American Meteor

by Norman Lock

  PRAISE FOR

  Norman Lock

  “One could spend forever worming through [Lock’s] magicked words, their worlds.”

  —The Believer

  “No other writer in recent memory, lives up to [Whitman’s] declaration that behind every book there is a hand reaching out to us, a hand to be held onto, a hand that has the power to touch us, to make us feel.”

  —Detroit Metro Times

  “Lock is a rapturous storyteller, and his tales are never less than engrossing.”

  —Kenyon Review

  “One of our country’s unsung treasures.”

  —Green Mountains Review

  “Our finest modern fabulist.”

  —Bookslut

  “A master storyteller.”

  —Largehearted Boy

  “[A] contemporary master of the form [and] virtuosic fabulist.”

  —Flavorwire

  “[Lock’s] window onto fiction [is] a welcome one: at once referential and playful, occupying a similar post-Borges space to . . . Stephen Millhauser and Neil Gaiman.”

  —Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  “[Lock] is not engaged in either homage or pastiche but in an intense dialogue with a number of past writers about the process of writing, and the nature of fiction itself.”

  —Weird Fiction

  “Lock’s work mines the stuff of dreams.”

  —Rumpus

  “You can feel the joy leaping off the page.”

  —Full Stop

  “Lock plays profound tricks, with language—his is crystalline and underline-worthy.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Lock’s stories stir time as though it were a soup . . . beyond the entertainment lie 21st-century conundrums: What really exists? Are we each, ultimately, alone and lonely? Where is technology taking humankind?”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass.”

  —Kate Bernheimer, editor of xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, and Fairy Tale Review

  “[Lock] has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world.”

  —Brian Evenson, author of Windeye and Immobility

  “Lock is one of our great miniaturists, to be read only a single time at one’s peril.”

  —Tim Horvath, author of Understories

  “A writer exquisite in the singularity (read for this ‘genius’) of his utterance.”

  —Gordon Lish

  AMERICAN METEOR

  Also by Norman Lock

  Fiction

  A History of the Imagination

  Joseph Cornell’s Operas / Émigrés

  Trio

  Notes to ‘The Book of Supplemental Diagrams’ for Marco Knauff’s Universe

  Land of the Snow Men

  The Long Rowing Unto Morning

  The King of Sweden

  Shadowplay

  Grim Tales

  Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions

  Escher’s Journal

  Love Among the Particles (Bellevue Literary Press)

  The Boy and His Winter (Bellevue Literary Press)

  Dutch Stories

  Stage Plays

  Water Music

  Favorite Sports of the Martyrs

  The House of Correction* (Broadway Play Publishing Co.)

  The Contract

  The Sinking Houses*

  The Book of Stains*

  The Monster in Winter

  Radio Plays

  Women in Hiding

  The Shining Man†

  The Primate House

  Let’s Make Money

  Mounting Panic

  Poetry

  Cirque du Calder

  In the Time of Rat

  Film

  The Body Shop

  * Published in Three Plays

  † Published in Two Plays for Radio

  First published in the United States in 2015 by

  Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NYU School of Medicine

  550 First Avenue

  OBV A612

  New York, NY 10016

  © 2015 by Norman Lock

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lock, Norman, 1950– author.

  American meteor / by Norman Lock.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-934137-95-6 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3562.O218A82 2015

  813’.54—dc23

  2014036638

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Front cover photo, Pulpit Rock, Echo Cañon, Utah, 1900 by William Henry Jackson—used by permission of High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  For Helen

  What am I myself but one of your meteors?

  —Walt Whitman, “Year of Meteors”

  AMERICAN METEOR

  Contents

  Part One: Lincoln

  Part Two: Custer

  Coda: Crazy Horse

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  Lincoln

  This then is life . . .

  —Walt Whitman, Starting from Paumanok

  Armory Square Hospital, Washington City, April 13, 1865

  I got so I could disentangle from the general stink the various odors that combined in an evil and rancid atmosphere, oppressing the sound, the maimed, and the dying alike. My nose, always a perceptive organ, would search among the currents of stagnating air, like a monkey’s snuffling delicately over a tempting morsel (filth, to you and me). I soon learned to recognize the different fumes of carbolic, pine tar, iodine, cigar smoke, whiskey, turpentine, creosote, blood, gore, lamp oil, sweat, paraffin, and the reeking contents of bedpans noisy with the riot of flies. I lay on the cot in a drowse, moving only to swat at them—sight halved by a bandage over my eye.

  Bored, I would watch the bloodstained surgeons and nurses passing to and fro, in frantic haste or in weariness, among long rows of cots that would seem, in their regularity, like cemetery plots if it weren’t for the thrashing of bodies consigned to their untidy sheets. My good eye fixed on the rafters overhead, I would not have known that the man next to me, whose blasted leg had been hauled away in a slop bucket, was still among the living if it hadn’t been for his infernal groans. I swear I’m not ashamed to say that, on more than one occa
sion, I wished him dead. I couldn’t sleep, you see, because of the ache in my socket after its eye had been put out by a red-hot piece of rebel shell.

  Lowering my gaze (if a one-eyed boy could be said to have a gaze) from the high ceiling, gauzy and sallow now with the smoke of the surgeons’ stogies, the ill-trimmed lamps, and coal stoves topped by madly rattling tubs where women, forearms beefy as any man’s, stirred boiling water in which sheets and dressings stewed, I looked at the pair of boots, forlorn beneath my neighbor’s cot. Henceforth, he would require only one of them.

  Although I’d been sick before and once, with scarlet fever, at death’s door, I’d never been inside a hospital until now. It was only natural for me to take an interest in the grim proceedings: I was sixteen and curious, like any other boy. Maybe if I’d been gravely wounded, I’d have been less able to view my surroundings dispassionately. But what pain I had was dulled by laudanum. All in all, I felt like a god must who comes, incognito, among his creatures—one of lowly rank and stature, but a divinity nonetheless, who can tranquilly survey the wreckage of his creation.

  Meditating—war had made me thoughtful—on the diverse ways a person may be recast by bullet, fire, or gangrene, I didn’t hear the man in an open-collared shirt and slouch hat bend over the ruined soldier next to me; didn’t hear him utter words of comfort while he dressed the weeping wound. So lost in my own hellish thoughts, I started and nearly cried out in surprise when he put his hand softly on my shoulder and, with his other, brushed the hair from my eye (the one that used to be). I’d have cursed him for his familiarity and interference—we were often interfered with by Bible-beaters, their damned turnip faces tearful or cunning in the lust for our souls—but something in this man’s face—its frank look and sad, almost puzzled smile—and in the gentleness of his hand as it lay so cool and nice on my feverish cheek made me hold my tongue.

  Besides, I’d seen him before.

  Brooklyn and Manhattan, 1860–1861

  Barelegged and shoeless, I stood against the sea—the salty remnant that swept into Sheepshead Bay—casting broken shells on the beach the Indians called “Land Without Shadows.” I considered myself a remarkable boy who, with the strength of Hercules, broke at every step the iron shackles meant, by a stern ocean, to hobble him. I was twelve— or nearly—on that September evening, with the whole of Brooklyn at my back and, beyond it, Staten Island and, in the unimaginable distance, the West unrolling like an enormous wave of soil, granite, and trees clear to the Pacific, which was said to be blue and reefed with coral. They took oysters there, also—oysters like ours, big as dinner plates, to sell on the Barbary Coast, just as I sold what I managed to rake up from the shallows to saloons and eateries from Coenties Slip to Gouverneur Lane. My stooped back aching with the work and with the sodden canvas bag, heavy with oyster shells, hung across it, I stood up in time to see a fat gull’s transit from air to water, legs crumpling under wings frantic to find again their gracefulness. It was a clumsy moment, saved by the low sun that gilded bird and wave alike. I noticed, out the corner of my eye (I had two of them then), the man who’d later kneel beside my cot in the Washington City hospital at the very end of Mr. Lincoln’s War. The “wound dresser” bore slight resemblance to this person capering on the wet sand, as if each of the four intervening years of war had tolled twice for him in sorrow, so aged and harrowed did he seem. But in 1860, he looked to be the youthful and vigorous man he was, although he behaved like a lunatic crazed by the seething tide. Those were nervous times. From “Bleeding Kansas” to Harper’s Ferry, the contagion had been spreading like fire through the rooms of a house, and only the senile or the insane, whose nerves hummed to quite different vibrations, might escape the universal jangle.

  He was muttering some prayer—or so it seemed to me, a boy who’d stood oftentimes on a Sunday morning outside the Methodist church to hear the hymns. The man stood, hat in hand, as if in the presence of the Almighty or a Gravesend copper—his throat moving impolitely, as might that of a man who’d swallowed raw whiskey. He was a sight! Abruptly, the wind picked up, as it will in September before nightfall, and gusts of words—strange and thrilling—came within my hearing, mixed with the noise of water dragging over gravel and broken shells: “You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.” Those were brave-sounding words to a boy hankering for adventure, with the salt burning his lips—a boy not knowing before this moment that he wished to throw off the yoke of his miserable days. I nearly threw off the oyster bag, but I didn’t, fearing my father’s razor strop.

  The wind fell away and, with it, the words of the lunatic, which no longer reached me. Surely, he must be one, the way he stood there, with the rising water picking at his boot laces—oblivious and mouthing blessings or obscenities at the trembling horizon! The exultation left me, like water squeezed from a sponge, and my heart grew sad. Perhaps it was the flooding tide, which made in the dusky light the same sad music were a band to play a heartrending adagio.

  I turned and, pulling the streaming bag after me, left the ocean, the beach, and, for all I knew, the world to its last darkness. I hurried across Coney Island Creek toward the Hope & Anchor to sell my sweet harvest.

  After that night, which I’ve never ceased to think of as marvelous (forty-some years later, I cannot recall it without a thrilling sensation at the back of my neck), I seemed to see the man everywhere I went: leaning, nonchalant, against the taffrail on the Brooklyn ferry, jawing with the teamster on a Broadway streetcar, loafing with roughnecks by Gowanus Creek, cooing over bedraggled pigeons in Battery Park, and flushed and rowdy in taprooms up and down Pearl, Fulton, and Water streets. Always, the man seemed to wind himself outlandishly among his fellows, as if to entangle himself en masse in them—an arm thrown congenially around their necks, embracing them all, bestowing a brotherly kiss on the bearded lips of them all. A wicker hamper of oysters at my feet, I’d watch with amazement while he sauntered amid a crowd of men and women who seemed not the least put out by his wildness. He was, I thought, a one-man circus or a freak show whose candor couldn’t embarrass me—not after having spent my childhood in a tenement house, with only a curtain dividing our half of the room from our neighbors’. Early on, I knew the ways of men and women and how they would grapple in love, misery, and in hatred, sometimes with a ferocity that drove me out onto the streets, where the night—its tonic, unpent air and its calm stars—silenced the clamor of my heart.

  In November 1861, I joined the “13th Brooklyn,” as the 87th New York Regiment was called, and went to war. My last look at Brooklyn—though not at Walt Whitman, as I would come to know my lunatic—was at the ferry slip where the regiment embarked on the steamboat Marion for Washington City, after a send-off at Fort Greene. His Honor, the mayor of Brooklyn, had declared in an aria of high-flown flapdoodle that the “flag will have to be born aloft through seas of blood,” including, as it turned out, mine. I would never again see the city of my birth and rearing, but Whitman—him I’d see in the Armory Square Hospital and, years later, in Camden. We didn’t speak or even so much as acknowledge each other on the ferry dock. He didn’t recognize the oyster boy who had unwittingly overheard his thoughts on the coming storm, in which I was now about to be engulfed and, later, would be struck down.

  Whitman moved amid the crowd of hoarse-throated soldiers, setting down the departing words of some in a notebook until he was swallowed up by fluttering handkerchiefs, brandished stovepipe hats, and particles of soot that descended from the Marion’s funnels in memory of our departure. Later, I would learn that the man I seemed all year to have dogged through the streets of lower Manhattan had recently been the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Times. He accompanied us during the last few hours of our youthfulness—suffering with us the fulminations of a righteous gang of government stooges and starched churchmen; parading with us down Myrtle Avenue into Prince Street, into Gold, and on to Vinegar Hill and the ferry depot to stand w
ith us on the pier above the East River, where we waited impatiently to throw ourselves into the pit that hath no bottom. For so it proved to be. He did not take down my words, and I would have had none to give him.

  I stood at the rail of the Marion, next to William Kidd, the regimental drummer who’d lose at Groveton something more vital to breath than an eye; and I bugled a martial air to silence the patriotic mob so that Marie Bisbee, of Brooklyn, could shout her farewell poem at us. She went at it hammer and tongs. Lucky for you, Jay, I remember just the first words:

  It is the martial sound of drum,

  The thrilling pipe is heard!

  And now alas! the hour has come,

  To say the parting word.

  Farewell brave youths, to battle field

  Thy country calls thee now!

  May He who does the widow shield,

  Watch o’er thy fervid brow.

  We weren’t taken in by her horseshit—at least Little Will and I weren’t. He looked at me slyly, two fingers pinching his nostrils shut in disgust, while I blew the spit out of my horn.

  Aboard the Steamer Marion, December 1861

  In recollection, all our bivouacs and battlefields were alike, at least for those of us who did their living and fighting and oftentimes their dying there. War’s architects saw them from loftier vantages where, in Union blue or Confederate gray, soldiers were no more than meteors or moths, uniform, fugitive, and doomed. Soon enough, I grew to hate warfare and took no interest in its bewildering strategies or reckless campaigns, as monotonous as the tunes I blew on my bugle, which I had named Jericho in honor of Joshua’s trumpet.

  When I first arrived in Lincoln—in 1882, that was, before you came out here—I played the trumpet in the town’s brass band. I wasn’t much good, and the burden of sociability proved too much for me to stay with it. But I was one hell of a bugle boy, Jay, and I wish you could’ve heard me!