Routes

by John Okas

  He checks this way and that. When all is clear on the street he jumps over the fence. Even though he knows that in the end Uncle Sam will pay for his sin, as a new thief, to keep himself honest, he must see the pigeon whose feathers he’s about to pluck. The Running Rabbit in him cannot be seen or heard. He softly hops over to the window and takes a quick peek. A young man about his age is having dinner with his folks. He is wearing pajamas, drinking milk and laughing. From the decent looks of the house and furnishings Corn Dog rests assured that young man is a long way from going naked. He raids the line. Easier than taking a pelt from a possum, he unpins the garments. A stroke of good luck, an omen that tells him he came to the right place, there is more on the patio, a blue canvas duffel bag, a hip-length jacket of dark blue wool and a pair of navy blue shoes. He snatches everything, runs around the corner, ducks behind some bushes with his take, and comes out with his buckskins in the duffel bag, dressed as a sailor. He is nervous, but tries affecting as best he can the casualness of a sailor on shore leave, imagining himself as at home on the street as the young man, Seaman Schuyler Walker—the laundry crayon in the garments identified him—was with his mom and dad. Now that he has committed a crime and is benefitting from it, his conscience is eased. At least he is on the wrong side of the law legitimately.

  He returns to the scene of the crime, and sees the same policeman on the corner. Dressed in uniform, head down in the upturned collar of the coat, bag over his shoulder, bronze hands in his pockets, the big blue boats on his feet, Corn Dog clomps along up the hill. The policeman gives him a little courtesy nod, as one man in uniform to another, and never gives him a second look. Fine!

  His plan is to go to Kane’s, reveal himself to Laudette and ask about Sarah, or maybe even meet her there. But what if she is not there? Corn Dog knows that even though he is sure, by the strength and clarity of the siren in his head, Sarah is there somewhere, and she might not be sure of herself. The city is a big place. She could be lost. Then he will stay underground, disguised, until he finds her. He’s sure, now that he has broken the law himself, Father Dodge would want even less to do with him. He reckons, in a pinch, Aunt Atana would put him up for a while.

  It is hard for him to believe, but he keeps having to remind himself that if he is reunited with Sarah, there will be a baby. It frightens him that he will have to use his ingenuity to find them all a place to stay. It will be a test of his new-found brazenness. With him he has over two hundred dollars that he saved from modelling for Penzini. It’s not much but it’s a start.

  He is glad to be past the policeman. Not wanting to press his luck a second time he continues his walk up the street; he will go over the hill on his way to Kane’s. With every step he takes he senses a new life, a charge to his confidence. Feeling protected, invisible, and invincible, he doesn’t stop himself from mixing with a crowd of fancy folks milling around on a red carpet in front of a big gold-trimmed building. Some are coming, some are going. All are in a festive mood, many seem as if they have been drinking. Corn Dog, child of nature, keeps track of months by the sun and moon. It is just another day to him, ten after the winter solstice, but it happens to be New Year’s Eve by the Freewayfarers’ reckoning. He realizes it when he sees a pair of couples, wearing funny hats and blowing kazoos and rattling noisemakers, exit the hotel.

  Then, when they clear the door, his heart leaps like a frog into his mouth, and he stops dead in his tracks, for behind the noisy foursome, cutting through the crowd like something supernatural, is a figure he both recognizes and doesn’t.

  Her face is powdered snow white and painted peach at the cheekbones; her dark eyes, half-closed in a self-satisfied yet ravenous expression, are darkened, veiled, underlined and overlined; her lips and nails are polished red as if dipped into blood; her lashes are brushed out long, her brows are raised by pluck and pencil. She is like Sarah, but not the Sarah he knew.

  Stunned, speechless and immobile, he watches her as she walks down the red carpet toward the curb where there is a waiting taxi, stepping smartly in black leather high heel shoes, and letting a full white fox fur coat, worn loosely over her shoulders, trail behind her. She puts her best points forward, wearing a formal evening dress of black silk that hugs her hips and bosom, and leaves her with bare back and shoulders. On her head she sports a high, white fur huntress’ hat, made to match the coat. The cap has a long black bird feather in a black silk band and a delicate black lace veil which hangs over her eyes, makes them seem all the more spoiled and fascinating. He is bewitched by the glamor of her looks, a woman a world apart from the clean-scrubbed girl in the plain cotton dress he saw the spring before last. Now her beauty frightens him, makes him break out in hot and cold sweats. Is she for real? He judges her presentation as deadly serious, not the face she put on for him for fun, but the one she put on when she wanted to leave the cabin to go home to her father.

  She walks by him, black and white, sharp and tall, without the slightest eye motion. With such distance in her eyes, she does not seem to want to acknowledge even the existence of any other persons beside herself. Her mouth pursed in a grim smile and her nose, upturned in a superior expression, seem to confirm that she thinks the world of herself. She prances a bit in place with impatience as she waits for the doorman to open the car door for her. Corn Dog is close enough to smell her perfume. He sails on the scent of sea which calls up the green pea in the split between her legs. His heart races, his stomach churns like a seasick sailor’s. He is feverish with excitement over her nearness, but powerless to call attention to himself.

  Sarah! No! Just a woman who looks like Sarah. This one, dressed like a Queen of the Night, is older. A vision of radiance and horror! An angel of loveliness, a vampire! Oh no, oh yes, it is she! No it isn’t! He remains paralyzed with imagining where she’s going, what she’s doing, whom she is going to meet, why she’s dressed to kill like this. Either she lives here and is going off to meet a man, or else she is coming from meeting a man in one of the rooms of this big gilt-edged palace. What other explanations can there be?

  Inside, Corn Dog shilly-shallies and willy-nillies, back and forth between “Is she?” or “Isn’t she?,” “Should I?” or “Shouldn’t I?” Outside he is transfixed, not knowing whether he’s seeing the beauty or the beast. He wishes she would turn his way, but her eyes, fixed on the door handle of the taxi, do not leave him much hope for that. He tries to take his hands out of his coat pockets and wave to get her attention but they are fast frozen inside. He tries to call “Sarah,” but he is too numb to get the word out until it is too late. She is in the cab. The driver engages the gears and takes her off to The Cygnet Prince, her first date with Harry Swan.

  It takes a few moments for the numbness to wear off and be replaced by regret. That was Sarah, and he stood there like a stiff and did nothing, said nothing. How was he supposed to know she’d be changed from the charming pretty girl he knew into the arch woman of his dreams, black and white and red, richly fragrant, sweet and nasty, a vision of love and madness?

  Up one moment, down the next, from a free bird in a stolen sailor’s uniform, an artist whose life imitates his art, to a sorry underdog. His fear of being spotted by the police and his poor self-image return. Who deserves to feel more inadequate than he who sees his love and stands by and says nothing?

  He is tossed in a tempest of emotion. Should he wait for her to come back and intercept her before she enters the lobby? But what if she doesn’t live here? He would rather not know, but he must find out. He doesn’t have the self-respect to inquire at the desk. He summons enough courage to go over and talk to the gold-braided, red-coated doorman, as one man in uniform to another.

  “Hi there,” he says. “Gee, I think that woman who just left here was someone I used to know … you know, the pretty one you put in the cab?”

  “You mean Miss Black? Oh she’s quite a doll, mate! Half of this town’s in love with her. She lives here in this hotel.”

  “Miss Black’s her nam
e then?” Lovesick Corn Dog blanches.

  “The one you knew? It’s hard to believe you’d forget a woman like her, mate. She’s got a little girl, a real sweetheart, too. The word is she’s a fashion model, a widow, believe it or not. Does the woman you’re thinking of have a little girl and a dead husband?”

  “No,” says Corn Dog, the blood draining from his head, his heart becoming so heavy it makes his stomach sink into his bowels. “I guess I was mistaken. It was someone different; they’re not the same person.”

  Sarah has gone from Blanche to Black and become a glittering white princess who lives in a gold palace, wears fur for fun, and rides high into the night by taxi. He has gone through changes himself. Every time he comes to this damn City by the Bay he is cast out, turned into a vagrant, a sad puppy lover.

  He is filled with rage and cannot help but condemn Sarah. He goes wild in an alley, kicking over cans of trash, imagining they are her. Then, remorse. He sits in the spilled rubbish and cries, ashamed of himself for losing control, condemning himself for condemning her. In all his life he’s never had a temper tantrum. The wake of it is a sobering experience. A warrior is truthful. Didn’t he mean what he said when he professed to her that he was a freethinker? He, not she, is the one who must be purified. A warrior must be serious, true to his word no matter what. Suddenly he wants her more than ever, and now does not feel worthy of her, either socially or spiritually.

  Sarah must be free to worship the white man’s machinery if she chooses, he thinks, I will learn to see things in a different light, and I won’t go around calling myself a freethinker when I’m really not.

  Honest Indigen Corn Dog is bound to honor. He must make himself worthy, willing to accept her as she is. Where else is there to turn in times like these but the desert. Purgatory. The buck does not need an internal combustion engine between his legs to get where he’s going. The journey of twelve hundred miles starts with the sidewalk under Corn Dog’s feet. Before Sarah has even arrived at the Opera House, he has hit the trail for the Valley of Death, with no intention to stop legging it until he is back in his native Land of Enchantment.

  Let her live the easy life inside the Golden Gate, I will be out roaming in the desert, lamenting, doing penance for my own sins and hers too, making myself good enough for her by drinking cactus juice and eating my friends the locusts and toads.

  Into the Classics

  It’s the eve of the new year and while the Cygnet Prince dances on stage, in his father’s private music box the literal Swan breaks his promise to leave the woman’s mystery intact and begins to romance Sarah with the promise of forever.

  “There was never another like you,” he whispers, nibbling on her bare shoulders, moon white, rising above the tight black gown. “I’ll always love you.”

  For some girls it might be a fairy tale come true, but Sarah cannot separate her professional life from her personal. She is not one to come apart easily. And by virtue of her love for the buck she is full of unthought-of reservations. She acts as if there’s a shark in the water and will not jump into anything potentially serious too quickly. At the same time the split personality is determined not to let her catch get away. She marks Swan as a man who only wants what he cannot have. If the bait is too easy he will take it and move along elsewhere. To seduce him she must be difficult every step of the way.

  “Harry,” she whispers back, chiding him. “Please! Didn’t you promise, hope to die? None of your drooling, now. I came here for the ballet, not to be eaten by a wolf.”

  “It’s the music that gets me in the mood about you, Cupcake.”

  “Well, learn to control yourself and listen.”

  Hoping for a reward, the good boy does as he is told, and keeps his hands to himself during the performance, watching the Prince dance around the lily pads with the water fairies, and casting sidelong glances at Sarah whenever there is a musical swell or any sort of choreographed amorousness. As in the opera, the combination of music and staging, the tender and athletic ways the courtship dance goes, prompt him to exciting fantasies, to imagine all the different wonderful ways sex would be with his smooth-as-milk companion.

  When the curtain falls, he says, “Would it hurt too much for us to get to know one another? Would you come to my place and share a cup of kindness with me?”

  “No tricks?”

  “Haven’t I been good so far?”

  Good enough. Swan’s town house, set high on the hill overlooking the Bay, is a man’s world. The living area is a game room. The walls are paneled in dark oak, like a rod and gun club, decorated with the hunter’s souvenirs, heads from the four corners of the globe. Not only moose, but eagle, zebra, marlin, even a stuffed grizzly. When she sees these she can’t help but think of Corn Dog. He often talked with disgust about dead things put on display as trophies, with no regard for the power of the animal’s spirit. He believed in relying on the animal spirit, not conquering it. How this cave would bear his curse for the uncovenanted slaughter in evidence. Would he love her in fur? She wouldn’t mind trying to get him to. Purest Cornie, she thinks of the missing buck with love and aggravation, you’re too good for this world.

  Swan wants her to sit, but there is no correct place for a lady in the living room. The long bar on the side and the pocket billiard table in the center are hardly the setting for a private chat. Strewn everywhere are the odds and ends of the sporting life, tennis rackets, golf clubs and so forth. In the dining room the fine mahogany dining table, host to frequent card games from the looks of it, is a mess of scratches, cigarette burns, and circular stains from the bottoms of beer glasses.

  He draws her attention to the upright piano in the corner. “You play, of course.”

  Sarah enjoys the compliment and doesn’t want to disappoint. She learned enough back in her choir girl days when the choirmaster invited her to study that she can tickle Harry’s fancy by faking her way through part one of Pynchon’s First Etude. She is rusty, cold, her nails get in the way, and she has no exact memory of the melody, but none of this stops her from improvising something around the heavy chords that feels right, something like Pynchon but nothing he ever really wrote.

  H Thronton Swan Junior has been exposed to the arts in school, but they have never uplifted him as much as the jockey power his position and money have given him over women. In the past when he has heard classical music he has always assumed its major theme was one of passion in submission to reason, that serious compositions with their order, harmony, stability and stateliness were expressions of a world where the cocky side of nature is under control. However, somehow in concert with his knowing Sarah, even though her Pynchon is not Pynchon, he finds inklings in the music that touch him personally in the most sensitive parts of his body. He does not mind that she’s out of practice and that the etude, so loosely interpreted, is not the etude. He hears kinks and queenly twists in the variations that make him want to wallow in excess, live like an aristocrat in decay. Yes, there is great control in the music but somehow, through Sarah, he sees that beneath the veneer, out of control, is a depth of license and debauchery.

  The playboy is enthralled. He never realized it before: this upper-class music as the perfect accompaniment to seduction with a capital S. Until now, the part of the goddess could be played by any model in a tinselly dress, who would “ooh” and “aah” over him. But this women has a weight about her that impresses him. Maybe he even is in love with this smooth young thing for showing a him a new trick. His new year’s resolution is to cut down on the party girls who go for jazz and gin and spend some time cultivating this serious genteel sort of lady who is into the classics.

  He suggests they repair to his den, and ushers her out of the clutter of the game room, into his study. The playboy’s lair is decorated like a sheik’s tent, with soft fabrics covering the walls and billowing from the ceiling, and cushions, from huge to head-size, piled up on the rug to form a couch. He begs Sarah to make herself comfortable. At first she shows reluctance
, then when she sinks in, she makes a face as if she absolutely loathes the arrangement where if one sits one has no choice but to stretch out.

  Edgar, Swan’s man, is a stubby cigar-chewing character who can’t even keep himself tidy, much less the house. He delivers a bottle of brandy and some not thoroughly clean glasses and has a brief, muffled conversation with Swan. Sarah makes it out as having something to do with horse races, and which of Swan’s bets have paid off that day. When Swan returns he takes a seat, sprawling out next to her.

  Of course the split pea doesn’t show either side of the real her, either that girlish character, the teenage runaway from Zion, or the one who has so many boyfriends she doesn’t know where to put them all: that if it weren’t for the holiday and her clients having engagements with their wives, she probably would have been booked thrice over that day. She cultivates Swan as a different type of friend and acts as if she can be honest with him, which in spirit, if not in fact, she hopes to be.

  She holds the crystal snifter to her wide lips, tosses down the long drink he has poured for her, and holds it out for more, before she launches into a fictitious personal history. Her lie is not out and out, but woven with threads unstitched from her real life. She tells Swan that she is the only child of a wealthy Bay State doctor, Gerald Black, that her mother died when she was twelve. She does not want Swan, as an older man of the world, to know she is not even twenty yet, so, to pad her tale with years, she fabricates an episode about studying abroad to make herself seem older. “When I came home I met and, soon after, married Cornelius Duke the Third. Cornie’s mother was Maria Santos, a Caramban banana plantation heiress, and his father was Cornelius the Second, a publishing king.” Tears like soft soapsuds foam in her dark eyes as she continues her story, heaving gentle sobs as punctuation. “But, oh, such dreadful things happened! Daddy and Cornie were both killed in the same yachting accident, a sudden squall off Seasquonsitt Island …”