The Americans, Baby

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I don’t know,’ the folk-singers’ Leader said, ‘not much of a man for demonstrations myself.’

  It was the largest he’d been in. He’d been in a few when at university but this was the biggest he’d been in. Thousands. Probably – twenty thousand. They could swamp the police if they wanted. Perhaps today they would. Perhaps they would carry the day.

  Yelling, the crowd moved forward and he moved with it. There was no alternative. He was one with the crowd.

  But he wanted to wield the crowd; he pushed when it went forward and resisted when it went back. He wanted to wield the crowd.

  He couldn’t see Sylvia. It was good to be back with radicals again. He took off his watch for safe keeping. The town had been stifling him. It was good to be back with real radicals.

  When the crowd pushed forward he pushed.

  He found it hard to keep balance. Like being in a strong undertow. The police moved them back and then the crowd pushed forward. Indian wrestling. He saw the back of a policeman and found himself against the barriers. The police trying to force them back. ‘We Shall Not Be Moved.’

  The President’s car came along. The bubble top. The perched security men. The crowd hoarse. He moved against the policemen in the swell of the crowd. The police tried to hold it. It went. Boiling. He was swept past. Twisting in the boil, freeing his arm, lunging, twisting he managed to punch the policeman in the kidney.

  The policeman groaned and bent to one side and turned around shouting, ‘Who did that?’ Two other constables tried to bash their way through to him.

  The policeman grabbed someone but was in pain and couldn’t hold.

  The crowd swept over the barricade. All on the road.

  More police horses. Linked police arms, punches and gradually the crowd was cowed and rammed back.

  The car went by. It was all over. One punch, he thought, and it’s all over.

  In the hotel he told Sylvia and Carl and the American Paul Jonson and others how he’d punched the policeman in the kidney.

  ‘I punched him right in the kidney,’ he said, hitting his fist with his hand.

  ‘I didn’t even see the President,’ Sylvia said tiredly.

  Becker on the Moon

  Becker already had dirt, gravel, pebble or what-have-you in his shoes. He did not like this country – despite what he told everyone. There was one place and one place only he wanted to be – old Atlanta, hoisting himself up that old ladder of success. The way he reasoned it was that even if he was going to be ill-destined, that is, if his interior life was going to be stickily uncomfortable, it didn’t preclude wealth. He was not a loser. What he meant was that one could be in a hell of an interior state without being a loser. But another thing was also true: the wealth, piled high in bags, was in Atlanta, not in this godforsaken country.

  He untied his shoe and, hopping on one foot, unbalanced, emptied out the gravel.

  ‘Having trouble?’ his hostess asked through her sunglasses. He struggled to grin back from behind his sunglasses.

  ‘I’m no country boy,’ he said.

  ‘The club president, Bob, is checking over the glider now.’

  These situations were always identical, he observed. You liked the proposition, the invitation sounded fine, just fine, but then you found that the promised climactic pleasure was wedged, if not sunken, between or under two fat slices of boring make-ready and tedious waiting. And the getting there and the getting back. Oh brother, the time he’d spent waiting for it to happen – it was the same with water-skiing. Now why couldn’t they get everything ready and then bring him out here. Instead, he stood, stood interminably in the neck-burning sun. And at the end of the sun’s rays were flies. He didn’t like walking over paddocks. The growth, alfalfa or whatever, was so damn spiky, seemed to fight him every inch.

  And yes, a rash of spear seeds up his trouser leg.

  ‘The club hardly owes any money on the glider now,’ his hostess said. ‘We pay it off by charging the guests.’

  Oh boy.

  ‘You need a Coke machine,’ he said, always the aggressive sales executive.

  His hostess blushed. ‘We do sell soft drinks but not Coke,’ she apologised.

  ‘Oh hell, it doesn’t matter to me – I’m off duty,’ he said, touching her arm.

  He could push the local distributor into placing a slot machine out here. The far reach of the Coca-Cola empire.

  ‘You must be hot in that suit,’ she said.

  ‘No, it’s not absolutely appropriate,’ he said. ‘But I have this associate to see mid-afternoon.’

  They stood watching the almost imperceptible action surrounding the preparation of the glider.

  ‘We attach it to the pie cart, and the pie cart to the winch truck and the boy rides the bicycle beside it, guiding the wing – out to the field,’ she informed him.

  She told him about the fatality. Compared with the sun and the raw ruralism death didn’t seem such a distressing alternative.

  As they sat in the cockpit she told him, ‘We need a thermal,’ searching the sky, shading her eyes with her hand.

  The towing hawser tightened and they were trundled to a fast speed along the strip.

  She described the updraft of hot air, the thermal, as they soared up into the sky, unhitched the hawser and began to wheel.

  You just keep your hands on those controls, lady.

  He thought he saw himself back down there on the strip, which almost fused his nerve circuit. He took what he thought was probably a grip of himself. Easy boy.

  Perhaps Atlanta had a contract out on him. Maybe this gliding lady had the job.

  Keep your eyes on that altimeter, miss.

  ‘I feel I’m above myself,’ he shouted, sociably, philosophically.

  No need to shout, no engine roar, just the wind stream.

  ‘Doesn’t look as if we’re going to get the thermal,’ she said, despondently.

  He found himself braced for a fall.

  He wanted, of all things, a Coke.

  They began to spiral back to the strip.

  He looked away to the banks of clouds, the streets of clouds, he looked beyond them to Atlanta and glimpsed, piled high, the bags of wealth.

  At his hostess’s small town house where she lived in business-like spinsterhood, Becker relaxed with three stiff shots of scotch. ‘Help yourself,’ she’d said.

  ‘I find it funny – you working for Coca-Cola,’ she said, ‘not meaning to sound rude.’

  He moved his head and neck, no-offence-taken.

  ‘What is it that amuses you?’ Wait for it.

  ‘Oh – I don’t know – perhaps the fact you travel right across the world to this town – just to sell Coca-Cola.’

  That’s funny? It didn’t amuse him.

  ‘I’m here to rationalise distribution,’ he said, recalling that apprehensive briefing those many months ago, ‘to advise the franchise men.’

  ‘Do you like it – Coke, I mean?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes I do,’ he said, he really did, he really did. ‘You have to swear to like it and drink it when you join the outfit.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s God’s truth.’

  ‘Music?’ she asked him, laughing. She went to the record player.

  ‘What do you like – music from the shows?’

  ‘Jazz,’ he said, ‘but please – no folk.’

  ‘No jazz, I’m sorry, I haven’t any jazz.’

  ‘Oh, music from the shows would be great. I like show music, I like the music from Hair.’

  ‘No, I don’t have Hair yet – hasn’t reached here yet. The Music Man?’

  ‘Sure – wonderful – yes, The Music Man.’ Sam called him the Music Man. Here’s to you, Sam.

  He felt like putting his head on his knees. What would be the time in Atlanta – he looked surreptitiously at his Omega moon watch. It would be morning. Those old railway lines would be jumping. The newspapers thumping on the dewy lawns in Peach Street, P
once de Leon Avenue, Pace’s Ferry Road. Coffee percolators burbling. Those old Blue Ridge mountains. Old Atlanta, Georgia.

  She was still talking and he realised something. He was being preliminarily seduced – or courted, was it? – by this spinster gliding woman.

  He looked at her anew – she was solidly made but not ugly – ‘she ain’t ugly.’

  She served white wine with the dinner and port with the coffee. He told her the funny story of how in New Orleans he’d learned that dessert wines were not served with dessert, ‘And damn me – they cleared away everything off the table,’ he told her, laughing like a Rotarian.

  He told her about Atlanta, about the Stone Mountain, ‘sheer naked granite’, he told her.

  In the lounge-room after dinner he noticed the lights were subdued and half way through Oklahoma! he took her hand lightly and she almost jumped on him with a kiss.

  They went after a while to her bedroom with her saying something like, ‘We’re old enough to know our own minds.’

  He worried whether he’d picked up anything from a whore he’d gone with in the city.

  She had a dressing-room off the bedroom and came back in a nylon nightdress.

  He sat waiting in his shirt and undershorts morosely interested in her. His drink clutched.

  Into bed.

  As she moaned, simulated or not he didn’t know, he thought of her searching, soaring, wheeling for that thermal.

  I’m not a great lover, he thought, but hell I try.

  He had no idea whether she was through or not but he figured he’d given her a reasonable length of time and he couldn’t keep going for ever and it could become a little tiring for both of them. He made some noises to let her know he was going to give it to her and then, his mind picturing the whore, he gave it to her.

  They’re not going to remember me as a great lover but I’m considerate to a limited degree which is all we can ask of one of God’s less radiant servants.

  ‘Don’t take this as prying,’ he said, ‘but do you usually invite travelling strangers to your bed?’

  ‘No,’ she said, somewhat guiltily, ‘I liked you but I do have a boy-friend – he runs the Tourist Bureau – we escort each other, have for a couple of years.’

  They both smoked.

  To kill the bed silence he thought he’d tell her a story apropos of nothing.

  ‘I made a decision for Christ once,’ he said, ‘when I was an adolescent teenager – in the Billy Graham Crusade.’

  She was staring at him.

  Well, OK, he was somewhat of a sensationalist.

  ‘I went down when they called, I went down through the thousands there at the Bowl with their peanuts and Cokes and Bibles and I went forward to the counsellors and I was about to kneel when I realised something. I realised what I wanted was not grace but a slice of God’s business. I didn’t want my soul cleansed – the five minute soul wash. I was really attracted by the way Billy and God had packed in all these customers. And there I’d been an innocent kid turning over in my secret mind how I could get a piece. Once you’ve come down through all those thousands, you can’t change your mind and go back. So down I knelt, made a decision for Christ, and filled out a card.’

  ‘Are you a practising Christian?’ she said, missing whatever the point was, puzzlement stammering her words.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I just like religion – there’s a bit of the evangelist in all of us. Here I am – pushing Coca-Cola.’

  ‘You’re a strange man.’

  ‘I sure don’t think of myself that way,’ he said. ‘I think of myself as everybody’s plain man.’

  There was another smoking silence, and then she said, ‘I can’t ask you to stay the night – country town and everything.’

  Termination.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  They didn’t kiss again or touch and they parted.

  He felt OK. Sex sometimes did that for him, that at least.

  On the way to his motel he counted the street-facing Coke signs in cafes and milk bars. He thought hungrily of the jar of hot mix in his suite.

  I’m a very religious man, he thought, in my own way. That’s part of my trouble. I’m soul conscious, too soul conscious. That’s why I had to tell that gliding girl that parable about the Rev. Billy.

  The wide country street made him stride it out and he thought, there’s a bit of the cowboy in all of us, but not too much in him. He was just about all evangelist. If at all cowboy he was strictly a town cowboy. Not one of God’s range riders. He was strictly a motel cowboy.

  He went to the milkbar for cigarettes as they were closing.

  ‘Closing up for the night?’ he said cordially, full of good will. Counting the Coke displays.

  The Greek in the fawn apron-jacket with green trim said, ‘You American?’

  We’re both on the ball tonight, Becker thought.

  He nodded.

  A younger Greek was sweeping up at a great pace.

  ‘That one,’ the older Greek nodded, ‘he like the donkey – going to work in the morning he don’t remember the way and you have to drag him along. In the night when the work finished he remember the way home all right and he go like mad.’

  Folklore was not exactly to Becker’s taste, but he chuckled.

  Hearing his chuckle Becker became uneasy about his feeling of well-being. This was not him. Not the queasy radiant servant he knew.

  How it happened he was not positively sure. He would have liked to get his feeling of well-being back to the motel. Just once.

  Perhaps the old drunk said, ‘Hey you, you American.’ But from his uneasy sense of well-being he was hauled and launched up into a wild, buffeting thermal of truculent exchange – about, of all things, the moon landing.

  ‘Does grass grow on Mars,

  Are there minerals on the moon,

  They think the radar telescope

  Will tell them very soon

  But they cannot find a person

  Or an aeroplane that’s lost

  Or a ship in distress at sea

  But they’ll see a thousand miles,’ the old drunk recited, then demanded of Becker, ‘Do you know how much it costs to put those two galahs for a stroll on the moon?’ belching from a stall where he was eating a meal, the last remaining customer.

  ‘Really, it’s not my line of business, sir,’ Becker cried out, dealing with the cellophane wrap of his cigarette packet.

  Becker had been turned around by the exchange, but the drunk did not look up from his steak, onions, and chips.

  ‘The moon doesn’t heed the barking of dogs,’ the old man said, ‘but the leaders are going to get away in a space ship.’

  Becker said, ‘That could well be – I could well believe that.’

  Mouth stuffed with food the drunk said, ‘We pay for it so you Americans can get out in time.’

  ‘Not all Americans,’ Becker laughed, with strain, ‘I don’t think I’ll get a seat.’

  How true.

  ‘Hydrogen only appears to defy gravity – but it shows there might be some unknown law which would enable speed above the speed of light.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know that, sir.’

  ‘We pay for it.’

  ‘I could use some of that budget myself,’ Becker laughed, wondering what to do with the crushed ball of cellophane in the swept cafe. ‘I pay,’ Becker said, ‘you should see my Federal tax – oh man,’ rushing to prove his share of the cost.

  ‘Tell me this,’ the old man said. ‘How fast would you be walking up the carriage of a train which was travelling at sixty miles an hour in the direction of the earth’s rotation …’

  ‘Sixty miles an hour?’ Becker checked, preparing himself for mental arithmetic.

  ‘Sixty miles an hour in the direction of the earth’s rotation and further consider the speed at which the earth orbits the sun, the sun moves in our galaxy and our galaxy moves in the universe.’

  Too many unknowns. Becker shrugged his head.
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br />   ‘What’s your name, son?’

  ‘Becker.’

  ‘What’s your line of business?’

  Becker felt like resisting the interrogation, but the man had the clinging insistency of drunkenness and cranky age.

  ‘Beverages, sir.’

  ‘What?’ Beverages seemed not to be one of the man’s words.

  Becker spoke out: ‘Coca-Cola.’

  ‘That’s your line of business?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Becker didn’t know whether the man lost interest or whether his mind had wandered or what, but that was the end of the conversation. The man went on fully occupied with mopping his plate with bread. He didn’t speak a further word, leaving Becker’s soul deep deep in a conversational crater.

  A Person of Accomplishment

  The invitation to go home with him to his place was absolutely unexpected. There they were writing up test analyses in his office, her mind running a fantasy about going to MIT for a Ph.D. and finding a big buck Negro in a white lab coat, when she’d felt a hand on her knee and heard him say, ‘Why don’t we stop at this point and go back to my place for a drink?’ The pressure of his hand on her knee said drinks and sex.

  Her second thoughts were whether she’d stay overnight with him. Whether she’d need a change of clothes for tomorrow and other things. She was also faintly blushing.

  She felt like saying ‘But we hardly know each other’, but that was not a particularly liberated thing to say, and checked it. Nor particularly honest because she’d never made this a real requirement with other men. Unexpected, that was what it was, unexpected. Over the months there hadn’t been a sexual breath to stir the clinical atmosphere between them.

  ‘I guess you must have sensed I was going to invite you home one of these fine nights,’ he said.

  She looked at his smile. ‘Well, not exactly …’

  ‘You will come, though?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said. There was the slight obligation of an invitation which comes from an associate professor to a humble research assistant – and then the difference in their ages – twenty-eight and forty, gave him some sort of command. She also felt gently encircled by his clean, serious, American gregariousness. His American geniality.