“I don’t want to let him up,” I said.
Mr. Caswell understood why. “Ben,” he said, “if David lets you up, will you stop fighting?”
Ben wouldn’t answer; he tried to bridge and throw me off. I threw my weight on him hard and flattened him out again. Then he tried to butt me with his forehead, but he’d tried that before.
“You boys are friends,” Mr. Caswell said. “Why do you have to fight so much?”
“He wouldn’t use my bike!” I said. I was very angry, and sorry for myself, and was even afraid I might cry.
“Ben wouldn’t use your bike?”
“He wouldn’t use it!”
“My goodness!” Mr. Caswell said, trying to be funny. He was a funny man, actually. One time he told us he had a cold in his elbow, and he said it in such a serious, surprised sort of voice even Ben laughed. “Heavens to Betsy! It’s like I tried to give a man five dollars and he wouldn’t take it so I hit him!”
Neither Ben nor I felt this was very funny.
“Well, what are you going to do when it comes suppertime? Can we send out some food for you?” Mr. Caswell asked.
“I don’t want to keep him down!” I burst out, regretting it immediately, because I saw a flicker of satisfaction on Ben’s face. “I wish I had another arm,” I said through my teeth. “I’d bash your face in!”
“Well, boys,” Mr. Caswell said, “are you going to hurt yourselves?”
“I don’t want to hurt him!” I said, still feeling sorry for myself. After all, hadn’t I won this fight?
“Ben?” Mr. Caswell said.
Ben wouldn’t answer.
“Ben,” Mr. Caswell said. I sensed pride and resignation in the word. Mr. Caswell thought for a moment, and then he said, “Well, I’m not going to butt in. Seems you’re both old enough so it wouldn’t help anyway. I’d stop and chat awhile, but I’ve got to finish my route.”
Before he left us, he reached down and with gentle fingers brushed the thorn from his son’s cheek. It was just in the skin, and Ben’s cheek didn’t even bleed. Then he was off, ambling along in his casual, mailman’s stride, leaving us with our problem.
It was now late in the afternoon. Just perceptibly the light was fading. It was the time when near things still have sharp edges and colors—the barberries of the hedge gleamed orangered, and the round leaves were dark green still. We seemed to have been prisoners of that small place for hours, and I began to recognize each tuft of grass. A few inches from Ben’s white hand was a crushed dandelion stem, split and bent so that I could see the silver inside of it, and I saw it again, with recognition, noting that it hadn’t changed. Ben strained against my weight. Each time, I could summon just enough strength to overpower him.
How long were we held in that deadlock? It began to grow dark. Ben’s face flickered like a dim light as my eyes moved, and the small twigs faded upward into his hair. I knew he would never give up. Once, he actually spoke, and frightened me. “Will you give up?” he asked. It was like a dream in which logic turns crazy. Was he the one who held me down? Once, he caught me off guard and turned me over, and for a violent moment we scrabbled, sobbing, into the barberry hedge. I fought him back down again, and brought him gasping into the bare dirt alongside the hedge. I hadn’t known I had such strength; I’d bent his arms where I had no leverage, where pain alone seemed to be my strength. My fingers seemed to have gone right through his wrists between tendon and bone, and he cursed me in a high, strangely boyish voice, half bawling—one long, little scream. I sobbed my own curses back at him, crying because it was so unfair that my greater strength hadn’t won this fight. And then there were long periods of silence, almost of relaxation, and I listened to the cars pass along the street. Then a light came on in a window across the street, and we knew it must be near suppertime.
And somehow our fight ended, not necessarily because of supper and its official demand upon us. Our fights always had to end in some sort of truce, which could be forgotten, so that we could fight again the next day. Neither of us ever won; most fights are not clearly won, and ours never were. On this occasion, I’d have to meet him the next day, Saturday, because we both had Saturday jobs at Milledge & Cunningham, sweeping up bushels of thread and cloth from beneath the cutting and sewing tables. Instead of overalls, they were making field jackets and fatigue clothes for the Army. Where Lucky Strike Green went, we thought. And Sunday night, Ben would be relieving me again on the Air Raid Tower. We couldn’t get away from each other if we tried.
When I got home, my soiled clothes were noticed, and I learned that about fourteen people had managed to see the fight, including my sister, Catherine. It was decided (my father abstaining) that after supper and a bath I would go to the Caswells’ and apologize. My arguments against doing this are of no matter here; I had to go. I didn’t mind facing Ben or his father, but Mrs. Caswell was another thing. She usually affected a richly ironic tone that left me speechless—even, I sometimes felt, armless and legless. I couldn’t cope with it. “To what honor do we owe your illustrious presence, Sir David?” That sort of thing. Mr. Caswell was hardly ever in sight. He’d be down in the basement or out in the garage.
I rode my bike the two blocks to Ben’s house. I didn’t have a light, and there was only one streetlight in between, but we always rode right on through the darkness. Our house was huge—we had rooms we never used at all—but Ben’s house was very small. It had enough rooms in it, but they were all in miniature—neat, small rooms crammed full of things. The Atwater Kent radio touched the living-room sofa on one side and the matching chair on the other. You could bump your head if you weren’t careful going up the little stairs. Ben was an only child, so they didn’t need a lot of room, but to see him stooping around in the halls and in his own narrow, low-ceilinged room made me want to get outside. The place was like a doll’s house, and Mrs. Caswell was the doll—she was round and short. The rest of us should have been outside, sticking our hands in through the windows. Nothing inside ever seemed to change, to get used; the lace antimacassars on the sofa arms never got dirty, never were pushed askew.
When I reached the house, I dropped my bike on the grass and went up on the little porch as quietly as I could. Finally I knocked, and Mrs. Caswell came to the door. Her skin had tiny striations on it, like a McIntosh apple; in some kinds of light she looked as though she had a rash all over. She was full of pressure, and she made me nervous.
“David, David, David,” she said, sighing with weary tolerance, as though I’d been there too often. Which I certainly hadn’t. She smiled—she always smiled—and I thought it hurt her to smile, because that constant irony seemed to be the result of pain.
She put her hand on my arm and drew me inside; she was always touching me. “Our postman is in his hobby shop,” she said, “and our Good Boy is in his books.”
She sat me down, too deeply, into the sofa. I never knew where to sit on it, in that last moment when there was still a little choice, because the cushions tilted and shifted. This time I sat next to an arm, too deep, but I hooked an elbow over the arm to hold myself up.
“Shouldn’t you allow Benjamin to do his homework?” she asked. “I suppose yours is all done, neat as pie?”
“No,” I said. Already I was going into a mild, classroomlike coma. Nothing that was going to happen was anything I wanted to happen.
“But David,” she said, affecting a reasonable tone, “how can our Benjamin be valedictorian if we don’t let him study?”
This was ridiculous. Nothing in the world could keep Ben from being valedictorian. Usually a girl was, because they took easy subjects like home economics or typing, but Ben’s only rival, Joan Warren, had moved to Northlee. Who cared, anyway? I don’t think Ben cared; he just had the habit of doing all his work. You could never pin anything like that on Ben. I thought, Why is she trying to ruin his reputation? My mother would have more sense than that.
Ben had heard us, and came stooping down the stairs, no opinion of my pre
sence visible on his sallow face. Behind him, the wallpaper was the same sallow color as his face.
“Hi, Dave,” he said. His eyes were blank, as though he were still thinking equations.
It was then that I confessed, lying, and trying to make little of it. “We were just wrestling,” I said.
“Just wrestling,” Ben agreed.
“My little boys were wrestling!” Mrs. Caswell said. “My little cubs, trying out their new muscles!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just wrestling a little.” I got up to go, and as I turned toward the door she came up to me and took me fiercely by the arm. I looked down into her face.
“Don’t you realize that Benjamin is a genius?” she said. There was a lot of hissing in her voice; she really meant it. I didn’t really doubt it myself. But she scared me. She scared me by saying such a crazy thing. I jerked my arm away from her hand and ran out of her house.
A few days later, just before school let out, Eddie Kusacs buzzed us all again. He came five times in all, that year, and each time is distinct in my memory. I don’t know where he came from, or what he was doing in a Marine Corsair so far from the sea. But there he was, fracturing the blue sky above the high school, fracturing our attention, fracturing the school, the teachers, telling us how we were the prisoners of our little town. Then he was gone.
The bicycle jumping that afternoon was more daring than usual. Pete Kelly established a new record. I beat my old mark by one foot. The sunlight made me sneeze as it bounced off the sidewalk, and beneath me was the familiar noise of sprockets and spokes, the little stressful twangs and creaks of my bike—then the lift and belly thrill of the flight. We didn’t go high in the air, but when I landed there was a dense, hard push through my elbows, and my handlebars squeaked down an inch or two. Then the slewing in the dry dirt beyond the walk, and for a moment all the girls’ eyes were still upon me.
As Ben came up to take his ritual jump, I said, “Come on, genius.” This was a bit like poking a snake, and I didn’t say it very loudly. I’ll never know if he heard it or not. But I still see him very clearly as he swung his long leg up over his bike. I see his blue sock and a section of white, hairless leg, thin and uniform as a length of two-inch pipe. He pushed off and began to pump hard. His long, limp hair came down over his forehead, and the wind pushed it aside, parted it in the middle. His mouth was set, made into a little slit by effort—the same expression he wore when he was mad at me—and he hunched over those strange handlebars of his that bent down and around like ram’s horns. There he went, his chain grinding, and he hit the ramp. I think his tire blew then and his wheel buckled later, when he landed, but others said no, everything went haywire at once.
I saw Ben in the air, swimming, parallel to his bike, and on his face still was that same determined, closed look I always see in my memories of him. Then he and the bike came down together. We got to him pretty quickly; I was proud because I was the first to get there, and we tried to untangle him. It was serious, we knew—no mere scrape case. His head didn’t want to come off the handlebars, and we knew enough to leave it alone while the girls’ screams brought authority from inside the school.
Dr. Winston was there in ten minutes, and when he and the school nurse removed Ben from his bike, Ben’s long hands spread and contracted as though he were rubbing coins between his thumbs and forefingers. They took him off to Northlee to the hospital, and by the next day the janitor had put bleach on the cement where Ben had bled, and a sawhorse over the canted block of sidewalk.
How were we all affected by this? It was shocking enough, but it was only a bicycle accident, I think we felt. That hex nut, for instance, that dented Ben’s skull—I’d turned it with a wrench while Ben held the handlebars straight. It was too familiar, not the instrument of the drama we wanted in our lives—not with the shadow of a Corsair in our minds and that huge radial engine still roaring in our ears.
When I met Mr. Caswell on the street a few days after the accident, I asked again—I had called at the house earlier—how Ben was getting along.
“Ben is still very sick, David,” he said. “He’s very, very sick.”
“Is he going to be out of school long?”
“We don’t know how long.” Mr. Caswell’s voice was calm and exact. “He hasn’t come to yet, you see.”
I think he already knew that the part of Ben’s brain that governed consciousness had been damaged. His voice was calm, but his eyes were glittery—not really wet, I thought, but they looked as if they had been polished.
“I hope he gets well soon,” I said.
“Thank you. Thank you, David,” he said.
I didn’t know what to do, so I stared at him for a moment, not able to share his feelings, though I knew immediately that Ben was in very grave danger and Mr. Caswell was grieving for his son. Already grieving—that I knew. I told him that Mr. Skelton had announced in assembly that Ben would graduate next June with the rest of us, even though he might miss spring term.
“Yes, he told us,” Mr. Caswell said. And then a strange thing happened to his mouth. As he drew in a long breath, his teeth clicked together, hard, about ten times. Nothing else happened, except that I suddenly felt his grief behind my own eyes, and my throat hurt badly. For a moment he looked straight at me, seeing what I was embarrassed to be caught at. I thought, it isn’t certain that Ben won’t get well again. But I knew, and perhaps because it is the healthy trick of a child to blame the inanimate for every accident, I felt myself begin to burn with an indignation inexpressible in any other way.
“It was that lousy bike!” I shouted. “That stupid bike!”
He was surprised. His mouth opened and closed upon the colorless, uniform rows of his dentures. He made a motion with his arm, and I thought he meant to put his mailbag down, so that he could comfort me. I walked away without looking back.
Ben never did regain consciousness. He died of pneumonia three years later, in 1946, while I was stationed at Fort Lawton, Seattle. I suppose I did, finally, have a few moments of glory in that war, although they were all Stateside. But as a veteran, if I’d admitted it, my claims to the war were fraudulent. The war missed me. My reserve enlistment ran out two months before the Korean War. That one missed me, too, so I am quite aware that things do miss, like the little bullet that once followed its blind trajectory so close to my heart.
Today, when Mr. Caswell came to our house, Davy wasn’t there to meet him because he’d gone shopping with his mother. I walked down and met him halfway.
“Hi, Dave,” he said, and unbuckled the strap from a bundle of letters and bills and junk, as he has now many thousand times.
“Hi, Bill,” I said, because we are both grown men now, and I can’t call him “Mr. Caswell.”
With his gray hand, he gave me a couple of letters and said, sternly, “Where’s my assistant today?”
Because he said it in an apparently serious way, he took me a little by surprise. I was caught, staring, while he waited for me to get the joke. I soon understood how he meant his stern voice to be taken, but he had put me off balance, and for a moment I felt the beat of my heart. “Went shopping with his mother,” I said.
“Well, now,” he said, and looked at me for a moment or two longer.
As I’ve said, we had never spoken of Ben, in all those years, and I found that I couldn’t, even now, though I would have liked to, if only to try to exorcise those memories of a time so full of fierce expectation. I might have told Mr. Caswell of the power that Ben still seems to hold over me—Ben, who still seems strong, unbeaten by time and reality. But what would that have meant to him? We were, both of us, merely survivors, who felt, I suppose, the irrational guilt that all survivors feel. Mr. Caswell didn’t say anything further to me. We stood there in a kind of deadlock, looking at each other. Then, with tolerance and complicity, we slid our soft glances apart.
Horned Pout Are Evil
HORNED POUT are evil, and it is only upon those evenings when one’s dark star is in
the ascendance that the urge to catch them comes. They are the slimy fish with bodies like biceps. They grunt at you, and they are poison to the touch in a darkly magic way, because if you hold them in just the right way they can’t harm you. But they are slippery, and when you probe for the hook they grind down on your fingers with their sharp but shallow teeth. You know that no matter how careful you are, at least one spine will get you, and these spines are covered with a highly irritating scum that keeps the wound sore for days. You go for horned pout in the darkest part of the night, by lantern light on doubtful, tarnlike water. They never die; in the morning they still lie bug-eyed in your bucket, smacking their wet lips and twitching their black barbels. Every horrible, necessary thing you do to them is done while they live. You skin them while they twitch and complain, and their pink meat quivers upon the board, quivers again in the salted batter, and then you eat them.
The Japanese favor a fish that is deadly poisonous, and expert butchers cut the meat close enough to the center of poison to give the meat some of its flavor, but not too close to kill—most of the time. A kind of culinary Russian roulette. While I’ve never heard of anyone being killed by a horned pout, I do suggest some similarity here. The fascination of the abomination, as Conrad said. The closer we get to nature, the less we tend to sentimentalize it, and the more we recognize ourselves as part of its infinite patience, its cruelty and beauty. Without the knowledge of danger, how can we aspire to be alive? We must keep our senses quivering.
One warm night in August the urge for horned pout came—or, more properly, it came first to my son, Peter, who was then nine. The night was moonless and dark blue, and the stars were hazy. We were at our cabin on the mountain, and the bug season was mostly over. Trout fishing was in the doldrums, and neither of us had felt that tapping message from what is wild for a long time.
After Pete suggested it, and the idea began to take hold, we naturally began to think of Ozzie Huckins. One reason was, he’d be hurt if we didn’t at least ask him, even though his wife might not let him go, and others were that he lived down on the flats where there were mudworms and night crawlers, and he had a boat and a Jeep pickup. I had a boat, too, but it was down on the lake. We could have fished in the lake, in the delta where the Fowler River comes into it, but the horned pout ran quite small there. Ozzie would know of some pond deep in the woods or swamps, accessible only to his Jeep. Also there was Ozzie’s hard cider, which is nearly too beautiful to drink out of ordinary tumblers. The current batch, I knew, had aged two years in used Newburyport rum barrels before being bottled. It was nearly colorless, clear except for a few tiny flakes, like those in Goldwasser, and not quite as grossly carbonated as champagne. Some of these qualities were caused by Ozzie’s hanging a cheesecloth bag of raw hamburger in each barrel during the aging process. Someday I’m going to find out why, but until I do I’ll savor this paradox along with all the others.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 8
