The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Tu quoque, eh?” I say and, entering into the spirit of things, toss my sombrero into the fire.

  Houston takes a drink, removes his jacket, cries, “All hail, Bacchus!” and adds that fine buckskin to the flames.

  I drink and donate my coat, a linsey-woolsey.

  He drinks and contributes his shirt. I mine. He his undershirt. I mine. Drink. Trousers. Drink. Drawers. Drink. Shoes. Drink. Socks. A beautiful conflagration rages in the fireplace, never mind the hideous stench.

  “Hoc erat in more maiorum!” I cheer, striking a grand posture with my naked body.

  “You tell em, boy!” he shouts, standing at my side.

  The blazing flames illuminate him clearly. His hairy body I see for the first time; his grizzled face is distinctly visible.

  He is not old Samuel Houston at all. He is old Wesley K. Stone, my father.

  “Daddy!” I gasp.

  His laughter is like thunder. Then he stops roaring and points a finger at me. “Now let me tell you something, son, in that fancy language of yourn: Vvlgus amicitias utilitate probat!”

  Then he rushes out the door and, still magnificently naked, leaps on his horse and rushes off into the night.

  “Siste, viator!” I scream after him. Stop! But he is gone, I am alone, eheu! all alone, vox clamantis in deserto, thinking of the meaning of his parting message: The common herd values friendships only for their usefulness. Ave atque vale, old daddy.

  But am I entirely alone? No, he has left his servant behind him. Emerging from the shadows of the cabin’s room, the servant approaches me and in the firelight I see that it, she, is not a servant but instead Tiana, little Tahlihina, his Cherokee mistress, left behind as if to prove perhaps he was, after all, the bold adventurous vagabond who would one day revenge the Alamo. Tiana gracefully approaches me, her palm raised calmly in the Indian manner of greeting, but to me the gesture is an entreaty to silence. There is a word on her lips. She stands as close to me as her dignity will permit, and I sink helplessly into the dark pools of her eyes until…until she puts a hand on my shoulder and I discover with ineffable chagrin that I have been beguiled again, twice-cozened. She is not Tiana, no, not the lovely dark-haired, doeful half-breed who had so agilely charmed the General. She is a sallow-skinned doxy, name of Sybil Samuels.

  Hic finis somnium.

  Chapter eight

  “I declare, you’re the spiffiest little whang-dilly I ever did see. Cute as a speckled pup. Didja have a nice beddie-bye-bye?” Her face was alarmingly close to mine, as if she had been counting my freckles, and her hand was on my shoulder. As she leaned over my near-nude supine body, her hair, released from its bun, fell over the sides of her face, and there was a dimpled softness, a pasty flaccidity, of her mouth and chin. She still wore the fragile chemise; if I lowered my eyes I could penetrate its décolletage. I groaned, either in dismay at her unabashed advance or in some kind of weird pleasure at her brazen proximity. Her concupiscent scent, rife with cheap cologne and an overpowering bodyness, suggested new developments in her oestrus cycle. She gave my shoulder a shake and said, “Scoot over, honeybunch, and we’ll fool around some.”

  Hoo boy now, I told myself: Go ahead. Here’s your chance. She can’t be more than thirty-five. Ignore the face, concentrate on the body, the body! Wild, hot, rarin’ to go. Telling me to scoot over. By jingo! Scoot over, honeybunch, make room for momma.

  But that was just it: motherless as I was, she was the only excuse for a dam, a progenitress by proxy, I had in all the world, even if there were scant chance she might ever become my legal stepmother. I would not risk the chance of becoming that most disgraceful of all obscene twelve-letter words.

  Oh, I dissembled, of course, I rationalized to myself, I varnished the truth, which was simply that I suddenly remembered a bunch of important phone calls I had to make. I was the Messianic conqueror of Little Rock, the foretokened cynosure returned from the East; my minions awaited me, I could not put them off any longer. Sex-starved as I was (cripes! I had not had, discounting the aborted ride of Clara, a decent lay for weeks), I had a higher duty to perform, a compulsive function to discharge. Later there would be abundant leisure for frisky folly, perhaps, and I was pleased to know the opportunity was there in Sybil’s eager utility. Some other time maybe, baby.

  Sybil inevitably took offense at my chivalry, and anointed me with florid maledictions all the way to the bathroom, where I locked the door and remained until her wrath had moderated. The bathroom clock said half past one. Then I quietly opened the door, saw that she was nowhere about, and sat down beside the telephone in the hall. Find it in the Yellow Pages! something said subliminally to me, so I leafed through that part of the directory, a book considerably thicker than when last I had used it and bleeding on the cover with a dramatic color photograph of the new Arkansas Arts Center. Flipping idly from page to page, from familiar name to familiar name, I finally came to the law firm of Wheeler, Bristol, Little, Saunders and McComb.

  I dialed their number. A secretary answered.

  “May I speak to Steve, please?” I asked, making my voice important.

  “Who’s calling, please?” she responded, honey-toned.

  “Cliff.” A sharp, brisk, handsome monosyllable.

  “Mr. McComb is on another line. Could you hang on?”

  I hung on. Sybil, nearer than I thought, was hoarsely screeching a tune, “What’s the nitty gritty, baby?”

  “Break it off!” I implored.

  “…Ev’rybody’s askin, what’s the nitty gritty?”

  “Come on, cut it out, I’m making a call!”

  “…Boop bop boob-a-da bobbp-boop da niddy griddy…”

  “GODDAMMIT, ENOUGH!”

  “Beg pardon?” the phone said.

  “Oh! I was talking to someone else. Steve?”

  “Cliff who?” the phone said.

  “Clifford Stone,” I said, and the secretary repeated it to him.

  Then his own voice came on, deep, staunch, political: “What say, Cliff? You in town?”

  “Yep,” I said, old cornpone Stone. “Just got in. Thought maybe we could polish off a couple beers or something tonight, you know?”

  “Can’t make it tonight, old buddy. Wife’s having some people over. Sorry. But listen, we oughta get together one of these days, hey? Gonna be around long?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well say, lemme give you a ring sometime, okay, boy?”

  “Okay, boy,” I echoed, and he was gone, back to his business, working himself up toward the Supreme Court.

  Sorry.

  Sybil was laughing beside me. “Got the brush-off, huh?” she put in, and laughed even louder, her pink hands on her huge hips.

  “Get off my back, will you?” I invoked.

  Your funeral, hot-shot,” she said and headed for the kitchen.

  To spite her, I called next directly to Woolworth’s, to fix myself up with sweet old Sarah Farnley. After an interminable wait, during which I supposed she was required to fill out in triplicate a form requesting permission to leave her candy counter and use the telephone, she came on, and I said, “Hiya, Sallysimple! (an old pet name of hers) Guess who?” “I couldn’t,” she said. “It’s me, Nubbin! (an old pet name of mine)” “No kidding?” she said, but not with much warmth. “Yeah, you doin anything tonight, sweetheart?” I breathed. “Somebody told me you was married,” she said. “Yeah, well, I was, I mean, I am, but, see, well, I thought—” “Not tonight, Nubbin. Sorry. Call me bout the middle of next week maybe. But not here. They don’t like it.”

  Sorry.

  I called Guy Hammond. Out of town. Ernest Jackson. In the hospital, kidneys. Byron Drenker. “Well, whaddaya know! Nub Stone! But gee, Nub, the little lady and me are flyin up to Chicago tomorrow for a convention. Maybe when I get back, huh?” Sissy Portis. “How good to hear that nice old voice of yours, honey! But didn’t you know? I’m not Portis any more! Last summer I married Biff Simon, you remember him, he was all-state qua
rterback with the Tigers…” Dick Anderson. Didn’t remember my name at first, said if it was urgent he might be able to see me in another week or two. Ken Vernon. Gone off on a White River float-fishing trip.

  Sorry. Sorry. Who, after all, am I?

  As a last resort I called the police station and asked for Dall Hawkins. Sergeant Hawkins, I added, as an afterthought. But sorry, he didn’t come on duty until three-thirty. Could I be helped by anyone else? No, thank you. It didn’t matter.

  Then I called my sister Lucinda, to discharge that part of my duties. Cindy is a pretty girl, or rather she was, before ten years of housewifery had taken it out of her, but an attractive older sister is never very easy for a boy to enamor or become enamored of. We had never occupied each other’s good graces; my general memory of her was of petty squabbles, senseless bickering, jealousy, rancor, malice. Our later years, away from home, would in absentia soften some of that ill will, but not enough to keep us from feeling like strangers or, more graphically, like a divorced couple. She wasn’t exactly tickled pink to get my call, but she did sincerely want to see me, as she and her husband had been on vacation to Biloxi the last time I was in Little Rock, and thus she hadn’t seen me for almost six years.

  “Why don’t you come over after supper, Cliff? Can you play bridge? Monday is our bridge night, but Mary Ann’s husband got called out of town so maybe you could take his place.”

  I wouldn’t mind taking his place in bed, but otherwise, No. I hate bridge. Poker yes, pinochle maybe, but not a frumpy trumpy game like bridge. I begged off that night, saying I already had plans, but would stop by tomorrow afternoon for a chat. Before her husband, Victor, got home from the P.O. Victor and I never hit it off very well.

  My stomach growled, I wanted something to eat, but I made one more, one last, phone call. To the Channel 8 studios, to catch Hy Norden. But the secretary who answered said that he didn’t come to work until after supper. Pressed, she confided that if it was a matter of urgent importance, I might find him at a place called the Deadline Club on East Third, where he often spent most of the afternoon. I decided to go confront him in person right after lunch. This phone-calling was getting me nowhere.

  Sybil, bless her heart, had made me a couple of corned-beef-on-rye sandwiches, which she deferentially presented to me at the kitchen table, along with a cold bottle of Busch Bavarian, once my favorite brew but unobtainable in beer-glutted Boston. “No luck, huh?” she said sympathetically. “I know how it is, kid. Things change. Why, just last week I bumped into an old pal of mine and she didn’t hardly know me.”

  I could do without her commiseration, but not her sandwiches. They were excellent, and the old, familiar, Saturday-night bite of the beer returned me yoreward with swifter thaumaturgy than any other sensory aspect of that place or time. I glowed. The contrast between that elegant little lunch and Pamela’s tough pork chops was incredible.

  Swelling with happy conviviality and gratification, I was moved, first carefully wiping my mouth with a napkin, to approach that woman from the rear as she was bent over the sink, and to osculate the back of her neck resoundingly, wrapping my arms around her middle.

  “Unt-uh,” she said, turning around to turn me down. “You had your chance.”

  I groped for her, maundering, “Aw, c’mon, baby—”

  “Nope. I aint nobody’s second fiddle.” She glowered, but then her face softened and she began to laugh. “You been stood up, joker. They hung you on a nail!”

  Her laughter, chiming scornfully behind me, followed me to the bathroom, where I showered and shaved and put on my seersucker suit, followed me thereafter, stridently derisive, followed me out of the house and on toward Fifteenth Street, where I could catch a bus. I could not shake it loose. That blatant guffaw, now whinnying, now caterwauling, pursued me relentlessly, as if the city itself were in stitches, as if all those hostile old friends, those tittering forgetters, those snobbish bastards laughing behind my back, shadowed me all through the town.

  Chapter nine

  Turning into Main on the bus, I snickered back at the town. Roosting low and scyphose in the seat with my knees up against the next one, I peered over the metal window rim and caught sight of the downtown structures of that city: the older little towers—Donaghey, Lafayette, Boyle, Rector—and the one new larger tower, called The Tower itself, surmounting the somber chastity of the others not so much with its height as with its color: a garish yellow suggestive of a week-old egg yolk; and in the midst of all those foursquare shafts the lonely acuminated spire of St. Andrew’s church, whose tip seems to poke itself higher than any of the other buildings and is, despite the gaudiness of The Tower, the dominant form of the skyline. Why did I snicker? I will confess that I snickered first and conceived a valid reason later, just as the scathed child will strike back at his tormentors with a fabricated laughter mocking their own, a bootless sound born more of hurt than of reason. My reason, which I had managed to invent before the bus had reached as far as Ninth and Main, was that all that mass, that congeries of brick, stone, and the new steel, for all its manifest show of enterprise in the midst of this languid desert of Arkansas, was yet a superficial, hackneyed, and sterile place, like a lone, vast, intricate, and curious piece of fungus on the empty bark of a tree, but a fungus all the same: fatuous and inane, the uncompleted soul of a town which could have been either another Memphis or only a Clodville, but through its desolate striving became something stale and teamless in between. Suddenly I remembered, in this frame of mind, why I had left Arkansas in the first place, years ago: to get away from this sterility, this deficiency, this cheap and hollow aspiration. Even if Boston had made me less human, more mechanical, it had given me a chance to be productive, creative, as if part of that patch of fungus had been cut away and taken to a laboratory, where, under ideal conditions, it was transformed into an orchid. Now I began to suspect that by returning that orchid to the fungus patch, even experimentally, it might perish.

  But the sidewalks of Lower Main at that hour showed no indication of becoming, as my father had forecast, a ghost town. Main was as busy that afternoon as I could remember. My nervous mind, shuttling violently back and forth between extremes of love and hate for the old town, reminded me that if I had still been in Boston at that hour I would have been cooped into my dark cubicle at the Cabot Foundation, still suffering some petty dread over the authenticity of some old firehouse sign and sweating out my life in trivial VAPic research. Here at least I was free, I could stand in the sun. I could relax and breathe. So I stood on the corner for a while, with my back up against the terrazzo façade of a shoe shop, and watched the people pass. Here and there I saw a familiar face, one dimly remembered from the corridors of the high school, but I could recall no names to match the faces. Several people cast blank stares at me, or at my seersucker suit, which, I began to feel, was out of place that early in the season (although that April afternoon was hotter than Boston ever gets in deepest summer), but nobody from out that crowd stepped forward to pound me on the back and say, “Why, Nub Stone! you old punkin-headed rascal you! Where you been all these years?” I stood too long, and was slammed back once more to the other side of my vacillating mood: Old Clifford Willow Stone, that pumpkin-headed rascal, might just as well have been still in his cubicle in Boston.

  After a while I gave it up and went on to the Deadline club, where, after climbing a long flight of stairs and passing through the big red door as nonchalantly as any fourth estater, I found Hy Norden. He was sitting across the room with a girl—or woman, I should say. There were four other people in the lounge, a couple of editors getting drunk together at the bar before facing the pace of the evening shift, a leg man sitting alone on his last legs, dregs of foam in the bottom of his empty schooner, and a photographer swearing at his Graflex. The seediness of the clientele (except Norden, whose dapper trappings alone would have made me recognize him) dishonored the splendor of the surroundings, which were just about the best that could be had in Little Roc
k (where, as in the rest of Arkansas—save the oasis of Hot Springs—liquor cannot be dispensed in doses over the bar to the general non-club public). There was a deep maroon carpet on the floor; the dim, dramatic lighting suggested the staging of a Greek tragedy by an avant-garde theater group, and the bar itself was a lavish affair, all glass and chrome and burnished mahogany. I always felt ill at ease whenever I entered one of those few Little Rock hangouts where the bottles of bourbon and Scotch are stacked tier on tier behind the bar; although this is a common sight in Boston and other cities, I always expected to be imminently raided in the presence of such potency in my home town.

  Norden had not seen me for ten years; nor I him, except his picture in the paper now and then. As I stood at his table looking down at him (he was engrossed in some sort of frivolous banter with the girl and did not look up immediately), I saw that those ten years had given him another twenty pounds, but had not changed the shade or texture of that wild blond hair, a sandy shock the envy of countless girls frustrating themselves with peroxide, nor of that puckered peachy mallow mouth always, when not guffawing, about to kiss something, nor of that leonine nose so discreetly suggestive of Semitic ancestry. (His father had descended—as rapidly as he could—from a family of Swedish Israelites named Nordencrantz, and had become a triumphantly successful lawyer, later circuit judge, later federal judge for the Eastern Arkansas district—but he is dead now, having hanged himself from a rafter in his four-car garage during the height of the Sunk Bayou Ferry scandal, so I will not impugn the motive for his name change.) Hy of course was born with the silver spoon in his mouth, which may have given it that peachy puckered aspect that would stamp his mien forever. At one time I thought his appellation was the result of surgery performed on “Hyman” or even “Hiram,” but as I later learned it was simply “Harsey,” his mother’s family name, with the arse removed. He was the head cheese, the Grand Panjandrum, primus inter pares, of the affluent Pulaski Heights set at the high school; anyone better would have been sent away to Exeter or Andover. He nudged me out in the election for Eleventh Grade Representative to the Student Council, and later, after I had eaten my boiled crow and put my loyal West Siders on his bandwagon in return for the campaign managership, he was elected Student Body President. His adversaries, intolerant of his success and popularity (and intelligence too; in three years of Latin he was the only student to make higher grades than I), extracted retribution in gym class, where Hy was dismally inept at physical combat, and I had often to defend him.