The Heavenly Table

by Donald Ray Pollock

  Though he had put on a brave front when his parents arrived from Philadelphia for his graduation ceremony, as soon as he saw them back onto the train, he’d packed a bag and fled to a hotel in nearby Columbus. After ordering a case of brandy brought up to his room, he had stripped down to his underwear and proceeded to get completely soused, his plan being to slit his veins open in the bathtub upon finishing the last bottle, just as the noblest of Romans had done. However, near the end of his third day, something began to bother him. Perhaps it was some vague sense of manly completeness he was after, or, more likely, just plain old revenge, but he suddenly felt the need to lose his virginity before committing himself to the Great Beyond. With a faithfulness that now seemed downright comical, he had kept himself pure for his wedding night, but now there would be no such night. How many times, he drunkenly wondered, as he cracked open another bottle, had that little slut been untrue while he walked around the Kenyon campus at two in the morning with a throbbing pair of blue balls?

  But how to go about it? He knew nobody in Columbus except a distant aunt, and the only thing he remembered about that overly pious woman was that she owned a vast collection of hair shirts and was allergic to sunlight. Too, he wanted to get the matter over with as quickly as possible, and hated the thought of wasting time on wining and dining and drawn-out seductions. Of course, there had to be prostitutes about; according to some of his school chums, such women were everywhere, even in the dreariest sectors of the Corn Belt. Drawing the window blinds, he lay down on the bed and entertained images of a sophisticated, dark-eyed Italian courtesan tapping shyly on his door. Their one night of passion would be so intense that later, unable to bear the thought of living without him, she would weigh herself down with stones and throw herself off a bridge into one of the muddy, carp-infested rivers that flowed through the Buckeye State in the same ponderous way sap seeps from a tapped maple. Then things got fuzzy, and after a time, he passed out again.

  In the end, after being holed up in the hotel room for over a week, he offered a slatternly, red-haired Irish chambermaid fifty dollars to sleep with him. Although she readily agreed to the exchange—after all, it was probably more money than she earned in a month—to his surprise, the little hussy had the audacity to insist on certain conditions. Studying him with eyes that resembled cold, green marbles, she said, “First off, ain’t nothin’ happens till the ol’ mouse is warmed up good and proper.”

  “Excuse me?” Bovard said, a puzzled look on his unshaven face. “The mouse?”

  “Me privates,” she said, rolling her eyes at his ignorance. “I love a man’s tongue on my puss, but my old man, he’s too old-fashioned for it. Says it always make him feel like a hog eatin’ from a trough.”

  “Good God!”

  “And I’d need a nice lunch before we get down to the bizness.”

  Completely rattled, Bovard reached for a bottle on the nightstand and took a long drink.

  “And cake and ice cream for dessert,” she went on. “I crave the sweets even more than a good screw.”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Bovard said in a faint voice, more to himself than to the maid.

  “And another thing, too,” she said, waving a finger in the air. “The fifty don’t count for anything extra.”

  “Extra?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “If’n, say, you force me to swaller your wad, or you get the notion to poke me in the bunghole. Each of them filthy acts is another fiver.”

  The maid said all of this without the slightest embarrassment, and the full extent of Bovard’s reversal of fortune struck him just then like a knife in the pit of his queasy stomach. To think that a fortnight ago he was engaged to one of the most beautiful and sought-after young women in Philadelphia, and now here he was, about to surrender his virtue to a gutter-minded domestic with a bubbly rash on her neck and a smear of what appeared to be egg yolk on her pointy, somewhat bristly chin. But he was growing afraid that he would lose the nerve to kill himself if he kept putting it off. She would have to do. He picked up the phone and ordered the lunch.

  When the desk clerk, a beer-bellied, liver-spotted sad sack, knocked at the door, the maid rushed to the closet and hid. Just pushing the cart into the room, loaded with enough food to feed a family of six, seemed to leave the poor bastard exhausted, and an uncomfortable minute or two went by while he leaned one hand against the wall and panted. Finally, after recovering from his labors and making sure everything was to Bovard’s satisfaction, he started out, but then turned and asked in a wheezy, apologetic voice, “Beg your pardon, sir, but you haven’t seen Myrtle around, have you?”

  “Myrtle?”

  “Yes, sir, the maid who takes care of this floor.”

  “No,” Bovard said hurriedly, “I haven’t seen anyone.”

  “I was just wondering, sir. She’s left her things right outside your door.”

  “Her things?”

  “Yes, sir, her mop and linens and such.” The man glanced at the closet, then started to step out into the hall. “That’s all right, sir,” he mumbled, as he closed the door. “She was having tummy troubles this morning, so she’s probably gone off to the terlet.”

  As he listened to the maid chomp and chew and slurp—he’d turned away toward the window when she dipped a fat, green pickle into the gravy boat and then licked it clean—Bovard wondered, with more than a little trepidation, what he had gotten himself into. After consuming half a chicken and a mound of mashed potatoes and a relish tray and four buttered rolls, she heaped a pint of chocolate ice cream on top of a three-layer coconut cake and did her best to finish it off, too. For several minutes, she sat looking a bit nauseated, but then grabbed the brandy bottle Bovard was nursing. She took a long swig and belched forth a thunderous, full-throated yawp, such as an enraged donkey might make. He shuddered, thinking again of his former fiancée. In all the years he had known her, not once had Elizabeth ever emitted such a gross sound in his presence. Why, he doubted very much if she had ever passed a whiff of gas outside the privacy of her water closet. He was just about to tell the maid that he’d changed his mind when she stood and quickly shucked off her uniform and undergarments, all of which were stained and tattered beyond description. Then, with a long, lazy sigh, she laid back on the bed and parted her stubby, purple-mottled legs. She looked over at him and patted the place beside her, smiling with teeth that reminded him of kernels of decayed Indian corn. It was too late to back out now without hurting her feelings, he told himself, and he was too much of a gentleman to do that, even to such a vile and loathsome creature. He got up from the chair by the window and staggered toward her.

  After a few clumsy, halfhearted caresses on his part, the maid quickly took over, displaying the same unbridled zeal for lovemaking that she had shown for eating. She forced his head between her thighs with her red, callused hands and ground her thickly thatched privates, the orange hair as rough as a wire brush, against his face. Five minutes of this and she exploded like a water balloon, squalling like a mashed cat and filling his mouth with what she referred to in a gasp as her “nectar.” Then she twisted around and pushed him back on the bed. She chewed on his knob and tickled his balls and tugged on his shaft until it was raw, but alas, he remained as soft as a sock in a laundry basket. Finally, after employing every trick she could think of—and it seemed to Bovard that the woman knew every dirty one in the book—she raised up and gave him a knowing look. “I could send a boy up, guvner, if that’s the problem,” she said. “Long as I still get me fifty, that is.”

  “A boy!” Bovard yelled, frustrated beyond measure with his cock’s lack of response. “You dirty whore! What do you think I am?”

  “I got no idy,” she said, rolling off the bed, “but a regular man you’re not. And who do you think you are anyway, callin’ me a whore? I got half a mind to send me old man up to kick the shit out of ye.”

  “Oh, so your husband is hanging around here somewhere, is he? What, lurking in a closet? Hidi
ng under some bed? What is he, your pimp?”

  “No, he works the desk downstairs,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Bovard stared at her for a second, a puzzled look on his face. “Him? The old fellow who brought up the cart?” Oh, God, he thought, could this frightful mess get any worse? What a mistake he’d made.

  “Ol’ Taylor might not look like much,” she said, “but at least he knows what to do when the hinges is greased and the door’s ready for entry. Why, he’s like a young bull when it comes to—”

  “Out!” Bovard screamed. “Get out!”

  “Would ye like your sheets changed before I leave?”

  “No, damn it to hell.”

  “There’s a lad I know who—”

  Bovard lurched from the bed with a look of insane fury on his face, and the maid grabbed her uniform off the floor and the money from the dresser and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her. He stopped and stared into the mirror hanging over the mahogany dresser. There he stood, twenty-two years old and naked except for a crusty nightshirt, the sour taste of some scullery maid’s unwashed vagina in his mouth, his tongue blistered and quite possibly bleeding, his manhood shriveled with shame and defeat, his brain soaked with alcohol, at the end of his tether in a hotel room in the middle of Ohio, when he realized with a jolt the awful truth about himself. And the truth was that he, Vincent Claremont Bovard, had never had any more interest in the female body than a woodchuck has in learning the particulars of Latin verb conjugation. Feeling himself getting sick, he stumbled into the bathroom and retched up the sliver of chicken the maid had pushed down his gullet in a playful mood. Then he went back into the room and flopped down on the bed. How could he have been so blind? So ignorant and full of self-denial? After all, his revered Greeks and Romans had written so much about it. Buggery. Pederasty. Homosexuality. Tears began to run down his face. Thank God Elizabeth had called off their engagement. Cold chills ran over his body as he thought about the embarrassing fiasco the wedding night might have been. Then he leaned over and vomited again, this time on the braided rug, before falling into a fitful, nightmarish sleep.

  The next afternoon, after deciding that leaving this world unsullied by lust was the more honorable thing to do after all, he looked by chance out the window and saw, down below on High Street, a military parade made up of Spanish American veterans showing their support for the war and carrying a banner advertising Liberty Bonds. He reached for a bottle and sat down to watch. Citizens of all ages were lined up on the sidewalk waving paper flags, tossing flowers and confetti. Though his head was fairly pounding, it was the most soul-stirring scene he had witnessed in ages, brimming over as it was with patriotism and excitement and the feeling that something world-changing was about to take place. Something much bigger and important than he, anyway.

  It was that moment that he was thinking of now, as he sat on the porch smoking and looking out over the camp. To die on the Western Front, he had realized that day as he watched the old soldiers marching by, would be a far better way to leave this world than slitting his wrists in a tub of hot water. Once the procession passed and the crowd began to drift away, he had dozed off again and awakened the next morning filled with energy and purpose. After a bath and a shave, he packed his trunk and took a cab to the nearest armory. Though the draft hadn’t officially started yet, he was quickly sent, for no other reason than he had a college degree, to the Plattsburgh Barracks in New York for officer training. And now here he was, back in Ohio and on the verge of realizing his true destiny. War-ravaged Europe, with its inbred rulers and long-standing prejudices, was going to provide him, Lieutenant Vincent Bovard, with a death worth fighting for.

  17

  THANKS TO A beaten-down bank manager named Leonard Spindler who had actually been praying for the past several weeks that such an event might happen, Cane and his brothers took the Farleigh Savings & Trust without firing a single shot. For the past nine years, Leonard had been ensnared in an increasingly unhappy marriage to the daughter of Francis Gilbert, a moneyed and maniacal bully who also happened to own the bank, along with most everything else in the town and the surrounding area. Ironically, he even had a hold on the property of Thaddeus Tardweller, a despised second cousin from his mother’s side of the family. For Leonard, it wasn’t so much that Mirabelle was hard to get along with—from the first time he’d met her, he had found the poor girl as easy to manipulate as a cud-chewing cow—but that her father wouldn’t back off in his demand that they start turning out babies. However, no matter how many times a day they had intercourse, sometimes with Gilbert standing right outside the bedroom door urging them on with a snappy rhythm he beat on a snare drum, the results were nil. What had once looked like a golden opportunity for advancement—Leonard had grown up on a chicken farm out in the country, but had fled to Farleigh on his eighteenth birthday with aspirations of becoming a dandy—had slowly turned into an unremitting nightmare, and the bank manager’s nerves had become so overwrought that he now suffered from interminable crying jags that he had no control over. And the longer his father-in-law clamored for an offshoot, the worse the affliction became. Just that morning, standing in the kitchen sipping a cup of tea and dabbing at his eyes with a dish towel while Mirabelle frantically did her fertility exercises in the parlor, he heard the man say loudly, “Girl, I realize anybody can make a mistake, but I still can’t understand why you hang on to that no-account fool. When in the hell is he ever going to plant his seed in ye? I can’t wait around forever for a grandson, though God only knows what kind of pinheaded cretin that might turn out to be with ol’ Bucket of Tears as the father. I’m tellin’ you, Mirabelle, honey, you’d be best to go ahead and cut your losses now before he saps all your youth. I know one or two men over in Atlanta who still ask about ye.”

  Leonard had endured a thousand such insults and harangues in silence over the years, but, as many tyrants realize too late, even a spineless toady sometimes has his limits. Although Francis Gilbert would have never dreamed that his son-in-law had the grit for such a scheme, Leonard had been slowly and methodically draining the bank coffers for the past eleven months, in preparation for his escape to gaudy, wide-open San Francisco. Once there, he planned, in no particular order, to become a complete fop, seek out the best ophthalmologist on the West Coast, and knock up the first woman with a good set of childbearing hips who’d spread her legs for him. Only one more thing was needed to perfect his plan, and that was a scapegoat.

  And so, when the awkward and grubby trio entered the bank just a few minutes after Leonard unlocked the door, and announced their felonious intentions, it was all he could do not to welcome them with open arms. In fact, he almost felt sorry for them, as he watched the short fat one trip on the doorjamb, and the youngest accidently spill over a spittoon on his way to guard the front window with a shotgun. It was obvious to the bank manager that the oldest, tall and serious in a black frock coat a bit too big for him, was the brains behind the operation, but even he, after pulling a pistol from the waist of his ragged overalls, seemed at a loss over what to do next. Afraid that some customer might walk in and spoil everything, Leonard took it upon himself to hurry the heist along, first showing them the empty vault, and then dumping the money from the two cash drawers into a bag and setting it on the counter. After that, to give them time to make their getaway and also to cover his own ass, he pretended to faint.

  The Jewetts were already two miles out of town by the time Leonard moseyed up the street to the sheriff’s office. On the way there, he went over the story he planned to tell one more time in his head, and then squeezed his eyes shut in front of Ollie’s Livery until the tears were practically cascading down his pale cheeks. Everyone in Farleigh knew that he bawled like a baby over the slightest upset, and he figured that anything less than full-scale blubbering might arouse suspicion. And what did it matter? After nine years of ridicule, what were one or two more embarrassments? He had thirty thousand dollars hidden under the floorboards
on the back porch at home, and only he and the robbers knew how little cash had actually been in the bank that morning. Within a few days, he would be on a train bound for the West Coast with a suitcase of money and the last laugh.

  The sheriff, Earl Cotter, a potbellied man with greasy gray hair and a vein-streaked nose shaped like a cork, was sitting at his desk leafing through a seed catalog when Leonard walked in wiping at his eyes. He shook his head at the powder-blue parasol the bank manager carried and the white carnation stuck in his buttonhole. Cotter was just about to ask Leonard why he was carrying a goddamn umbrella when there hadn’t been a drop of rain in three weeks, when it suddenly occurred to him that the man never left his post before lunchtime. Never. “What are you doin’ over here?” he said, furrowing his brow.

  Leonard took several deep breaths as he wiped at his face with a handkerchief, then let out a sigh and whimpered, “It was awful. I thought for sure I was a dead man.”

  Before the bank manager could finish his report, Cotter leaped up from his desk and grabbed a shotgun from the rack behind him. Hurrying to the door, he stepped out warily and pointed the gun up and down the street. But there wasn’t a sign of anything out there except for the Phillips boy bouncing on his damn pogo stick on the wooden walkway in front of Cinderella Vanbibber’s house. After the way she had harassed him since spring about birds landing on her fence posts, he was a little surprised the old bitch hadn’t already sent her maid over with a complaint about it. “How long since this happened?” he shouted at Leonard through the open doorway.