet were Epsom salts, Pepto-Bismol, iodine, and, for visitors, aspirin.

Coots might have looked back up at Latouche’s apartment window, maybe swallowing a Bucet with a fresh cup of espresso if nothing better was to be had. He, just lately, knew where Latouche lived. He was very much on his case, narrowing. Latouche might have mistaken the gaunt, tall Coots in his suit for an owner, a big legitimate importer. Outside his addiction, morphine now beaten, Coots insisted on having his things in order. The shooting of his wife had finally convinced him deeply against sloppiness. The worst of it was the mess. He led a tidy, controlled life. He despised what controlled him. His books railed against control, didn’t they, despite the obliquity? Conspiracies of control were the target for his massed attacks, using stacked cords of bodies out front, behind, flanking. Up at seven for his stomach exercises; fruit, espresso, and pumpernickel toast; cold shower, then hot briefly, beating last night’s cigarette residue from his lungs like Tarzan with a habit; speed-reading the London and New York Timeses, especially for dire foreign and space alien occurrences, then more deliciously the personals; next perhaps a novel urged on him by some hopeful who’d pierced through his secretary, a matter of fifteen minutes (Coots had speed-read by sixth grade in St. Louis without realizing it was unnatural). His mind brilliantly plundered the book, storing entire sentences, shucking the rest like a piece of green corn, only a few nuggets in there. Coots cared very little for creative writing other than his own, and was blithely unconscious of any real American literary scene — a part of his charm to his adorers. He would write very slowly and often beautifully, clearheaded, trusting only hashish or a minor barbiturate, with his mild Benson & Hedges cigarettes. At times he would quit one or the other to exercise his control. Coots had lost a rough twenty years stoned, in Tangiers, New Orleans, New York and Mexico, filthy on a mattress, and he wanted to make them count.

Some had called him a genius since the fifties. Now he was a man of adequate means and invited everywhere for very little reason except the sight of him, alive and gray and imperturbable, a miracle of crotchety survival, beyond space and time. By late afternoon, through with his “studies”—diseases, drugs, hieroglyphics (he had no facility with languages and was deaf to music) — he’d be tired, and walk off the funk in the company of his secretary on interesting streets, wanting to “see a death” near him. His cane, really a sheath for a long stiletto, tapped along merrily. New York was getting too expensive, but he had always loved the hate and Byzantine corruption not only as metaphor but directly inhaling them so as to store them as power. He had been among natives and occult literatures and believed in magic as flatly as in chemistry. He had experienced rare days when he could do no wrong. He would sail an envelope, eyes blind, and it would smack right into the wastebasket. He would drop his razor and the thing would tumble perfectly to his toe, clipping a nail that needed it. On his tape recorder certain meaningful phrases would rise in volume for no technical reason, and they would be important to his life and work. He could fast for a week and be stronger. On the streets he was almost sure that if the enemy were persuasive enough, he could cause “a death” and pass by as an innocent bystander. The evidence of this had come clear years ago when an absurdly rude landlady had looked at him and fallen dead right on the stair landing outside his door, the hexed “gash.” At night, eating with friends and admirers, some of them world-famous actors and musicians, he was polite and attentive. He would not lie, and he refused to be cajoled into being “strange” by some fresh fool who had misunderstood him entirely. Most of the world was perfectly obvious to him. He would not romanticize the “alien.” In his own case, he’d never romanticized being a junkie. Contemporaries in drug and drink had dropped around him like flies — into morgue or loony bin — but a certain dim ingeniousness and regularity had dragged him through, so that his gray eminence punched out like a face on Mount Rushmore. For several thousands worldwide, Coots was one of the true fathers of the century. And greatly tested by calamity. His wife, then their son shooting up like Pop (amphetamines), but lasting only till thirty, liver all gone. Coots was not stone. He fell in love with forlorn helplessness, even now, and would cry like a woman when penetrated by some dreams. Dr. Latouche was in his dreams — not love, not envy, but what? Coots was driven, as not in decades.

When he found the billiards club, an establishment for the Arrived, he snorted. The Britishness. These atavistic beasts he’d had fun with in his violent satires, but even those books were old. He reckoned he looked MP enough to get in and was very pleased when the deskman, young, collegiate, recognized him and waved to the back rooms where all the fun was, offering him the place. It was dark green and woody, pungent with hearthsmoke, with jolly music from somewhere like England happening. Low voices drifted from separate parlors. Coots had no opinion of billiards at all, but the place made him a little homesick for St. Louis in the thirties: innocent American pool tables, the first taste of tobacco, the swoon. He was a boy then, just graduated from the neighborhood pond, with sun-browned cheeks, a string of bullheads, and a cane pole with black cotton line. Learning to be idle and mock, forever. The heft of the cue stick always made it seem like a good thing to knock with. Even Harvard never dragged that feeling from him. The pool hall had a real wood fire you could spit in and watch.

The first players to his right were neither one Latouche. Coots could tell by their faces that they were dumbed by privilege and bucks, and he hissed straight at them, feeling the hidden stiletto in his cane. How a sweep of it across the throat would tumble them, gasping Why? Why? Queer angels would then move down on them with a coup de grace of quick sodomy. Coots’s grandfather was a rich inventor and Coots had never been without a constant monthly sum, but the frigid regard of certain wealthy raised a fire from balls to crown in him. And where was Latouche? In another parlor, vainly ignoring active grofft by placing himself in public at billiards. Coots had only, with delight, heard of grofft in his Central American travels, where he’d made himself fit enough to penetrate the wilds in search of a storied hallucinogen. The drug was a retching bust, but the grofft tales were very interesting. Latouche must have been there to contract grofft. Coots had never heard of a white man with it.

A man near ninety could not have pushed into the deeps down there. Coots remembered the horrible misunderstandings with natives, the dangerous approach through a white-water creek, the malarial bottoms, where mosquitoes were the air. He had written solemnly about his explorations, but in the back of his mind he’d since wondered if he was thoroughly had by the tribesmen. Some foliage had moved, a barking human face emerged briefly, and the thing had run off lowly like a pointer, having smelled or seen that Coots was not the right thing. Grofft! shouted the natives, terrified. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he was alarmed too, near killed by a fer-de-lance before he snapped out of it. In the University of Mexico medical library he had looked up the pathology. But the entry on grofft read as if it didn’t belong, as if it had been written in dread by a haunted mystic of the seventeenth century. The cause: probably the bite of a grofftite — the breath or saliva. Etiology? Symptoms: lupine facial features and doglike barking and whining; quadruped posture; hebephrenia; extremely nervous devotion to a search, general agitation, constant disappointment; lethargy, then renewal. Treatment: Nobody of any medical skill had ever run down a grofftite. History: The skeletons of grofftites had been seen (and avoided) in places near and far from settlements; no uniformity in demise except bones of the fingers, forehead, and sometimes neck were often (twelve cases reported) fractured, the teeth broken; head in three cases planted to jaw depth in dirt, as if thrown violently from a high elevation. And this: Grofftites have lived up to fifty years after being stricken. It was claimed infants were taken off by grofftites but these might be mere Indian tales or manipulative responses to the urban interlocutors. N.B.: Indians have demanded money to imitate a grofftite.

Coots, peering hard at old Latouche in the last parlor now, suspected it might be a powerful drug that induced grofftism. He was in the country of powerful brews, and he could not shake the idea that it was a vaguely religious, maybe even saintly condition, drunk deliberately down by the devout, enough d’s to go direct to disease, the divine. The sight of noble old Latouche, cuing the ball and doing something smooth with it, was making Coots silly.

Thinking back through the years, he had known very, very few people of pure virtue, if that was Latouche’s case. In his suit Coots felt rude and small. Latouche — another endearing trait — wore wonderful clothes, but he was a bit sloppy and misfit in them. They loved his rumpled way, his scuffed shoes, the speck of sauce on his tie. What an agreeable granddad of a guy.

The doctor was playing a young man with a built-up physique. The young man wore a blazer. Ribbed socks — Coots noticed — with spangling black loafers. He acted familiar with old Latouche. Coots wondered if Latouche was the ward of this muscular stooge.

“Good evening, our genius,” said Latouche, surprised. “You’re a billiards man too?”

“Hardly. Just a watcher. Lifelong.”

“Order you a drink?”

“Too early. Perhaps a tonic with lime.”

“We’re just talking about the rumors that God is a woman. What do the literary people say about that?”

“When wasn’t it? It’s a neurotic hag demanding worship while it lays a pox down. An obtuse monster, a self-worshiping fiend. I know gods, Doctor.”

“Should have guessed you’d have an opinion. This is Riley Barnes, Coots. Barnes, the author. Barnes knows your work. I’ve been reading you. Some difficulty, I confess, for an old sawbones. I liked the surgeon using the plumber’s friend in a heart operation. I’d suppose you’ve known some awfully bad doctors. So have I, but—”

“You have literary interest?” Coots asked Barnes. “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”

“Yes sir,” said Barnes, knowing Coots too. “I’m a stevedore. The docks.”

“You know, I’d spotted Riley. Somehow I thought I must meet him. So I did. Very fortuitous circumstance. I watched him through a telescope. How could I have guessed he was a literary man and wild for billiards? The city always surprises you,” explained Latouche.

Coots had written about men like Barnes, one of his physical type of boy. He had them falling through space, ejecting incandescent sperm while being hanged by the neck. . Old duffer consuls would gobble it up. Sacrifice of the young to evil, entrenched needs. The way the world worked.

“You and your friend bought. . commodities down there. I was in different clothes,” said Barnes. “Didn’t think you’d recognize me, sir. Anyway, it’s an honor. I know people who’d pay to be here.”

“Go on with your game, please,” said Coots to the young man. Was he in his late twenties? Coots wondered. Straight. Off a mural of American Labor in an old union hall, dusty hoarse Commies around being ass-fucked by shark-skinned fat union bosses with stogies. Brando, On the Waterfront. What we pansies would have given to jump his bones. Stop. Latouche is the mission. The doctor did seem a little depressed, anxious, behind the jolly front. In the old days I’d have shucked him for drugs. Exactly the kind of croaker we’d set up till thoroughly burned down. Some of them were so stupidly moral they believed they were helping my endless kidney stones. Could be literary because I was so good at those riffs. Multiple personalities I developed. Then no personality at all when sick — protoplasm, whimpering, completely dishonored. Working the subways for drunks, at my best. New York, New York! Never again, knock on wood. Paper cup of coffee dissolving at the edge with spit. Ketchup on crackers, free at the Automat, for weeks. Harvard education. Unfit to attack Hitler or Tōjō, thank God.

“How’s your dog, Doctor? It isn’t here?”

“No.” Latouche looked guilty, furtive. “Had to bury her. She got something, poor girl. They didn’t know what.”

Coots came alive, took a seat in a padded drugstore chair copied from the thirties.

“Was a Hungarian breed, something, wasn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t talk about the dog, Mr. Coots,” interjected Barnes. Latouche was his charge, then.

“It’s fine, Riley. Really.” Latouche grasped the billiard table, his fingers going white over the felt edge.

“I’m a cat man, myself,” said Coots. Could he now detect Latouche trembling, his eyes rolling back into his head? Delicious, better than his first horror movies with Lon and Bela in St. Louis.

“Can’t stand them!” yelled Latouche. He shot back — reloaded, rather, thought Coots. “Sneaky, conniving!. . the odor of cat piss! Doesn’t that tell you something?” Agitated, pushing the insane, this beat the medical libraries cold. (“A death”?) But I don’t have the full persuasion for a spell, really, Coots decided. What do I hate about the man? My own grandfather? Grand patricide? Biting the hand that.

“I’ll have to ask you, Mr. Coots.” Barnes again. My word, so rapidly the nurse, all the jargon.

“No. I want this resolved and confessed!” shouted Latouche. “Secrets are killing me!”

The cue stick, released, fell over, plump, on the rug. Both his hands were on the table now.

“I buried Nana, I had Nana buried with my wives, between them, in Forest Hills cemetery! Riley did it for me!”

“That isn’t so bad, Latouche. Isn’t there a law, though? The Indians, you know. . the Egyptians. .”

“We didn’t ask. I did it at night,” said Riley Barnes.

“He’s got grofft, doesn’t he?”

“How’d you know?” Barnes bolstered Latouche. “Oh yes. Your travels. Would you know how it’s treated? Dr. Latouche, bless him, believes he can just ignore it away.”

Latouche was slavering and attempting to drop to the floor, while Barnes was resisting, gently, though all his big muscles were needed. The doctor certainly had his right man. Barnes seemed to care deeply for him. Coots smiled less than he wanted to, hands crossed on his stiletto cane in front, the boulevardier.

“I don’t think this is a mind-over-matter case, Barnes”—Latouche actually whimpered like a dog now—“though by what I’ve observed, the doctor has civilized the disease. Perhaps strength of character. Or just being un-Indian, highly Western. I recall the smallpox didn’t kill that many of us, but wiped out whole tribes of the Sioux. We’ve antibodies, but—”

Barnes sadly let the doctor go and raced to the door, pulling it to and locking. The doctor went around the table on all fours, sniffing and pointing, heedless of them. Why was this, Coots asked himself, so charming to him?

Why did Latouche pique such high disgust? Was he an old lifetime closet fairy and Coots knew it? Many great professionals were, no great mystery. Then was it the hypocrisy Coots loathed? The laurels and friendships gained by an, at least, eighty-year false front? But he did not really think Latouche was gay. Some deeply sick, hidden gays were fascinated by weapons, especially on the right wing, the loud NRA and all that, but not Latouche, who loved the technology more than the blast. Latouche acquainted himself with past heroes in dangerous times, as did Coots, who owned in his locker one of Billy the Kid’s purported old irons. But Latouche liked to balance the loads, better.

Latouche was all around the room now, scraping at the door and whimpering urgently. Something was out there he had to hunt. Coots thought of a feverish liver-spotted thing whirling in its cage, wanting the quail fields. He had witnessed that once in Texas when he was a failed marijuana farmer. The face of the doctor was working classically, too. His cheeks closed forward, lupine, more than could be done by a well man. Then came the barks and worried low growls, the mutter of need, almost ecstatic.

“How did he get into the Honduran wilds?” asked Coots.

“He didn’t. I went for him. The Indians were known for prodigious strength. Please don’t let on, Mr. Coots. You’re a man of the world, the cosmos. It shouldn’t shock you. I’d found a healthy young Indian, I thought. He’d had a fatal accident. I took his blood and brought it back chilled. We transfused Dr. Latouche.”

“Extraordinary. Why?”

“It had worked for one of his old colleagues. The man’s ninety-five now, in glowing health. Down there, the laws. . deep back in there, there are no laws. You can buy somebody. Never mind, I had the boat connections and the way, so I did it for him. There aren’t many Latouches in the world. Like there aren’t many of you. He’d been low, depressed, feeble, didn’t believe in drugs. This is corny, but he’s the grandfather I never had, and the father who left me. I didn’t want to lose him right after I’d found him.”

“Commendable. So this is the ‘secret’?”

“Yes.”

“But, my God, boy, he’s a horror. How can you have him out here in public playing at billiards?”

“He goes a long time without spells. He’s set off by mental. . imagery, I think. Especially dogs. Or their enemies. Cats, awful. And sometimes blacks, unfortunately, although Dr. Latouche doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.”

“He’s going to quit this after a while, then?”

“If things go right. But the spells are getting longer. We’ve got to keep him locked in here. I’m sorry.”

“Not at all. I’ve no other business. So he gave you money, he paid you. .”

“Mr. Coots, you’d imagine, but Dr. Latouche doesn’t even have that much money. He’s given it all away. He should have a better apartment, servants, but he’s got none of it. Thousands are alive because of Dr. Latouche.”

“And he looks a young seventy.”

“Doesn’t he? I think it’s all love and happy work, Mr. Coots.”

“William. You think so? And nobody knows any more than I do about the disease?”

“Looked everywhere. Only one doc in New York had ever heard of it. It’s never been treated in South America. We can only be grateful his is milder, so far. If you believe this, Dr. Latouche wants to begin a fund to go in and cure those few pitiful Indians. Not for himself, not in his lifetime.”

“Yet an Indian. . died. For him.”

“That’s the worst way to put it. And it was my choice.”

Coots lit a Player’s. He needed a strong hit. Fifty years of cigarettes now, with no drastic trouble. He was enjoying the smoke no less than the first good inhale in St. Louis. In that pool hall, he remembered now, a strange old man from nowhere had put his hand on his shoulder and said to him, “My lad, you will write masterpieces.” One of those magic episodes that had punctuated his life. Now Latouche was grievously scuttling and digging at the floor with his long elegant surgeon’s fingers.

“I don’t know why you’re here, sir. But you are the thing, I hope. Obviously you know medicine and magic. I’ve read all your books. What can we do?”

“The Indians did nothing. I believe they revered and, I know, feared the grofftites.”

“Your guess would be better than any doctor’s, I’d bet.”

“I could try something.” Coots was into the grim clinical zone he often elected for himself. It was obvious he could have been a fine MD, given any ambition to heal. The other, too. He grabbed at the pertinent file in his head. The delight of the fit was wearing out. He had lost his spite somewhere.

“You might try slapping him a hard one. Be a bigger dog. Canines respond to bald aggression. They’re pack animals.”

“I doubt I could—”

“Do it. Don’t hold back. Otherwise, you could drench yourself with bitch urine. But he might just hump you and bite your back.”

Barnes did reach down, turning the doctor’s cheeks up, and slap him powerfully, then shut his eyes in pity.

It worked.

Soon enough, Latouche was biped, straightening his tweedy suit back to its original loose rumple, pulling down his vest and replacing his watch chain across the front in the old style. His medical fraternity pin hung there, a small vanity. He was national president in the fifties, the decade of Coots’s first grand fame and obscenity trial. The French, who like their authors sick, fell on his book in droves. Coots stayed shyly and happily away, grogged in morpheus. It had taken him years and the help of friends, but the thing was out and he was going to make some money. Manslaughterer, junkie, thief, queer, layabout — the outer and under had won through. He was regent guru of the beatniks, like it or not.

“Little phase there. I seem to have left you. My cheek smarts. Did I fall?” Latouche wanted to know.

“A little,” said Riley Barnes quickly.

“Old men get tired. Don’t they, Coots? Are you sometimes just tired?”

“Yes indeed.”

“I think it’s martini time. Can almost taste it already, terribly cold, with big white onions. Would you, Riley? What’s your pleasure, Coots?”

“The same. Sounds perfect.”

“All right, then. Don’t want to try the stick?”

“No. Let’s sit in the booth and talk, guns maybe. Hard decisions about the forty-four/forty-five.”

Coots noticed Latouche did not have that detestable turkeyness under the throat that the old often do. Even in his thinness Coots had one gaining on him. A thing that the aging imp Capote attempted to cure by fellatio, he’d heard. They sat.

“Good. I have one. An eighteenth-century heavy handgun. Short piece, cap and ball, of course. Never shot.”

“Bring it on down to the range next Tuesday. We’ll rig it.”

The martinis came, with Barnes, who had a light beer, imported. A health man. How long was his dick? The drinks were sublime, just the ticket. Coots opened up even more. He was narrowing on the question of his own spite.

“I have the Billy the Kid gun,” he said.

“You don’t. There is no Billy the Kid gun.”

“But there is. I’ll show it to you. You must come down to my fort. Say Tuesday instead of the range.”

Barnes spoke up, delighted. “He’s known for not inviting many, Dr. Latouche. You should feel honored. This could be a legendary evening for us.”

Coots looked at the boy, who had become too chummy.

“How about just an old-timers’ chat, the two of us?” said Coots. “This is no rebuke, Barnes.”

“Sorry. Not at all. I go to the gym, anyway, when he goes shooting. I could be nearby, however.”

“Then it’s fixed. I’m feeling better all the time,” said Latouche. “Let me ask you something. Why did Billy the Kid kill so many?”

“¿Quien es?” chuckled Coots. These were the Kid’s last words before being gunned down by Pat Garrett. “I’m not sure. It was a sort of war, the Lincoln County thing. It wasn’t twenty-one, not nearly that. But I’d imagine it got in his blood, very early, when he was attacked by a bully with a knife. Rather like a drug addiction. I’ve studied killers. Now let me ask you: When you shoot, who are you shooting, mentally? What kind of enemies does a man like you have?”

The old doctor was surprised. “Well. . quite zero. It’s all mental, a sport.”

“Come now. You’re too good at it. Some emotion belongs, surely.”

“I’ve no enemies I know of.”

“Life has treated you nicely. No malpractice suit, say, totally unjust. The lawyers. You’ve known women. Some yapping gash that bilked you. Tell me too, that somewhere in the world of money there wasn’t. . And you were in the war, no?”

Coots hardly ever beseeched this much. Even when directly interviewed, for money, he’d not shown this zeal.

“Downrange there you must see some Nazi, some Commie, hippie, queer, black mugger, proponent of socialized medicine, or, really, man a—” Coots almost said cat, as a joke. He looked at Riley Barnes, intense and worshipful, vastly enjoying, and lucky. “Mengele, a Stalin, a Klansman.”

“Not at all. I’m afraid you’re making me sound like a man of no passion. What do you shoot, Coots?”

“Everything. Old age.”

This created high giggles in the other two. Poor men, was he that interesting to them? A scholar, a dreamer, and rather a drudge is what Coots thought he was. He yearned for the character of William Bonney.

“I suppose people who don’t hate don’t write,” said the doctor. “With surgery, I was rarely conscious of a person. Another thing entirely. Never have I felt the necessity, either, to interpret the universe. It was mainly just one piece of work, then another.”

“Then who would you rather have been, Latouche? Please think.”

“Umm. Well, actually. . Methuselah. I’m not ready to go. I’ve known hardly a day I’ve not truly enjoyed. Even the war, I was always up bright and early. Even, do not mistake me, the morning of my wives’ funerals. You’ve made me honest. Is that your function?”

“But, my man, you have. .” Coots reflected and checked on Riley Barnes, who was writing something down on a billfold tablet. “You have grofft. The only man in North America.”

Barnes flashed up, eyes sorrowful. He might want to strike Coots. When he masturbated, looking in the mirror, did he insert his finger in his anus to intensify it? Could he entice women into rim jobs? Many muscle men—vide your obsessive weightlifters in the big house — were “anally retentive,” thanks, Sigmund. And sex was a way of keeping, owning lovers, having them to play with in the bank vault later. As opposed to the looser lostness of the mere pussy, which invited death and servility. Barnes’s big stevedore’s hand was on Latouche’s wrist.

“Yes, I have it. But luckily, it seems, just a mild touch. I’ve not been on all fours yet. No barking. Riley watches me honestly.”

As with a thirty-year quart-a-day man he’d once met at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans: “I have no drinking problem, Coots.” Skin flaking off from the burst veiny patches of his face, yellow as a crayon, and his tongue black.

“Then Tuesday night at seven, Latouche.”

“Delighted. I’ll have Riley bring me around in my vintage Hudson. Now there’s an item you might like. Spotless. Forest green. Purrs like a”—Barnes harder on his wrist—“sewing machine.”

“The Hudson and Billy the Kid’s gun,” said Barnes in wonder. “A great American evening.”

A couple days later Coots flew to Kansas with his amanuensis, Horton. They planned to live there soon, and had already bought a small clapboard house with a picket fence and a porch in the university town. Coots hoped he might teach a class there, though there was some lack of enthusiasm from the older faculty, to whom he was a profane dope fiend and pederast who wrote gibberish. His secretary friend was attempting to broker him into a place. Coots could use the money. It was a sorry scandal that they would exclude him. In several apparent ways he was a conservative. He loved the plains of the Midwest and was fascinated by the Old West and its worthy guns. He knew Native American culture (Custer’s stuffed horse, Comanche, was in the university museum); had the notes for two large books wherein he would explore the West in space-time narratives and by way of his “cut-up” method — not montage, he insisted, but more: common threads of magic in random clippings from various sources, sometimes announced into his tape recorder and retranscribed. He’d not yet got all from cannabis that he intended, either. Coots was a hard worker, putting to shame the energies of the senior faculty, with their emeritus rose beds and sailing vacations.

It was hard for Horton not to get angry about the matter, though Coots accepted the landscape and l’état gladly as they were away from wearying, impolite and expensive New York. The main point was he was old, damn it, and had been everywhere. He’d never had a thing against roots and a calm place, there was no crime in that. And there would be wide and free places to shoot. He could have a cat or two, his favorite creatures. He was so much like them it was nearly like having children. “The furred serpent,” Egyptians called them.

He did not tell Horton about Latouche.

Lawrence, Kansas, occupied them. Coots breathed in his “square” neighborhood: perfect, superb. The air might give him a few more years, a few more books. The scratchy, potent West. The “Johnsons”—trustworthy, minding their own business, nonjudgmental, quick to ally with a fellow in trouble, salt of the earth, loving of land, their house was yours, etc. — Coots had the forgotten shock of being waved at by citizens who didn’t know him from Adam. Howdy. Partners in the given day. Suitably, it came a “gusher” while they were there. The rain smelled sweet, rich. Thinking of the golden wheat lapping it up, breadbasket of the world, amber fields of, sun-browned boy with a string of bullheads, home-dried cut cane pole with black cotton line, drilled piece of corncob for a bobber, Prince Albert tin with nightcrawlers in wet leaves for bait.

Horton liked seeing the old fellow this happy.

They were out in Latouche-land too. Latouche was originally from Ellsworth.

It was the land of generals — Eisenhower, Bradley. And Frank James rode through Lawrence itself with the guerrilla slaughterers and Quantrill. Then Coots and T. S. Eliot over in St. Louis, not far from Twain. Ah, dreamed Coots on his porch, his thin hair blowing, to have fucked Huck when the country was young, about to strangle itself in the Big One, sun-swollen teenage corpses in the cornfield. Sherman sodomizes the South. John Brown began here first, Kansas, bloody Kansas, my Kansas. What did Latouche think of it? Had Latouche ever thought much at all?

The doctor was at his door and they walked out to see the Hudson purring at the curb. Barnes, in gym suit, was at the wheel saluting him. The Hudson was a gem all right. A space fiction of 1950, drop-shaped, chubby, svelte too. Barnes yelled something about being careful, he’d see Latouche at midnight. Coots noticed his massive legs. That boy could really hurt you if he wanted. Without him, the car gone, Latouche seemed smaller, with snowier hair, cautious and unbalanced. Coots helped him down the stairs to “the bunker,” leaning on the sharp door — like a vault door. Coots gasped, weak himself. Safe inside, Latouche took the sofa and looked about, out of his overcoat. They were alone. Horton was away for the night.

“I’ve brought this mini — tape recorder, if you don’t mind. It’s for Riley’s sake,” said Latouche.

Coots minded. His words were worth a great deal lately. The BBC thing, and NPR. He was to play a junkie priest in a movie soon too. Might as well ham it up toward the end.

Something had clicked one strange tired morning a month ago — he’d been very, very tired, from no direct cause. Coots was going to die soon, the fatigue told him quietly. Some ancient soft voice like that of the unknown man in the pool hall, but this was not an “episode.” This was the dead and dry tone of the inevitable. He didn’t know when he’d die, but something announced the beginning of the last lap. The public flies were on him, even worse.

“I thought you’d bring your forty-four/forty-five,” he said coolly. Coots could wither, with his scratchy voice and small eyes.

“But I did, in the other pocket.” Latouche drew the handsome brute out, size of a good man’s organ, laying it on the coffee table next to the minirecorder, a Toshiba. He punched it on. Coots’s anger left when he spied the weapon. Lovely little highwayman’s surprise, lovely.

“I’ve loaded the thing. Can’t quite figure why,” said Latouche.

“The mean streets. It’s a bad area.”

“No.” Latouche stared at Coots as if lost. He seemed really to have no idea why the thing was loaded. Septagonal barrel?

“Barnes knows you have a loaded gun?”

“No. He’s a deep pacifist, for gun control. New York law, of course.”

“I think he killed an Indian for you.” Coots smiled at the little reels turning inside the machine.

“He told you?”

“I gather things. Pretty nasty, and unethical, medically speaking, you know.”

“Oh, I do. It’s all a bad mysterious thing. And my fault. I found out that Riley has a dangerous loyalty to me. Almost an innocence. If only I could take it back. I’m very shallow with people, I’m afraid.”

“But I suppose you’ve been paid back. The blood of a very wrong Indian. Hmm?”

“Yes. And that wasn’t my first transfusion. I’ve had two others — one for each of my marriages — each done legally. Good Swiss blood, very.”

“What do you mean, for?”

“For Maggie and Verna both. I was slowing down and I did it for us. To keep up, to prance, to dance. They were both a good deal younger and I couldn’t give them an old coot dead on his lounge chair at the end of the day.”

“And they worked?”

“My word, yes! You couldn’t keep me down. It was amazing, scary, truly. I romanced them, read in erotic books” (Latouche blushed), “rowed down the river with them in the bow. I pleased them constantly, not just with flowers and gifts. In fact—”

“Just a second. I’ll have the martinis out. Save this.”

Coots prepared the martinis with more care than usual, dropping in Latouche’s big white onions, specially bought that afternoon. He waited longer, too, to diffuse the agitation the nonagenarian had got himself into. Coots — Saul on the road to Tarsus — suddenly had an overwhelming light on him; nothing like this had happened to him before. He liked Latouche, thoroughly. True friendship was attacking him. He was very afraid the fellow would get too wound up and stumble into the names, the “imagery,” and say cat or dog — wolf? snake? Negro? quail? He was close to saying everything, and in danger. He waited almost impolitely long. When he went out with the tray he stared at the gun. Let’s get that thing away, Coots decided. Which is what he did, turning it in his other hand admiringly, his martini hand freezing.

“Fine heft. A real buried treasure. The recoil must be a consideration. Jim ’Awkins and Long John Silver, eh?”

“What?”

“Treasure Island. Stevenson. What did you do as a boy in Kansas?”

“Oh, sure now. Even I read that one once, I think.”

“I dreamed of almost nothing but pirates, myself.”

“I dreamed of, can you believe it, Kansas itself. Simply re-pictured what was around me. The wheatfields, the blizzards, the combines, the awful summer sun. For dreams in my sleep, I never had any. I never dream.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. A man would die, flat out.”

“But it’s true. Freud would’ve had no use for me.”

“Well, surgery did. But what a fact.”

“The transfusions, though—” began Latouche.

“My friend, this is startling too. Yours worked. Mine didn’t. I tried to kick morphine with one. No go.”

Latouche couldn’t know that he had Coots entirely. Coots had a young healthy crush on him, wanting nothing.

“I’m very sorry.” Latouche drank deep. Coots was saddened by the unusual sloppiness, gin down the doctor’s chin, untended. “But my transfusions, let me tell you, I think, I know — poor Maggie, poor Verna — I was too much. How they loved me! What a heavenly benefit, their love. I could not leave them alone, Coots. Finally, I — now I say, the bed, the bed, the bed, the bed. The dances, the bicycling, the jogging, the too long mountain hikes in rain — they loved it for me. Then always the bed, the couch, the shower, even the garage, every which way, all hours! Then I’d be up with their breakfast, waking them. I’d have written up an oncological technique while they slept! Too much, too much! They died.”

“What?”

Latouche’s pathetic unlined face was sopped with gin, dropping down like a beard of tears and slobber.

Coots dragged his handkerchief out and kneeled to attend Latouche, dabbing away, kinder than a nurse.

“My friend, my friend,” he sympathized in his great scratch, softened.

“It’s true. I killed them. They were just worn out, is all. Still lovely, both, still should have been in the fine bloom of a woman’s middle age, that arousing. .”

“But one would suppose that one often destroys the loved one. I have destroyed. Have been destroyed,” Coots said, trying to aid.

“I don’t mean your. . fictions, your creative writing! I mean destroyed!”

“Yes, but guilt, must. .”

“I don’t know what brought me to shout it out. I don’t know why that pistol is loaded. Something made. . You. It’s you, Coots. You demand terrible buried things, somehow. Calamities. Isn’t that it?”

“That’s not a condition of our friendship.”

Latouche calmed down and smiled. “We are friends, aren’t we? All our strangenesses and our differences. We are, yes?”

“Doubtless, friends. And for that I’ll get a fresh one for you. Take it easy. All is locked, here in the bunker.”

Latouche saw the big secured door and nodded, instantly more solid himself.

This drink Coots did thoroughly, a spring in his step, close again to that sun-browned boy with his string of bullheads, his Prince Albert tin filled with nightcrawlers.

When he came out, Latouche was gone and the door was thrown open. There had been a noise in his writing room, and now only Latouche’s things were left, his tape recorder, gun, and overcoat across the arm of the sofa. The front door was unlocked; it must have been thrown open very rapidly, speed quieting the noise.

Coots shut his eyes and knew. He’d forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, entirely the dog hides on the wall of his writing room: the Rottweiler’s black one, and the German shepherds’ speckled gray. Latouche must have stepped inside, looked, then fled, feeling hunted himself. On the spoor.

Horton’s Honda Express, the little city motorbike, was next to the front entranceway, helmet on the seat. Coots knew he should take this. He’d handled it perfectly many times. It would be required, he was positive.

He labored with the big two-by-twelve board on the stairs that served Horton as a ramp. His own long smart overcoat on, helmeted — Horton’s humor insisted on a dove aviary painted all over the helmet — and buckled in, he cranked the scooter and rushed precariously upward through exhaust clouds to the sidewalk, then out bumping off the curb, an old man from hell. Wouldn’t you know, his pesty neighbor, the junkie dentist Newcomb, antithesis of Latouche, hooked possibly on everything and ever determined to visit, was right in his way, and was knocked down by Coots and the whirling machine. Coots cursed with his last cigarette breath, despising this low absurdity. He thought he saw Latouche three blocks up as the street was otherwise empty. Something was scrambling ahead on all fours, head down, trailed by its suspenders, white shirttails out.

It was Latouche. Coots ran over his jacket in the street. Then there was a boot, an old Wellington boot, straight up, abandoned. Poor man! Coots could hardly breathe — the pity, the terror, the love, and the effort with that board. His adrenaline, if it was there, was wondering where to go. He could hardly get air down. Latouche was faster, or through asthmatic illusion Coots thought he was, and he turned back the accelerator all the way. The doctor was running up into the middle of the city. Soon he’d be lost in neon and street strollers, sloths, pimps, bus-stop criminals, sluts. Coots could see citizens spotting the sidewalks, increasingly, a quarter mile up.

At last his respiration and vision were easier. How fast could a dog run? He looked at the speedometer: thirty mph, and he still wasn’t gaining on him. What kind of dog was Latouche? Something Central American and predacious. Please not a greyhound, pushing forty! The motorbike could hit that speed too, but barely. How, then, could he catch Latouche?

He didn’t know it but he passed Riley Barnes, early out of the gym, coming toward him in the Hudson. Barnes flinched and soon U-turned. Coots’s frail head in the bird helmet was unmistakable. By the time he came even, Coots was narrowing his eyes, an elderly cavalry scout in spectacles. Latouche had run into the crowd. He was gone. There was only reckoning with his speed now and trying to stay up even. If Latouche took a turn, it was hopeless. The motorbike wobbled into higher speed, but the traffic would have him soon. Coots felt pure hate for humankind, especially New Yorkers, too cowardly to stay in their rooms; they must be out with their autos, part of the clot, rubbernecking at each other — like dogs. Dogs! Packs of them sniffing, licking balls, consorting in dumb zeal, not a clue, not an inward reflection. The mayor and the police should be shot, for not shooting them. And then this streetlight. He was in a paroxysm of fury.

“Where in the hell are you going, Mr. Coots?” Riley Barnes was next to him at the junction, yelling to him from the high car. “Stop, please.”

Coots did.

“He went into the grofft. I swear, Barnes, a horrible inadvertency at my place. He saw some ‘imagery’ on my wall in another room. He’s up there, blocks, incredibly fast.”

“Get in the car, quick. He can’t be out here!” Barnes was in tears already.

“The car’s no good. If he turns, you’ve no chance. This Honda’s the thing. Let me go.”

“I’m going too. He’s mine.”

“Fool. Then get on the back if you can.”

“You can handle this?” Great poundage in the rear with Barnes. They sank down.

“I can handle it. Shut up and look.”

They were off, riding as if on a wire, given Barnes’s body. Every yard was risky and grim. The motorbike wanted to waddle off into the gutter or straight out into the oncoming lanes. Coots’s arms were noodles from the effort.

“Don’t move! Just look, damn you!” His voice whipped back around the helmeted cheeks.

He looked too, tried to. Hunter of the hunter, pointer of the pointer. It had been ages since he’d labored physically at anything, but Nature had not slighted him in adrenaline. He was handling the cargo nicely after another half mile. But Nature — in Latouche’s case, God? — had not slighted the doctor either. Age ninety, ninety! His fitness was uncanny. Coots thought he saw a clot of citizens part, shouting, at something on the ground another three blocks up. Maybe they were gaining a little. Latouche could not be given much more by his heart and lungs. His bootless feet must be awful by now. If only some decent man would just stop him. But where was a decent citizen of New York to be found? It would take a tourist, some Johnson from Kansas.

“Help! Help him!” shouted Barnes, sensing the same.

All Latouche did was gather disgusted glares from both sidewalks.

The thing they feared worst occurred. Plainly, just two blocks up now, a corner crowd parted, faces snapped down, then to the left, some of them pointing down a side street. Latouche had turned. If he began weaving the streets, he was doomed unless he fainted. Coots’s grand new friend would be snatched from him by the most horrible chance and he would be forever had by another “black thing” as vile as his wife’s death. This plague of one, this Kansan prince of North America, was nearing his end and Coots did not even feel potent enough to be his nurse.

Latouche may have been the only man of pure virtue Coots had ever known. You could not really fornicate somebody to death. That was all just Latouche’s elevated code, wasn’t it? An anachronism. Guilty for his own vigor, guilty for his own superb gifts. Could be slight atherosclerosis closing on the old gent, who’d buried awesomely too many contemporaries. Left lonely in his luck.

He must have turned yet again. These streets were near empty, and they saw nothing. It would be merely a matter, Coots feared, of patrolling for his corpse, if they were even that fortunate. They’d have to go to the police and do the official. In the precincts they might know Latouche and get on it with more effort.

The motorbike putted — bleakly — as Coots halted it. The weight of Barnes, at rest, nearly threw them over into the road. But he stood them up with his mighty legs spread. He had not expected to stop.

“Go on! Go on!” cried Barnes in a futile voice as Coots removed the helmet. His hair stood out in wisps. The city had never seemed so unnecessary and odious to him. You could forget there was an old-time Greenwich Village, once worth inhabiting, breathing. And a zoo, the museums, Columbia, the fruitful subway where he’d rolled drunks for dope money. You could “raincoat” a stiff, tying the thing over his head with the sleeves, and have the money without violence; it was quite safe, even for the skinny Coots.

He must meditate the point here, a new one. Where did grofftites want to go? Where would they rest? Where was the quarry? There had to be something, he figured. While Barnes was calling the police, Coots tried to voodoo it out, but there was no file in his head about this he could turn to. Bad luck. “Spot of bother”—a refrain of the nasty British colonial — rang silly back and forth in his mind. He had no further sources. Barnes was probably worthless, in his grand-sonly adoration. Knock down the maze, what could be the rat’s desire? Somebody should have injected rats with grofft gland, offered a number of rat gratifications at the end.

The two of them, Coots and the almost whimpering Barnes — as if taking on symptoms in sympathy — stood foolishly beside the Honda peeping around, statues of the bereaved. Coots had had it with impotence, too old and losing too much by it in the past.

“He was talking about his wives, how he’d murdered them, worn them out with love. He sounded hyper, self-flagellating, caused by a quick suck of gin, maybe.”

Barnes stood taller and clamped on Coots’s wrist, too hard. You fucking monster. Then Barnes kneeled in street clothes with white bucks on his feet, drew a pen from his coat, and began drawing some route on his right shoe.

“What are you doing?”

“He’s talked about his wives before. He could barely stand going to the cemetery with flowers for them. And their birthdays ruined him for days. He was chin-up, but I could tell.”

“What cemetery?”

“Forest Hills, and the dog is there too. I know how to get in at night.”

“That’s ages from here. He couldn’t make it.”

“He could try. It’s all we have. I’ve got a crow’s flight route here on my shoe. We’ve got to go. Look along the way for him.”

Damn the horror between here and there, thought Coots. It’s the only mission.

The men wobbled along for a while seeing nothing, then hit an expressway where motorbikes were disallowed and Coots put the engine up red-line, clawing for near forty-five, deathly slow against the eighteen-wheelers. They looked along the highway for the doctor’s flattened corpse. He could bake flat like a dog before New York got irritated by the smell. Thank the stars, they were soon off it, buffeted by winds of every rolling thing back there.

The landscape became tree-lined, with residential hedges on both sides where dogs could conceivably sleep in the street for a while, as in Kansas. Coots thought of every possible hazard to Latouche on a run even near here. They were too monstrous to confront. He aimed the scooter numbly, dread age tuckering him again in this long helpless mourning. He wondered if Barnes could feel the cap and ball.44/.45 in his overcoat pocket. He’d forgotten it himself and could not recall why he’d pocketed it. Then it came to him — it was exactly the caliber he’d used to nail the dogs, the favored size of the Old West and until lately the modern army. So what? Except that plugging the dogs was the last large physical thing he had done.

There was a narrow screened gate in a northern wall before a gravel path. Barnes simply destroyed the gate before moving instantly a long ways ahead. Happy to be off the Honda, Coots crept like a rag on wasp’s legs. It would be best to let Barnes see that there was nothing at the graves, then return to him. On the other hand, deeper into the burial grounds — vast — he noticed cross paths and cul-de-sacs. He might get lost out here, celebrating this fool’s errand by his own tragedy. This place at night was a sullen metropolis, its high monuments like a blind skyscape. The roll of it had its own charm, but not now.

He called ahead to Barnes. There was no answer. Coots was at the bottom of a very dark, long hill. He should stop, but he couldn’t.

“Not yet, friends. Three or four more books I’ve got in me, I think,” he announced to the brothering tombstones around him. No limit to the elevated vanity of some of them. Who the hell did they think they were, these fat-cat dead? No doubt with hordes of progeny scumming the Northeast. Old tennisers and polo players who should have died at birth, but giving the granite finger to the lowly and the modest who neighbored them. No worse fate than to fall and just be discovered out here.

Something let go a howl, canine and terrifying. It was too high for Barnes or Latouche. Too beyond, too nauseating. He stumbled down the hill toward it, however, loving the pistol when he felt it again. Ghoul, I am ready. Eat me, try. Then he heard what was plainly Barnes, near a big tree by the moon, weeping. Oh no. Oh what.

Apparently Barnes had done the howling. He sat at a plot of three stones.

Latouche had got deeply into one of the graves. His head was in it and both arms. He lay there — bloody, barefoot and dead. The name on the stone of the scratched grave was VERNA LOUISE LATOUCHE.

Coots kneeled, arm on the shoulder of the muddy Barnes, who was beating the ground with his hands, sobbing. He turned his face, changed into one hole of grief.

“Imposs — he was already coldish,” said Riley Barnes.

“I think, lad, you’ll find he’s broken his fingers and his jaws. Poor Latouche.”

“He was the finest man I’ve ever known.”

“What was his given name?”

“Harold. Harry. I’m just a termite.” Barnes was able to quit weeping, slowly. “What are you doing with that gun?”

“I. . suppose I was going to try and woo him out of it with a piece of familiarity. It’s his. He was an uncommon pistoleer.”

“That was nice, Coots.”

Barnes stood, filthy at the knees and palms. Then he kneeled again and pulled Latouche out of the hole; he was at the depth you’d see when an infantryman was caught out by bombs. Coots looked up at the rushing beardy clouds. He preferred not to see Latouche’s face. That would be profane. Barnes, brushing the dirt from the doctor’s face, seemed to agree. He would not look at him full-on. They also agreed that officials should be told — the ambulance, hurling lights, Coots could already imagine. This was enough.

There was, of course, the unspoken idea between them that Latouche should not be found like this. The gossip, the ugliness, the possibility of blemish on his life. Neither said anything for a good while until Coots, finally, spoke up.

“Really it’s a better death than most. He didn’t have to wait for it. More valiant, don’t you think? We’ve got one problem. They won’t believe it.”

“It doesn’t matter. All of him was unbelievable, when you study it.”

“You go call. Can you do the Honda?”

“No problem.”

“I’d like to stay and watch. A few more minutes with him.”

“You’re a good man, Mr. Coots. I really never knew that, by your stuff.”

“I have my vagrant loyalties.”

As he waited, seating himself finally in an ecstasy of relief — so tired, so worse than weary, his right hand in an agony from twisting on the motorbike — he found a Player’s cigarette in his coat and lit it. Nature did nothing more, but the city became louder. Horns, screeches, a ball game, airplanes — it was all obscene.

“Oh yes I saw ‘a death,’ Harry. So Harry—” He stopped.

Coots’s eyes became misted and blind. This was all right, this was fitting.

“But what a gap, Harry. What an awful gap you leave. And I only a watcher.”

Bats Out of Hell Division

WE, IN A RAGGED BOLD LINE ACROSS THEIR EYES, COME ON. SHREDS of the flag leap back from the pole held by Billy, then Ira. We, you’d suspect, my posteritites, are not getting on too well. They have shot hell out of us. More properly we are merely the Bats by now. Our cause is leaking, the fragments of it left around those great burned holes, as if their general put his cigar into the document a few times. Thank you mercilessly, Great Perfecter. But we’re still out there. We gain by inches, then lose by yards. But back by inches over the night, huff, flap, narg. I am on a first-name basis with five who have had their very trigger fingers blown away—c’est rien, mere bagatelle. They mutter, these Cajuns. Something about us their cannon doesn’t like, to put it mildly. By now you must know that half our guns are no good, either.

Estes — as I spy around — gets on without buttocks, just hewn off one sorry cowardly night. Morton lacks hair, too close to the cannon before he decided on retreat. I have become the scribe — not voluntarily, but because all limbs are gone except my writing arm. Benedict, Ruth and the Captain say I am not unsightly, in my tent with the one armhole out of it, not counting the one for my head. I’m a draped man of some charm, says our benign crone of a nurse, Emmaline. Nobody comes forward to our rear like loyal Emmaline, the only woman to see this much this close. She comes up to the foul hospital, carrying a depth of pity. How, we wonder, does she carry on? “I’ve seen everything, boys! These milky old eyes have seen it all!” The only real atheist around, she carries love and helplessness forward in a bucket in either hand. We wonder, surely, whether this is the last woman we’ll ever see. Maybe they use her to make us fight for home, but which way would that work? Better to think she’s part of no plan at all. The best things in life, or whatever you call this, happen like that, even I in my old youth have learned. This marks the very thing, most momentous, I am writing about. It’s over for me but I can’t leave. No. I’d rather just stick here at my niggled work, undismayed by an occasional overshot bomb. I just lean over, disgusted, and think there’s not much left of me to hit. Shrapnel blows through my tent-dress every now and then.

The best thing is that on retreat our boys run the rats and shocked wrens and baby rabbits back to me. Out of my tent shoots my arm. Yummy. The creatures had figured me for a goner. The smoke from the enemy’s prime ribs, T-bones and basted turkeys floats over here at night sometimes, cruelly, damn the wind. In my long glass I can hardly find a human figure over there among the thick and bristling cannon, and when I do find a face, the smirk on it is killing. That is enough. I whisk back to the rear, wheel rapidly under my dress. Wind blows my tent up and I must resemble some fop’s umbrella, rolling in the wheelbarrow. Some of us in that last long entrenchment, I noted, are so narrow against the wind they suffer the advantage of disappearing as targets. One man cuts and eats his own bunions. Corporal Nigg was still in his place, frozen upright, long dead but continuing as the sentry. Who can fire him? Who has time for clerical work? Nigg is present, accounted for, damn you, a soldier’s soldier. So Private Ruth brings my journey in the wheelbarrow to its conclusion back at the tent, puffing. Calamity has provided me with perquisites. Some resent me, as they go off to lose an eye or ear and return to chat, lucky this time.

The charge, our old bread and butter, has withered into the final horror of the field, democracy. It is a good thing we are still grassroot-mean, or there would be no impetus left. Referendums for and against the next charge take a long time, collecting ballots down the line, out in the swamp. Every sniper has an opinion, every mule-lackey, every musician. The vote is always in favor, for we are the Bats Out of Hell Division, even if we are down to less than regiment size. These boys can still stir you. When I know something big’s afoot, I shriek for Ruth, who rolls me up to jump-off with the shock troops. Nobody is disheartened by my appearance. There are men far, far worse off than I, men unblessed with the ability to write and read; men whose salivation has been taken from them by breathing in one ball of fire too many. Oh Jesus, I’d go rolling out there with them if I could. It’s Ruth that holds me back. Otherwise I’d be in the fore, quill high, greeting their cannon — hub to hub they are — a row almost endless of snobs’ nostrils, soon to come alive with smoke and flame: grape, canister, ball, bomb, balls and chain. They greet us even with flying glass. I’ll never forget the lovely day they took nearly my all. In a way I want to revisit it; a sentimental journey, however, this war has no time for. Ruth won’t budge. He has his orders. I, the scribe, have become as important as our general, who is, of no debate, criminally insane just like the rest of them.

Shot to pieces in that rehearsal excursion down to Mexico, the man was buried, but returned out of the very earth once he heard another cracking good one was on. At last, at last! The World War of his dreams. “Thought I’d never live to see it! There is a God, and God is love!” I have license to exaggerate, as I have just done, but many would be horrified to know how little. He is said to have commented on hearing the first news, “Brother against brother! In my lifetime! Can Providence be truly this good?”

He is dead set on having these battles writ down permanently in ink and will most certainly push me on afterward, whatever befalls, into working up his own biography. There is about enough left of him to drape a horse. Once he’s tied on, his voice never stops, and you can hear the wind whistling through him even in the rare interludes of quiet when he has simply blasted away his throat organs. Up and down the line, his raw nagging moans away, overcoming shot and shell; a song eternal, this bawling, in the ears of the ruined but driven. The two colonels and four captains flap around in imitation, one stout captain with a shepherd’s crook in hand. He is likely to pull a malingerer out of the trench by the neck with it, and has often pulled up the dead and scolded them and their families. Audace, avanti, allons mes frères! Captain Haught is from everywhere. He is the one who told me our colors were inspired by the Russians in Crimea and that there is no more suave concord or color pleasing to our Lord than gray trimmed in yellow. No coward or lay-back, he walks straight up at the front of his unit into the very jaws of their hydra and returns at leisure, starched, unspotted, perfectly whole, armed only with the shepherd’s staff. His only flaw is his appetite. It is rumored he has stolen biscuits from corpses right in the middle of an enfilade, and can’t be hurried.

There is a man, way forward, who claims to have been shot through the very heart. He has found a hidden place out there, however, some hole in the field, so that he never retreats full and properly, but stops to burrow in like something feral. His boasts are relayed to us in the rear. Soldiers have seen him during battle and do report there is a great dark stain on the left chest of his tunic. Then they see him in the next assault in media res. This is what he has said to them: he doesn’t want to miss a minute of it because there will never ever be anything like it again. It will set the tone for a century and will be in all the books. Great-grandchildren will still be shaking their heads, overpowered. There can never be any repeat of this thing. He saw the first long shadows of it at the one around that church in southern Tennessee and he has been in three worse since. So. They imagine he lives on roots and their liquid in whatever small cellar he has found or dug. Already he is practicing his posture around a stove fueled only by corncobs in an impoverished, riven home. He speaks his tales to gathered neighbors, family and children. They say he has a mirror down there, long as a tailor’s, at which he practices. But he can hear our general bawling and their hub-to-hub cannon, and is never tardy for the charge. He is always already into it when his fellow soldiers catch up with him. His name is Beverly Crouch. Crouch has the distinction — whether he’s truly been shot through the heart or not — of having been a white slave back home, right alongside the Africans with hoe and sack sometimes, but bonding out for other jobs too, wherever the weather and agriculture were better.

Our pathetic cannoneers, the remains of a proud battery of near-geniuses who could shoot the head off a chicken at a mile, speak with great accuracy still but no force, so little shot and shell are left, the main charge yet to come. The conservation they endure in the very heat of battle is almost hysterical. The salvo, that precious Italian concept, seems like some remote advantage in a historical tome. They can hope only to demoralize the other side a little, with an occasional round hitting one of their colonels amid-shoulders. I was never impressed that much by an officer’s head blown off beside me, but the general declares this is a huge mournful event “over there,” where they are different. The artillerymen are aided in their precision by our forward observer Jones Pierce-Hatton, who has never dressed in anything but civilian clothes, in the beau monde way — gray suit with wide Panama, and binoculars of the Swiss avant-garde. There is a lone enormous tree on a little hump of hill, into the top boughs of which he has fastened a crow’s nest. Here is where he looks and rains fire on the enemy. It must be rather godly up there, calling the wrath and precision down on individuals of the indigo persuasion. They really hate him over there. His ladder’s been all shot away for a long time. They brought out a line of sharpshooters forward from the ramparts; all of them blazed away upward at him. Now here was a salvo, remarkable, before they were convinced to retire by our own Kentucky experts. Some of these men were hardly anything but eyes, shoulders and trigger fingers. They slipped back gaunt and wispy into their nooks and bowers. The entire top of the tree and especially his crow’s nest, all was shredded, much bark and lumber falling down. Somebody yelled up to him, seeing his wide hat come up out of the nest again, asking whether he was hit. There was a long pause.

“Why shit yes! What would you imagine!” But he did not come down and through the days, nobody asked any more questions. Spots of blood, dried, lay around the roots of the trunk where they rigged his food and coffee basket. All he insists on is the coffee, the only real stuff left anywhere over here. He has the canteen that would have gone to the general. Mr. Jones Pierce-Hatton seeks no other reward.

Our only triumph was knocking down their one competing balloon, an airship with basket for the observer underneath, and for this we can thank Granny Nature. The same ill wind that brought us those belly-churning odors of roasting prime meat increased and blew the thing off its anchor, so it wobbled over here right up alongside Jones Pierce-Hatton in his nest. You could hear the cries of dismay from the disheartened passenger as he came alongside the lone enormous tree at bright high noon. Pierce-Hatton shot into the thing with his French double quailing piece, and such a blast of burning air covered the top of this single stick of the forest we reckoned on a momentary view of hell itself (and saw, truly, it was barely a degree worse than what we had).

Somebody called up to Pierce-Hatton to ask whether he was injured. A head wearing nothing but the scorched crown of a hat arose from the hutch.

“Why shit yes! Haven’t you got eyes, man?” came the reply.

Something big is afoot. The cannoneers are bringing up the last of the magazine and stacking it. We haven’t seen this in weeks, seems years. The thing, our last, comes on at dawn tomorrow. New flags, last in supply, are unrolled. The band has swelled. The deserters, not that many, have returned, but most are in the band. We’ve never had this enormous a musical outfit before, nor so well instrumented. Fifes, drums long and short, snares, French horns, an Ophicleide, banjos with new woodchuck skin, trumpets and cornets, trombone, four marching violins, and a brand-new man with huge cymbals. They rehearse very softly, but I am told it’s a thing from Tchaikovsky they have in mind, a military arrangement of the Concerto for Violin in D, Opus 35. The lines are shaken out, just two fifty-yard-long vanguards. Even three of the camp dogs are with them. We have no rear. The band is right behind them. When I know thoroughly what is up, I double my shrieking at Ruth. We are going, definitely. You bastard, you think I would miss this? I know you’ve been having it easy. I remind him profanely of his family and tell him I will search them out and write about them badly. So, by God, we are in there too, just ahead of the band. I put my quill away and exchange it for an assault saber. They are lying about everywhere and easy to find.

Is there a better music than the eruption of a true salvo from our beleaguered cannoneers, hub to hub, those ten of them, at the first sparks of dawn in the gray mist? You die for this music. But it lasted only thirty minutes and then we move off in our ghostly ranks, Ruth cursing and whining as he lifts the barrow behind me. Their cannons have not opened yet. They are waiting, waiting, perhaps till the last cynical second, every drop of blood squeezed from their dramatic absence, wrecking us in the mind — they hope. But there is no hesitation and when you see the pitted and shell-raked field, the last quartermile, suddenly the band up and high in the best enthusiasm, tearing and swelling the heart, we know we have seen heaven. Then their cannon erases their fortifications in serial billows, and the rare banshee music of passing shot that few are privileged to hear seems so thick we have another firmament to breathe, an ozone of the delirious. I am so happy, so happy!

Hardly anybody falls. I tell you we are gaunt! We are almost not there, and we are starting that dear, deep-down precious trot toward them. Their musketry is popping and pecking. Their men are so thick on the line the flame is solid, and it is all we see out of the cannon smoke. Now at last we run; run dear boys, run! I had a chance to look about and the flags, my godly stars and bars, my regimental white cross on blue field, were clustered, gathered to the center. Oh boys, boys! I am shrieking. Up, get it up, my brothers! To them, into them! The general ahead, squalling atop his beast, rides straight into the furnace and our lines go in, and I go in. What a hell of a band we’ve got just behind. You can tell they are committed. They are going ahead too! Oh, happy bayonets high, oh happy, happy, happy! Then we are running in sudden silence. There is mystery and miracle left in this hard century! They are not firing anymore. We are running through stone silence, the grand old yell in our throats, our gray and butternut and naked corpses hurling forward, barely finding their rail fence, their earthen works, their growling ramparts. Bayonets down! Earn heaven, lads! Murder!

But the smoke has cleared off their line and we run up to stare at silent men with their guns down. Somewhere just behind them their general is bawling, even over the volume of ours.

There is great confusion, but I am glad I was near the center where General Kosciusky, a Polish-Russian, was screaming at the men in blue.

“Stop it! Stop it! I can’t take it anymore. The lost cause! Look at you! My holy God, gray brothers, behold yourself! Cease fire! Cease it all!”

So, you see, we were just staring at their deep and thick line, every soldier in a new blue boat, their general screaming behind them.

“By God, we surrender!” he shouted. “This can’t go on. The music. The Tchaikovsky! You wretched specters coming on! It’s too much. Too much.”

Our general, stunned, went over to take his sword. We, all energy gone in the last run, sagged about. Nothing in history led us to believe we had not simply crossed over to paradise itself and were dead just minutes ago.

In their tent there was a conference. Then their men began stacking arms and bringing forward food to us. You wouldn’t believe the victuals. I gorged on honey and oysters fresh from the shell. You could hear a long constant moan of gnawing men as we sat around with plates on our laps, sucking in venison, turkey, porterhouses, piles of fat white beans.

When their general, a splendid tall man, the very replica of the bearded Greek commander, returned to the line and chanced to look down at me in my barrow, he began weeping again, and I am sorry I had nothing but a greasy face and the eyes of a dog to greet him.

Such arms, cannon, even repeating rifles; such almost infinite caissons, so many thrilling flags and handsome plump mules; and thousands of cutlasses and musical instruments — these were all ours. We, the few of the two lines and the band, could not encircle them. We did not know how to guard this host, and just gave up and fell back on more food, whiskey and coffee.

I was, as the scribe, invited into the last conference on dispensation. Our general, held by two orderlies like a towel between them, was still too stunned to gloat. His impossible silence spoke the whole moment. But we must argue a bit on the matter of a name for this battle. There were no landmarks or creeks or churches about; only a family of Germans named Hastenburg who had lived in a house northwest of the field, long obliterated, suggested any proper noun.

It was decided then that this was the Battle of Hastenburg.

Evening of the Yarp: A Report by Roonswent Dover

DARN IT WERE BORING, WISHT I WERE A HAWK OR CRAB. WHEN I SEEN him first I leapt out of my face for glad cause nothing moving lately but only rabbit nibble and run headfirst into the bottom of the purple cane. Deacon Charles at the VT school say go a head and write like this dont change. He wants to see it quick cause I seen the Yarp. Or somebody like him. Xcuse me please for not correct but I am hard attempting to spell at least sweller it being so important. Of a mountain man/boy nineteen first that day at two-forty-one o’clock afternoon on the watch I found at the road going up to Missus Skatt’s house.

The sin of the old people I wondert what it was cause I dint feel it. The evil things of Roonswent Dover which is me werent felt by me like the others cause I had no feltedness of their kind of sin. I found out the Yarp did too.

He was a man hitchhiking where dont nobody come, ever, up a red ditch juncted to a road so dirty and spit out red on the paving. He was a true-looking lean man near hungery looking in a high collar white city shirt but no necktie up on it. I passed him then slapped my thigh, why not, I’m so miserable bored. Maybe this man knewn something markable or a good thing to seek, him wanting a ride up that ditch where nobody but old woman Skatt lives. Rained down to gullies, that road, but we figure she be hungery, she walk out of there, down the mountain with her crooked feet, buffalo toenails and ruint smell. I backed up and he looked in the window. I say can’t you see no truck nor even tractor could get up that gullied red road? He said he would go on with me and rest and see Missus Skatt later. He sat down, no suitcase, bag, nor cane nor hat, just coming out of winter and going to near freeze this night. Thanks for the lift. You know where you are? I asked him. Yes I been here plenty time and I know your Missus Skatt very very well. It doesn’t matter much when I get there sooner or later but I will go with you to the store.

I asted him how he knewn I was going to the store (and I was). He said life is simple around here and I had the look of a store visit on me. Nobody much confused him and now he was hungery, feeling low and getting chill. He gave me a cigar for my trouble and said it was the kind governors and dictators smoked from Latin America. We lit up and I was feeling chumly. He asted me would there be music at the store. This struck me goofy, of course there were a radio at ever store and a televisioner too. And would there be food? I turned over to him saying what else would there be in a store to be a store at all, certain it has food, gas, oil, shells, bait, sardines, herrings, rat cheese, and two old geezer at a wood stove playing Risk, and Macky Vellens. He said what, I repeated, he pronounced it better, MacKeyavellea of course, the writer of the Prince they used as a handbook to Risk, taking on personalities, book falling depart apieces through the generations. Mr Simpson and Gene James owned it with theyr smart pet goat that makes change I swear not, only the truth alone.

Then that man, the Yarp, he said shut up. Riding aside me afortunate my charity, he said Shut Up ragely. It were glum, I werent happy, but couldnt get mad cause he seem a danger now. I dont want to hear none of your tales, boy, he kept on it, too many tales come out of these mountains and everwhere. There shouldnt be any tales.

I said well you can see the goat with his front foot, but he hissed or spat so I look out the window away from him, stopt talk.

In your mind you thinking you paying for the gas and tires hauling me. And it was true, what he said.

We had eleven mile to go and it was crooked high down to low then high again, not even a dead dog nor cat nor chicken keep you company under the overhangs of them sweaty rocks. I aint nere liked them and now, getting on dark, the mountains I feel they live and sqeeze in on you to a narrow lane when nobody’s around. I nere give up that feeling sinct I was a kid. It aint Arkansas or no real place. Now come sleet specking my poor dusty glass all acracked, which, I didn’t like the sun running down either.

We’ll have a nice snow tonight, the Yarp adventured. The quiet I was keeping didnt make no call to break it so I remaint quiet. Nineteen or not I was frighted. But if the quiet woulder asked me I woulder said You fool, it’s on too late to snow, that sleet is just a peck from some froze cloud way up there. Its April, you fool.

Yes it’ll catch Missus Skatt just unfreezing from the winter. She won’t have enough wood. I’m sure glad I’m going with you to the warm store, Roonswent Dover.

Yes he called my name. There aint no way of knowing my name and be a stranger cause I go by Bill Dover to everbodys knowlege. I aint got even no license plate on this truck. You can see ten mile clear out here, cant be no stranger as ever came near your house nor your daddy or mommer that you dont know about. Our part of the county can’t have no stranger moren ten minutes. So it were cold quiet now, believe it, no heater in my truck only a lantern in case of a mountain accident, lucky if theyr matches in that glove apartment. I couldnt get no speed outer her neither and we aint got to the real high passes yet. We was in a holler and then a vale, pinking out to the sides. There was some sun, a bit, so sudden I got brave.

But you shunt know my name.

He nored me.

You know too many legends, boy. Everbody does. You got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself, dont you? The imagination is what ruins it. They shouldn’t never imagined heaven nor hell. They shoulder taken their years, thats all. You already know the more you think of something aforehand it isn’t anything like that at all. They’ll be legending though, they’ll be doing wrong and doing nothing, bargaining with heaven or hell. They shoulder just taken their years and practiced being dumb, over and over. Already that school is confusing you and hurting your mind, Roonswent Dover, son of Grady and Miriam.

I just fix small engines, I aventured.

You lie!

That last shout was good for another two mile of silents.

It snows here when there aint no snows anywhere else near. We must be higher, higher than all Arkansas and Missouri. In our county the Indian were never pushed out and we has whole fullblood Indians, but they are innocent. All the killing and stealing on tourists or policemen or sometimes a local for peculiar reasons is done not by them. Some said it were womens, womens and girls. A Indian told me that when I was seventeen. Now our Indians are Nini Indians. They fought on the Souths side and had slaves where nare white man here fought for either side, most for not knowing there were a war on and the rest, said my Uncle Rell, because they were drunk or idiots. A Ozark army might have swayed the war, says Rell. Our family wernt interbred but some Ozarkens, come to church and school too, theyr daughters get pregnant by them or theyr sons. So the Indians were defeated, and without slaves they moved up here from like Paragould near the river and sorrowed-out and become puny. Anybody can whip an Indian a head taller than him, a girl could do it. It is still a agony how many years? a thousand years after the War Between the States now the Indian is in deep sorrow even to plant a bean or tote water or feed his dog. They groan out loud all the time, feeble and they hate it, cursing Robert E. Lee who promised them slaves all the future. So theyr homes is tragic, likely to be a stricken old bus or a natural cave or sometimes what I saw, they tooken to living secret under a white man’s house that they dug a hole under it. And they are in ever abandoned shack or outhouse, they are in so fast, they might be puny but they are quick, whole families can get on a squat quicker than deer fleas. (The old shacks and cabins here and there was left over from the diamond rush when my pa was a boy.) Reason Im explaining the Indians is they had legends more than us. Theyr chief drives a schoolbus to the VT school and will lie like a mockingbird back and forth to it. The bus dont allow nare radio so that Indian Don Suchi Nini sings to us these stories and believes he is the one who will change them back to real. They still want slaves and Don Nini says the whites better remain strong or, clunk, they be Indian slaves come nigh. When I was littler he had me making my grades and I went to the VT so I wouldnt be no slave. So we know what theyr thinking, and theyr everwhere, slunking round and creeping lenthwise in some Ozark ledge or listening from some nookery, and you cant do nothing about it. Xcept sometimes a girl will kill one, and they are set back in theyr revolution for a few week. I never treated nare Indian bad and most here dont. They might be puny but they scare me, the men dont care whether they got on a dress or overalls, and they will melt right in front of you into a line of trees. So, three mile up from the store on that last bad mountain, this Indian goes across my lights, which, wouldn’t you know, is full of snow, active snow, and he was old and naked except for rubber wading boots. It just made me shake. I never seen nare like it, cracking my teeth that way. Then there were a little mountain girl coming after him with a fork hoe, what a dreadsome ancient sneer on her face. They come off the side of the mountain across the road and maintained on down the mountain where nothing but no goat should get a perch, on down to awful black night rock near the pitch of a well.

Oh! I said out. You see that? Hands bout to tear off the steering wheel.

I didnt see anything at all, lad, said him.

Everthing since he got in that truck was mocking me, minding back. Xcept maybe that speech on legends, hell and heaven.

The snow was churning and up in the road, some storm blowing down about three mile high, seemed right from the North Pole, only in our county. But it was, I knewn he was the Yarp in a way already, I bet. He was lost over there in the dark seat and maybe he didnt see that old Indian and girl. Wouldnt you know the engine quit and overheat and I had to coast down, Ive did it before, all the way to the store. Xcept the unsound got to me, in the curves and sliding on them circular threads that does as tires. The quiet was outside and inside and my poor lights was flickering. I knewn Id have already been down twict and back if the Yarp wadn’t with me.

You hear about murdering thieving females in these parts, said the Yarp.

I werent going to adventure, Nat Hidey, no I werent. Was peering in the snow which, it was heavier than normal snow and it was gray not good white. A Yarp’s eyes of course is suppose to be hot yellow and his skin disappeared from his throat so you can see its tongue long in it and tonsils and open voice box, it makes you sick. I werent going to look over there at all. I werent getting it yet but the Yarps smell of course would be a combination of bull spunk and road kill. Your Yarp suppose to have tiny long bird legs and big long feet too. I was on my way to the store, nailed in my windshield. A Yarp doesnt have to be none of that unless the time come on him. A Yarp has passed for a preacher, you know that. He dont know any breed and he can be an Indian or Kentuckian or live far off in a hospital. But he denominates in black garments, sudden he will lift his coat and you can see all his digestion, everthing he’s eaten all chewed and gravyed-up in them tubes and holds and glands, and it makes you sicker. Thered be a baby’s foot or one woman saw his stomach and there were a human brain. You can picture me as a hard looker through that windshield.

A Yarp is weak and quick like Indians in the legs, thin, but in the upper body powerful, so this thing throw through the woods and running water and pea gravel top-weighted. It can reach up with its arms and yank you down, but it aint hardly nothing underneath but coot legs and wading feet. My grandpa knewn a family of Yarps, peaceable, but nere eye has set on a whole family sinct his time which was eighty year ago when the Ozarks was founded. A Yarp really belong in Europe or Asia is what my grandpa say, he dont like it here in Arkansas, but some fell off accidental in the boats going out and there we are, they come a Yarping with Vikes and Pilgrims, they dont know no breed. Like the Indian they would be not so scarey if they was strong and upright. They is twict the fear to me weak and slimy, hanging down toward the ground like a slug snail, presiding on you specially when they are in groups nearby you, glooming at you, wanting something you cant give but they have to stay after it. That feebletude and they putting hands on you, that belongs more in your nightmares than a strong evil man, it gets your back clammier, your head colder, your heart miserabler.

I coasted on down not talking at all like Im talking now, lights flickering at the snow that were like gray scales, I finally got it, like fish scales, aflapping on the glass. I wouldnt look but he started shaking with cold I guess, commenced knocking on the tin floorboard of my Ford, gruesomish. There hadnt been lights left or right the whole trip, nare cabin nor goodly shack even if there were a light to commit, you hadnt sawn it.

Hurry, lad, the store, said him. I was cold to bones too. When what you know, the engine caught on for maybe cooling down gainst the snow. This thing get a hundred mile on a gallon of water when its good. Will there be music, he asted again. Saying from my choked throat was grievous.

Even if the radio broke they have a televisioner that pull in a music channel all snowy. Out here for the mountains we cant barely get waves, but there is people moving, dancing in the speckled screen we dont know the source, but there be a tiny music at it. The people is sad-looking themselves back and fro specially when the music goes out entire, you just having loud snow and forms pitching and pulling at each other. But I didnt say this to the man I knewn certain were a Yarp, chatting and shifting with cold. I wont it were light enough to see his feet and legs so thin out the right side low of my eyeball.

If there isnt music, lad, we must ride on.

Oh no we dont said I to me.

He knewn already that at the VT school we gathered with Deacon Charles, some nine of us young hillbillies at the head of the willow creek back of the parked schoolbus, the Indian chief Don Nini with us too listening and saying and ahearkening at lunch, seemed it was wouldnt you know subject of females and some studying the old stories and some about the at large way of the world. Some of them had Satan with a fiddle, why Im assaying off again here, the music. He was known to come to a dance out of nowhere and negotiate his fiddle to warp womens and girls. But Deacon who is reasonable in the head and forty-five and run the small engine course said that was made up by jealous male hillbillies whose wives and sweethearts was taken off by a musical stranger. Any slicker could do her, even out of a flat Arkansas town. You might as well say that Satan had a good car or money, which would work better. Deacon knewn the flat delta as well as us in the hills and of course was in the arm service when we was fighting I believe India. He said there werent even half the real tales never that they claim, like youd think a standard Ozark person was going round hardly nothing but a blabbering tale, tales piling up in ever holler and cove. No, and a lots were did pure for government men and university people who wouldnt leave them alone and specially during the Deep Ression. In the Deep Ression times folks often told a tale get the government interested in you as interesting, as workable or feedable or sometimes even free money which they awarded you for not coming off the mountain and mixing in nare cities, which already had too many folks. Some had went to California and messed it up terrible. The governor of California had began a new state and he didnt want nare hillbillies on it. In California they have science that grow eggs on a tree, and them hillbillies so sloppy and shuffling, they dont know how to harvest them down and walk cracking them with their stupid Arkansas feet. Deacon Charles would hold up his banana at lunch and say Whats this? A banana. Well, more than that, friends, youre looking at California, where I shipped out to the East. You say I went west to get East, how? Well, friends, there is a line in the ocean all stormy where everything gets backwards, that’s how. They worship whats little, like a stick. Back to the tales, he said when you then dropped the ones said by parents to scare theyr young into formity, you hadnt hardly no real tales left. No, your witches and your haints, there wasn’t many of them and the tales told about them got them wrong, my hillbilly geese, all gaggle and tongue. Your active supernaturals aint ever going to get that apparent, for one thing. He live on the rim of things and dont want to be discovered. I seen exactly one Yarp and I been searching all my life.

Finally the store, but it looked dim in that rain of snow, just a quarter the light that usually come out of there from Mr Simpson and old Gene James, tall and gray-bald with a bowtie like some girl stood him up sixty years ago. The thing, the Yarp, hopped out and went on in while I gassed up and watered the truck. Ice and snow was already thick and made my truck ghosted. Oh it were freezing and I trembled scared both, not wanting in the store but too cold not to.

The Yarp was over next to the wood stove where they was sitting just staring at the Risk board, no pieces on it. Something was wrong and I were glad theyr was somebody else to share the Yarp with, even nineteen like I am.

He had said something made them stop and frown, Mr Simpson out of a old blanket over him and the smart goat next to the leg of the Yarp. That goat could make change for a dollar, signalled with his right foot.

Theyr not believing I am Missus Skatts man, Roonswent, said the Yarp.

Mr Simpson had a face long like a mule’s, with magnifying glasses he wore making his eyes huge and swimming at you. He said, That old woman crooked and near eighty and dyes her hair red? She on them inclines like a crab been skint. Aint no young man like you be courting her. Why youd be too young for her son.

Before this night is over I will be with her. I have seen her many many times. I have been with her many many times.

Gene James spoke, God made the vaginer of even a plain woman so sweet that even after knucular war and it was the only thing left, the race would be continued. But she cross the line.

How could you get up there? said Mr Simpson.

You cant hardly get up there on a hard summer day, said Gene James. Hed of been the right age if nare man would court her, which, it made you sick to think about. Its froze in on top of being naught but gullies, said James, like that was the law, that was it.

Why I’ll walk right up there from here, said the Yarp.

Some dimwits was released on the county about when I was ten from a bus wreck down a iced incline, them that wasnt killed outright. They come from the hatch in Little Rock to spy the Ozarks. Folks liked some of them and took them in and some of them bred, we all knewn. Gene James looked at him and then me like he might be one, this Yarp, just now showing up from torment. You couldn’t tell them from normal. But I was busy looking at that mans legs and feets. The feets were long and wide all right, in Ill be hung, dirty white or gray scuffed brogans like an normous baby shoe. You never seen that brand nigh nowhere round here. I liked being clost to my home, three mile on.

Mr Simpson he would wear a gown or womens pedal-pushers, and highheel canvas sandals with bush socks, anything, so he wasnt one to pass judgment, but I was flickering with my eyes at old James wanting him to see the infant boots. Before he could two Ninis came in stomping snow off. They had on blankets and towels and you couldnt tell man or woman or two of the same. Mr Simpson spoke some Nini because he traded with them. One had on a beanie thing on its head with a rubber band under its chin, and it said something so Mr Simpson pointed and the two went back and sat on the one piano bench and the one in the beanie commenct playing the piano, Indian or bad, which was good for seventy-one out of eighty-eight keys. They took up some time from the Yarp question. You thought about the only one ever truly play that thing was away high and rich maybe on Mars by now, Len Simpson. The Yarp was closing his eyes like sweet music was alooning. I was trying to whisper Yarp to old James before that thing raised up his coat and made the geezer vomit and die. Gene James was a stubborn born liar, but I was the first to see the Yarp. Now someways out of my fear with four other rightly human persons, I thought I had evened with Deacon Charles. I had a true tale and would be the center of the lunch talkings for a long time. Gene James was only fifth or eighth on what he’d seen true, at eighty or more. The Yarp spoken again.

I’ve a great hard long love for Missus Skatt. Shes not always what she looks to you, a goat or crab scuttling down that hill of false diamonds from her house. That is a good house, built better than most in the county. And I don’t look like this all the time either. Her children is what I love, the young ones. She cooks a sumptuous venison and hare, and has a wheat patch, crushes her own meal herself for larripan bread. We have roasting ears and sweet potatoes right out of the wood ash. Im going to feed myself here.

Before no man could commence his tongue he had come back with a bottle of herrings and sour cream which he put upon a saltine and sucked in, not a crumb left on his palm.

Missus Skatt can lasso a deer. But its her children most I love.

She never had no children. Married but barren or maybe too foul to touch, said Mr Simpson.

She lasso them hares too, ho? said Gene James.

She stares them till theyr hearts break, said the Yarp. That fine house was built by her husband Andrew and shortly he fell dead.

We know all that, the two geezer spoken together.

But you know only a mite. I’m going to tell you of her children and her charming history which will explain why you are sitting here poor, ignorant and stupid with bad backs. For Missus Skatt she runs a sort of charm school you would call it in a town. Unknown to you she has raised every woman in this county. And before her another woman kin to her. While the Indians play that music that I love they cant understand me and even when they stop theyll just look at a mouth moving.

That one without a hat understands American, said Mr Simpson, eyes swole in the magnifying glasses.

But that Indian wont hear a thing. This isnt Indian business.

Then he told a long weirded thing such as I cant hope to repeat only relying on my memory with my simular attempt.

He says all the girl children is drawn to Missus Skatt and sneaks over to her they cant help it, when theyr ten or like that. This was even before the founding of the Ozarks with another woman. Why even right then a girl was hauling wood to her cause she knewn it was cold and she was near out of fuel. All around the girls and the womens learnt at her knee these things: how to pleasure a man so good hed cry for it, how to coy on him, how to get inside him like a mindful tapeworm, because she anointed them with special powerful sexual parts and strong soft arms and eary soothing voices. She coached them when to begin apleading for all they want within the county because they could never go outside the county ever and their men couldnt neither. And how to nag and harangue and beat down and whup their men not raising a little finger, and how to make him worm small and stuck to his spot. You take mind, the Yarp said, that this county aint forever had nothing but tired sorry men droven down like a stake to their patches. They never went off to fight a war even when the whole world needed them to fight evil. Nor none of them was athletes nor only feckless at lumbering or even executing in a automobile. And none ventured out or away and couldnt hardly catch a fish on a spring day with trouts leaping on the bank. Nor with cow nor horse nor goat (the Yarp kicked the goat and Mr Simpson and Gene James seen them whitish baby shoes of a sudden) any count. That they died not only before theyr womens but passed over like sissies mewling and pouting ten years afore they ever hit dirt. You notice how they are coming down level and under the Indians. The Yarp pointed over at the back of that Indian who was playing and sudden he began playing something ghostly like what were wrote by a man with a long beard in a Asian castle and sung by his beautiful daughter.

You notice too the crimes of murder and theft in the nights, all them I tell you now by her womens and girls. Not found by sheriffs nor nobody because the innocence is what she drilled in to them. Right now she is teaching that little wood-hauling girl how to be innocent and quick and steal, you bet. Its a thieves university, the womens, yes your wives too and your children-seeming girls has done it with bloody hand and prestidigitation of the fingers, theyr off with stolen goods, what theyr men dont get them. And sometimes they drop things like the watch Roonswent Dover found. He turned around and his eyes was yellow on me. I couldn’t look and down at his knees I see them thin chickeny legs cutting out under his black pants. I just gulped and he was around, said Now this! and he pushed himself right up to Gene James, pulled his coat out.

Old man James took a gander and begun vomiting and then he fell off his chair dead with a whitened head. I was holding my hand over my eyes and didnt know what he was after for a long second. Mr Simpson hed seen but he survived and got up and yelled to them Indians for help but they never even turnt around.

Yes her time has come. Its over for her now. One last night of pleasure and it will be done. This Im getting xactly I think.

You wont tell none of it Simpson because theyll think youve passed to senile and take away your store.

He turned to me. I was ten feet off. The pet goat was nuzzling my legs for comfort and baaing.

And if you tell anybody this you will die, Roonswent. You are going to know whats wrong around here but you cant do nothing about it and that is your eternal curse, which is like that of many a man. But I wont have to worry. Youre of the age where a woman has already touched you and touched you deeply. You think you are being so kind to your mommer taking her a fixed sewing machine but when she takes it you look deep like you’ve never looked, youll see what is there.

So Im up the hills and mounts, so give me this.

He took a fold-in plastic fishing pole off the wall. It made a stout cane. He went toward the door, red spots on the floor off his infant shoes.

Theyll be out tonight, but just your littler girls. Even I have to swat them off. Youd think not, but I tell you, even Ive been womaned. I aint half the Yarp (he said it!) I used to be.

Therell be a time when the Indians will get the courage too gainst us old white bones. The Yarp went out in the cold snow and turned toward the mountains wed left. But he didnt take all his smell.

Mr Simpson looked horrible miserable.

What did he show you? I asked him.

Miz Skatt’s head in his belly, cooking and hollering.

Later in the week me and two, Deacon Quarles and Chief Nini, clambered up the hill and went in the house. There was just, you couldn’t believe it, piles of jewelry, watches, radios, knives and ribbons, deputies badges and wigs. Missus Skatt were in her bedroom with a old head and a young body, all laid out nude and peaceful.

So I havent said it, Ive written it and I hope this might make a difference. But I think it wont, not at all. Im got, Im doomed.

But its done for Deacon Charles and he says he will send it on to the governor. That makes me even or better than Deacon Charles, remember.

Mother Mouth

TODAY, VERNON, I NOTICED ELVIS WAS GETTING HAIRY. FINDING THAT, my tongue got hot all the way down to my heart to which it was attached. There was no keeping off the temperature or the rump rump noise of my want in my person. We don’t go to church hardly anymore except to learn good English. Their music ain’t ourn. Ourselves, we suck the air out the radio when it plays the Memphis beam with Negroes, shouts, moans and rumps in it. Between ourselves we conceive a sound like a worried panther having lots of mama and baby words. It can’t be in a church. We take the airwaves out of our little Philco and spit them back with the mama panther in them. The Philco is all we could afford after you wrote the extra zero on that check and left us for three years in jail.

From now on you are such a disgrace, you understand, that you have absolutely no sway in anything and will only hang in the back or at the rear side to us in disrespect. I, with my dark inset eyes, him and his rustling eyes, we have made a vow, Elvis and I: that we will remain slim and elegant and catlike in our movements until the day he has captured his child bride, who will dye her hair jet black like mine. Then I, then he, will get fat together in blurring of each other toward the end, and we have impacted ourselves so. We like pills when we can get them but our beauty we know can’t never last, that’s a part of the glory. We can’t be forty years old. Romance don’t really allow forty years of life to what we are. Oh, we might go on as something, some shape or mass, but we’re not even there anymore, it’s burnt up, panther and all.

He will sing about the Teddy Bear, how he wants to be it, and millions of little ears will hear something like never they heard before, down to their feet, and wealth untold will unfold. Every song will be about me, it won’t be no real girl, and that is what they will hear and gasp upon and find so magic all to their toes. In pictures you will see him with women, all kinds of gorgeous girls and cute like what ignored him when he was poor and baby-pretty, but you will never ever see love in Elvis’s eye for any of them, because it will only be me, and our music together. He’ll be looking away like into a mirror all his life but it’s me he’s looking at. You won’t be able to imagine Elvis ever looking directly at anybody, it will always be off to the side at guess who, the mirror maybe? but more me.

Then I will die and the source will dry up for him. The famous will visit him at some mansion right on Memphis’s Main Street, and he will tell these people, in maybe English, “Mama ain’t out there no more feeding them chickens in the back.” The tears and the crack in his voice will always be there from then on, Vernon — jail trash, you’ll be back venaling around like a rodent with an evangelist hairdo, but the money will be bad, Vernon, always bad, like that extra zero you wrote on that check — and my boy will get coiled and wrapped and weird inside and out, leaping in flight wild with Tupelo space clothes on him, doing movements that are trying to climb the ladder to heaven where his mama is, and the music gift will still be there, only there ain’t nothing worthy to sing no more, and he is making those thrown-out grabbing postures and sweating like with my fluid all over him, becoming a mass, just a groping mass, on the rope — up, up, me waiting for him.

Because there ain’t anything like Mama Nooky. Ask all them soldiers that lay dying on the fields of that great war you weren’t in.

Rat-Faced Auntie

EDGAR PLAYED THE TROMBONE AND FOR EIGHT YEARS HE WAS A MOST requested boy. Based in Chicago, he did a lot of studio work and homed in the fine, lusty Peets Lambert band. He could step into a serious club and be hailed and dragged onstage by any good band. Even back when, in Georgia at age seventeen, he was more than accomplished on both slide and valve. He favored the copper and silver Bachs. He’d come out of Athens roaring, skipping his high school senior year because he was such a prodigy. Edgar had then got the ear of a jazz fanatic on the university faculty who contracted for his audition in Nashville with Peets Lambert’s old big band. It was turning electric and throwing out, ruthlessly, the old players. Lambert had a new sound — jazz/swing, jazz/reggae, jazz/classic, jazz/blues, jazz/country, even. This was simply desperation to survive. The band had not recorded in seven years. Now even the manager was only twenty.

Lambert, a disguised sixty-six, had not made enough to be comfortable from constant tours. He was wearing down, had emphysema, and it was hoped the new Lambert Big Thunder Hounds would get hip and record again. Edgar was approved immediately. He found himself in Chicago with two suitcases, two horns, and ten thousand dollars from Lambert. The band members came from everywhere and almost all were near-adolescent. Edgar loved them. He’d been on the horn so thoroughly since age ten that he’d never been to a scout or church camp or had even played in a high school band, having bypassed them for the Atlanta Symphony at age fourteen. So this was a grand society for him. He loved it, lived it, inhaled it. Immediately he began cigarettes — what the heck? — and staying out late with the guys: hipsters from Los Angeles, nerds from Juilliard, a gal bassist from Jackson, Mississippi — his crush — who hardly spoke except relentlessly and in exquisite taste with her Ampeg fretless. Edgar was in love from their first meeting. He too was shy and awkward, except on his horn, and it took him a year to ask her out, though he watched her religiously during his breaks — how she stood, short and blonde, but somehow with long, heartbreaking legs in black hose as she called on her strings to provide the hard bottom gut of the band. When they did record, did make money, back down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he listened and was caused to tremble by the wanton bass authority that poured from the modest, yes, woman. “All woman,” he repeated to himself.

Lambert threatened to throw them out if they took drugs or even drank much. The parents at home loved that about Lambert. He’d returned in fame from a beloved, almost persecuted era in music, and seemed a practical saint to them, a saint of cool when he appeared on television in a turtleneck with his still thick salt-and-pepper hair, beret, and those long genius piano fingers, announcing against drugs nationally. He was one of the first celebrities to do it in the seventies. A victim of cigarettes, he gently pled for the young to avoid his error, though everybody noticed the good man lighting one up in the wings or bathroom every now and then. He looked guilty, though, and nobody said a word. Edgar, with no prior use or education in drugs at all, learned something alarming: Parton Peavey, the black boy on guitar, came into the band daily on heroin and never stopped in the years that Edgar knew him. (He was a fabulous crowd-pleaser in a herd of twenty-six crowd-pleasers — flat-out celestial on an old Fender clawed to pieces, maybe dug out of a burned-down nightclub in the Mississippi Delta, the great bad taste of the fifties left in its remaining blue — Parton Peavey was a star and everybody knew it.) Parton was from east Texas, like the Winters, Stevie Ray and, later, Robert Cray. He would vacation in Beaumont once a month and return with a literal bag of heroin (China White in a one-pound burlap sugar bag). Edgar, drop-jawed, saw him fix himself in a Milwaukee hotel room, calm as putting on a Band-Aid. Didn’t he know Lambert would can him instantly? The band was heaven come real to Edgar and he couldn’t understand why Parton would do this. But Parton didn’t care, it seemed. He played brilliantly, though, and gigged out far more than any of them. The truth was that he was close on being a celebrity at his rail-thin age of twenty-one.

He was so good, or so wanted (guitars owned the world), the suspicion was Peets Lambert couldn’t get rid of him, even if he did know. When he let out, peerless amid the stage-packed Big Thunder Hounds, it was a sound such as not heard any where. Maybe he was addicted to that, too. Come another year he could fire Lambert and buy the band himself. He already had four records. Really, after three years and all that money, it was a miracle he remained with the band at all. He was an imitation of nobody, seemed unconscious of anybody before him, and had his own cult. All this with heroin. Edgar constantly expected him to fall over or go raving, taken off by ambulances and the police, but Parton didn’t.

Parton was docile, not sullen or conceited, uneasy with women, and in ways more boyish than Edgar. He was not stupid, but he didn’t know one state capital, and when they were headed to a city, he’d only ask, “Up North? Down South?” He seemed barely to have known an ocean, though Beaumont was on the Gulf of Mexico itself. The Pacific off Los Angeles — Venice rather frightened him. He believed, Edgar figured, that the United States didn’t end, ever. There was a lot in the world most of them didn’t know, some of them near-infantile despite their prodigy, but Peavey took the ticket. Even during his molelike existence in Athens, Edgar had never approached this insulation, practicing upward of twelve hours a day. The thing was, this made Parton Peavey likable, in a strangely hip way, and he began a fad of willful ignorance in the band. People would claim they knew nothing, had never heard of spearmint gum or a pocket calculator. He and Peavey became good friends. Everybody wanted to be close to him. There was a good, young quiet warmth about him, an endless politeness, too. And he was shot full of the world’s worst bad, all the time.

The band rose. Edgar had two cars — a Volvo coupe in Chicago and an old vintage Caddy convertible back home in Athens where he got the GED one idle summer at his parents’ insistence. He was a minor star down there. Nobody cared much for the trombone, but they respected him as an eccentric phenomenon, and the local paper kept up with him. He affected, newly, an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a pet weasel that clung to his neck when he dashed around Chicago and Athens. Edgar had a plain, narrow, long-nosed face. He let his hair grow down to midback, sometimes braiding it twice. He had the necessary headband — chartreuse — and he had a tattoo of an upside-down American flag right at the bottom of his throat where a tie-knot would have been. (His parents gasped when they saw it and he did, too, thirteen years later.) Edgar had always felt behind on his personality. It was near the end of the Vietnam War, so he had to get in fast on his outrage, and a bit louder. He’d gotten tattooed, sober, by the best in a New Orleans parlor, although the old mulatto was an ex-marine and hated the job—“Strictly for money, boy, you got the American right, you got the American right. Play your horn and sport while they dies for you.” Somebody gave Edgar books by Kerouac, Bukowski, Brautigan, Hemingway and Burroughs; also the poetry of Anne Sexton, which he liked especially and reread. He was coming on strongly to the bass-playing woman, Snooky, and barely knew that he was capturing her with his new vocabulary stolen from Ms. Sexton. With her and the others his library stopped. He could not conceive needing anything else, ever.

Edgar could afford to get a sitter for his apartment in Chicago, a jazz-smitten female student at the University of Chicago who was just a friend. She took care of his weasel, his Harley and Volvo, his books, his stereo equipment, and his collection of trombone recordings, which dated from the twenties on. Living the trombone had paid off in spades. He could buy and sell most college graduates his age. He had the leisure — holy smoke, he was playing all the time already — to take Caribbean vacations, playing trombone with West Indian steel bands (what a sound!) and drummers in Rio (salsa, salsa). The girl, from Louisiana, would boil crawfish for him on his return. He pretended to like them, but it was really Parton they delighted, by the potful, his chin shining with juice. What wonderful friends Edgar had then! Paradise, and Snooky slowly falling in love with him. She had a wild side, of course, especially liking midnight and later on the Harley, whipping around Lake Michigan on the back, hands under his armpits, in a dress with a bare twat underneath, her legs spread, the wind slipping around her joyful “womanity,” she said, confessing shyly to him after several rides. That, and the fact she was quietly but increasingly jealous of his house sitter, sitting closer to him and nailing down his thigh with her little hand, were the signals she was going for him in a long way, Edgar thought.

The band went by chartered plane. Snooky was flirted with by everybody, even Parton, but inevitably she’d sit by Edgar, trembling, and he would nurse her fear of flying. Her outfits became sexier and more garish as she was brought out front more and more to riot the house. It was a beloved thing to him that she remained shy and girlish as she aged. They were growing up together, a very privileged American jazz adolescence. In a way, though, to the crowd, Peets Lambert was her pimp. He went wow and stroked his chin at the piano when she came out nearly nude in her brief gaudy dress and stiletto heels, hamming with the happy lech smashed by her naughty rig, avuncular (old Peets had seen the wimmens in his time!). The public loved it, the Hollywood Bowl howled. Could it get any better? They did nine encores one night. Edgar played so well some nights that he knew he’d lucked into another whole planet of jazz, just a few of the greats nodding wisely around him. Somebody told Edgar that jazz was the only original American art form. He felt safe in history then.

Most of these nights he was secretly drunk. Edgar, still abhorring Parton’s habit, was becoming alcoholic, having never touched drink before age twenty-four. There was no great reason for it. The band was chaster and soberer by a long shot than any of their contemporaries. Some of them, get this, Rolling Stone noted, played dominoes and Scrabble at the hotels, enormous bars flowing around them, themselves oblivious, like a bunch of Mormons in the lobby.

Only Edgar and another man, a middle-aged survivor from the last band, a relative of Lambert, hid out in a dark rear booth, drinking, playing nothing but boozy arias back and forth, in prep for the gig. The older man was a veteran. Only vodka would do, maybe a dex on a tired trip, then Listerine and a quick Visine to the eyes before stage time. (Lambert would throw you out.) Woodrow, the saxman, assured him that liquor, when controlled, was a friend of music. It was no mystery then that Edgar was playing better. Woodrow argued that he should know, he himself wasn’t worth shit, never had been, and had plenty of time to listen, since Lambert rarely used him unless in a loud ensemble. But he knew music and Edgar, you cooking infant, you are away, man. You make other grown trombonists cry. Edgar rejected Woodrow’s claim: you’re the wise one, the dad, he said. You’re the tradition, the years, the true center. Holy smoke, man, you’re football, or a church.

Rolling Stone, concentrating on Parton, Snooky, the maniacal drummer Smith, Edgar and Lambert, had them in a big article called “Revenge of Big Jazz.” Life did about the same in huge pictures. Parton Peavey had never heard of either magazine. What a gas. He led both features, quoted in his wonderful innocence, drug-thin and solemn in nothing but boxer shorts backstage with a bottle of Geritol in his hand. The following spring their new record, Quiet Pages from Little Lives— the loudest thing they’d ever done — went gold. What jazz had done that lately?

Edgar let out an unusual, drunken obscenity of approval as they looked at the articles. Snooky was shocked. She accused the house sitter of pushing drinks on Edgar and maybe the black cigarillos, too, cutting into his breath, his life, and so on. The house sitter began crying. Though Edgar denied it, the upshot was that Snooky told the girl to leave. Nasty, but her man. This was the final signal. They soon married in her city, Jackson, with Parton and Lambert in attendance. Afterward, Edgar and Snooky began to make love clumsily. They had a long honeymoon in the apartment with only the heavenly gigs to interrupt it. Edgar would look up at the cold black Chicago sky and say, “Thank you.” Snooky loved this. She did not notice his drinking. He was such a perfect, gentle, vigorous husband. Nothing could be wrong. On the plane they were treated like two people “going steady” on a high school bus trip. He could swallow nearly a half pint of vodka at once in the jet’s restroom.

Lambert got cancer, but he could live with it. For a while the band’s celebrity increased because this fact was known. He never missed a show, even during chemotherapy. His piano playing became quieter, more wistful, more classical, his contemporaries noticed, adoring him further, if that were possible.

Then, pop, America forgot them almost wholesale, down to bargain basement at the stores. The band held a two-year discussion about this fact, but nobody could find a reason. Did Life kill people? They hated, in all their musicianship, and with saintly Lambert’s genius, to have been some vagrant novelty. The jet trips stopped instantly and the hotel rooms were poorer. They ganged up in rooms to make the budget. They traveled in a bus. None of them except Woodrow had saved much. Their foot had been in the door, they were about to step in as permanent guests, then. . But they had youth and were extremely loyal to each other and to the music. Edgar, who could barely read music, if truth be known, began trying to write for the band with a computer, but he wasn’t any good.

Two more records, then studio time became too expensive to make them — that kind of sales. So it was all over America, slowly and much more than anybody wanted. Lambert would fly ahead. Sick and more irritable lately, he’d greet them cheerfully, but his heart was down. All the kids were down. The halls became very thin, half deserted, echoing. Cocaine, more cigarettes, even cough syrup for its codeine became usual. Edgar stayed with the vodka. He’d tried Parton’s heroin once, over his protests, but it made him very sick. Snooky and most of them still took nothing.

One night out of Oklahoma City, Edgar had a sort of fit, insanely unlike him. He shouted another withering obscenity, grabbed the steering wheel away from the driver, and raced them off from the rest stop, screaming “I’ll take us somewhere! I’ll take us somewhere!” He turned the bus over on a curve, laying it down very fast in a long ditch. Everybody was shaken badly. Some had cracked ribs and terrible bruises. But there were no serious injuries except to Parton Peavey. His left hand would never be the same even after three surgeries. Also, something was wrong with the bus insurance — not a dime, and they didn’t have enough to get the bus fixed. The band canceled and laid up a month, leaking money.

The third week Lambert called for a band meeting in his small hot room in the motel. He began calmly. Then he insisted Edgar come up front. The general feeling was that Lambert would forgive him. Lambert was that kind of man. But then he saw Edgar was drunk. Edgar and the band had never heard that kind of profanity and hollering from him. Lambert kicked Edgar out and screamed at those, like Smith and Parton, who stood up for him. It was a bitterly sad thing. The worst, thought Edgar. But he was wrong.

Snooky left him. The pets, who’d been disturbed by his behavior, went with her — weasel Ralph and dachshund Funderbird. The house sitter came back. Edgar slept with her mournfully.

Parton, who’d left the band — several others had too — and gone on to solo celebrity (loved by the knowing for his crippled left hand; he was a real vet at twenty-nine now, a dues payer) came by for a last visit. He didn’t blame Edgar at all. Further, he was tearful about Edgar’s breakup with Snooky, who remained with the little-attended Big Thunder Hounds. He had no solutions, no black Beaumont wisdom, except, “Up to now, Edguh, we been lucky. Don’t rush it.”

Edgar looked at him through fuzz: a child. He felt much older than Parton. He didn’t think he could live at peace like that. He was often breathless and felt dirty around the neck, sweaty, where his tattoo was. An old Dylan thing chased around in his head: “boiled seaweed and a dirty hot dog.” Most of the time, he could not even eat that down, but it was what he deserved.

He’d made a lot of friends, however, gigging around Chicago, and for a long time he was known as a classy drinking man, an aristocrat of the ’bone, my man. Then he became a student at Northwestern where they had a fine-music program and worshiped pros. He’d heard Snooky was there, studying double bass, but he saw her only twice. Edgar was an uncommon freshman. He’d thought college was the thing to keep him straight, but it wasn’t. He felt elderly in the classroom, the reverse of his band experience. He did not know what the rest of them did. Against the odds, he played the clubs till five in the morning, around Rush and out in the burbs where jazz was a discreet rage with the young rich. His appearance in class — blasted, orange, looking thirty — was a miracle. But he pushed on through classes where he was not valued, making poor grades, keeping his mouth shut, and memorizing desperately. He fell down more than once, smashing his head on a desk. A mere pint a day was a masterpiece when he wanted the bar. The house sitter left. There went any order at home. He developed separate dumps of classwork. His refrigerator became green inside with uneaten food as the money got low. By the time he graduated at twenty-seven, thin and trembling, with a sociology major, he was a bum. He had no more time to fool around.

He crashed his old Harley into a pier post after a graduation party he gave himself and the fellow bums on the South Side, where he now lived with his few remaining possessions, a small dusty transistor radio and shower shoes. A lot of his clothes he simply lost. He was thinking an old thought about Snooky when he hit the post, his motorcycle flying out into the water of Lake Michigan. The yachtsmen were highly irritated. When the ambulance came, he still knew nothing. But he remembered what one paramedic said when they were lifting him in, looking at his tattoo: “Look at this piece of shit’s throat. Drive slow. He comes out of the booze, he’ll scream when to hurry.”

His sternum was cracked. For a month afterward he did not drink. The Dilaudid was pretty good, though. When they wouldn’t give him any more he had three especially lonely, agonized days. He wrote — why not? — an old aunt who was rich, and lied to her that he was in graduate school and poor. From La Grange came a note and money almost by return mail. What a mystic boon. He drank a great deal on it.

He would retell the story of how he’d had all the clubs going for a while with his “new” sound, but he was a sick drunk by then, the spitty and flat noise duplicating him. Even the avant-garde had found out he was merely drunk, and given him the door. But now his chest hurt too much to play. Plus, both instruments needed fixing.

He liked to travel light anyway, he told the fellows on the corner. Those cases were heavy, guys. One of them took him at his word and stole both horns. He knew who’d done it, but he was in such a world now that he just stared with his mouth open at the man and asked him, please, for a slug of port. The man refused. Edgar, forgetting the trombones, said he’d remember this. He wrote his aunt about his graduate studies and here came another money order from La Grange. Guilty, he began making notes on the bums. He used the back of his classwork pages. Some of the bums were long and vibrant narrators. Two of them spoke to Edgar in Russian. He kept scrawling on the page. As payment for their stories he would buy them drinks (sometimes the fellows cleaned up enough to get in a bar, hair combed in a bathroom). They thought he was very classy. The trombone stealer died. One of the narrators kindly took him to the pawnshop and he got his horns back.

He was thirty-four when he finally got treatment and afterwards, why not, he headed back down to Georgia on an Amtrak which went through Jackson, where he looked stupidly around for any sign of Snooky. He kept clothes and toiletries in his horn cases. He wanted, he thought, never to play the horns again. He could smell alcohol in them and they made him sick. But he wanted them near to remember.

Edgar’s sobriety did curious things to him. For one thing, he had not realized he was tall. His posture was still poor, though, having been curved over in search of the pavement all those years. He had blood and air in him again, and was still a bit high on withdrawal. His face was plumper, unblotched, his hearing and eyesight better. However, he had the impression he looked suddenly older, thrown forward into his forties at thirty-four. He had intimations that he would die soon, and must hurry. He also felt exceedingly and cheerfully dumb, as a saint or child might feel. He greatly enjoyed not knowing vast lots of things. He could remember nothing from his college “education.” Going back to school now under the patronage of his aunt (under the lie that Chicago, foul and windy, made his studies there impossible), he found he could barely write, and did it with his tongue out, counting the letters and misspelling like a fresh rube trying to explain Mars to somebody back home. Women, though his desire was wild from lack, frightened him. He withdrew from music. It hurt him even in restaurants. He discovered himself asleep, eyes wide open, for long periods of time. He guessed he’d nightmared himself haggard with liquor and his body was still catching up, sly fox. He became agoraphobic and would often walk straight out of a room with more than three people in it. Attending class was hard. Then there was one last thing: he was certain that he would do something large, significant and permanent. Yet his imagination was gone, and he supposed it would be a deeply ordinary thing he’d do, after all.

At the little college in La Grange where he pursued his master’s degree, depression hit him and he could barely stutter his name. One day he stopped in the hallway of his department in flowing traffic and for several minutes had no real idea where he was. The voices and moving legs around him were suddenly the most poisonous nonsense, but there was nowhere else to go. He was older than everybody again. Later he remembered that with seventeen years in Georgia and seventeen in Chicago he was torn between languages, even whole modes. He hadn’t heard Southern spoken by a large group in ages, and it sounded dead wrong, just as the crepe myrtle and warm sun seemed dead wrong. Somebody passed with a Walkman on. He awoke, sickened by the tiny overflow from the earphones. A winsome girl was shaking him by the arm. They were classmates. She, astoundingly, seemed concerned, though she made him afraid.

Next was the matter of his aunt, whose patronage he had never quite understood. He was into her for many thousands already and did not dare count it up until he was a well man. Neither could he face his parents, who had lost him during the years he was a bum. Athens was not far, but it was a century away. They were old people now. The sight of him might kill them.

Long, long ago, his father, who rarely drank, had got loaded on beer to level with the famous hipster his son had become. Edgar was touched. His father, who wrote innocuous historical features for the local paper, seemed bound to drill at the truth about his wealthy older sister, Hadley.

Hadley was rat-faced. She resembled other animals, too, depending on her anger. It was a shame she was so homely and bellicose. A low, crook-backed and turtled thing, her typical expression was the scowl, her typical comment, derision. She scratched the air with snorts and protests. Edgar got it after he’d moved in: “You keep your room like a doghouse!” Edgar thinking it near clinical in classified piles. Nobody could remember her being pleasant to anybody for very long. When she was young she had considerable breasts. Two husbands comforted themselves briefly with them. The husbands may have become husbands mainly for such comfort. But the harshness of her face reasserted itself and the mean gruesomeness of her voice knocked out, in a few months, her breastly charms, and the long rut of acrimony got its habit, driving the last husband pure deaf and happy of it. The old lady had retired from formal religion long ago, blaming the perfume and powder of her contemporaries, widows like her, who gave her “a snarling snootful.” Now she listened to the pastor on the radio, but only to keep up a mutter of assault against him. He was too meek and liberal for her. Hadley was a loner first, but not finally. Curiously, she’d had three handsome daughters. She wanted an ear, she demanded an audience, but something that nodded and remained fairly mute. She had worn out her daughters years ago. Her iron-jawed homeliness depressed them. They avoided her except at Christmas and Mother’s Day, which she always ruined. They wondered why there was such a long mystery of dispute with her as she was wealthy, safe, air-conditioned, pampered by a forgiving black maid, and hardly threatened by the music, newspapers, widespread fools and widow-harmers she so reviled. Paying for anything especially disgusted her and there was always a furor about some bill. The habits, hairdos, and clothing of her daughters’ husbands moved her tongue to little acidic lashes, as if they weren’t there, only their shells. The old woman, though, was smart and not just an ignorant blowhard. It seemed she had educated herself to the point of contempt for close to everything; further knowledge was frivolous. She dusted it off with a snarl.

Edgar numbed himself early on. His own rages and countermeasures had cost him soul and ground in the past. He was still a wreck easing himself slowly back into the waters of hope, and with caution he might repair some of the mournful holes. He was dutifully hacking away in sociology in exchange for his roof, the use of her car, even money for postage. Edgar, on the advice of his counselor, was writing letters of amends to Snooky, Parton, Lambert — still alive! — and delaying the long one to his parents. The old woman knew he’d been a drunk. Said she could smell it in his letters. Hadley relished it, she had him. Edgar would rally up a blank nod and she could scratch away at will. He hid his smoking from her. The day she smelled smoke in her Chrysler would be a loud, nasty one, he reckoned. His elegant garret in the Tudor mansion hid cartons of Larks and ephedrine bottles. The horn cases, necessary, made him sad.

Auntie Hadley had no bad habits. Her enormous love for chocolate was controlled. The single Manhattan she poured herself at six-thirty, correctly just preceding dinner, was all she ever had. He wondered why she bothered. He could have had twelve to establish his thirst. She looked in his eyes for the suspected thirst. He stared down at her legs and was shocked to see them smooth, pretty enough to flirt by themselves. Here she was seventy or more. Her back was slightly humped, her chest low and heavy. The young legs were an anomaly, tight in their hose.

She dressed well. Much better than he, though he did not care. She’d put him in designer dungarees. He had several too expensive turtlenecks from Atlanta because of his tattoo. He wore a better coat than he’d ever had at the height of his money. Maybe clothes were her bad habit. She dressed way above the town, her blouses in warm hues like the breasts of birds. Her pumps were girlishly simple. The girl who’d held his arm in the hall saw Hadley in the Chrysler once and said she looked stamped by Vassar or Smith. But Edgar knew she’d had only three years at a women’s college as undistinguished as the one he now attended — private, small, arrogant, and mediocre. From Northwestern to here was a damned other free fall of its own. Still, three years of college for a woman in the Depression wasn’t bad. His aunt had a certain sneering polish to her. As for himself, he had flogged into the “program” with minimal credits and letters of recommendation from three drug/alcohol counselors who almost had to approve of him. The big letter, though, he’d touched from a senile prof who had been a high horse in urban ethnic studies. The quality of his dementia was that he cheered thunderously everybody he came in contact with. A hoary, religiously approving idiot in atonement for all the years he’d sternly drawn the line, perhaps. Edgar sucked up to the emeritus, who favored the phrase “my poor children!” He’d never even taught Edgar. But he had a letter from the famous old man and could have had his clothes and car. The faculty here were impressed to the point of envy.

Edgar looked bent, used and ill. In short, perfect, “one of ours” among the faculty, young and old. Even his former “rough time” with drugs and drink worked for him, and his jazz name was never forgotten. Those narcoleptic from two glasses of wine could hardly believe he was alive and were glad he’d got through to bring forth more good things. They trusted him more than he did.

Gradually, though, Edgar did get better. He took to running on the track in the hot sun and at night he slept like a babe. His cough disappeared and his ulcer was cured — he became near lotused-out by well-being. The people around him were good and nothing was ruined by irony, except for Auntie Hadley. He could shake hands and mean it. Little beautiful things. But watch your pious little disease, Edgar, the counselor’s voice had warned. It’ll leap in good times.

Edgar unearthed his notes on the bums. With an appalling gloom he found them well written, though barely legible. They were dangerous, like his horns. He was another man, then, in his whiskey insight. How long could he go on being a mute fraud among these good people? Well, he’d practically whispered to the chairman that he was going to write about bums for his thesis — whether Chicagoan, Russian, or Southern, he didn’t know yet. But were bums all right as a subject? The chairman thought it excellent. Think of the therapy for Edgar, too. This was his life’s inevitable opus, wasting nothing. Hardly any of the profs had experience with a big city. The man was so happy, Edgar felt even more guilty. He did not want to write about bums any more than he wanted to play trombone. This was not how he would be significant.

In the spring the social sciences party was held on the ground floor of a Victorian bed-and-breakfast hotel made over by two bored doctors’ wives who became livelier in the role of perennial hostesses. Both of the wives were flirts, sexually attractive but chaste, fired by their Perdido Bay suntans. They danced their narrow waists, merry calves, and clapping sandals over the swank oak-plank hallways and up to the “boudoirs” above. There Edgar dreamed he might surprise them with the salty fluids of his mouth: desire was grinding awfully on him now, the gates thrown open by his health. He’d have to watch it. The wives served wine and cheese on silver trays worth more than the annual salaries of most La Grange faculty. One wife when asked about her husband shouted, “Oh, that dumb old bum!” Edgar hoped the man would die soon from overwork so she could kneel in front of him with money in hand, dragging on his jeans — holy smoke. Quit. She would find Edgar “darned alive!” He’d show her deep, rare animal need.

Could he awaken her senses, perhaps in a shack by the railroad, with only a naked lightbulb and a soiled mattress on which she struggled rump up? Bum’s dream, sot’s hope. He was waylaid, beyond himself. The faculty men around Sally had looks of civilized attraction, he noticed. She seemed nothing but a pleasant ornament of a rousing spring day, something to break up shoptalk. Oh, Snooky, Snooky.

Edgar’s aunt was at the party, too, hopefully lost in a blockade of deaf people. She’d insisted on coming. He did not know what she expected from the event. Maybe to spy on him, the fraud.

Great hell — Auntie Hadley was six feet away, under the archway, staring straight at him. For how long? He’d been caught in point-blank lust for married Sally. The old woman bored into him with distaste. In his hand he held a glass of nothing, a lemon-lime drink at which he now sipped, mortified. He pretended an aesthetic view of the premises. Whom did she expect, Plato? Since she was not mixing, not having a good time, what exactly did she want? To stalk the territory until she found something appreciably awful, like him?

He slouched away to the cheese. What she liked best, he thought, were fools in authority. Maybe she’d find a dean and nail his moronism for Edgar later. While he was tracking décolletage and secondarily a man who could be a chum like Parton or Smith, anybody but another recovering chemical fraud stuffed with sincerity, their happiness right from the manual, he glanced over the crowd toward Hadley. She was holding her wine glass like a hatchet. Some old cowboy bum wisdom he’d once heard—“Small-breasted women are mean”—could not apply to her with her low great ones. No fury like a woman scorned: by her own parents, seeing their ugly duckling have no reprieve over time; by boys and men making rude comments; beaten back into her shell, sad little ducky, left to suffer among the natural beauties of Savannah; sad in the playroom with her gorgeous dolls, maybe beheading them, and her toy villages, setting them on fire. He was trying to achieve sympathy.

“You saw that lady?” came a girl’s voice below. It was the grad student who had touched him in the hall. He liked her looks, all fresh faced in her green party chemise, above the mode of faculty wives and her peers, who were deliberately nondescript. “She dresses so well. Must be somebody. An older Jackie Kennedy, except for the hump and the dog-ugly face.”

The girl was naughty but risking it, touching Edgar’s arm again for the first time in months, eyes bubbling, needing discipline.

“Ow, I’m sorry. Real rude. I’m half drunk.”

“It’s my aunt. My landlady, too. She’s making things easier for me here.”

“Truly sorry. Let me tell you something better. My friend knows two deaf-mutes who were looking at Pres Reagan one day on television. They began laughing like crazy. Friend asked them what it was. ‘He’s lying!’ they signaled. They knew.”

As for décolletage, this girl Emma Dean was well fixed. Either that or boosted. Her cleavage practically spoke to him and he was positive she knew it. It made him happy.

“I work with the deaf. Lifelong dissertation there, Edgar boy. They know many secret things we don’t.”

“I believe you.”

“I know some of your secrets, too. I’m a busybody, probably bound for sociology, and I can see that you’re not too happy here, believing it’s beneath you and not Northwestern. You know too much about music and life, and worst of all, poor you, fame. You’ve got an honest, seasoned face. But with your slump and the hair in your face, you’re so. . morose. Like you’re expecting defeat any second. . Hate me, then. I’ve been improving the world since I was a little tapper.”

“No. You seem kind.” He straightened up and pulled back his forelock. “I’ve hardly seen you,” he lied, spying her every other day, wishing.

“You looked drunk. That’s why I came over and embarrassed myself. I’m drunk. My glasses are all fogged up, too.” She was even more friendly when she took them off. “Do you expect a lot from yourself?”

“Maybe just the rote stuff, for a while.”

“My parents were nothing. Daddy at the dry cleaners his whole life, and mother had to work — white domestic help. Imagine that in La Grange. We’d drive past all the great white mansions and spreading magnolias. I wanted to be somebody. Even now, I’m not going to be just. . sociology. They’re not going to be able to study me, class me. Hey, I was a virgin till I was twenty-five. You heard of that lately? Not because I was any holy-roly, either. I knew I’d enjoy sexual intercourse with the right person. My orgasms come very easy and I cry out like a panther. But. .”

Her lips were dry and she stopped. She licked them and took a breath. Edgar noticed her eyes were moist. She was almost crying.

“Get me some more wine, please.”

He got it posthaste, hoping she wouldn’t use up her drunkenness on somebody else. He hadn’t been near a woman in five years.

“I’m all ears.”

“See,” she wept a little. “We lived in a brick bunker on a bare yard at the edge of town. There were eight of us with about the money and room for two. I wore my brother’s awful brown shoes in ninth grade when it really, really mattered.”

Edgar guided her to the big front porch. Good, nobody else was around. It was a wonderful bluish-yellow and green here in mid-spring. They sat on the steps facing east. She wouldn’t say anything. He was afraid she would go off in a sick fog.

“What about those doctors’ wives that run this place?” he asked.

“Society cows looking for an audience anywhere. I’m so direct today.”

“I don’t mind. I like you. You look good.”

“How did you fail? Were you poor?”

“Fail?”

“You’re here, I mean. You don’t have any money. Nobody really means to be in sociology, do they? You’re older. You look delayed or off track — I can tell. I can spot true success a mile off.”

“Fail, really. .”

“See, if my mother and father hadn’t had to, if they hadn’t. . they got married when she was fourteen. My mother was beautiful and at forty she looks as old as your aunt. But they just had to. . couple, see, they’re blind as swamp rabbits. Two of my brothers are deaf, but they kept on keeping on. I was sick one day at school my senior year and walked home. We hardly ever had a working car. I walked in and tried to get on my pallet before I threw up again, and from their room I suddenly heard this ruckus. I couldn’t bear it. It was noon and he was home from the cleaners. They were in there mating, cursing each other, awful curses. I went out to the front yard and vomited, all dizzy, then looked up. Right on the road in front drove these rich boys in my class who were out for a restaurant lunch. They were hanging out the windows laughing at me. I never told that to anybody, Edgar.”

“Oh, no. Awful. You poor girl.”

Edgar took her hand. She had long fragile fingers with a class ring from Emory on one. It was still a teenager’s hand.

“Nine months from then I had a new baby sister. Mama all crumpled up and thin and lined. But I had a bright inner life and I went away on scholarship. Made A’s in almost everything, and Atlanta hardened me up.”

The party inside seemed a dim fraud, with Emma and her feather-light hands out here.

“I won’t tell you his name, but I had an affair with a married man — a wealthy important senator in Atlanta. The upshot was it ruined my life. He and his wife ‘reconciled’ and they named me a call girl he’d only seen a couple times during their marital stress. He’d promised me marriage, of course, but I never asked for it or wanted it. I took some money and shut up. My pop cursed me. My mother just died. They had principles, you know. But I gave him all the money for the four kids still at home.”

“Rough.”

“You might ask somebody in Atlanta who the senator was. Not me.”

“I believe you.”

“The man would put me naked in a silver Norwegian fox coat and work me over good, half a day at a time. He took poppers. We frolicked up where you could see all Atlanta. I liked him. We played backgammon. He cried when he lost me.”

“Were you ‘somebody’ then?”

“No. You know what I was — mainly dumb.”

“You don’t hear many people being truly ‘ruined’ anymore.”

Now there was another voice behind them and above. Edgar quailed.

“That was very nice, Edgar. Perfectly stranded, and I barely knew a soul.” His aunt stood peeved, he guessed, though her voice had some teasing in it, maybe in deference to Emma. He and Emma rose.

“Aunt Hadley, this is Emma Dean, one of my. . colleagues in the department.”

“Can anyone tell me, please, what sociology is? I’ve asked four or five times and got the silliest stares.”

Clearly she did not want an answer. Emma smiled, blinking her eyes dry.

“You’ve a lovely suit!” said Emma.

The old woman did not acknowledge the comment.

“I guess I’ve had enough ‘higher education’ for a day. Are you done?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ll go then?”

Edgar was forlorn and felt infantile. The old woman demoted everyone, he knew. Suddenly he wished that he had vast wealth.

“I’ll ride home with you. My home, I mean,” said Emma. “I don’t even have a car, Edgar. Can you believe it?”

“Oh, the poverty-stricken bohemian student is rather a tradition, isn’t it?” Hadley said, bright with scorn.

“Then I’m very traditional, ma’am.”

“But you go to honky-tonks.”

“Ma’am?”

“Your dress. Those see-through shoes.”

“Would these be like what the ‘flappers’ wore in your day?” Emma remained kind, without strain.

“‘In my day’? I’m not dead, young lady. Surprisingly, I believe I’m still alive enough to pay all the bills.”

They were quiet going to the car, calmly elegant like the old lady. Edgar noticed with some horror that Emma promptly opened the front door and sat down. Auntie Hadley just stood there, flaming. Edgar froze, with gloom and awkwardness. She knocked his hand away when he tried to help her in. They rode a piece in hard silence until Emma instructed him as to where she lived, sounding drunk. It was way out south of town on a tarry country road, Edgar found out slowly. When he finally got there and drove into the “park” it became clear she lived in a long redwood mobile home in a group of pines. There was a man sitting barefoot on wooden steps at the front door.

“That’s Michael the Math Monster. He’s deaf,” laughed Emma.

“You have a husband?” asked Hadley.

“No, just a friend. Another grad goob. Shares the rent.”

“And all the fun, I’d imagine.”

Edgar was vilely impotent. Emma did not seem so attractive and remarkable anymore as she hit her leg (“Ow! Gee!”) getting out. She was common and messy. He winced when she stumbled in the pine straw. His aunt would not be missing a stroke. Emma had become the thing Hadley knew her to be. But it was not Emma. He wasn’t himself either around this poison. A gutless lackey at thirty-five, losing worth by the minute.

How many people become what they seem to be to harridans and wags? He was furious as he drove. Then he recalled his aunt was still in the back seat.

“Wouldn’t you like to ride up front?”

“Might as well continue on back here. They’ll think I’m domestic help or some retarded person not let near the wheel.”

“I’d be taken more for the chauffeur. Here I am with tie and suit.”

“Eyes on the road. You drive like an old man from Nester Switch. Slow, but dangerous.”

“Don’t want to ruffle you.”

“You and those mummies I saw at the party couldn’t ruffle me if you tried. You tell me what sociology is and why it is necessary they draw salary.”

“It is the study of people in groups — money, trends, codes, idols, taboos.” With his rage still hot, he wanted to focus on her case, but subtly, subtly. “Class distinction, or sometimes just ordinary meanness.”

She was quiet until they almost got to her big shaded Tudor redoubt. He wanted two quarts of Manhattans just for starters.

“In other words, nosy parasites without a life of their own,” she said.

“All kinds, great and low like anywhere. Could I ask you”—Edgar flipped by money, the room, the car, the stamps, clothes—“has there been anything. . unusually terrible in your life?”

“What? Why no!” He noticed in the rearview mirror that when she scowled she was twice as ugly. “You’re not using me to study. You stick with the bums.”

A man twelve years in prison wouldn’t take a rim job from you, he thought.

But he tried to set things back to the ordinary, crabbed as it was. He parked out front. He’d run for supper. Hadley liked Chinese food, Mexican, or something from the deli. She liked cream and pickled herring best, curious for an old Protestant woman. Edgar wondered if some Jew in Savannah had given her a kind word once, maybe he’d even loved her. Auntie’s wild loss.

“Well phooey,” she said, out before he could help. “You were supposed to drive into the garage. There should be something in there for you by now. It’s something that looked good for you. I had some advice.”

Edgar walked to the garage. What would need a garage — lawn mower, weed eater, leaf blower? Something meek and janitorial.

When he nicked on the light, he could hardly reckon on it. It was a showroom-new, cream-colored BMW motorcycle. He was knocked dumber when he recalled what they cost. The keys were in it and he had to get on and drive, ho neighbors! But first he must see his aunt.

She was at her Manhattan, watching the television news.

“Thank you. What does it. . mean?” That she projects I’ll kill myself. But a new one wasn’t required. He’d almost done it on that piece of rolling bones an era ago.

“I thought about you lumbering in to park that Chrysler on campus. Not really fit. I’m told these motorcycles are ‘hot’ with your young professionals.”

“I’m staggered. Thanks again.”

“Get on the thing. Drive it, Edgar.”

“Yes, I will.”

“It must be a great fight, staying sober.”

He was trying to see something of his father’s face in Auntie Hadley’s: a long-nosed projection of the nostrils, a gathering of the lips into a plump rabbit bite. Another animal was present, too, in the forehead and eyes: a monkey. Some breed rarefied by spite and terror, squawling from a nook in a rain forest. But his father’s face was pleasantly usual, as in one of those old ads of a bus driver inviting you aboard, happy hills and vales ahead.

“Frankly, boy, I wish you were more interesting.” She studied him back. “Your father really didn’t give you much to shoot for, did he?” Could the troll guess he was thinking of his father? His regular face. His father was deferential, almost unctuous, and uncritical. He was all right, was his father, Oliver. He should see him soon.

His father was a newspaperman — no, that was too strong a word — whose regular column in the local paper was, essentially, one timid paragraph of introduction to a reprinted item of obscure history. The articles illustrated that people of the past were much like ourselves. He had little money, few other interests except choir, and viewed himself as a meek servant of the Big Picture. His only small vanity was in seeing his articles reprinted elsewhere every now and then. Edgar knew that outside the small-town antiquarian South, a larger newspaper would have pulled the trapdoor on his father and his monkish library work. His father had wanted to be a history teacher but could not face the classroom. In the forties, in fact, a huge bully of a student, smelling out his fear, beat him up. Hadley had dutifully reported this to Edgar when he was newly in the house. He was also informed that Sue, Edgar’s mother, had always made more than her husband, doing the books of shops around town. She was a CPA. They were faithful moderate Methodists. His father — he hated this — sang in the church choir. He did not like him forming the big prayerful O’s with his mouth, his eyes on the director, a sissy. The BMW was coming with a great tax. He felt murderous. He should have known.

“When men were realler, they drank for good reasons. Look at Grant and Churchill with their great wars. Look at Poe and Faulkner and Jack London and their masterpieces. Now you’ve got a national curse of drugs and drink, millions of nobodies who never once had a great day or a fine thought. This puny selfism, uff! It seems to me you became a drunkard just for lack of something to do. Just a miserable fad. No direction, no strong legs under you.” She was building.

“Don’t you want to add ‘no intestinal fortitude’?” Edgar said helpfully, blazing inside.

“Now your proposed treatise or whatever, Bums of. Name your poison. Why, Lord, that’s less a topic than a confession of kin. You want to go to school and still wallow with the wretched? Where’s the merit? With your history, it seems you’d seek something higher for your interest. You’d have got a snootful of bums in the Depression. It took a Roosevelt and a world war to get them off the streets.”

“I suppose”—this was the limit—“you labored greatly for your fortune and all was perfect with your marriages.” Her first husband, by what Edgar knew, amassed his wealth in lumber and chickens by deliberate long hours away from her. The second, before he went willfully deaf, was something of a bonds genius. He built this vast house — for her, why? — then fled to a single basement room where he did woodwork with loud tools.

“You’re a spiteful young person. And not very young. I was not idle. I guided their affairs, if you want to know. I had presence and spirit. Both your uncles had weak hearts and not very much will. I don’t know why God matched me with such invalids, but that was what I got. I’m not the prettiest thing on the block.”

Her voice had quieted to something like a lament. He wondered how deeply she believed herself. What was the truth? Maybe he was the last of her invalids. Maybe she must have them. When was she going to die?

“Well, about supper.”

“I’m no good for supper now, thank you. Go ride your present. Ride it, please, with one thing in mind: your talent. I’ve read your letters, of course, and I saw your notes, scrambled as they are. You can write. You have seen trouble. You have conquered a great flaw. Now, Edgar, nobody has known it, but I have diaries. I have jotted histories of my time. I believe there would be a discerning audience for it. And you can write it.”

“Write what?”

“My life. My life and times.”

He turned and went to the motorcycle, still in his suit, drenched with perspiration and stinking of acrimony. The BMW seemed a nasty, irrelevant toy. A mighty vision shot to hell. But when he got it going down the streets, big beam out front, sweet cut grass smells flowing by, the wind whipping, he began to giggle. There it was: her patronage, her life as done by Edgar who could write no more at all. He drove on to Emma’s. Why not?

He felt rangy, and much better. In the summer his work in the classroom went well. He knew many of the answers and seemed to have the good questions too. His more rural peers gave him some reverence. Some of them were hardly more cosmopolitan than the rube who sang about Kansas City in the musical Oklahoma!

Even better, Emma Dean seemed to be going for him. He recalled Snooky and tracked the difference. This time he had to do almost nothing. It was a rapid impassioning with young Emma — was she twenty-seven? But there was an unhappy strangeness to it on her part. She wanted him near, but it seemed she wanted him mournfully. The affair was making her sad. But Emma persisted: she bought him things, and slyly hinted at the times when Michael the Math Monster, who was deaf, would be out of the mobile home. She told him mysteries about the deaf and what they knew. What that permanent silence gave them — some claimed to hear music from heaven, or right from the brain.

One night in mid-June she was impatient and gloomy, yet suddenly she pulled off her dress. This “courting” could not go on forever — they weren’t infants. She did cry out like a panther, bless her. Edgar was very happy, but she wept. She wouldn’t tell him why, and he could only tenderly guess, remembering her history. He knew things would get better, more natural. Most stunning, though, was the certain knowledge she would be his last woman. The truth banged him with an enormous bright weight — at last things were in motion. He was very lucky to have her. And this time he would not destroy.

For Emma he improved his history, sometimes believing it. After the collapse of the band he said he’d become a long meditator. It did not necessarily mean failure. It was a long wait with a nobler design. He had shed material wants willingly and sought different, wholer, more authentic company. These phases were not unknown to many great men, not that he was great. But he felt a mission, and had for a long time.

The term mission, in regard to Auntie Hadley’s request, still made him giggle, then snarl. He began writing even worse at school. He had never answered her. This was a petty and vile act, but it bought him his first taste of power in her petty and vile world. The only token in her land was cowardly muteness. Wasn’t it cowardly, after all, to nag and bite like she did? Wasn’t it the life choice of a nit? He pretended to be hurt by her comments against him and his family for much longer than he actually was. She was watching him cautiously now, and keeping her mouth shut more. It wouldn’t do to offend the author, for nit’s sake. Giggle. But he was not rotten enough to tell Emma about it. All in all, he couldn’t get away from pity for his aunt.

“Let’s go riding on the bike, you behind, Emma.”

“But I’m afraid.”

“You won’t be. And let me suggest something — take off your underpants and wear a dress instead.”

“Excuse me.”

“Please do it. Women find a whole new world, I hear.”

“Well, I’m all for that.”

She was game, and by Lake Tornado, she was hugging him with delight, bountiful sighs going in his ear. He was sly. Nature was with him. She liked that he’d had a wife and was experienced. She told him he was a new man, all bronzed and straight, on the motorcycle. They would have times, good times. Yelling back, he assured her—the best time, he shouted. Ah, he was all gone for her now.

They’d told him at the ward, just hang on, hang on. Good things would come, eternal things. It was a law of recovery, tested millions of times.

Take it at the flood, then, Edgar Alien Po’ Boy, which is what Emma now called him. Her love name. Oh, the wimmens, the wimmens. Their world — holy smoke! — and how he’d missed the light hands, the sly codes in the whole little city — its own language — they set up around you. The unexpected, priceless gifts, good nowhere but the city of love. “Give me some sugar,” she said. How long since he’d heard that. Despite her Emory degree, summa cum laude, Emma stayed more the congenial truck-stop waitress, the charity that most got near him. Maybe because of her many brothers she understood the good-natured cuffing that men did and the brawny highway troubles behind them. She was a pal, a corker, a skit, handed to him. Pale fire burning through it all. With her, Edgar found, in some discomfort, that he could write better, he could wax forth. But she was always a bit sad, though she worked diligently with her deaf people in the institution south of Atlanta. It was not an unworthy mission — here we were — to alleviate suffering: find its cause, cut it off, and kill it, as General Powell said he’d intended with the Iraqi army in Kuwait. Emma was a great cheerleader of the war. Her patriotism was caught up. Democracy, freedom! Protection of our sand brothers. The tattoo on his throat — Emma’d never seen it, they made love with her glasses off — caused him no end of grief. For he felt Southern now: proud and brave with no irony or cynicism. Leave that to the hag in the Tudor dungeon.

Yet Emma stayed sad.

There was something in her he could not yet touch.

Nobody had said of this mission that the good things wouldn’t be tough to get. He was with her a great deal. Good Michael the Math Monster, attuned quickly in his deafness, stayed out of the mobile home for long tracts of time. Edgar halfway moved in, while he worried about the feelings (and money) of his aunt.

After, at last, the long honest letter to his parents, Edgar shook with relief. They would go to Athens. It was time, and Emma agreed. He was gratified by her presence. He still did not feel worthy to meet them alone. Emma, a prize, would tell them he stood tall. A weak and dim man could not have her. A dim and weak man could not handle the BMW with this intelligent brunette frightened on the backseat. Deliberately he drove right into the racing ring-road fury of Atlanta traffic, cocky and weaving at seventy-five plus, envied. Emma almost died, a happy leech on his back. It was the city of her “ruin,” but she laughed at it, another whole venue. A woman’s shouts of pleasure could knock down buildings.

Athens had grown, of course. The university took in forty-five thousand now. Edgar got solemn when they rode into his block. He hadn’t remembered his house as this unprosperous. It was stained from tree sap. The yard was shaggy. All this dereliction was unlike his father in the old times. Inside it smelled like used lives — corpus smells in the homes of the meek, hard to believe of one’s people. His own smell was in there somewhere, he reckoned. But the chicory coffee his mother drank constantly — a special blend from the French Market in New Orleans — was sweet nostalgia. She’d cooked a raisin-apple pie for them, too.

For his advent, Edgar’s folks — Oliver and Sue — had dressed up. His father wore a tie and the gray strands of his hair were nursed back. His mother had on a blue churchy dress. She had a lot of hair, but it was white, a grief to Edgar. What did he expect though? Athens was out there, doing better than they were, that was all. His dad moved slowly with arthritis of the feet. His mother seemed resolute on showing off her younger health, bouncing a little with her coffee cup.

It went much better than he’d hoped. A taste of the coffee — like a swat — filled him with a glow. They said he looked wonderful, all grown and mature, maybe taller. He almost forgot Emma. Out back with his father, they laughed about his aunt. Edgar played her as a more minor crank than she was and spoke of “paying her off when I head out on my own.” On horn or in academe, his father wanted to know. Not the horn, Edgar said. His dad didn’t understand: why couldn’t Edgar recover it all? He was still young. What a gift, what years! Edgar turned and saw Emma with her coffee, not glad, eavesdropping from behind the kitchen door. The backyard was bleak, rutted with water drainage.

When he left, despite the small melancholy, Edgar felt fixed and relieved.

Emma did not. She didn’t speak on the motorcycle all the way back. In Atlanta, he thought he heard her crying through the wind.

He was attentive and wanted to help. But it was a cruel night for Emma. She claimed her back hurt and he could tell she wanted him to go. She’d been hurt and made sad all over again; she didn’t even try to smile. There was maybe even something like hate in her eyes. Well, Edgar Alien Po’ Boy’s out of here, he said. This got nothing from her. The mobile home looked glum, newly desperate, not the lake cabin it had seemed before.

At his aunt’s he sat unbending from his trip snags. After a while he felt there was something different about his plush garret. Then he saw — how could he have missed them? Stacked neat and high on his desk were handsome purplish leather-bound books. There were two stacks, each two feet up — her diaries and “jottings.” They made him angry. They were arrogantly under lock and key, but with the keys out for him to jump in and have a go. Hadley was away somewhere. He let go an uncommon obscenity. Then he went straight to bed.

At breakfast she was on him before he could dart to class an hour early. Quietly, more like a human being, she began.

“Edgar, one thing I notice about your graduate studies: you don’t really do that much. You’ve time for all kinds of things. I’ve seen your motorcycle at Emma Dean’s. . place, more than a few times.”

He resented this, and braced. But she wasn’t her old self. He frankly liked her pleading.

“You, if you could just do a bit of work every day, say two hours, on our book. You could make your own notes and start the outline, almost idly. Do the readings. I’m offering you treasured, secret views of a heart and mind that has been through crucial times. You never knew, for instance, that I had my day with music, did you? Not your noisy success, not your. . bubble. My time was milder and private as girls were taught. Why, I’d play an afternoon triumph of Chopin, there would be Father, sneaking in to listen in the hall. He’d have tears running down his cheeks. Too, I did dollwork, their porcelain faces showing history and nationality when there was no world-consciousness in Georgia at all. They’re still in the attic for you to see. And I will be constantly available for you to consult. I’ve bought a new tape recorder, which is of course yours after our interviews are done. I’ve completed an outline. We can compare outlines once—”

The horror! as Edgar Alien Po’ Boy might have written, grabbed him.

“I was no mean student, nephew, but in composition I couldn’t quite express myself, though I was excellent in elocution. Ethical elocution — I was the star there. My first husband dragged me from college. There was heartbreak. Big moments in the sun were probably waiting for me! But love, love, was the order of the day. Edgar, I’m not going to live forever, I wouldn’t think.”

Was that a frightened giggle, a voice from a little girl in her horse-drawn carriage?

“Academic people, I’ve noticed, will delay things forever. Why, I sent some things to the press at Athens years ago. It took a year to get them back, and with a beastly note, beastly.”

Edgar became, though sickened, interested in the long confession. Here was a sick glee, close to a great pop of vodka in a rushing airplane.

“In Savannah, old Savannah! there were gay times. Homosexuals won’t steal that term! There were lanterns on the levee indeed. I was good with horses. What a picture, I on my roan Sweetheart on the way to third grade in the city! Horses were thought elegant, a whole culture gone with the wind! Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in ten days, I believe. Not that you, with all our source material — seventy-three years! But Edgar, you are falling behind. I won’t watch you do that again! You’ve a degree from one of our great universities.”

“I’ll read and form an opinion,” said Edgar flatly with ire.

“Further, it would be all right, I would allow, to have Miss Dean stay here with you. You can have a larger room — Hank’s, with his special woodwork, and a television, too, and his Victrola, unused since his deafness. I’m no prude. I can modernize. I don’t want you at that trailer. A man needs pleasure, but in the right place. I’ll put in the large couch with a fold-out. We’ll get right to it. Shelley had his muse.”

“Didn’t she write Frankenstein?”

You couldn’t get to the old thing anymore. She just faded away.

That night, Emma still in grief, he sat his horn cases on his desk next to the books. He didn’t know quite what he was doing. Both things made him sick. He stared a long time, judging the contest.

At the end of the summer after two major exams, essay-type, the chairman called him in. Edgar liked him. No great achiever either in the classroom or in research (though there was a rumored thin book, When God Was a Boy, they said), Schmidt cheered the worthy and had no envy. He said Edgar looked good, but there was a problem.

“Your prose style. Your writing. We don’t see that kind much. I agree academe needs shaking, but there is a sort of. . grunt-talk, a primitive getting-there. Seems almost to cause you. . pain. And some to the reader. Now I am a Hemingway fan, a Raymond Carver zealot, but are you trying something new, dimensional, I don’t know, would this fit the bums’ world, is that what?”

“No, sir. I’m not trying anything that I’m aware of.”

“This is your best?”

“I’m looking for an awakening, I guess. In the old days at Northwestern, though, I could write better.”

“Then we’ll just root for you. I appreciate your honesty. We want to get life and expression together. Isn’t that the whole point?”

“Sure.”

“The example of pain into flowers, ho?”

Edgar nodded.

“Because very soon it’s thesis time for you. There are outside readers.”

Peets Lambert and his band came into town, out from seeming nowhere. Lambert was still alive. Someone called Edgar from the college and said Lambert had left tickets for him in the chapel where they’d play. The student coordinator later said Lambert was very cordial and, whoa, eighty-five years old. It had been almost twenty years since Edgar first played with the band. Lambert remembered him well and wanted to chat after the concert. The student, who knew Edgar, said Lambert wanted to know everything about him and had even driven by his aunt’s house, but had found nobody home the previous afternoon.

Edgar, Emma and Auntie Hadley went together. Emma thought it would be cruel not to invite her. She’d love big band swing. This would be quite the sentimental evening for everybody! Obscurely, Emma had gotten happy again.

And swing it was. Snooky wasn’t there, nor anybody near her age. Lambert had brought back some of his old friends including Woodrow and settled for what he could get on the nostalgia circuit — hence La Grange. By far he was the leading ancient, but several in the band were close. They had a bad singer, and no one looked particularly happy in their black suits. The playing was sloppy and sometimes verged on the funereal. But Lambert hammed and was hip, very, like a confident ghost pawing at the band. Surprisingly, Edgar sat through it calmly. It was a sort of music, and he did not hate it, he was not made ill. To his left, he saw his aunt looked very pleased. Her eyes seemed to be swooning back in her biography. The band played a Charleston, capping with the bad singer, the only leaping youth in the band. The students who were there — not many — liked it, they were charmed.

So when the band was breaking up, Edgar and Emma went backstage, which barely existed. There was Lambert, alone, unmobbed, smoking a cigarette but looking guilty, same as years ago. The old cancer thinness was on him, his face speckled and translucent on its skull. He lit up when he saw Edgar.

“I know you, my ’boner. Oops, sorry little lady!” His naughty hipness was imperishable, sealed with him. He wasn’t missing a thing with those eyes. Edgar wondered if his hearing, however, had dimmed.

He drew Edgar in, slipped into an undervoice — old collaborators — a few feet away from Emma, who was not really shut out. Lambert smiled over Edgar’s shoulders, always a dog for the wimmens. He told Edgar about Snooky, mother of two in Dallas. Parton Peavey had cleaned up and as everybody knew was a “rich old man, nearing the big four-oh.” Edgar was downed a little by how much they had aged.

“You guys didn’t know, but I invested for all of you, us, the cats, way back then. Young people, all they thought of was their axes. So there’s a piece of your salary you never saw. So, beautiful, it’s come to, da-dum, something big and tidy.”

Edgar jumped, very alert. He planned suddenly: cash in one bundle back to his aunt. A made man, he’d get his own place and fix up his parents’ house. He would buy an island, where? Emma would continue to work among the native deaf and he, what? He’d come out with a large thing from his meditative years.

“After what I did for you, I know you’ll sign it back to me. Parton Peavey, Smith, Snooky, no problem, they all did. You can see that I and the band, we needs the bread. Verily.”

Edgar, first raised, now bumped the wretched bum’s pavement.

“How much was it?”

“Near sixty thousand apiece. A hundred, near, for our legend Peavey. Isn’t that great? I brought the pen. You know what I did for you?”

Edgar signed three lines as Lambert held out the stock transfer.

“The band goes on. I can afford a casket.” Lambert winked. “Good young people making the band go on. Woodrow takes it when I’m planted. Your funds, Big Thunder Hounds Foundation, huh? Not even really for me, get it? Look at me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I saw that house where you live yesterday. Not gone with the wind, ho? The wind has come back and put you in a castle. Edgar, Edgar, I’m hating this, but could you spare me a little? A couple thou. What I did for you when you were a baby, remember. Times are rough. You can see. I’d never have seen you, chicken and peas La Grange, man—”

“I don’t have any money.”

“House-poor, huh? But a little scratch — the things I did for you — you cost me, the bus. .”

Edgar moved away. Lambert was in a fit of his own virtue. Stooped and angry, Edgar caught Emma’s arm and they ran to where his aunt was waiting in the foyer, caught in the act of giving the snoot to a couple of leather punkers who’d come to (Edgar wished) spit at Lambert’s Wall Street Crash music.

“What’s this rushing?” his aunt wanted to know. They were in the car before Emma told her.

“Edgar has just lost a great deal of money he didn’t know he had.”

Emma’s work with the deaf must have given her some kind of ears, Edgar grieved.

“Oh, yes. The music’s wonderful for a while. But your musicians are notorious bankrupts,” said his aunt.

“They’re just ‘bubbles,’ aren’t they?” He smashed at her.

“Exactly what I said. My generation always knew that.”

By Christmas break, things had changed only for Emma. She had blitzed through her work and was taking the master’s. Her thesis on the deaf was heralded and would be published, with the help of her major professor, her major herald. Edgar didn’t know she was this good. She even got a small advance — one thousand — from publishers in New York, and was hounded instantly for it by her father, from the school of You Owe. All eight of his children owed him for their lifelong hard times. Emma gave him seven hundred.

They remained passionate, but she would not move to Hadley’s house. Edgar was glad. They did make love, though, on the sofa a few times. She opened his horn cases one morning and peered at the freckled and scarred instruments a long time. They seemed to make her angry. Without a word, she left the house and drove away in the Japanese wreck she’d bought.

He was baffled by her sadness, which was turning more into anger nowadays. She would clam up and sometimes beat her fists on whatever was near, including once, his thighs. She had a television and watched the war news through January. She liked to turn up the speech of the generals and said she had a crush on Powell.

The terrible day he went into the trailer, February was ending with a big blow that made the pines whoo and shiver, spooky, warning the homes on wheels beneath them. There had been, during the morning, a burst water main up the road, catching the whole trailer park without water. Emma had been busy cleaning with Lysol, and was outraged by the stoppage. She was in a torrent when he entered, with good news, he thought. Inspired by her, he was well into a book about Chicago bums. He could write again, and what he had was so good that the chairman was trying to get him a large grant to revisit his old haunts. It would be enough to take Emma with him. It was not a bad city at all. Away from the South, she might be happier — holy smoke, why shouldn’t she? She’d never left it. There was her depression, itself.

Edgar sat on the sprung bunk she slept on, petting her. He told her about bums.

For many years, he and female drunks had simply wound up together. He had a place. They just appeared in it, no memory of having got there, isolated by the blazing nimbus of alcohol. The woman might even be sober, some pitying angel on the spoor of a heartbroken man. You could not be awful enough for some women: they were stirred by emaciation, destitution, whiskey whiskers, bus fumes. For other women you could not get foreign enough. Witness Clem, the acned Iranian sot, always with a beauty queen. Some black women were greatly attracted to downed white men. What wild loyalties he’d seen when he’d been sober enough to notice. You had Commies, capital ists (ruined, but adhering), even monarchists, in bumhood. Take away the sickness, he had loved a good deal of the life. He even missed being insane, sometimes. The world matched his dreams some days. Something, a small good thing, almost always turned up. He missed making the nut of drink every day. He missed the raddled adventures. There always was a focus: securing the next high, defending the hoard of liquor money, but with chivalry; getting through the day without murder; being a world citizen, voting and passionate, about the headlines off some fat cat’s newspaper. What about the exploratory raptures of one’s own liquored mind? The drunkard, or bum, was not wasting his mind all the time. He was going deeper in than others: great lore, buzzing insights. The conversation frequently was above the university. Some few bums were renuncios. They had given up the regular world on purpose, and could explain why in long wonderful stories, each one distinct, bravely of no category or school. He’d also met deaf bums, of course. He knew more about them than she’d thought. He knew the blind, too — what stories he could tell about Rasta Paul!

Emma listened closely, having stopped her tears long ago. She seemed avidly sympathetic, her pretty mouth open, her dress falling off her shoulders like a flushed senorita’s, carelessly revealing those breasts that shot warmth through his manhood. Her eyes met his, and it was off with her spectacles and dress, on the bunk in a minute.

Hang in, all good things will come, Edgar remembered. Even his reverie about Sally, the doctor’s wife, lived out long and more on that dirty mattress, a single lightbulb shaking over it. Never had Emma been this carnal. She threw herself into long rituals of defilement, yes. Begged him to take her back there, as never before, and then she was on him with her mouth lest he finish without her tasting it all. She hurled back and forth, then out with her legs, voracious. The panther cry came, rose and fell, rose again. Then she suddenly cast him off, screaming no, no, no, no, no! Immediately she began to cry. She reached and put her spectacles back on, peering first at his naked chest, then at his throat.

“What the hell does that tattoo mean? I never saw that! There’s a war on. Are you for that monster we’re fighting?! Our generals, our airmen — they’re men, and you, you don’t have. . moxie, moxie—that’s it! Your aunt keeps you! Peets Lambert kept you! You ungrateful bitch! You’re gothic, Edgar!”

This was terror. She wouldn’t quit.

“You won’t even play the horns — your natural God-given ticket! No, crowds get to you, weak bitch! Memory gets you! You drag me to your pitiful parents, and I saw the nowhere, the awful never, of you all. But I had to be there to prop you up! Your significant thing, your meditated thing, I’ve screwed, sucked, let you. . You’ve even got gray, waiting, on somebody else’s motorcycle!”

And, before the dish came at him,

“Now your bums, your magical romantic bums. The deaf don’t have a choice, Mister Chicago. And let me tell you something else. After this book, the deaf aren’t going to be my life. I’ve done them, I’m tired. I’m too selfish, if you’ve got to know! It’s my time. I can’t help it. I want healthy people, and rich, traveling people, happy doing kings and princes. But I had to love you. Love you, I know, more than you do me! How could you?”

She kneeled and brought up a bowl of Lysol and threw it in Edgar’s face. The pain was so horrible, the act so sudden, that he simply laid out his arms and rocked, before his hands came up on their own and dragged at his eyes. He was conscious of her running back and forth in the trailer. But there was no water, not there or in any trailer around them. It was a long, long time before she had him, naked, in her Toyota wreck. Something went wrong with it, though, and it stopped. He was blind. He was probably good and blind before she, having raced around desperately for ditch water, opened the radiator for its fluid and came to him with a few drops of it, sprinkling some on his eyes. It tasted like antifreeze.

When he left the hospital ten days later, he had only a speck of vision, low in his left eye.

Emma had never left him, and implied her remaining life in this act.

“I’ll never leave you, Edgar,” she crooned, over and over.

She never discussed anything with Auntie Hadley or him. She would be there at the house with him forever, or wherever, she said. Emma had real power in her guilt. The aunt might be flabbergasted, but Edgar couldn’t see things like that now. He never heard an incautious opinion from his aunt anymore. Emma said, indeed, that the woman was being sweet, real sweet. He could hear them in conference. They seemed to be agreeing about almost everything. Emma allowed the aunt to buy her clothes. She described them to Edgar, meekly delighted. All he could see were the new Paris shoes.

Her love for him, he felt, went on past the penitential, which he, manly, protested many times. She swore it was not so, not in the least. Horrible as it was, throwing Lysol at him had been an act that told her where she belonged. He could not know how much she loved him. That thing about kings and princes was just the last of her daydreamy youth shouting itself out.

Edgar asked for his valved Bach trombone. It didn’t really taste like whiskey at all. He practiced it awhile. Blind men had come forth beautifully in jazz. His aunt’s hand was on his shoulder, appreciative.

One day his parents came with a present of Lambert’s latest swing record, a minor hit. They said it brought back memories. Edgar loved them desperately, and he could hear the kind Emma celebrating his progress as they left, meaning to visit often. It was all delightful, but the horn itself was no go. It was as if he’d never touched one. There was weakness in his chest, not from the healed sternum, but something more. He just couldn’t. He cried a little. It was mainly for Emma, anyway. He didn’t want her to see him cry. In fact, he was glad he was no good.

He’d gotten the grant. Emma was ready to lead him in Chicago, back to the old haunts, anywhere. Handicaps very often increased being, she said. Such people were called the “differently abled” nowadays.

Edgar had never wanted to go back to Chicago. That wasn’t his item, his thing.

Once, a month blind and just sitting there, seeing if he could read a long speck in one of Hadley’s diaries, he came across something from 1931: “I. . am. . made. . all. . different. . I. . can’t. . enjoy. . anything. . God. . you. . my. . husband. . pokes. . at. . me. . I. . am. . angry. . feel. . there. . is. . a. . dangerous. . snake. . down. . there. . not. . him. . me. . before. . he. . got. . there. . God. . help. . me.”

Hadley made a movement. She was next to him, on a wooden chair. Emma was away. Auntie Hadley started whispering about Milton and that “Argentina man,” and Helen Keller’s triumphant books.

“Milton was years preparing for his life’s work — what a paradise regained for us all, Edgar. His daughters served him and took his dictation. I can have all this brailled for you. You could then dictate and Emma would surely help. She is all you. You are luckier than your ugly aunt, in many ways.”

“Actually, the blind can write,” said Edgar suddenly.

“A whole new world. ‘They also serve who stand and wait.’ But you wouldn’t have to wait anymore.”

Edgar grinned. She’d not seen him grin. He knew something deep and merry, the exact ticket.

“Your physical needs are all covered. Then there’s my will, after I. . and a big sum for the book. And all the instruments, of course, for composition.”

“Do something for me, Auntie. Would you put Lambert’s record on the Victrola so we can listen together? The past, swing, times forgotten.”

She played it and sat, not a squeak.

God, the band was wretched, and yet they’d come round again with a hit. You never knew.

He screwed up his mouth when it was done, tongue against his teeth, watching Hadley’s foot bounce to this merde, holy smoke!

He told her there would be a declaration when Emma came back. He wanted a gathering. This was a big moment for him.

Emma sat, a Manhattan like Hadley’s in her hand, at six-thirty that evening. They told him it was snowing out even though it was early April — so very rare and lovely and ghostly quiet. The town was filling up and mute. A beloved merchants’ calamity thrilling the young at heart.

“All right, let’s get started. A real book knows everything. Let’s clear the air in two ways. First, Auntie Hadley, to get modern, when did you first know you were a shit? Was it a sudden revelation, what? When did it arrive that you were and would be, awful? Next, we of the addicted must write letters of amends to everybody alive. Maybe even to the dead. I want to hear that pen scratching near me while I’m at my work, sweetie. This needn’t take forever, though the sheer amount of paper will be staggering.”

There was silence before she acquiesced. Did he hear something moist and flowing from her?

“Emma, dear.” He himself began crying. “I release you body and soul. Don’t need no cellmate, not even no lovin’, till the old opus is done. Think it over then. Have at the kings and princes.”

Why was he so happy, so profoundly, almost, delirious?

Loud and bright and full of jazz, Rat-Face Confesses— that would be the title of their book.

Scandale d’Estime

THEY WERE DESTROYING A THEATER IN KOSCIUSKO, AND MY FATHER bought the bricks. He had made a good deal. He asked me and a buddy of mine to live there a while in a hotel to stack the unbroken bricks for him and load them on a truck.

We were, my buddy and I, probably seventeen. We read Downbeat magazine and knew a few Dylan Thomas poems, which seemed to us as good as poetry could get. Horace was the better reader and memorized poems whole. There was a small college in our town, and we knew some of the younger faculty who had left in despair and irony over the puritan expectations of it. As they had been able to talk about upwards of three books, we considered them great poetic souls. I wish there were a good term for the zeal we felt for these older hip brethren, which included one stylish lady named Annibell: cats almost got it, when the Beats and jazzers established themselves. Those who got the joke and continued on with their private music. A personal groove.

Now and then there was a question of what we should do with the new women in our heads. You might go out with some local girl, but she was not really there, she was not the real faraway city woman in your cat head. You might kiss her and moil around — but she was, you knew, fifth string, a drear substitute for the musical woman in a black long-sleeve sweater you had in your mind on the seashore of the East — the gray, head-hurting East, very European to my mind, where you thought so much and the culture labored so heavy on you your head hurt. The beauty and the wisdom of this woman — uttered along the seashore in weary sighs — was a steady dream, and I woke with it, pathetically, to attack a world fouled by the gloomy usual. I yearned to talk and grope with a woman who was exhausted by the world and would find me a “droll” challenge. She would be somewhat older. She either sighed, or mumbled pure music. I had no interest in the young freshness of girls at all.

Every brick I unearthed from the dust and chalky mortar, cleaning it off with a steel brush and wet flannel rag — which made my hands red and sliced with little lines all over — became part of the house I was building in my mind for this woman. New York Slim they would call her. The house would be on the seashore, where you could look out the window and sigh in a big way. For her, even a special sighing room.

The old hotel we stayed in had rail balconies on the inside floors where you could lean and look down into not much of a lobby, your feet on a gone tan carpet.

It felt good to be tired and cut up at the end of the day, just showered and looking down at the lobby with your hair slick. You felt you were a working man. I had a red kerchief tied around my neck like a European working man, all shot with working blood. A whole new energy came through you. This was before I began to drink and smoke, and I would not feel like this, clean and worthy and nicely used in the bones, for many more times, for a great long while. The only problem was that there was absolutely nothing to do. The town might have been named for a Polish patriot who led American troops in the Revolutionary War, but the glory just mocked you in a town where shops slammed shut at five to prevent any history whatsoever beyond twilight. We had no car and had read all the magazines backward. There was a bare courtesy light bulb at the bus station, and we actually went to stand beneath it, hoping to invite life. But nothing. A man who hated to move ran a restaurant up the way and we soon got tired of his distress. Nobody even played checkers there. Gloomy John Birch literature would fall off the checkout counter, and there were flags bleached to pink and purple in a bottle on it too, seeming to represent a whole other nasty little country.

I leaned and watched the lobby for New York Slim to walk in, lost in Kosciusko, Miss., and looking for me. I would look at my watch and curse fate, giving her just a few more minutes. Then I would curse her and tell her I was through. Natalie Wood, or more probably her cousin from the South, Lee Wood, would come instead. I had seen West Side Story that year, and Natalie was slowly replacing New York Slim. When New York Slim did finally get here, there would be hard words, tears, and it would be tough to tell her she had lost everything — the brick house on the seashore, the sighing room, my drollness, everything — and that I was giving it all over to one of the Miss Woods. There was nothing I could do about it I’d say, it was an affaire de coeur, sorry. The fact is I was going mildly insane. I peered harder into the lobby. All you saw was a solitary whiskered gruff man, probably retired, not even reading a magazine, but looking straight ahead in a sort of shocked anger that put some fear into you. He was not the denizen of an interesting passionate play by T. Williams, as you might hope, but a horrified sufferer of age bound to a colorless tunnel, as if his stare were tied in a knot at the end of it. His face was spotted red, from waiting, I thought. Someday he would just disappear into the wallpaper, which also had red spots in it. Though he’d been without applicants for a long time, in my mind I made him into a smoldering corrupter of the young. We never said a word to him.

In my own town a man named Harold, old enough to be a teacher, was attending the college. Harold, who lived in an attic apartment, was balding and already a man with a heavy if not lengthy past. He had been drafted during the Korean War but had not gone over there with the army until the truce was signed, so that his adventures in the East, for which he had made a lurid album he showed me, were all done in peacetime. The photographs showed a bunch of men in fatigues hanging around in squads, the usual thing, but then there was a whole woman section too. Harold was still in love with these Asian women — I believe they were Japanese — from around where he was stationed. But I had never met a man in love this way, this very meticulous strange way. One of the women had her legs open, and Harold had pasted a straw flat on the photograph running off the picture to the margin and a small photo of his own face. The straw went from her private parts into his very mouth. He had written More, More, More! in the margin. I had seen a few pictures of naked women, but this one drew me back again and again, especially when Harold was out of the room, because I had never seen a woman so seriously and happily showing herself. A dark riot of nerves came over me when I saw her face, so agreeable to the camera. Harold was a very thin man with white hairy forearms, just weak sticks, and narrow in the chest, also hairy above his shirt opening. It must have been a time when American GIs were overwhelmingly popular over there. Harold did not seem like a man who could support this weird Asiatic “love,” yet there were other women — none of them whores, he pointed out — who had loved him, and were also photographed coiled around Harold. Some were full naked or not, and some were playing with each other, happy. Their eyes were all for Harold, who gleamed brightly into the camera, younger and more prosperous than now, a bitter student on the GI Bill.

Harold was a smoker of those short cork-tipped but unfiltered Kools. He wore black high-top sneakers, decades before they were necessary, with irony, for artistics everywhere. The startling denominator in Harold was that he was capable of great passions high and low. I saw him stare at the woman on the street below his place, an abandoned woman I found out later, who walked the bricks smoking a long cigarette in a holder. I’ve never seen so much smoke come out of a person. She would walk slowly along in the regular fog of a ghostly cinema, staring ruefully at the brick streets. She was the daughter of a town scion, a remarkable chemistry prof who was also the mayor, and lived with him on the other side of the block. But her lot was lonesome and bereft. She was one of those women who’d had a single lifetime catastrophe and never recovered, beautiful for the tragedies of T. Williams but now almost unheard of, when everybody joins something and gets well.

“She needs me,” Harold spoke, watching her with deep concern. “That woman needs my love, and here I am selfishly withholding it from her.” But Harold, I thought, she’s the mother of one of my classmates — she’s very, very old. Harold went on condemning himself for not stepping out to the curb and offering his “love” to her. Her son, my elder contemporary, was a person of almost toxic brilliance, scowling and reviling any collection of people in every room I ever saw him in. Another friend later explained that the woman died of a heart attack in that same house, with her son, then an MD, attending. Or rather, more just technically witnessing, as my friend had it, using chilly terms like infarction and fibrillate. Then she was gone—bam, he had said, as he struck his palm with a fist. I saw the wide and high Victorian house as a place of almost epic coldness, a hint of sulphur in the rooms. Harold stayed at the sill, hanging in the window between thought and act, the shadow on a film always in my head, like a ghost on a negative.

Harold found most learning at the college “morbid” and would declaim hotly how desperately much he did not want to know zoology, Old Testament and history. But he was here exploring the “possibles and necessaries,” vaguely of the arts, “doomed to Southern history.” “Oh God, yes I must read it, the obituaries of everybody I despise.” He had a personal contempt for anybody who had ever made a public dent in anything. Fame and battles bored him — all species of dementia. Harold despised so much, you felt very lucky for his friendship. What he liked best were small, troubled people. His passion for the Asian women seemed conditional, almost, on the enormous trouble they had known. Harold attended every play, concert, reading, art opening, and recital at the college and in the adjoining capital city, and found almost everything “unbearably poignant.” He was all for the arts, the more obscure the better. His friends, besides me and two other pals with their “maturity of vision,” he’d call it, were all girls of forlorn mark. Too fat, too nervous, too skinny, too scattered for talk in this world’s language. These he would play bridge with in the college grill. If your back was to them and you didn’t know, you’d have thought they were all girls. Harold loved low gossip and considered scandal the only evidence of true existence on this morbid plain. His voice would go girlish too, more girlish sometimes than that frequent effeminacy you heard from mama-and maid-raised boys. The college was a harbor for great sissies. You’d turn around and see all the hair on his pale, skinny arms and think, well golly, that’s Harold, old veteran Harold. The full Harold to me, though, would be him looking down at that abandoned wife, on the old brick street, afternoon after afternoon, hating himself for all his “wretched hesitations,” saying she needed him, and that he was a cad not to “venture unto her, take her hand.” Wretched hesitation, Harold said, is what embalms our lives, and that was what age demanded of you more and more, to get less and less life. But he was passionately involved in all the troubles of the odd girls he escorted to the grill, and they had a clique around him. It never occurred to me that Harold was sleeping with them, but an older guy much later told me that most assuredly he was. I could think of Harold then, a teacher of history, with another album of his women, and I could see these troubled girls, naked and happy — Harold’s harem, holding out against this “morbid waterless plain,” as he called the environs.

A few scandals at the college made Harold beam and emerge from his habitual state, which was, I think I can say, a kind of expectant gloom. A luster came on him when it was clear the speech and drama teacher — who had kept one of his male protégés, a prominent sissy, in lust bondage — had gone down to scandal, and packed up, leaving in the night. Harold’s pale hairy arms flailed out and back, delighted, up to the neck in it. “Oh, the truth and beauty of a wrecked life, nothing touches it!” he went, imagining the moment-by-moment excruciations of the discovered pederast. The drama master, driving lonely and flushed in his car back to North Carolina. Then there was the milder, but somehow more “evocative” disclosure regarding the tall Ichabodish French teacher, a curiously removed (how! they learned) man, who drove a giant old blue Cadillac that seemed even larger than Detroit intended. This timid man oozed about in something between a hearse and a cigarette boat. His exposure came about when his landlord opened his rooms one holiday. Everywhere in the room were Kleenexes and castaway plastic bags from the cleaners. He would touch nothing in the room without a Kleenex. He had his socks and underwear dry-cleaned, and wore them straight from the bags. Unused clothes were stacked in their bags in the corner. Kleenex was all over the bedsheets. He could not touch the telephone, doorknob, faucet, or even his own toothbrush without them. Kleenex boxes towered in all nooks and closets. In his diary, there was a last sobbing entry: “Night and day, I detect moisture around my body. Must act.” He was, this French prof, comprehensively germophobic, and the strange order of his disorder howled from the room. Probably this was not even a scandal, but in this small Baptist town with the landlord so loud about it, the professor too was reduced, and soon prowled away in shame. Harold relished this. The perfection of it almost silenced him, a silly eye-shut dream on his face. “The perfection, the perfection, of this.” Every worthy life would have a scandal, Harold said. There was a central public catastrophe in the life of every person of value. The dead sheep, the masses, who lived fearful of scandal (though feeding off it in nasty little ecstasies) were their own death verdict. “Prepare, prepare, little man, for your own explosion,” he told me sincerely. “I am trying to be worth a scandal myself.” Oscar Wilde enchanted him, and Fatty Arbuckle, but not Mae West, who had worn scandal like a gown and made a teasing whole career of it.

I once was sent over to the college by my English teacher to pick up a tape recorder, and was making as long a trip out of it as I could, when I passed a class and saw Harold in the back row, looking down at his desk in silent rage, not as if baffled but as if understanding too much, and personally offended. But this was less noticeable than what he wore. I had simply caught him out of his house in the act of being Harold, gritting his teeth, twirling his pencil, hissing. He had on an old-fashioned ribbed undershirt, some floppy gray-green pants, and some sort of executive shoes, I think banker’s wingtips, with white tube workman’s socks. His hair curled out everywhere from his pale skin. At this college they were stern on dress code. But they left Harold alone, I saw. He did look piercing and untouchable, his Korean near-veteranship a class of its own. They did love the Christian soldier, which he was not, but he had absolute freedom nonetheless as a lance corporal of Section 8. I was very happy for him. He had real dignity in his undershirt of the kind big-city Italians and serious white trash wore. The best thing was that he was unconscious of being out of line at all. It was hard to imagine Harold charging in the vanguard, or even hiding in a frozen hole, against the Communists in Korea, with his ascetic thinness, his hairy arms and chest, thrown against some garlicky horde and their bugles. Harold was not a coward, I’m sure, but I saw another thing suddenly about him, this partisan of Wilde and Errol Flynn: Harold was maybe doomed to no scandal of his own at all. He was too open, too egregious (a word I assure you I didn’t know then) to have one, especially there in his undershirt in the fifties. But he wanted one so badly, and one for all his friends like me. He fed wistfully on the few scraps thrown his way in our dull society.

When the symphony director and several doctors and lawyers were tracked down and filmed by city police in the old city auditorium — usually a venue for wrestling — preening in women’s underwear and swapping spit, Harold howled “Impeccable!” He hoped, he wanted so, for them all to be driven to the city limits sign and hurled out in shame down a notch of high weeds, their red panties up between their white buttocks. An M.D. was exposed in a zealous ring of coprophiliacs, sharing photographs at parties centering on soiled diapers. “There is a god! God is red!” In Harold’s senior year, here came a lawyer exposed for teen pornography, hauling girls over state lines. Again Harold trembled, but there was always a bit of sadness that he himself was not cut down and hauled off — he loved most the phrase “spirited away”—for some dreadful irredeemable disclosure.

Harold never worried himself about the life after scandal. He indicated that he was, in fact, carrying on lugubriously after a lurid bomb in his past (not the bomb, but a bomb), but I think he was playing me false, for the first time. He wanted it so much, and lived from one minor scandal to the next, but as I say, I never expected him to be blindsided by disclosure after I saw him that day when I was seventeen. I got the sudden sense of Harold as finished, even though he was shy of thirty, too transparent and happy in his sins. He would never get the scandale d’estime he so wanted. I had even thought that Harold wanted badly to be gay — queer, we said then — but could not bring it off. He was a theater queer around me sometimes, but you knew he couldn’t cross over the line, it wasn’t made for him, or he for it.

Harold was one of the few around who knew about the existence of Samuel Beckett, and he hailed the man, perfectly ordered in his obliquity for Harold — an Irishman close to Joyce, veteran of the French underground, who lived in Paris, wrote in French, and had absolutely no hope. Drama couldn’t get any better than Waiting for Godot, whose French title he would call out now and then like a charm, appropriate to nothing at hand I could see. Harold felt Godot was written in “direct spiritual telepathy” to veterans of Korea. He skipped nicely over the fact he never fought the war and I could agree that he was a telepathic cousin to them, because Harold was not, whatsoever, a phony. I was always struck by the fact he felt so sore and deep about particular people, and I felt dwarfish in my humanity, compared with him. Harold had seen Godot in Cambridge, and when it began playing in the South he drove his squat-rocket, mange-spotted ocher Studebaker far and wide to cities and college campuses to view it again. He would do the same for West Side Story, which he regarded as the highest achievement in musicals, ever. He saw the movie a number of times. Sometimes he’d take one or more of the odd girls with him, and once he asked me. He intended to drive all the way to Shreveport to see it again. He said I would see the kind of girl I wanted to marry in Natalie Wood and would hear the music of one of America’s few uncontested geniuses, Leonard Bernstein. Then we would dip back to see a production of Godot in Baton Rouge, which, he warned, I was not really old enough for but needed because even a dunce could tell it was “necessary” for any sensate member of the twentieth century.

My mother was not enchanted. She was not happy about my trip with Harold, and much unhappier when she saw him, balding and with one of those cork-tipped Kools in the side of his mouth, behind the wheel of that car. I was a little embarrassed myself, because my folks put high stock in a nice car, and Mother was very sincere about appearances. I had told her Harold had ulcers, though I don’t know how it came up. But when she said “He shouldn’t smoke with those ulcers,” I could tell she was much concerned by more than that. Neither was Harold throwing any charm her way. He never had the automatic smarm and gush in the kit of most Southern men at introduction. I knew he was too experienced for that, but Mother didn’t like that he was a Korean near-vet, this old, just now going to college, and my friend. I waited for him to light up with just a bit of the rote charm, but he wouldn’t. He looked bored and impatient, thinking probably she owed him thanks for taking this probationary brat off her hands for a weekend. I was conscious that she thought he might be queer, so I just told her outright he wasn’t.

“Harold has many women,” I said, picking up my bag. She looked at me more suspiciously than ever. I just piled in, we left, and I was unsettled five ways as this rolling mutant of the V-2 went off simpering with its weak engine. Harold said nothing to cheer me up. Then he finally spoke, across the bridge after Vicksburg.

“Your father’s a very lucky man.”

“You know him?”

“No, fool. Your mother’s fine, A-plus fine. I’d die for her. A woman like that loved me, I’d cut off an arm.”

Again, Harold seemed to be talking way beyond his years, and I believe now he must have thought of himself as extremely old. But it was the first time I realized my mother was a well-dressed, finely put together woman, and I began looking at her anew after that. Harold sat so wordlessly in silhouette in the car — I wondered if he was stunned and putting the make on her. With my mother. What impeccable depravity, as he might have said.

I had a little dance combo at the high school. Harold had come to see us, and he bragged on my trumpet playing, many notes and very fast, but, unfortunately, no soul. Soul might come to me if I was patient, he said. It could happen to Southern boys, look at Elvis, and he went on to call Roy Orbison much better than Elvis. You must hear that voice, he said, but he failed to get it on the lousy scratching radio. What came in almost solid was a special kind of Studebaker music, mournful like somebody calling over another lost radio. He predicted men like that were going to make horns obsolete shortly, and Harold was dead right. By the time I finished college, nobody wanted to hear anything but guitar and voice. Even pianos were lucky to get a chip in here and there. I was destroyed by the absolute triumph of the greasers, the very class I and my cronies pointedly abhorred. Maybe there is no class hatred like the small towner with airs against unabashed white trash.

He was right about Natalie Wood. I had seen her once in Rebel Without a Cause but ignored her in favor of Dean. In West Side Story, though, as she was dancing and singing, and especially when she performed “Somewhere” amidst the gang horror of New York, I teared up and wanted her more than anything before in my life. She was it, tripled. Please wouldn’t she wait until I got famous and rich, and got some more height? Harold stood there, forever, as the credits rolled at the end. He seemed to be memorizing the name of every member who’d even carried a mop in the studio. I was smitten, looking down at the floor I was so charged, and still riding on that New York music.

We went to Baton Rouge to sleep at a Holiday Inn — very new and seeming swankier then — but on the way down Harold said maybe he should tell me this was a Negro production of Godot we were going to the next night.

“You’re kidding. This Beckett wrote for Negroes?”

“Grow up. He wrote for man, little man.”

“Oh. Well, sure.”

You would not believe how condescending and polite I was in that audience of Negroes in suits. The play was riveting and strange to me, and I thought maybe I was one of the few not getting it, just here and there a dose of sense. Nobody laughed, and I don’t know at all about the quality of the production. But it was a quiet smiling scandal that we were here at all, and I was glad to hear Harold’s earnest sighs now and again when a point of confusion and futility — I got that — was made. I felt very allied to the culture-hip scene. We were not going to put up with any racists once we were outside the theater either, me and my Negro friends, hearkening in our suits — goddamnit, let there be trouble. Our very class and righteousness would blow them away.

Out in the foyer, digging the crowd with Harold, I felt very promoted in my suit and Ivy League haircut, only I wanted a goatee very badly. Harold had pulled off to a wall for a smoke. I also wanted to say something on the mark.

“Way out, very. But really, how many of them you think really got it, Hare?”

He was disgusted, eyes closed in smoke.

“You tit. You little tits go right from blind ignorance to cynicism, never feeling a damned thing.”

“No, no, I feel. Miles Davis is my man.”

I was rescued by the appearance of the first great public faggot I’d ever witnessed. This black thing, tall and skinny as a drum major, was leading a trio of admirers out of the auditorium, hands curling and thrown out from his chest, squealing like a mule on fire, and dressed in something mauve and body-fit with a red necktie on it.

I smiled across the way at Harold, who had distanced himself, checked the near-empty theater, and began doing the pantomime I had learned off Ray Wiley, a worldly child of the army base who claimed to have encountered many queers. I wet both forefingers, smoothed my eyebrows with them, and formed my mouth in an O with my lips covering the hole, then held my arms out as if in a flying tackle. We conceived of queers as sort of helpless roving linebackers apt to dive on you and bury their faces in your loins. Wiley told many happy stories about how these men were discovered in their act in army lounges and stomped senseless. You could also use burning naphtha to rout them.

“What in hell?” Harold hissed, flicking eyes around the precincts like a spy.

He came over and grabbed my arm very strongly for such a skinny creature. Harold wore a formless blue serge suit with a clip-on green tie on his flat collar like a salesman at a funeral. I don’t believe he owned a button-down. He had on those heavy black executive shoes too. I noticed him red-eyed. He’d been crying quietly about Godot. Just as I’d wept tinnily for Natalie Wood.

“Behave, fool. You’re not in your own pathetic little country. Something wonderful has happened here, and you’re totally unmarked by it.”

“No. I’m marked, Hare. Truly marked, I swear. It was all there, man, straight on.”

“That and Our Town are the dramas of the century. Now you’ve seen both of them, thanks to me. What do you get from them? Zero. Out here queer-baiting. My God, you remind me of all those wry husbands dragged to the theater by their wives. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

“Look, man, I got something from it, all right? I only wish Natalie Wood was in it.”

Harold had pushed too far and I went sullen, out to his hopelessly square car, which looked even more like the grounded rocket of a very confused small nation. I thought about how stern old Harold was a great hypocrite, really, him with his album and glue-on straw from mouth to girl. The Studebaker left the campus with its weak hissing. He wouldn’t let it go.

“You’re not even up to sophomoric yet, is your trouble, cat. Cats know things, they sense things. Young men like Elvis have left you light years behind.”

I got a thicker skin of the sullen around me. Oh yeah? What about your Asian women, the trolls you cultivate now? I wanted to say. What great sense was in that? And, and. . Harold did not wear his heart on his sleeve. He wore it on his forehead, throbbing away at you. I had a mother to scold me already, thank you.

“If you were worthy, I’d take you out for a drink, a liqueur. That’s what your mother expects me to do, teach you to drink,” he suddenly said, picking up on the very mother thought in my head, flicking me, chums again, on the suit sleeve. “I’m sorry for growling, cat. Really.”

“Likoor? Liquor?”

On Harold’s patient directions, the amused bartender at the Holiday Inn made us a sort of booze snow cone with crème de menthe. I guess I was so healthy and unpolluted, I felt it immediately, my first drink, or suck. I lit up like a pink sponge. All the world seemed at my feet, and I could barely stand the joy of Godot, Natalie Wood, and Harold in it at the same time. Even the city name, Baton Rouge, was vastly hip. Red stick, red stick. Very way out. Life was a long wonderful thing. It was so good you expected some official to show up and cancel it.

I tried to impress Harold with scandals I knew of myself, and told him about a shooting on a town square down south. A man had killed two policemen with a shotgun and gone home to threaten his own family, whereupon his oldest son ran him against a house with a truck and killed his own father with a.22, nine shots, the father yelling “Oh my God!” over and over. At the end, the son threw the pistol on the ground and said, “Daddy, why’d you make me do it? You knew I loved you.”

“No, no. That’s. . just baroque misery. So beastly obvious. Nothing but low, mean, stunned feelings result. Nothing is left but the mourners. It’s the province of our bard up at Oxford. Nobody throbs in shame, derided worldwide. Scandal pierces, is poignant, pi-quant, resonant. If I could reorder that sad thing they call a state fair. . You see, scandal is obsession, essence! Instead of the freak show, I’d have the heroes of scandal caged up while folks filed by to review them.”

“Review them? Then what?”

“Why, throw rotten fruit, eggs and excrement at them!” Harold gave that long girlish neigh that grabbed his throat after some of his insights, and too many heads turned in the Holiday Inn bar. He didn’t care.

“Scandal is delicious, little man. All we are is obsession and pain. That is all humans are. And when these wild things go public, and are met with howls, they ring out the only honest history we have! They are unbearable! Magnificent! Wicked! You read where the pathetic object goes off to psychiatric care or some phony drinking hospital, or a dull jail, but that’s only for the public, slamming the door shut on them. What they really are is raving on the heath, little man, in their honest unbearable humanity!”

So, in months afterward, I tried to achieve soul, or stand in the path of it so it would come to me. And I thought deeply about what I could do, what I had, who I was, to possibly rave on the heath someday. I wanted very much a rare, perhaps even dark, thing with a woman — Natalie Wood or her cousin, after I’d sent New York Slim off begging. My imagination could do nothing else for me, otherwise.

Harold sort of faded at the little college. I got tired of him, and at midyear a real Korean vet appeared as a late student on campus. He was much like Harold, they said, and Harold was very annoyed at being somewhat displaced and duplicated. The other fellow went crackers in a motel over in Jackson one night. Harold was called over by a local pastor to help minister to him. He didn’t like this role at all, although he did what he could. The man had true awful memories of Chosin Reservoir and was not poetic at all in his breakdown, also very real. Harold, you could tell, was fairly sorry to help him get back on his feet, and considered his insanity banal. I’d never seen Harold this ungenerous before, but I guess he was threatened by this man at the tiny college, where he used to hold forth among his desperate harem in the grill. He began giving “all of his entity” to a new large buxom girl with red cheeks who played clarinet in the orchestra, and I quit seeing much of him. He swore she was the one, an honest life’s passion. He was glad the waiting was over. I saw them at the drugstore together once. Harold was even paler and thinner and a good deal shorter than the girl. Drained by love, I guess. She had big calves and a very long lap, and seemed completely conquered by him. He was soon to graduate and become a high school teacher in a town north in the state that I didn’t think held much promise for scandal. He went off with no good-bye, the girl with him.

I just remembered that before he left I at last hit the mark on scandal for him, and he saw I was coming around.

“Okay, give me a worthy scandal, little man.” I was taller than Harold.

“This way. General MacArthur is discovered hunching a sheep just minutes after his ‘Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away’ speech to a grateful Congress.”

“Finally. Perfect. Discovered by one of Truman’s aides, some nervous square from Missouri.”

The wild horsey shout.

My parents were much relieved, I detected, when Harold was finally away. The age, the dress, his bewildering pull, never set right for them, and my mother was disturbed when I told her he had found her attractive.

Now I was being a fine lad with my pal Horace, but not too fine, pulling out the bricks from the theater razement by honest sweat and toil, bored insane and almost to bed in Kosciusko. I looked down at the lobby desk from the balcony a long long time, but nobody came. It was just the old man sitting the night in the same chair, full speed ahead with his tangled stare, a silent movie of Godot even further gone into real life. Just to get a rise from him I spoke out the French title, like Harold loved to: “En Attendant Godot!” a little above normal speaking voice.

This worried the man, and he turned his head slowly around, then cocked it back at me, whose face denied anything had made a noise at all. He seemed very worried, even alarmed. Then for no good cause at all, I did my queer pantomime, slicking my eyebrows, running my tongue back and forth, my eyes big and avid, arms out as if to dive down on him. I was suddenly very angry at him for not being a woman. He was looking backward straight up at me. His arms began moving and a low rush of language I did not understand muttered from him.

I felt so good and healthy and showered, but I was using up all my potential here. My manhood was being sucked away by a dead town. My pal Horace opened the door of our room. He’d taken a nap to prepare himself for a real sleep in a minute, and gave a grogged palsy smile, feeling good too, with his body worked. I kept up the queer routine, which he always thought was a howl. He mimicked drop-kicking a homo in the groin. Horace was a bass player and quite a scholar, much better at books than I was. We passed much time mimicking the stone-dumb and depraved creatures of our state, especially the governor, who had recently suggested setting off large nuclear devices to blow open a canal way from the Tennessee River to Mobile.

“Come here. I want you to listen,” he said.

“Listen?”

“Come here.”

He took me to the window, which was open to the lukewarm Kosciusko evening, and told me not to look down, just listen.

At first I heard what I took to be just somebody mumbling on the sidewalk beneath us. Then a harmonica started up, very softly, lonely as a midnight highway dog. It was the blues, with no audience, for no money. For all my musical life, I’d never heard the blues erupt solitary and isolated like this. When the harmonica stopped, the voice went very high and strained in its grief — you couldn’t really tell whether it was a man or a woman.

“Let’s. .”

“Don’t look down,” said Horace.

“What? Why not?”

“Let’s don’t find out who it is. You don’t want to know, do you?”

I saw his point. Horace had a copy of Swann’s Way on the bed beside where he was sleeping and he was deep.

Kosciusko was a better town than we thought, if it afforded this tune at ten in the night. Maybe it was a man just released from jail, or maybe a woman just off a bus somewhere. Horace was right on, it was best not to know the source of this eerie, moaning thing. You couldn’t quite make out the words, but it had the blackstrap moan in it all right. The harmonica trailed in again, sweet and with a bit of terror in it. I grabbed the song. It was all mine. I heard something when the voice started and I could tell Horace had not caught it. Buddy, could you spare a future? This can’t be life. Then it just stopped and did not come back, like something swallowed up in a storm drain. I didn’t hear any steps going away. I looked over to shake my head, smiling, but Horace had already gone back to sleep.

I went out, closed the door, to see what more I could get from the balcony rail. Sometimes you see something that seems made for you, like a good fishing hole, and you won’t leave it although the hours prove there’s nothing there. The old man was still at his post, along with the gone tan carpet, the gone desk clerk, serried cubbyholes in a rack behind. But then, I could hardly believe it, feet in ladies’ sandals appeared, and a stretch of nice tan leg, black short-cut hair in bangs with a few strands of gray in it, and I could not question: a black long-sleeve slightly unseasonal sweater, bosoms small but prominent, and like great lamps in this stag-dark tedium. It was New York Slim, about ten years older than I had guessed her. I was back to New York Slim, instantly unfaithful to Natalie Wood, Natalie was nothing, this woman and I already having had two years of history in the head, you can’t deny old lovers. I couldn’t see all her face, but from the cut to the profile you knew she was at least summer chicken going into fall maybe. She talked to the old man, but he did not rise like an Old South gent should. Then she came up the stairs and saw me, kept going but slower, and the age in her face wasn’t too much — not quite in my mother’s era — with the muscles in her face making lines that matched those in her legs, drawing tight in strands as she took the last two steps. She did not look of this place at all. Then she smiled but at the same time shook her head, as if she knew something about me besides the fact I was nothing but a boy and felt that very much as I looked into her eyes — what color? — and sensed deep events decades long. Also, she was easy here, maybe she lived here, because without checking in she opened the door two away from ours and went in. I was so happy and tormented I looked at the last of her foot going in the closing door many times over, gathered to the rail like a great sinner at the bar.

I checked quickly, very quietly, to see if Horace was still asleep. Ever since the music out on the street I knew something was being made for me, only me, unshareable. It might have been her singing, though already I knew it wasn’t, no, but the singer could be an agent of telepathy as Harold believed in. Sure. The set of her was foreign here, I was certain of that. I had nothing to say. But Harold, now Harold would just go up to somebody and talk if he wanted to. With women he told me he just went right up and said I think we should be friends and probably sleep together, and it worked, he was right in with them. I went to her door and knocked, an enormous chill all over my body. It took a while. I thought I heard her say inside not yet. I knocked again. She opened the door barefooted with a bottle in her hand, a little clear one not for booze, and she was about to say something but I wasn’t who she thought.

“I feel I ought to know you,” I said. “You ring a bell.”

“You don’t know me. And I don’t want to know anybody else now, especially not anybody decent and young.” She took a pull on the bottle, and she seemed a little drunk.

“I’m not so decent as all that.”

“He thinks you are a Communist. He forgot to say you’re only a boy. Why’d you scare him?”

“That old man down there? I was just clearing my throat. Stretching.”

“He said you had symbolic gestures.”

“Oh. He’s a sick one, you know.”

“Yes he is. A very sick one.”

“Could we just talk? We’ve been working bricks and it gets lonesome. We’ve been at it now a week.”

She pulled from the bottle again and I could smell something familiar from it, not booze, something we’d had in the house. The label had microscopic print.

“Come in, oh Mister Communist Police. Arrest me if you must, but I will never break. I will never tell.”

“I’m no Communist. Don’t kid. Say, you’ve been living here.”

“I doubt it,” she said. Not only was she blurred in speech but the speech wasn’t quite American. I knew it.

“I go away, I come back. I go away, I come back,” she continued.

Besides some domestic things on the dresser, there was a bicycle raised on a jack to its axle. You could pedal and go nowhere. I pointed this out, asking if something was wrong with it. You never, also, saw a woman her age on a bike where I come from.

“I go nowhere on that one.” Beside the bike were tall black-laced boots, looking serious and military, but they seemed her size. She sat and slumped to one arm on the bed, pulling from the tiny bottle again.

“What’s that?”

“Happy medicine for nervous bad women.” I saw it was paregoric, the stuff prescribed on ice for nausea. I didn’t know about the opium in it then.

“Your voice.”

“Canadian. Quebec. World citizen. You all sound like the nickras down here. Who taught who to talk? This man I paid out of jail today down over Lexington, he hates the nickras too, but I ask him why does he talk like them then?”

“What was he in for?”

“Throwing things in the night. Fireworks.”

“Disturbing the peace?”

“More keeping. Believes. Depends on what you believe. But dumb to get caught. More of the white trash. Lumpen.”

On the dresser were several long steely pins. I went over and picked one up. They were too long for hairdos. It was extremely sharp on the end.

“Medical,” she said. “Look but don’t touch, if you please. Acupuncture, for relief. Go ahead. The man out of jail didn’t believe in them either.”

I wondered if she was practicing some kind of voodoo surgery. Those signs you see along the road in the country, on the outskirts of town. SISTER GRACE, PALMS. You sometimes feel your blood go darker, and I was feeling it here, more excited than disapproving. This world was fetched in fresh just for me, but I could never tell Horace. I was greedy for all her details. She was European, ageless, a brunette Marlene Dietrich with those long legs.

It was then I saw a Klan robe, a green rounded cross on the left breast, all white otherwise. It had a small ladies’ hood, cut to fashion for her, or so it seemed. The closet door was half open and she didn’t mind my seeing. It all was like stumbling into an alien person’s attic. My people hated the Klan, and I did too, I thought. But there is an undeniable romance, maybe adventure, to hating a whole race of people: it had its sway. Recently in Bay St. Louis, I had left a beautiful girlfriend to go to New Orleans. I did not get much of anywhere with her, but she’d talked affectionately with me. As I was leaving, she said, truly caring for me, I thought, “Oh George, do watch out for the nigguhs in New Orleans. They’re all loose and free over there and they’ll just do anything.” She had seemed lovely in her need to be protected from the dark hordes. I was taken very warmly by this problem, and went off like a knight of the streets, full of romantic charge, with something to prove. I’d been at the closet door overlong. The hanger next over held a great length of dog chain with bracelets at both ends. I supposed she wore this around her waist, like medieval women in the “Prince Valiant” comic strip.

When I turned to her, she could see my face was different, even though her eyes were blurred and she looked ready to sleep.

“I told you thas too bad. You’re decent. I’m not, young boy.”

“But not really—”

“Don’t tell me. I know decent from the other look. I can sort them. You’ve got that decent polish on you. You are decent, and you will just go to sleep with fairy plums in your head, not like me.”

“That’s not a church choir gown. I know that. Still—”

“You have to go. Somebody is coming. You don’t want to see him.”

“The man from jail?What’s he. . It’s late. Why’s he coming?”

“Why to frig me, I’d imagine. Out of here, Tom Sawyer with your neckerchief. Put all those nice muscles to bed.”

She was right that I didn’t want to see the man. I closed the door with my head flaming, confused. But I was not disgusted. I wanted to save her. You could see she was too good for anybody around here. Forces were martialed against her.

I couldn’t go into my room. I put my hand on the knob of the room next to hers. It was unlocked. The room inside was made up, unused. I crept in and waited, dark in my head, forcing myself toward love of her. Even the muscle lines in her face would go away if I loved her right.

I lay on the bed without moving a spring. Then I crept to check for a hole in the wall. There was none. But I edged up the window so as to listen around.

Not five minutes passed before there were steps on the stairs, very slow and dramatic, you knew it in the rickety floor. He went over the carpet and opened her door without saying anything. She knew him all too well. Nothing, not even muffled, came through then. I lay half sick waiting for sounds of protest and struggle, and when they failed to occur, I knew the drug was used to smother her will. Mute things were proceeding as in a film so bad I might have written it myself.

But through the window I heard the clink of, yes, it had to be that dog chain, and then soon with it, at first unaccountable, but there was no mistaking it, the whir of the bicycle being pumped and clanking just a little. This went on a long, severe time. Through the window this was quite clear. I was thinking of creeping out there, but then the man’s voice said short things, low and anxious, while the bicycle kept up. It was moaning, pathetic, but fearful at the same time. At first I thought it was the woman. Only her voice, in a dismayed faint gasp was heard then, and this was unbearable. It seemed as though she was afraid that he would hit her. He moaned shortly again, but not in sex: it sounded like encouragement in another language. The whirring slowed, and I heard his big steps, the knocks going through the carpet in my room. I waited and waited, waiting for bedsprings and weeping, but I never heard them. The silence became deader than quiet, and then Now here it is! the man said very plainly. But there had passed an enormous amount of time. Only my head was racing, flushed, ahead of the seconds.

Then I heard nothing for so long I fell off asleep very deep into the night, close to dawn, I think. I woke when the light came in gray and went back to our room. I stared at the ceiling, and that day at the bricks, a moron’s job, I was worthless. Horace wanted to know what had me all blown. We’d eaten in the hotel dining room, but we were the only ones there. He wanted to know what I was watching for, what was ailing. I kept going back to the hotel all day, telling him I had a bad stomach. I was really letting him down on the work. The old man still sat there, but once, for the first time, he was gone. I couldn’t tell if anybody else was around. So I knocked on her door, worn out and shucking my labor.

She was having a nap and was fresher than last night, no blur to her, and in a homey wrap. She didn’t mind at all I was there. I asked if I could get her anything. She said well indeed I could get her two Coca-Colas with ice. I was so fast at this, down to the dining room, troubling the one harried fat lady — though she was doing nothing else — and back, it had to be a record for service. She’d brushed her hair (I mattered, she cared) and her face was not so tired.

“I have the feeling you could use a friend, miss.” I had rehearsed that all day.

She put her head down, then sat. I was sure she was crying. Her eyes blinked pink at the rims when she lifted up, and I was gone for her, out of my depth. The other Coke wasn’t for me, though. She poured from a new paregoric bottle on the dresser into one glass and added Coke, storing the other one. Then she drank.

“Much better. It gets hard alone. This is a clean drink. All this is very clean. With your Tennessee whiskey it gets sloppy and all ragged. This is dry-cleaned magic. Not so bad.”

“I guess the nerves never leave you.”

“Never. I had a husband and you aren’t like him at all. But it’s the youth, the age we met, nearly the same. You get to me, neighbor. It’s clean, the look. Washed and pure in the blood, that lucky color. I’ve had it.” For the first time, she smiled. Her teeth were not that bad, a maturer gold was all. My dentist could brighten them right up.

“Tell me. Why did you yell waiting down to him last night? He thought you knew all about him. He was very disturbed.”

“That old man.” I was struck cold and wretched. “Him? You waited for him last night? I don’t believe it.”

Not only that but the man was her father-in-law, and French. Her husband had been killed with the French Legion at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Communists did it. The father had lived in Saigon, wanting to be close to his son with the war on. She was Canadian French, going to school there. It was ballroom and ballet dancing, her whole life, until the war went bad. She’d not been married very long when Edouard was killed. His father had lost twice now from the “other side.” He had been Vichy, was imprisoned after the war, but got out still vocal against Communists and Jews. France was inhospitable to him, so he went to Indochina, and made much money in rubber and tires. After the death of her husband she was lost and absolutely poor. Her parents had left for Canada. She did not think of the old man at all. She began dancing naked in a special club, full of opium and not knowing whether she liked it or not. The old man came in with some friends, he too in awful despair. He did not know where she was, nor did he know it was “Baby Doll”—her husband’s nickname for her — dancing. He watched her on the stage and she soothed his grief long before he knew who she was. He’d only seen her a few times. He went up to her afterwards, she in her silk cape and big shoes, stage-dancing whore shoes. They fell into each other weeping. But he was gone for her in no father-in-law way, and she had nothing. So he took her to Quebec where her parents guessed what was going on; she would not marry him nor did he seem to want it. Her parents told her to die in hell and never speak their name. The way he was about Communists and Jews and now nickras, the way he sent out very angry and offensive literature, got him shunned again but noticed by a visitor from the South in the States. There was much work to be done here after the Brown decision, integration, the last order breaking down in the last great power, and he would be most welcome down here, he and his money and organization. People were listening up. The public was for them, only the forms against. She did nothing but be his and run as a bag woman here and there at a necessary point. She could not stand the trash at the Klan rallies, and she never wore the gown or hood outside the room. As for the nickras, they were fine primitives and she felt sorry for them; some of the men were beautiful with their smiles and shoulders, and they were happy until the Jews and Communists ageetated theem. She had never met a Jew, but the Communeests, without a god they both could not bear a healthy white race, it was an abomination to them, and they owned entertainment, much of government, bragging always about how smart they were because they did not have hearts. Or guts. I mustn’t think too badly of the old man. Everything was wrong with him. Bowels, liver, arthritis, skin cancers, ulcers, psoriasis, piles. There was always a good room for her. This is the worst one she’d ever had. It was she I should think badly about. She was telling me all this because I was young, something was going to happen soon, and she had no church, nor any friends. Witness Albert, the father-inlaw, he had all theeeese tings eell and he took no pain medicine, compared to weak her, Felice, who had nothing really wrong and did not do much but whore for her kin. He was so unhealthy it didn’t take but once a month or so now. It took him that long to recover. It took him forever to. . befit himself, a longer riding of the bicycle naked in the robe with the hood on, wearing the black boots, and racing with the skirt of it tied up, the chain from her wrist to his wrist on the bed, his face buried in half a watermelon, but peeping like a child at her pumping nether parts. She giggled. Something from his youth, she couldn’t know. I was not a man yet and I shouldn’t smile. One day odd things might overcome me in my despair, if I ever had despair. Sometimes she thought he was doing it to his own youth, or his son, or he and his son together, at the end long long long silence, his having got with her but demanding her to ride still until it was finished and he a dead ruin. It had crossed her mind he might die, and in ingratitude she had driven the bike faster and faster, hoping to bring on the classic champion’s death to him, but she didn’t know if his will was in order, she’d gotten that mean. But really there was a way of not even being there and responding that a man couldn’t know. Women got married and lived their whole lives doing that, absent and wild and pleasing all at once.

She’d finished two Cokes and the blur was on again. At one point I thought she was breaking down and crying, but I cannot remember at what point. There was sweat on her forehead, and her lips moving, I could swear she’d become younger and younger as her cheeks stretched, then got older at the end, the paregoric driving a hotter, duller black to her eyes.

“I need a bath. Sometimes seven or eight a day,” she said dully. “Don’t forget to be my friend, boy. I think I’ve done something to your youth. You don’t look so decent now.” She waved for me to go.

This had taken a long while, and when I went by the room, Horace was in it, asking what in hell was going on, the day was done.

I told him a person down the way had some medicine for me and that we had chatted while I got better.

At breakfast the next day, Horace and I were still the only ones in the dining room, and feeling obliged for detaining the help, I claimed stomach distress that was not completely a lie. I was too excited and too heavy in her story, like a walking boy museum, hebephrenic and bitten at the scalp and loins. I was up the stairs before I realized I had passed the old man, who was back in the chair, with a black suit on. I knocked and she met me in the door on her way out. She drew me in and shut the door.

“He’s down there, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, all nerves.

“Albert is very jealous. You have to watch it. It’s the worst thing about him. We’re going out to see my dog in the country. A man gave me a Weimaraner dog, a real lovey. When Albert gets bad he threatens to kill it.”

“No. He’s a monster.”

“In jealousy, yes.”

She was dressed in an innocent-looking country outfit, printed skirt and baby blue blouse. The little bow in her hair turned my heart around. Next she put on a raincoat I thought marked for French espionage. I was simply riveted to my stuttering place in awe.

“Visit me when you can, but be careful. Tonight he’s away.”

“Oh yes. I’m your friend. I’m hanging tough.”

That afternoon I worked twice as hard, owing it to Horace from yesterday. I was in the bricks so smoothly I might have been made for them. The sweat was pouring off me. I stood up and untied the kerchief to swab off. Horace was looking across the street.

“That old man, he’s watching you.”

He stood in front of the Baptist church across the road, hat in hand, and not looking at me as meanly as I had expected. He was standing just in front of the bricked marquee, with its message or sermon of the week: JESUS WEPT. COME AND GATHER. He was simply studying me mildly, almost kind in his face of red spots and rakeddown short gray hair. He was younger too, up and about on the pavements, the chair a whole other life dismissed with some strength. I mopped through to my eyes and peeked. His face buried in half a watermelon but peeking every now and then, I thought. My shirt was off and I felt small, a grimy peon.

“I believe he’s looking at your mighty build,” said Horace. “Must be the village queer. Let’s set him on fire.”

It is quite mature, I thought, to know everything and say nothing. I had not practiced this much in my life, and felt myself almost plump with rough wisdom, as the old man walked on.

I told Horace I was not wanting any supper that night, stomach knotted and butterflied. But I was her prized friend, heavy on the aftershave, the shave itself a ludicrous solemn wipe of the blade through foam. He went down to the John Birch diner with his Swann’s Way in hand, to give the shiftless owner more grief.

She was not right. Something had happened. There were five new bottles of paregoric on the dresser next to the long needles, the brush and the hand mirror. She stared at me with her mouth pinched and her eyes wary with fear and sadness. What is it? I wanted to know. You can tell me, in my last clean shirt, a blue one to match her blouse, telepathy.

“He took me to the field, the fence, and the dog was not there anymore. But he wanted me to look at the vacant field where it had been, I know it. The man in the house wasn’t our friend anymore, either, Albert told me, angry. He was a busybody, a turncoat, maybe a fellow traveler or a Jew.”

“You think he killed them both?”

“I don’t know. We go on a while and then there’s always some kind of rage or treachery.”

“Why don’t I take that Klan outfit and shove it up his ass for him?”

“No,” she said quickly, head swung up to glare and then dissolve, back into her bewildered tortured beauty.

“But you have no real home and an awful life. I could get money. My father is well-off. By the end of this week I’ll have two hundred.”

“Very, very sweet. Hand me my dream bottle.”

I did, and went and fetched her two Cokes, lightning across the face of the piggish, unknowing woman alone in the dining room.

“You’re Peter Pan,” she smiled. “I think you remind Albert of his son.”

“Your husband.”

“He wasn’t so much older when we met. He liked my legs, even my poverty.”

“So do I, Felice.” It was rich and almost too heavy on my tongue.

“All I can do is drag youth down to indecentness.”

“No. You care. You’re in a trap. There’s a whole other world. There’s movies, and music, and poems, and fishing in a private place with cypresses in the water. You with me. You can’t tell. Time—”

“Oh, please shut up. I told you I didn’t need to know anybody else. I’m just sailing along the current in the rain gutter, a piece of nothing, nobody can touch me without drowning.”

I thought that was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

I was just on the edge of breaking into song with that great anthem of blind Christian affirmation of the fifties, “I Believe.” All jazz, Beatism, cattism had fallen away. By God, I was in Harold’s world, women with troubles, a spell of swooning charity on me.

“You’ve forgotten I’m your friend,” I told her.

“Well, that’s something. To know you’re not alone. A part of me must have that.”

I knew she was about to say a thing so sincere and poignant, from that bleak experienced face of hers, that it would be a sign for our parting, and she did.

“Even in hell the real part of me can carry that young face of you with me, friend George.”

I left the room all moist and on the verge of going ugly in the face with sorrow and joy.

I was wanting to be a broader man when next we met, so I picked up Horace’s Proust and began reading it that night while he went down to the bus station to see if the magazines had changed. The great champion of sensitivity and time, in his cork-lined room, allergic to noise, claimed my pal. This thicket of nerves I could not broach, however, most likely because I had my own, clawing over the pages in competition. But it was still of great use in the room, because it was French, I thought as I tossed it away.

Horace came in with a great smile. I was on the bed dreaming high and valiant stuff. He looked behind him down the hall.

“Well, somebody’s having a good time here. Did you know there was a woman down the way? And she must be all woman. They hadn’t shut the transom. She couldn’t get enough from some guy. Oh Bertie, Bertie, deeper, deeper!” I changed from the smile of my good dreams to a face that must have been stone fury.

“You couldn’t have heard that. That’s from a dirty comic book.”

“I tell you. And get this, what she was moaning when I left: Churn butter churn! Churn butter churn! Old Bertie whamming away.”

He couldn’t have made this up.

“Your kind go from blind ignorance straight to cynicism. You don’t feel, you don’t know.”

“Hey, George, you quoting Marcel? I’m not cynical at all. She was having a hell of a time.”

Her language, an image from French dairy cow country — my good horror. How could this thing be? Albert was using the dog against her. He was forcing the paregoric down her, making her sick and blabbering.

“Now, man. You ought to see your face. What’s eating you?”

Horace was tall, too wise, knowing nothing. I hated him.

I couldn’t go see her that night. It was a bitter, bitter evening. Horace wanted to go down to the lobby and lie in wait so we could check out the woman when she came by. I told him that was a horrible sophomoric idea. Why? he asked, getting fed up with me. He said we might have found a lady with a profession here. He was ready to do a Chinese dwarf.

“Let’s leave it like the harmonica player,” I said, stonily.

“That isn’t the same at all.”

“Leave it.”

“You don’t tell me, all right? You’re not the duke of Kosciusko.”

He went down and I was happy he came back without seeing her.

The next morning was Sunday. Horace called himself a free-thinking Baptist. He’d brought a suit and he went out to that church down the way. I was apostate, but very glad he wasn’t. I checked the rail, being stealthy. That bastard Albert was in the chair, staring tiredly, having forced her twice this week. I was praying for an artery to snap in his face and vowed direct revenge if it didn’t. The man must be stomped and dragged off in a net. I could see venom popped up in his cheeks, spotting them red.

“Hey you,” I called, not very loud.

He twisted his head back, trying to find me.

“En Attendant Godot? En Attendant?”

He got up, shaken, and I watched the top of his head, gray hair brushed forward Roman, leave for the street.

When I knocked on the door and waited, I heard something clink inside. She came to the door in nothing but a house wrap, wet from the bath.

“Friend George.” Her eyes were very dull. She was on the stuff, her conscience awful.

When I went in she’d already gone back to the tub. I sat on the bed and heard her stir the water. Then I heard the clink again. For the longest time she said nothing.

“You ought to watch your transom. My friend heard you really having a good time last night.”

There was no reply at all.

“I thought wrong. You don’t need a friend so much as. . somebody to betray.”

Nothing. You heard water sounds, just a little.

I studied the bed and carpet and dresser — all she had and was, as far as I knew. A hotel was a stupid and desperate place to live, I suddenly thought. And rotation from one to another, having her bicycle and robe and boots and chain everywhere, up the stairs dutifully with them again and again, setting up like carnival gypsies except with less dignity and no good at all even to yokels with a quarter. But I was being unfair to her, and caught myself up again. Because I cherished her, nothing could budge me.

“I so need a friend now. It’s the end of things,” she said in a little, faint voice. “Come in here and sit. There’s a curtain between us. Oh!” I thought she gasped and I hurried in, face blushing and dying to help. The curtain was closed, all right, the brown shadow of her behind it sitting in the water. “Oh!” I thought she said again.

Around the front gathered edge of the curtain near the faucets the dog chain lay out on the floor with one of its bracelets open, the rest of the chain in the tub with Felice.

“Put it on your wrist, my pal,” she said tinnily, almost sighing it.

So I did and snapped it on. I would be a gypsy too. I’d be the panting boy in the wings, waiting until her act was over and the others had had their fill of her. Until we made our move. This charity and long-suffering had never even nearly come near me before. I’m just sailing along the current in the rain gutter, a piece of nothing, nobody can touch me without drowning. The steel of the cuff was very serious and required a key for release, I noticed.

“You will be with me down down down oh! There’s a way to do it in the liver they said brings it there quick but oh! no no no.” This was all so faint and not recollected until a long while afterwards.

“Felice! Are you okay? I’m buckled on the chain with you.”

“Something’s not right, and I’ve used the last one.” Her voice was faint, dimming like a small girl going to sleep, her breath wet on the pillow.

“Everything will be all right. Everything. I know you’re under horrible pressure. I’m reading Proust, drawing closer to your world. The French Proust.”

There would be no way for me not to view a lot of her with the chain binding us, I reckoned. This would be an unearthly familiarity. The die would be cast. The new world would begin right then, and I felt actual waves of a kind of happy nausea.

“Oh oh oh oh ohh! Not right.”

This voice did not rise in friendship or passion. She was very sick and I knew something was wrong, unpretended and real.

“I’m not dying the right way, George.”

I got up, thinking, and pulled the chain to the door. I couldn’t look at what I wanted without pulling her a little, with a splash from the tub. I finally had my eyes just past the jamb and looked on the dresser. The paregoric bottles were there, three empty, but where the long acupuncture needles always were was empty space. It was too catastrophic a thing to even consider; but I knew she had them.

“Felice, I’m opening the curtain!”

She was lying over with her head forward, drugged, on the shower plunger between the faucets. Her hands were down on her stomach. The tub water was pink around it with three streams of blood. She’d pushed them in the right side where the liver was, I found out. Oriental, Oriental, I remember thinking over and over, trying to call the dread something.

I got in the tub with her and lifted her. You think you are one muscled champion until you try to lift a wet naked woman dead-haul. It can barely be done, and I thought she was already dead, so that in this fear I finally did it and we both fell over together, confused in the chain, off the tiles into the carpet of the room. My nose was flat in it and it smelled like the dusty feet of a horde. She was whimpering. When I saw the heads of the needles, puffed out with blue and darker skin, with a near-black blood dripping out like spread fingers, I almost went under.

I looked for a phone, but we had no phone in these rooms. Her legs began moving although her face looked dead. I drew up and whirled my head around looking. I reached the robe on the hanger and dragged it off, then threw it over her and put my arms under hers, tugging and pleading with her.

With as much ease as I could I got her out on the stoop and she began walking a little, saying oh oh oh. We went down the stairs very slowly. When we got toward the bottom, I raised up and there Albert was staring at us from his black suit, his eyes seeming beyond a known emotion. I gasped at him to phone help, she was dying. Some others behind Albert stood there, but I barely noticed even their shoes. I settled her on the last stair then sat myself, unwrapping the chain around us both and getting some free length to my wrist. Then I saw she was revealed and I pulled the robe together on her.

She had a great deal of blood in her lap and on the side of the robe, up level with the circled cross of the Klan.

“This is my affair,” said Albert. “Let her go.”

“It is not. I’m with her now. Can’t you see? I’m her future now!”

“No you ain’t, son,” said my father, who’d come up with Horace, the both of them in suits.

He’d come up to bring us some treats from Mother and had intercepted Horace coming in from church. My father had a cigarette in his mouth, but it had almost fallen out of his sidelips and hung there while he stared with an open mouth at the bloody woman in the Klan robe. He looked so damned distinguished and in charge I felt dimmed out and pushed back to about age ten, staring at the handcuff of the dog chain on my wrist. Horace was holding the sack of goodies and seemed exactly the son he deserved.

I didn’t see Harold again until almost twenty years later. I was in a very bad band playing at cocktail hour for peanuts and for a convention of educators in San Antonio, Texas. I had been fired from my regular job for drinking, and before that I had been jailed and nuthoused for setting fire to my estranged wife’s lawn, which blew up her lawn mower. In the band I was desperate and would have been throbbing in shame but I was still drunk enough to ignore it and was majoring on the theme Whim of Fortune, and I believe trying to attach myself to a woman of such low estate that the two of us would destroy ourselves in spontaneous combustion at an impossible diving speed. But I had clarity enough to see Harold walk out of the milling pack of cocktailers in the ballroom and come right up to the bandstand, natty in a good slim blazer, and stare at me with an even brotherly smile.

He had heard about my troubles, and commiserated, seeming the picture of sobriety and successful wisdom to me. His hair was all gray, but his posture had improved, and his baldness was distinguished, even at the ears all around. Something terribly healthy was going on in his life and I envied him. I hadn’t felt decent in three years.

“Oh, no. I’m not nice, my friend, not at all. I’m just ordinary as potatoes.”

“Aw Harold. I doubt it.”

“That was the last gasp of riot, in school when you knew me. That was the whole wad.”

“You didn’t reach your juicy scandal, the great one?”

“Never. My head simply turned around and I got old. I just wasn’t even looking that way anymore. All I had was divorce — very usual — and my memories. It’s like I knew you’d be here. C’mon up to the room. I’ll show you something. Pathetic, and I can’t leave it alone.”

“Telepathy, Harold. Remember?”

I dragged my horn case along with him to the elevator. Harold began attacking the stupefying hopelessness of his students. I had grown enough to know only a good teacher could assault them this meticulously, and that he adored them. He was reading a paper on mild innovations in the classroom here at the convention. Many of his students had won national honors. He was still at the same obscure little school.

In the room he pulled out his albums — the one with the Asian women, and then another one with photographs of all his college girls in total surrender, bare, and all of them very happy about it, Harold beaming among them. The effect was more of an arcane archaeological find where a race of drab and ungainly women were frozen in postures of ritual fulfillment. How could he get them to be so glad about it, all of them? I wondered. Only the last album was very sexy. There were pictures of that big woman he married, from clothed to very unclothed, to inside her, many angles. In these the woman seemed cruel and proud, with threatening smiles, dominating the photographer himself, and triumphant in a near-fascist way.

“See, I’m not nice. I’ve got to keep them. Look again, caress them.”

Given the times, none of this was very scandalous, and you had to reimagine the fifties to get very disturbed. They were curios, and Harold did seem pathetic, hanging on to them, and having them along to assist his biography, which nobody was ever going to write.

“I’m a sad old man,” he smiled.

“I had a great scandal, I think,” I told him.

“Well. Word gets around. It must have been rough.”

I stared at him. It must have been blankly.

“Not those. Those are nothing. Those were mere absolutely typical drunkenness, right on schedule,” I at last admitted to somebody.

Then I tried, and failed, with boorish pauses and needless lies, to tell him about Felice.

She lived, but just barely. All three needles had found the liver, and others had died with a third of the same wounds. I understand she was yellow and even black all over for weeks. A newsman called our home. I had been identified as “a youth” in their local small paper. My father took the call and politely told him that I really had nothing further to add and was trying to get on with my life. The newsman himself was very understanding and polite. My father wasn’t, not to me. He had a name in town. Above all things, he despised scandal.

My love for Felice went on belligerently, sullenly, for a month. It was all I had that was undiscussable and untouchable, and it pulled me through, wondering about her and the difference I might have made in her life. I would see her in other hotels, and there she behaved much like a nun of the old tales, looking out a drab window with a bar of light on her face, and you saw a tear under her eye for remembrance of wholesome youth and true love and what could have been. I tried to rave on the heath but was too conscious of the real fact that I was just bawling like a brat.

“But Harold, Harold!” I took the sleeve of his blazer, shaking it. “I was real then. I throbbed, buddy. I did throb.”

Harold was stunned.

“That woman got you. But she needed me,” he said.

Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?

HIS DREAMS WERE NOT GOOD. E. DAN ROSS HAD CONSTANT NIGHTmares, but lately they had run at him deep and loud, almost begging him. He was afraid his son would kill his second wife. Ross often wanted to kill his own wife, Newt’s mother, but he was always talking himself out of it, talking himself back into love for her. This had been going on for thirty-two years. E. Dan Ross did not consider his marriage at all exceptional. But he was afraid his son had inherited a more desperate fire.

Newt had been fired from the state cow college where he taught composition and poetry. Newt was a poet. But a friend of Ross’s had called from the campus and told him he thought Newt, alas, had a drinking problem. He was not released for only the scandal of sleeping with a student named Ivy Pilgrim. There was his temper and the other thing, drink. Newt was thirty. He took many things very seriously, but in a stupid, inappropriate way, Ross thought. There were many examples of this through the years. Now, for example, he had married this Ivy Pilgrim. This was his second wife.

The marriage should not have taken place. Newt was unable to swim rightly in his life and times. The girl was not pregnant, neither was she rich. If she had made up that name, by the way, Ross might kill her himself. He could imagine a hypersensitive dirt-town twit leeching onto his boy. Newt’s poetry had won several awards, including two national ones, and his two books had been seriously reviewed in New York papers, and by one in England.

Ross did not have to do all the imagining. Newt had sent him a photograph a month ago. It was taken in front of their quarters in the college town, where they remained, Newt having been reduced in scandal, the girl having been promoted, Ross figured. Ross was a writer himself. He was proud of Newt. Now he was driving to see him from Point Clear, Alabama, a gorgeous village on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. Ross and his wife lived on a goodly spread along the beach. He worked in a room on the pier with the brown water practically lapping around his legs. It was a fecund and soul-washed place, he felt. He drove a black Buick Riviera, his fifth, with a new two-seater fiberglass boat trailing behind. It was deliberately two-seater. There would be no room for the girl when they went out to try the bass and bream.

He saw ahead to them: the girl would be negligent, a soft puff of skin above her blue jeans, woolly “earth sandals” on her feet, and a fading light in her eyes, under which lay slight bags from beer and marijuana and Valium when she could get it. Newt’s eyes would be red and there would be a scowl on him. He will be humming a low and nervous song. He will be filthy and misclothed, like an Englishman. His hands will be soft and dirty around the fingernails. He’ll look like a deserter on the lam. This is the mode affected by retarded bohemians around campus. Cats would slink underfoot in their home. Cats go with really sorry people. If anybody smokes, Newt and Ivy will make a point of never emptying the ashtray, probably a coffee can, crammed and stinking with cigarettes. Somebody will have sores on the leg or a very bad bruise somewhere. They will have a guitar which nobody can play worth spit. A third of a bottle of whiskey is somewhere, probably under the sink. They’ll be collecting cash from the penny bowl in order to make a trip to the liquor store. This is the big decision of the day. Old cat food would lie in a bowl, crusted. Shoes and socks would be left out. Wherever they go to school or teach it is greatly lousy, unspeakably and harmfully wrong. This was his son and his wife, holding down the block among their awful neighbors in a smirking conspiracy of sorriness; a tract of rental houses with muddy, unfixed motorcycles and bicycles around. Somebody’s kid would sit obscene-mouthed on a porch.

E. Dan Ross, a successful biographer, glib to the point of hackery (he prided himself on this), came near a real monologue in his head: your son is thirty and you see the honors he has won in poetry become like cheap trinkets won at a fair and now you know it has not been a good bargain. A bit of even immortal expression should not make this necessary. It should have brought him a better woman and a better home. Your son has been fired in scandal from a bad school. Newt must prevail, have a “story.” These poets are oh, yes, insistent on their troubled biography. The fact is that more clichés are attached to the life of a “real” writer than to that of a hack. Every one of them had practically memorized the bios of their idols and thought something was wrong if they paid the light bill on time. When I talk to my son, Ross thought, it is comfortable for both of us to pretend that I am a hack and he the flaming original; it gives us defined places for discussion, though I have poetry in my veins and he knows it, as I know damned well he is no real alcoholic. The truth is, Newt would drink himself into a problem just for the required “life.” Nobody in our family ever had problems with the bottle. It is that head of his. He did not know how to do life, he did not know how to cut the crap and work hard. He did not know that doomed love would wreck his work if he played around with it too much. There is cruelty in the heart of those who love like this. There is a mean selfishness that goes along with being so deplorable. You will say what of the life of the spirit, what has material dress to do with the innerness, the deep habits of the soul, blabba rabba. Beware of occasions that call for a change of clothing, take no heed for the morrow, Thoreau and Jesus, sure, but Newt has no mighty spiritual side that Ross has seen. Newt’s talent, and it is a talent I admit, is milking the sadness out of damned near everything. Isolating it, wording it into precise howls and gasping protests.

Newt swam in melancholy, he was all finned out for tragedy, right out of the nineteenth century, à la Ruskin, wasn’t it? Look deep enough into the heart of things and you will see something you’re not inclined to laugh at. Yeah, gimme tragedy or give me nothing. My heart is bitter and it’s mine, that’s why I eat it. He would squeeze the sadness out of this Buick Riviera convertible like it was a bright black sponge. Ross agreed that his son should win the awards — he was good, good, good — but he could make you look back and be sorry for having had a fine time somewhere. You would stand convicted in the court of the real for having had a blast at Club Med, or for seeing the hopefulness at a christening. Ross had been offered university jobs paying four times what his son made, condo included. But Newt’s readers — what, seventy worldwide? — rejoiced in the banal horror of that. They were, doubtless, whiskered Philip Larkinophiles in shiny rayon pants, their necrotic women consorts sighing through yellow teeth. The job Newt had thrown away, his allegiance to the girl for whom he had thrown it all away, had paralyzed him. There must be love; it has to have been all worthwhile. Ross took an inner wager on Newt’s having a pigtail. He now sang with a punkish band. Odds were that he had not only a pigtail but some cheap pointless jewelry too around his wrist, like a shoelace.

Ross intended to talk his son out of this Ivy Pilgrim. A second brief marriage would go right into the vita of a modern poet just like an ingredient on a beer can. No problem there. Lately his son had written “No poems” in every letter, almost proudly, it seemed to Ross. But this was more likely a cry beneath a great mistake. In the backseat of the car were a CD player and a superior piece of leather Samsonite oversize luggage, filled with CDs. It was not a wedding gift. It was to remind Newt, who might be stunned and captured in this dreadful cow-college burg, that there were other waters. Sometimes the young simply forgot that. The suitcase was straight-out for him to leave with. Ross was near wealthy and read Robert Lowell too, goddamnit. And “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was his favorite poem. Had poetry done any better in this century? No. There were inklings here and there, Ross thought, that his boy was better than Eliot, if you take away the self-prescribed phoenix around his neck, this thing with women. Newt had a son from his first wife, a college beauty who had supported his melancholy. Already Newt was at odds with his seven-year-old son, who was happy and liked sports and war toys. He cursed his ex-wife and raised her into an evil planetary queen, since she sold real estate and had remarried a muscled man who had three aerobic salons. But Ross recalled the time when this woman was the source of Newt’s poems, when it was she and Newt against the world, a raving dungeon teasing the eternally thirsty and famished.

This little Ivy Pilgrim had to be a loser and Newt would kill her one day. He had threatened his last wife several times and had shot a hunting arrow into his estranged house. Ross projected seeing Newt in the newspaper, jailed and disconsolate, Ivy Pilgrim’s corpse featured in his bio, Newt not remembering much, doomed forever. Then bent on suicide. Or a life of atonement, perhaps evangelism. Or teaching prison poetry workshops, a regular venue for worthless poets nowadays.

Everett Dan Ross (given, not a pen name; how he despised writers who changed their names for whatever reason!) could see Ivy Pilgrim in the desolate house. Hangdog and clouded, nothing to say for herself. It made him furious. He predicted her inertia, a feckless, heavy tagalong. The bad skin would tell you she was a vegetarian. At best she would be working a desk out of a welfare office someday. Or “involved” in an estate settlement (meticulous leeching of the scorned dead). One always appreciated those who gave attention to one’s son, but she would have a sickening deed to him, conscious that they were a bright scandal at this dump of a college (“Oh yes, they don’t know what to do with us!”) in the Romantic vein. When the truth was, nobody cared much. They might as well have been a couple of eloped hamsters. She was a squatter, a morbid lump, understanding nothing, burying him with her sex. She’d favor the states of “laid back” and “mellow,” as if threatened crucially by their opposites.

Ross, through life, had experienced unsafe moments. He knew where Newt’s melancholy came from. It was not being sued by that true hack whose biography Ross had done. It wasn’t Ross’s fault the man was too lazy to read the book before it came out, anyway, though Ross had rather surprised himself by his own honesty, bursting out here at age fifty-two — why? Nor was it the matter of the air rifle that always rode close to him. Nor was it a panic of age and certain realizations, for instance that he was not a good lover even when he loved his wife, Nabby. He knew what was correct, that wives liked long tenderness and caressing. But he was apt to drive himself over her, and afterward he could not help despising her as he piled into sleep for escape. She deserved better. Maybe his homicidal thoughts about her were a part of the whole long-running thing. The flashes of his murderous thoughts when she paused too long getting ready to go out, when she was rude to slow or mistaken service personnel, when she threw out something perfectly fine in the trash, just because she was tired of it or was having some fit of tidiness; even more, when she wanted to talk about them, their “relationship,” their love. She wondered why they were married and worse, she spoke this aloud, bombing the ease of the day, exploding his work, pitching him into a rage of choice over weapons (Ross chose the wire, the garrote, yes!). Didn’t she know that millions thought this and could shut up about it? Why study it if you weren’t going to do anything? She did not have the courage to walk out the door. He did, though, along with the near ability to exterminate her. She also called his work “our work” and saw herself as the woman behind the man, etc., merely out of cherished dumb truism. But none of these things, and maybe not even melancholy, could be classified as the true unsafe moments.

Especially since his forties, some old scene he’d visited, made his compromises with, even dwelled with, appeared ineffably sad. Something beyond futility or hopelessness. It was an enormous more-than-melancholy that something had ever existed at all, that it kept taking the trouble to have day and eyesight on it. He felt that one of them — he or it — must act to destroy. He would look at an aged quarter — piece of change — and think this. Or he would look at an oft-seen woman the same way. One of them, he reasoned, should perish. He didn’t know whether this was only mortality, the sheer weariness of repetition working him down, calling to him, or whether it was insanity. The quarter would do nothing but keep making its rounds as it had since it was minted, it would not change, would always be just the quarter. The woman, after the billions of women before her, still prevailed on the eyesight, still clutched her space, still sought relief from her pain, still stuffed her hunger. He himself woke up each morning as if required. The quarter flatly demands use. The woman shakes out her neurons and puts her feet on the floor. His clients insisted their stories be told. He was never out of work. Yet he would stare at them in the unsafe moments and want the two of them to hurl together and wrestle and explode. His very work. Maybe that was why he’d queered that last bio. The unsafe moments were winning.

Ross’s Buick Riviera, black with spoked wheel covers, was much like the transport of a cinematic contract killer; or of a pimp; or of a black slumlord. There was something mean, heartless and smug in the car. In it he could feel what he was, his life. Writing up someone else’s life was rather like killing them; rather like selling them; rather like renting something exorbitant to them. It was a car of secrets, a car of nearly garish bad taste (white leather upholstery), a car of penetrating swank; a car owned by somebody who might have struck somebody else once or twice in a bar or at a country club. It was such a car in which a man who would dye his gray hair might sit, though Ross didn’t do this.

He kept himself going with quinine and Kool cigarettes. All his life he had been sleepy. There was nothing natural about barely anything he did or had ever done. At home with his wife he was restless. In his writing room on the pier he was angry and impatient as often as he was lulled by the brown tide. Sleeping, he dreamed nightmares constantly. He would awaken, relieved greatly, but within minutes he was despising the fact that his eyes were open and the day was proceeding. It was necessary to give himself several knocks for consciousness. His natural mood was refractory. He’d not had many other women, mainly for this reason and for the reason that an affair made him feel morbidly common, even when the woman displayed attraction much past that of his wife, who was in her late forties and going to crepey skin, bless her.

It could be that his profession was more dangerous than he’d thought. Now he could arrange his notes and tapes and, well, dispense with somebody’s entire lifetime in a matter of two months’ real work. His mind outlined them, they were his, and he wrote them out with hardly any trouble at all. The dangerous fact, one of them, was that the books were more interesting than they were. There was always a great lie in supposing any life was significant at all, really. And one anointed that lie with a further arrangement into prevarication — that the life had a form and a point. E. Dan Ross feared that knowing so many biographies, originating them, had doomed his capacity to love. All he had left was comprehension. He might have become that sad monster of the eighties.

Certainly he had feelings, he was no cold fish. But many prolific authors he’d met were, undeniably. They were not great humanists, neither were they caretakers of the soul. Some were simply addicted to writing, victims of inner logorrhea. A logorrheic was a painful thing to watch: they simply could not stop observing, never seeing much, really. They had no lives at all. In a special way they were rude and dumb, and misused life awfully. This was pointed out by a friend who played golf with him and a famous, almost indecently prolific, author. The author was no good at golf, confident but awkward, and bent down in a retarded way at the ball. His friend had told Ross when the author was away from them: “He’s not even here, the bastard. Really, he has no imagination and no intelligence much. This golf game, or something about this afternoon, I’ll give you five to one it appears straightaway in one of his stories or books.” His friend was right. They both saw it published: a certain old man who played in kilts, detailed by the author. That old man in kilts was the only thing he’d gotten from the game. Then the case of the tiny emaciated female writer, with always a queer smell on her — mop water, runaway mildew? — who did everything out of the house quickly, nipping at “reality” like a bird on a window ledge. She’d see an auto race or a boxing match and flee instantly back to her quarters to write it up. She was in a condition of essential echolalia was all, goofy and inept in public. Thinking these things, E. Dan Ross felt uncharitable, but feared he’d lost his love for humanity, and might be bound on becoming a zombie or twit. Something about wrapping up a life like a dead fish in newspaper; something about lives as mere lengthened death certificates, hung on cold toes at the morgue; like tossing in the first shovelful of soil on a casket, knocking on the last period. “Full stop,” said the British. Exactly.

Ross also frightened himself in the matter of his maturity. Perhaps he didn’t believe in maturity. When did it ever happen? When would he, a nondrinker, ever get fully sober? Were others greatly soberer and more “grown” than he? He kept an air rifle in his car, very secretly, hardly ever using it. But here and then he could not help himself. He would find himself in a delicious advantage, usually in city traffic, at night, and shoot some innocent person in the leg or buttocks; once, a policeman in the head. Everett Dan Ross was fiftytwo years old and he knew sixty would make no difference. He would still love this and have to do it. The idea of striking someone innocent, with impunity, unprovoked, was the delicious thing — the compelling drug. He adored looking straight ahead through the windshield while in his periphery a person howled, baffled and outraged, feet away from him on the sidewalk or in an intersection, coming smugly out of a bank just seconds earlier, looking all tidy and made as people do after arranging money. His air rifle — a Daisy of the old school with a wooden stock and a leather thong off its breech ring — would already be put away, snapped into a secret compartment he had made in the car door which even his wife knew nothing about. Everett Dan Ross knew that he was likely headed for jail or criminal embarrassment, but he could not help it. Every new town beckoned him and he was lifted even higher than by the quinine in preparation. It was ecstasy. He was helpless. The further curious thing was that there was no hate in this, either, and no specific spite. The anonymity of the act threw him into a pleasure field, bigger than that of sexual completion, as if his brain itself were pinched to climax. There would follow, inevitably, shame and horror. Why was he not — he questioned himself — setting up the vain clients of his biographies, his fake autobiographies, some of whom he truly detested? Instead of these innocents? They could be saints, it did not matter. He had to witness, and exactly in that aloof peripheral way, the indignity of nameless pedestrians. He favored no creed, no generation, no style, no race. But he would not shoot an animal, never. That act seemed intolerably cruel to him.

Assuredly his books raised the image of those he wrote about. Ross had developed the talent long ago of composing significance into any life. He had done gangsters, missionaries, musicians, politicians, philanthropists, athletes, even other old writers. He could put an aura on a beggar. Then with the air rifle, he would shoot complete innocents to see them dwindle. He would swear off for months but then he would come back to it.

It had happened often that Ross was more interesting than his subjects. He was certainly not as vain. Writing his own autobiography would not have occurred to him. But there was a vain and vulgar motive in everybody he depicted: look at me, basically. The ones who insisted on prefaces disclaiming this howling fact made him especially contemptuous. It was not hilarious anymore, this “many friends have beseeched me to put down in writing,” etc. Blab, blook, blep. It was astounding to Ross to find not one of his biographees conscious of this dusty ritual in their own case. Their lives were exempt from the usual flagrant exhibitions of the others. His last chore on a porcine Ohio hack writer — the suer, as Ross called him — a sentimental old fraud who’d authored one decent book a century ago when he was alive, then rode like a barnacle the esteem of the famous who suffered him the rest of his life, dropping names like frantic anchors in a storm of hackism and banality. Ross had to pretend blithe unconsciousness to the fact that the man “was ready for his story to be told,” and had sent friends to Ross to “entice you to sit down with shy, modest X.” Ross also had to watch the man get drunk about seventy times and blubber about his “deep personal losses,” his “time-stolen buddies.” The depth of his friendship with them increased in proportion to their wealth and fame. Ross kept a bland face while the obvious brayed like a jackass in the room. The amazing fact was that the man had lived his entire life out of the vocabulary and sensibility of his one decent book. There seemed to be no other words for existence since 1968, no epithets for reality outside the ones he’d bandaged on it twenty years ago. He’d written his own bible. Most of all he adored himself as a boy, and wept often now about his weeping then. Ross gutted through, and one night, as it always did, the hook fell out to him gleaming — the point of the biography: history as a changeless drunken hulk, endlessly redundant; God himself as a grinding hack. The sainthood of no surprises. The Dead Sea. This truth he sedulously ignored, of course — or thought he had — and whipped out a tome of mild hagiography. This was his fifteenth book and sold better than the others, perhaps because it celebrated the failure of promise and made the universal good old boys and girls very comfortable. The hack was a Beam-soaked country song.

The fact that Ross himself was a sort of scheduled hack did not alarm him. There weren’t many hacks of his kind, and that pleased him. He dared the world to give him a life he could not make significant on paper and earn some money with. So didn’t this indicate the dull surprise that nobody was significant? Or was it the great Christian view — every man a king? Ross had no idea, and no intention of following up on the truth. Years ago he had found that truth and the whole matter of the examined life were overrated, highly. There were preposterous differences in values among the lives he had thrown himself into. Even in sensual pleasure, there was wide variance. He himself thought there was no food served anywhere worth more than ten dollars. No woman on earth was worth more than fifty, if you meant bed per night. Others thought differently, obviously. The young diva who put pebbles in her butt and clutched them with her sphincter (she insisted he include this) — well, it was simply something. It made borderline depraved people feel better when they read it. Also, when would the discussion about love ever quit? He could be deeply in love with most of the women in every fashion magazine he’d ever flipped through. The women would have to talk themselves out of his love, stumble or pick their noses. Usually he did not love Nabby, his wife, but given an hour and a fresh situation he could talk himself into adoring her.

What he loved was his son.

What was love but lack of judgment?

So if God judged, he was not love, eh?

This sort of stuff was the curse of the thinking class. You went away to college and came back with such as that to nag your sleep till you dropped.

Best to shut up and live.

Best to shoot anonymous innocent citizens with an air rifle and shut up about it. The delicious thing was that the stricken howled and bore the indignity as best they could, never to have an answer. He saw them questing through the decades for the source of that moment. He saw them dying with the mystery of it. Through the years the stricken had looked up at the top of buildings, sideways to the alleys, and directly at passersby. Once he had looked directly at a policeman, beebeed, rubbing his head and saying something. Twice people had looked deeply at Ross and his car — another year, another Riviera — but Ross was feigning, of course, sincere drivership. What a rush, joy nearly pouring from his eyes!

In Newt’s neighborhood his car was blocked briefly by some children playing touch football on the broken pavement. They came around and admired his car and the two-seater boat towed behind as he pulled in between dusty motorcycles in front of a dark green cottage, his son’s. Already he wanted away from it, on some calm pond with the singing electric motor easing the two of them into cool lily-padded coves, a curtain of cattails behind their manly conversation. They had not fished together in ages. Newt used to adore this beyond all things. Ross had prepared his cynicism, but he had prepared his love even more. The roving happy intelligence on the face of little Newt, age eleven, shot with beauty from a dying Southern sun as he lifted the great orange and blue shellcracker out of the green with his bowed cane pole — there was your boy, a poet already. He’d said he had a new friend, this fish, and not a stupid meal. He’d stroked it, then released it. You didn’t see that much in the bloody Southern young, respect for a mere damned fish. He’d known barbers to mount one that size, chew and spit over it for decades.

They seemed to have matched Ross’s care in his presents with (planned?) carelessness about his arrival. This sort of thing had happened many times to Ross in the homes of celebrities, even in the midst of his projects with them. Somebody would let him in without even false hospitality: “Ah, here is the pest with his notes again,” they might as well have said, surprised he was at the front door instead of the back, where the fellow with their goddamn mountain water delivered.

The girl indicated somebody sitting there in overalls who was not Newt, a big oaf named Bim, he thought she said. Yes, there always had to be some worthless slug dear to them all for God knew what reasons hanging about murdering time. Bim wore shower shoes. He did not get up or extend a hand. Ross badly wanted his cynicism not to rise again, and made small talk. The man had a stud in his nose. He dressed like this because the school was a cow college, Ross guessed. It was hip to enforce this, not deny it, as with Ivy League wear, etc.

“So where do you hail from, Bim?”

“Earth,” said the man.

Drive that motherfucking stud through the rest of your nose, coolster, thought Ross. Ross looked straight at Bim with such bleak amazed hatred that the man rose and left the house as if driven by pain. Ross stood six feet high and still had his muscles, though he sometimes forgot. There wasn’t much nonsense in him, and those who liked him loved this. The others didn’t. He might seem capable of patient chilly murder.

“I don’t know what you did, but thanks,” said Ivy Pilgrim. “He’s in Newt’s band and thinks he has a title to that chair. Can’t bear him.”

“Bimmer has a fine sensitivity. Hello, Dad.” Newt had entered from the back. There were only four rooms. “Where’d Bimmer go?”

Newt did not have a ponytail. He had cut off almost all his hair and was red in the face around his beard. He wore gold-rim glasses set back into his black whiskers, and his dark eyes glinted as always. His head looked white and abused, as just shoved into jail. The boy had looked a great deal like D. H. Lawrence since puberty. Here was the young Lawrence convicted and scraped by Philistines. But he didn’t seem drunk. That was good.

“I don’t believe Bimmer liked me,” said Ross.

“He moves with the wind,” sighed his son.

“Mainly he sits in the chair,” said Ivy Pilgrim.

Ross looked her over. She was better than the photograph, an elfin beauty from this profile. And she wasn’t afraid of Newt.

“You have the most beautiful hair I’ve seen on a man about forever. That salt and pepper gets me every time,” she said to Ross.

“Thank you, Ivy.” Watch it, old man, Ross thought. Other profile suggests a kitten, woo you silly.

“What instrument does Bimmer play?” he asked.

“Civil Defense siren, bongos, sticks,” said Newt seriously.

“So you’re in earnest about this band?”

“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.” Since Newt was twenty, Ross was wary of asking him any questions at all. He’d get the wild black glare of bothered pain.

Who could tell what this meant? Though with his bald head it seemed goony and desperate.

Ross was parched from the road. He sat in Bimmer’s chair, big and tweedy. The place was not so bad and was fairly clean. There were absolutely no books around. He wondered if there were a drink around. He’d planned to share some iced beer with Newt, by way of coaching him toward moderation, recovering what a man could be — healthy in a beer advertisement. He was throwing himself into the breech, having lost the taste for the stuff years ago.

“I’m either going to sing or go into the marines,” said Newt. Was he able to sit still? He was verging in and out of his chair. Akathisia, inability to sit, Ross recalled from somewhere. It was a startling thing when one’s own went ahead and accumulated neuroses quite without your help. Ross looked at the girl, who’d come in with a welcome ginger ale, Dr. Brown’s.

“Newt remembered you liked this,” she said.

This was an act that endeared both of them to him. At last, a touch of kindness from the boy, though announced by his wife.

“Well, I need a splash with mine,” said Newt. He went to the kitchen and out came the Rebel Yell, a handsome jug of bourbon nearly full. However, this was histrionic, Ross was sure. Newt did not look like he needed the drink. He had affected the attitude that a man of his crisis could not acknowledge ginger ale alone. Ross, having thought more than usual on the way up to Auburn and presiding too much as father to this moment, sincerely wanted to relax and say to hell with it. He wasn’t letting anybody live. The marines, singing? So what? Give some ease. He himself had been a marine, sort of.

Where was it written in stone, this generational dispute? Are fathers always supposed to wander around bemused and dense about their young? Wasn’t it true old Ross himself had nailed the young diva, weeping runt, with her heavy musical titties bobbling, right in the back door? While Nabby, loyal at home — source of Newt right in front of him — was shaking her mirror so a younger face would spill out on it? Not very swell, really, and his guilt did not assuage this banal treachery. Old, old Ross, up the heinie of America’s busty prodigy. Awful, might as well be some tottering thing with a white belt and toupee, pot, swinging around Hilton Head. What a fiend for one of Newt’s poems, but really beneath the high contempt of them.

“So how’s the poetry making, anyway, sport?”

Newt was tragic and blasé at once, if possible, gulping down the bourbon and ginger.

“Nothing. It’s the light. Light’s not right.”

“But you’re not a painter, Newton. What light?”

“He means in his brain,” explained Ivy.

“My love for Ivy has killed the light.”

Newt had to give himself his own review, this seriously? Good gad. Save some for the epitaph.

“I like it that way,” Newt added hurriedly, but just as direly.

Ivy seemed upset and guilty, yearning toward Ross for help. “I didn’t want to be any sort of killer.”

He liked this girl. She had almost not to say another thing in her favor. She had the pigtail, pleasant down the nice scoop of her back.

“Well, can’t we open the shroud a little here, Newton? Look outside and see if you can see a little hope. Maybe some future memories, son.”

Newt shuffled to the door and looked at the car and boat a whole minute, too long. Ivy got Ross another Dr. Brown’s. The last thing Ross might say in a hospital room someday in the future, nurse turning out of the room: “Nice legs.” Good for little Ivy. Would it never stop? Ross had long suspected, maybe stupidly but as good as any genius, through life and his biographies, that women with good legs were happy and sane. Leg man as philosopher. Well, Nabby’s seemed to persuade mostly joy out of the day, didn’t they? Even given the sullen, jagged life he sometimes showed her. Get out of my skin and look, he thought: Was I ever as, oh, difficult as Newt myself? Probably, right after he’d fired himself from the war, though he hid it in Chase’s house in San Pedro.

“So what do you see, Newt?”

“No wonder Bimmer left,” said Newt.

“Now, can you explain that?”

“Bimmer’s father is a man of. . merchandise.”

Hold off, hang fire, with Henry James. Ross cut himself off. With a new enormous filtered Kool lit — stay with these and you’ve got at most twenty-five years, likely; we don’t have a clumsy century of discord to work it out, Newt, for heaven’s sake — he thought, Don’t give me that merchandise crapola, young man. I bred you in Nabby. You know very well my beach house and all of it could burn up and not impress me a great deal, never did. Let’s take off the gloves, then. I came here.

“Is that why your man Bimmer dresses like a laid-off ploughboy? Missing the fields and horse shit over to the back forty?”

Newt smiled. Maybe this was the real turf, here we were. The smile was nice, at last, but why did he have to destroy his head? His son’s hair was black and beautiful like his used to be.

“So let me declare myself and your mother finally. The quick wedding, there wasn’t any time for presents much.”

Ivy went with him to the Riviera. She saw the CD player inside and gave a gasp of pleasure. It was the piece of luggage full of CDs she wound up with.

“This wonderful suitcase. I’ll bet you want us to get out of this dump p.d.q.?”

Ross felt very mean for his previous plans for the bag.

“Where are you from, Ivy?”

“Grand Bay, close to Bayou La Batre. Right across the bay from you. The poor side, I guess. But I loved it. And I’m not broke.”

“Fine. Very fine.” Unnecessary, but necessary, on the other hand. She’d won him.

“So there we are. Boat, motor, the player. And voilà! (Ross opened the bag, nearly a trunk). Some late wedding music.”

“Must be fifty discs there!” cheered Ivy.

“Thought you and I might break in the boat and pursue the finny tribe this afternoon,” said Ross, brightly.

Christmas in May, he was feeling, was really an excellent idea. Look down, son.

Newt barely glanced into the suitcase.

“Fishing? That’s pretty off the point, Dad.”

“Oh, Newton!” Ivy jumped right on him.

“What’s. .” Don’t, Ross. He was going to ask what was the point, you bald little bastard?

“I’ve promised the kids I’d play some touch with them. Just about to go out there. Then there’s the band tonight. You can come with Ivy if you want.”

“Newt takes the band very seriously,” said Ivy. This seemed to be a helpful truth for both the men. Ross forgot Newt’s rudeness. Or did he know? What part of loony Berryman or Lowell had he researched? Newt glanced at Ivy dangerously. This brought Ross’s nightmares right up, howling. This was the feared thing. His son seemed to want to beat on this strange idiot who’d just opened her mouth.

Ross couldn’t bear it. He went out with a fresh Kool and the remains of the ginger ale and stood in the yard near his sleek Buick, gazing through some cypresses to a man-provoked swamp behind the hideous cinder blocks of an enormous grocery, some kind of weeds native only to the rear of mall buildings, ripping up through overflowed mortar on the ground.

Here he was back in “life,” shit, man with twenty-five years to go, wearing a many-pocketed safari shirt next to a pimp’s car. What did an old American man wear rightly, anyway? Fifty-two was old. Cut the hopeful magazine protests. You spent half your time just trying not to look like a fool. What intense shopping. Hell, shouldn’t he have on a blazer, get real in a gray Volvo? Disconnection and funk, out here with his killer Kool, pouting like a wallflower; son inside wrecking the afternoon with bald intensity. Back to his nightmares, the latest most especially: Ross, as an adult, was attending classes in elementary school, somehow repeating, but bardlike, vastly appreciated at the school by one and all for some reason, king of the hill, strolling with the children, glib, but why? The school was paying him a salary while he was doing what? But at the school gate he was in a convertible with two girls, and two men — one of them Newt — jumped in the car and rammed long metal tongs through the skulls of the girls. Their screams were horrible, the blood and bone were all over Ross. Then policemen appeared and drove metal tongs through the skulls of Newt and the other man. The screams of Newt were unbearable, loud! He’d awakened, panting. Ross almost wept, looking at the back of that grocery now. But it was a dry rehearsal, with only a frown and closed eyes.

Ivy touched him on the arm. “Sometimes you’ve just got to ignore him. I’ll go fishing with you. Please, I’d love to. And I love everything you brought. Thank your wife, Nabby, for me.”

Marriage was a good cause, thought Ross. On a given day chances were one of you might be human. Was D. H. Lawrence a rude bastard, even into his thirties?

He saw the kids gather and Newt go out as the giant weird quarterback. The day was marked for gloom but he was going to have something good out of it. He did not want to watch his son play football. But thanks, Lord, for providing him with the dread image: Newt had once embarrassed him playing football with young kids.

He was home from graduate school — Greensboro — at Christmas. He was invited over to an old classmate’s house in Daphne. Ross came later to have a toddy with the boy’s father. It was another big modest beach house with a screened porch all the way across the back. They took their hot rums out to the old wooden lounges and watched Newt and his friend quarterback a touch game with his friend’s nephews and nieces, ages five to twelve. Ross was pleased his boy cared about sports at all. It was a stirring late December day, cool and perfect for neighborhood touch, under the Spanish moss and between the hedges. But then Ross saw his contemporary staring harder out there and when Ross noticed, things were not nice. Newt was hogging the play and playing too rough, much too rough. He smashed the girl granddaughter of this man into the hedge. She didn’t cry, but she hung out of the game, rubbing her arms. Then Newt fired a pass into the stomach of a boy child that blew him down into the oyster-shell driveway. The kid was cut up but returned. Newt’s friend implored him and the children were talking about him, but he remained odd, yes, and driven. Ross was looking at something he deeply despised seeing. He did not want to think about the other examples. They called the game. The children came up on the porch hurt and amazed, but gamely saying nothing around Ross. They were tough, good children, no whiners. In the car home, he said to Newt, “Son, you were a mite fierce out there. Just kids, kids.” Newt waited a while and came back, too gravely: “You want me to smile all day like a waitress?”

This fierceness, off the point, that was it.

So they drove around and Ivy, who did not change from her short skirt and flowered blouse to go fishing, directed him through town to pick up Newt’s bounced checks — this tavern, that grocery, the phone company. Ross didn’t mind. He’d expected financial distress and had brought some money. With some irony of kinship he’d brought up a fairly big check from Louisiana State University Press to sign over to Newt. This concern had published Newt’s books. Ross had just picked up a nice bit of change from a piece of his they were anthologizing. Christ, though, the kid might make something out of it. But not a kid. He was thirty. Newt’s sister Ann was twenty-eight, married in Orlando, straight and clean as a javelin, thanks. Ivy Pilgrim (her real name) wanted to know all about Ann and Nabby. Then they did go fishing.

Auburn had some lovely shaded holes for fishing in the country. Erase the school, and it was a sweet dream of nature. Ross, a Tuscaloosa man, could never quite eliminate his prejudice that Auburn U should have really never occurred, especially now that it had fired his boy. There had been some cancerous accident among the livestock and chicken droppings years ago, and, well, football arose and paid the buildings to stay there and spread. These farm boys, still confused, had five different animal mascots, trying to get the whole barnyard zoo in. Ivy was amused by these old jokes, bless her, though he really didn’t mean them. She was in architecture, hanging tough. How could Newt have attracted her? he thought, instantly remorseful.

She thought Newt would return to his poems soon. Improbably, she understood his books and wanted him to move on to — pray for rain! — some gladness, bless him. The poetry had won her over, but as a way of life it sucked wind.

“Newt is proud of you and he wants to be glad,” she said.

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

Once he had been to an inspirational seminar with one of his clients. The speaker was a man who had been through unbearable, unlucky, unavoidable horror. He told the crowd he intended never ever to have another bad day. He just wouldn’t. He was going to force every day to be a good day. Ross was heeding the man now. He was glad he’d remembered. He concentrated on Ivy, who was a good fisherman. She had sporting grace. They caught several bluegills and one large bass. There was never any question but that she’d clean them and put them in the freezer, since Ross was buying her supper.

“I suppose, though, Newt is casting around for other work?”

“It’s the band, the band, the band. He writes for it, he sings. He says everything he’s ever wanted to say is in the band.”

Ross had noted the late gloomy competency in American music, ever a listener in his Riviera. Electricity had opened the doors to every uncharming hobbyist in every wretched burg, even in Ohio. You could not find a dusthole without its guitar man, big eyes on the Big Time beyond the flyspecked window, drooling, intent on being wild, wild, wild. America, unable to leave its guitar alone, teenager with his dick: “Look here, I’ve got one too.” He saw Newt, late-coming thirty, in the tuning hordes, and it depressed him mightily. As witness the millions of drips in “computers” now. Yeah, toothless grizzled layabout in the Mildewville Café: “Yep, my boy used to cornhole bus exhausts, he’s now in computers.” Look down at a modern hotel lobby, three quarters of them were in “computers,” asking the desk clerk if the sun was shining. His daughter’s husband, a gruesome Mormon yuppie, was “in computers.” Then Ross’s ears harked to the Riviera speakers — something new, acoustic, a protolesbian with a message. Give people a chance, Ross corrected himself: you were a G-22, Intelligence, with the marines in the worst war ever, by choice, dim bulb in forehead. Whole squad smoked by mortars because of you, put them on the wrong beach. A gloomy competency would have been refreshing, ask their mothers. I could have stayed home and just been shitty, like the singer Donovan, hurting only music.

Back at home, she showered while Ross set up the CD player with its amazing resonant speaker boxes. What a sound they had here with Miles Davis. She heard it while the water ran. Ross was excited too. In his fresh shirt, blazer, trousers and wingtips, he emerged from his own shower, opened the mirror door of the medicine chest to check Newton’s drugs, and caught Ivy Pilgrim sitting naked on her bed, arms around her breasts, sadly abject and staring at the floor. Ross looked on, lengthening the accident. This is my daughter, my daughter, he thought, proud of her. The brave little thing.

There was a great misery she was not sharing with him. Doomed or blessed — he couldn’t know — he froze at the mirror until she looked over at him in the reflection and saw him in his own grief. Ross felt through the centuries for all chipper wives having to meet their in-laws. Holy damn, the strain. She was such a little lady, revealed. He smiled at her and she seemed to catch his gratitude instantly. Oops, slam the mirror. Nice there was nothing ugly here. I won’t have a bad day, I won’t. This was the best of it, and later he thanked the highway rushing in front of him for it.

• • •

The place was a converted warehouse rank with college vomit, beer in AstroTurf, a disinfectant thrown contemptuously over it. The spirit of everywhere: spend your money, thanks, fuck you. Chickenyard hippies, already stunned by beer, living for somebody right out of suburban nullity like them, “twisted” on his guitar stroking: “He don’t give a damn.” Couple of them so skinny they looked bent over by the weight of their cocks. Ivy had quit beaming. Since the mirror there had been an honest despair between them.

Newt and his truly miserable band came on, tuning forever as the talentless grim do. Ross was sorry he was so experienced, old. He could look at the face and bald pate of the drummer, comprehending instantly his dope years and pubic sorriness, pushed on till damned near forty, no better on drums than any medical doctor on a given Sunday afternoon with the guys. Then came Bimmer, a snob in overalls, fooling with his microphone like some goon on an airport PA system. Then a short bassman so ugly he had to go public. The sax man could play, but he was like some required afterthought in a dismal riot of geeks. Then there was a skinny man near seven feet tall who just danced, male go-go. What an appalling idea. Then Newt, not contented with the damage he’d done on backup guitar, began singing. He was drunk and fierce, of course. The point seemed to be anger that music was ever invented. It was one of the ugliest episodes Ross had ever witnessed. He smiled weakly at poor Ivy, who was not even tapping her foot. She looked injured.

At the stage, Ross saw the chicken-yard hippies and a couple of their gruesome painted hags, hateful deaf little twats who might have once made the long trip to Birmingham. They loved Newt and egged him on. This was true revolt. Ross wondered why the band had bothered to tune.

He had had dreadful insights too, too often nowadays, waking up in a faraway hotel with his work sitting there, waiting for him to limn another life. The whole race was numb and bad, walking on thin skin over a cesspool. Democracy and Christianity were all wrong: nobody much was worth a shit. And almost everybody was going to the doctor.

“Professional help” for Newt flashed across his mind, but he kicked it away, seeing another long line, hordes, at the mental health clinic, bright-eyed group addicts who couldn’t find better work waiting inside. Ross had known a few. One, a pudgy solipsist from Memphis, had no other point to his life except the fact he had quit cigarettes. A worthless loquacious busybody, he’d never had a day of honest labor in his life. What did he do? He “house sat” for people. But the fellow could talk about “life” all day.

Then things really got mean.

Newt, between sets, red-eyed, hoarse, angrily drunk, drew up a chair ten feet away from Ivy and his father, muttering something and bearing on them like some poleaxed diagnostician. Ross at last made out that Newt was disgusted by his blazer, his shoes, his “rehearsal to be above this place.”

“This place is the whole world, sad Ross-daddy. You won’t even open your eyes. There’s nowhere else to go but here! No gas, no wheels, no—” He almost vomited. Then he walked his chair over to them, still in it, heaving like a cripple. He was right in their faces, sweat all over him.

“Good-looking pair, you two. Did you get an old touch of her, Pops?” He reached around and placed his hand over Ivy’s right breast. “But I tell you. Might as well not try. You can’t make Ivy come, no sir. She ain’t gon come for you. Might as well be humping a rock, Rosser!”

Crazy, mean, unfinished, he laid his head on the table between them. The sweat coming out of his prickly head made Ross almost gag. Then he rose up. His eyes were black, mad. He couldn’t evict the words, seemed to be almost choking.

Ross handed over the endorsed check and stood to leave.

“What are you going to do for work, son?”

“S’all that bitch outside says. Job, job, job.”

“Well, bounced checks, bounced checks, bounced checks is not your sweetest path either.” He hated Newt. An image of Newt, literally booted out the window by an Auburn official, rose up and pleased him.

“Shut up, you old fuck,” said Newt. “Get home to Mama. And remember, remember. .”

“What? Be decent, goddamnit.”

“Let the big dog eat. Always fill up with supreme.”

Ross looked with pity at Ivy. Given the tragedy, he could not even offer to drive her home.

Outside the turn at the Old Spanish Fort, Ross knew he would lie to Nabby. All was well in Auburn. Save Nabby, God, he asked. She was a fine golfer, in trim, but all those days in the sun had suddenly assaulted her. Almost overnight, she was wrinkled and the skin of her underchin had folds. The mirror scared her and made her very sad. Ross, for all his desk work and Kools, and without significant exercise, was a man near commercially handsome, though not vain. There was something wrong with the picture of a pretty fifty-two-year-old fellow in a Riviera, anyway. In the mirror, he often saw the jerk who’d got eleven young men mortared over there — a surviving untouched dandy. A quality in all of Ross apologized and begged people to look elsewhere.

Newt, by the way, had married somebody much like his mother. Small, bosomy, with slender legs agreeable in the calf. Probably he wouldn’t kill Ivy. Ross would make a good day of this one, be damned. It was only midnight. Nabby was up.

He caressed her, desperate and pitiful, wishing long sorrowful love into her. She cried out, delighted. As if, Ross thought, he were putting a whole new son in Nabby and she was making him now, with deep pleasure.

Newt had left some books in the house a while back. Ross wanted to see what made his son. He picked up the thing by Kundera with the unburdening thesis that life is an experiment only run once. We get no second run, unlike experience of every other regard. Everything mistaken and foul is forever there and that is you, the mouse cannot start the maze again; once, even missing the bull’s-eye by miles, is all you got. It is unique and hugely unfair. No wonder the look you see on most people — wary, deflected, puzzled—“What the hell is happening?” Guy at a restaurant, gets out of his car and creeps in as on the surface of the moon. Ross liked this and stopped reading. There would be no Newt ever again, and whatever he’d left out, fathering the boy, it was just botched forever, having had the single run. Forgiven, too, like a lab assistant first day on the job. And then Ann, not a waver, twice as content as Ross was, almost alarmingly happy. She was the one run too. He could call Ann this instant and experience such mutual love it almost made him choke. There was the greedy Mormon, her husband, but so what? You didn’t pick her bedmate out of a catalog.

The old hack suing E. Dan Ross backed off, unable to face the prospect of any further revelations on himself the trial might bring. He called up Ross himself, moaning. He was a wreck, but a man of honor too, a First Amendment champion after all. Ross, who’d never even hired a lawyer, felt sorry for what the erupting truth had brought to both of them. He feared for his future credit with clients. But the hack was invited on television, in view of his new explosion of hackery, a photo album valentine to every celebrity he’d let a fart off near. He became a wealthy man, able to buy a chauffeur who took him far and wide, smelling up the privacy of others.

For months they did not hear from Newt, only two cards from Ivy thanking them for boat, motor, luggage and Newt. This sounded good. Around Christmas they got a letter from Newt. He was in the state asylum in Tuscaloosa, drying out and “regaining health and reason.” The marriage was all over. He was smashed with contrition. There’d been too many things he’d done to Ivy, unforgivable, though she’d wanted to hang in right till the last. What last nastiness he had done was, after her badgering, he’d written her a poem of such devastating spite there was no recovery. It was a “sinful, horrible thing.” Now he still loved her. She’d been a jewel. He was a pig, but at least looking up and out now. He pleaded with them not to visit him. Later, out, when he was better. He still had health insurance from the school and needed nothing.

. . And Dad, the boat and motor was wonderful. Bimmer stole it, though. He proved to be no real friend at all. I ran after him down the highway outside the city limits with a tire tool in my hand. They say I was raving, my true friends, and they brought me up here. True. I was raving. No more “they said.” Please forgive me. I’m already much better.

Love, Newton

Nabby and he held hands for an hour. Nabby began praying aloud for Newt and then blamed the “foreigners at Auburn and all that dreadful radioactivity from the science department.” Ross was incredulous. Nabby was going nuts in sympathy. Have a good day, Ross, have a good day. He walked out to the pier, into his writing room, and trembled. For no reason he cursed the Bay of Mobile, even the happy crabs out there. What could a man take?

Then, next week, another blow lowered him. Chase’s wife called and told him Chase was dead. He’d taken a pistol over to Long Beach, threatened his ex-wife, and was killed in a shoot-out with the police. God have mercy. Chase was a policeman himself.

Ross recalled the street, the long steep hill down to Paseo del Mar from Chase’s house, with thick adobe walls around it. Ross had needed the walls. He was badly messed up and stayed that way a month, having fired himself from the war, G-22, all that, after he misdirected the Seals to a hot beach and got them mortared. Chase met him in a bar and they stayed soaked for five weeks. Chase was a one-liner maniac. All of life had a filthy pun or stinger. Ross thought it was all for him and appreciated it. But when he got better and wouldn’t drink anymore, Chase kept it up. Ross needn’t have been there at all, really, he found out. Chase became angry when Ross quit laughing. Not only were the jokes not funny anymore, Ross knew he was witnessing a dire malady. Chase kept hitting the beer and telling Ross repeatedly about his ex-wife, whom he loved still even though married to Bernice, a quiet thin Englishwoman, almost not there at all but very strong for Chase, it seemed to Everett D. Ross, before he was E. Dan Ross. Ross heard of vague trouble with the woman in Long Beach and the law. But Chase was selfless and mainly responsible for Ross’s recovery, giving him all he needed and more. Chase had also adopted a poor street kid, a friend of his daughter’s. He was like that. He would opt for stress and then holler in fits about it. When Ross told him he was leaving, taking his rearranged name with him back to Mobile where his wife waited, hoping for his well-being, Chase went into a rage and attacked him for ingratitude, malingering, and — what was it? — “betrayal.” Not of the Seals. Of Chase. It was never clear and Chase apologized, back into the rapid-fire one-liners. Chase was very strange, but Ross had not thought he was deranged. The shoot-out sounded like, certainly, suicide, near the mother of his children. Too, too much. A man Ross’s age, calling happily to the ships at sea around LA Harbor over his ham set. Raving puns and punchers.

The very next day he heard that a classmate of his, the class joker, had shot himself dead in a bathtub in San Francisco. Wanted to make no mess. Something about money and his father’s turning his back on him. Ross could not work. He stayed in his pier room rolling up paper from his new biography — of an old sort of holy cowboy in San Antonio. Talked to animals, birds, such as that. Four wives, twelve children. The balls of paper lay in a string like popcorn on the meager tide, going around the ocean to California where the dead friends were. Ross thought of the men not only as dead but as dead fathers. Children: smaller them, offspring of grown pranksters, gag addicts. Ross thought of his air rifle. His classmate, last Ross had seen of him, right before he went over to Vietnam, was in the National Guard. He did something hazy for athletic teams around Chicago, where Ross last saw him. It didn’t take much time. His real life work was theft and happy cynicism about others. Bridge could level anybody with mordant wit. He’d kept Ross and others howling through their passionate high school years. Once, on a lake beach in late April, a class party where some of the girls were in their bathing suits sunning themselves, first time out this spring, Bridge had passed a couple of lookers and stopped, appreciative, right in front of them: “Very, very nice. Up to morgue white, those tans.” The boys howled, the girls frowned, mortified. Given everything by his psychiatrist parents, Bridge still stole, regularly. Ross heard he’d been kicked out of the university for stealing a football player’s watch from a locker. Bridge was an equipment man. He deeply relished equipment, and ran at the edge of athletic teams, the aristocracy in Southern schools. In Chicago, he’d taken Ross up to his attic. Here was a pretty scary thing: Bridge had stolen from his unit a Browning.30-caliber machine gun and live ammo and enough gear to dress a store dummy, stolen somewhere else; he had set the dummy behind the machine gun among a number of sandbags (the labor!) so that the machine gun aimed right at the arriving visitor. Ross jumped back when the light was turned on. Bridge, Bridge. Used to wear three pairs of socks to make his legs look bigger. Used Man Tan so he was brown in midwinter. Children, money and booze. Maybe great unrepayable debt at the end.

Ross knew he was of the age to begin losing friends to death. But more profound was the fact that he was not the first to go. Fools, some thirty of them from his big high school in Mobile, had gone over to Asia and none of them was seriously scratched or demented on return. It was a merry and lusty school, mental health or illness practically unheard of. What was his month of breakdown? Nothing. What was he doing, balling up the hard work and watching it float off? Nothing.

His son in a nut ward, Nabby collapsing, he took down a straight large glass of tequila and peered strongly across the bay to where Ivy Pilgrim had grown up. Did she have to be all disappeared from Newt, forever? A smart young woman, very sexy, plenty tough, endowed, couldn’t cure him. He missed her. Ross, frankly, was glad Newton didn’t want him at the asylum. But he sat down and wrote him a long letter, encouraging his strengths. The tequila gave him some peace. He took another half glass. His friend, Andy the pelican, walked into the room and Ross began talking to him, wanting to know his adventures before he opened a can of tuna for him.

He confessed his grief and confusion to the pelican. The absurd creature, flying bag, talked back to him: “Tell me. It’s rough all over, pard. Lost my whole family in Hurricane Fred.” One thing about the sea, thought Ross, sneering toward it, it doesn’t care. Almost beautiful in that act. Maybe we should all try it.

Next thing they heard, Newt was visiting his sister in Orlando. She and her husband lent their condo at New Smyrna Beach to him. He was sunning and “refining his health” at pool and ocean-side. He was working on poems and didn’t know how he felt about them. Walker, Ann’s husband, came by frequently and chatted. He liked Walker a lot. He wasn’t going to impose on them forever. The world was “over there” and he knew it. Ross and Nabby’s music was helping, thanks. Especially Bach. Had they ever listened to the Tabernacle Choir? Glorious. Newt said that he wanted “excruciatingly to walk in the Way.” Grats extreme too for the money. He was just beginning his life and would be reimbursing everybody soon. “Truly, though, people, I like being poor and I am going to get used to it.”

Ross had written himself neutral. He rewrote what he had thrown to sea, it didn’t matter, there it was all back and the life of the saintly cowboy wrote itself. He wrote twenty pages one night, nonstop, and recollected that he could not remember what he had said. When he read the pages, however, they were perfect. The words had gone along by themselves. Ross seemed not to have mattered at all. His mind, his heart, his belly were not engaged. Entailed was a long episode of murder, rape, and the burning alive of a prized horse. A short herd of people were killed, the cowboy wounded in the throat. It was some of Ross’s best writing, but he had not particularly cared. Even hacks sometimes cared, he knew. This business was too alike to the computer goons he despised. Ross was bleak. He’d just gotten too damned good at his stuff. He was expendable. Nothing but the habitual circuitry was required.

Otherwise, it was a good year. Nabby did not say any more insane things. But she badly wanted a face-lift. Felt sure she was falling apart and would not show herself near sunlight. Back in her room the ointments overblew the air. She kept herself in goo and almost quit golf. They had had separate rooms since Newt went to the asylum. She felt ugly. Ross felt for her deeply. This emotion was a constant tender sorrow and that was what he had instead of the eruptions of love and homicidal urges. It was much better, this not too sad little flow. Their love life was much better, in truth. A sort of easy tidal cheer came over Ross, fifty-three. He was appreciating his years and the pleasant gravitation toward death. It had a sweet daze to it. He could look at his tomb and smile, white flag up in calm surrender.

Why not a face-lift, and why not love? Things were falling together even though he was a disattached man. He rushed to finish the book before the old cowboy died. Blink, there it was. The old man’s children read it to him and he liked it very much. They told Ross his eyes, like a robin’s eggs, brightened. He blessed the author. He had never thought his life made any sense. He had never meant to be famous or read about. He wished he could read. By far he was the most pleasant subject Ross had ever worked with.

Nabby, fresher at the neck though a little pinched at the eyes after her face-lift, wanted the children to visit over Thanksgiving and have a family portrait made. They’d not heard much from either of them lately. Newt was teaching night classes at a community college in Orlando. He had his own place.

But when Ann called he could hear his daughter was not right. Something had happened. The upshot was Newt had converted to Mormonism, very zealously, and had simply walked out of town and his job and his apartment, without a word to anyone. Nobody knew where he was. He had destroyed all his poetry two months before. He left everything he owned.

Ross could see his wife, blank in her new face, holding the phone as if it were a wounded animal. She cradled it and stroked it. Ross had never seen an act like that. Ann’s voice continued but her mother listened at the end, when Ross took the phone, as if death were speaking to her directly. Ann’s husband, Walker, came on and detailed the same version.

“What do Mormons, new Mormons, do?” asked Ross.

“There’s no place, like a Mecca, if that’s what you mean,” said Walker.

“I mean how should they act?”

“It’s inside, Ross. They affirm. They attend. They practice. They study. A great deal of study.”

“What did, damn it, Mormonism — or you—do to Newton?”

“He wasn’t raving. It’s not charismatic.”

“Would he be in some fucking airport selling flowers?”

Walker hung up. His reverent tongue was well known. All told, he was a Boy Scout with a hard-on for wealth; the boy so good he was out of order. He wouldn’t even drink a Coke. Caffeine, you know. When Ross lit a Kool, Walker looked at him with great pity. Ross hated him now, smug and square-jawed, wearing a crew cut. He saw him dripping with a mass of tentacles attached to him, dragging poor Newton into the creed, “elders” spiriting him away. The cult around Howard Hughes, letting him dwindle into a freak while they waited on his money. Clean-cut international voodoo. Blacks and Indians were the tribes of Satan, weren’t they? Ross always rooted against BYU when they played football on television. Sure. Hardworking, clean-limbed boys next door. Just one tiny thing or three: we swallow swords, eat snakes, and ride around on bicycles bothering people for two years. Nabby lay on her bed with her new face turned into the pillow. Ross petted her, but his anger drove him out to the pier again, where for a long time he searched the far shore for the image of his lost daughter-in-law, Ivy, naked and in grief, hugging her breasts.

So. The colleges wouldn’t have him anymore. There goes that option. He had a great future behind him, did Newt.

“Destroyed his poems.” Right out of early Technicolor. Have mercy on us. What kind of new Newton did we have now? Fig Newton, Fucked Newton. He tried hard again not to detest his boy. He tried to picture him helpless. Mormons probably specialized in weak depressed poets. Promise him multiple wives, a new bicycle. But more accurately Ross detested Newton for the sane cheer of his letters. What a con man, cashing Ross’s ardent checks. Venal politician. Ross could hit him in the face.

From Ann he had heard that Ivy was at home with her father, who was sick and might die. They’d cut a leg off him just lately. Ross wanted to take the form of Andy the pelican and fly over there to her.

This did not feel like his home right now. He did not like Nabby collapsing again, especially with her expensive new face. He reviewed his grudges against her. Five years ago, at the death of his father — an ancient man beloved by everyone except Nabby, who thought he was an awful chauvinist who loved to be adored too much: true — she had not shed a tear until later in the car when she told Ross some woman had alluded slyly to her sun wrinkles. She began cursing and crying for herself, his father barely in the ground. Ross almost drove the Riviera off the road. He said not a word all the way home from Florida. Nabby, jealous of the dead man who’d upstaged her own dear plight; the funeral a mere formality while huge issues like sun wrinkles were being battled.

Feeling stranded, he’d driven over to Bayou La Batre four days later. He didn’t call ahead. The Pilgrims lived just off Route 90 in a little town called Grand Bay. A healthy piece of change from the old cowboy’s book had just arrived. He was anxious to spend money on something worthwhile. How impoverished were the Pilgrims? the mother had been a surprise. He’d not told nabby about it, for the first time in his life with her.

Their home was neat. On the front were new cypress boards, unpainted. The house was large and the yard was almost grassless, car ruts to one side, where he parked behind a jeep with an Auburn sticker on the rear window. Over here you got a sense of poor Catholics, almost a third world, some of them Cajun and Slavic and Creole. He’d always loved this country. Most of your good food came from these people; your music, your bonhomie, your sparkling black-eyed nymphs. Upland, the Protestants had no culture. If anything, they were a restraint on all culture, especially as it touched on joy. He thought of Newton, now even odder than they were, beyond them, in a culture of how much crap can you swallow, unblinking, and remain upright. Close by was the great shipyard at Pascagoula, where Ivy’s father had worked. You threw a crab net in the water and thought of submarines the length of football fields close under you, moving out with fearsome nukes aboard. Almost a staggering anomaly, these things launched out of the mumbling-dumb state of Mississippi.

Ivy and one of her brothers, also a painter at Ingalls, met him at the door. They were very gracious, though mournful. It didn’t look like their father was going to make it. An hour from now they would go back to the hospital in Mobile. Surprising himself, Ross asked if he might go with them, drive them. They thought this was curious, but would welcome a ride in his Riviera, which the brother thought was the “sporting end.” He had a coastal brogue. Ivy had got rid of hers. Maybe it would not go with a career in architecture. Ivy looked radiant in sorrow. When he mentioned Newt, the brother left for the back of the house, where it smelled like Zatarain’s spices and coffee.

“I’ve heard a few things, none of them very happy. I’m afraid I don’t love him anymore, if you wanted to know that,” she said.

The finality hurt Ross, but he’d expected it. He did not love the boy much either.

“He was in the shipyards ‘witnessing.’ My brothers saw him. Some security guys took him out of the yard. He had a bicycle. He told my brother he was going to places around large bodies of water.”

“Did he have ‘literature’?”

“The Book of Mormon? No, he didn’t. You’d know that Newt would be his own kind of Mormon or anything. He’d stretch it.”

Ross recalled his hideous singing.

“Did you ever think of Newt’s age?” she asked him.

Ross went into a terrible cigarette cough and near-retching, reddening his face. Father of Newt, he felt very ugly in front of her; a perpetrator.

“His age. Thirty-one. Jesus Christ was crucified at age thirty-three. A Mormon is a missionary, all the males, for two years.” Ivy revealed this much in the manner of a weary scientist. The evidence was in: cancel the future.

“You figured that out, Ivy. Do you. . How. . Would you like him dead?”

“Oh no, Dan!” She was shy of using his first name, but this brought her closer to him. “A friend of mine from Jackson, big party girl, said she saw him at the Barnett Reservoir north of the city. He was ‘witnessing’ outside a rock-and-roll club and some drunk broke his ribs. The ambulance came but he wouldn’t get in.”

“He rode a bike to Jackson, Mississippi?”

“I suppose so. Don’t they have to?”

At the hospital he was useless, pointless, and ashamed of his good clothes, a pompous bandage on his distress. He smoked too much. He looked for a Book of Mormon in the waiting room. One of the nurses told him no flatly and looked at him with humor when he asked if there were one around. An alien to their faith, he was being persecuted anyway. The world was broken and mean.

The only good thing about the trip was the sincere good-bye hug from Ivy in her yard. She was on him quickly with arms tight around his neck, not chipper anymore, and she cried for her father, him and Newt, too, all at once. The strength of it told him he would probably never see her again. So long, daughter. I will not have a bad day, will not. He crashed into early night.

In Mobile, on Broadway beneath one of the grandfather live oaks “bearded with Spanish moss”—as a hack would write — Ross beheld a preacher, a raver, with a boom box hollering gospel music beside him on the sidewalk. He was witnessing through the din, screaming. Heavy metal would be met on its own terms. Three of the curious peered on. It was a long red light. Ross unsnapped the chamber, lower left, where his air rifle was hidden. He badly needed to shoot. But for that reason, he did not. He saw it was in there oiled, heavy with ammo, semper fidelis, a part of his dreams.

The next option was to buy a tramp and hump her silly. Make a lifelong friend of her. Nice to have a dive to dip into, young Tootsie lighting up in her whore gaud. Calamity Jane. Long time, no see, my beacon. Miserable bar folks withering around their high-minded big-time copulation. Relieve himself of wads, send her to South Alabama U, suckology. Nabby bouncing dimes off her face back home, considering a mirror on the ceiling and her own water tower of ointment.

He cruised home, shaking his head. He was having another bad day, and the clock was up on legs, running.

The next day he set out for Jackson, got as far as Hattiesburg, saw a bicycle shop, hundreds of bikes out front, sparkling spokes and fenders under the especially hired muttering-dumb Mississippi sun, and grew nauseated by chaos. Too many. He’d never find Newt, going on one mission from one large body to the next. He feared his own wrath if he found him. Two more years of life for him, if you listened to Ivy, who might know him better than Ross. Newt’s conversion still struck him as elaborately pretended, another riot of fierceness. In Salt Lake City, he would have turned Methodist. What was he “witnessing”—what was his hairy face saying? He wouldn’t sustain. He was a damned lyric poet, good hell, having a crucifixion a day, maybe even broken ribs, but chicken when the nails and the hill hove into view.

They did not know where he was for nearly a year. Minor grief awoke Ross every morning. Nabby almost shut down conversation. Some days he woke up among his usual things, felt he had nothing but money and stuff, was crammed, pukey with possessions — its, those, thingness, haveness. One night in April he tore up a transistor radio. Nothing but swill came out of it, and he always expected to hear something horrible about Newton. He dropped his head and wanted to burn his home. The men he’d got mortared called to him in nightmares, as they had not ever before. The tequila, nothing, would help. The murdered men begged him to write their “stories, our stories.” Their heads came out on long sprouts from a single enormous hacked and blasted trunk. He got to where he feared the bed and slept on the couch under a large picture of him and Nabby and the kids, ages ago. Everybody was grinning properly, but Ross looked for precocious lunacy in the eyes of young Newt, or some religious cast, some grim trance. He fell asleep searching for it.

What was religion, why was he loath to approach it on its own terms? You adopted it, is what you did, and you met with others you supposed felt as you did, and you took a god together, somebody you could complain to and have commiserate. Not an unnatural thing one bit, though inimical to the other half of your nature, which denied as regularly as your pulse out of the evidence of everyday life. For instance the fact that God was away, ancient and vague at his best. Also there was the question of the bully. Ross had never been a bully. Better that he had been, perhaps. He had never struck a man in a bar or country club. Ross’s mother was a religious woman, aided in her widowhood by church friends and priest, who actually seemed to care. He had never bullied her. Rather the reverse. She’d used the scriptures to push him around, guiltify him. There was no appeal to a woman with two millennia of religion behind her. Ross suddenly thought of the children Newt played football with, or at, hurting them, oppressing them. A thin guy, he was the bully, as with his little wives. A lifelong bully? Bullying the happiness out of life. Bullying his parents — a year and a half without a word.

When Ross was in his twenties, he went to Nabby’s family reunion up in Indiana. Most of her relatives were fine, scratchy hill people, amused by the twentieth century, amused by their new gadgets like weed eaters, dishwashers and color televisions. They were rough, princely Southern Americans. Ross thought of Crockett and Bowie, Travis, the men at the Alamo. But then the pastor of the clan came on board, late. It was Nabby’s uncle, against tobacco, coffee, makeup, short dresses, “jungle music” and swearing. Stillness fell over the clan. The heart went out of the party. That son of a bitch was striding around, quoting the prophets, and men put away their smokes, women gathered inward, somebody poured out the coffee, and he was having a great time, having paralyzed everybody before he fell on his chicken. So here was Newt? indiana preacher’s genes busting out, raiding the gladness of others.

They received a letter, finally, from Newton, who was not too far from them, eight hours away in Mississippi. He was superintendent of a boys’ “training school” and taught English. The school had a storm-wire fence around it, barbed wire on top, armed guards, and dogs for both dope and pursuit at the ready. Tough cases went there. Sometimes they escaped out to the county and beyond to create hell. Parents had given up, courts had thrown in the towel and placed them here, the last resort. Occasionally there were killings, knifings, breakages; and constant sodomy. A good many of the boys were simply in “training” to be lifelong convicts, of course. Much of their conversation was earnest comparison of penal situations in exotic places, their benefits and liabilities. Many boys were planning their careers from one joint to another as they aged, actually setting up retirement plans in the better prisons they considered beds of roses. A good half of them never wanted outside again. The clientele was interracial, international and a bane to the county, which was always crying out for more protection and harsher penitence. Newt wrote that he had to whip boys and knock them down sometimes, but that “a calm voice turneth away anger,” and he was diligently practicing his calmness. He was married yet again. His wife was pregnant. She was plain and tall, a Mennonite and recovering heroin addict, healthy and doing very well. This love was honest and not dreamy. Newt apologized for much and sent over twelve poems.

They were extraordinary, going places glad and hellish he’d never approached before.

Ross cried tears of gratitude. His hands shook as he reread the poems: such true hard-won love, such precise vision, such sane accuracy — a sanity so calm it was beyond what most men called sanity. He raised his face and looked over Dauphin Island to the west, taken. Nabby trembled the entire day, delirious and already planning Christmas three months ahead. Newt was bringing his wife over to meet them and visit a week, if they would have him. He invited Ross to visit him at the school as soon as he could get over. His voice on the phone when Ross called seemed a miracle of quiet strength. He made long, patient sentences such as Ross had never heard from him before. Ross would leave that night.

His brand-new navy blue Riviera sat in the shell drive. It was a sweet corsair, meant for a great mission: nothing better than the health and love of the prodigal son. Bring out the horns and tambourines. Poor Ann. There was no competition. All she was now was nice, poor Ann. He wanted to pick up his wealth in one gesture and dump it on Newton.

Outside Raymond, Mississippi, he pushed the hot nose of his chariot into a warm midmorning full of nits, mosquitoes, gnats and flying beetles. His windshield was a mess. Ross was going silly. He felt for the bugs and their colonies. Almost Schweitzer was he, hair snowier, fond, fond of all that crept and flogged.

They were very stern at the gate, sincere cannons on their hips, thorough check of the interior, slow suspicious drawls rolled out of the lard they ate to get here. While they repeated the cautions three or four times — about stopping the car (don’t) and watching his wallet (“hard eye if I’s yoo”) and staying some lengths away from everybody, they acted as if Newt were a great creature on the hill (“Mister Ross he fonk nare boot cup, nard”).

Ross had not been searched thoroughly since the war, when at the hospital they feared briefly for his suicide, and in a strange way he felt flattered by these crackers taking the time around his own domain. Only when he was driving up to Newt’s house did he go cold, as splashed with alcohol. They’d missed the air rifle, which he had forgotten was there. Then he fell back, silly. It was an air rifle only. There would have been no trouble, only shy explanation about its presence and the snap compartment, where there should have been, if he were mature he supposed, a sawed-off pump for danger on the road. The times they were a-changing, all the merciless ghouls prowling for you out there, no problem. A shotgun would be easier to explain than a Daisy. Over here was the home of the peacemakers racked across the rear windshield, handy to the driver. Could always be a fawn or doe out of season to shoot, Roy Bob. Over here they considered anybody not in the training school fair gubernatorial timber.

So this was Newt’s new job, new home, new Newt. He’d not said how long he’d been here. A job like this, wouldn’t it take a while to qualify? But this was the Magnolia State. He’d probably beaten out somebody who’d killed only two people, his mother and father; little spot on his résumé.

Some boys were walking around freely, gawking at his car. This must be how a woman felt, men “undressing her with their eyes,” as that Ohio tub of guts might “inscribe.” Those kids would probably tear this car down in fifteen minutes. My God, they had skill-shops here to give them their degrees in it. Ross noticed that almost every boy, whether gaunt or swaybacked, chubby or delicate, had on expensive high-top sneakers. Crack and high-tops were probably the school mascots. But he saw more security men than boys outside. He’d glanced at the Rules for Visitors booklet: no sunglasses, no overcoats, no mingling with the student body. Do not give cigarettes or lighters if requested. Your auto was not supposed to have a smoked glass windshield or windows, but they had let him through because he was the father of “Mister Ross.”

At Newt’s WPA-constructed house, like the house of a ranger in a state park — boards and fieldstone — Ross hugged his son at the door, getting a timid but then longer hug back. His wife was still getting ready. They had just finished a late-morning breakfast. There had been trouble last night. Three boys cut the wire and escaped, APBs were issued, the dogs went out, and they were brought back before they even reached Raymond, where they were going to set fire to something.

Ross was thinking about the appearance of Newt’s pregnant wife. Why had he thought it necessary to describe her as “plain” in his letter, even if she was? It was something too deliberate, if you worried the matter. Revenge? Against Ivy, his first wife, his mother? Ross’s handsome world scorned? He hoped not.

She, Dianne, was very tall, taller than Newt by three inches and close to Ross’s height. She sat at the dining room table, very long and big-stomached, about seven months along. Her father had run this place before Newton. He was retiring and Newton, well, was right there, ready, willing, able — and with (she placed her hand over Newton’s at the salt and pepper shakers) the touch of the poet.

Ross did not want to ask his boy the wrong questions and run him away. He was gingerly courteous — to the point of shallowness, he realized, and hated this. It made him feel weak and bullied and this couldn’t go on long. But Newt was forthright.

“Not just the broken ribs over at the reservoir, Dad. I was saying my thing at Tishomingo, on the boat dock, and her” (he smiled over at Dianne, who looked fine although a bit gawky — old romantic history a-kindling) “boyfriend, this tattooed, ponytailed ‘ice’ addict, stabbed me with a knife right in the heart.”

“You’re not telling me—”

“Right in the heart. But Dianne knew, she was once a nurse and still will be when she gets her license back. She wouldn’t let me or anybody pull it out. The knife itself was like a stopper on the blood.”

“That’s true,” said Dianne. “He went all the way to the hospital with it still in him and you could see it pumping up and down with Newton’s heart. They helicoptered him to Memphis.”

“She followed me in a car, without her boyfriend.” Newt giggled. “She was strung out, violently sick herself, but drove all the way over, couple hundred miles.”

“The love got me through, don’t you see, Mr. Ross? I was already in love with him, like a flash. It pulled me through the heroin, the withdrawal. I sat out there in that waiting room, sick as a dog. But there is a God, there is one.”

“Or love. Or both, sure,” said Ross. “He stuck you for being a Mormon, Newt?”

Newt still smiled at his father. He looked much older, used, but his grown-out hair was long, like a saint’s or our Lord’s, thought Ross. Now the spectacles gentled him and he seemed wise and traveled, much like his new poems.

“Pa, don’t you know me? I was Mormon, I was Jew, I was Christ, I was Socrates, I was John the Baptist, I was Hart Crane, Keats, Rimbaud. I was everything tragic. I’m still outcast, but I’m almost sane.”

His son giggled and it was not nervous or the giggle of a madman. It was just an American giggle, a man’s giggle—“What the hell is going on?”—full-blooded and wary.

“You love these boys? I suppose they’re helping you back to. . helping you as. .”

“Hell no, I don’t love them. I hate these bastards. It might not be all their fault, but they’re detestable vermin and utter shits, for the main part. I love, well, five. The rest. . What you find most often is they’ve been spoiled, not deprived. Like me. Nobody lasts long here. They try to love but it gets them in a few months. Dianne’s father lasted, but he’s the meanest, toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”

Dianne assented, laughing again, about this paternal monster, just a solid fact. The laugh surely lit up that plain face nicely.

“Come eat with me in the big hall and I’ll show you something,” said Newt.

“Is this a bad question? What are you going to do? Stay here because you hate it?”

“No. I’ll do my best. But I’m in fair shape for a job up at Fayetteville. They’ve seen my new work and I guess they like post-insane poets at Arkansas. Actually, a lot of folks like you a lot when you straighten out a little. The world’s a lot better than I thought it was.”

Ross considered.

“Newt, do you believe in Christ?”

“Absolutely. Everything but the cross. That never had anything to do with my ‘antisocial’ activity. I’ll still holler for Jesus.”

“I love you, boy.”

“I know it. Last month I finally knew it. Didn’t take me forever, is all I can say.”

“Thanks for that.”

“There’s some repaying to do.”

“Already done. The new poems.”

Dianne wept a little for joy. This was greatly corny, but it was magnificent.

In the big hall, eating at the head table among the boys, Ross got a drop-jaws look at real “antisocial” manners. Guards were swarming everywhere, but the boys, some of them large and dangerous, nearly tore the place apart. They threw peas, meat, rolls, just to get primed. Two huge blacks jumped on each other jabbing away with plastic knives. A half grapefruit sailed right by the heads of Ross and Newt. It had been pegged with such velocity that it knocked down the great clock on the wall behind them. Whoever had done it, they never knew. He was eating mildly among them, slick, cool, anonymous, wildly innocent, successful. Right from that you could get the general tenor. Unbelievable. Newt and he were exiting when a stout boy about Newt’s height broke line and tackled him, then jumped up and kicked him with his huge black military-looking high-tops. Newt scrambled up, but was well hurt before the guards cornered the boy, who’d never stopped cursing violently, screaming, the whole time. With their truncheons the guards beat the shit out of the kid and kept it up when he was handcuffed and down, maybe unconscious. None of the other boys seemed to think it was unusual. They neither cheered nor booed.

Newt wanted him to sleep over so they could go fishing early the next day. He knew a place that was white perch and bass heaven. Dianne insisted, so he did.

They did fairly well on the fish, again in a pond so dark green and gorgeous you could forget the training school and human horror everywhere.

“I guess, like I heard anyway, you went to bodies of water because, well, because what?” Ross asked.

“Because in the South, I figured, the men who change the world mostly go fishing?” He laughed at his father with the fly rod in his hands, so sincere. “They want out of this goddamned place.”

Next morning he left them cheerfully, driving out, but then, as he neared the gate, he circled back — out on his own hook, cautious in the car with smoked windows. He had seen what he wanted, set it up, had found his nest. There was a place in the parking lot for officials and staff that the Riviera nestled into, uniform in the ranks of autos and pickups, as you might see in a big grocery lot. Behind his smoked window he was unseen. Sixty feet away was the entrance to a shop or snack bar. Anyway, a lot of the boys were gathered there, allowed to smoke.

Ross unsnapped the compartment and withdrew the Daisy. My, it had been months, years. Thin, tall, lumpy, sneering, bent, happy, morose, black, white, Indian. It didn’t matter. He rolled the window down just a tad, backing up so the barrel wasn’t outside the window.

He began popping the boys singly, aiming for the back of their necks and, if lucky, an ear. That was about the best pain he could inflict. A boy leapt up, howling, holding his wound. He got another right on the tit. Did he roar, drop his cigarette, stomp and threaten the others? Yes. He popped another in the back of the head, a hipster with tattooed arms mimicking sodomy. Many of them were questioning, protesting, searching the trees in the sky and other inmates.

Ross rolled up the window and watched them through the one-way glass.

That’s it, lads. Start asking some big questions like me, you little nits. You haven’t even started yet.