by Philip Roth
“After the kids, after the fire,” I heard her telling him, “I was taking any job I could. I didn’t know what I was doing back then. I was in a fog. Well, there was this suicide,” Faunia said. “This was up in the woods outside of Blackwell. With a shotgun. Bird shot. Body was gone. A woman I knew, this boozer, Sissie, called me to come up and help her. She was going up there to clean the place out. ‘I know this is going to sound odd,’ Sissie says to me, ‘but I know you have a strong stomach and you can handle things. Can you help me do this?’ There was a man and woman living there, and their children, and they had an argument, and he went in the other room and blew his brains out. ‘I’m going up there to clean it out,’ Sissie says, so I went up there with her. I needed the money, and I didn’t know what I was doing anyway, so I went. The smell of death. That’s what I remember. Metallic. Blood. The smell. It came out only when we started cleaning. You couldn’t get the full effect until the warm water hit the blood. This place is a log cabin. Blood on the walls everywhere. Ba-boom, he’s all over the walls, all over everything. Once the warm water and disinfectant hit it . . . whew. I had rubber gloves, I had to put on a mask, because even I couldn’t take this anymore. Also chunks of bone on the wall, stuck in with the blood. Put the gun in his mouth. Ba-boom. Tendency to get bone and teeth out there too. Seeing it. There it all was. I remember looking at Sissie. I looked at her and she was shaking her head. ‘Why the fuck are we doing this for any amount of money?’ We finished the job as best we could. A hundred dollars an hour. Which I still don’t think was enough.”
“What would have been the right price?” I heard Coleman asking Faunia.
“A thousand. Burn the fucking place down. There was no right price. Sissie went outside. She couldn’t handle it anymore. But me, two little kids dead, maniac Lester following me everywhere, on my case day and night, who cares? I started snooping. Because I can be that way. I wanted to know why the hell this guy had done it. It’s always fascinated me. Why people kill themselves. Why there are mass murderers. Death in general. Just fascinating. Looked at the pictures. Looked if there was any happiness there. Looked at the whole place. Until I got to the medicine cabinet. The drugs. The bottles. No happiness there. His own little pharmacy. I figure psychiatric drugs. Stuff that should have been taken and hadn’t. It was clear that he was trying to get help, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t take the medication.”
“How do you know this?” Coleman asked.
“I’m assuming. I don’t know. This is my own story. This is my story.”
“Maybe he took the stuff and he killed himself anyway.”
“Could be,” she said. “The blood. Blood sticks. You could not possibly get the blood off the floor. Towel after towel after towel. Still had that color. Eventually it turned more and more a salmon color, but you still couldn’t get it out. Like something still alive. Heavy-duty disinfectant—didn’t help. Metallic. Sweet. Sickening. I don’t gag. Put my mind above it. But I came close.”
“How long did it take?” he asked her.
“We were there for about five hours. I was playing amateur detective. He was in his mid-thirties. I don’t know what he did. Salesman or something. He was a woodsy-type personality. Mountain type. Big beard. Bushy hair. She was petite. Sweet face. Light skin. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Very mousy. Intimidated. This is only what I’m getting from the pictures. He was the big strong mountain type and she’s this little mousy person. I don’t know. But I want to know. I was an emancipated minor. Dropped out of school. I could not go to school. Aside from everything else, it was boring. All this real stuff was happening in people’s houses. Sure as shit happening in my house. How could I go to school and learn what the capital of Nebraska was? I wanted to know. I wanted to get out and look around. That’s why I went to Florida, and that’s how I wound up all over, and that’s why I snooped about that house. Just to look around. I wanted to know the worst. What is the worst? You know? She was there at the time he did it. By the time we got there, she was under psychiatric care.”
“Is that the worst thing you’ve ever had to do? The worst work you’ve ever had to do?”
“Grotesque. Yes. I’ve seen a lot of stuff. But that thing—it wasn’t that it was only grotesque. On the other hand, it was fascinating. I wanted to know why.”
She wanted to know what is the worst. Not the best, the worst. By which she meant the truth. What is the truth? So he told it to her. First woman since Ellie to find out. First anyone since Ellie. Because he loved her at that moment, imagining her scrubbing the blood. It was the closest he ever felt to her. Could it be? It was the closest Coleman ever felt to anyone! He loved her. Because that is when you love somebody—when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game. He had no reservations about her. None. It was beyond thinking or calculating. It was instinctive. A few hours later it might turn out to be a very bad idea, but at that moment, no. He trusts her—that’s what it is. He trusts her: she scrubbed the blood off the floor. She’s not religious, she’s not sanctimonious, she is not deformed by the fairy tale of purity, whatever other perversions may have disfigured her. She’s not interested in judging—she’s seen too much for all that shit. She’s not going to run away like Steena, whatever I say. “What would you think,” he asked her, “if I told you I wasn’t a white man?”
At first she just looked at him, if stupefied, stupefied for a split second and no more. Then she started laughing, burst into the laughter that was her trademark. “What would I think? I would think you were telling me something that I figured out a long time ago.”
“That isn’t so.”
“Oh, isn’t it? I know what you are. I lived down south. I met ’em all. Sure, I know. Why else could I possibly like you so much? Because you’re a college professor? I’d go out of my mind if that was you.”
“I don’t believe you, Faunia.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “You done with your inquiry?”
“What inquiry?”
“About the worst job I ever had.”
“Sure,” he said. And then waited for her inquiry about his not being white. But it never came. She didn’t really seem to care. And she didn’t run away. When he told her the whole story, she listened all right, but not because she found it incredible or unbelievable or even strange—it certainly wasn’t reprehensible. No. It sounded just like life to her.
In February, I got a call from Ernestine, maybe because it was Black History Month and she remembered having to identify for me Matthew Henson and Dr. Charles Drew. Maybe she was thinking that it was time for her to take up again my education in race, touching particularly on everything that Coleman had cut himself off from, a full-to-the-brimming ready-made East Orange world, four square miles rich in the most clinging creaturely detail, the solid, lyrical bedrock of a successful boyhood, all the safeguards, the allegiances, the battles, the legitimacy simply taken for granted, nothing theoretical about it, nothing specious or illusory about it—all the blissful stuff of a happy beginning throbbing with excitement and common sense that her brother Coleman had blotted out.
To my surprise, after telling me that Walter Silk and his wife would be up from Asbury Park on Sunday, she said that, if I didn’t mind driving to Jersey, I was welcome to come for Sunday dinner. “You wanted to meet Walt. And I thought you might like to see the house. There are photograph albums. There’s Coleman’s room, where Coleman and Walter slept. The twin beds are still there. It was my boy’s room after them, but the same maple frames are still right there.”
I was being invited to see the Family Silk plenty that Coleman jettisoned, as though it were his bondage, in order to live within a sphere commensurate with his sense of his scale—in order to become somebody other, somebody who suited him, and make his destiny by being subjugated by something else. Jettisoned it all, the whole ramified Negro thing, thinking that he could not displace it by any other means. So much yearning, so much plotting and passion and subt
lety and dissembling, all of it feeding the hunger to leave the house and be transformed.
To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America’s story, the high drama that is upping and leaving—and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.
“I’d like to come,” I said.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” she said. “But you’re a grown man. You can look after yourself.”
I laughed. “What are you telling me?”
“Walter may be getting up on eighty, but he is still a large and roaring furnace. What he says you’re not going to like.”
“About whites?”
“About Coleman. About the calculating liar. About the heartless son. About the traitor to his race.”
“You told him he was dead.”
“I decided to. Yes, I told Walter. We’re a family. I told him everything.”
A few days later, a photograph arrived in the mail with a note from Ernestine: “I came upon this and thought of our visit. Please keep it, if you like, as a memento of your friend Coleman Silk.” It was a faded black-and-white photograph measuring about four by five inches, a blown-up snapshot, more than likely taken originally in somebody’s backyard with a Brownie box camera, of Coleman as the fighting machine that his opponent will find facing him when the bell sounds. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen, though with those small carved features that in the man had been so engagingly boyish looking mannishly adult in the boy. He sports, like a pro, the whammy glare, the unwavering gaze of the prowling carnivore, everything eradicated but the appetite for victory and the finesse to destroy. That look is level, issuing straight out of him like a command, even while the sharp little chin is steeply tucked into the skinny shoulder. His gloves are at the ready in the classic position—out in front as though loaded not merely with fists but with all the momentum of his one and a half decades—and each is larger in circumference than his face. One gets the subliminal sense of a kid with three heads. I am a boxer, the menacing pose cockily announces, I don’t knock ’em out—I cut ’em up. I outclass ’em till they stop the fight. Unmistakably the brother she had christened Mr. Determined; indeed, “Mr. Determined,” in what must have been Ernestine’s girlhood hand, was inscribed in faint blue fountain-pen ink across the back of the picture.
She’s something too, I thought, and found a clear plastic frame for the boy boxer and set him on my writing desk. The audacity of that family did not begin and end with Coleman. It’s a bold gift, I thought, from a deceptively bold woman. I wondered what she had in mind by inviting me to the house. I wondered what I might have in mind by accepting the invitation. Strange to think that Coleman’s sister and I had been taken so by each other’s company—though strange only if you remembered that everything about Coleman was ten, twenty, a hundred thousand times stranger.
Ernestine’s invitation, Coleman’s photograph—this was how I came to set out for East Orange on the first February Sunday after the Senate had voted not to remove Bill Clinton from office, and how I came to be on a remote mountain road that ordinarily I never take on my local back-and-forth driving but that serves as a shortcut from my house to Route 7. And that was how I came to notice, parked at the edge of a wide field I would otherwise have shot right by, the dilapidated gray pickup truck with the POW/MIA bumper sticker that, I was sure, had to be Les Farley’s. I saw that pickup, somehow knew it was his, and unable just to keep on going, incapable of recording its presence and continuing on, I braked to a halt. I backed up until my car was in front of his, and, at the side of the road, I parked.
I suppose I was never altogether convinced that I was doing what I was doing—otherwise how could I have done it?—but it was by then nearly three months during which time Coleman Silk’s life had become closer to me than my own, and so it was unthinkable that I should be anywhere other than there in the cold, atop that mountain, standing with my gloved hand on the hood of the very vehicle that had come barreling down the wrong side of the road and sent Coleman swerving through the guardrail and, with Faunia beside him, into the river on the evening before his seventy-second birthday. If this was the murder weapon, the murderer couldn’t be far away.
When I realized where I was headed—and thought again of how surprising it was to hear from Ernestine, to be asked to meet Walter, to be thinking all day and often into the night about someone I’d known for less than a year and never as the closest of friends—the course of events seemed logical enough. This is what happens when you write books. There’s not just something that drives you to find out everything—something begins putting everything in your path. There is suddenly no such thing as a back road that doesn’t lead headlong into your obsession.
And so you do what I was doing. Coleman, Coleman, Coleman, you who are now no one now run my existence. Of course you could not write the book. You’d written the book—the book was your life. Writing personally is exposing and concealing at the same time, but with you it could only be concealment and so it would never work. Your book was your life—and your art? Once you set the thing in motion, your art was being a white man. Being, in your brother’s words, “more white than the whites.” That was your singular act of invention: every day you woke up to be what you had made yourself.
There was hardly any snow left on the ground, only patches of it cobwebbing the stubble of the open field, no trail to follow, so I started bang across to the other side, where there was a thin wall of trees, and through the trees I could see another field, so I kept going until I reached the second field, and I crossed that, and through another, a deeper wall of trees, thick with high evergreens, and there at the other side was the shining eye of a frozen lake, oval and pointed at either end, with snow-freckled brownish hills rising all around it and the mountains, caressable-looking, curving away in the distance. Having walked some five hundred yards from the road, I’d intruded upon—no, trespassed upon; it was almost an unlawful sense that I had . . . I’d trespassed upon a setting as pristine, I would think, as unviolated, as serenely unspoiled, as envelops any inland body of water in New England. It gave you an idea, as such places do—as they’re cherished for doing—of what the world was like before the advent of man. The power of nature is sometimes very calming, and this was a calming place, calling a halt to your trivial thinking without, at the same time, overawing you with reminders of the nothingness of a life span and the vastness of extinction. It was all on a scale safely this side of the sublime. A man could absorb the beauty into his being without feeling belittled or permeated by fear.
Almost midway out on the ice there was a solitary figure in brown coveralls and a black cap seated on a low yellow bucket, bending over an ice hole with an abbreviated fishing rod in his gloved hands. I didn’t step onto the ice until I saw that he’d looked up and spotted me. I didn’t want to come upon him unawares, or in any way look as though I intended to, not if the fisherman really was Les Farley. If this was Les Farley, he wasn’t someone you wanted to take by surprise.
Of course I thought about turning back. I thought about heading back to the road, about getting into my car, about proceeding on to Route 7 South and down through Connecticut to 684 and from there onto the Garden State Parkway. I thought about getting a look at Coleman’s bedroom. I thought about getting a look at Coleman’s brother, who, for what Coleman did, could not stop hating him even after his death. I thought about that and nothing else all the way across the ice to get my look at Coleman’s killer. Right up to the point where I said, “Hi. How’s it goin’?” I thought: Steal up on him or don’t steal up on him, it makes no difference. You’re the enemy either way. On this empty, ice-whitened stage, the only enemy.
“The fish biting?” I said.
“Oh, not too good, not too bad.” He did no more than glance my way before focusing his attention back on the ice hole, one of twelve or fifteen identical holes cut into rock-hard ice and spread randomly across some forty or so square feet of lake. Most likely the holes had been drill
ed by the device that was lying just a few steps away from his yellow bucket, which was itself really a seven-gallon detergent pail. The drilling device consisted of a metal shaft about four feet long ending in a wide, cylindrical length of corkscrew blade, a strong, serious boring tool whose imposing bit—rotated by turning the cranked handle at the top—glittered like new in the sunlight. An auger.
“It serves its purpose,” he mumbled. “Passes the time.”
It was as though I weren’t the first but more like the fiftieth person who’d happened out on the ice midway across a lake five hundred yards from a backcountry road in the rural highlands to ask about the fishing. As he wore a black wool watch cap pulled low on his forehead and down over his ears, and as he sported a dark, graying chin beard and a thickish mustache, there was only a narrow band of face on display. If it was remarkable in any way, that was because of its broadness—on the horizontal axis, an open oblong plain of a face. His dark eyebrows were long and thick, his eyes were blue and noticeably widely spaced, while centered above the mustache was the unsprouted, bridgeless nose of a kid. In just this band of himself Farley exposed between the whiskered muzzle and the woolen cap, all kinds of principles were at work, geometric and psychological both, and none seemed congruent with the others.
“Beautiful spot,” I said.
“Why I’m here.”
“Peaceful.”
“Close to God,” he said.
“Yes? You feel that?”
Now he shed the outer edge, the coating of his inwardness, shed something of the mood in which I’d caught him, and looked as if he were ready to link up with me as more than just a meaningless distraction. His posture didn’t change—still very much fishing rather than gabbing—but at least a little of the antisocial aura was dissipated by a richer, more ruminative voice than I would have expected. Thoughtful, you might even call it, though in a drastically impersonal way.
