The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  Since childhood, I had called up a special vision as my tranquilizer against fear, anxiety, humiliation, hurt feeling. I ran it over and over through my head until I escaped the missed catch, lost election, broken heirloom, broken date. The image was that I swim up, up from the suffocating bottom of a dark pool, up to lighter water, my lungs bursting; then I shoot out, breaking the surface, keep going; I fly past the tops of buildings, past planes, past clouds. My problems clutch at my feet—the school principal, the coach of the baseball team, the draft official, James Dexter—but I kick them off, soar higher.

  So now, to exorcise Stark, I resurrected the image and flew. His hairy steel hand grabbed again and again at my ankle, held fast, so I couldn’t kick. And so my arched wings dropped wax to burn his face. Screaming, he let go, and I climbed to the sun.

  The sun flared as it sank, striking my face with light, the shaft burst my image, and I opened my eyes to see Leila standing framed in the gold, her hand opening in hello. Beside her in the lot, Maisie and Davy ran laughing around the helicopter.

  “Who’s come to call?” she smiled.

  “Your father-in-law’s inside,” I yelled.

  She nodded several times, started toward the theater.

  “Leila,” I ran toward her. “Leila, listen, your mother tried to get you at the terminal. She thought, you know”—I pointed at her Mexican shirt and bare thighs—“she thought maybe you’d want to change your clothes first.”

  Leila looked at the pattern of green leaves growing on her arm. “No,” she smiled, “I don’t think so. Why should I? Everybody having fits about Bruno?” She’d expected him, I suppose, sooner or later.

  “Boy, you said it.” I smiled.

  She called Maisie and Davy to her. “Oh, Devin,” she turned back to say, “Fitzgerald got off fine.” She picked Davy up, gave Maisie her large pocketbook to carry. The three of them went inside the theater.

  I stayed on the bridge, my legs nearly numb with tiredness, the ache to go to sleep. Five minutes went by. Then Mr. Edmunds or Edgars hurried out and called over to Gurley, the pilot, who was now sitting on the ground near his helicopter, smoking. Beside him, a row of white butts stuck in the dirt like anonymous grave markers. The two men spoke briefly, then Gurley stretched his legs, stamped down the cigarettes, buttoned up his jacket, climbed up into the machine, and pulled the door closed after him. Stark’s employee waved a brisk good-bye as he rushed back to the theater, where he bobbed his head at the Menelades, who were then coming out the door.

  Slowly the motor wound to a hideous roar, spinning the blades faster and faster into a blur. Dust whirled again, and weightless, the black machine slowly lifted, sucked upward toward the sun. The sky was on fire.

  Part Three

  The Land of the Wolf

  Chapter 18

  I Become Neglected and Am Provided For

  There is an eyesore in downtown Floren Park, a village otherwise glossy, called Slough Lane. A dim, dirty street, little more really than a dirt ditch, Slough Lane runs a short way at a right turn off the Arcade and ends in a mud field that is littered with communal rubbish, with rusted parts of indefinable machinery, with a rotted mattress, rotting tires, toppled pyramids of rusted cans and broken bottles. It was all incompatible with the Alpine chalets and Victorian gingerbread, and the residents preferred it hidden from the tourists in Arcadia.

  Along either side of the lane slump a dozen tin cabins, one-room square ruins, whose orange or pink rouge is peeling down their faces. There are rusted cars decaying beside a few of these cabins; rusted T.V. antennae lay crippled on the roofs; there is broken glass in the yards.

  I walked down Slough Lane waiting for the sun to set and stopped in front of a grimy store that crouched in the middle of the row, shoved between two cabins, the only two rejuvenated with fresh rose fronts. By squinting through the window soot, I read that it called itself a store for adults. Peering further in, I could see its offerings: cigarettes, beer, fishing tackle, aged potato chips clipped to a stand, movie magazines, newspapers, and three dusty shelves of dusty books for adult reading. Calhoun Grange was on a magazine cover in the window telling his fans that draft dodgers ought to be jailed. I went inside where a dusty sign, in front of a row of bared breasts and bared buttocks, told me I would not be allowed to loiter. Opening a magazine anyhow, I turned the pages quickly until a dwarfish man with dirty hair, his eyes horrifically magnified by opaque glasses, came at me from somewhere in a dark corner, and I retreated back outside.

  On the other side of the ditch, a plainly dressed man was talking to a colorfully dressed one. The latter frowned, shook his head impatiently and walked off; his black patent boots stepped with distaste in the dirt. His hair was black patent too, and his modish suit a brilliant blue with black trimming. The plainly dressed man watched him saunter to the last cabin, kick dirt from his boots against the step, then unlock the door and go in. He stood watching even then, until he noticed me standing there, at which point be stuck a small notebook back in his coat pocket and unhurriedly retraced his steps up Slough Lane to the Arcade. I followed him out.

  By now the sky had blotted out all color left by the sun, but had not lightened the day’s heat or its humidity. Pulling my shirttail from my pants, I flapped it against my skin to cool myself. The man with the notebook had disappeared. In the Arcade, tourists were firing rifles at tin animals that sprang jerkily out of tin bushes. They were waiting for fat trout to hook themselves onto lines dropped among bread lumps in plastic bins. They were buying Navajo jewelry made in Japan and mountain landscapes painted in Manhattan. They were strolling out of the grand promenade of Main Street into this little promenade, dripping slices of pizza, ears of hot corn, frankfurters blobbed with mustard. Sluggish with heat, I leaned against the side of the shooting gallery and watched them.

  The moon rose up, red as the sun. And I walked back to the theater. In front of the doors sat a long, gray Oldsmobile; in front of the car stood Bruno Stark talking to Leila, who held Davy in her arm and Maise by the hand. Behind Stark waited Edgars and Edmunds, briefcases against their chests. I came to the edge of their circle.

  “Well, Bruno,” Leila said, “you’ll do whatever you decide to do.”

  He smiled at her wryly; it was by no means an affectionate look, but hate was curiously tinged with respect. “True enough. So. All right. We’ll go over it all tomorrow. And I’ll look over the papers tonight. So. You’re a smart cookie, Leila. But all in all, I think this is going to be the best solution. Tomorrow.” He took Davy from her and squeezed him appraisingly between his hands. “What do you say, boy?”

  Davy said nothing.

  “You’re a rich man, David Stark. You don’t know it, but you’re a rich man someday. When you finish up college, you and I will go to work. See things. So. Eat. Grow big. Strong. You’re going to have it all.” He tightened his fingers, frightening Davy, whose eyes widened and whose mouth began to quiver. Stark set him down on the ground beside Maisie, then sharply rubbed her head with his knuckles. “And how about you, young lady? What do you say to one of those talking dolls, maybe a carriage too. How about that?”

  Maisie ducked her head from beneath his hand. She kept staring at Stark as she pressed the end of her red bead necklace to her mouth.

  “A choosy buyer, no less.” Stark asked his employees to observe Maisie’s sagacity. Grinning, they bobbed their heads, “Maybe a bicycle, then,” he bid. “What do you say to a bicycle, princess? Maybe with a horn. A light. A basket. How would that be?”

  Slowly, after deliberation, Maisie nodded her head yes.

  “Good, good.” Stark nodded too. “Smart girl. Don’t settle. Hold out for what you want.”

  Leila spoke. “Listen, Bruno, you’re welcome to come stay at my house. We can make room. Why should you stay at a hotel?”

  “No, no, no, I already made arrangements.”

  Leila shrugged.
“Okay, if you’re sure. Mother will be disappointed.”

  “Tomorrow,” Stark told her. “Edgars, I’d like to make arrangements to talk to this sheriff, what’s his name—Booter. And this Dr. Ferrell guy. Okay, let’s go.”

  Edgars got in the Oldsmobile, started the motor. Edmunds opened the back door.

  “Excuse me. Mr. Stark?” I stepped forward.

  He ran me through his memory bank. “Devin. Yes. Tomorrow. All right?”

  I stepped back.

  “So. Nine o’clock,” he said to Leila, and in silence she agreed.

  The lights of the Oldsmobile swung past the creek, past the bridge, and scanned the woods across from them, then swinging around, light jabbed through the lot and was gone. Leila got in the Red Bus with the children.

  “Mind if I ride back with you?”

  “No. Let’s go.” She turned off the blaring radio that told us the North Vietnamese said they really didn’t see how they could talk to us unless we stopped bombing them. Leila drove quietly, one hand at the base of the wheel, one on Davy, asleep in her lap. Maisie had her head stuck out the window, her eyes shut, her mouth opened happily to the wind.

  “Are you okay, Leila?”

  “I’m fine.” She pulled Davy closer to her.

  “Can I ask you what this new ‘best solution’ is?”

  “Well, let’s see. First of all, Bruno wants to close down the theater. I show,” she smiled, “a low margin of profit. And so I’m a bad investment. Meanwhile, Lady Red’s trying to sell him the two buildings and the lot, and if they show an even lower margin of profit, then he’ll buy them. And that will be a good investment.”

  “Yeah. Taxes, I guess. What will he do with them?”

  “Tear them down and build something with a high margin of profit. Oh, who knows what Bruno’s up to. I don’t think he’s decided yet.”

  “What does he want you to do?”

  “Well, he thinks it would be appropriate for Mittie’s children to be moved to Portland and be given allowances. Well, it’s okay if I don’t want to come along, as long as they are there by the end of the month.”

  “Oh.”

  She added nothing further until we reached the house, when she asked me to carry Davy in for her.

  Dressed in a pink chiffon garden dress in the polished perfection of our living room, Mrs. Thurston was seated, handsomely arranged beside the vacuumed fireplace, doing needlepoint. She swanned her neck past us expectantly as we entered. When no one followed, she stood to peep around the lace curtain freshly stapled to the front door.

  “And Bruno?” she chirped to the crickets outside. “And Bruno?” She cricked her head to one side. I shook my head. “Why Leila, honey, where is your father-in-law? Where are ou-er guests?”

  “He’s staying at a hotel, Mother.”

  “At a ho-tel? Why surely that can’t be, Leila. What in the world do you mean, a ho-tel? What about his dinner? What about his business associates? Leila Stark, surely you did not fail in your manners, you did not neglect to invite your own relative to share your hospitality? Did you hear me?”

  Leila had taken Davy into her bedroom. Coming out, she touched her mother’s arm. “No, I asked him, Mother, but he’d already made other arrangements. Probably he didn’t want to impose on us at such short notice.”

  Mrs. Thurston’s mouth pursed in and out; she stabbed her needle through a pensive shepherdess in her embroidery. “Impose? I never! Oh, Leila, Leila child, you are deceived. But I believe I can understand reality when it is staring me in the eyes. That man, Bruno Stark, has deliberately chosen this opportunity to make a statement. And what he is saying is, he has never considered us good enough for His Royal Highness. He has always disesteemed us and begrudged us Mittie’s love, and now he is announcing, just as big as your life, ‘It is all YOUR FAULT.’ Saying it just as loud and clear by his actions in checking into a public hotel as if he had stood right here in this very yard and painted those words across the front of the house a mile high.”

  “Mother…” Leila undid her sandals, stretched out on the couch, and put her feet up on the armrest. With a wince, Mrs. Thurston restrained herself from removing them.

  The kitchen door swung open. Stuck all over with white pasty patches, as though she planned to glue herself to the wall, Sabby Norah walked disconsolately out of the kitchen.

  “Oh, Mrs. Thurston,” she sniffed, wiping more paste across her cheek, “the dough won’t come off the rolling pin.”

  “Darling, darling,” Mrs. Thurston tapped Sabby toward the kitchen again. “Go back and flour. Evenly. A steady motion, keeping the wrists firm. Roll and lift. Roll and lift. And flour, Sabby. Flour.”

  Already floured, Sabby left.

  “That child,” the home economist sighed, “is a good child, an industrious child, but she is simply not a…talented child.”

  I took a radish from a plate of concentric hors d’oeuvres on the coffee table.

  “Devin, don’t eat that!” Mrs. Thurston called.

  I spat the radish into my hand.

  “You’re going to ruin your supper,” she explained. “And, Leila, I want you to know that I had made the effort, in addition to everything else I had to do”—she panned the house with her eyes—“to prepare a native dish for that man. Went to the trouble of preparing Hungarian goulash, as well as a cherry soup from Budapest.”

  “Bruno’s family is Russian, Mother,” Leila murmured from the couch.

  Mrs. Thurston’s rejoinder was taken from the political sciences. “Well, it is a known fact that both those nations are members of the same Iron Block. And even you, Leila, who persist in establishing your own identity in defiance of your elders, in defying your training by glorifying communism as if it were the Promised Land, even you cannot deny that the result of their policies has been to completely wipe away our right to be an individual. And I’m certain that if they require everybody, regardless of their education, to toil in the field and work in the subway booths, then they also require everybody to eat the same food. And all I can say is, it is curious to me to be disesteemed by a Man from Russia, when your family has been living in America ever since…why ever since there was an America for civilized people to live in!”

  As no one appeared to be ready with a rebuttal, Mrs. Thurston retired to steady Sabby’s wrists, noting only in departure that it was remarkable how some people could lie there with their eyes shut while other people were going around publicly insulting them.

  The phone rang, and I answered it in the kitchen, “Hello.”

  “Yeah. Who is this?”

  “This is Devin Donahue.”

  “Listen, man, the pigs have got me. Pulled me in. Chained me. Wow! Gestapo City!”

  “Spurgeon?”

  “This is it, man. They got Kafka. Dreyfus. Leary. Now they got me.”

  I thought of his threats against the F.B.I., the C.I.A., Sara Lee. “Where are you, Spur?”

  “Where am I? I’m in a slimy sink of Stalag blood. I’m in Auschwitz, jerk. I’m in Wounded Knee. They can’t hide from me now. I’m seeing through their glasses face to face. I’m sitting in the silent secret closet of the U.S.A. The water closet, man. The slop hole, where the shit’s packed down three hundred years thick. The turds on the top are floating in piss!”

  “Spur? Are you down at the station?”

  “Can you believe it?”

  I thought of the spice jar, the cigarette papers in his pocket. “Was it”—I tried to whisper, for Mrs. Thurston was in the kitchen too, helping Sabby pry dough from a rolling pin—“possession of…um, Mary Janes?”

  “Possessed? They’re the ones that are possessed, jack. The whole militaryindustrialcomplex is possessed! Repressed, regressed, obsessed, and abscessed!”

  I translated. “Did they bust you for pot, Spur?”

  “You think I’m
a shit-kicking fluff-of-cotton-candy-in-my-pants MORON? You think I’d let those mule-eunuchs grass my ass?”

  “What did you do with the stuff?”

  “Dropped it in a can of flowers. They were taking them in too, man!”

  “The women?”

  “The flowers! The S.S. is confiscating hydrangeas! Can you dig it? A dragnet for lilacs! Oh, shit, this would blow Shelley’s mind!”

  “What was the charge, Spur?”

  “Put the chick on.”

  “Leila?”

  “Yeah. Put her on. I gotta be sprung, man. This is Gas Chamber, U.S.A.”

  Mrs. Thurston was sledge-hammering a ball of dough with anthropomorphizing fervor. I called Leila to the phone. “A poor one-armed son of a bitch would like to speak to you, Leila.”

  “Devin!” her mother clucked, disapproving of profanity even against the profane.

  “Hurry up, Leila. You’re his one phone call; he’s in jail.”

  “Oh, Good Lord,” Mrs. Thurston said, and raised her eyes, I thought perhaps in thanksgiving for an answered prayer.

  “Hello, Spur, what’s the matter?” Leila said. Ten minutes later, she spoke again. “Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Leila Stark,” her mother followed her to the door. “Now, don’t you start interfering with the police in the performance of their duties. If they have arrested Spurgeon, I am sure they had a perfectly good reason why.”

  “What did he do?” I asked Leila.

  “It’s hard to tell,” she said, binding on her sandals. “But it sounds like he tried to talk some of the flower ladies into attacking Gabe Booter, and he got carried away and scared one of them yelling at her, so she started hitting Spur over the head with a can of flowers,” Leila began laughing, “and when Booter went over to stop her, Spur bit him on the thigh, and then peed on his patrol car.”