American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  His mood soared and plunged. Sometimes he thought he was a character in a Marvel comic. If something noisy and catastrophic did not happen every fourth or fifth panel—BlaaaMMMM KAZAPPPP BBEErrrrooppp—he was frightened he had fallen out of his life. His arms would tingle. The very sky would move or wrinkle over-head. The first store that caught his eye would seem ideal for robbery or simple mayhem. There was the pleasure of running through the moves, what doors, alarms, who worked where, how much cash, what merchandise, whose brain could he scramble best? He was sure he could pull anything off, an optimism as infinite as the need for testing it.

  He thought of Daphne whose photographic skin stunned the sky. At last the coy mistress on whose each ear he could spend an age. What was she doing at that second?

  Higgins could not find a card game in this city. People knew him, in some quarters he was called the Professor. Not because they knew his resume, but because he was serious about cards. The trouble was that people had threatened to break his fingers. He had to be circumspect. Pool, maybe. A gentleman’s game because there was no way not to be. Higgins decided his appointments could hold. He entered a billiard parlor on 14th Street and indicated he wanted action. “Like what,” he was asked. “Like whatever you are thinking but more,” Higgins said.

  “Ten?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “I really want a hundred.”

  This was all talk to rustle up somebody big from the shadows. A large black man in a handsome white suit said, “Only a hundred?”

  “Five hundred.”

  The black man wiped the sneer off his face. “I see.”

  Higgins had the advantage, not caring whether he won or lost. The pleasure was in the smack of the balls, a drop of sweat on the other man’s nose.

  “Rack ’em up,” Higgins said. “Eight ball for five hundred. That right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Higgins shot three games, losing two to one, for five hundred down. “I guess you’ll be ready for a thousand next time.”

  “Of course,” said the man.

  “What’s your limit?”

  “Nothing you can climb up to.”

  “Five?”

  “Two out of three.”

  “No. Five per.”

  “You serious?”

  “Look at me.”

  “You got it on you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Talk to me when you do.”

  “Good.” Higgins examined his watch. Two appointments. “I don’t want you to think I’m setting you up. You’re real good. Beat me fair and square.” Higgins thought that was reverse English.

  “I thought so.”

  It was all bullshit, both of them. Higgins loved it. Like monkeys in the trees, who could screech louder, that was the game. Higgins felt as if he’d had a fix. Up, he was up, when he hit the street at 5:36.

  11

  Liveliness is not in the eye of the beholder, unlike morality. Liveliness is in the blood. Or the psychohistory. Lively people really are lively. They cannot help it. Usually they are day people. They open their eyes wide awake at seven. Normal people find them insufferable.

  Randol Carlyle had been lively since the day he tried to hemorrhage his mother from the inside. He never minded anything told him. He learned to drive at the age of ten, had sex at thirteen, first won more than a thousand dollars at poker when seventeen. He had a sense that other people were standing still, some of them damned near frozen, while he was skipping and dodging and scatting and cornering on two wheels.

  And where did this liveliness come from, when on the inside of his head there was hardly a lively landscape, being something like the desert in the dry season, a few cacti, reptiles slithering about, large inert forces unfolding in geological time frames, the hope of minerals or oil underground but nothing shiny in hand or in view? A dullard landscape in that not much lived and that died soon and was cleaned up by vultures and ants. Even the sky was spare, and stingy with clouds. Perhaps the energy of spiders, making their myriads of webs, made Carlyle lively, and gave him a watchful and acquisitive bent.

  He didn’t count himself arrived until he had a thousand acres, a house with fifty rooms, a jet so he could take himself up to Louisville or Chicago if the mood hit.

  Somewhere about the third wife, he wondered if he hadn’t ought to slow down as other men did. Aw, what the hell. Being dead was time enough to slow down. Maybe the trouble was that Carlyle never took a real hard shot to the head or the heart. Moving so fast like he was, he wasn’t much of a target. Or maybe he took a shot but didn’t notice, so it doesn’t count. Carlyle would look in the mirror and see a heavyweight champ that had not been nicked.

  The first shot he took was not much. More like a premonition of a shot. He was casting a long lingering look at his daughter Daphne, age fifteen, and he suffered the queasy feeling this pretty little thing was going to be trouble, precisely because she looked incapable of troubling a strong breeze. She was going to be all the trouble he had sent on its way coming back to him. They say even a desert has its ways of knowing what to expect. Still and all, Carlyle was not accustomed to seeing a sensitive thought in his landscape from horizon to horizon. He went straight to his rawhide bar and mixed himself something devilish of tequila and rum with a slice of lime.

  In the year following, seeing Daphne become prettier, he decided that the trouble would be young men and he halfway accepted that and said, “Aw hell,” and went on being lively.

  Carlyle owned a horse named Roy, a golden palomino, and they went out together in the afternoons to have a look-see. It was Carlyle’s practice to converse with Roy about horticultural matters which, safe to assume, Roy was interested in. Carlyle was careful not to discuss monetary and political affairs with Roy. Them he discussed only with himself. And Harris. A parrot.

  Sweeping back and forth through his house on errands of no point, he was in fact busy with business. That great waterless mind was aplanning and ascheming and amanipulating with the intensity of a high dry wind. Listing all the facets of Carlyle’s enterprise would fill a column in a newspaper. He broadcasted and manufactured and published and produced movies. He advertised and farmed and engendered prize stock. And he traded with other countries. His executive secret was that all of these were a man’s toys. Carlyle’s liveliness was his livelihood.

  Carlyle did not care for cities, which had been built street and skyscraper by the devil. He believed instead in telecommunications, by wire and shortwave and satellite and any miracle of science that promised to put him somewhere he wasn’t. Fast. So he sprawled most days in his library and addressed the images of his staffs and subordinates and boards and lieutenants. He reclined stylishly in an oak chair, spewing smoke from a cigar, and he discoursed on how the world could be won. Sometimes these electronic encounters lasted minutes only. He said his piece—“and don’t you forget it, goodbye for now.” And the far-flung minions watched their big daddy on a six foot screen, bigger than life, and said, Yes Sir! He had instilled in them the confusion of not knowing where he was or when he would appear. “Hello, I’m in Oklahoma City.” “Today I’m in New York and it sure is shitty up here.”

  And the heart-stopper. “I may be stopping by tomorrow to say hello.” Only ex-soldiers who have heard a captain say the General is inspecting this weekend, all passes canceled, can embrace the panic those words unfurled. Then people would say he was in the building, or in another department, or in route, or he was having lunch in the executive dining room, or just did. But who had actually seen him? Sometimes he made long distance calls from other time zones and told people he was downstairs in the lobby. After elaborate discussions of how to parcel the afternoon, where to dine, maybe theater for executives and wives, laying waste everybody’s plans for twelve hours, he would say, “Maybe there’s not enough time, catch you next time.”

  So he was everywhere, invisible father, liveliness run amuck.

  Carlyle had never forgiven LB
J for acquiring all those radio and TV stations, not fighting fair but becoming President so he could take what he wanted with the FCC in his pocket. When Carlyle wanted to puff himself up red and angry, he would depict the poacher’s progress. Then came the vile names and he felt better. Carlyle’s one endearing trait was that he preferred to fight fair and beat you to death that way. LBJ had taken the honor out of the game and Carlyle was still suffering the nostalgia of the good old days when real men eyed one another straight on while trying their damndest to subtract each other’s balls. Now when push and shove weren’t enough and the shit was momentarily into the fan, he often puzzled how to proceed, stiffening the backbone and upping the grit or looking for the blind side. He found himself looking more and more and hating it.

  “Goddamned pigfucking sonofabitch, LBJ, he’s to blame. Then we got Richard in there and he was all bullshit and two-bit. And the ones since not worth cussing at. And here I am the last Texan left holding up the flag and looking like some stupid asshole. Well, shoot.”

  Case in point #1 was this lowdown New York conglomerate riding into town with Yankee ideas. Well, Carlyle was Sam Houston at the Alamo for sure. They were attempting to get at him through a crooked union. Pay enough, they could buy themselves a strike against two of his papers. Carlyle had never heard tell of such a thing. Unbefuckingbelievable. And then the Yankees would double-cross that union. And only a few scumbags at the top, and they godfathers already, would put money in the bank. For a time Carlyle wished he were working class so he could personally beat hell out of the union boss. Oh, shit, the bosses were like him, not touchable. You were lucky to see them vanish into a limousine. Working himself up for five minutes into a Texas tornado, Carlyle was ready to lead those shitforbrains workers, standing up proud for America and the sweat of the brow.

  Agitated as he was, Carlyle really did some sweeping, upstairs and downstairs, from living room to dining room to library to porch. There he found GeorgiaAnne in a rocking chair picking tunes, she his fourth wife, Lady of his manor. She could sing Jambalaya to bring tears to a man’s eyes, Carlyle’s anyway.

  Actually, to bring tears to Carlyle’s eyes, all GeorgiaAnne had to do was walk naked across a room. And if she happened to seat herself gently on his chest, his eyes misted over entirely.

  Besides an athletic beauty from head to foot, GeorgiaAnne had something else: a sort of frontier dignity. Her smile was like a little girl’s, sweetly serious, dignified, proud. It was to Carlyle’s credit that it was her smile that he saw and loved first, across seventy feet of intervening people, at an otherwise undignified party in Nashville.

  “Goddamn fucking mudbags,” Carlyle shouted to the empty sky.

  “Why, honey! What you got on your mind, sweetie?”

  “Oh, it burns a man’s heart, GA,” pronounced Gee Ay. “There’s people so low down they can’t see over grass. People who was supposed to be born rats and weasels and damned if they don’t turn out looking almost human. I’m eating a mouthful of sand and I’ve got a belly full of motor oil.”

  “Sweetie, you just come here on this sofa and rest your head on my lap.”

  “I’ll put my head up your ass and meet the kind of people I’m talking about. I’ve got a good mind to take my 12 gauge and blow away a little of the barn.”

  “Randol, sweetie, come on down here.”

  GeorgiaAnne settled Carlyle down on the big sofa and nestled his fevered brain on her soft thigh and she composed intricate melodies on his temples. A big parrot named Harris eyed them from atop a bamboo perch.

  “Whatthefuck. Whatthefuck,” Harris asked pointedly.

  Carlyle cocked an eye up at that hugh red and green bird. “Quiet down, Harris, you good for nothing hunk of lion food.”

  “Weeeelllll,” said Harris.

  Carlyle subsided, like sand setting softly after trucks have high-balled across the desert. In five minutes he was thinking more of GeorgiaAnne’s fingers than any Yankee maurauders. Then the rest of GeorgiaAnne. He lumbered his body over so he was eye to thigh and pushing a bit of flimsy aside, smacked his lively lips on what he often called the choicest piece of white meat south of Saskatchewan. Like a half-drowned man loving the beach he is thrown up on, Carlyle concentrated his entire liveliness and grateful passion on that one left leg.

  “Heavenly honeypot,” said Harris. “Heavenly honey-pot.”

  GeorgiaAnne, whether through inclination or a proper Southern education, murmured, “Oh, Randol honey, you’re ex-ci-ting me.”

  “Who else, sweet baby,” Carlyle said as he shredded more and more clothes in brute determination to get to the bottom of what was roiling him.

  Harris bobbed his head in a frenzy of envy.

  Carlyle’s strongest memory was of his mother acting like a mother duck toward him. Waddling and clucking.

  It is true that C students run the world.

  Carlyle’s luckiest break was never to have had a philosophical thought.

  And how did the stylish Carlyle see himself? God’s delight in His handiwork after seven days and nights was nothing compared to Carlyle’s delight in himself.

  At night in the desert it is cold. The moon burns white on the sand.

  12

  Bradford Morris spoke of harsh-sounding shapes. He saw architecture in musical terms. Buildings had perfect pitch. A roof could convey to his eye a crescendo, windows executed fugues. Other architects were, of course, tone deaf. For him the words dulcet doorway and clangorous plaza meant something. He sat in his office, staring moodily at projects abuilding, each a symphony, he the conductor.

  Bradford Morris raised one elegant hand, like a priest blessing, and counted off the rhythm of an edifice high on his wall.

  Unlike doctors and lawyers, who know that money is first, architects often spend time bickering over what makes a beautiful building. They edge dangerously close to the fine arts. Morris was a spokesperson for the Musical School. His only rage, until his mother, was directed at certain fools he called Pissminimalists, who were crazy modern and built large sharp-edged skyscrapers entirely devoid of melody. If turned loose he would compose buildings that soared into pure unfettered music. Unfortunately, you had to find clients to pay for all that jazz.

  Morris sipped cool coffee, not tasting it at all. His mind swirled like smoke. Classical truths weren’t much use, people thought. The rush to ride trends had pretty well gutted the age. The stainless steel desire to be a machine was the dominant madness. But life had been stirred, to tunes emanating from galaxies, out of original mud and mush, and still was slime divinely inspired. Morris picked at a scab on his right hand, assured that under that trapdoor primordial seas washed primordial beaches.

  Morris reflected on ancient accidents sputtering like a string of firecrackers toward what we are. All those dinosaurs wending toward extinction in order to create a place for us.…

  Morris eyed the sketches for a hotel. Thirty-eight stories, in downtown Dallas. The only fun was on top, where millionaires and celebrities and royalty would stay, and Morris could ejaculate a few wild ideas. The imagery was straight from the client. A demented Texas named Carlyle who had confided that some people had presumed to call him a big prick and he wanted his hotel to be just that.

  Morris found concentration difficult. His wife Felicia had been acting strangely. Possibly her period. Probably something he didn’t know about. Maybe she was sneaking out dressed as a man. Morris was amused at his own amusement. Why was he not horrified? It was sick and a scandal, was it not? So? There was an answer: any oddness in his wife made him seem more nearly commonplace.

  And there was Mother—as loathsome as a maggot. He cringed to think such a terrible thought but thought it again.

  It was tough to be a gentle soul when all around you were loonies and crocodiles. Morris sighed.

  Perhaps he liked his wife Felicia as he liked certain men. A buddy. Well, she was. A devoted buddy.

  When Morris went home that evening, his wife said she had some bad new
s and some good news. Namely, she had cancer but the doctors thought it wouldn’t kill her for six, maybe twelve months. Morris felt sick. His thoughts of the afternoon came back to him. Also the assistant with whom he was involved, if you can call what they did on the run an involvement. He listened to the details without any manifest emotions. Good WASP. But the emotions raged or at least they scurried. How could he live without her, he wondered, even as he found himself thinking that cancer somehow became his wife. Felicia had always been subtly out of control and now her very body echoed that tendency. Even as he watched her, monstrous outlaw cells were gobbling up her interior spaces. Mafia metabolism. Berserk boondoggle busy building lumps like potatoes, and nodules like grapes, and mounds like aspic.

  She had always had a sense of tumor, Morris thought, and one second later thought: I’m losing my mind. It’s no use fooling around about it, I’m cracking. I don’t know, is it my father’s dying, my mother’s plotting? The harder truth was that he might simply be a man who cunningly shammed what other people call normalcy. Perhaps he was an over-achiever, sanity-wise, nuts all along but able through hard work to make people think he was an ordinary guy. Half the battle is clothes. You go to a Brooks Brothers sort of emporium and buy from the windows. Nothing betrayed there. Then you pick a profession, any profession, you marry, and you find out what all your neighbors are doing, generally speaking, and you copy the consensus.

  Morris watched his wife speak more than he heard her speak. He was wondering if any of these truths were true? Why was he so hard on himself? But his inhuman detachment was proof enough in itself, was it not? Morris marveled at himself, eerie edifice. Here was his wife, good buddy, saying she might be dead in a year and his mind was racing as if on Grand Prix loops.

  More images flooded his mind, his wife exploding in slow motion, as the cancer built up pressure inside her. Then she was the jungle, ants eating her first from the outside, then from the inside, not so different from cancer. Then came the image of acids. Cancer was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving not too solid flesh and making various by-products that were no longer human.