Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  I’m going to go, my Sprite is waiting in the driveway, I came back for George A., but he’s not coming, he chose the shotgun and I can’t really blame him because once upon a time when offered the same opportunity I did the same thing.

  And here he is now coming from the bathroom, still grinning at the thought of Bill on the Kawasaki in his do-rag and a jean vest with rockers like they sell at GAP or Aeropostale.

  –Where you going?

  –I need some air.

  –Okay, I’m going to hit the hay. I’ll see you in the morning.

  And he hugs me just like always, two brisk back-claps to indicate no funny stuff intended.

  –Okay, then.

  I start off.

  –Hey, David?

  I turn back.

  –Merry Christmas.

  That big smile, that face, that young face, those black rings under his eyes, new and still so faint, the warm nuanced smile that I remember from the beach, This one’s for you, DP.

  And if I were writing fiction, I’d have him say, By the way, about the shotgun . . . You should have it.

  And I’d say, Fuck it, George A., keep the damn thing.

  I’d make us both generous and good—where “good” means selfless—the way we wished to be and weren’t.

  But he didn’t say it and I didn’t say it. He just said, Merry Christmas, and it seemed to me that he was on the up seat and I was heading lower, and in some sense that was true, but not the big sense, not the last one.

  Six weeks from now, or eight, when I next visit, we’ll tell our jokes again and take on the Jacks and chicken-jerk our chins and walk like Egyptians, and when he gets sick I’ll come from Chapel Hill—and after that Manhattan, and after that New England—and we’ll ring the bells and chant and swing the censer and harrow hell and storm the heavens, but after tonight it’s never quite the same between us. Last summer in the lair it was him and me, the lost boys in our Adirondack summer camp, loyal to each other against the defection of the counselors, our parents. I coached him to the pier and George A. introduced me to the Piedmont blues and walked me through those turnarounds. Now tempted by the shotgun, George A. switches sides and takes it and he fucks me. So I feel. And maybe sickness is the reason, but I never quite forgive him or our parents.

  So I walk off and leave him, and in a way it ends here, our family; this is, for me, the last scene. That’s me going, headed out the kitchen door, and as I leave the clock is striking midnight on the upstairs landing, and in the drive the topless Sprite awaits me and I put my key in the ignition. The engine whirs to life and I can see it’s snowing, and as the headlights hit the backyard swing set, I remember Central Park with Eric, the children gathered with their nannies, the little boy in the blue coat who thought his crying stopped the clock though it had merely rung the hour.

  Inside, the clock is striking now and I think once more about the animals, about their joyless dance, their intervals, their fixed expressions. It seems to me the first animal is Want, the second Want Rejected; and the third is Goodness, Trying to Want Nothing, who denies himself a tater or gives away his shotgun; and the fourth animal is Goodness’s Failure, Badness, who steals the stereo equipment or Mary Rose’s timber or runs away with Imogen his sister not-so-sister. And the fifth animal is Sickness, who wins by losing and gets his wants met that way and is blackened before he ever holds a light and throws it. And the sixth animal is the Leaver, Brother A, the Spaceman, who takes the space trip to escape the cycle and carries the poison with him in the spaceship on his space boots and infects each new world he lands in and finally crashes back and re-creates the world he fled from in the place he fled to to escape it.

  And the carousel goes round and round to the tune of the carillon, and the children come and start it over da capo and repeat the chorus.

  The Bridge

  Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.

  —Herman Melville (after Schiller)

  8

  So the years go by, the years go helling like the brook down Northeast Mountain in the spring thaw.

  Following that Christmas, I drop out of UNC and head down to Four Roses, stealing firewood out of Nags Head Woods and hauling driftwood off the beach to heat it through the winter. Mornings, sometimes I wake up to find an ice-skimmed toilet and I piss a steaming hole in it, and through the picture window, when I see the dark blue stain against the mid-blue ocean, I grab a rod and reel and sprint down to the water. Standing barefoot in the January surf for as long as I can take it, I haul in four- and five-pound blues and bread and fry them up in Crisco and make fries in the hot oil right beside them and use the heads for soup and keep the big pot bungeed on the porch and eat till it turns funky or some marauding animal overturns it. And I like it out there, living this way, deliberately, having little money, needing little and wishing I could do without it altogether. Reading hours every day and late into the evening, writing poem after poem, I’m like a hermit crab, my real-world claw growing puny with disuse, while the one I use for inner seizing, inner grasping, develops and gets stronger. I see myself as independent from my family, a Taoist metabolizing sunlight, even as I’m living at Four Roses. Wanting’s dangerous and since I still want something from my people I hide it—from myself, primarily—and come to get it in this place that isn’t really even fit to live in in the winter. So though I think I’ve left it, the old competition with George A. goes on unabated in the shadows, and maybe that’s the reason why this winter, reading Absalom, Absalom! for the first time—about the white brother who loves and shoots the black one in a dispute over a woman—I feel as though I’m levitating above the mattress. Though I don’t consciously remember, something in me remembers for me how I put my six-gun to Margaret’s stomach and pulled the trigger when she told me he was coming.

  And in the spring, I hitchhike to New Orleans and visit Randy, my old friend from Exeter, who’s like a brother, only chosen. While he’s in classes at Tulane, I’m reading in Howard-Tilton Library, and in the afternoons we meet and run through Audubon Park and down across the Mississippi Levee, and on Friday nights, we take the streetcar to the Quarter and eat oysters at Felix’s and when school lets out, we take a road trip to the Big Bend and do mushrooms in the desert and dive in the Rio Grande and let it carry us miles downriver.

  And after this adventure, I reenroll in school and back in Chapel Hill one sweltering August night walking past frat row, I gaze into the diorama and see a tall slim clear-faced boy standing on the DKE House steps with a beer in one hand and a canary-yellow cashmere sweater tied around his shoulders. With thick dark hair and a sly, warm grin that deprecates itself from a position of great confidence, he looks familiar, looks, in fact, a little bit like me, or rather who I might have been if the circle had remained unbroken. Who is it? It’s George A. Payne, my brother.

  There I am giving him a bear hug on the porch—me in my white T and cutoffs, my dark hair loose around my shoulders and my bare feet black and calloused from the pavements—and there are his new brothers eyeing him, their pledge, and me, the hostile who’s penetrated their perimeter, trying to do the social math that puts the two of us together.

  –Goddamn, George A.—goddamn! I say, pushing him away to look. You look great. You look like a million dollars.

  –Thanks, he says, holding up a ring of keys and giving them a jingle. Come on, I want to show you something.

  He leads me to the curb, where a new 280Z—metallic bronze, the color of a new-struck penny—gleams beneath the streetlight. I shelf my eyes and peer through my ­reflection —between deep bucket seats, a high transmission well with the stick trussed up like a dominatrix in fawn leather.

  –This is yours?

  He gives me the grin of happy illegality, the one he gave me on the porch last Christmas.

  –How much did this cost?

  –We got an end-of-season deal.

  –How m
uch?

  –About seven?

  –Seven thousand dollars?

  It’s a good thing I’m a Taoist, a good thing I don’t care about material possessions, or else I might be hurt by the injustice, the disproportion in our portions, I might grow wroth like Cain did when the Lord showed preference to Abel.

  But on the other hand, nine months ago at Mandala, sobbing into his big hands, George A. seemed to have lost the basic certainty that who he’d be when he woke up in the morning was the same person he’d been when he lay down the previous evening. So fuck the car, and fuck the shotgun for that matter.

  –Take me for a spin, you asshole.

  George A. makes an apologetic wince.

  –I have this thing for rush. Rain check?

  –Rain check.

  We hug and pat each other on the back—two brisk claps as always—and when we pull away this time it seems to me our eye lines don’t quite intersect, or maybe just mine doesn’t because I’m looking off across his shoulder. And there I leave him on the DKE House porch, fraternizing with his new brothers—brothers not by blood but chosen—and walk away down Cameron deeper into campus as the bell tower tolls the hour and the carillon plays the Fight Song, Rah, rah, Car’lina-lina, and I sing the chorus, Bullshit, fucking bullshit.

  And the good news is his breakdown appears to have been a one-off like the doctors said at Mandala, a bad reaction to that funky weed he smoked before he went back out to practice, and it will be five more years before we get the diagnosis and are disabused of this illusion. For now it seems that he’s the old George A. again with a new Datsun for his trouble and my shotgun thrown in into the bargain. As with Margaret’s teenage pregnancy, sickness, injury and crisis are once again rewarded in our family. You get something, but you have to give up something for it. Me, I’d prefer to keep the something and go barefoot from April to Thanksgiving, but my anger and my drinking, like my recent sojourn at Four Roses, are clues I’m not as free as I think either. And as in some fairy tale, even as we grow to manhood and go off into our separate lives, who George A. and I are today is who we will remain, and down below us at the center of the iceberg, no longer hot, at ambient temperature, lies the shotgun, forgotten but not gone, till something in me bids me to go back and find it and bring it up into sunlight, hoc opus, hic labor.

  And in his Carolina years, George A. falls in love with Cammy Pruden, a pretty blonde Chi O, who can do shots with the boys on Saturday night and do the down-and-dirty shag and show up at church on Sunday morning looking demure and put together in the BMW her daddy gave her for her birthday. He’s an agribusiness magnate somewhere in the eastern precincts, down there in Pasquotank or maybe it’s Perquimans County, and one day driving to the coast George A. pulls over and nods at shiny green John Deeres, multiples of them, heading down the rows in fields that stretch away to the horizon. All that, George A. says, is Cammy’s family fiefdom, and he asks her to marry him and she accepts and George A. gives her our grandmother Mary’s ring and Cammy gives George A. a Labrador retriever and a doggy bed from L.L. Bean for Christmas.

  Me, a month before I graduate, in a sudden fit of ­practicality—a panic—I stop by a professor’s office and ask him the procedure one—that is, I—might follow to become a Poet in the real world. Interrupted at his grading, he looks up somber-faced and blinks.

  –Mr. Payne, he says, if you need a kick in the ass, go to grad school; if not, go out and live a little. That’s what they all did, the ones I think you want to emulate, or ought to if you’re serious in your ambition.

  My career counseling in toto—there you have it—lasts under a minute.

  So I head down to the beach and take a minimum-wage job in a cabinet shop, making $2.30 an hour and writing in the evenings. I learn to use a table saw, a router, to measure twice before I cut, to build countertops and cabinets. After five months on the job, I’ve got the whole thing pretty much, except for finishing and painting, and the owner spends fifteen minutes with me in the morning giving me a list, and then goes about his business while I build his kitchens and install them in the houses going up up north along the ocean in Duck and in Corolla. And one day on a job, a contractor hands me an invoice and I realize that on this project in which I’ve done all the labor, I’m making roughly ten cents on the dollar to the owner’s ninety, which brings Marx home more viscerally than reading Kapital did at Carolina. The qi-exchange equation’s out of balance—not 50-50 or even 60-40, but 90-10—and I feel exploited, as if I’m suffering an extraction, but when I ask him for a raise, he stares down at his feet and shakes his head as though my character has suddenly become suspect. When I’ve been there for another month, he says, he’ll bump me up a quarter.

  So I say sayonara and head off to Wanchese where I can make twice the hourly rate working in the fish house, shucking scallops and filleting flounder. Once there, I begin to ask incoming captains if they’ll take me fishing, and mostly they regard me with misgiving, shake their heads and walk off without comment, but eventually one takes a chance on me and I ship out on a scalloper, a Western rig called the Bald Eagle. Two weeks at sea without a shower, six hours on, six hours off around the clock, the work’s so brutal I, a seasoned runner, develop nosebleeds from the strain of constant lifting. I like it, though, like the hardness, like the pitching deck and sunrise on the ocean, like it that the crew is paid in shares and when the boat does well, we do, and when it doesn’t, we share the disappointment. In Wanchese, the qi-exchange equation is in better balance, and I like the men I work with, and after a few trips I get to try my hand at one of the big Hathaway winches that bring the massive dredges off the bottom and dump them on the work deck, and an old-timer on that boat tells me I have the best touch he’s ever seen at the winch, a compliment I relish.

  I’m a sojourner in that world, though, and unlike many of my fellows I have the intention to leave and the ability to do so. And one day at the P.O., when I stop in after work in my white boots and orange Grundéns oilskins, I find a check for $2,100, my first dividend from Rose Oil Company, my share of the surplus value generated by the labor of people I don’t even know in a business started by my grandfather where I’ve never worked and will never work an hour. I stare at that check for sixty seconds, maybe only half that, and then I take it to the bank and cash it because it means I get to spend the winter writing instead of fishing. And so in addition to the money, I get a lesson in human nature, namely mine, as I who recently played the exploited laborer now get to play the capitalist and consume the surplus value generated by the work of others, and I’m not the good one or the bad one, I have both capacities inside myself and play them each in turn as the platter turns and the carillon plays the music.

  And one night at a big dance the whole beach turns out to, I see two women who aren’t local dancing together on the dance floor, blonde on blonde and girl on girl, and they own the room and know it. One of them is Nell, who’s from D.C. and just my type, blonde and insubordinate and almost six feet tall, and something about her sends me. Her inch-long bangs look radical and self-inflicted, the sort of thing you do in the bathroom mirror late at night in a cold-water flat in the East Village or Adams Morgan when you want to make a major change and your hair is what you have to work with. I introduce myself, we trade a bit of repartee, as Nell’s blonde friend, Amelia, smiles and discreetly makes an exit. Before long Nell comes to dinner at Four Roses, and it turns out she’s smart and funny and a feminist. She’s working at a local medical clinic saving bucks to go to grad school. She wants to be a midwife, but she’s applied to Yale to do it. Nell has a subversive agenda together with a plan of positive engagement, a more developed one than I have when it comes to my own future. And pretty soon we’re skinny-dipping, doing Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in the wash as waves sheet in around us, and not long after that she’s living with me at Four Roses and we’re sharing family stories.

  Nell’s an Army brat; her father
is a general and her mom made her career advancing his and had a stroke at fifty and kept her mental sharpness and lost her speech, and Nell’s determination not to let her voice be taken is connected. In my mind’s eye I see her at those garden parties that her mom arranged with the trim officers and officers’ wives—­nineteen- and twenty-year-old Nell breezing in from college, braless, in her sleeveless T, with her unshaved pits and her self-inflicted haircut and her 100-megawatt smile, tossing out remarks about the military-industrial complex. And, at those same parties, there would be Nell’s older sister, Ann, carrying the hors d’oeuvres tray with her hair curled and a polka-dotted dress on like their mother’s. Our families bear no resemblance to each other, yet reverse gender and birth order and Ann and Nell for all intents and purposes might be George A. and David. I don’t have to recruit Nell or explain about the poison in the wheat or in the water, she knows all about it, and it’s me who boards her spaceship, next stop New Haven.

  Before we go, though, one weekend George A. shows up in the Z from Carolina, and the Rose Oil dividend I’ve put into my writing, he’s put into the new pump-action Browning in the rear compartment of the Z-ster, and the decoys, two mesh bags full, and the waders and the stag-handled Italian bird knife with the gut hook and the private guide who’s going to take him duck hunting in the morning. George A. invites me, and I go, carrying binoculars and not a shotgun.

  The blind’s a mile out in the Albemarle, and I recall us out there under open sky on open water, the brutal cold and razor wind and the great dune, Penny’s Hill, golden in the distance like a magic wheat mound on the barrier island, looming over the Corolla Light and the Whalehead Club, abandoned in that era, like a fairy-tale castle under its blue copper roof tiles. Though we see chevrons of snow geese and Canadas passing way high up, not many ducks are flying. Late in the afternoon, though, George A. finally gets a shot and hits a wood duck, a little fast one with a head as highly colored as a harlequin in the commedia dell’arte.