Interference & Other Stories

by Richard Hoffman

  Soon he felt his mother’s hand on his back, and she was saying something. He didn’t move. His mother stroked his back and then began to pat his bottom. He withdrew his head from the wet dark under his pillow.

  “You don’t have to go to Mass today, Pumpkin, if you don’t want,” to.

  Marty stared at the crucifix. “I don’t want Grandpa to be dead.” He could feel his grandfather’s scratchy face against his cheek, could smell his grandfather and taste the little swallow of beer he sometimes left in the bottom of the tall brown bottle, could see him lean from his great black chair and spit tobacco juice into the blue Maxwell House coffee can on the floor. He remembered his classmates laughing when he told Sister Eunice that his grandfather was the governor; that’s what his father called him—“Howdy, Governor,” he would say. His grandfather walked with two canes because something had fallen on his legs at the truck plant; Marty could see those canes right now hanging on the back of the black chair.

  “I want to go to Mass,” he said.

  He walked the three blocks to the church alone, without crying, and arrived just as the previous Mass was getting over. People were coming out of the church and getting in cars parked on the baseball field next to the school. Marty went up the church steps, holding onto the black iron rail, against the crush of the colorful talkative faithful.

  Inside, he could smell incense, and there were people still moving around in the choir loft, which meant that the Mass before had been a High Mass. Marty loved High Mass for the organ and the singing of the Kyrie and the Agnus Dei, but his father would never go because it took too long. He took a place in the third pew on the left, in the middle so no one would have to climb over him. He opened his missal to the prayers before Mass and looked at the picture there of an empty sanctuary with the trapezoid representing the arrangement of the starched pall covering the empty chalice and unconsecrated host in front of the tabernacle. He looked up at the altar, saw that it was so, and took heart. The Mass is the highest form of prayer, said Sister Eunice, and had been known to work miracles, even stop wars.

  An altar boy came from the sacristy bearing a golden staff that ended in a small cone used to extinguish the candles. It was David Corcoran, the best pitcher on the school baseball team. Marty watched him put out the candles from the High Mass, one by one, leaving only the two that flanked the tabernacle. The smell of the curling smoke reached Marty, and he thought of the white roses in his backyard. Sister Eunice said that the altar candles were made only from pure beeswax, and Marty thought of the white roses not only because of the smell but because he liked to watch the fat, heavy, furry bees fumble over the roses and think that they were making the wax for the candles to worship Our Lord. He noticed that, under his cassock, David Corcoran was wearing worn gray high-top Converse sneakers.

  Marty looked at the life-sized painted plaster crucifix above the altar. Jesus’ body hung heavy and exhausted, blood running from his wounds, his eyes sunk in shadow, his loins draped with a cloth. He looked real except for a chalky spot where one toe had been chipped, and Marty tried hard not to look at that.

  People filled the pew on either side of Marty. On his right was Mr. Lazzaro whose first name, Marty knew, was Gabriel, like the angel. He was said to be some kind of inventor, but Marty’s father said he was a drunk who couldn’t hold a job. An old woman with flabby, speckled arms knelt on Marty’s left; leaning her rump on the seat, she was saying her purple glass rosary in a loud murmur.

  The woman who knelt in front of Marty was wearing a stole made of three dead animals. Their snouts were flattened, and their paws hung detached from the surrounding fur. Marty could tell that their eyes were not real.

  He wanted his grandfather back, but it was because of what had happened to his father’s face that he wanted the miracle. He wanted his fathers face, composed and serious, coaching him, showing him how to grip the ball across the seams. He wanted his father’s voice, “Follow-through, follow through! Attaboy!” Not what he heard in his room and on the way out the door to Mass: his father’s cries and moans, his mother comforting him.

  A bell rang, and the priest and altar boys entered the sanctuary. Marty followed the words of the priest in his missal, the Latin the priest was saying on the left-hand page, the English on the right.

  Et introibo ad altare Dei, And I will go to the altar of God,

  ad Deuni qui laetificat God who gives joy

  juventutem tneum. to my youth.

  The priest was Father Baxter who took over for Sister Eunice every Thursday morning to instruct the class in the catechism. Marty studied hard and tried to impress him because he was also the school baseball coach, and Marty’s father had said that he’d be ready to go out for the team by the fifth grade. And even though that was two whole years away, Marty had set his sights on it already.

  Marty had to move from the Ordinary to the Canon, in the back of the missal, to pray along with the priest who was saying the Introit in Latin, then back to the Ordinary with its pictures of all the priest was doing, then back to the Canon for the Epistle. He didn’t want to be one of those Catholics Sister Eunice said merely attended Mass and didn’t pray along with the priest. Soon everyone rose for the Gospel.

  “From the Gospel of Luke,” said Father Baxter, “Chapter 11, verses 33 through 36. And Jesus said to them: ‘No man when he has lighted a candle, puts it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick…’”

  Marty’s face grew hot and his hands shook. The Gospel he had turned to was the wrong one. That meant that he had also read the wrong Introit and Epistle! He had turned the pages to the wrong Sunday. He’d been praying the wrong Mass.

  Now there would be no miracle. His father’s face as he had seen it when he sat on the floor, naked, holding his knees, would never disappear from his memory. The old woman on his left nudged Marty and said, “Shh,” because he was grinding his teeth.

  From the pulpit Father Baxter was saying, “…and for the soul of our dear brother, Edgar Mueller, who died quietly in his sleep last night.”

  It was like retching, as if something was being pulled up out of him, out of his belly, and Marty made a loud sound that he himself didn’t hear until Mr. Lazzaro put his arm around him and pulled him close. Marty flailed at him and broke away. The woman in the fur stole had turned around and was reaching toward Marty’s eyes with a lace-bordered handkerchief but couldn’t reach him. One of the animals’ heads hung down, and Marty could see the sharp little teeth in its mouth. He stood up.

  “He didn’t wake up!” he shouted. “He didn’t wake up!” And he scrambled to his left, walking on the padded kneeler, hand over hand along the back of the pew in front, climbing over knees and legs. In the side aisle he ran past three ushers standing against the wall holding the long-handled wicker collection baskets, past the dark mahogany confessionals, and into the vestibule where a round man with a red face, wearing a green plaid jacket, knelt down in front of the door and held out his arms to him.

  “Hey, hey, take it easy, son,” the man said.

  Marty dodged and twisted and got by him and ran the three blocks home. When he arrived, his mother was at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He went to Aunt Elizabeth’s, Pumpkin.”

  “He’s a liar!” said Marty. “He said bad dreams can never kill you, and Grandpa had a bad dream and he died!”

  “Marty. Wait a minute. You don’t know that for sure. Grandpa was very old.”

  His mother was holding both his hands. Although her voice had been gentle, Marty looked in her eyes and thought he saw that she was angry. “I’m sorry I called Daddy a liar,” he said.

  “It’s all right, Pumpkin. You’re confused.”

  He thought about what his father had told him and remembered the dream he’d had that night. He and his father were underneath the bleachers at a baseball game. They were looking for something in the weeds and mud. He could see the sunny field and th
e players through the legs of the people in the stands. There were paper cups and red-and-white popcorn boxes on the ground. “Look there,” said Marty’s father, “by your foot.” It was a shiny nickel. Then the bleachers and all the people were falling down on them, very slowly and without any sound, and Marty heard himself shriek and woke sitting up in his bed.

  “Suppose that Grandpa had a bad dream,” Marty said to his mother. He thought of how long it took his grandfather to get out of his black chair and steady himself with his two canes. “Like something was going to fall on him? Something big? Then maybe Grandpa was too slow, because he was too old, or too tired, so that he couldn’t wake up in time. Mom?”

  “I don’t know, Pumpkin. I suppose.”

  “But Daddy’s not old,” said Marty.

  On Wednesday night Marty overheard his parents talking. “Absolutely not,” his father said, “not after the display he put on at church on Sunday. He’s to stay home from school and we’ll ask Mrs. Mallon to come over for the day.” Soon afterward his mother came upstairs to tell him.

  Thursday morning, the day of his grandfather’s funeral, he stayed in bed. The house was quiet. But he heard the tea kettle whistle and the clink of Mrs. Mallon’s spoon on her cup in the kitchen. Earlier his father had come upstairs to talk to him. “You know what we’re going to do next Sunday?” he’d said. “Next Sunday you and I are going to get up early, get in the car, and drive to Philadelphia for a doubleheader against the Cubs. How about that?”

  His father had stood in the doorway in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, wearing a brand-new pair of shoes.

  GUY HAS A STORY TO TELL

  But he doesn’t dare tell it in the morning because nobody’s ready for it; people are balancing paper cups of coffee between their knees while unwrapping their fast-food breakfasts, or they’re rooting around in the cupboard looking for the pancake mix, or they’re carefully measuring out spoonfuls of coffee while the water comes to a boil. Besides, if he told it in the morning, the dog would not want to go out, the cat would not want to come in, the rush-hour traffic on the bridges into the city would come to a halt, the little waves on the river would harden into something like frosting or stucco, birds would fall from the sky, and the nocturnal animals—raccoons, opossum, skunks—would stay awake to hear it. No way; he couldn’t tell it in the morning.

  Noontime seemed the perfect time, shadowless and relatively idle; but if Guy told the story then, the whole day would fall apart like two halves of a cantaloupe, the goopy seeds of everything that was going to happen ruined, exposed like film to the brilliant midday sun. Impossible. He couldn’t bring himself to tell the story while the hour and minute hands, posed as if in prayer, pretended to be still, and he doubted anybody else could either.

  Dusk is the time to tell a story, he thought. But then Guy noticed how for all the peace that seemed to accompany that delicious hour, it was plummeting into yesterday like an accelerating raindrop above a river and he couldn’t bring himself to even begin. All the shops and businesses would remain open and the iron gates unlocked, people would sit immobilized on benches at bus-stops, chicks in their nests would grow desperate waiting for their parents, mice in the walls would crouch there in the first pangs of hunger, no bread would be cut, no plates passed across tables, no gossip about the day would transpire. Farmers coming in from the fields would stop with one foot in each of two plowed furrows, and the landscape outside the commuter train window would never change, nor the reflection of the faces equally available in the glass. On second thought, dusk would be a terrible time to tell the story.

  It went without saying that he couldn’t tell the story at night, partly because of certain episodes in the story itself, not to mention its themes, but also because walking around the whole day carrying a story you can’t tell is wearying to the point of exhaustion, and Guy needed to sleep. Besides, it was a dark story, and at night the dark is too complete to augment with further darkness. The story would disappear, a shadow into shadow, ink into an inkwell, a panther deep into the jungle, a Black Maria idling, headlights off and far from any streetlamp. Unthinkable to tell the story at night. Out of the question.

  Guy can only even try to tell the story if he starts in the split-second before first light, the moment before the roosters notice and kickstart the day, drowning him out with their habitual jubilation, along with the last bitter hissing cat brawl of the night, church bells, engines starting, barking dogs, and the first alarm clocks. It’s the best Guy can do: “Once,” he manages to say at that exact right moment, but then another day, with neither memory nor forethought, with its trillion stories, breaks.

  FROM THIS DISTANCE, AT THIS SPEED

  Early morning. Beside the interstate, westbound, on the way to my fathers house, two men stand on a wooden scaffold before a blank billboard. The billboard is new: the bottom a green enamel trellis, the sign space perfect white, not painted over, and with two flood lamps on long pipes that hook over the top. One of the men is quite fat so that the other appears to be tall and very thin. A motorist at this early hour, passing a mile a minute, might be put in mind of Laurel and Hardy. Then acres again of young corn. It is June.

  The heavy man, the elder, wears a V-neck white T-shirt and soiled plaid pants. The T-shirt rides up, and nowhere do his shirt and trousers meet. When he bends to pick up a chart, the cleavage of his substantial rump is visible. He smokes a cigar and from time to time white ash falls and remains on the sill of his ponderous belly until he brushes it off. Now he blows smoke at the chart in his hand, tips back his Braves baseball cap, and slowly shakes his head.

  Okay, we’ll call him Ollie.

  Therefore it is Stan who is now on one knee, stirring paint and staring at the multi-layered spatterings of who-knows-how-many previous jobs, the boards of the scaffold itself more beautiful than any sign he can remember. He would like to paint one billboard like this, no lines, no shapes, no words: colors, numberless rosettes of color upon color, suggesting depth, approaching without the facile trick of perspective the truly three-dimensional; a profusion of color that beckons to be entered, the illusion of infinite joy.

  No matter what Stan’s story is, it must be as grave and unjust, as fearfully aware of its own unwanted end, as anyone’s; therefore, because it is morning and he is there, wearing bleached white overalls and a paper cap, he must be thinking this, regardless of what else is on his mind, as he stirs the paint and loses himself to the pasts alluring opalescence.

  Ollie is different. He has disguised himself in fat, preferring to suggest that he is unacquainted with the fabulous. Behind his chart, behind his smoke, behind his flesh, what he is thinking would be obvious even to the passing motorists if they were not struggling to awaken or rehearsing conversations in their heads at 60 mph. Ollie’s thought springs lightly, full of grace, freer than Stan’s because he keeps it well-protected. He has a vision. Like Stan’s, it is made of remembered and longed-for paint. Ollie believes in a painting in which every line is true. He has had more years to watch the scaffold thicken with chromatic history, and it doesn’t gladden him as it once did. Let Stan believe there’s something to be learned from beauty that merely happens by itself. That’s what a young man is supposed to think. Old men know better, or at least know different, and are monstrous when they don’t.

  Ollie flicks a broken cylinder of white ash from his belly too late again, another hole burnt in his T-shirt, the price of concentration. The chart in his hand is the billboard in miniature, to scale, and colorless. The colors are named: Blue 3-1, Red 6-1-2, Yellow 2-1-4, etc. He knows what all these numbers mean, but the mixing is Stan’s department.

  Stan is a young man passing a familiar way, so Stan is, in a way, his son. There are just two of them, and it is early in the day. Okay then, Stan is Ollie’s son.

  Now it is just the beginning of morning rush hour. A trooper stations his car across the highway behind a billboard. “LET THE SUN SHINE,” it says. “WNOW,” it says. Stan and Oll
ie painted it a short time ago. The sun is a smudge through dark gray clouds. As the traffic increases, a helicopter clatters overhead. More people paying no attention pass. Each car says wish.

  Stan has always liked to paint, but the assignments neither please nor challenge him. There is no green like this young corn in the sun, no blue like the distant mountains, no paint the color of his flesh. Though no one notices, he modifies the prescribed colors, heightening or deepening so that he must take extra care to keep his color scheme harmonious throughout; it is the only way he can maintain his interest. Ollie he cannot understand and wishes he sometimes had another partner, someone less trouble, lighter, not his father.

  The background color, a shade of yellow, is ready.

  Ollie hums to himself as he blocks the space, enlarging the sketch on the chart and writing in the numbers for Stan. For Ollie this is a fallback career, not what he wanted at all. He wanted to paint white lines. Growing up, he had wanted to be one of those unselfish, unacknowledged legislators, and he practiced day and night so that not a wave, not a ripple, not a wiggle ever marred the sureness of his beautiful boundaries. He painted parking lots and football fields, tennis courts and polo grounds, but he was never assigned a highway, not even a two-lane road. Those were the men whom he respected most—entrusted with peoples lives, they were an elite corps, champions of humanitarian accuracy. The examiners, however, had found him insufficiently concerned with where the roads were going, and it was true that he could not have told you where a single road originated, what it passed, or where it ended. What made Ollie bitter, what seemed most unfair, was that no one had ever told him he needed to know that, and although his greatest pleasure had been to lay down the razor-edged lines of a parking plaza or the boxes within boxes of a tennis court, his pride demanded he resign. So for twenty-five years he has been painting billboards.