If a paratrooper left Club Geronimo with a girl, it was proper for him to use the stairs, but otherwise he had to jump off the balcony—a descent of some twelve feet—onto the hard dirt alley below. Because of previous broken ankles, collarbones, and wrists, this practice was frowned upon by the MPs, and if they caught you at it you would receive “company punishment” for two weeks. But the punishment by the members of your company for breaking tradition was rather harsh too. So, while drinking in Club Geronimo, you always had ahead of you this scary little choice of exit. Somehow this awaiting test made the atmosphere of the club a little more edgy than it ordinarily would have been even among paratroopers, who had already, by volunteering for such duty, indicated their physical narcissism.
But this is a story of madness in the context of madness, about the actions of Corporal E., who couldn’t seem to leave me alone. He came from Pennsylvania, where he had grown up on a farm. Though he was solidly built, I always thought of his broad muscles as lacking in tone, like an animal raised too quickly for slaughter, transformed at the end into its proper increments of protein and fat, something less than animal. He carried no extra fat, of course, but to me his strength seemed dumb, badly organized. He was always ordering me to do pushups, and because he was cadre I had to do them. It seemed to perplex him that I did push-ups as easily as I did, and I could see in his eyes a deep yearning for some more satisfying way to utilize me. At the time, surrounded as I was by the Army’s irrationality, I didn’t consider his constant need of me to indicate any nameable psychosis, but now I think I can put a name to it, and the name is erotic delusion. He was always winking at me, and bumping into me, his expression indicating collusion between us. It was only after my usual cold or exasperated response that he would have me do the push-ups.
This night, he’d been watching me for a while, and when I was coming back from the head he deliberately bumped me into a table. When I didn’t respond the way his delusion predicted, he pointed to the wet linoleum and told me to get down there and give him twenty. I examined the cruddy floor and my clean, creased chinos and told him to go fuck himself.
I won’t reproduce the usual ceremonial posturings and banal insults that followed. Suffice to say that at a certain point he hit me on the left cheek hard enough to hurt like hell and cause me to taste blood. I won’t indulge here in the usual modest protestations of inadequacy, either. What happened next was that I hurt Corporal E. very badly—so badly, evidently, that he was reduced to a strange, childish panic. He managed to grab my left hand and clamp his teeth over my bent forefinger. Once his jaws were set, the rest of him turned passive and still. In considerable pain, I found myself standing there with the corporal more or less on the end of my left arm.
A strange feeling. His eyes were open, and seemed to stare into mine. I requested that he let go. When he didn’t comply, I made the mistake of hitting him in the nose. The pain became unbearable, as if the blow had turned the bolt in a lock. He didn’t even blink, and blood from his nose mixed with blood from my finger. I had to get away from him. I felt that I was becoming my own finger, as though he had all of me in his jaws. I continued to argue with his unwavering gaze.
“Let go or I’ll have to hit you with this bottle,” I said reasonably, pressing a beer bottle tentatively along his head above his ear. “Let go and I won’t hit you anymore, okay?”
Maybe he had won after all, I thought. I couldn’t believe, had never known before, how one small member of my body could generate so much pain. I became afraid of all wounds, as tender as a child. Even the twelve-foot jump from the balcony now loomed before me like an impossible cliff. The pain was so intense I couldn’t hit him with the bottle for fear of causing such pain in him.
My friends had gathered around us. They argued with him too, and offered me helpful suggestions I could barely hear through the vibrating pain. They told me to hit him, to gouge out his eyes. One tried to pry open the jaws with a spoon, another by pressing the joints of the jawbone with his thumbs, another by strangulation. Nothing worked. I began to faint, and had to put my head down for a moment until the drab colors of the linoleum resumed their proper tones. I tapped his head with the bottle, a tender, tentative little blow that failed to register in his bright eyes. The others discussed where on his head would be the best spot to sap him. No one wanted to kill him, really, but all could see that the situation was intolerable. Corporal E.’s right canine, in particular, was half sunk into my finger, surely grating upon white bone. “Maybe they got a crowbar,” I heard someone say.
The pain flowed up my forearm and scorched my elbow, played about with my upper arm, sometimes on the surface, then again like the thrust of a huge needle down into the clefts between the muscles themselves. My arm felt flayed, then drawn, as though it were being stripped, layer by gleaming layer. I had no idea what was going on in the Club Geronimo then, I just spoke to the corporal’s steadfast madness. I had a steel table fork at his throat, the dull tines pressing into the complications of his neck. “I’ll kill you,” I told him. “I’ll have to. I’m going to shove this fork clean through your neck. I’ll twist it. Let go. Listen, do you hear me? I can’t stand this. I’ll have to kill you. Let go. Let go of my finger. Let go.”
My earnestness had reduced me to plain language. I called him no names, accused him and his mother of no perversions. It was as though we were alone, made one by this terrible connection, bone to bone. When I touched the fork to his neck the pain thrust my own consciousness askew. It was just his head that had me, like the severed head of a snapping turtle clenched upon a stick, the stick you hold out, dreamlike, as a substitute for your hand.
The pain increased. It never reached a plateau where I might confront it, know it, and negotiate some kind of treaty with it. But it was the sight of his teeth deep in my flesh, and the fear of amputation, that finally made me act. I took the bottle again, and began to tap above his ear. With each small blow my whole left side was seared by fire. I felt like a man having to amputate his own limb. Still operating, I think, was a deep rule against murder, but this was true desperation and I began to tap his head harder, faster, the soft ring of the bottle on his skull growing harder until the tympanic hollows below his bones answered, and finally his black pupils widened. With a slow, even, peaceful elevation of his gaze the pigmented parts of his eyes moved up into his forehead. His jaws slowly opened upon a gush of my blood and I was free, singular; it was like being born again.
A human bite is considered dangerous, and my crushed and torn finger was treated by the medics in radical fashion. After the novocaine, the cleaning, the stitches, the tetanus and penicillin shots, I felt as I know Corporal E. did the next morning—that something much more climactic than a saloon fight had occurred. Within a week he had arranged to have himself transferred out of the regiment.
Soon I will have to go to my office to have the conference with G. about his frightening novel, and I find myself in anxiety, yearning again for that sudden clear freedom, the clamped homunculus gone from my flesh forever.
Did I say that one of the fictional objects G. has set up for vengeance is a college professor whose open, rather shy demeanor hides the most calculating, malicious intent, and whose initials are the same as mine? This character in G.’s novel is called Albert Bamberger, and in the end, when Bamberger is found out, degraded and subjected to public contumely, G.’s lack of narrative and descriptive talent is transcended by a kind of gleeful energy. At the most dramatic point, Albert Bamberger, attempting to escape, is brought down by a knife thrown by the hero.
Am I right in believing that Albert Bamberger, who gets the “Arkansas toothpick” between his shoulder blades, is me, or am I just another madly alert animal in a world of imagined conspiracy? G. will no doubt watch me slyly as we discuss his novel, because I won’t bring this matter of identification into the open. That is what he will be waiting for, but I won’t do it. I know he wants me to admit it, to have to feel that fictional blade, that ghostly s
teel, in my back.
We use each other, the materials of reality, our experiences, everything at all in our “encapsulated delusional systems.” Even in my apprehension I sense my kinship with G., and cannot wholly condemn his mad attempt to make his own satisfying order out of chaos. I, too, am driven by a similar horror vacui. Though I would call my work by another name, I will use G. and all the rest for my own purposes, use them coldly and without mercy, more coldly than their own warm needful selves could ever understand.
The Buck in Trotevale’s
I WATCH my son pursue an apple across the floor. He is seven months old. He grabs the shiny globe with both hands and puts it to his mouth: squeak, squeak, he gums it. There it goes, rolling bumpily beneath a chair, while he gravely watches. Onward! He’ll corner the damned thing. Someday he’ll get his teeth into such promising fruit. Meanwhile, he tries. And tries again—he won’t give up. I am sure that I was never so determined. Although his eyes are mirror images of mine, I am uncomfortably aware of an alien deepness there, as if even now he were governed by a discipline I have never known. He works at his apple as he does at his world, single-mindedly, until it either accommodates him or shows itself to be impervious. Now the apple has escaped him again, and he watches it until it stops rolling, marks it well before arranging himself for the long crawl toward it. He rarely cries…and I wonder, knowing that they will always be mine, at the injustice of this stranger’s inevitable wounds.…
When I was fourteen, coping with that world of benevolent rulers—coping with an instinctive directness much like my son’s—Mr. Brown rented our furnished room. Now, I believe Mr. Brown to have been a kind of Yankee, although I didn’t at first because he came from the South—from Massachusetts, where all those Massachusetts hunters come from, the ones who park in the middle of the road and shoot heifers for deer, not knowing the difference; proudly (it is said every year) bearing their pied trophies through Leah Town Square on the fenders of their Buicks, deer tags fluttering from bovine ears. I never saw this, myself, but at fourteen, New Hampshire boys are careful license-plate watchers. Massachusetts. I still hear some disapproval echoing in my older voice.
I didn’t know Mr. Brown very well at first. He was quiet, and had a talent for missing squeaky boards and squeaky stairs. I’d see him in the upstairs hall once in a while, between his room and the bathroom. He’d come home from work, wash, and change his clothes before walking downtown to the Welkum Diner for his supper. I can see him walking down Maple Street—tall, superbly balanced, each foot reaching the sidewalk as if searching carefully for purchase. His heels rose lightly before each step, and I believed that if the sidewalk had suddenly tipped right up on its side, Mr. Brown would have been ready for it. He was in his late sixties, I suppose—an almost too handsome man with his tanned face and thick white hair, his straight shoulders—and yet I like to think of him as being in his seventies. Seventy-seven makes me think of him, the two numerals spare and lean as the man, trim as most men are who grow old and active. He walked a lot. He even skied, and on winter Sundays we would see him on Pike Hill doing his graceful old-fashioned christies on the unbroken snow, each long ski under control, his ski clothes fresh and dry. In the summer he hired a high school boy and a motorboat and water-skied on Lake Cascom. His age was a little more apparent when he wore bathing trunks, of course. His belly bulged out. But even then, seeing that taut little pot, you knew that it contained only enough innards to run the lean body. There was no surplus about Mr. Brown.
He hunted, too. His shotgun was a Purdey. He let me see it in its oak-and-leather case, luminous as if a fire burned beneath the French walnut stock, the metal covered with delicate English scrollwork. His deer rifle was almost too beautiful for my young eyes, and I have never seen another like it. It was made in Austria, between the wars, and had two barrels, over and under, like a shotgun, but with a high carved comb to the stock to bring Mr. Brown’s eye up to an iron sight. I held this masterpiece, a prince among our common Winchesters and Marlins.
“I have it because, in its own way, it’s almost as beautiful as a deer,” he said. “I’m sure the deer couldn’t care less, but I do.”
But precious as it was, I would have chosen my father’s Winchester. With that familiar weapon in my hand, my vision of myself as a Yankee boy, thin-lipped and taciturn, was complete. Such foreign beauties as the over-and-under could not seduce me from the common dream.
One conforms, of course, without knowing it—and not only to the common dream, for I was skillfully eased into my after-school job at Trotevale’s without once questioning the justice of this sentence. Collusion it was, I know now, between my parents and their dream of Education. Mr. Brown was Trotevale’s shoe clerk, and that was how I got to know him a little better.
Every day after school, and on the long Saturdays, I found myself a clerk among the socks and shirts, with a button on the cash register sacred to my hesitant finger. Hair combed, white shirt and bow tie, I hid down the long aisles of glass-fronted, varnished counters, pretending to be a customer.
I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t tie a knot on a parcel. I counted change too many times before reluctantly giving it up to a customer. “Where are the handkerchiefs?” I would desperately ask a passing clerk. “Where are the boys’ blue denim pants sizes three or four, and what does that mean—age, or inches?” All day I trotted back and forth between customer and source of information, and by the end of the first long Saturday I was amazed and a little frightened by the number of things there were to know, just to being a clerk. Having exhausted everyone else’s patience (how could they remember how many times I’d asked the same question?), I had taken to asking Mr. Brown everything. He never chided me for my profound lack of interest; he had an extremely dependable fund of gentle patience.
“Don’t you have a family?” I asked him once. “Why do you live in our furnished room? Are you going to live here forever?”
“No, I don’t have a family,” he said, no obvious opinion of families in his voice. “No mother, no father, no wife, no children. And most likely I won’t stay here or anyplace else forever. And that’s not such an uncommon way to be.” He smiled that private smile of experience. “I’m what you might call an old bastard. Nobody claims me but myself.”
I know now that this is not so terribly uncommon. There are many nomadic old bastards come to Leah and pass through, not all of them bums or lumberjacks with a quick eye for a bottle. Many are short-order cooks, those skinny food-haters; you can see their bones, their silver identification bracelets, tattoos, and spatulas in any diner, their sunken faces framed by the exhaust fan. There are other kinds: awning-menders, embalmers, one-shot salesmen fleeing some private suburban nightmare—and clerks, like Mr. Brown. They stay a year or two and head around the circuit once again: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont. Old men, mostly, pretty set in their ways, they almost have to be single. The jobs pay little, but there’s always a job somewhere.
Trotevale’s store is no longer on Leah’s square. A couple of years ago the Cascom Savings Bank, next door, took over both buildings, and now the two look like one. Built in 1854 of wood, modernized by a sheathing of red brick in 1907, they are now modernized again, rather gaudily, in three-colored cathedral stone which seems to be held together by chrome strips, like a modern automobile. You hardly notice the disappearance. Trotevale’s sign was black, framed by gilt paint, and the raised gilt letters said TROTEVALE’S. That’s all. Two counters ran down the middle of the store, piled with sweaters, shirts, gloves, and other kinds of “good” clothes. Work clothes were in the basement, piled on plain tables. On the left side of the main floor, shoe boxes filled the wall from front to back, and Mr. Brown, if there were no customers, sat composedly in one of the four wooden armchairs. On the right, glass-fronted cases reached to the ceiling, and every ten feet or so a pair of long-handled tweezers, long enough to reach the highest five-dollar Dobbs, leaned against the cabinets. Ladies’ undispl
ayables were upstairs, along with the office and the tailor’s room, on a wide balcony that went all the way around, close below the stampedmetal ceiling. The balustrade was carved orange cypress: balls, flutes, grapes, Corinthian capitals, and Roman arches. The whole store was fine, consistent 1907, except for the surface of the main floor, which had been covered with plastic tile in wide green and white squares. Upon this miraculous surface the old mahogany counters, the cast-iron adjustable tie racks, the jigsawed buttresses and varnished legs all seemed to float, as in a painting by Dali, an inch or so above the floor. It was Trotevale’s first concession to those two-page magazine ads (before and after), and of course it wasn’t enough. All it did was knock the pins out from under 1907.
Each day after school I’d go home, change my clothes, and go to Trotevale’s for the two hours until closing time. On Saturday I came in at eight-thirty in the morning. Eleven and a half hours! And those long, dusty afternoons were rarely broken by anything amusing. I watched the second hand of the white-faced clock at the back of the store, and sometimes it stopped dead for what seemed like whole seconds. Long ones they were, too. Sometimes I looked at myself, back, front, and sides, in the tricky fitting mirrors, not caring at all for my profile. Better the front view, and I could practice my frigid Yankee stare—that bright aggressive look I found legitimate upon the faces of my friends—the one that declares equality and asks: What kind of a damn fool are you?
Leah, New Hampshire Page 13
