So. They are these defeated people, crumpled up like old Dixie cups someone pissed in before deciding to toss them, fucked up with grief and regret. Right? No, they are giving him shit: “What kind of car is it you drive?” “Who’d you say it was that published your book?” “How big of an advance would a book like this be likely to get?” “Where will we be staying?” These American revolutionaries are interested in the amenities.
The afternoon has had an unusual effect on him. In having sat in a shabby North Berkeley apartment across from the fugitive heiress, the girl whose absence has been the strange floating turd in the punchbowl of jeunesse dorée, Guy feels that he has experienced the sense of wonder you might undergo in opening up an oyster and finding a pearl. So Guy decides he is going to be expansive about it. So they’ve fucked everything up, and they’re mostly wrong, and every exchange they shared with him wobbled at the edge of argument. So the Shepards take a scattershot approach to assigning blame, at times conveniently impugning the dead. So there is not even a single focused reason that will serve to clarify his own motives. He sees a group of people. He sees a narrative. He sees himself having lunch with an editor.
He’s not exactly sure how he’s going to swing it. At least a couple of round trips are in store for someone, and there are the void distances of the interstate, where every caged body becomes an all too obvious ornamentation of the scrub ‘n’ sky landscape, where smokies in their cruisers lie in wait for miscreants, parked in the scant shade at the side of the road to avoid sunshine so hot it splits rocks and the sand-blasted bones of dead mammals. How obvious is the most famous girl in America? He’ll Clark Kent her: glasses and a bun.
The wind is high, bending the tops of the trees, when Randi decides to call it quits for the afternoon. Guy’s been out all day, and she managed to clear chunks of cement, probably left over from the construction of that damned patio that seems designed to unambigously demarcate the limits of one’s outdoor enjoyment, from out of her garden patch, to add fresh soil and fertilizer, and to stake and trellis her tomato seedlings, though it’s probably a little late to be dealing with tomatoes. But she can see and taste them—ripe as blisters, their buttery tang, late summer’s bounty—and it keeps her working through the afternoon. The boxes of KITCHEN STUFF have yet to be unpacked, but it just seemed like one of those days when staying indoors was like asking for an engraved invitation to a total comedown later on, a malignantly gloomy mood from which she would have demanded to be coaxed by Guy, if she could get him to sit in one place. She has been working without gloves, and the dirt has been driven up under her fingernails and embedded in the creases of her hands, inlaid streaks of black, and she admires her hands in the bright kitchen light before scrubbing them in the deep porcelain basin, admires them because dirty hands give shape to another moment in the day’s orderly progression, from clean to dirty to clean again, the dirt spinning down the drain.
She puts on a sweatshirt and goes back outdoors to muscle the patio furniture onto that concrete pad; she swears to God it looks as if you could land a helicopter here if you wanted to. The wind, with its hint of someplace else’s chill gale. She listens for the unmistakable sound of a VW Bug. Tonight she’ll put out the citronella candles, and they’ll relax outside.
HANK WALKED SLOWLY DOWN Burlingame Avenue, a penciled list in the breast pocket of his shirt. The day was bright and clear. He could hear the whistle of a Southern Pacific train behind him as it moved through the station without stopping.
Today was the housekeeper’s day off and he’d driven downtown in the station wagon, yes, taking matters into his own hands, as Lydia had said with a sneer. He enjoyed doing the marketing. The Safeway was laid out to be enjoyed, bright and wide and colorful. He enjoyed the checkout counter, had a favorite among the clerks, Roy, whom he’d gotten to know slightly over the years, probably better than he knew certain of his colleagues. Was this embarrassing? Interesting? Signs of some sort of “common man” “hangup,” as Lydia frequently suggested? Roy had been a bookbinder, high-quality precision craftwork that had given him a bleeding ulcer and a bald head at the age of thirty-one. So he’d quit and was now being paid something like four-fifty an hour to ring up groceries, to snap open brown paper bags and pack them up. Hard to imagine, on a busy Sunday afternoon, that this was less nerve-wracking than binding books.
Roy seemed to be off today, though, so Hank had steered the cart into the line forming before Delia’s register. Delia’s father had bought her a new car when hers “hydroplaned” on a slippery road. He’d provided the down payment for a little Milpitas cottage after her apartment had been broken into. He’d sent her to Santa Clara University for two and a half years before she decided that what she really really wanted to do was not go to Santa Clara University. Delia freely confessed her dependence on her old man. She looked maybe Italian or Greek; Hank pictured her father as a stern but indulgent type with hairy arms, but who could know? They’d never gotten on a last-name basis. The clerks were stripped of their surnames as part of the wave of epidemic casualness. Delia was lean and tan and had a big booming voice she used, raising a bunch of carrots or a canister of breadcrumbs high over her head to call for a price, bringing an assistant manager running over, keys jangling on the Key-Bak clipped to his waistband. So how is it, Hank thought, that you’re here? How did your dad manage to keep you? How come you’re ringing up groceries instead of carrying a rifle through your days?
“How you doing, Mr. Galton?”
Of course she knew him, famous fellow that he was. In the news more during the past four months than he’d been over the course of his entire life. Though he had not yet acquired the foul appetite for press conferences that possessed, say, his future son-in-law, if Stump was in fact still that. The contempt Stump had for what he thought of as the family’s stale decorum! Whatever it was the family had decided upon, had been bred, to say, Stump could be counted on to say the opposite. Fine, OK. But this wasn’t around the dining table. This wasn’t someplace where Stump looked stupidly out of place, like the Burlingame Country Club, where dozens of eligible young girls entertained boyfriends who—who were not Eric Stump. Someplace where Eric Stump opened his yap and a knowledgeable person of experience, a Mickey Tobin, simply settled back with his drink and enjoyed the show. Someplace where Stump, ever dedicated to the prospect of his intellect as a burnished display (Hank didn’t claim much of one, but he assumed that intellect should be like money: concealed yet present at all times), simply tired himself out from talking. This was in front of the reporters to whom none of it mattered. To them, Stump was one of the magical people dwelling in the tragedy-touched world of the rich and famous. Standing each day before the clustered microphones outside the house, Stump faced an inexhaustible audience expecting an illimitable story. And brother, when the big time came calling, he was ready. All his crap about philosophy, all his barely sheathed contempt for “the media,” and he got weak in the knees at the idea of telling his story for publication, just like every housewife and longshoreman and shopkeeper Hank had interviewed when he started out as a cub with the old San Francisco Call back in 1940. Starstruck, his skin ready to receive the glow that constant, passionate scrutiny imparted to it. He’d helped with her homework touched her eaten the last meal she prepared seen the panties in which she was carried away “half naked” watched TV with her listened to her desires and goals. They smoked pot they made love and yes they’d had a very interesting discussion, with friends, about politics just a day or so before it happened. But basically she just wanted a dog and a station wagon. Yes, Stump warmed to his role as the interpreter of every mysterious and occluded young mind occupying every messy rear bedroom in every house.
“Thirty-seven forty, please, Mr. Galton.”
Fishing in his pocketful of anonymous cash. Which is of course exactly what it had never been.
The grocery bags were stowed now in the back of the wagon, which he’d parked in the shade of a tree growing at the edge of the
municipal lot. Hank walked slowly, in a light breeze, slightly unsteady on his feet. These old suburban downtowns, bleached in sunshine. A tavern, a delicatessen, a store selling uniforms. A Chinese restaurant, nothing sadder by daylight, the characters forming its name, its true Chinese name, carved in red-painted wood and crawling down the bright stucco wall. Might say “Fuck You, White Devil” for all Hank knew. The only Chinese person Hank knew was Sam Yee, to whom he brought his shirts.
Feeling slightly unsteady, trying to take a true look at these things. It was like touring a place you were about to leave permanently.
But all he was doing was running errands. Nothing suspicious about that, correct? If someone was to leap out of a doorway and confront him, confront him with the subject of his culpability, holding a microphone or a protest sign or a hand grenade (they seemed equally likely possibilities), his list was as innocent as Christ. Now see here: he wanted to buy some stamps, and a package of Aquafilters, and a pound of spiced ham, and a magazine for Helene. Lydia laughed sharply. She thought it was ridiculous. She wondered what would bring this playacting to an end. Going downtown in a brown station wagon like a fool. And then, if he really wanted to, he could come home and stack cans in the pantry.
But that was what he wanted. Affix a clean piece of scrap paper to the fridge with a magnet and begin the list all over again. If you just kept buying groceries the household would continue forever.
Groceries. There hadn’t been enough money to satisfy the SLA’s ransom demand that he personally feed the state’s poor. Not that they’d believed him. He had a hard enough time explaining to the immediate family, let alone to the fanatics holding his daughter, the elaborately interwoven relationships among the old man’s heirs, the Galton Corporation, the Galton Foundation, and the Galton Family Trust. In effect, Hank was the paid employee of his father’s money, not its possessor. The bottom line was that he was worth about two million bucks, about a half million of it available in cash, which he’d duly forked over to the food relief effort, a program dubbed People in Need. For the remainder of what would be required, he’d had to appeal to the corporation, which, acting through the trustees, had given him a total of four million dollars to work with. He and the other five family members on the board had recused themselves from the vote. Though he was glad not to have been there, tired of hearing the value of his daughter’s life weighed. They came out with the four million figure and he said fine. Sounds good. What the hell did he know? Not only did he have no idea how much it would cost, he had no idea what “it” was; in one tape Alice said that the SLA would accept a “good-faith gesture,” that “whatever you come up with is basically OK.” What he’d god damned come up with was one-quarter of his net worth. But later in the tape Cinque, to whose voice Hank had begun to react with nauseous loathing, had endeavored to clarify the matter by defining a “good-faith gesture” as a “sincere effort.” Thank you so very much. Sincere effort further stipulated to mean seventy dollars’ worth of “top-quality fresh meats, dairy products and produce,” handed over to anyone who turned up to ask for it, regardless of need.
Oh, that was a good tape, the February 19 tape, a fine tape. They could seal that one in a capsule and blast it into space with a Snoopy doll and copies of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band. (How had he learned of these things?) Wherever it turned up, whatever bat-eared, green-blooded creature hauled it out of the icy void to discover something about the human race in the twentieth century, that tape would impart with complete accuracy an allusive record of all the ingratitude, the venality, the envy, the hypocritical greed, the ineducable recalcitrance, the superficiality, and above all the cavalier disregard for fact that, as far as he was concerned, distinguished the new generation from the preceding one. What ate him up was that he listened to the—you should pardon the expression—substance of what Cinque said and found himself trying hard to give a damn. Many of the things he’d always been secure from had been brought to his attention, and he wanted to sympathize. But that this repellent shit, Cinque, had appointed himself Official Spokesman just turned him off so completely that he had trouble doing so.
On the February 19 tape, Cinque berated him, provided a comically inaccurate list of “his” assets, demanded an additional four million bucks, demanded that the food program be handed over to the prickly Western Addition Project Area Committee, and then built to one of the trademark crescendos Hank had become accustomed to:
You do, indeed, know me. You have always known me. I’m that nigger you have hunted and feared night and day. I’m that nigger you have killed hundreds of my people in a vain hope of finding. I’m that nigger that is no longer just hunted, robbed and murdered. I’m the nigger that hunts you now!
Yes, you know me. You know me, I’m the wetback. You know me, I’m the gook, the broad, the servant, the spik.
Yes, indeed, you know us all and we know you—the oppressor, murderer and robber. And you have hunted and robbed and exploited us all. Now we are the hunters that will give you no rest. And we will not compromise the freedom of our children.
DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE!
That first distribution. A bucket of blood, as his father might have said. Angry crowds overran the distribution sites; men climbed aboard the trucks to stand in their beds, on their roofs, heaving frozen chickens into the throng. Imagine checking into the hospital with that as your chief complaint. Frozen broiler to the head. Roving gangs robbed recipients of their grocery bags. A Black Muslim bakery overseeing the distribution in Oakland billed the program for $154,000, claiming that it had provided that much of its own food to replace stolen and looted stock. “Volunteers” showed up at the warehouses, offered to drive laden trucks to the distribution centers, and then vanished, trucks, food, and all. Leaving Hank wondering: What do you do with two tons of canned Virginia hams? Security guards hired to protect the warehouses started looting from them as well. Reporters on the evening news took a gleeful interest in unpacking the groceries from random sacks provided by disgruntled recipients (no shortage of these deadbeats), displaying for their viewers weirdly juxtaposed food items: a can of tomato juice, a box of pancake mix, a head of lettuce. A jar of peanut butter, a sack of flour, a box of rice. Crackers, celery, and powdered milk.
“Hard to imagine serving a dinner made from these items to your family.”
He’d spoken long distance to his brother Walt.
“You know what they say, Hank,” Walt said in his light lazy drawl.
“Hmm?”
“Build a man a fire, and he’s warm for one night.” Walt paused, and Hank anticipated a punch line, picturing Walt’s smile.
“Yeah?”
“Set a man on fire, and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”
Lydia had liked that one. It put her in mind of Reagan’s comment, delivered at a Washington luncheon. “It’s just too bad,” the governor had said, “we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.”
He wanted the Aquafilters, to be sure, but it was a joy and a satisfaction to enter the Smoke Shop (Lydia’s bark of a laugh), Isidore at the ancient register in his ridiculous toupee. Long, narrow store, much of the floor space occupied by unsold newspapers, tied and bundled for return. Buzzy fluorescents. Behind the counter hundreds of brands of cigarettes were ranked along the wall, and in display cases there were pipe tobacco blends, cigars, cigar cases, cigar cutters, humidors, tobacco pouches, lighters, cigarette cases, pipes of briar and meerschaum, cigarette holders of ebony, of bone, of tortoiseshell, crystal and alabaster ashtrays, and a small hand-lettered sign:
OWING TO THE POTENTIAL FOR
MISUSE WE NO LONGER CARRY
ROLLING MACHINES OR CIGARETTE
PAPERS. THE MANAGEMENT REGRETS
ANY INCONVENIENCE.
“Get a load of this bullshit,” said Isidore. Hank turned to face him.
“Seriously,” said Isidore, who appeared to be reading a trade magazine
of some sort. “Have a look.” He passed the magazine over the register. Of course he’d have a look. He was taking his own advice and filling his days. The Aquafilters, the spiced ham, the stamps, the whatever else was written on that validating piece of paper in his pocket: They could wait another minute.
What Isidore wanted him to look at was a display ad, for “SPIRIT OF ’76” cigarettes. The pack depicted Archibald Willard’s three familiar figures, silhouetted against a red, white, and blue background. Twenty Class “A” Cigarettes. Limited-time availability; participating retailers would receive special countertop displays. He passed the magazine back. This was not something for which he had a witty aperçu at the ready. For some reason this had struck Isidore as being a cut above, even shabbier than, the usual level of gross vulgarity. Or perhaps he thought Hank was class, would respond. Or maybe he was just an old man who ran a smoke shop and thought the Bicentennial, still two years away, was bullshit. Hank was leaning in that direction himself. Bicentennial this and Bicentennial that. Flags and banners all over. All it took was an anniversary to make everybody forget a decade’s worth of troubles. Would that an ailing marriage could be cured that easily.
Trance Page 18
