Death Goes Better With Coca-Cola

by Dave Godfrey

  “You can’t expect to shame me too; you’ve had enough. I’ll be always when I want to, and who cares about before. That wasn’t perfect; it wasn’t even fair.”

  “We’ve done worse.”

  “Last summer was worse I suppose? I wanted you more all the time then, even if my stuhla didn’t.”

  “Oh, come off that dung, Sara.”

  “Last summer was just great, really. My sukshma and my stuhla wanted you just the same, like twins.”

  “Like an old lady with toy poodles. Come on, Sara. You get over feeling like that. Call it your body, even your bod.”

  “I never got over it, even after I met him. That first morning here was so great.”

  “It wasn’t, you know that. Some of the others weren’t bad, but that first one was funny. That’s all it really was, funny.”

  “No. I don’t know about you. But for me it was like what he calls jivamukti, which means union with the whole world or something. It’s the closest they get to the idea of heaven. He gets very excited when he talks about it.”

  “Come on, come on. Any two kids, aged anywhere between three and thirteen, could have done better out of pure instinct.”

  “I wouldn’t know; I’d only read books before.”

  “That’s better, poke at me for awhile. I was thinking before that I should tell you to enjoy yourself more. You’re getting to be sadder than I ever was.”

  “I really like to talk to you, you know. You’ve been around so much you really give me a different slant on things.”

  “Poke away, love. Come on to the dance and I’ll show you I’m better in other ways too. Bigger gaskets for a longer ride.”

  “I’ve got to get to the train.”

  “Turn around then; we’re at the dock.”

  “Here? Not this dock, damn it. Then I’ll have to climb the hill to the station and be late and everything. Shit.”

  “Never be unladylike. The happiest days of a young girl’s life are when she’s swearing at her husband. Take the paddle and keep us from bumping.”

  “What time is it? You’re really cutting yourself off from me. The train’ll be here and me in a wet bathing suit and your jacket.”

  “You said you’d stay.”

  “I never did. What time is it?”

  “That train’s always late. Go home, change into something pretty, snow him, then bring him down here to the pavilion and let him see the competition. Kick up your heels. We’re going to be good this summer.”

  “You’d make a worse salesman than my father, Scroppy. Don’t push it, eh? I feel bad enough. He doesn’t like dancing and you know I wouldn’t bring him here. Just play something for me. I’m so late.”

  I lay in the dingy while she hopped out and tied it up; my back feeling the heft of the rudder, my feet sopping in the bilge; feeling the night air getting colder around me, watching her run across the creaky pavilion dock, whose boards whistled white with that soft patina of silver pine wood attains only after years of winter snow, years of the sun of summer, of its wind and waves. She started up the iron stairway to the road. The wind billowed in my jacket.

  “We’re really going to kick down the stars, beautiful. I’m really going to blow my ass.”

  Her voice came back down the hill from the road like the ending of a rock-and-roll record, where nobody can think of an idea for the end so they just play the last phrase softer and softer until the sound man can fade them out.

  “I’m really going to kick them all down, beautiful.” I said softly. “I’m really going to blow my ass.”

  “Glad to hear it.” The drummer was standing on the dance deck of the pavilion above me, Bobby Grimes, a negro from Hamilton, whirling a pair of drum brushes from his fingers. “Nothing like a little loosening to make a man scramble.”

  “You just try and keep up with the rest of us tonight, eh?” I said. “You’re forever speeding things up. I thought I learned you how to count to four once.”

  “Sorry, man,” he said, “didn’t know you didn’t get socked out there or I wouldn’t have put you down so easy.”

  He walked back inside the pavilion, swinging the wire brushes slowly, one on either side of his thighs, of his dark-suited, slow-moving body. And cold is simply the acceptance of the need of warmth.

  Night Tripper

  When I can, I fly at night, for I dislike the thought of crashing into sunlight. So I arrived in Chicago very early this time and I just walked around, after riding in the airport bus down to the Palmer House and drinking coffee there, because I had so recently done a lot of things which I had enjoyed and I was about to make a visit in which there would be absolutely no enjoyment, and I was in search of a certain neutrality.

  Walking around, I did not want to remember Tony Hasper and how he had once been, or to think about the rightness or wrongness of the situation; I simply arranged a few things that had recently happened in a list so that I would have something to say. For that had been the trouble, not having such things arranged, the previous time.

  Tony was with his friends on the fourth floor of a tenement in the 50s between Greenwood and Cottage Grove. They were eating a breakfast of corn flakes and scrambled eggs, at a table which was a Bell Telephone cable spool laid on its side and painted in very bright oranges and blues. One of them, who was a photographer and had money, was just returned from a trip to India and there were photographs of starving Harijans in Bihar on all the walls. Some of the prints were still drying. He was a clever photographer and you saw not only the burnt, unresponsive eyes of children whose minds were damaged by malnutrition, but also, next to these, photographs of a Rajput man whose hair was carefully combed, and oiled, and dust free. Another of them, who was a painter, was working on a munitions series, but he was too clever. He was doing paintings, on 4 x 4 poplar, of men feeding Nike missiles, and of the Phoenix system for the F-111B. But he had gone too far; he was too overt. He was not sure of his own art. In the corner of the painting he had printed: HUGHES: Creating a New World with Electronics. And over another he had printed: A QUOTE FROM McNAMARA’S BAND: FY 1962 through FY 1966 sales of arms abroad of $8.1 billion . . . 1.4 million man-years of employment spread throughout the 50 states and over $1 billion in profits to American Industry.

  “Is Tony still in the back?” I said.

  “Sure man,” the painter said. “Did you bring us some bread?”

  “With clever stuff like that you should be able to sell all over the place,” I said. “Life should come and pay five thousand just to shoot you all in your new, creative, underground way of life.”

  “Your friend is in the back room,” the painter said. He had on a green shirt with red flowers and wore white jockey shorts and assumed an expression of great peacefulness as though he had suffered to an extent of which I could never become aware. As though my sarcasm was beneath his notice.

  Tony was still in the room that had been a sunroom before they had had to plywood up all the windows and put in fluorescent lighting. On the plywood his own early sunflowers were marred by nail holes and damp and by the peeling of the paint around the imperfections of the board. Tony had a bed and there was a hand-woven rug on the floor.

  “How’s it going, Ton?” I said.

  I looked at him very closely and then I just wanted to talk and I was glad that I had my list arranged.

  “I was coming back from the coast,” I said, “and I just thought I’d drop by and tell you what it was like.”

  Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle, I thought. And what cage is like the iron-cage of despair?

  “You’d have done some wild paintings,” I said. “We’ll have to go sometime. It’s not exactly the Vineyard, but it’s beautiful. And far from spoiled.”

  And the sea there was omar deep and ephah wide, I thought. But that made little sense.

  “I fished a little, but you kno
w how it is — never enough time to get at ease. I was only really lucky the first time. Took a bus right out of the city, not very far up the coast, to a little bay where there were ferries going past — like buses on Wabash. I didn’t even want to catch anything there. It’s already late May out on the coast. I just wanted to sit there, bobbing, off a little cave that ran right into the mountains, called Hole-in-the-Wall, and that looked like it owned a spirit or two. But I had the herring strips down, almost by habit, and I got a nice Spring. Hard to carry on a trip though, and I would have given it away or something, but a boy with his father in a rowboat down the way got one too, larger, and I decided then to keep mine. I went up to the restaurant over the bay and watched the weather and watched the father and son clean their salmon while I ate some shrimps, and then I went and borrowed their gear to clean mine. They weren’t very impressed that I had to borrow gear, but the boy was very proud of what he had caught. The two of them were very short and they looked like one another.

  “The next day I went out on the island, but the wind was blowing right down the strait so I couldn’t go out. Talked to an old navy-man fisherman for a while and we quoted Pope at one another. Horace still charms with graceful negligence. That was his favourite, standing on the boards of the pier with the boats rocking along each side and a small flock of Goldeneyes spiraling high and wary off the far shore. Horace still charms with graceful negligence and without method talks us into sense; will, like a friend, familiarly convey the truest notions in the easiest way. It’s hard to believe when you meet someone who thinks in that way and still has a memory to use.

  “He suggested I might try one of the rivers, and drift-fish it, so I did, but that was a mistake. The river was open, but it shouldn’t have been. Not this early in March. I had a good guide, it wasn’t that. But there were so many black fish, spent from spawning, that the clean ones you picked up were in your mind tarnished by contagion. I only drifted down for one afternoon and then I came here. Through Seattle.

  “Seattle is a bad time now. I had to wait until past midnight for my connecting flight. The place was full of soldiers and whores, as though it were the ’40s again, but there was one mess of unsureness in the air, Ton. I talked to them, but I couldn’t talk to them about certain things. About the father and son, for instance. And the not talking of it made it almost an image of old calendar art for me. I’ll have to take you up there and have you do it modern for me in the summer, when the fresh run comes.”

  Tony did not reply, of course, to any of this. The switch is off. The grey is monked. His cow took an overdose. This train is full, Charlie. Grass from a lyed mine. Etc. Etc. For more than a year, gentle amateur physicians and readers, he has been convinced that he is a pawpaw tree and its fruit, and says so, with additions and variation, when he talks. If there had been any change, his friends would have told me about it.

  They haven’t taken him into a hospital. That is what we fought about the previous time, when I hadn’t prepared my list and when I blew up at them after I had seen him. One of the friends is a spoiled social worker, if there is such a category, and doesn’t trust the system into which Tony would be placed if they gave him up. They were all with him when he took the last bad trip, although they all pretend to know that it was bad stuff and nothing else that switched him out. They take good care of him. Tony’s father was a tailgunner in a bomber. His mother raised him until he was fifteen and then she married her Dreyfus Fund salesman. When I knew him he was in his early twenties and just bursting into a creative life. He was an action painter, and would paint sometimes for five or six hours straight, hurling, scraping, lashing paint onto canvas as though it too were alive and quickened by his own energy. He took peyote the first time simply because he could not conceive of himself as somebody who didn’t. We turned it at a funeral chapel, an old, refurbished Victorian house. When he first tried to chew it he got sick and couldn’t keep it down. We had to wander around town and find some gelatin capsules so he could get the small chunks of peyote into his stomach without retching. Then he went off and on. At times he could swear I was trying to knife him, or that I was coming at him with an axe, and he would crouch in terror and run away down black alleys; at times he would become euphoric and warble about the blue guitars he was hearing and the tomato skies that embraced him and the vitality of the golden blood he could feel carousing through him and speaking to him of wisdoms. When he came down off the mountain he remembered the fear and he swore never to take it again. For two or three months he refrained and worked on his sunflower series. Then he turned his head to acid and I went to another continent. Now his friends take good care of him. They have seen minds burned out in other ways. They have chosen their reasons; they do for him what they would have done for themselves. Under the circumstances.

  Mais moi, I am glad that I have a list prepared, my mind at least roughly organized so that I need not think of old measures, of omars and ephahs, so that I can continue talking.

  “If you come out there to that coast with me some time, Ton, we’ll go all the way up into one of the sounds and just fish and live on the boat and argue. We’ll take about a hundred of the big Ryecrisp cartwheels you can get out there and a sack of spinach for greens. The sea is full of fish for the asking: rockfish, perch, oysters and mussels. And when the spinach is gone we can get our greens from lamb’s quarters, sheep sorrel, nettle greens, sea plantain, Indian consumption plant. Or have Labrador Tea on the shore.”

  This list of things I talk about to an old friend, a man of only twenty-six, a man of whom I have good memories, a man whose eyes are as bleary as any famined Harijan child’s, whose face is as without character now as the split globe of a lemon-half, scuffed into an alley’s soot.

  “If we go up maybe you’ll get that for me, the way the two of them looked like one another. Like my ancestral spirits walking up from the sea. They both wore those black, red-soled, rubber boots, turned down half so that the thin grey cloth inside showed visible to the sun, with their red-and-black bush shirts open at the collar to the warmth of the day. And something in their faces, something of a human similarity when they looked at one another. The boy carrying his salmon in his arms like a flopping treasure.”

  When I finish the list, I simply repeat it, with few variations, almost singing parts of it, gazing at the sunflowers and at memories, at the sun-streaked alleys outside beyond the plywood. Gazing at that great dead mass of flopping salmon as the boy struggled to keep his arms straight beneath it and struggled to be able to assume its entire weight as he moved up slowly from the sea.

  Two Smiths

  May. Spring is late to come. Slush and the streets full of shivering lushes near the Spadina LCBO. The boy standing in front of me eager to talk, hair as long as that of Charles Dickens at nineteen, a gold circle in one ear; impetuous to talk, a bright orange and green sailor jersey striped boldly above his Levi Strauss blue jeans, blue-eyed; determined to tell me how it is with him, why he clipped out on the reserves, where he smoked across the border, his smile twisted in a billy-jo, mountain boy way; gurgling out how it was with him when he got to enjoying his brother’s enjoyment of killing people way over there in Asia and how it was when he knew he just had to get out, to cut out, because he could see how easy it would be for him to start enjoying the same killing. He, Jimmy Randall Smith.

  Sure. January. Full winter may never come. Rhett Smith is beside me in the midwest, lifting an old .12 gauge out of his flower-painted Chevy. His young man’s clipped beard is gone.

  “Have to have the car repainted now,” I say.

  Rhett doesn’t answer. His face is tight in the cold, near-winter wind. Something else is bothering him. Something else is keeping him from talking, from replying to my jest about his repainted Chevy. So that I talk, uncharacteristically. Once we have climbed over the fence and are into the corn fields, completely stripped down now, completely ready for winter. He waves at the thin-faced girl with peroxid
e hair who sits in the Chevy and looks discontented, as though the heat may be suddenly and mysteriously turned off while we are hunting.

  “A funny old bird is all that I’m sure is left,” I say. “I’ve almost given him a name. I’ve seen him three or four times in the whole year. He’s got one singular habit that keeps him alive. He flies straight up.”

  I look at Rhett Smith. I am not amusing him. He’s back in the south, or he’s back in the county seat, or in the state’s capital, in a courtroom under pressure. He is unable to relax, as I can now in the cleared corn field, looking for that one old bird with the singular habit.

  “Shouldn’t hunt him down,” I say, “but you know how it is, sometimes you reach a certain intensity about getting something done. I’ve got my freezer stocked. He’s probably tough, probably full of old lead.

  “Put some lead near him myself, one time, doing it the local way: without dogs, just lots of men in a line. We came through the fields six at a time. Twice we peppered away at that old bird. It’s a well-analyzed way of hunting, the way you do it here. The birds go up, they go along, or they go away; it doesn’t really matter. There’s always two or three men who can get an angle on him. Sometimes more if he flies the wrong way.

  “This bird seemed to know there was something else. Went up like a partridge into a pine tree. Went up thirty or forty feet. Everybody had a shot at him, more or less. Good business for the hardware store — that was about all. We all shot into one another’s shot. It’s just not something you’re used to. You’re used to a long, quick, lean flight. You’re used to aiming ahead. A transcendental bird, I guess. A romantic out of place in the pragmatic west.”

  Rhett Smith is not looking at me.

  “They put a lot of pressure on you, I guess.” I say.

  “Wasn’t bad,” he says. “Wasn’t bad at all. I admit I made a mistake.”