Scumbler

by William Wharton

  I start spreading my wall clocks along the walls at the feet of the coffins between the grandfather clocks. Lotte helps me. Clocks are more her kind of thing than motorcycles.

  For somebody who doesn’t pay more than three hundred francs for any wall clock, I have a beautiful collection. They’re going to be worth a fortune someday; probably already worth a small fortune in America.

  The French are spending big money for American faded blue jeans and university sweat shirts with “UCLA” written on them. Americans are buying French antiques. Nobody wants what they have. I guess that’s what’s called the spirit of life.

  SOMETHING ELSE, SOMETHING NEW.

  DOESN’T MATTER IF NEW IS WORSE;

  ALWAYS CHANGING FOR NO REASON:

  THAT’S OUR BLESSING AND OUR CURSE.

  We get all the clocks distributed along the walls, between coffins, on the floor and on the table. Then I search out keys and start winding. I set all the clocks at quarter to twelve. It takes over an hour to get them wound and set. Then I start them. I know by listening just when a clock is balanced so it’ll keep running.

  MECHANICAL HEART SURGEON, I HOLD

  THE TICK AND LISTEN FOR THE TOCK.

  I grab Lotte’s hand and we run out the tunnel, up the ladder, out her door, across Rue du Four, across Boulevard Saint-Germain and into the big church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I might well be giving my whole nest away, but some ideas are too important to ignore.

  We sit four rows from the altar. There are a few tourists wandering around staring at the columns or vaulting, paging through guidebooks. There are the usual ten or twenty old women in black; some are telling beads, some just sitting and one is lighting a candle at a side altar. A priest or deacon is arranging flowers at the foot of a statue by the main altar.

  Lotte and I know what we’re listening for, so we hear the first notes. The sound is softly muted and, for some strange reason of acoustics, sounds as if it’s coming from the vaulted arches where the nave and transept cross. The ringing tones accumulate, increase in volume till there’s a cacophony of reverberating, hollow sounds: as close a thing to celestial-sphere music as anyone will ever hear.

  The nice old lady drops her candle and stares into the vaults. The women in black on the benches stare up, mouths open. Our candle lady drops to her knees beside her burning candle on the church floor. The priest arranging flowers runs three quick steps to the front of the altar, shades his eyes and gawks up into the vaulting. He runs a few more steps down the aisle past us, staring up all the time. Then he runs back to the foot of the altar, genuflects deeply and scoots across out a side door.

  By this time, the whole din has begun to drop off; the old women look around at each other. The one on the floor pushes herself painfully onto her feet and picks up her candle, still burning. The old women surge together. We’re having a communion of saints, miracle of the bells.

  Lotte and I hurry out. I’d better get back and stop those damned clocks. If they strike like that every fifteen minutes for eight days, either somebody’s going to catch on or they’ll change Paris into another Lourdes and that’d be one hell of a note.

  MIRACLES DO

  APPEN. JUST BEING BORN OR

  BEING HAPPY. BUT WATCH OUT FOR CRAPPY

  HALOS OR POUNDING TALK IN A TENT

  XXI

  AUTO-DA-FÉ

  It’s a rainy day, warm rain, early summer day. I’m home working on a still life of potatoes spilling from a paper bag, all earth colors and white. It’s getting close to six o’clock, bank-closing time, so I pack up the box. We need a stash of cash day-to-day living money; cash flows through us like some kind of multinational corporation.

  I take the checkbook and don’t bother to change from my painting clothes; there’s not enough time. I drive my Honda over to the Bank of America on the Place Vendôme. The streets are slick with light rain so I’m wearing my helmet. I’ve taken my name off it; some flic might stop me and turn in the escaped prisoner.

  I go into the bank, dirty, wet, paint-smeared, windblown. I must admit I probably look like Jesse James; I write out my check for cash. The girl looks at me and asks for identification. I have a signature card on the bank, don’t usually need identification. I drove over without my wallet, just the checkbook. There’s a big consultation. They’re not sure of the signature; I’m erratic in everything, even the way I sign my name. In the end, they refuse to give me my own money.

  I could spit. Here I’ve gone all the way across town in the slippery rain for nothing. I leave the bank feeling like a panhandler shown to the door. It’s raining harder.

  MONEY KNOWS NO LOVE, RAIN SLIDES

  OVER IT AND DEAD SEEDS DON’T GROW.

  IT’S HARD TO CHEW OR EVEN BITE.

  I get home and the concierge hands me a letter: official-looking affair, air mail special delivery. I hate opening letters like that anytime, and I especially don’t want to look at one just now.

  Upstairs, I pour myself a shot from my bottle of homemade Cointreau. I bake the orange skins myself, then add eau-de-vie at eighteen francs per liter. It’s drinkable. I open the letter.

  It’s from some real-estate investor in California; says he wants to buy my forty acres. I skip down to the bottom. He’s offering me eight thousand dollars an acre, three hundred and twenty thousand U.S. bucks! I can’t believe it. I read it again. There it is; this is an official bid on the property. Holy mud, I’m a rich man! I’m going to go out and buy myself a house with fifteen bathrooms, take up plumbing. I’m going to get me an apprentice girl Friday to run around after me, cleaning up my palette when I’m finished, stretching canvases, show my paintings for me, writing letters. I’ll be a big international painter, like Sandy Asshole or something.

  I sock down three more fake Cointreaus, reading and rereading the letter. It looks legitimate. I don’t know anybody who hates me enough to pull a joke like this!

  I bought that forty acres as the ultimate hideout. The only way to get in there is to hike about two miles uphill, or go in on a trail bike. It’s the top of a high ridge and covers all the sides down to the bottom, including a dry stream on one side. It’s down by that stream where I built my nest with the rocks and the corrugated plastic roof. I have branches growing all over that nest so nobody could ever find it, not even a rattlesnake. This is the place I dream about on the worst nights. When it all seems too much, things feel as if they’re sliding out from under me, I dream about sneaking down there in the night.

  I’ve got canned food buried, a shallow well and water storage. There’s an old butane-run generator and six bottles of butane gas buried there wrapped in plastic. We could hide out in that nest for a year; nobody’d ever find us. When you’ve spent three years in prison, a private place like that is worth everything.

  One kind of freedom is knowing you can get away if you have to. I don’t want Social Security: that’s just government robbery, plays on people’s simplest kinds of fear. They take over thirteen percent off top and give a lousy four or five hundred or so a month when you’re sixty-five. If I get that far, I don’t even think I’ll apply for it: old people’s dole. I’ve got my own Social Security: rats’ nests, clocks, paintings, kids.

  LEANING BACK, ROCKING-CHAIR MIND

  HOPING FOR PEOPLE TO BE KIND TO YOU.

  GOVERNMENTS AREN’T CIVIL LET ALONE KIND.

  And now, holy dog turds, I’m into three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The IRS bastards are really going to make out if I sell. No way to hide a thing like that. Damn! They’ll get their fat fists into it all right. They’ll come out with about eighty thousand for doing absolutely nothing, taking no risks. They’ll use the money to kill all kinds of people I don’t even know—little children, maybe. They’ll build more nuclear bombs so they can kill everybody in the world ten times more often. They’ll make a bunch of creeps rich; people I don’t like and don’t want to know. What a pisser.

  YOUR OWN HARVEST FLOWERS

  BOMB OTHER LANDS
r />   PASSING TO OTHERS, RIPPED

  HARD FROM YOUR HANDS.

  We bought this forty acres more than twenty-five years ago, bought it for six thousand. We started paying taxes at a dollar an acre, about right. The taxes have been sneaking up every year, getting to be an expensive hideout. For years, our biggest hump has been getting together enough money to meet those taxes. Now I can’t keep up with them, just holding on by my teeth. Tax collectors are on my heels, barking after me to get our land, our nest.

  NIBBLING, QUIBBLING, BITING AT

  BUBBLES, MANUFACTURING TROUBLES.

  California’s where we moved when I got out of prison. We were living on a hill, in a shack, in a place called Topanga Canyon when we bought that forty. I wanted to get as far as I could from home, couldn’t get a passport yet, even. If I could, we’d’ve gone to Mexico or Greece—anywhere, to put as much space between me and America as possible.

  When I was in prison, nobody wrote to me, not my wife or even my mother. Nobody is writing to the draft-dodging, yellow-bellied Nazi-lover. In prison mail is more important than food.

  Then I start getting unsigned letters every day. They come for three years. I don’t know who it is but I write back, write long letters, send drawings, trying to hold myself together.

  When they finally let me out, after the cockeyed war’s over, she’s waiting for me at the gate, turns out she’s a former student of mine. By then we’re already in love. I fell in love with Kate before I even knew her name. She tells me she’s loved me since she was seventeen. I didn’t even remember her as a student; had a hard time telling her that.

  Anyway, with our second baby, Kate wants a more normal house, not a rats’ nest. She wants electricity and sewers, streetlights and a place you can park a car. Kate never enjoyed riding on the back of a motorcycle. Sewers and things like that get to mean a lot when you don’t have them.

  Kate’s my big love and I want her to be happy. She’s probably the only woman in the world who could stay with me and be reasonably happy at it.

  I keep asking her if she wants out. Anytime she wants to go, everything’s hers: paintings, clocks, rats’ nests, the works. So far, every year she’s opted to stick it out. We always spend New Year’s Eve in bed, stay up to hear midnight, drink champagne, have a private party; usually these days it’s at the mill.

  STAY TOGETHER, SOUL GLUE, NOT INERTIA, OUR

  OWN DYNAMIC, TWO THRUSTS FORMING NEW VECTORS.

  So back in California we go down to a nowhere place called the San Fernando Valley: flat, covered with people boxes. We buy an acre there in a walnut grove, ten evenly spaced diseased walnut trees growing on it. I’m teaching at a private school, so we have money. The way we live, a teacher’s salary is big. I promise Kate I’ll build her a real house.

  I start designing. I begin by getting a bulldozer and plowing up little hills and valleys to give some character to that acre. Everything’s so flat around there you’re afraid to open your eyes; might just see clear off the end of the world. One of the troubles with California, generally, is that on a clear day you can see so damned far.

  The skies are too high, the houses too low. You look out and you’re liable to see anything, maybe something a hundred miles away. The smog helps scumble the world somewhat, but it kills you.

  So I plow up my little hills to block the view, especially the view into my neighbors’ view windows. This acre of mine begins to look like a miniature golf course or a poor man’s Disneyland.

  After I’ve built my landscape, I pick the location for my house, the spot with the most privacy. It’s like trying to hide on a tabletop. I invest in trees and bushes, start the landscape-gardening part.

  All around where the house is going to be, I plant trees that are supposed to grow fast with thick leaves. Then I design tree- and bush-lined paths between the hills from the street toward the house. There are four paths: three lead to dead ends; only one goes to the actual place for the house.

  There’s an agricultural college near us called Pierce College. They have a horticultural section. At night I steal exotic and interesting trees, plant them on my acre.

  The neighbors around me have built expensive fake ranch houses with wood-shake roofs, or Normandy farmhouses with asbestos-straw roofs, exposed Styrofoam beams, all kinds of fancy gewgaws. These neighbors are watching me build my hills and plant my garden. They start getting worried looks on their faces; then they begin asking questions about what kind of house I’m going to build.

  I tell my neighbor on the left, the one with the Tudor-style two-story house and the Bentley, how I’m building the whole house underground, with one long cone up into the sky to catch pure air and pipe it in. I tell him I’m putting a high fence around my acre and importing wild animals so it’ll be like real nature. He asks about airspace. I tell him I’ve checked and I own up to two miles over my acre: approximately eight trillion bushels of smog.

  I tell the next jocko, the neighbor on the right, who lives in an imitation Cliff May house with ten different kinds of colored pebbles all over everything, how I’m building a six-story house with one room on each floor, with an outside elevator and a penthouse on top. I tell him I’m a radio ham and I’m going to put up a huge antenna that’ll be the highest in the west San Fernando Valley. I’ll put this on top of the penthouse and be able to get China and Moscow. I invite him to come listen if he wants. He asks if it’ll interfere with his TV reception.

  The cowboy across the street, with the ranch-style house and straw hanging out a fake window over his three-car garage, stops by. He drives a pickup truck pulling a horse trailer with no horse. I tell him I’m building a completely round house of Duralumin. All the floors in the house will be slightly tilted so the place can be cleaned just by squirting a hose. All the furniture will be plastic and waterproof. I tell him my wife hates housecleaning, was brought up in China where she always had at least ten servants.

  But worst of all is the lady who comes over while I’m watering my avocado trees and passionflowers. She asks where I got my hose. I tell her Sears; actually I got it at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. She sneers Sears and backs away.

  I know I’m not going to make it. I’m an insult to these people, everything they believe. I don’t want any more trouble. I go to a realtor and put our acre up for sale, as is. It’s sold in a week and we make a good profit. I bought it for twenty-five hundred, sell it for thirty-three. The crazy place is worth fifty thousand now: fancy residential area called Walnut Acres—after those old diseased trees, I guess.

  I take my money up into the hills to an artist friend, a ceramist who dabbles with real estate. I tell him I want a place where we can be alone. He tells me to get my boots; we hike up to this beautiful forty acres. I buy it right there; go home to tell Kate I’ve traded our one acre for forty. I feel like Jack who sold the cow for a handful of beans.

  ONLY SOME KERNELS NOW:

  NOT WORTH A COW

  The next day, I coax Kate onto the motorcycle and cruise as near as I can get. We hike in the rest of the way. From the top there, we can see the ocean in one direction and out over the San Fernando Valley in the other. There’s nothing but natural canyon all around us. We can look as far as we want in any direction without being afraid of seeing anything, if you know what I mean.

  Kate starts crying. She’s standing on top of the mountain, looking out into all that emptiness and crying. She doesn’t want to live up here. It’s worse than where we live now. She’s not going to live like a mountain goat!

  I promise Kate I’ll get electricity into the place where we’re living. I promise to build an addition. We’ll use our main room for a bedroom. I’ll build a big room for the new living room and have a real kitchen. I promise her all the things she wants in a house. I even promise to doze in a road to the door and cut out a parking place.

  It takes me five years’ work but I get it done. I finish just in time for the big fire to eat it up with a whoosh!

  The mornin
g after the fire, we both go up there; everything’s still smoldering and we look out over a black-and-white landscape. God, it feels good. We’re free from all those crappy things, too good to throw away, not good enough to satisfy us. It’s all gone. That’s the kind of stuff gums up life. It’s all gone.

  BLACK IS WHITE AND SMOKE BECOMES

  INCENSE, BLESSING US WITH FREEDOM,

  RELEASING OUR NATURAL DESIRE TO FLEE,

  FLY OVER ALL THE STILL WORLD AND THEN

  ALIGHT TO OUR OWN LIGHT.

  During those years from 1945 to 1960, life has been getting worse and worse in America. We don’t want to raise our kids in the middle of all the competitive-comparative bullshit, but we’re stuck.

  Now Kate surprises me. She’d bought fire insurance without saying anything and that money helps spring us. I finally get a passport; we take off a month later and have only been back to visit. It’s the best thing ever happened. Our kids never locked onto Channel 4; don’t have standardized sesame-seed minds. Our life’s been hard sometimes, but fun. Even Kate’s learned to like being outside things, edge-playing, I think. A good part of being alive is staying alive on purpose.

  PLAYING IN THE DARK, IN OUR OWN BALL PARK

  NOT MUCH OF WINNINGS BUT HAVING OUR OWN

  INNINGS.

  So here I am, in Paris, France, sitting with this letter about the forty acres in my hand. What’ll it do to us? What’ll we do with all that money besides pay taxes? I know we won’t buy any stocks and bonds; we’d be pure hypocrites if we did a thing like that. We still have some extra money, maybe a couple thousand. What could we do to make life any better?

  I know I don’t want any sports car. We’ve got all the food, all the shelter, all the loving we can handle. The blood-sucking money would probably be bad in the long run for our kids. The toughest thing in the world for anybody is to live in a nest that’s so comfortable you get used to it, actually need it. You spend your life struggling to match what you’ve always had. There’s not much sense of attainment in treading water. We won’t do that to our kids.