“Ha!” the old man boomed, and Roger was afraid he was going to get to his feet and try something. “Worth anything? The very mukluk Admiral Byrd wore in Little America? The very one?” The old man drew himself up, cradling the shoe to his chest. “And I tell you something—and you can tell Walter from me,” he said, lowering his voice in confidentiality. “I’ve got plenty more where this came from. Plenty. Notebooks, parkas, reindeer pants and finnesko boots, the sun compass itself—the very one he used to make his fix on the Pole.” He rocked back on his haunches. “Yes,” he murmured, and he might have been talking to himself, so oblivious was he of Roger and his surroundings, “you tell Walter. All we need is maybe a million. And that’s nothing these days. Nothing.”
The old man was as crazy as plant life, but that only took you so far, and though Roger had nowhere to go—hadn’t had anywhere to go in maybe ten years now—he was getting impatient. “You’re absolutely right,” he said, cutting him off in the middle of a windy speech about his museum, and he used the phrase as an excuse to lean forward and shake the dry old hand again. But this time, unlike the first, when every eye in the station was on them, Roger expertly slipped the watch over the bony wrist and dropped it in his coat pocket, and the old man didn’t know a thing about it.
Or maybe he did. His expression changed suddenly, as if he was trying to remember something. The lines stood out in his face. He looked old. Old and constipated. “I’m thirsty,” he suddenly announced.
“Thirsty?” Roger roared, drunk with his own success. “Hell, so am I—what say we share a pint or two, eh? Have a party. Drink to your mukluk and your museum.” He stood and patted his pockets theatrically, enjoying himself all over again—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much fun. “But I’m a little short. You got any cash? For a drink, I mean?”
Another facial change. The jaw clenched, the eyes caught hold of him. “You’re not the young man from the Geographic Society,” the old man said quietly.
“The hell I’m not,” Roger protested, and he was so frisky all of a sudden he spun around twice and threw out his arms like a tap dancer rising to the finale. “Sure I am, old man, sure I am—but listen, what did you say your name was?”
“Byrd. Richard Evelyn Byrd. The third.”
Oh, the solemnity of it, the dignity. He might have been announcing the King of Arabia or something. Roger laughed out loud. “Bird, huh? Tweet-tweet. Bird the Third.” Then he let a hint of ugliness creep into his voice, and he stood over the old man now, no mistaking the posture: “I said, you got any cash for a drink, Bird the Third?”
The hand shook, the fingers fumbled in the jacket pocket, and there was the wallet, genuine calfskin, receptacle for the sort of notes and documents that separated people like the old man from Roger and Rohlich and all the other bleary-eyed, rotten-toothed bums and winos curled up on their sheets of cardboard across the city. In that moment, Roger almost felt sorry for the old retard—almost. But in the end, of course, he felt sorrier for himself, and in a quick swipe the wallet was his: five twenties, folded and joined with a paper clip; three ones; a return ticket, Washington to Boston. Photos: an old lady, a kid in a Little League outfit, some white-haired old duffer in a parka. And what was this, what was this? A Visa card, thin as a wafer, shiny as a pot of gold.
He was used to a cocktail before dinner—a Manhattan, generally, shaken, and with a twist instead of a cherry—and a good cabernet or pinot noir with his meal, but this was something he hadn’t experienced before, this was something new. The young man passed him the bottle—Gallo White Port, the label read, Alcohol 19% By Volume—and he took a long gulping swallow that left his chin wet and his stomach burning. He was thirsty, nearly parched, and the liquid—it was cold, it was wet—went down easily, and after the first drink he didn’t care what it was. When the bottle was gone, the young man produced another, and though he’d been hungry, though he hadn’t eaten anything except the egg-salad sandwich and the apple his son had given him at the Boston station, the hunger faded and he felt better and better as the evening wore on. He was telling the young man about pemmican, how it was the highest-energy food man had yet to devise and how many calories you had to replace daily just to stay alive at seventy-five below, when all at once he felt as lucid as he ever had. He caught himself up so suddenly he almost choked. This wasn’t the young man from the Geographic Society, not at all. There was the same fringe of patchy, youthful beard, the startled blue eyes and delicate raw skin, but the nose was all wrong and the mouth had a mean, hurtful look to it. And his clothes—they were in tatters, soaked through with the grease and leavings of the ages, reeking, an unforgivably human stink he could smell from all the way over here. “This isn’t Washington,” the old man said, understanding now that he’d gotten off at the wrong stop, that he was in some other city altogether, a place he didn’t know, understanding that he was lost. “Is it?”
His face shining with drink, his ragged arms flailing at the air, the young man howled with manic glee, kicked at the newspapers heaped up round him and finally had to clutch his ribs tight to stop the laughter. He laughed till he began to cough, and he coughed till he brought something up and spat it on the floor. “You are out there, Bird,” he said, straining at each word, and the laughter seized him again. “You are really out there.”
So: he was lost. It had happened to him before, two or three times at least. A trick of the mind, that was all, one little mistake—getting off at the wrong stop, turning right instead of left—and the world became a strange and unfathomable place, terrain to explore all over again. He didn’t mind. They’d come for him, Leverett and his wife, sweet girl, really, and the grandchildren, they’d find him. But then a little wedge of concern inserted itself along the fracture line of his psyche, and it became a worry. Who was this man if he wasn’t from the Geographic Society, and what did he want? And what was this place? Newspapers. Drifts of them, mountains, a whole continent, and all it was was newsprint.
He took the bottle when it came to him and he took a drink and passed it back, and there was a third member of their party now, another hand interposed between him and the young man who wasn’t from the Geographic Society. Matted beard, nose like a bird of prey, eyes frozen into his head, and he didn’t know him, not at all, but why did he look so familiar? He felt himself drifting. It was cold, damnably cold, for what—October, wasn’t it? “Early winter this year,” he murmured, but no one uttered a word in response.
The next time he noticed anything, it was the candle. He must have dozed. But there it was, the candle. A light in the wilderness. The bottle came back to him and the feeble light leapt out suddenly to illuminate the new man’s face, and he knew him, knew him as well as he knew his own son and his own father. “You,” he said out of the void, “I know you.”
There was a low cackle, a dribble of hard-edged laughter from two ravaged throats. “Yeah, we know you, too, Bird the Third,” the young man said, and his voice had changed, the tone of it, till everything he said sounded like a schoolyard taunt.
“No,” the old man insisted, “not you … I mean”—and he looked the newcomer full in the face—“I mean you.” The inspiration had flared in his brain, and he knew the man even after all these years, a great man, his father’s equal almost, the only other man in the world who’d been to both poles and back again. “You’re Roald Amundsen.”
The laugh was ugly, almost a bark. The man showed the stubs of his teeth. He took his time, drinking, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Shit, man, sure I am,” he said, and the other one was laughing again, “and this here, your friend with the bottle, this guy’s Santy Claus.”
Roger was on a tear. For a full week, seven whole days and maybe more, he didn’t know where he was. He hadn’t had this much money, all at once, since he’d left New Jersey, when he was a kid living in that lopsided trailer with his mother and stocking the shelves at Waldbaum’s. The whole thing with the old man had been unreal, the sort of score everybody
dreams about but never makes, never. Oh, sure, zombies like Rohlich would tell you they were hitchhiking once and Madonna gave them a lift or some high roller in Atlantic City handed them a C-note when all they asked for was a quarter, but this was unreal, this happened. Those five twenties alone could have kept him flying for a month or more, but of course they’d disappeared, dropped down the hole where all of it went sooner or later—usually sooner. He didn’t know where he’d been or what he’d done, but he ached all over, so it must have been good, and he needed a drink so bad he could taste it. Or couldn’t taste it. Or whatever.
And shit, it was cold. Too cold for this time of year. Cold and drizzling. When he woke up an hour or so ago he’d found himself on a wet slab of cardboard out back of the fish restaurant the yuppies flocked to—Cicero’s—and he didn’t know how he’d got there or what he’d done the night before, and his pockets were empty. No loose change. No nothing. He’d wandered over to the mission and passed a short dog around with the black guy they called Hoops, and now he was wet through to the skin and shivering and looking for a benefactor so he could invest in the Gallo Company and warm up where it counted most. He remembered the old guy’s watch then, the black Movado, and felt around in his pockets for it. It was gone. He had a further—and dimmer—recollection of pawning it and getting ten bucks for the thing and being all pissed off about it, but then he wasn’t so sure—it might have been another watch and another time.
He stayed on the street for a couple hours, it got a whole lot colder, and all he came up with was ninety-two cents. By then, his thirst was driving him crazy, so he bought a can of beer and went over to the warehouse to see who was around and maybe trade up for a hit or two of wine. He saw that somebody had tried to hammer the crease out of the door and that they’d moved a whole shitload of papers out and a whole new shitload in, but other than that nothing had changed. There was nobody around, so he made himself a little igloo out of bundled newspaper, drank his beer in two swallows, and tried to stop shivering for a minute at a time.
At first he didn’t hear it—or it didn’t register. The place was cavernous, with a ceiling you could fly planes under and walls that went on for a block, and it was noisy, middle of the day, trucks rumbling in and out of the South Street entrance with cans and bottles, and Mr. and Mrs. Nice driving up with Sis and Bud to deliver their neat foursquare string-tied bundles of newspaper. It was noisy and he didn’t hear a thing but the muted rumble of all that activity, and he wished five o’clock would come and they’d shut the place down and go home and leave him in peace, but after a while he became aware that somebody was there with him, just up the next aisle, muttering to himself in the low sweet singsong tones of the crackbrained and hopeless. Another bum. Somebody he knew maybe. A man with a short dog and maybe a bite of something scavenged from the top of the bin out back of the supermarket. He felt his spirits lift.
He pushed himself up, keeping an eye out for the watchman, and slipped up the next aisle. The papers had fallen in drifts here, sloppily stacked, and he fought his way through them in the direction of the voice, his harsh ragged breath crystallizing before him. There was a nook carved out of the wall, and he saw the back of a white head, the old withered stalk of a neck, and there he was: Bird the Third.
He was amazed. He would have thought the guy would be long gone, would have found his people, his keeper, whatever. But still, there he was, and for a moment Roger felt a surge of hope. Maybe he had something on him still, something he’d overlooked, some piece of jewelry, a pair of glasses—hell, his clothes even. But then he saw that they’d already got to him. The old retard’s suit was gone, and his socks and shoes too. Somebody’d switched on him, and he was dressed in a puke-green janitor’s jumpsuit and was missing a shoe—or he’d found a shoe somewhere, a torn greasy old Nike sneaker with the toes ripped out. He was pathetic. A mess. And he wasn’t worth anything to anybody.
For a long while, Roger just stood there watching him. The old man was shivering, his arms wrapped around himself like coils, the bare foot discolored and bad-looking. He had that thousand-mile stare on his face, the same one you saw on some of the older guys, the Vietnam vets and whatnot. Roger’s brain was working hard, and for a moment he saw himself taking the guy along to the police station and turning him in like a hero and maybe getting a reward from the guy’s family or whoever. They had to be looking for him. You don’t come from that world, with your haircut and your suitcase and your Movado watch, without somebody looking for you, especially if you’re a little soft in the head to begin with.
It was a good idea for about eight seconds, and then it became a whole lot less good, and ten seconds further on it just plain stank. There wouldn’t be any reward—maybe for Joe Average and Mr. and Mrs. Nice, maybe for them, but not for the likes of Roger. That’s how things worked. There were two worlds operating here, the one where Bird the Third and all the rest of them lived, and this one, the real one, where you slept under things at ankle level and ate the crumbs they gave you. Well, fuck that. Fuck it. It was just like the credit card. He’d tried it on maybe twenty liquor stores, the ones he knew and the ones he didn’t, and nobody took him for Bird the Third, no matter how much ID he showed or how hard he tried. Not the way he looked, no way. He was going to trade the thing for a bottle at this one place—Here, you want the card, Visa Gold? Keep it—but then the jerk behind the counter got nasty, real nasty, and confiscated the whole business, plastic, ID and all. That’s how it was.
He was going to say something, goodbye or thanks for the ride or whatever, but in the end he decided against it. Somewhere, in some deep tunnel of what used to be his reality and was now somebody else’s, he even felt a stab of pity and, worse, guilt. But he comforted himself with the thought that if he hadn’t been there at the station, somebody else would have, and any way you looked at it Bird the Third would have wound up plucked. In the end, he just shrugged. Then he made his way off through the drifts, thinking maybe he’d just go on down to the station and check out the trains.
Oh, but it was cold. Cold to the bone. And dry. He knew the irony of it all too well—a shelf made of water, frozen and compacted over the howling eons, and not a drop to drink. It was locked in, unavailable, dry as paper. He shifted position and winced. It was his foot. He’d lost all feeling in it there for a while, but now it came back with a vengeance, a thousand hot needles radiating all the way up his leg to the thigh. That’s how it was with frostbite. He’d lose his toes, he knew that, but they’d all lost toes, fingers—the great ones—even the tips of their noses. There were continents to explore, unknown corners to make known, and what was a little discomfort compared to the greatness of that?
He thought of his father in the weather shack where he’d wintered alone, the fear of that eternal blackness closing in on him like a fist, alternately freezing and asphyxiating himself on the fumes from the kerosene stove. That was greatness. That was will. That was the indomitable spirit he’d inherited. But still, it was cold, terribly, implacably, unrelentingly cold, and his foot hurt him and he felt himself drifting off to sleep. That was how it happened, that was how they died out here, numbed by the cold, seduced into sleep and forgetfulness.
He stirred, and he fought it. He beat at his thighs, hammered his hands against the meat of his arms, but he couldn’t keep it up, and before long he subsided. He tried to call out, but his voice was gone, and besides, it was the coward’s way—his father would never have called out. Never. No, he would have gone on into the grip of that polar night, never wavering, never halting, on and on, into the dream.
(1992)
STONES IN MY PASSWAY, HELLHOUND ON MY TRAIL
I got stones in my passway
and my road seems black as night.
I have pains in my heart,
they have taken my appetite.
—Robert Johnson (1914?-1938)
Saturday night. He’s playing the House Party Club in Dallas, singing his blues, picking notes with a penknife. His v
oice rides up to a reedy falsetto that gets the men hooting and then down to a cavernous growl that chills the women, the hard chords driving behind it, his left foot beating like a hammer. The club’s patrons—field hands and laborers—pound over the floorboards like the start of the derby, stamping along with him. Skirts fly, hats slump over eyebrows, drinks spill, ironed hair goes wiry. Overhead two dim yellow bulbs sway on their cords; the light is suffused with cigarette smoke, dingy and brown. The floor is wet with spittle and tobacco juice. From the back room, a smell of eggs frying. And beans.
Huddie Doss, the proprietor, has set up a bar in the corner: two barrels of roofing nails and a pine plank. The plank supports a cluster of gallon jugs, a bottle of Mexican rum, a pewter jigger, and three lemons. Robert sits on a stool at the far end of the room, boxed in by men in kerchiefs, women in calico. The men watch his fingers, the women look into his eyes.
It is 1938, dust bowl, New Deal. FDR is on the radio, and somebody in Robin-sonville is naming a baby after Jesse Owens. Once, on the road to Natchez, Robert saw a Pierce Arrow and talked about it for a week. Another time he spent six weeks in Chicago and didn’t know the World’s Fair was going on. Now he plays his guitar up and down the Mississippi, and in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. He’s never heard of Hitler and he hasn’t eaten in two days.
When he was fifteen he watched a poisoned dog tear out its entrails. It was like this:
They were out in the fields when a voice shouted, “Loup’s gone mad!” and then he was running with the rest of them, down the slope and across the red dust road, past the shanties and into the gully where they dumped their trash, the dog crying high over the sun and then baying deep as craters in the moon. It was a coonhound, tawny, big-boned, the color of a lion. Robert pushed through the gathering crowd and stood watching as the animal dragged its hindquarters along the ground like a birthing bitch, the ropy testicles strung out behind. It was mewling now, the high-pitched cries sawing away at each breath, and then it was baying again, howling death until the day was filled with it, their ears and the pits of their stomachs soured with it. One of the men said in a terse, angry voice, “Go get Turkey Nason to come on down here with his gun.” and a boy detached himself from the crowd and darted up the rise.
T.C. Boyle Stories Page 52
