Shedding Skin

by Robert Ward

  Robert Ward

  SHEDDING SKIN

  “In Which the Narrator Becomes a Mountain Man and Harvests the Grapes of Wrath” and “In Which the Narrator Meets the Phantom of Cleveland and Learns That There Is No Business Like Show Business” originally appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Fall 1969.

  “A Priest For My Parents,” “Art and Celery,” and “The End of Innocence and All That” originally appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Fall 1971.

  “In Which the Narrator Becomes a Mountain Man and Harvests the Grapes of Wrath” appeared in WorksinProgress, Number 4, © 1971 by The Literary Guild of America, Inc.

  “The Terror of the Swami and Some Speed-Freak Football” originally appeared in the Seneca Review, November 30, 1971.

  This book is dedicated to:

  Ray Franke

  Mike Disend

  Bill Harrison

  Jack Hicks

  PART ONE

  I.

  In Which I Begin by Digging My Hole

  I have my blue jeans rolled up to reveal the plaid underside and my Tom Corbett Space Cadet T-shirt clings tight to my stomach. Yes, and my white high-topped Keds surround my dancing feet, my red bandanna is tied around my neck, the point tickling my throat. Behind me, in the row house, Freda and Father sit beneath the Norman Rockwell kitchen calendar arguing about budgets. Ahead of me is Craig Avenue. That’s where the Hill is, where Baba Looie might be. It is where Gene Autry and Roy Rogers move inside our bodies, take over our speech, stop stuttering in Walter, make Kirk forget his scraped-up knees, turn Shirley Steinberg—who will later get gunned down for real in a tavern fight—into the traveling minstrel girl, charm a man out of his snake ring like it or not. Running down Craig Avenue, I’m no fat kid who will have trouble with braces acne marriage. I will not step on a crack. I am Lash LaRue; the bushes shrink from my touch. Me and my silver gun, my jewel-studded holster. Even though I cannot breathe with this scarf strangling my neck. I can still dodge Walter’s bullet.

  “Gotcha!”

  “Missed.”

  “Didn’t. Can’t dodge two feet.”

  “Can, Walter. Jump the exact moment you pull the trigger. Before the bullet comes out of the gun, I’m free.”

  “Sure.”

  A punch in the gut for Walt. See him lying on the chalked hopscotch, his head resting in sevensies. Kirk from the mulberry tree:

  “Krehhh, krehhhh, you’re all dead.”

  No chance to dodge. Call in the rulebook.

  “Fix fix new man.”

  “No new men. No new men. Awwww no.”

  I may as well die, change the game to Best Death.

  No one wants to play. It doesn’t matter. We go to the Hill. Dust all over Tom Corbett’s shirt. Standing on the Hill, should we go get the Seckel pears? No, Greenleaf will call the cops. What’s a penny made of? Dirty copper. So funny I forgot to laugh. Later we will say Funny as a fart in a space suit.

  “Let’s dig.”

  Run over to Walter’s for the shovel. Little Eddie, who has painted valentines on the backs of his box turtles, wants to dig. We push him out of the way. No one likes him because he has a cleft palate. Dig dig dig, working good here in the sunshine, dirt all over Kirk like moondust, digging further into that soft orange clay, stop, wipe off your head with the bandanna, go over to Eddie’s—yes, you can play, we love you, bring us the water bottle, bring us the ruler with the King Syrup picture on it; we’ve got a nice hole here now, three feet deep. Sweat all over us, as we sit in the hole, lob grenades at Japs, slitty-eyed midgets never stop Combat Kelly or the Blackhawks. Shoot marbles against the wall, get all the way down, we could store apples in here, Greenleaf comes looking, we spread a dark army blanket overtop and he breaks his leg. Dust all over everything, it’s four o’clock, time for Kate Smith, do you wanna go? No, nah, forget it, she’s a horse, never wears anything but long dresses because her calves are burned, nothing but scars. You wanna dig? Yeah yeah yeah. Let’s get this hole deeper, all the way to China. I wanna buy some chop suey, digging digging, our hands coated with the dust, our shovels cracking into rock, digging digging digging our hole….

  II.

  The Town of Thatched Rooves

  There are Glenn and Freda, my parents, locked behind the shiny bathroom door, him screaming as she lances his pustules, and here am I in my room, eating Toll House cookies, playing with my battery of imaginary friends in the Town of Thatched Rooves. A warm town with kettles of stew, and big bulky men with red noses and orange weather-chapped cheeks. A town like Dickens’ England, and all of them love me. Yes, I am in the pub, sitting behind the great oaken table, smiling and pounding my fist. Swans sail through every leaded window and even though most of the men are bloodthirsty pirates, they refuse to bother the swans in deference to me, their young but able-bodied leader.

  “Hey, mates, how’s ‘bout another round o’ ale?”

  “Why not, Pete, why the hell not?”

  All our arms are around one another, and we’re singing with full-bodied bass voices about the good ship Elizabeth, and eye-patches are being snapped into place, capes swirling through blue fog air. Behind me someone is tapping his wolf’s-head cane on the sawdust floor with resounding thumps. And I, Bobby Ward, am full, full, warm all over…. “We got it, Bobby, we got it.”

  In the narrow hallway, my father’s eyes are popping out of his forehead. Yellow light blocking out Mother’s face, as she screeches like a wounded cricket.

  “We got the bastard, the big one on his back. We got it.”

  My father turns around to reveal the sliced cyst. Blood and pus run down his back, seep over the edge of the flower-printed towel wrapped wrinkly around his waist.

  “You see,” says my mother. “He just leans forward and we get the maximum amount of pressure on it. Then all we need to do is flick it with the lance and booooom! It explodes.”

  My father’s mouth is hanging open, and he is shaking his head like an epileptic.

  “We really got the son of a bitch. Yessiree bob. Son a bitch only responds to one thing—Force force and more force—’n’ ‘at’s jest what we gave it you better believe it.”

  I tell him that I do certainly believe it and slam the door. Then I sit staring at my cowboy curtains, looking at Roy and Dale, Trigger, Pat Brady and his jeep, Nellybell, waiting for them to move, to take me to Bobby Benson’s B-Bar-B Ranch, where we will shoot and fight and be in the real.

  But tonight it doesn’t happen. I am aware of the curtains as cloth, and I am aware of the stitches which make up Roy’s slant eyes. Even Nellybell is not 3-D, or metal, but flat, very flat, small black stitches in cotton. I climb out of bed and sit by my window.

  “This is no way to grow up,” I tell my imaginary friend Warren. “This is liable to do very bad things to my consciousness. I am liable to become demented.”

  “That’s true,” says Warren. “You are probably going to be a neurotic, audacious brat who is brilliant in short spurts but who is too fragmented to be decent.”

  “Gee,” I sob. “Is there no chance for me?”

  “None.”

  Warren’s voice is the voice of the aristocrat who has just turned down the peasants’ request for land reforms. I picture myself reaching down my own throat, grabbing him by his short legs and pulling him out of my body. But I do not do that for fear that he will be a small replica of myself.

  “Ah, you might make it anyway,” he says, without conviction.

  “Thanks,” I say. Then I let him sweep me away from Roy and Dale (who are still not Roy and Dale but only stitches), across the cold floor. And not a moment too soon, for blue lightning is crossing the room. Gray smoke is circling my head. From the other side of the wall my father makes a cry of pained delight. I shut my eyes and feel
Warren turn over in my stomach. He is going to sleep now. I assume that it is time for me to do the same.

  III.

  A Priest for My Parents

  My father and I are out in the alley. He has read a book which tells you How to Be a Pal to Your Son, and he is throwing me this ball.

  “Good catch, Bobby.”

  I throw him a curve and it hits the chest. He begins to scream:

  “You’re trying to hurt my chest. You know I have that new bump there and you’re trying to smash it. If you keep it up, I’m going to quit.”

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  He throws me the ball with a girlish flip. I watch the pigeons land on the telephone wires and I wish I could go with them to Capistrano. I am throwing slowly now, standing in the middle of the alley. Actually, I’m back in the pub with Errol Flynn; Wallace Beery is in the background adjusting his eyepatch and my father is throwing me the pinkie again.

  “What do you want to do this year in school?”

  “I want to do very good.”

  “That’s wonderful, and what subjects do you like?”

  “I love all my subjects, Da-Da.”

  He is standing at the other end of the alley, his hands on his hips.

  “You’re mocking me. You shouldn’t do that. I’ll not stand for it.”

  I am surprised to hear him say “I’ll not stand for it.” That’s a favorite of Mother Freda’s. In fact, so is standing with the hands on the hips. I think my father is slowly becoming the same person as my mother.

  “Your father’s identity is on shaky grounds,” says Warren.

  “How will I come out of this crisis?”

  “To you the damage is already done.”

  “But how?”

  “You’ll see later.”

  “Warren, you are a drag.”

  I throw my father a fast ball and it hits him on one of his forehead gacks.

  “Christ, oh Christ. Oh me. Oh no Christ.”

  My father is hopping around at the other end of the alley, his eighty-nine-cent vinyl glove dangling from his wrist.

  “My forehead. Oh my forehead. You’ve done this, you little bastard.”

  I throw my own glove next to the rusting American Flyer bike which is lying in the backyard crabgrass and go up the rotting steps to the kitchen. Inside, my mother is talking to herself.

  “I was such a nice innocent girl. I was so sweet. Why? Why?”

  “When was this?” I ask her.

  “This was before you were born.”

  “Why aren’t you happy now, Mother? Can’t you be sweet and innocent again?”

  “What do you mean, again?” she screams, bunching her cheeks together like a fist. “I am still basically sweet and innocent. Underneath. It’s underneath.”

  She stares at me. Her great, broad face, the left eye twitching madly. I want to help her. But the words don’t come out that way.

  “Why don’t you go get a new boyfriend?”

  She gasps, runs her fist across her lips.

  “Oh God, to think I raised a beast. To think of the nights I sat up when you were sick.”

  I picture her swaying my rocker. I remember her telling me how she warded off rats when we lived in Washington. I am flooded with deep guilt and want to slice off my tongue. I hug her tightly, hoping that I may somehow squeeze the innocence from within, make it appear on her skin, light up her eyes.

  “I could have married Ronald Hogan,” she says. “The missionary?” I ask.

  “Yes, the missionary,” she says, sniffling back the tears. “That’s the very one. I had many a chance. The boys would come over and we’d make homemade ice cream and sing songs. Ronald was a tall, pale boy, not anywhere near as handsome as your father, but he knew something your father will never know.”

  “What’s that?” I say on cue.

  “He knew how to …”

  “Be kind.”

  The voice is my father’s. He’s come from the alley, still holding his chest.

  “That supercilious idiot,” he says. “Yes, it’s a damn shame you didn’t marry him. I can see you both now in the remotest outpost of the Dark Continent. You and Ronald Hogan. He armed with the Old Testament and you with your innocence. Yes, your great, beautiful innocence. Like a protective shield you see on TV.”

  My mother is in tears. For a moment I feel a great loathing for my father. I want to butt him with my head. Then my mother leaps up and runs down into the cellar. My father sits in her place. He puts his head in his hands. Rocks back and forth.

  “I’m sorry about hitting you with the ball,” I say.

  “I could have married the missionary,” he says through his nose.

  He begins to chuckle. Though I don’t think it that funny, I chuckle mightily. The only time we are united is when I assent to his bitterness.

  IV.

  Mother Freda Turns into the Heap

  Mother Freda’s existence is a song with a single stanza. Endless repetitions of that one line, accompanied by a dull, persistent drumming which allows for no variations. Only exhaustion accounts for the occasional pauses in her imbecilic tune, pauses which introduce, for the briefest of moments, a new melody, equally as banal as the first.

  This month she is blowing all the chords she knows to the Symphony of Participation. Ashley Montagu (pronounced Managooo) and Margaret Mead have stirred her into swirling whirlwinds of activity. She bursts into my room in her massive green artist’s smock, proclaiming self-realization. She stands on one blubbery leg, waving her arms like windmills from the Town of Thatched Rooves. Of course, she should have seen it years ago. How could it have ever escaped her? Do I realize that in Georgia Maine Kansas Alaska women past forty are shaking the world? I do not. And if they, then why not she? Is life (I ask you) a wall, built on dedication to family alone? It is not. It is more like a building, or even a shopping center. It may begin with one store and grow into an entire complex of stores, each appealing to a different trade, but by their very union growing together, until entire communities spring around them. At the finish of her speech her sagging jowls are redder than the cobblestones of my beloved town, redder than the scarlet jerseys worn by the hateful San Francisco 49ers. She stands majestic by my shredded curtains (done with my own teeth during an intergalaxy fight with Glutar), her button nose arched into the air of unlimited possibility.

  “Yes” is what I tell her that day, every day. A hearty shake of my acne-coated face and a deep gut-reaction “Yes.”

  “Yes” to Mother Freda as she sits in the corner of the garage, the light pouring through the dusty window to reveal masses of cobwebs tangled in her braided hair. From the lawn chair I watch paint flying from her crusty brushes, onto the hood of the Chevrolet, onto the ceiling, onto the chalky bags of lawn fertilizer, onto the garden trowels and broken rakes which line the paint-dashed walls. Paint everywhere from Mother Freda. Even streaming down the canvas and into the deep wrinkles of Mother Freda’s thighs.

  After three hours every Sunday she emerges from her “loft” looking like The Heap, a huge mound of greasy slime who is a hero of D.C. Comics. No matter how busy I am with my Town (and there is much to be done; unknown invaders attack our prosperous seaports, black plagues are rumored in the provinces), I do not miss the opportunity to stand by the screen door, clap whistle stomp my feet.

  “Three cheers for Mother Freda,” I yell, “she who is not fractured by the flotsam and jetsam of this painful ordeal.”

  My good-natured cheers earn me Mother’s smile, a smile made earthly by the gap between her teeth.

  “Look,” she coos, holding up the still-dripping canvas.

  Between the horizontal agonies of random smudges is a figure. Why Freda how marvelous, a blond maiden tripping over green blot (grass), a silver milk can dangling from one gnarled finger. Why Freda how divine. And in the upper corner there, yes it is indeed Mr. Sun, spreading his sopping warmth from the canvas to you.

  “You like?” she asks, sounding like Dondi.
<
br />   I gingerly move my hand from my chin and blow her a kiss. She stumbles across the gravel, her fat, paint-ooze arms as open as her mouth. Too late to dodge; I am pressed into the slippery, dripping bosom of this mighty beast my mother, Mother Freda.

  V.

  Collecting Payment

  On that gray and rainy day, I am running into Pop Acorn’s little neighborhood store. My father is in there with wispy-haired Pop. They are reading Nazi magazines. Though my father is an intelligent man, he cannot resist stories about atrocities. I hear them and begin to speak:

  “Daddy … Daddy … something horrible has happened. Over at Govan’s Little League field. That man, Ichman, who is supposed to be in America. Well, he was over there. Walking his dog. I know it was him, Daddy. I know from Scar. He said, ‘Hey come here kid, me an’ you is gonna have a house party.’ Oh those eyes of his, Dad, those terrible eyes.”

  I pretend I am going to faint, and feel Pop Acorn’s bony fingers grab my back. My father is in a rage.

  “Eichmann at the ball park, hey? Not impossible. It’s right here in Scar that they suspect him to be in New York, and if he might be up there, then he could also be down here.”

  “Sure,” says Pop Acorn, drooling. “Baltimore’s the town all these Mafia guys come because the heat’s on somewheres else. You’d better take a look.”

  While I take small gasps of air and make weird sighs, my father smashes his hand on a Wheaties box. He tells Pop that it might seem crazy, “but my son and I are gonna visit that ball park, and if we don’t report back in two hours, call the fuzz.” Pop nods gravely. Then he winks at me and makes a clucking sound. It is the only time I have ever heard him laugh.

  Crouched behind the wheel, my father tugs at his soiled trench-coat collar. We ride in absolute silence. Every so often I give small neck jerks.