In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

by William H. Gass

  So he sounded with the bait. He was hooked through his throat to the tail.

  Even now I dare not let my mind look upon the picture of that pair peering beneath her lifted skirts. How infernally lewd! How majestically revolting! She would ask him if he saw any. He would hesitate, realizing more than she how important it was to say yes, and yet not clearly, not surely finding grounds for an affirmation. He moistens his finger and applies it to the spot. Perhaps a brighter light. Perhaps if she removed her dress. In worry she watches him. What does it all mean? Can they say for certain that hair grows there; that it does not? She is persuaded to pronounce the negative but he holds her back. There is a doubt. There must be a doubt.

  Or he has kept the substance of our conversations from her. He spies out her moles, creeps upon her dressing, at her bath, or he remembers lovelier days when he was whole and she was smooth and clean and there was flesh to glory in. Then those moles were yellow on her hip perhaps like beads inviting kisses. No. I see the moistened finger, the hiked skirt, the inquiring frown. I see it clearly, bright with color, dimensional with shadow. There is somehow a bond between them greater than comfort. She is a nurse. She is a wife. But what else really? Was there a time when that same finger touched her thigh with love? I consider it and shudder. The mind plays strange games. No. No youth for them. They were always old. Does that finger touch her now with any tenderness or is it, as I rather fancy, like the touch of a dry stick?

  There was a time when my hand, too, held heat and when its touch left a burn beneath the skin and I sought beauty like the bee his queen; but it was a high flight for an old tyrant, and not worth wings. Doubtless there were sweet and brave and foolish times between them. There may be sweet times now. Such times lie beyond my conjuring. I only know that thorough evil is as bright as perfect good and seems as fair; for animals that live in caves are bleached by darkness and so shine in their surroundings as the good soul does in its, albino as the stars. But beauty or any of its brilliant semblances is foreign to Mr. Wallace and his wife and to the Means. Real wickedness is rare. Certainly it does not rest in the tawdry murder of millions, even Jews. It rests rather on the pale brow of every saviour who to save us all from death first kills. Nevertheless, it is the Jewish fleshsmoke that one smells, the burning cords of bodies, and it is hard to see the soul through that stiff irreverent wood, I suppose, just as it is hard for me to light a bright bulb in the house of the Means, or place between the boards of husband Wallace and his wife a lover’s need and pleasure.

  Although, as it turned out, I was unable to capture Mr. Wallace, who clung tenaciously to his secrets, my triumph was complete. I broke the weaker vessel. I heard his cane rap on the front door and I rushed from my study to prevent his entrance. However, my wife forestalled me and Mr. Wallace was already in the living room when I arrived, sinking on the piano bench, his face alarmingly red and his eyes blinking at shadows. He filled the room with his hoarse hospitalities. I was brusque with my wife. I had hoped to hold him to the porch. I had read of saints who kissed the suppurating sores of beggars and I had always doubted the spiritual merit of it, but in front of Mr. Wallace I could only marvel that the act had been performed. At last I turned my wife away and Mr. Wallace pulled at the brim of his straw hat and stuttered at a shout his puzzlement. He shook, poor fellow, with anxiety. I laughed. I made light of everything. Moles are of course, I said, the accidents of birth. There’s no more to be seen in their position than in the order of the stars. The ancient Greek philosophers, for the most part, have spoken clearly on the subject. Perhaps Pythagoras was not as plain as one would wish, while Socrates had in him from his birth a warning voice and Plato was given on occasion to behavior which was, well, scarcely consistent with his love of mathematics; yet Aristotle remained firm and did not generally recognize the power of premonition. The Christian Church, to be frank, regards such things as satanic, although there have been happenings which do appear upon their face to be . . . of a nature nearer to—what shall I say?—the epiphany of an occult world: nail holes on the feet and hands of even little boys, visions of the virgin, voices, seizures, transports, ecstasies, then the miracles worked by sainted bones, the wood of the true cross, cloth of the holy cape, blood, excrement, and so on . . . wounds in the side from which cool water flows as pure as the purest spring. Still . . . still . . . the church is stern. The Jews, too, are a hardheaded lot. There is of course the Cabala, the magical book. Nevertheless Yaweh is forthright. And so we know the leaves of tea arrange themselves for our amusement while the warm insides of fowl permit only the primitive to divine. Was it not before Philippi that the ghost of Julius Caesar . . .? However . . . all omens are imaginings. We should laugh when we read disaster. In medieval days the story went about of a stream of spring-fresh water so sweet and pure that on the tongue it made the spirit eloquent and the head giddy with thanksgiving. Yet when men followed its turnings to its source they found it sprang from the decaying jaws of a dead dog. Thence the faithful spoke of how it was that from a foul, corrupt, and wicked world the clean and whole and good would one day flow. Mr. Wallace thanked me and tried to rise. He beckoned me and I went close and a powerful hand gripped my upper arm and pulled. The monster rose and his mouth broke open bitterly. Good-bye.

  At last. But Mr. Wallace cannot whisper. The walls rang with him. What did she think when she heard? Will she cringe again? She came with tea some minutes later and pretended surprise at finding him gone. I had to stare at her until her cup shook. Then I went upstairs to my room.

  When all was well begun and seemed well ended, the Wallaces joined the Means. Perhaps the Means read moles better than I do. Better: perhaps they do not know what moles may mean.

  The houses here are served by alleys. Garages face them. Trash spills over the cinders and oil flavors the earth. The Wallaces have helped themselves up the Means’ porch steps and day is falling when I begin my walk through the alleys by the backsides of the houses. The house of love is first. The shades are drawn. Who knows when passion may choose to spring from its clothes? I hear the Wallaces moving on the porch—the scrape of a chair. Eternity Tomorrow. It is tacked on the inside of the door. The letters swallow at the light. Their car is parked elsewhere but I resist the temptation to go in. Cracks in the walls net the floor. Beer cans glow. A wagon hangs precariously by its handle to the wall. I am at the entrance and frightened by it as a child is frightened by the cold air that drifts from a cave to damp the excitement of its discovery. Not since I was very young have I felt the foreignness of places used by others. I had forgotten that sensation and its power—electric to the nerve ends. The oiled ash, the cool air, the violet light, the wracked and splintered wood, the letters of the prophecy—they all urge me strangely. Mrs. Wallace hoots. I move on. The lane looks empty of all life like a road in a painting of a dream. I am a necromancer carrying a lantern. The lamp is lit but it gives no light. My steps are unnaturally loud and I tell myself I have fallen into the circle of my own spell. Tin briefly fires. Then I hear the voice of Mrs. Cramm. Her virtuous shoes show beneath the partly opened door of her garage. She stores things there for she has no car. By her shoes are another pair—a child’s. The child giggles and is shushed. I have been loud in the lane yet they have not heard me. Now stock still, I fear to move. The door swings and I back in panic. I jump into the Means’ garage. The door does not close and Mrs. Cramm remains hidden behind it with the child, conversing in low tones. Finally the feet begin to move and I duck deeply into the darkness of the Means. I feel a fool. Steps are coming quickly. Light steps. What a fool. They turn in. The child is in the door, a boy I think—Tim or Ames. I crouch in the dark by a tire, hiding my eyes as if he might see me with them. Fool. Why? Why have I done this? Why am I hiding here like a thief? The child’s feet pass me and I hear a loud clink. Then he comes from the rear of the barn and goes out and his feet disappear onto grass. My courage returns and I follow what my ears have remembered back into the barn but I fail to find what it was he h
as deposited there. I bark my shin on a cycle. In the lane I put my hands in my pockets. The alley is empty. The light is nearly gone. I realize that I have breached the the fortress, yet in doing so I lost all feeling for the Means and sensed only myself, fearful, hiding from a child. A cat fires from a crack in Mrs. Cramm’s garage and passes silently into the darkness. My stomach burns. I walk forward until I reach the turf and stand by redbud and by dogwood trees. I see her then, utterly gray and unshaped and unaccompanied, a thin gray mist by a tree trunk, and I stand dumbly too while the dusk deepens. Indeed I am not myself. This is not the world. I have gone too far. It is the way fairy tales begin—with a sudden slip over the rim of reality. The streetlights flare on Mrs. Cramm. Her arms are clenched around her. She is watching the Means’ front porch from which I hear a whinny. Unaccountably I think of Hänsel and Gretel. They were real and they went for a walk in a real forest but they walked too far in the forest and suddenly the forest was a forest of story with the loveliest little cottage of gingerbread in it. There is a flash in the ribboned darkness. From the corner of my eye I think I see the back door of the Means’ house close. Mrs. Cramm is fixed—gray and grotesque as primitive stone. I back away. The ribbons of light entangle me. I crawl between garages. My feet slip on cans. Fool fool fool. I try to think what I’m doing. One day Jack went to town to buy a cow and came home with a handful of beans. I slip. There is a roar of ocean like a roaring mob. Have I gone down before the giant? Mrs. Cramm is suddenly gone and I slink home.

  It was an experience from which I have not yet recovered. I go back each evening just when dusk is falling and stand by the redbud tree at the back of Mrs. Cramm’s yard. I never see her, yet I know that on the evenings when the Wallaces visit with the Means, she talks to the children. I have lain like fog between the garages and only heard whispers—vague, tantalizing murmurs. Every evening I hope the streetlights will surprise her again. I know where every streak will be. I think I have seen her in the back seat of the Means’ car when it is parked in the barn sometimes—a blank patch of stone gray. Is it Ames who slips out to meet her? Recently, while I’ve been loitering at the end of the alley, taking my last look around, I’ve felt I’ve mixed up all my starts and endings, that the future is over and the past has just begun. I await each evening with growing excitement. My stomach turns and turns. I am terribly and recklessly impelled to force an entrance to their lives, the lives of all of them; even, although this is absurd, to go into the fabric of their days, to mote their air with my eyes and move with their pulse and share their feeling; to be the clothes that lie against their skins, to shift with them, absorb their smells. Oh I know the thought is awful, yet I do not care. To have her anger bite and burn inside me, to have his brute lust rise in me at the sight of her sagging, tumbling breasts, to meet her flesh and his in mine or have the sores of Mr. Wallace break my skin or the raw hoot of his wife crawl out my throat . . . I do not care . . . I do not care. The desire is as strong as any I have ever had: to see, to feel, to know, and to possess! Shut in my room as I so often am now with my wife’s eyes fastened to the other side of the door like blemishes in the wood, I try to analyze my feelings. I lay them out one by one like fortune’s cards or clothes for journeying and when I see them clearly then I know the time is only days before I shall squeeze through the back screen of the Means’ house and be inside.

  ICICLES

  I

  It had snowed heavily during the night, but by morning the sky had cleared, deepening the frost. The sun when it rose was dazzling, and at once it began to melt the roofs and window edges, power lines and limbs of trees. Icicles formed rapidly. At first they were thick and opaque like frozen slush, but later, lengthening, they cleared and began to glitter brilliantly like pieces of heavy glass. When Fender left his house he had to duck, sweeping a number away with his arm, they were that long already, and there were more when he returned at five—a row had formed above his picture window. Multiply like weeds, he thought, kicking fragments from his stoop with the side of his foot. Later he sat in his living room eating a pot pie from a tray in his lap and chewing crackers, his gaze passing idly along the streets in the wheel ruts and leaping the disorderly heaps of shoveling. He was vaguely aware of the ice that had curtained a quarter of his window, and of the light from the streetlamps reflected by it, but he was thinking how difficult it was to sell property so suspiciously hidden. This time of year the wind blew over the porches of the houses he was showing. His prospects were invariably shivering before he got them in. He’d say it was no day to trade caves, or some such thing, and they’d nod in a determined way that made him realize they meant it. A faint smile might drift to their faces. Inside there were boots and rubbers and the mess of snow and papers, sellers like shabby furniture, their wan and solemn children staring large-eyed at the strangers, while in-laws, made fat, no doubt, by their wisdom, held their arms like bundles to their chests and stopped up the doorways. There was always frost on the windows, darkening the rooms, and the attics and basements and enclosed porches were cold and grim, and his prospects had stiff, inhuman faces.

  Prospects: a pickly word, a sour betrayer. It was supposed to fill your thoughts with gold, or with clear air and great and lovely distances. Well, the metal came quickly enough to mind, but beards followed shortly, dirt and the deceptions of the desert, biscuits like powdered pumice, tin spoons, stinking mules, clattering cups, stinking water, deceiving air.

  You’ve got to watch their eyes, Glick. Watch their eyes. Then at the first sign (here Fender would bang his hands together) close in. Greed. (He’d hug himself.) Greed’s what you want to see—all the worst, Glick—envy, that possessive eye. Bang! That eagerness. That need.

  But he had a list of numbers to call. He’d better get at it.

  He hated winter. The same gray sky lay on the ground, day after day, gray as industrial smoke, and in the sky the ground floated like a street that’s been salted, and his closets were cold, holes wore through his pockets, and he was lonely, indoors and out, with a loneliness like the loneliness of overshoes or someone else’s cough. At the office you seldom got out; your hours weren’t your own; you figured insurance and read the ads in the papers and called when people were home. At the other desk, stacking brochures that advertised lots in Florida and sucking on his fountain pen, rearranging flowers that were dead and dialing numbers without lifting the receiver, was Glick—Glick, the wiseman, Glick, the joker—green all winter like a pine . . . all winter. There was no one else to talk to but Isabelle, and of course Isabelle . . .

  Glick, why do you do that? I mean, why do you dial like that, with the receiver on the hook? Glick leans over his desk, placing both hands on the phone like a healer. I rehearse the number I’m going to call. He’s very serious, very intense. I rehearse everything. He says it proudly. Preparation is the secret of success.

  Advice. From the start. Very wise. And Glick was the younger man. Glick. A pickle. A pickly fellow. Fender’s fork poked through the crust of his pie, releasing steam, and he squinted at the crawling, winking snow. No friend of his. Who knew what shape the lawns were in?

  Fender allowed his first bite to fall back. Still staring aimlessly, he rinsed his mouth with air and sent it coasting against the pane. Another advantage of living alone. No embarrassment. Only sensible. He stirred the pie with his fork. If he touched his tongue to the window—that would be cooling. Undeniably another advantage. Who would dare to . . . publicly? Even alone he felt constraint. As if Pearson might be passing and would see him apply such a kiss to the glass. To Pearson it would look strange and Pearson would hold the strangeness against him.

  Again there was no beef to speak of. Deftly he exposed a piece. Lights pierced the pie as about them the gravy darkly oozed and bubbled. The pies were best when the company was still trying to make a good impression. There would be lots of meat then, and the crust would be tender. Pies, he thought, pies . . .

  He wondered whether he ought to try another kind, maybe the
kind with the cow on the label. He believed the cow was smiling and he tried to imagine its face and its figure clearly but shards of ice in the drifts disturbed him. There were sales, times of year the price subsided, others again when it rose; there was a rhythm in the market as regular as though it were moved by the moon. He was supposed to keep his ear to the ground and hear the new supermarket opening or the branch bank or the store, the block of offices going up, the factory closing. . . .

  Fortunate if you had a freezer.

  Pearson, this morning, had once again whacked Fender’s desk with his newspaper. Suddenly: whackwhack. Keep your ears to the ground, Fender. Listen. Listen with all you’ve got, with the whole business—hard—with your eyes, with your nose—with the soul, Fender—yes, that’s what I mean, that’s it—the soul. So keep those ears down. That’s how we get on in this business. That’s how, I should say, you get on, hay, fair friend? But look—I mean Isabelle, Glick—look: there Fender sits. He sits. Where’s your spirit, Fender, your sporting spirit? Merry up. Oh . . . sad. He’s a sad old dog, Glick. Sad old dog. Try to match me, Fender. Here—take on a real master. Get your blood up. Ah, but look: he sits. Poor pooch. I say, Isabelle—poor pooch. Come on, Fender, try to top the old pro just once and really harken, fair friend, hay?—really listen in. Think if you heard as much as I do. A din! Now then, are you ready, wound and set? Okay—okay—what’s happening—here’s a nice one for you—what’s happening at sixteen thirty-two, oh let’s make it, um, ah—Balinese?