Now Ernest held a tall glass filled with ice and club soda colored with what looked to be a splash of bourbon. Guy knew these as Ernest’s visiting-Mom-and-Dad highballs. He would sit around the house the entire day, pacing himself, a subtle drunk, steadily emptying and refilling these junior prom drinks. Around five he’d go and lie down, pulling an electric blanket over himself in the frigid cold of their parents’ bedroom, and sleep off the muzzy edges of the drunk until he awoke an hour or so later, sharp and mean enough to make their mother cry over dinner. Then he’d take the car and head out to the bars, where he’d drink until he fell off his stool.
“Hello, Ernest.”
“I like the look. You look real natural, Guy-Guy. Like a guy who crashes the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic for the atmosphere.”
“Does he get a hello? He walks in, he’s driving since the crack of dawn, and the long-lost brother is all over him.”
“I greeted you when you came in. Guess you want me to try again. Hi, there, little brother. And now we resume our broadcast day.”
Ernest paused to drink. Ice chimed.
“That is some mop. It looks like dune grass on that bald head of yours. C’mere, Guy-Guy. I want to pull your hair, see if it’s real. Like Santa’s beard.”
“Still hung up on Santa, Ernest? Explains the back-to-school clothes. Did you get some galoshes too? A nice pencil case?”
Mrs. Mock explained. “We took Ernest to the shopping center this morning. Because there was a sale.”
“My desert ensemble.”
“You look more like a Wilkes-Barre golf pro.”
“Ah, ha. Ha.”
“He needed some clothes. You boys need clothes.”
Ernest sipped his drink. “I’m sure Mom can drive you over to the Goodwill after lunch.”
“Oh, lunch,” said Mrs. Mock.
“Lunch sounds good,” said Guy.
“I don’t see any sign of your father. And where is your lady friend, Guy?”
“Randi? Randi, you mean?”
“Of course that’s who I mean. Why, Guy, you didn’t bring that other young lady friend of yours back here, did you?”
“‘Other young lady friend’?” Ernest smiled at him over the drink.
“What sort of friend?” Guy felt sudden, atrocious pain in the vicinity of several small, little-known organs.
He smiled back. “I have lots of friends. Friends are good, Ernest. Friends are our friends. Only you would consider the having of a friend to be an inherently suspicious thing.”
“I don’t think we can count on your father right now. He said something about cleaning out the rain gutters,” said Mrs. Mock.
“My guess is he’s a no-show,” ventured Ernest.
“They have rain gutters in Las Vegas?”
“Form’s sake,” said Ernest.
“What gets in them that you have to clean them?”
“Fallout?”
“Is she coming? Should we hold lunch for her?”
“Who? Randi? Randi is not here.”
“Who really is?” Ernest emptied the glass and rose from his chair. Guy watched. He seemed steady on his feet. He figured he could chalk the belligerence up to his unexpected arrival. Was it belligerence even? Guy had discovered that as often as not, a provocation from Ernest was intended as an invitation to a special, dangerous genre of fellowship. Ernest conversed best, most fluently and easily, with strangers seated twenty feet down the bar, via digs he delivered in the direction of the mirror directly opposite, while occasionally reading in the eyes of a wary bartender the telemetry gauging the reaction to his comments. Declining an invitation to share in the interests of a man who enjoyed being punched in the face required a certain amount of tact and discretion, neither of which was Guy’s strong suit.
Surprisingly, maybe, lunch was uneventful. Mrs. Mock devoted herself to preparing and serving the meal, Ernest read the newspaper, explosively clearing his throat from time to time, and Guy stared through the sliding glass doors at the blanching sun that threw itself over the shadowless day. Afterward Guy put on his trunks and went out to the pool, where he swam laps. He paused in the middle of the pool after a while and, treading water, spotted his father behind the cabins. Mr. Mock moved forward, but erratically, pausing every couple of steps to do something that looked as if he were trying to get dog shit off his shoe. As he approached, Guy realized that he was smoothing with his foot the gravel that lined the walkway on one side. He was wearing a faded dress shirt and a pair of jeans that he had cut the legs off unevenly. Guy waved, but the old man took no notice of him.
“We’re in Libya,” Ernest said later, sitting with Guy at the bar of the Golden Charm Casino, which consisted of the bar and four slot machines. “A ‘hot spot,’ as they say.”
“Who’s in Libya?” said Guy. It was around one in the morning and they were very drunk. Guy felt himself leaning forward with the eagerness of a child, listening to Ernest. He sipped his beer and stuffed a handful of dry roasted peanuts into his mouth.
After dinner Ernest had grabbed Guy by the hair, rapped hard on his forehead with a pair of knuckles, and invited him out for a drink. Here they were. Ernest was feeling chatty.
“A CQA op, it was. I’d been doing blunt and edge work, very comfortable with it, but I wanted to branch out. They had a triple S op—safe, simple, and secret—and I wanted to give it a shot.”
“Who had?”
“They said, can you do falls?”
“Who said?”
“I said, you give me a clear seventy-five feet of vertical passage and a hard surface and I’m your man.”
“Whose man?”
“I arrange with the subject to meet. It’s different. Blunt and edge, you have either a simple or a chase situation. Blunt, usually simple. The guy turns his back, you clock him in the temple with a hammer. Edge, you are frequently teaching a lesson.”
“Teaching who a lesson?”
“Edge, there’s severing involved, and mess. Gory stuff. Subtlety is not an issue. As a technique, it’s inherently terroristic. So you are in a chase or guarded situation. An unhappy, resistant subject, running, begging, bleeding. You get used to it, and you don’t—this was always a big plus for me—you don’t have to hone your interpersonal skills. But in this case, like I say, it’s simple and secret. And I am not used to setting up meetings. So I am, you know, a little tentative.”
Here Ernest called the bartender over. Like all bartenders seemed to for Ernest, this guy immediately dropped everything—in this instance a lengthy and highly vivid, yet still suspiciously adumbrated description of his personal collection of intaglio prints, delivered to an off-duty chorine, half in the bag and so statuesque Guy would have sworn she was a transvestite—to rush right over and take Ernest’s order. Guy couldn’t figure it. Ernest wasn’t an overgenerous tipper. In his new J. C. Penney clothes, he was dressed about as well as he ever was. He did not feign camaraderie with bartenders or sympathy for their ontological condition. Something about Ernest made bartenders come running, though.
“Wild Turkey 101 on the rocks,” he said, “and another Shirley Temple for the kid. They said, Ernest, the subject drinks. This is a perfect cover: case your height, get him loaded, take him up there, and drop him. Sounds easy, right? But you know how hard it is to get a drunk drunk in Libya? Hard is how hard.”
“Who said?”
“But I figure I’ll manage. They fly me in on Shitheel Air, sitting with the goats and the chickens, just like everybody else. I got a seersucker suit and a Canadian passport and I’m carrying an old Pentax for a prop. I got an envelope full of cash. Bad news is, every place you go, you’re hemorrhaging dinars. To get an entry visa. To get a cab. To get a table. To get a menu. To get a room. Good news is, with enough dinars you can get anybody to get anything for you. Get it? Makes that envelope skinny as a mermaid’s pussy, but in the end I get my booze. See?”
Guy raised his glass of beer and moved it from side to side, a gesture meant to ind
icate comprehension, a concentration of attention, an eagerness to hear the story unfold.
“Now, my powers of persuasion are, OK, they leave a little to be desired under the very best of circumstances, but it is not real difficult to finesse a drunk into ascending to a great height with you. I told him I had a business proposition to discuss. I’m a Western stranger in a seersucker suit and a fedora, a universally familiar type, and it sort of follows that I would have a business proposition to discuss. Now, my great height. For my great height I had picked out an old converted villa with thick walls and a marble staircase and an old-fashioned elevator in a cage that we could ride in the pretty predictable event of drunken fatigue.” He built the place with his hands as he spoke. “Among other things the place housed the Tripoli bureau of the Associated Press, for a steady and inconspicuous influx of pushy Westerners like myself, and an outfit called Mustafa Importing, which supposedly is the firm I’m supposedly doing business through and which I happen to know is closed on that day. Oh, what a shame. They appear to have stepped out. Would you care to come up to the roof with me, have a cigarette? I believe there is an excellent harbor view. Whatever bullshit. The building rises six fucking stories above a street made of opportunely solid cobblestones. It has a parapet about yea high.”
His hand hovered about three feet above the ground. Guy looked down the bar. The bartender was back with the chorus girl, who had been joined at the bar by a man wearing a black leather vest and a sort of sombrero with fringed balls dangling from the brim.
“I am nervous. The guy’s drunk, I don’t think he’s at all leery, but all I can think is: can’t pull this off I’ll have to go back to blunt and edge. Which is fine when you’re first breaking in, but after a while you realize that for all the anatomical knowledge involved there is just not a whole lot of prestige in cracking someone in their temple or severing their spinal cord in the cervical region. People don’t respect it, they don’t see the nuance, they don’t understand how improvisational in nature it can be. Rightly or wrongly, as a specialty it has zero cachet.”
Guy crossed his arms and laid his head on top of them. Soon the bartender was over, rapping sharply on the bar with a shot glass near Guy’s ear.
“No sleeping in here, buddy.”
“He’s all right,” said Ernest. “He’s listening.”
“Listen sitting up.”
Guy raised himself. He felt unusually tired. He wanted to go home and fall asleep on the couch. He felt the beginnings of a hemorrhoid massing sinisterly on his anus, like a rehearsal for cancer. Ernest’s story kept moving forward, but it had grown impossibly ponderous, like a glider made of scrap iron. Ernest had been giving him the foreign intrigue routine for hours. The formal rigor of a haiku—
Soldier in mufti
arrives on a decrepit
(airplane, ferry, bus).
A mission of death,
the locale’s meanest season,
grim job to do well
Soldier: a brother,
a good son, a brave comrade;
kills out of duty.
Blade of bright sunlight,
now red, as a sunset!
night covers all.
—with none of the brevity and lightfootedness, Ernest’s voice steady and unwavering as he unpacked the stories like merchandise from a sample case. Guy found that who he was sitting tiredly next to was a drunken braggart, not the bold raconteur of memory.
“He sits on the parapet, smoking,” Ernest was saying. “My chance is come. I bend down like to tie my shoe. Then I grab his ankles. I lift them up, get them above the level of the parapet, where his whole center of gravity shifts, he’s leaning back, the fear just caught in his throat, terrible, nothing’s coming out, he’s just seized up. I look him in the eye. The souls meet for a sweet adios! Then I give him a shove and he’s gone, goodbye.”
“Wow,” said Guy, without enthusiasm, watching his beer going flat.
“So.” Ernest elevated his chin to stare down at Guy. “How’s the Institute of Soviet Socialist Sports?”
“We’re just fine.”
“You, the Olivetti, and the file cabinet.”
“A Smith-Corona, actually.”
“Very patriotic. I approve.”
“Yeah, well, you can laugh, but personally I think we’re doing some important work. I think we’re ready to start to branch out a little. I think we’ve set forth our ideas pretty clearly and I think they lend themselves to extrapolation so that they can be applied to society as a whole. I think we’ve built a solid foundation to work on—”
“Oh, ho.” Ernest waved out a match, dismissing Guy. “Nobody needs help latching onto these parlor pink ideas of yours, Guy-Guy. Everybody knows these ideas. The whole fucking world has picked up on these ideas; these ideas are what Leonard Bernstein is talking about with Teddy Kennedy over dinner at Kay Graham’s house. These ideas are what Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch are paying to send their kids to Columbia and Ann Arbor to learn. Ideas, he says. You got a little niche, and you’re working it, man. Don’t bullshit me.”
“I’m not,” said Guy. “We see things differently, is all.” Guy felt as if the effort to defend himself, to strain clarity from the murky impressions filling his head, was too much to ask of himself. That plus this same hardy argument had reappeared, ghostlike, so many times, and its materialization here had outpaced any memory of it that might have emerged to warn him.
“Your ideas are all about having more ideas. I mean, what are you actually doing?”
Guy noted: He had only had to say the word ideas exactly once to provoke this sarcastic ricocheting. (So relax, let it go.)
Guy noted: Such a reaction was the one predictable general effect of having had ideas. (So let it go already.)
Guy noted: Whether from the right or the left, the ideas always take it on the chin. (No problem, then, just letting it go.)
Guy noted: This is not the time, the place, or the person for his candor. (Drop it, veer off, let it go!)
What he said was, “You want to know what I’m ‘actually doing,’ secret agent man?” Then he told him, rewinding the tape back to the day in June when he’d first offered his assistance and providing details on the cross-country trips, the Manhattan stay, the Pennsylvania farmhouse not far from where the two of them had grown up.
“Ah,” said Ernest.
“Really,” said Ernest.
“How interesting,” said Ernest.
It was later, as the desert dawn began to light up the living room and Guy huddled under his blankets on the couch, that it came to him: Ernest had copped that whole Tripoli rooftop scene from A Kiss Before Dying. The chutzpah: they’d seen it together at the Ritz, in Scranton, back in 1956. With Robert Wagner, a young Joanne Woodward, and an old Mary Astor. Also Virginia Leith, who later was to achieve a certain renown portraying a chatty severed head in a bathing cap in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. The son of a bitch, Guy thought, that son of a fucking bitch.
So in effect it is no more than the shape and will of his own big mouth that Guy is seeking to evade here as July comes to its close. The next couple of days are a dumb rush as the company prepares to depart, waiting to learn the location of whatever place Randi manages to find for them. Now he encounters for the first time the SLA’s disturbing propensity to rapidly accumulate and then leave behind vast amounts of evidence—papers, mostly, notable for their blazing, suicidally self-incriminating contents. And so dreary. In a marbled-cover composition book he finds Teko’s “Revolutionary Diary.”
Wed., July 24
Day clear and mild. Added approx. 5 lbs. sand to supplement dumbbell weight. I was only one who tried: T made typical complaints. J. absent at fall out, must speak to her again. Y. claims wrist injury. Ran 3 miles, w/ankle weights.
Inventoried provisions: need corn flakes. (Kellogs!)
After lunch found T. and J. in living room. T. reading “Fear of Flying”, J. bourgie book on Quebec separatism movement. Unsatisfactory reaction
to my vocal disapproval. Then advised them that it was time for Criticism/Self Criticism session. Very disrespectful, undisiplined response overall (esp. J.)
Dinner: rice & beans. T’s wash: burned rice not off bottom of pot. Must speak to her again. Too much “relaxing” as usual after dinner:
BEER CIGARETS
self: I III
Y: I IIII
T: II IIIIII (!)
J: II IIIII
(Objection: expense, physical readiness, usual disipline.)
Clear night, many stars.
What do we want from such documents? Guy wonders. What do you think you may one day need to remember about your life? Major Scobie keeping the record of his fifteen years in Sierra Leone in the tin box beneath his bed. What good did all that minutiae do him? Guy chucks the notebook back onto the mound of papers on the floor in Teko and Yolanda’s bedroom, sending the stuff near the top sliding down around his ankles. Joan comes to the doorway and stops short; she won’t come in here.
“Basically we’re all set,” she says.
“I knew you’d be.”
“Will you look at all this shit?”
“How come you’re so tidy?”
“You haven’t heard? I’m a bourgeois.”
“Oh, yeah,” Guy says vaguely. He sits down on the edge of the rumpled bed, starts, reaches under the blanket, and pulls out a dirty athletic supporter.
“For what?” asks Joan.
Guy drops the jockstrap. “Where’s your protégée?”
Trance Page 30
