Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  Roy Rausch belabored all things to Peter Koenig, two kings in uneasy counsel. And here, adding a third party—this party, especially, Dolores Starr—the air became volatile and male plumage displayed. Rausch was still on about Jack’s imagined deviance: inevitable, he supposed, among theatre people, ordained by the whereabouts of George Castille, and the primary sign of a fall from faith.

  Peter faced the bluster from behind his desk, aware of Christ Equestrian (or Asinarian?) in the print behind him, knowing how Jesus must have felt, straddling a donkey’s back.

  The assemblyman stood at Dolores’ arrival, did not shake hands, but nodded by the rules, as if to say he was polite to women even when the jury was out as to whether they were ladies. He asked whether it was true, whether Jack was staying with her and her son, and if he was, whether that was proper. When Dolores confirmed Jack’s presence and her own honorable intentions, Rausch settled back in his chair, steepled his fingers under his chin, and looked confidently at Koenig.

  But Koenig could not deliver. Or would not, imagining Jack better off sheltered in the fleshpots of Roy Rausch’s imagining than on the streets like that chorus who had snatched him from Grover’s Corners. Koenig worried instead about the soul’s migration, that there were things Jack Rausch needed that he could not find in Antioch, and that his needs were understandable and just.

  Meanwhile, Roy took up the outcry. He would take Dolores at her word. He knew that single mothers were often hard put to make the best of the consequences of their actions.

  And as she started to speak, started to crack the vessel and spill it all, the office door opened, admitting the formidable parade of Adele Rausch. Dolores held her counsel at the arrival of Jack’s Maddaw. Now the four of them arrayed themselves like an epic debate, like a conclave of generals or demons, and instead of eloquence, when Maddaw asked for the whereabouts of her grandson, they all fell silent.

  It was Lao-tzu who said this: that the Tao gives birth to One. That One gives birth to Two, Two to Three, and Three to all things.

  Roy Rausch looked to his mother and to the preacher, demanding simple answers to nuanced questions. Jack had always been intricate to love, and the assemblyman had ceased trying to do so on those mornings a dozen years ago, when the boy sat on Adele’s lap looking at Roman images and his father peeked through the doorway like a forgotten tutelary, wishing Jack had never returned there, wishing no ill on him but wishing he would just go away, watching as the two of them sat above Maddaw’s photo album, harvesting sunlight and colors that, from his own vantage point, were blurred and indefinite and therefore menacing.

  Peter Koenig was imagining as well. Trying to receive Adele Rausch with the dignity she expected, his thoughts veering nonetheless down a dark channel, he imagined the boy at the lean-to bus stop on the corner of 4th and Fellini, his dark hair matted by rain, his thin jacket clutched against hostility and the inclemency of a humid spring night. What could he have told Jack Rausch to keep and affirm him?

  Meanwhile Dolores thought of Aron, her ire at the assemblyman’s jab against single motherhood sliding naturally toward concern for her own single child, lingering there briefly, then sliding away, as though she watched him through the door of a sunlit room. He was ousted and overwhelmed by Jack’s gifts, by uncomplicated radiance, she concluded. The world welled in uncontrollable currents around them. In her mind’s eye her son looked heavier, his eyelids pouched with 3 a.m. weariness, and she wondered again how he had betrayed his promise.

  Adele Rausch had enough of them all. She had arrived to jostle. At the source of right-wing politics for fifty years, she knew that it all came back to mirrors—mirrors like those Dolores had placed on stage at the theatre. And though she would not be caught dead at any play of Stephen Thorne’s—nor few at Antioch, for that matter—Adele Rausch saw mirrors everywhere, mirrors in which all things blurred and vanished but the face of the beholder. Jack was her blood, her grandson, though not even she would openly own to that.

  Nonetheless, she would not let him wander from care.

  48 Episode: Kommós

  They call it the kommós. A lament in the tragedy, a song shared by the actors and the chorus. It appears near the end of the play, at the play’s catastrophe—when Oedipus blinds himself, when Orestes and Elektra stand over the murdered body of their mother, when Medea slaughters her children.

  It is the song before the storm or after it, when the world catches its breath at the monstrousness of things.

  Yes, children, sometimes you eat the god, T. Tommy said, as the thunder rumbled. And sometimes the god eats you. And some are called on account of rain.

  Apache Downs and Billy Shepard, assigned crew duty by Stephen and George, began to clear the stage as the Brischords settled on the lowest tier. Their Pentheus stood midstage, still brooding over his sister Maia, blonde hair stirring in an uncanny wind from the west, long cord hooked to his amplifier as the retro Stratocaster sputtered.

  He tuned to the sound of T. Tommy’s voice.

  Seven of them, teen and vagrant and in between, wandered the stage as a late spring rainstorm rushed toward the park from the west, bound east to spread across the Highlands and Crescent Hill, Queen Anne and Carpenter Gothic tangling in lightning and thunder and tepid June rain. The set was changing around them, as Apache and Billy had been at work removing Hamlet’s mirrors, one of them dropped and broken over an altar of plankage and lumber.

  There was a time, T. Tommy told the Brischords, back when I played a role in the economy—in the Clinton years, before Bush took back the country—when a prospect passed me by. Yes, an opportunity T. Tommy did not seize upon, if you can imagine. But this time I sinned through commission, not omission, and the world come down like this:

  June or July of ’94. I believe the white Bronco was still on the road, Al Cowlings at the wheel and the Juice in the back. I got the letter at my apartment, return address my darling Lydia, for whom I had distant yearnings after the tragedy of the Landon girl. Unfortunately it was a chain letter—no correspondence but the promise of riches and the threat that disaster would fall were I not to forward it to friends. And Daddy Chrome remembers, I am sure, don’t shake your head, Chrome, you was one of my five correspondents, and you must of sent it along, else you would be derelict and where you are today.

  The guitar sprang into life, a melancholic blues riff girded with yearning and an unmoored passion. T. Tommy looked up and straight into the dolor of it, and he knew the boy was passing close to something intimate and forbidden. He dipped the last of his pomade, welsh-combed it through his forelock, and went on.

  I did as it instructed, and I am here to thank the Lord and the King that not a penny came into my hands. Because I heard what transpired with Aurelius Wheat.

  Named for the ancient emperor, the philosopher. Social worker himself, of girth and sparse beard, undistinguished in his walk across Broadway to his office, menthol Virginia Slim smoldering in one hand and Big Gulp coffee steaming in the other, brothers and sister. Lord knows he tried to heed his namesake, who said that the only wealth you will keep forever is what you have given away. So when he got the chain letter Aurelius did nothing, discarded the note and forgot about it until a lottery ticket rose on his horizons, a gift from a Vietnamese family he had guided through USCIS offices, more specifically from the sixteen-year-old son he would have guided luridly home were it not for a strong sense of Stoic ethics.

  Aurelius had learned from his mother piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but almost from evil thoughts. But the ticket come through. It brought him ten thousand dollars, and unhinged the simplicity of his living. Until he remembered his ancestral wisdom, returning the money to the family he had helped, every dime of it, devoted to the education of that boy he would always watch chastely and from afar.

  Of course, the family being family, money flowed from its original intent. I understand that one of the cousins was pregnant by a much older white man, abandoned when he a
bated, and she needed the money for refuge and child care. Aurelius’ young amoroso was more than glad to help his cousin, and Aurelius heard the story and understood, wishing there were more in his coffers to educate the boy, since he had given away what he could keep forever. And of course they would be more, because the impure and adrenalized excitement of the winning ticket had inveigled him, and oddly in search of its dregs he sent a two dollar trifecta bet on the ponies to Churchill via his supervisor, assured she would double his wager in a donation to Crusade for Children. He picked three names—Morning Star, Golden Touch, and Pan Pipe—because he found them ‘cute,’ never reckoning odds or trainers or past performance, and astonished when they came in, finished in perfect order and brought him seven thousand fifty four dollars and change. He kept the fifty four and change, passed the seven on to the Nguyen family, and was not surprised when the boy directed it as seed money to his great-aunt’s restaurant, the infant cousin by then having been taken into the father’s family, and the Vietnamese world north of the river settled into hard-working and thankful balance.

  Until, of course, the rumbles xenophobic began, three restaurateurs raising public objections, wondering where Mai Nguyen had received financing, the trail of public record back to Aurelius’ donations, the accusation of government financing and aberrant desire, the restaurant closing, Aurelius buckling under a job inquiry, his suspension with pay but also with confusion, media scrutiny, and humiliation. It led to a sad suicide, children, a cocktail of over-the-counter sleeping aids purchased with the $54.32 left over from the winning ticket, his savings funneled toward a burial on the family farm up near Central Barren, where parents embarrassed by the whole entanglement of Aurelius Wheat were consoled when the gravedigger, setting the site yards away from the family plot, uncovered soil that gave all signs of being oil-rich.

  So Aurelius Wheat passed from the understanding of men, his opportunity tapped and tapped out. It is the god’s doing: all of us ride the storm, its lessons slipping away even as they carry us back and forward, any place but here and now.

  Tommy ended the story to Vincent’s accompaniment as the wind rose over the park. The evergreens that lined the western borders, the rise and tumble of the sculpted land as it abutted Sixth Street, all bent away from the diving gusts, and T. Tommy and the Brischords huddled in their funhouse of mirror and timber.

  They sang against the tempest, a king in lamé and his tribe in exile. All the wind songs came to them— Dylan, Stevie Nicks, Jim Morrison’s Riders—all the while the storm gaining traction, the high oak and poplar by the stage beginning to bow down in homage. Come in, Tommy, Falcon urged. Come in, honey. Here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool.

  And Tommy, being both, shouldered off her hand and moved center stage in the downpour. He knew what lay backstage—could not would not go there. But out here he smelled the vintage of the tempest, and he glittered in rain-spackled augury, launching into the driving wail of the old levee song,

  Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,

  Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,

  When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.

  And it’s comin’, he told friend and follower, to the surge and drive of Vinnie’s bucking ostinato on the bass strings. Breath of the god in the air. They say ‘bring him on’ until he comes, and then the world falls out from under them and they wonder what the fuck they’ve done.

  And then behind him, as if cued from the wings, the Keith Richards swampy hook from “Gimme Shelter” emergent, climbing the set like a vine, and the first lightning flare, shearing a oak limb over toward Fourth Street, and even Tommy was afraid, you could see it.

  Oh, naw, son, he exclaimed. Naw, get back into the lean-to, and Vincent De Chevre receded into the shadow, the music still driving, amplified and dangerously electric. In compromise to the storm, Daddy Chrome followed the boy and turned down the volume, as if somehow that would stop the current, but the riff continued.

  Resigned, T. Tommy joined in at the second verse:

  Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’

  My very street today

  Burns like a red coal carpet

  Mad bull lost its way

  as the other four, Vinnie singing backup as well, slid into the chorus, because now they all knew in a space under knowing that it was, indeed, just a shot away.

  It was Maia, of course, who had brought Vinnie to this. Her confession on the stage that morning had unpinned his moorings, and he had wandered through the afternoon impelled on a dark wind he did not understand until sunset. But the gods are friends to such shadows: Kronos and Rhea, and their children Zeus and Hera. And parent and child, like Myrhha and Theas, like Oedipus and mama. The offspring doomed like someone garbled the genetic code.

  Vinnie still backed away from it. Even told himself that it had to do with Jack, that the new friendship with the dark and golden boy had a hint of the letch in it. He pushed the truth backstage, where it coiled and watched him from behind transparent scales.

  But by sunset he had owned what he was up against. Vincent came to the stage as the storm brewed and surged east up the river, began to play only when he heard T. Tommy speak, inventing atop the scalding undertow of old Zeppelin songs. And now, backing Tommy’s broken wail, missing Jack’s bottom to the great and ominous Stones song, he turned the corner toward resolution, riding the night and telling himself, no doubt, that everything would all be all right, that it would all pass.

  Taking the song through all of its threats now, through war and rape and murder and flood, Vinnie played on, his thoughts fastened to the rhythm of the riff and to that rhythm only, riding the snake as Tommy and the Brischords wailed the final chorus and the wind screamed over them all.

  He must have felt himself unravel. Like a ghost in a sarcophagus right before it fragments into the vital, undefining flow, Vinnie must have passed through a moment of knowing what was happening, must have stepped from the shadows slowly to see himself reflected manifold in the fractured mirror. To see the vine rising to claim the stage and T. Tommy hustle for cover as the lightning crashed and branch not twenty yards beyond them, and the windows on the court rattled with the heavy, pursuant thunder.

  50 Episode: First Aftermath

  Seven days and not a sign. The police combing the park, the surrounding streets to no trace of Vincent De Chevre. The family as bereft as all families are in these circumstances. The media, on the other hand, baffled as to how the tragedy would be presented: Vincent was young and blonde and white, but he was male, so the traditional coverage of candlelit vigils, internet photos, maternal pleas, and high school students hugging one another to the strains of “Amazing Grace” no longer applied, as the city struggled with a new language for abduction.

  Of course, the search continued. The police went to work, leads trailing into urban myths of vanishing hitchhikers and alien impressments. A group of indigents questioned fruitlessly, announcements from Peter Koenig’s pulpit and George’s and Dolores’ lecterns, students talking to students, Madeleine Rausch talking to her people, who talked to theirs. Everyone talking to the police except the people at Fourth and Fellini. And the people at that corner of chaos full of opinion and knowhow, every cyclist’s and loiterer’s advice cut with rock and witchery.

  Ganymede. Europa. Persephone. Orion. For generations the gods had snatched mortals, and even among the Muses, who should have known better, there was speculation.

  Thalia was sure he would turn up. Hadn’t the rest of them, after all? Wasn’t the story in the going to fetch the hostage, as the De Chevres themselves had done when they rescued Jack Rausch from Antioch and the prisons of Grover’s Corners?

  Calliope and Melpomene pointed out that in all the stories, even in the Rausch rescue, none of the hostages had returned home. They were placed among the gods or had undergone the fiery, scattering change into constellations. Glamorous, indeed, but no longer among their mortal families mourning a
nd bereft.

  Erato brushed back her anarchy of hair, her green eyes shining feverishly. She said that it had to do with love and desire. Somehow the god had wanted Vincent De Chevre, like he had wanted Ampelos in that distant, exploratory time of his divine adolescence. To what purpose we could not be sure, but Vincent was beautiful and gifted, after all, and blessed with golden ringlets that rivaled those of his sister for color and allure. Those were the kind of youths desired by unmanageable forces, who ended poorly because they were beloved.

  So much for motive. Clio and Euterpe insisted on forensics. The police had collared T. Tommy and the Brischords the morning after the storm, dumped them back at Fourth and Fellini after only a few hours interrogation. Tommy was holding court from there, was back among his people and joining the chorus of testimony, his opinion of more authority because he had been there. And though T. Tommy had not seen the vanishing, because he had been at the scene, seen the boy reflected in two dozen shards of mirror, simulacra held in the startled glass so that even next morning a police detective, cynical and smart and subject to no delusion, sent some of the fragments back to the lab for evidence, for anything.

  Some of the Muses chose not to debate, but crouched in the storm-ruined branches, sprouting feathers as they listened to their sisters go on, their black wings gleaming in the sunlight. There was a time when they had punished girls by transforming them into magpies: for telling false stories that impugned them. But now, working changes on themselves for celerity and concealment, they rose aflutter from the wreckage of trees and soared north over tennis courts and Park Avenue, over Ormsby’s rows of houses until they saw the intersection, the orbiting bicycles and the slow, linear push of traffic. Here they set themselves down to listen, watch, and bode.

  And there the debates continued, as words took the place of discovery.