by Tito Perdue
He followed halfway across the slum, weaving in and out, sometimes walking abreast, till at last they seemed to grow accustomed to it. They were young, yet not so very young as not to have been doing things these recent weeks. Indeed, he saw them whispering about it jubilantly. Lee groaned. She did have the most good lips, swollen with yearning. Mettlesome was she too, and had a dear white hand swinging back and forth, which he durst not take, however.
He remembered the three of them entering a store, then of waiting around while she selected a ribbon for herself. She looked good in this. She knew it, Lee knew it, and the boy knew it too. Next, they returned to the street again and made the brief walk to the gate. He had thought to see a parting here, instead they both ducked out through the shaft and appeared on the other side. It was here they decided to kiss. Lee groaned. Her blue eye was half-closed, and yet he could read enough in it to recall what it was to hold a woman in one’s arms. Lee came nearer; he had his way, and the boy would hold more tightly still, lest she worm out of his grasp and run away. Suddenly, he called out:
“Careful!”
They kissed. Perhaps if he studied closely enough in that blue eye, he might read the date of her death, the names and numbers of her offspring, or better, the look of the world in thirty years to come. Again they came together, this time so frantically, with so much true feeling, that Lee moaned and howled and called—and ended up cudgeling on the sentry!
Twenty
YEARS PASSED—OR RATHER A FEW days in which he was able to conjure up in his mind exactly what such years would bring. He didn’t want it. In any case, his health and money both were running low. This was not at all the grand species he had been led to believe, and he had no ten million years for the next one to come on board.
Often he would rise early, but then go back to bed. Contrary to everything, he had actually come to appreciate his room, its bleakness, and the hotel, too, which seemed now abandoned, since even the jester had gone away. Then too, the view from his window gave him some happiness—he liked to sit there long hours with his wife, pointing to peasants in the field and events that had happened in history.
He did grieve for his books, even if he wasn’t so sure he had a vocation for them anymore. Instead, he was drawn again and again to the window and the scenery that more and more was coming to serve as his own special manuscript, an example of the printmaker’s art, with cottages and exuberant swine walking around. Once only he caught sight of that new-made sun, huger by far and more brilliant, heralding a new sort of man; for one instant, it peeped up over the horizon and then ducked back down.
First, there would be an end to cities. He’d not see it, no, nor receive credit for having laid out the actual plans for what was coming up next—small world of fine people. Last year, he had wanted a thousand acres for each living soul; now, he had moved on to fifteen hundred and a spiritual system that . . . Suddenly, he heard something on one of the floors, a most unto- wardly sound that put him on guard at once and had him considering whether to slip beneath the bed. Though he was often mistaken about many things, he had never yet been mistaken when hostile forces were coming close. Officially speaking, the hotel was empty, but now he could most definitely hear at least two persons, large ones blundering about ignorantly in the style of the Law. His own pistol was lost; moreover, to make matters worse, his bed was so high it gave a view upon anyone hoping to hide beneath. He hurried out into the hall and then upstairs to an apartment where a large family had formerly lived. Here the bed was low. He got under it.
It all took such a time that he almost fell off to sleep. Now he could hear them rooting about in his room while giving off little squeals of joy. Recently, he had put aside a hoard of tobacco and canned foods and the like; now (he had no doubt), this too was forfeit.
He held his breath, waiting for the inevitable departure; instead, he heard them trooping up the stairs, heard them conferring, heard a knocking at the door. From his hiding place he could see a rubberized sole that, owing no doubt to the size and substance of the person, was squeezed down to an amazing thinness. Lee didn’t like it. This was not how he had foreseen it when he was young and used to hypothesize how his personal tragedy might turn out.
There was now a large red face, a balloon really, grinning at him in the sideways position.
“Oh lookie, I think I sees something. I do, I do sees something!”
Lee might have knocked out both eyes with his cane; instead, he retreated. He fully expected to be dragged out into the light. He expected it so much that he knew not what to say when, in fact, they simply lifted the bed and moved it a far distance away. He scampered for it, ardent to return under its shade, until he recognized that one of the men had pinned his trouser leg, allowing him to make no progress at all.
“My, my, my; lookie here what we got!”
“Hold! Listen, I probably knew your very father.” They were taking it in the greatest merriment; he remembered his indignation that they could look so lightly upon a murdering man.
“Let’s go downtown, you want to?”
“No.”
“Let’s do.”
He found himself being hustled downstairs at far greater speed than he liked. A tiny crowd had gathered, some dozen of persons, all of them grinning the grin that has ever accompanied the condemned to the stake. The car itself was plush and warm but smelled of hair oil, shoe polish, and snuff. The radio apparatus was infinitely more complex than in ’49 and ’47—this one had knobs and buttons and warning lights. Yet the voice was just as hoarse and came in the same amputated spurts as when he had been a nine-year-old in the clutches for the first time of these people’s grandfather-police.
He tried to enjoy it; he had to assume this was simply their strategy for earning a living, even if they could just as well have read about it instead. The town itself was full of Christmas shoppers—enviable people, red-cheeked . . . He was close to weeping. It seemed to him monstrous how little they knew about his quality, in fact nothing, and never would. He sat, looking straight ahead with that dignity that belongs to people who choose not to resist. His soul, of course, that was free, and not so much running behind as hovering overhead. Now that he really was captured and pressed in between two gross organisms (compacted, as it seemed to him, not from ligament and bone, but lymph, pure and simple), he began to consider what might happen. Not much. They might snatch his life away—he didn’t want it. Indeed, he could picture himself bidding farewell very happily, even to taking out his kerchief and waving with it. Or, they might keep him squeezed in between two bodies full with gas, in which event he would simply abandon to them his body and fly off with his soul! How well he knew them! They had been granted every chance to develop and had always refused to do so. Then too, if he could not by some stratagem or another break out of this circle of weak minds, then did he merit any cruelty that weak minds could invent.
The journey needed twenty minutes. At one moment he had taken out his matches and was using them when the man slapped them out of his hand. Lee looked at him. He still could not specify what it was precisely about these late twentieth-century faces, whether atrophy or entropy, anomie or satiety. This one had corruption to the lids; Lee did not want the man’s exudations on him. Moreover, whereas ignorant people in the past might have been unwashed, or have had ear and nose clogged clown-wise in hair, this man was entirely glabrous, no doubt a portent of the future when pus and corruption afforded nothing to grow roots in. Lee came closer.
“What the hell you looking at?”
“You ever read Ortega y Gasset?”
“Fuck you.”
“No, you should! Or heck, you could start by reading some of those books that used to be mine.”
Useless, the man had gone back to picking his teeth. Looking at him, Lee could remember the very moment, years ago, when he had broken with common man.
“Tell me, how’s your football team doing this year?”
“I tell you what, we could stop and tak
e care of you right here and now. Is that what you want?”
“No.”
“Then shut up.”
He had expected the same merry secretary who used to wear such memorable sweaters; instead, there was a computer in the corner. He had no slightest doubt but that he was soon to be attached to the thing and analyzed. Formerly, he could cry his way out of prison, but not now, not with the machine taking down everything he said.
They put him in a chair then stepped back, the two of them, to get a better look. The wall-eyed man had the authority; it was the young one that worried Lee.
“Just like to know why it is, Sir, that you don’t pay your rent?”
“What’s that?”
“Rent. Don’t believe Mrs. DeBardeleben much appreciates you running off like that without paying your rent.”
Tea room rent! Lee smiled.
“And how about that little boy?”
“Oh for God’s sake. You’re not going to tell me I murdered someone!”
“We hadn’t had no murders. Why, did you murder somebody?”
“Apparently not.”
“That little boy—you meant to murder him. Didn’t you?”
“Oh for God’s sake. Look, if you knew what he was like . . . ”
“You have any idea who his daddy is? Huh?”
“Oh for God’s sake. I didn’t have access to the daddy!” Useless. Suddenly, he stood. “I need to piss.”
“Well don’t do it here.”
He was taken down the hall to a narrow closet with toilet. There was a window. It was cracked open a bit; however, he looked upon it as a trap. His first scheme was to refuse to come out; his second, that if he but concentrated with his will, the man might turn and involuntarily drift away. Somewhere a telephone was ringing.
He got one foot out and then, his joy increasing by leaps, followed it up with a leg. He had grown so thin that he could throw out his limbs one by one and make a pile of them in the grass. It came to him that this was one of the finest things he had ever done, that it was unbelievable, daring, and impossibly good, and that out of all of history it had been reserved for him to do it.
There was a yard and no one watching; he was able to walk across and then, taking his courage, back into the same building whence he had left. Worst was the slowness, the length of the hall, the door; finally, he was outside again. He had one minute exactly for a new piece of grand luck to come his way. Behind him the station had not yet exploded, though he waited for it from one heartbeat to the next.
His luck came in the form of a little black taxi waiting there all these years.
Twenty-one
THE DRIVER WAS A JOCUND MAN, A talker too. Lee let him go on at length, all the way down to the woods, then paid him off in such good bills as that he would never wish to report about it. The line of trees had shrunk back a few inches since his day, the lower foliage especially, where a certain late twentieth-century etiolation had taken hold. Nevertheless, he stepped quickly and was thirty feet deep into the woods before night began to fall. The music of the crickets! He had to laugh out loud. By any measure they were supposed to be hibernating by now.
He might have tarried here a week, but for lack of sleeping facilities. Then too, he had lost his ancient ability of walking noiselessly in leaves. And he had no cane.
An hour later and he was in deep, so deep that even if he turned back now he was likely to miss the town in the dark. True, the radio tower was still to be seen: the topmost lantern had turned a flashing blue in token of his escape. It gave him great pleasure.
It was a very black night, with black trees and birds brushing so close as to make a personal affront of it. Twice he lashed out, not with cane but a branch of near size. Something was astir—now he saw it, a transparent glass lizard with organs all in view. Usually, he knew, the truth came as a great shock, whereas nothing surprised him anymore; nature was in decay.
He came up over a hill, half-expecting, as it were, a new-age ocean, pink and silent; instead, it was a wold-land all in shadow. When he died it must be from beauty, the kind that would have him shaking his head and wringing his hands while leaving him weaker each time. Further, his patience was running out. He wanted beauty from both barrels, full in the face and no longer merely teasing about the edges. Suddenly, that moment, the moon contracted violently, darkened, then came back on in X rays. For one brief moment, he was vouchsafed a vision of the thing in all its hollowness and the tremendous number of souls inside required for all time to roll large-sized balls of dung about.
Midnight discovered him counting his money under a tree. By his estimate, he was a full seven miles into the forest, and it was many more miles before the next settlement. There were hills behind, smoke coming off the summits. He seemed to remember an orchard in this vicinity, with mule and press for squeezing; now, knowing what he knew, the mule had disappeared and the cider had all long ago been consumed. He had great pity for himself, an old man always handled unfairly—not for the life of him could he say how he had come to such a pass. The last he remembered he was young and of a unique arrogance, and even now he would have preferred it that way. He lit a cigarette; then he again started in on that high-pitched moaning that sounded ludicrous even in his own ear.
She came to him in dark clothing, noiseless and young. One moment he was squinting into the trees; the next, there were two calm familiar brown eyes on a level with his own.
“I have no place to live in!”
“I know.”
“And very little money too!”
“I know, I know.” (She was standing on his knee, four inches tall.) “But soon you’ll not have to worry about that.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well! Let’s not forget you’re seventy-three years old. And then too, it’s going to be very cold tonight.”
“Cold?”
“Very cold.”
“Ah.”
“See what I mean?”
“Ah ha!”
“See?
“Yes! Yes, I do see!”
He stood at once, took off his coat and walked away from it. The money was no use, and yet, he found himself against his own best will and determination coming back for it after all. Another ingenious idea came to mind—to take off his shirts as well.
He had wanted his death by heat, being too old to experience cold in its full meaning. Too old, too thin, his head too occupied with books. He was amused at the spectacle, all the more so that he had taken recently to using suspenders. He was quite cheerful. He made a mental note: “There was no fear.”
Sometimes he went forward, sometimes he slept. One time he heard his dog yapping to come out and play. These phenomena were strange—never would he have expected vomiting from the result of cold.
He had come far. He saw what he thought to be a hamlet; in fact, they were the distant spires and steeples of the egregious Birmingham itself. Yet he could not honestly say that he was not dreaming. His one great dread was that the sun with its famous warmth might come and bring him back to earth again.
