The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  “What? Oh, yes…I’m sorry, Devin. Are you upset about it?”

  An automatic “yes” was bubbling up, when, inexplicably, it just burst, evanescent as empty air, and I slowly allowed myself to acknowledge that incapacity of the comfort-seeking spirit to sustain its griefs. And finally I answered Leila, “No, I guess really I’m not as much as I thought I’d be.” For it didn’t matter as much as the sting in my groin or the peacefulness of lying there hazy in the filtered sun with her. Slowly I began to admit that Verl had been right all along about Jardin and me. Maybe about James Dexter and all those other theories of his that used to irritate me so much. Perhaps it had taken Tanya to teach me. Mrs. Sirenos and a good right hook. It shocked me to lose grief so abruptly, like a tire blown out. I was already missing the grief as much as I had missed Jardin.

  Finally Leila smiled. “I’m glad,” she said. She gave me the rest of my clothes to pull on over my bruises. “Can you get up?”

  I left Tanya’s cabin braced on Leila’s arm.

  “Devin, if you feel up to it, how’d you like to do me a favor?”

  “Sure,” I said, my head swimming like a drunk in a wool suit trying to climb out of a pool.

  “I’m worried about Nate. I’m being realistic, and I don’t think he has…I have a feeling he doesn’t have a lot of years left. And the worst thing is that he’s already just given up. Nothing matters to him. I think if we could get him involved in something, maybe it would help. I don’t mean just being nice to him. Sabby’s really helped there already, and you and Joely, and Mother. But something outside of himself, something he can like himself for again.”

  “Okay. Like what do you mean?”

  “There’s a play he’s mentioned several times, a production he was involved in a long time ago. It seemed like it had some special importance to him. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. I’d like to do it for him, to get him to do it. He needs something. We all do.”

  “I don’t know, Leila. People have pretty much had it.”

  “Look at us all,” she said. “What’s happened to us? We’re just waiting it out here, no different from Nate, passing the time, dropping away, and we’re getting bored and ugly. Waiting until Bruno tears the place down and puts up a damn supermarket. Or somebody gets drafted or gets married or the world blows up. We were supposed to be a company, people who felt the same way, who wanted to make something come alive. That’s what I thought Mittie wanted. That was the plan.” Slowly, ceremoniously, we walked out of Slough Lane and into the parking lot. “The theater,” she pointed, “even a silly place like this—even an old rollerdrome in the middle of a stupid tourist park—it can be a part of the fight, you know.”

  She opened the van door, then suddenly just slid down into the dirt beside it, clutching her huge pocketbook in her arms like a baby and crying. I knelt beside her, holding her until she stopped. “What can I do?” I asked her.

  “Help me,” she said. “Help me get the others to try. They probably aren’t going to want to take on anything new. But we should! Not just for Nate, or Mittie, but for all of us.” She pulled herself up. “I won’t let Bruno win!”

  I promised her I would try.

  She wanted to go home, so I helped her into the van. “Just go home and try to get some rest. It’ll be okay. Thanks for coming to my rescue.”

  • • •

  In a corner booth of the Red Lagoon Bar, I sat for a long while thinking. If it was all true, then why did I want whatever James Dexter wanted when I believed James Dexter wanted all the wrong things? What did I want?

  Sauntering to the bathroom, Spurgeon Debson saw me. He squatted down next to the booth, peered at my blackened, puffy eye. It was the first direct interest he’d ever shown in me. “Pigs?” he asked. “Narcs?”

  “Maturation,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he nodded, with all the sad cost of revolutions in his gaze.

  “You think you got problems?” Marlin scoffed at my shiner. “Shit! You spent four years behind an ivy wall, Donahue! I got the draft on my ass, and the crabs, and a pregnant girlfriend!”

  “Don’t mind him,” Joely said. “He’s been buzzed out on bennies all night.”

  “He went around and switched all the nameposts on all the summer houses near Mrs. Booter’s,” sighed Pete Barney wistfully.

  “Let no one know who they are! Let nothing in life be certain!” Marlin was high, and spooking me with his wild eyes.

  “Listen, you guys,” I told them. “Leila’s had a good idea. She wants us to put on a new play. Cheer us all up. All My Sons.”

  “Forget it,” Marlin said. He was watching Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic convention in Chicago on Tony Menelade’s little television set behind the bar.

  “Isn’t there any more Calhoun money left?” Pete asked.

  Marlin gasped out loud. “I got to get some air!” Tugging itchily at his Levis, he rushed away.

  “How ’bout sticking with him, Pete? He’s totally gone.” Pete obligingly chased after Marlin as Joely stood up. He too was walking as bowlegged as Calhoun Grange; everyone had “shaved.” “I have to get back to the theater,” he said. I stayed where I was.

  “Serves you right, you little twerp.” Lady Red leaned into my booth and pointed at my eye.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She emptied an ashtray into a plate left in front of me and took away my glass. Obviously, it was time for me to leave. As she rang up my check, she told me, “I knew that name was as phony as a grade-B movie. ‘Tanya’! And that story! Ring mark on her wedding finger. You didn’t notice, of course!”

  “Slumming it for kicks, that’s what she was doing,” Tony suggested from his stool behind the bar.

  Lady Red whirled on him now. “Slumming it! Here? Are you kidding? Those two work a cheap bar in Denver, that’s all. Bullshit, she was running from slums! And that bastard put a lousy dick on her! A lousy dick nosing around in my bar, bothering my girls!”

  Tony was being reckless. “Well, she went back with him, didn’t she?”

  Red charged him with her raised voice. “You think you know so much? Well, listen, maybe she was a sap, but if I ever go, I go, got it? I don’t get pushed around, you can sure count on that!” She slammed the cash register shut. “We’re closing,” she said coldly.

  I left.

  Out in the moonlit parking lot, Ronny and Marlin were pissing at one another from a distance of twelve paces.

  “Yeah. I’ll piss! I’ll piss right in your eye!” Marlin yelled.

  “TRY IT!” challenged Ronny back, gesturing at his open mouth. “Get it in here and I’ll drink it!”

  “Jesus, Pete, what’s going on out here?” I asked.

  “Marlin insulted Ronny. His…his virility, I guess, and then they started fighting, and then this,” he said remorsefully.

  “For God’s sake, couldn’t you stop them?”

  “Are you kidding, what could I do?”

  Across the creek a dog was barking. Spurgeon’s Great Dane. Maybe we were on his pissing ground. Mad as his master, he charged the bridge and flew at the now-urinating duelists. Marlin, Pete, and I sprinted away, but Ronny stood like a Spartan.

  “I hope that bastard gets his balls bitten off!” Marlin called back to us as he fled around the side of the theater. But Ronny raised the Dane, spun him, and hurled him into the creek. Then he crouched, waiting, his arms like prongs, to plunge the dog down when he came back at him again.

  “In the name of our fathers and all our sons,” Ronny shouted, while the terrified dog yelped and paddled until he could scramble away and up the other bank. Suddenly, bright headlights shot out from near the bar. A police car had pulled up. Standing, Ronny raised his head into the glare. The sight we then saw was ghastly. Behind us, Gabe Booter, the sheriff, was approaching. Before us, Ronny stared with one rage-mad eye and one empty socket
.

  “For God’s sake, Ronny!” I cried. “Your eye fell out!”

  Oedipus, the Cyclops, King Philip of Macedon, Long John Silver—I glimpsed them all like a nightmare in his very young stonewhite face as he fell frantically to his knees, spinning in a circle of dark dust, looking with his moving hands.

  Chapter 22

  I Fall into Captivity

  “Who threw that dog in the creek?” Booter boomed, seesawing toward us on his tall, gaunt legs. “What’s going on here?” He hit us with a big-beam flashlight.

  “That dog’s mad,” I explained, while Ronny, at my feet, kept twirling in the dirt for his eye.

  “Mad?” Booter put on an official look. “Was he drooling foam? Anybody git bit?”

  “No,” I said, “but I think his owner let him run wild.” I figured my next news would gain his support. “Spurgeon Debson, guy with a beard, used to sell jewelry on the street—it’s his dog.”

  I was right. The sheriff’s face puffed out like a goiter as a hiss steamed out the sides of his mouth. He pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt and began to bark numbers into it. From across the creek, Spur’s dog barked back. “Six-four. Six-four…MADDOX! Get off your goddamn ass!”

  Over in front of the bar, someone threw open the door of the police car and yelled, “Yeah, Sheriff?”

  “MADDOX,” the sheriff bellowed into his machine. “Get the pound over here. We got a mad dog.”

  “We don’t know for sure if the dog’s got rabies,” Pete modified my accusation.

  “Humph,” said Booter, who was recalling, I knew, that the dog’s owner had recently tried to bite him on the thigh. Suddenly, Ronny’s head hit the knee of the sheriff who flashed the light down to see someone crawling frenetically in the dark. Jerking away his boot, he asked, “What’s the matter with him? Did he git bit?”

  “He lost his eye,” Pete explained.

  “MY GOD?” Booter gasped as Ronny reached up, grabbed his flashlight, and ran it in short arcs across the dirt.

  “Help me look for it,” he groaned.

  “MY GOD!” repeated the sheriff. Then the light caught a glint of green glass, which Ronny snatched up. “Boy! You need help, boy?” Booter sputtered.

  “It’s a glass eye,” I thought I should point out. Mr. Booter just gawked at me while Ronny turned his back to us and, however one does such things, fit his eye back into its socket. Over the creek bank, the Great Dane kept barking, as out from the black, humid pitch behind us the deputy appeared, wearing a gun that reached almost to his knee.

  “Pound’s coming,” he promised, effervescent with duty. “That the dog over there? Anybody hurt?” Nobody was. “Look here, Sheriff,” he took Booter purposefully aside, but didn’t lower his voice. “Lucky we happened by. Lady over there on Sloan Street just calls in and says these boys here was, well, says they was indecently ex-posing themselves, right here in the middle of the parking lot. Says she seen them out her window, and it oughtn’t to be allowed. Says she’s lived here twenty-two years. Says we ought to do something about it, and she will if we won’t.” He put his hand protectively over his gun and studied us carefully.

  That lady must have had the eyes of a hawk, I thought.

  Booter’s eyes squinted to dots of suspicion. “Indecent exposure?”

  “Yes, sir, Sheriff, according to the call, they was urinating all over each other. That’s what she told the desk.”

  Memory soared into outrage. Had not Debson pissed on Booter’s tires? And here we were, with Debson’s dog, performing barbaric rituals in the parking lot. I could see it all on Booter’s face. We were obviously all in it together with Spur, no doubt members of his cult, devil worshipers, anarchists, yippies, pissers on America, who had tricked him into sympathy. The silence grew. In it, Ronny came down from whatever rage had led him on. He slumped to the dirt, and Pete and I huddled around him. His fly was still open.

  “Okay,” Booter snapped. “You fairies been shining your dicks in the moon?”

  “Just answering the call of nature,” Ronny threw out.

  The sheriff dismissed it. “Decent people use the proper facilities. All right, boys, let’s go.” It was a famous line. We all knew the two conventional responses: to go quietly, or to refuse to go at all. Having been taught to obey our elders, we went quietly.

  “Maddox, where’s that g.d. dog catcher?”

  “Don’t know,” the deputy admitted, adding with a throw of his search beam, “Dog’s gone anyhow.” The Great Dane had lost interest in us and wandered off.

  “Well, call in a description, have him picked up.” Knowledge of his master condemned the animal to the charge of madness.

  And so, prickly with fear, we were led into the car and driven off in ignominy by the proud Maddox, who drove slowly up Main Street as if he led a parade. Booter sat beside him and gassed us first with the thick fumes of his pipe, then with a trumpeting fart that announced our arrival at the Floren Park City Hall Police Station Dog Pound Seat of Government.

  Chapter 23

  A Visitor

  In the receiving room, despite all we had been taught of police methods, we were neither beaten with rubber hoses, grilled under hot lights, forced to strip, buggered, nor celled with cockroaches. Nor were we told that anything we said would be held against us. We were not advised of our right to make a phone call. We were neither fingerprinted nor photographed. We simply sat on a wooden bench in a small room that looked just the way it was supposed to, with an old desk and swivel chairs, the posters and water cooler, and file cabinet, while Maddox slowly typed out our biographies.

  “Do you think we’re going to have to go to court?” asked Pete mournfully. “It’ll be on our records. You and I weren’t even…even peeing!”

  My crotch ached, so I asked permission to go to the bathroom, where I found that I had, in fact, opened the cut from the razor again. My new shorts were sticky with blood. How could I, given the schedule of my life, be washing blood from a self-inflicted groin wound in a police-station john? But, as though too aberrant to sustain significance, the fact almost didn’t even interest me. Like so much else this summer, it simply didn’t fit, so it faded, ephemeral and transitory as faces glimpsed from a train window.

  When I went back into the room, a party had gathered. Margery and Joely were talking to Pete and Ronny. In the office doorway, Sheriff Booter was talking to Leila.

  “But you know and I know, Miz Stark, that the people of this town just ain’t gonna stand for this kind of disturbance and creating a public nuisance of yourself and the sort of indecent obscenity I’m getting reports on from everywhere.” He paused to pull a huge lighter, a plastic trout caught in a clear rectangle of green water, from his pants’ pocket and light her cigarette with it. “Because I’m gonna have to do something about it, and you understand that. And I can come down hard.”

  Leila nodded gravely. Booter nodded back. He said nothing to us, the indecent disturbers. “Yes, I understand,” Leila said. “Thanks for calling me.”

  It was almost 2 A.M. now, yet in the grimy hallway, stale with the sweat of a long day’s heat, she looked like morning. She was wearing a white cotton robe like a shepherd in a Bible illustration. It was stitched at the collar with gold the color of her hair. Ronny, Pete, and I, clearly, were cast as the bad sheep. I had certainly got off to a bad start in my promise to Leila to help her pull everybody together.

  “So, okay, then, I’m gonna release them on your recognizance, Miz Stark, and you see if you can’t keep ’em in line. Otherwise…”

  Leila nodded away the alternative.

  “I don’t want to have to bring you boys down here again, you hear?” We heard. “If I do, I ain’t gonna be quite so friendly.” We assured him enthusiastically that he would never see us again as long as we lived.

  And so we were given into Leila’s charge, and she led us solemnly out of th
e valley of the shadow of detention and into the night. So passed, in my twenty-second year, the day of my brother’s wedding.

  Breakfast gave us Mrs. Thurston back, her face seared into heightened dignity by a day’s solitary confinement in the bathroom wrestling with the demon of Spur’s crabs. She did not come upon us with whitened hair like Moses returning from the burning bush, but her eyes had looked on horror and showed it. We couldn’t help but study her walk; it was, to our remorse, a little straddled.

  “Are you mad, Grandma?” Maisie asked her.

  Mrs. Thurston put down her coffee cup and carefully considered the question. “No, darling,” she finally answered. “Grandma’s not mad. The twists and turns of life,” she glanced reproachfully at Leila, “have attempted to drive your poor grandma mad. But, honey, they have not succeeded.”

  The door to Wolfstein’s bedroom inched slowly open. “Nathan, good morning, Nathan,” Amanda greeted with concern the gray, hollowed shape lost in the fraying bathrobe. “Why, you’re up bright and early today, and looking just wonderful too. Now what you need is some breakfast. Leila, angel, reach me down that pan so I can scramble Nathan here some eggs to get him off to a good start.”

  A queasy shudder contorted Wolfstein’s face. “Thank you, Amanda, but I think coffee, just coffee will be…fine.”

  “Nonsense,” she replied, and our spirits rose. Mrs. Thurston was definitely on the mend.

  “We got a postcard from Cal,” Leila announced, frowning in a funny way. Maybe she hadn’t liked him. “He asked to be remembered to you, Nate.”

  “From Mr. Grange?” Sabby breathed. “Could I see it?” So Leila went to the mantel and returned with a handful of opened mail. Grange’s card was a picture of a Hollywood studio—where he worked perhaps. It was addressed to “Leila Beaumont and Co.” “Hi. Just so you won’t forget me. Had a great time in your place. Hello to Nate and everybody. They’re working my you-know-what off here. That’s the way it goes. Come on out anytime. Yours, Cal.”