Between Men

by Richard Canning

  The head librarian is a young man but happens to be suffering from premature balding. I begin to suggest to him that he purchase a nice felt hat just like mine, but think better of it.

  I have never found young men with premature balding attractive. On the contrary, I have always found it disconcerting to be in the presence of such unfortunate young men. The way their hairlines recede reminds me far too much of the sly manner in which life recedes.

  Yet somehow I am deeply attracted to the head librarian. It must be the look of sadness on his face, which is all creased like crepe paper. He also has very nice hands, probably from handling all those books.

  I despise work of all kinds, but I ask the head librarian if I can be of any assistance. He says no, reorganizing the Dewey decimal system is a treacherous and sensitive business, one that requires years of training. But as he says this, he throws me a look, pale and sharp as a paper plane. In my heart I know that the head librarian would have liked very much if I could have worked by his side, throughout the night.

  Outside, snow is fluttering down in the street. There is snow on my coat collar. How aggravating! It might stain the felt! I go to brush the snow off my collar before it melts.

  As my fingers make contact with the snow I discover (or my fingers discover) that the snow is not real snow, but little pieces of white felt that have been carefully cut out and sewn into the shape of snowflakes. I take a closer look at the little impostors. There are three of them. Just like real snowflakes, none of these artificial snowflakes seem to be alike.

  As I finger the so-called snowflakes, I think about how strange life is. There was a time when I lived for felt. Now I feel almost indifferent to it. I suppose the allure of felt lay in its relation to all fabrics that were not felt. But what with them manufacturing everything in felt these days—stars, snowflakes—felt was rapidly beginning to lose all its appeal. Or perhaps my love of felt was just a passing childhood fancy, and this disinterest a sign of maturity.

  I cup my hands and check to see if all the snowflakes have been sewn from felt, but the rest of it appears to be real.

  Trying to figure out where to go next, and if indeed there is anywhere else to go, I walk over to a lamppost and lean against it. Snow continues to drift down. I find myself wishing my mother were around. Not that she would be able to help me. She was never very good with advice. But just the fact of her being here would make me feel a little better.

  If she were here with me now, she would brush the snow from my coat collar.

  Once again, I wonder where they took her. I had gone out to buy some red crayons. When I returned, the door to our apartment was open and my mother was gone. She had left a note on the table saying:

  Keep mastering the art of crayons! I love you. There is toffee cooling on the stove.

  Feeling tired, I close my eyes. I open them to find the Inspector standing a few feet away, peering at me through a huge magnifying glass. In his trench coat he cuts an impressive figure; I can see why boys find him so irresistible.

  The game is up my friend, he says, licking his lips. Some of his spittle lands on my cheek. The Inspector pulls out some big shiny handcuffs from a leather bag and places them on my wrists. Then he takes my fingerprints.

  While he stoops over to look for his miniature camera, a handful of red crayons falls out of his pockets, onto the snow.

  He finds the camera and proceeds to take my picture for official purposes. The tiny flashes hurt my eyes.

  There is only one thing to do! Surely it will be better to join the ranks of the doctor and the boy than to fall into the hands of the Inspector.

  As the Inspector places a fresh roll of film in his miniature camera, I run over to the bridge.

  For a moment I hesitate.

  Not because I desperately yearn to keep on living. I had always found living to be an unpleasant experience, simultaneously mysterious and monotonous, an experience made bearable only by the constant use of red crayons. Perhaps I would have felt differently if I had done something meaningful with my life—a miniature pony that acts as guide to the blind must feel quite attached to living—but I had never been interested in making myself useful.

  Gazing down into the river, I realize that if I take my own life, I will never get to visit the great chalk deposits of western Kansas that I have always dreamed of visiting. I will never get to see the extinct (yet wonderfully preserved) skeletons of sea serpents and flying reptiles trapped in the deposits’ soft chalky walls.

  Nor will I get to see my mother again.

  Yet somehow I have the feeling that the chalk deposits will not live up to my expectations. And that I will not get to see my mother again, whether I am alive or dead.

  I throw myself off the bridge and into the river. As I fly through the air I remember that as a child I used to call suicide “silver side.”

  When I hit the cold water, I make a modest splash. I don’t sink immediately. I float a bit.

  The snow has stopped falling. On the bridge above I can see the generous silhouette of the Inspector. I look past him, up at the stars.

  Unlike my star, which is dull and flat, those stars are twinkling. But of course they are not really twinkling. They only seem to be. In actual fact, they are caving in. And what appears to be twinkling is nothing but the motion of air, scattering the light.

  Mouth of the River

  Bruce Benderson

  I turned up one of those steep inclines toward Stapler’s ramshackle Victorian mansion in Astoria, Oregon, suddenly feeling quite happy to be in the oldest U.S. settlement in the entire West. The house, once gracious and stately, was in dire need of repair; it had become a dowdy old spinster, full of cobwebs and busted-spring furniture. Although it was unlocked, as if expecting visitors, it wasn’t particularly welcoming with its thermostat set to 62. The first thing I did was twirl the dial up to 76. I could hear the old furnace groan as if in astonished protest, then burst into rumbling flames. Stapler had said he had no intention of coming out until the following weekend and had crisply requested I be sparing with the heat. But no one would know until the bill came. By then I’d be back in New York, I figured; let them take it out of my salary.

  The next thing I headed for was the liquor cabinet. It was quite well stocked, to my delight. I poured myself a scotch and took a sip to swallow a morphine tablet, then headed for the sinking porch, which creaked under my feet. Since the house hadn’t warmed up yet, I’d be no less comfortable in the damp and drizzle. It was noon, and the view in the encroaching fog revealed only the sharp edges of roofs, between which one could catch glimpses of the leaden water of the mouth of the river. However, in some areas of the sky, the droplet-saturated air caught the rays of a struggling sun and diffused them into a lustrous wash. This was reflected in the wet black asphalt to create a disorienting, mirrorlike sensation, similar to the one achieved by staring directly into silver. Dimensions and directions get lost in the watery glare, and you plunge blinded into its metallic dispersal. With the help of the scotch and the morphine, I floated into this melancholy evanescence until a female voice startled me out of the watery feeling.

  Claiming to have been sent by Stapler as a sort of local guide was an ancient, shriveled woman with elfin eyes and crudely cropped hair, who introduced herself as Delilah. Was I ready for a trip into the heart of Astoria? she wanted to know. But first, she said, eyeing the scotch, would I be willing to supply a little “fuel”? I felt surprisingly profligate with the borrowed bottle, and I led the old witch inside to pour her a stiff one. As we entered, her wrinkled face burst into an expression of astonishment. Was I planning on opening a sauna? For her, the place was stifling! I compromised by turning the thermostat down to 69, and we settled into one of the broken-down couches in the high-ceilinged Victorian parlor. She clutched the glass of scotch with knobby, arthritic hands and toasted me with the Finnish expression “Kippis!” Then she bottomed up faster than I could raise my glass to my lips.

  A half hour l
ater, we were in Delilah’s strangely well-preserved Studebaker. I could hear her gasp and wheeze as she struggled with the clutch, but each time I looked at her with concern, she shook the glance off with hostility. Then the sun suddenly broke through the clouds, revealing one of the oldest faces I’d ever seen. Above a mass of deep wrinkles were two cataract-clouded blue eyes, and from them glimmered a silvery light, producing the same effect as the silver-tinged sky of Astoria I’d noticed earlier. Perhaps I imagined that the eyes seemed to be sizing me up, and her mouth, which was little more than a thin, rigid line, seemed to curl at the corners with a hint of perverse amusement.

  “How . . . old are you, Delilah?” I heard myself blurting indecorously.

  “A hundred and two,” she barked. “Now put that behind your ears and cogitate on it!”

  Delilah was part of the large community of people of Finnish extraction who still lived in Astoria, Oregon, many of whom had ancestors who’d been squashed by the government and the industrialists during the climax of the labor movement. She was, in fact, no real Delilah, but a Finnish immigrant, appropriately named Aamu, who’d come to work in a salmon cannery at the age of thirteen and had moonlighted more than eighty years ago in the offices of the Finnish communist newspaper Toveritar,1 a publication with strong connections to the Wobblies as well as to other labor organizations and the Communist Party.

  We were heading in Aamu’s pickup for the docks because, as she explained, she had a very special surprise in store for me. Her great-grandson, Jukka, whom most people called Johnny, had just received his certificate as a bar pilot and would be guiding his first Japanese container ship under the Astoria Bridge. It was a lucrative, but potentially very dangerous, job. Hidden under the swirling waters of the river’s enormous mouth were treacherous bars, which could act like sucking mouths that created huge, voracious swells. A good number of even experienced sailors had met their deaths there, riding one moment on the flat surface of the sea, which seemed as stable as a floor, and then suddenly swooning downward, with enormous walls of liquid rising up menacingly on either side. That’s why a supply of highly trained local captains was needed in Astoria, to get the ships safely past the river mouth and take them upstream.

  The thought of our upcoming adventure sent a thrill coursing down my spine, and I wondered, perhaps wildly, how such an experience could have been prepared for me. Was not the river, with its predictable downstream course, lined on either side by the punctilious settlements of commerce, the perfect objective correlative of the predictable, bland cultural tyranny I so deplored? And wasn’t it just and natural that when it met the swirling id of the sea, a violent and ungovernable reaction should occur? But how, in a million years, could all of those who seemed to be shaping my trip out here realize that this represented the distillation of my imaginings, that I myself had been slipping downstream on a dull, predictable path of aging, only to find myself suddenly facing an inexplicable unmooring, dark, full of exciting, perhaps treacherous currents?

  Aamu had parked the car a few blocks from the pilots’ pier, to give me a better feeling of downtown, I assumed; and as we walked past the Maritime Museum on a neighboring wharf, I saw that the adjoining harbor, which was full of sailboats and recreational cruisers, had been invaded by a colony of enormous sea walruses. They were sprawled on the docks as if drugged, some belly up, morosely staring at the heavens. At the sound of our walking by, several of these tubby mammoths flipped to a standing position with surprising speed and charged along the dock toward us with raucous, rageful honks. Inebriated as we were, both Aamu and I broke into startled laughter, and together, our noise and the animals’ seemed to shatter the moist air like glass.

  With this feeling of libido and spontaneity rippling through me, I followed Aamu onto the small pilot boat, which immediately took off from the dock and headed toward the bridge. Three men were with us, the driver of the pilot boat, his assistant, and the river pilot. According to the usual procedure, Aamu’s great-grandson Johnny, the bar pilot, had been driven out earlier beyond the bars to meet a container ship coming from Japan. He would navigate the freighter past the bars and under the bridge, whereupon we would meet him at the ship with the river pilot. It was the river pilot’s job to relieve Johnny and then guide the ship a hundred miles along the river to Portland. Both bar pilot and river pilot had months of rigorous training under their belts. Only they, and not, for example, the Japanese captain of the freighter, knew every current, inlet, and shallow of the Columbia and its mouth, a necessity for getting it safely from the ocean to Portland.

  The light, euphoric feeling of release still dominated my body as we skipped across the waves toward a speck in the distance. Droplets of rain made glimmering, blurred patterns against the windshield of the boat; its pilot was in a merry mood, as well, spouting river tales of past gales and sailor bloopers, flirting with Aamu, whom he’d known since he was a child, as if she were an attractive young filly, by peppering her with harmless, macho banter. Each time he turned to gaze out the water-spattered windshield, Aamu would make comic gestures of contempt in his direction, then swiftly slip a flask that she’d filled with Stapler’s scotch from her purse, take a quick swig, and rapidly pass it to me.

  Slowly, the ship we were heading for came into view, enlarging almost imperceptibly, until it finally revealed its full nine-hundred-foot length, the size of three city blocks. It was a faceless, windowless gray hulk, rising several stories above the level of the sea—like a monstrous steel anvil that had the miraculous ability to float on the surface of the water. The closer we came, the more its menace increased, dwarfing our small pilot’s craft to the proportions of a fly, making it clear that if just the wrong swell of water were to thrust us against it, it would shatter us like a sledgehammer could crystal. There it stood, almost motionless, as if glued to the ocean, a fragile rope ladder hanging from its wall of a side like a few strands of a spiderweb.

  “They must be carrying, say, about four thousand Toyotas,” said the driver of our boat with a slightly ironic gloat. “Looks pretty stable now, but when they get out to sea, they’re so top-heavy that they really roll.”

  The gray, floating mammoth sent a shiver of awe through me, not so much from the imminent danger of getting close to such massive bulk, but from the realization that every feature, aside from its utilitarian function, was designed to repulse. Faceless and sealed to the environment, its only purpose was to protect and transfer six thousand tons of steel, plastic, and rubber; and inside this windowless prison, which moved at only twenty-two miles per hour at top speed, was a crew of about twelve or fifteen, who spent several probably dismal months at sea. It was commerce at its ugliest and most oppressive; but this didn’t mean that it, as well, couldn’t be deceived and destroyed by the vortex at which nature met civilization. The thought of this afforded me a perverse pleasure.

  Slowly, our small craft inched toward the hulk, more and more slowly until we were side by side, almost touching. Then the river pilot bid us a cheery good-bye and hopped onto our deck. Seizing the rope ladder hanging from the container ship, he climbed up the side of the boat with the agility of a monkey. According to the driver of our boat, we now had to wait several minutes during which the bar pilot, finished with his task, presented the river pilot to the Japanese captain and turned over direction of the freighter up the Columbia River to him. Then the bar pilot, who was Delilah’s great-grandson Johnny, would come back down the ladder and we’d transport him back to shore.

  Just as predicted, a body appeared at the top of the container ship’s rope ladder. It moved even faster than the one that had gone up, because it was younger and slimmer. As it stepped from the bottom of the ladder onto our deck I caught a glimpse of the oval face beneath the black wool cap. It was beaming with excitement, probably from the fact of having accomplished its first journey past the bars by itself. It was a stirringly handsome face, strong and sculpted, with just a touch of Billy Budd vulnerability; or at least that’s how I
saw it in the trembling excitement of the moment. Then the shadow of a darker thrill passed through me as I studied the large, blue, tempestuous eyes, which seemed to hold that same wild energy I’d seen earlier on this trip and been so startled and confused by; my entire soul fell into those eyes, and my whole journey compressed in my mind into one wordless, insane realization that I cannot describe.

  There was, however, another surprise in store for me. Instead of pulling away, our boat hovered, still unmoving, inches away from the container ship.

  “Aren’t we going now?” I ventured.

  The question was met with a tense silence.

  By now Johnny, the bar pilot, had entered the boat. Was I imagining that he kept staring at me with a playful, teasing smile? Aamu spit out some cursory introductions, after which silence reigned again, while our boat stayed inexplicably in place and Johnny kept staring at me, almost challengingly, I thought. To avoid his glance, I studied his large, dry, but somehow sensitive-looking hands, letting my eye trail from them up his arms to the curves of his muscular shoulders. Then my gaze slid downward along his broad, flat chest, pausing irresistibly at his crotch to discover that the material of his pants was raised like a tent, signifying an erection.

  Just a few moments later, another figure appeared at the top of the rope ladder and scrambled down to our deck even faster than Johnny had. He was dressed like the two pilots, in down jacket and work boots, but he had tied a black bandanna around his chin, which had been pulled up to the level of the top of his nose. As he hopped onto our deck, a second, almost identically dressed figure appeared at the top of the rope ladder, and it, too, scrambled down to our boat. Both of them were much smaller than Johnny, wiry and crouched, as if ready to leap up and bolt at any moment.

  Immediately Aamu extracted her flask, and both strangers in bandannas took a gulp from it. Tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife as we headed back to Astoria. No one had introduced me to the two extra passengers. The waves had risen, and we leaped swiftly over them, like a weighted cork; but while the other passengers and I were tossed upward a bit each time we hit a wave, the two strangers remained in place, their knees spread, their feet planted firmly on the floor. They still had not removed their bandannas, and everyone in the boat seemed to avoid their and my glance, except for Aamu and her great-grandson, who seemed to be gazing at me with a gloating, almost jubilant expectation.