Stan is worried. Stirring an extra splash of white into Green 11-7-2 with a narrow wooden paddle, he sees no future for himself in this. More and more billboards, owned by advertising firms, are given over to the lithographed campaigns of cigarette and soft-drink companies. Guy dunks a broom in paste and slaps it up there, three rolls for a twelve-footer, four for a sixteen. Done. A quarter of an hour for a cowboy and his cigarette, a co-ed and her cola. His father says that there will always be a market for the best and puts his hand, holding both a chart and an acrid dead cigar, on his shoulder. Stan knows it’s hopeless, but its Ollie’s dream and Ollie is his father and he loves him. In other words, he has come to feel that if he doesn’t make the same mistakes his father made, he’s guilty of betrayal. When Stan is angry he decides his father makes him feel this way deliberately, or at least halfway so, intending to make him feel guilty but convincing himself he is trying to be encouraging. At other times he knows full well his father is only Ollie, fat and aging, doing the best he can, and Stan feels better then, more patient with the few years they have left upon the scaffolding together, executing one sign or another, following instructions.
Traffic begins to thin to midmorning numbers. The trooper leaves his post across the highway, tires crunching gravel, a cloud of dust and exhaust blowing north. The wind is up, flapping Ollie’s trousers and blowing Stan’s paper cap far off into the matchless green and regular rows of corn.
No different from other people, these two have to be imagined or ignored. What are their aims, their shames, their hopes? Where, among the possible relations of fathers and sons, is the truth of their connection? A traveler, from this distance, at this speed, is allowed, encouraged, perhaps enjoined by charity to consider them and speculate. They are, after all, on a kind of stage:
OLLIE:
These few precepts in thy memory look
Thou character (they are not from a book
But from my life are most hard wrung
As from a handkerchief of tears). Along
Your voyage may they stead thee well
For they are all is given me to tell:
Eschew false choices, ever find the third
Thing left withheld, occult, unoffered.
Judge not other persons by your wants;
They may have had the same dreams once
But changed them, tempered by necessity.
Neither a worrier nor a pretender be
For worrying oft fogs the view of port
And a pretender is an empty craft. In short,
Give what thou hast; take only when in need;
Strive to be genuine in thought and deed.
STAN:
Most humbly do I thank thee, good my lord.
Was e’er a son so well provided? One word
Of thy loving admonitions for estate
Would leave me boundless rich; oh happy fate
To have this tender hand upon my shoulder!
Inspirited am I, assured, made bolder.
The morning is ideal and the work goes well. By noon, much of the background is finished, delineating half an open Bible and half a message in hollow, stenciled letters. The traffic swells again and moves a little faster. The trooper returns to his post.
Stan and Ollie change places so that Stan can begin, after lunch, to flesh out Ollie’s sketched enlargement of the right side of the chart. They pass each other carefully, the scaffold narrow and precarious.
Stan pours hot water from his thermos into a Styrofoam cup of oriental noodles. The rest of his lunch is an apple. When he finishes, the empty cup gets away from him; he hates litter and tries to follow it so he can retrieve it later. In the wind, the cup seems to move like a small animal, scurrying from stalk to stalk, stopping, darting, finally disappearing. Stan imagines it coming to rest right next to his paper cap.
Ollie opens his black lunch pail and takes out two sandwiches he wrapped in foil the night before. He hesitates a moment to play a game with himself: one of the sandwiches is ham and Swiss, the other olive loaf and white American—he asks himself which one he would prefer to eat first and decides on the olive loaf; then he tries to guess which one is which. He opens the ham and Swiss. He will have to eat it first—rules of the game.
“Story of my life,” he says to himself. He folds down the wire retainer that holds a 16-ounce can of beer in the lid of his lunch pail—warm, but it can’t be helped—and expertly lifts the tab to open: fit, it says. Between sandwiches he will eat a bag of pretzels. For dessert, a cinnamon bun.
Ollie insists on taking the full hour for lunch. Stan is annoyed; he can remember several jobs they could have finished earlier.
Okay; but if Stan and Ollie are no different from sons and fathers elsewhere, they have quarrels rooted in frustrations more important. The love between sons and fathers must continually be renegotiated.
Stan is working to suggest the silken sheen on a purple ribbon laying across what are meant to be columns of text but are not meant to be legible. He sees Ollie finish his lunch, glance at his watch, and settle back to nurse the last few swallows of his beer. He trespasses on his father’s peace.
“It’s not as if you need me, Dad,” he says. He has rehearsed a hundred ways to begin this conversation, and now he believes he is jumping right in; in fact, he is appealing to his father’s fear and pride at the same time to throw him off guard.
Stan should know better. By now he ought to understand that his father’s love is sentimental: he is capable of astounding gentleness, but only when things are simple. Ollie interprets emotional confusion as the result of an attack and counters at once with invective.
“It’s not as if you neeeeed me, Dad,” Ollie whines. “You little pissant! Need you? Only thing I need you for is to balance the friggin’ scaffold.”
Stan, despite his umbrage at being mocked, cannot stanch the chuckle rising at the notion that his hundred forty pounds offsets his father’s jumbo counterpoise.
“You always were a quitter,” Ollie barks from around the cigar in his teeth. “I’m tryin’ to see you set up nice, line up your ducks. Then I’m out of your way. You think I couldn’t leave tomorrow? Today? Right now? That’s what I said—right now—you heard me right.” He has got himself up on one knee and is pushing hard with both hands on his thigh to stand. The scaffold sways, and Stan’s brush whacks a purple splotch on the empty Bible’s binding.
“Just once!” Stan shouts. “Just once I’d like to talk to you without you blowing up and mocking me and giving me that martyr stuff. Look what you made me do.” And then he mutters, not sure in his anger if he means for his father to hear, “Fat old stupid fool.” Trying to remove the purple stain, he knows he has the momentum to keep on going, to shout now that there are no ducks…face facts …a life of his own …the shrinking future …the endless possibilities of color…but he looks at Ollie.
Ollie’s leaning forward, fists on hips, legs spread, face red, but Stan sees his eyes for an instant, wet and stricken, spiritless, before his father once again impersonates his simple-hearted self. He heard.
Though Ollie tears his cigar from his mouth and flings it away; though he bellows curses at his son and sneers and shakes his fist; though he says, “Go ‘head and quit, you smart-ass. I got other fish to fry too, hot shot. Arizona! Arizona’s where I’d be right now if it weren’t for you”; though an ugliness that looks a lot like hate distorts his features, Stan is sorry. He believes he never meant to hurt his father. He tells himself he doesn’t really think his father is stupid, or a fool; he feels that he has somehow cheated, the way his father has always cheated, by stooping to abuse.
Ollie has always wanted Stan to venerate him, to extol his virtues in anecdotes beginning, “Once my father…” or, “My father used to say…”; he believes, so deeply that he doesn’t know it, that a father, any father, is a saint, a tyrant, or a fool. To be called a “fat old stupid fool” by his son is a kind of mortal wound: both saints and tyrants are remembered, fools are n
ot. What’s more, he wasn’t meant to hear it, or so he believes, which means to him that this is what he comes to, finally, in the eyes of his son. Ollie can feel himself bleeding: dreams, pride, purpose, hope.
“You little scum!” he screams, and his voice squeaks. “I give you everything I have and it isn’t good enough for you, eh, hotshot? Fine. We finish this friggin’ holy-roller sign I’m out o’ here and I don’t give a Flying Wallenda’s jockstrap what you do!”
Stan wants to say “I’m sorry, Dad,” but that’s what he says when he rocks the scaffold. He is aware of what his words have done and his transgression looms, bloated, like the incomplete, illegible Bible he’s been trying to make appear three-dimensional. He has never called Ollie “Father,” and for a moment he hopes that by saying something like, “Forgive me, Father, I was wrong,” the words might resonate enough to assuage his father’s pain, but he knows it would be lost on Ollie. He has never called his father anything but “Dad,” so “I’m sorry, Ollie,” is impossible and insulting. Because he has cried for Ollie before, in secret, often, and then resigned himself to patronizing him; because he has tried to canonize him, as Ollie wants, to make things simpler; because he has sworn to leave a hundred times and has not been able to, he says “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? Not as sorry as you’re gonna be. You think I’m kiddin’.
““No. I know I hurt you, Dad. Father. Ollie. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
“Argh, you’re a waste o’ good sperm. Hand me that brush. Forget it. It was nothing, the weather, the worries, those damn Chink noodles you insist on eating.”
While they work in silence, layers of smoky clouds shift, allowing the sun to brighten now this green patch of corn, now that; nevertheless, a sparse rain falls, the fat drops splatting like accelerated snowflakes on the billboard and scaffold. A big drop splashes on Ollie’s nose.
“Sun shower,” he says, “look for a rainbow.” Stan wipes his brush on the fluted rim of the paint can and looks; since he’s been old enough to understand he’s heard this every summer, every time it rains, “Sun shower—look for a rainbow.” Together they attend to the horizon, but there is no rainbow this time.
The evening rush hour begins. Traffic moves even faster than in the morning; people are speeding home to relax. The trooper pulls onto the interstate, his blue lights flashing, heading east.
Stan and Ollie work slowly; although the days are getting longer and the sky has cleared, neither wants to finish the job today.
“The light’s no good from this angle,” says Stan, “cant get the colors right.”
Ollie wonders what the light has got to do with it; the colors are predetermined, coded, fixed, but lies afraid to ask. Stan’s awful touchy these days. Besides, it’ll take awhile to seal the cans, clean the brushes, pack up the gear. Ollie doesn’t have another sign, another job, lined up yet. “May as well knock off,” he says.
“Soon as I get this letter done,” says Stan. He is working on the message now, what he and Ollie call the “pitch.” A gnat finds the light in his eye. “Damn bugs,” he says, blinking and rubbing his eye with his wrist.
“Gnats,” says Ollie, watching their extemporary reel, “good day tomorrow. Sunny.”
When gnats come out to dance and play,
The next will be a sunny day,
recites Stan to himself—another of his father’s predictable small wisdoms. Near tears, stanching them by flaring his nostrils and breathing rapidly, he wonders how to efface that moment when he saw, in his fathers eyes, that naked plea for mercy. Gnats dive at his shining eyes. There is nothing worse, he thinks, than to see ones father as—no, not a fool, not a fool exactly—as a sort of sad clown, beaten, lovable, but with only a sentimental, selfish, indulgent love, to see him as an old vaudevillian parroting the same one-liners every day. A Flying Wallenda’s jockstrap? The quasi-wicked snigger of a waste o’ good sperm? Can I unsee what I saw today? Unthink my thought, ununderstand? Will time splash other colors over this, restain it, paint it out? He wonders, sadly. “Look for a rainbow Sunny day tomorrow.”
Stan puts the finishing serif on the letter N. He has changed the typeface called for by their customer, Hope Second Reformed, because he feels more comfortable with the Old Style Roman than with Gothic. “IT IS WRITTEN” it will say until tomorrow.
Ollie’s hungry. “Gotta take care of the corporation,” he says, slapping his belly. By now, the sky to the west is tinged with coral and a cool translucent orange. For Ollie, sundown is a demarcation, and his dinner is a sacrament whose object is renewal; his heavy dinner starts the ritual release from consciousness of all that happened since the morning, a vespers of fullness and forgetfulness, an evening of relinquished worries and sleepy peace. For Ollie this is wisdom—to emerge from the day like a dog from a ditch and shake it off. “Shake it off,” he’s always told his son when Stan was hurt. Hit your thumb with a hammer? Disappointed? Frightened? Grieving? Shake it off, man, shake it off. Though he professes no religion, Ollie is a man of faith. Tomorrow will be new.
Carefully, hand over hand on the heavy ropes, rhythmically, habitually compensating for each other, balancing, they lower themselves and the scaffold to the ground. Ollie places the paint cans, soaking brushes, rags, plumb line, and chalk beneath a tarp at the foot of the billboard. The mercury lamps, on photo sensors, come on silently and flatten and distort the colors and perspective of the uncompleted sign with lunar light. Stan looks down the waist-high rows of young corn, thinking, for a moment, of his cap; when he turns, the regular rows disappear and he faces a solid green that looks dusty and blue and dull in the vaporous light. He is afraid. Tonight he will look at all his heavy lap-sized books of reproduc-tions, hoping to find his aspirations still alive, and he knows already that he will not sleep.
In their battered pickup, Ollie driving, they bounce along the unpaved road to the nearest ramp and pull onto the highway east-bound. It is almost dark and there is hardly any traffic now. Most people are home, finishing their evening meal. Many will read, or watch television, or nap. Some few will begin to do what they have wanted to do all day. One or two, in a troubled solitude, will step outside to look at the sky, naming to themselves those few constellations they recognize.
ARE YOU WITH ME?
Weeks before the event, posters began to appear in town, each day more of them—on lampposts, on trees, in shop windows—until you could not escape knowing that the great and illustrious artist Pomo Pursnipov was coming to town to perform. Besides the date and time, and the place—the village green—the posters quoted several important sounding journals citing Pursnipovs literary genius.
“Here are stories with the potential to lift and inspire,” wrote one critic.
“Nothing short of enlightening,” opined another. “Will set your heart pounding and your mind aflame.”
“Let Pomo Pursnipov set you on the righteous path to regaining what is rightfully yours.”
By the day of the event, there were hardly any in the town who declined to attend. The green was crowded with people. The evenings maestro, the celebrated Pursnipov, led by an escort in a gendarmes cape with a lions head clasp and a backwards Yankees baseball cap, walked through the parting crowd from the rear and ascended the three steps to the band shell. All eyes were on him as he sipped from a glass of water and surveyed his audience. Then he ducked down behind the podium, out of view for a moment, and replaced his water glass. Straightening, he cleared his throat and began:
“I came here to tell you a story” Here he paused. “However, I shall tell you neither of the stories you want to hear. The two you want to hear you want to hear in order to be assured that things are working out. They’re not, in case you didn’t notice.
“In the first story—which is true, by the way, so far as it goes—a peasant, a worker, a pauper, perhaps represented by a ragged barnyard fowl, in any case some animate emblem of the dispossessed, lives at the foot of a mountain. On the top of this mountain is a castle fille
d with all the riches of the earth, enough to buy and sell our hero’s destiny a million times over. Are you with me? Does this sound familiar? Of course it does.
“The rest of the story is a string of predictable station stops that if I were to tell it, I would carefully disguise by adding detail. In your case, seeing as this is a city with cosmopolitan aspirations—like our hero, but more on that later—I would fashion episodes in which our hero—or heroine—happens upon a benefactor or finds a magic something-lamp or lotto ticket, it hardly matters-or wins a scholarship, but!” And here he raised his hand for emphasis. “But he proves, by way of several complementary episodes, that on his way up the mountain he has not, emphatically not, lost the common touch. Call him—where am I?—okay, call him something that impedes his progress up the mountain to the castle—you tell meCome on now, don’t be shy.” And here the artist cupped his ear and beckoned with his other hand. “What’s that? I’m sorry, I can hardly hear you. What? Manuel!”
People looked around at one another and behind them; no one had heard anyone say anything.
“Manuel! Yes, that’s good! You’re good at this! Man well. Hispanic. Also a hint of “manual,” by hand, a laborer, Manny, macho, and so forth. Great! Already in the file of stereotypes. No no, don’t be offended, I’ll be sure to describe his features so fully even you won’t notice that at his core he’s a cartoon.
“At least that’s what I would do if I were going to tell you that story. But, come on, you have heard it before. You know it by heart. And every time you sit there and listen to some variation of it, you make a terrible mistake. You listen and once again identify with the exceptional underdog. Your children watch you, want you to be proud, and they begin to dream of the climb. Thats what I’ve been trying to demonstrate here.
“So… what are the trials we’ll put our hero through on his way to occupancy of the castle? I promise you that any of you can do this if you let yourself. What trials? Anyone? Come on, you’ve heard the tale a thousand times.” And here, once again, Pursnipov cupped his ear and leaned out over the podium. “Yes? What’s that? A jealous rival? A wicked uncle? A wound? Yes, good, good, good. You see? Now there’s a story you can sell!”
Interference & Other Stories Page 10
