After a moment you realized they were waiting for the rest, whatever that was. But there was nothing more you could think of, fit for words to say. Joe’s problem was that there are no sufficient suicide reasons. Therefore, suicide is impossible. Are you running away from something? he said.
Is that what it looks like? you said. What would I be running away from?
You tell us. Did you commit a crime or something?
What kind of a crime could I commit?
Kill someone? You tell us. Uneasy laugh, Joe not sure what he was dealing with.
Do I look like a killer? It sounded like a real question, not rhetorical but calling for an answer.
There was Joe’s look, and Amy not looking, to impress on you that they hadn’t known you long enough to know.
After a while you gave them this: I used to drink.
Ha, Amy said. You’re an alcoholic.
You said, If I was, would that be enough?
Would it?
I used to stop at Lenny’s after school, a couple of drinks each day before going home.
You’re an alcoholic, running away from the consequences.
Would that be a sufficient explanation?
They thought it over. Gently, full of cliché, Amy said: You can’t run away from your problems, Peter. You should join the Alcoholics Anonymous. They can do you a lot of good. There’s no need to kill yourself just because you’re alcoholic.
You thought it over too. You said, I did quit. I haven’t had a drink in two years.
Good for you, Amy said, but you have to keep your guard up. Once an alcoholic always an alcoholic. Just because you’ve stopped doesn’t mean you’re cured.
You said, I made a vow. Never again.
Is that what broke up your family? Drinking?
You looked back over the connections. It might have been an indirect cause.
And it destroyed your teaching career?
Joe: How could it destroy his teaching career if he quit drinking two years ago?
They sat there thinking. Amy said, So if you stopped drinking two years ago, why did you wait to kill yourself until now?
We’re forgetting, Joe said. He didn’t kill himself.
Oh.
Joe laughed. The laughter died in the silence. You noticed stars between the treetops. Made you think of Linda Gregory and others in houses several hundred miles back, which would be under these same stars at this same time. Questions you had been thinking about all these days: Did they discover Peter Gregory’s letter? Did they find the car? Did they tell the family? Did they believe he was dead?
Hell, Joe said. Come on, he said to Amy, pulling himself to his feet, let’s go to bed. To Peter Gregory he said, Don’t kill us while we sleep, okay?
You lay on the ground in the blanket they had given you. Nearby the tent blocked a shadow out of the sky. In the tree dark just beyond the grass under the night, brushing its tail against your hope of sleep alone under the stars. With little raccoon hands turned up under the leaves and pale white shoulders and vanished sex. Foul play in the woods, away from the towns and cities and houses, under cover of the natural world where you had taken yourself to live. Animal deaths in the woods are always violent, the naturalist said, goshawk and rabbit, fox and squirrel, no such thing as natural death out there.
Someone did it to her, if it was a her. Someone’s last violent moment mulched for the new generation. Someone is missing your little raccoon, wondering what happened.
You could hear them asleep, full of normality, while you lay thinking about dead things. The night was full of crime and law, indistinguishable, you can’t have one without the other. It had public death, bodies in the road, police lights steering the traffic around. And police lights across the street for hateful old Jock Hadley where the Hammer Man had bashed him. And the Hammer Man himself, killer of old men, mythologized by the newspapers with a titillating question, where will he strike next? It had lawyers and police investigators, the lawyer for Florry Gates’s father with his message on Peter Gregory’s answering machine, and Sam Indigo the detective snooping around for evidence. It had insults and abuse, calling you bum, the old man’s attacks shouted across the street like hammer blows to make sure no one in the neighborhood would forget what Gregory did, and Florry Gates shouting back in the clear night, her clear voice loud all the way up and down the second-story windows: Shut the fuck up, you old fart.
In the clear Pennsylvania night old Gregory shocks continued to unravel, coupling erotic images of life and death: a live Jock Hadley sitting all day on the stoop in front of his bungalow chattering to everyone who went by, with his smooth bald head, white chin stubble, mean and leering eyes. And the imagined dead equivalent, eyes glazed, crumpled edges in the bald skull and punctures of the brain. With shame for the still humming Gregory thoughts that would not die. Complicity in all. You got yours, you old bastard. The little raccoon was a creature like yourself, its death conceived in a brain like yours, which had puncture holes like Jock Hadley’s. You listened to the argument leaking out through the holes, the moral difference between the homicidal stop-life imposed violently by professional murderers upon old men in the woods and the inadvertent and accidental stop-life tradition in the Gregory family.
These kids had come out from civilization to protect you from foul play in the wilderness, and they wanted to understand. You owed them an explanation, but Gregory’s shame interfered. You needed to think how to open yourself to them without doing irreparable damage to Murry Bree.
In the morning, Joe passed the chocolate around to you and Amy. He washed out his canteen and brushed his teeth at the edge of the water. There was cool bright fog over the river, breathing light in the trees. Let’s get going, Joe said. He enjoyed the morning. As you walked out to the road, his step became jaunty, he rose on his toes, he said Good Morning to the trees and bushes and walked with his arm around Amy’s waist, and you tried to keep up with their long strides.
TEN
Here’s more stories for you, kids—
Prevented from telling by your first ride, salesman in a noisy car in need of shocks, who drove you half way into Jersey, where he left you in the early afternoon. The man was worried about the education of young people in the American ways, lacking an adequate understanding of the free enterprise system. It’s the future that depends on the kids, he said, that’s what depends on the kids.
(While you were thinking, Maybe you could satisfy their curiosity with Lenny’s, in the afternoons after school, the high ceiling with fans turning. Plate glass window to the gloomy rain or guilty sunshine in the street outside, Johnson Pharmacy, the Activist Bookshop. Stools at the counter, tables with spindly chairs along the wall. Gregory’s refuge when teaching was done. A hundred papers to grade tonight but not yet. Bourbon before Linda. The whiskey had a voice that worked its way down warmly into your gizzard. No, I mean gizzard, it’s the correct word. It said. Your bar friends whom you saw every day at Lenny’s and nowhere else. They include the dead eyed chemistry professor from the university who didn’t mind talking to a high school teacher and the old retired hospital security guard who knew everything about Gregory’s private life and the woman from the Activist Bookstore who stopped regularly on her way home and wore her hair tied back like a squaw. What the whiskey said. Drink me. It was warm, spreading out in the gizzard and making it glow. A free country, you have my permission. Drink me, a higher law. Free enterprise, the whiskey said.)
The question I wonder whether kids are being properly taught these days is our free enterprise system. That’s the question I have my strong doubts about. When I see kids I try to find out what they know. I ask them what do you know about the system on which our country was built, the greatest land on earth. And what I always find out, none of our kids these days knows a damn thing about the free enterprise system. You kids too, I bet you don’t, even though you are hitchhikers, which is the perfect expression of free enterprise.
(Drink me. Forgetting that you quit two
years ago: Never Again. Try the woman from the Activist Bookstore with straight black hair like an Indian squaw, sitting on a bar stool next to him. T-shirt with trees and lakes, bears and moose, antlers on her breasts. Going her own way, independent, free enterprise. Read books, look down on Republicans, the world of Philistines. Dropped out of graduate school or flunked, not clear which. Went to Lenny’s for a drink after work like a man, no makeup, weather beaten face, who gave him permission to talk. Validating the whiskey’s permission already given, to talk about Louis the Lover, that’s Louis the Lover, kids, yes you can tell me, talk to me, I’m discreet. Talk, talk, by all means talk, off your chest. Languid lazy cynical speech with permission that made it all all right. Two jaded people, disappointed in life, as she described them, you’re jaded I’m jaded, sit side by side in Lenny’s for an hour every weekday afternoon, no weekends, enjoying life as it is, too wise to change, take it as it is. For a while he kept forgetting her name, which was Anita Long.)
The essence of the free enterprise system is if you leave things alone everything will take care of itself. Suppose a society needs a service performed, some product is needed. Deodorants. Nobody wants to make deodorants, you think you need a law saying somebody must make deodorants so society don’t stink. But that is socialism. You don’t need laws in free enterprise. If society wants deodorants in free enterprise, it gets deodorants. Do you know how? Listen kids, do you know the little stimulus, gizmo, gadget that gives society its deodorants in free enterprise? I’ll bet you do and you never thought of it.
(What kind of a crime could I commit? The whiskey gave him permission which Anita Long seconded, saying any oldfashioned husband would call up his wife once in a while to tell her sorry he won’t be home for dinner tonight. It’s your right, like her right as a single woman to have a drink by herself and go home with whomever she liked. The permission she gave along with the whiskey’s permission peeled him open to another person inside, normally silenced, censored, unacknowledged under the artificial skin of Peter Gregory, just as it peeled off her environmental T-shirt, pulled it over her head, zip, just like that. Anita Long, teaching him how to utilize permission and escape the bonds that gregorized him, as one permission led to another. In her room small and cramped and messy with books and magazines and clothes, she had nice bare little breasts permitted without bra where the pine trees had been. Which made it natural for the jeans to come off without discussion and the rest too, changing her look, and giving the erstwhile Gregory a like permission to take off himself. There was no difference between receiving permission and taking off clothes, the same thing actually. As was lying around on the messy bed with her and soon enough climbing on top and going inside while she hummed with permission. Yes indeed, it’s all right, good, fine, let yourself go, come come come, go and come both, a free country, free enterprise, the capitalist system everyone for him-or-herself, why the hell not, even though she was a stranger outside the precincts of Lenny’s, unknown, with her hair drawn back black like a squaw and her face weatherbeaten and unadorned, and her heart bitter about whatever she had wanted but failed to become, while she defended fiercely her permissions with her still youthful body into her lonely forties living fiercely to herself.)
I’ll tell you then. It’s not laws, not regulation, not some guy with a computer figuring out which of this and that society needs. None of that socialistic crap. It’s profit, pure and sweet, lovely golden profit, which gives you deodorants and keeps you from making too many, distributes our labors and makes us what we are, me a tire salesman and you a hitchhiker, and brings us all together for the good of all. Don’t you never allow nobody to slander profit.
(Never Again. You could drill closer to the nerve and take a chance to tell what happened after the judge, whose name was Marla Williams, behind her raised desk in her gray hair, wisps floating free around her chubby troubled face, who never looked at him, pronounced sentence and added, “I suspend this sentence on the following grounds—” Tell the quick male shout from back of the room, “Shame!” precipitating a fast rising uproar of disappointed and angry sounds, with a preponderance of o and then s, booing, the word no repeated, hissing and whistling, making it hard to hear what the following grounds were. In that moment of maximum unpopularity, the Gregory man tried to separate himself from the Hate Gregory noise all around, which he heard projected from himself into the whole room and thrown back to him embodied externally in strangers’ leering jeering faces and voices of people he never knew, while he tried to catch what Judge Marla Williams was saying about “first offense,” “law abiding citizen,” “unintended harm,” “contributions to the community,” “no good served by locking up this harmless man,” “remorse,” “fully regretful,” “this tragic case.” Over this, Wrong! wrong! wrong! go the voices, dissatisfied with the palliative of community service, shouting for shame and give him what he deserves, and justice, and revenge, the bleeding hearts, the weakness of female liberal judges, while this female judge goes bang, bang, bang with her gavel. The letters would come afterwards.)
And you know how free enterprise regulates itself? Keeps standards up? Self interest. Your self interest and my self interest, working together for the good of all. If your product is shoddy, if it is cheap and not what you claim it to be, the society will reject it in favor of your competitor. Your self interest requires you to turn out a good product which people can trust. So don’t you let nobody slander self-interest either, and don’t talk about selfish because what the hell is there in the world but selfish?
(That was two years ago, they’ll say, remote and irrelevant, a distraction from the truth. Come closer to our time, folks, how History Repeats. Notice how Permission and Free Enterprise come into conflict with Never Again. Principles, terrible destructive things, both of them. The student named Florry Gates gave permission in the swing on her front porch. But you’re under age, The Gregory said, which goaded her to force on him with her exploring hand the irresistible permission which only she had the right to withhold. As for her father, it was not the mistake in her assumption he had gone to bed. It was her suggestion they do it a second time. That, and the shortness of the swing, which required them to get into an ungainly position whose purpose was difficult to conceal on short notice. I vow never to see you again. Short vow: on Sunday night when Life as Gregory was already drawing to a close, Florry Gates, whom nothing could deter, picked him up in her car and drove him out to a city park. They had a fight. Peter Gregory wanted to know what her father was suing him for. She said it was a question of her age and your being a teacher of the young in a position of trust. He had a glimpse of horror: statutory rape, he said, that’s a criminal charge, what did you tell him, for God’s sake? I never, she said. She cried. Her father was a lawyer, with a finicky view of things, it was beyond her, the law is a mysterious thing. She wanted Peter Gregory to make love to her in the park, to show his faith in her after their troubles. He had no faith in her. He was shocked, he told her so, he should have listened to himself: never again. Never again? She wailed, how can you be so mean? This led to a discussion about whose fault it was. Thinking it obvious, he called her the seducer, reminding how he had warned her of this very danger. She was outraged. What? she said. I seduced you? She was so extremely shocked she almost shocked Peter Gregory’s memory away. He apologized for overstatement, difficult when apology of any kind seems so dangerous. She pushed his cock back into his pants and asked him to get out of her car. He got out. She asked him to get back in. He declined. She drove off. After a few minutes she came back. You watched from behind the dark pavilion while she drove around the circle, looking, because there was a limit to her anger which would not make him walk all that way. But already you were changing, and you stayed out of sight until she went away. Never again, you said, all the things you had said Never Again to when it was too late.)
The trouble with free enterprise, it’s never been tried. People blame the mess we’re in on something that has never been trie
d. Take the welfare state, for example. Listen my children, do you know anything about taxes in Sweden? Everybody talks how great Sweden is, free love and all that crap. But I tell you, which country has the highest suicide rate of all? It’s those long winter nights of the midnight sun. Give me free enterprise over free love anyday.
(Maybe it would be enough to give them Mr. Gregory’s student endorsements.
This coarse is the most stupid boring coarse I ever had in my life.
Mr. Gregory is a very nice man. He reminds me of my Uncle but somebody ought to tell him how to teche. He doesn’t know how to teche.
This coarse is a very intellectual coarse. It is all about writing and how to think. The trouble is that there isn’t anything to this coarse. The teacher (I refer to Mr. Peter J. Gregory, Ph.D.) is not interested in the coarse and is bored with the students. I can understand his being bored with the students because the intellectual level of the average senior high English class is pretty low but that is no excuse for the teacher to ignore the few intelligent students in his class as well. The result is I found the class very boring and not interesting and I didn’t get anything out of it at all.
This coarse would be better if Mr. Gregory made some comments on our papers along with the grade. He skips class too much.
Improvements I would suggest. Divide the class into groups and have each group talk with itself. Each group should have an equal number of boys and girls. Eliminate the individual writing of themes. Let each theme be written by a group of students, no less than three. Have the teacher change his teaching methods and ideas. He is too old fashion. He doesn’t know anything about modern innovative educational practices. Choose interesting topics for themes such as the Changing Sex Morays, Input and Feedback on How People In the Class First Lost Their Virginity, Etc.
The trouble with Mr. Gregory is he is not interested in our problems. All he cares about is how we write.
After Gregory Page 5
