“Why don’t you draw a picture for us?” Bonnie asked her, meaning that her attempts to dance and be graceful in the happy wash of music were not good to look at. Not understanding what Bonnie really meant, because she couldn’t understand everything, she went off happily to get her pencils and posterboard. Bonnie gave him a sad look. When Thelma returned she made him sit next to Bonnie on the horsehair settee, then took his arm strongly, as if it were a log, and placed it over Bonnie’s shoulders.
“Thath ni’!” she said, and as he and Bonnie moved, using all their learned skills in such matters in order to be more comfortable with that burning arm, took her pencil easily in thumb and fingers and deftly began to draw.
The radio murmured, rattled tympanically, crooned and occasionally wailed or moaned, nothing it did important because of its lack of volume and because all of the songs were familiar and nothing to him. He and Bonnie didn’t talk, not because they were posing but because, he thought, of his arm and his hand that was now around her waist, resting easily on her hip. That meant enough to think about, at least for him—what his arm encompassed.
Thelma finished soon, or what seemed soon to him, and submitted her drawing for surprise and praise. She had placed herself—her not so gross but still recognizable self—between them, so that they cuddled her. His revulsion at the idea of this embrace was surprisingly strong, almost of a moral intensity, of taboo—as if all the while he’d been having lustful thoughts not of Bonnie but of Thelma.
They praised her drawing, which deserved wonder.
After a while Bonnie made them hot chocolate, a marshmallow foundering in each cup. He smoked a cigarette, which made him think of a beer, but there seemed no occasion for alcohol in this place. Without his asking, Bonnie told him more about Oval.
“Daddy!” Thelma said when she heard the name. She pointed at Bonnie and said, “Sister!” and at John and said, “Brother!”
“Oh, Thelma, you haven’t got a real sister or brother, but we love you just as much as if we were!” She turned back to John and said,
“Oval doesn’t talk much about himself because he’s always taking care of other people and all they want to talk about are their own problems. But every once in a while I’ll ask him something about his life. He was in the Navy, but that’s just about all he’ll say about that subject. At the Co-op he’s an engineer—that’s his title, I guess. He invented and built this freezing machine of his, I know that. He was married…” She nodded surreptitiously at Thelma, who was working at the drawing again. “And I guess she couldn’t take…” Another nod. “So that didn’t last very long. Actually he’s not the kind of person you quiz like that, not because he’s hard to talk to, though. He just doesn’t seem that interested in himself.”
“That’s a very strange person,” John said. He hadn’t removed his sneak-thief arm, but now decided that he should, and did.
“I truly believe he saved my life,” Bonnie said. “I was so bitter, John, so cynical and bitter. I couldn’t give love. I’d been treated rotten and all I felt was hate, the ego-Satan in me was in the ascendant. I had lost Christ.”
“A man was rotten to you?”
“A man, men, but that’s all gone. All the hatred and resentment are all gone, just gone! It’s such a wonderful feeling! You must give love and only love! Oval quoted Glenn Clark in one of his sermons. Someone asked Dr. Clark what would happen if someone refused to take your love. Dr. Clark answered, ‘Increase the dose.’ Isn’t that lovely?”
That night as the air cooled and he pulled a light blanket over his sheet, he lived more easily in his body, and was even able to stretch a little, that underrated pleasure. He’d found that it was Friday. The radio news had said nothing of A-bombs or of the Apocalypse, but spoke cheerfully of little wars, assassinations, lynchings, famines, jihads, the luring but distant responsibilities he, for this personal, episodic term, simply let happen. As he shut his eyes his eyelids felt cool.
Gracie Lundgren had come down with rotten leg. It was terrible for poor Gracie, but it was not his fault, at least not legally his fault. Dory and Loretta would have none of that, and regarded him with loathing, their lips stiff with disgust. On the whey field they slid her stretcher into the high Army ambulance. There was not much hope for her. He knew if he could see her she would forgive him, and maybe he could cut out the rot with his jackknife, even though he knew his knife was dull because he had been cutting nickels in half with it. Cutting nickels in half was something as reprehensible as masturbation. Dory and Loretta wouldn’t think of letting him touch her again, or even see her, so for a moment he thought of forcing them to let him into the ambulance, but then he remembered that the knife idea was just a show he’d put on anyway, and they knew it. His shame was intolerable.
Awake, sometime in the night; a bell-like muffler sped up the street, the muffler of a huge, slow-turning engine, each mighty, cavernous explosion steadily belling after the next, a vibrato of purring gongs.
“John? John?” In dim, down-hall light from the door, Bonnie’s tall figure came floating toward him. This was detectably more real than the field where Dory and Loretta stood guarding the ambulance. The dream shame, identified as merely that, began to dissipate in the enormous reality of Bonnie here, now. It still held, somewhat; the shame of their disapproval was too strong to go away at once, but it was fading into the puzzlement of interpretation. Then Bonnie’s real hands were on his naked shoulders. “John?” she asked, half whispering.
“Yes,” he said, meaning total agreement, and pulled her down to him, her cheek coming next to his cheek a little hard, as if she’d fallen. Her hair and cool ear were perfumed. He pulled his covers aside so that her body lay next to his, but there was a meaty feeling about it that was not quite right.
“Wait, John!” she whispered urgently. “No! Please! John!” Her breasts were soft and firm on his chest, then she pushed away. “Wait a minute! Are you awake?” She really disagreed with what he wanted, he was beginning to understand. He kissed her on the lips, soft lips and sweet watery breath, but her mouth moved too busily against his and she was saying, “No, no, wake up, please! You’ve got to help!”
He lay back, but like a miser wouldn’t let go of his treasure. For the moment she was willing to accept these terms. “It’s Urban. He’s asked for you. Can you get dressed and come with me?”
He let her get up and she turned on the bed lamp, her white nightgown falling back down over her legs.
“I thought I was in Paradise,” he said.
She smiled quickly and then stopped, shaking her head. “It might be serious. Are you willing to come?”
“Okay.”
“Let’s get dressed and go to him, then.”
He met her in the front hall and hobbled along with her to her car, which she backed out into the dark street—carefully, he noticed.
“His housekeeper called. He wanted Oval. She said she had to stick her head out the window and yell up to the roof. He’s on the roof.”
“Why does he want to see me?”
“Because Oval’s not here, I guess.”
“What have I got to do with Oval? I’m just an innocent bystander.”
“Maybe he took a shine to you.”
“So he’s sitting on his roof just before the end of the world and there’s something he’s got to tell me?”
“What do you believe in, John?”
“Constant floating guilt.”
“Be serious.” They were driving along a curving boulevard below a hazy half-moon and muted streetlights. “We’re almost there,” she added.
“I am serious,” he said.
“Do you believe in God?”
He discarded one flippant answer after another. Not so’s you’d notice. God who? I believe in many gods. Our Father who aren’t in heaven?
“Do you?”
“Well, no, I guess not. Actually I’m pretty neutral on the subject.”
“Oh, John, there is a force for good in us! You’
ll see!”
The Church Ovarian Apocalyptic was no wider than the bungalows on either side of it, but was tall, with a steep roof and a steeple, a Little-Brown-Church-in-the-Vale sort of church, with a small residential wing at an angle to the church part. Several cars were parked in the space formed by the angle, and as they got out of Bonnie’s car he saw people sitting quietly in a circle on the grass. A dark young woman came out of the church to greet them, saying, “Madre,” and “Dios,” and other prayerful things in Spanish, which made him think of his old refrain, agua caliente, and then, He maketh the deep to boil like a pot. “Come quick!” she said, and led them into the dark church and up narrow winding stairs to the base of the steeple, a little lookout with wooden railings all around. Out on the far edge of the ridgepole someone straddled the sharp roof peak.
“Urban! Urban!” Bonnie called. “What are you doing out there? Come back! Please come back! We love you and care for you, Urban!”
“Send the kid over here. I want to talk to him,” Urban said in a normal voice.
“No, no! You come back, Urban! We are one with the Universal Mind. God is love and forgiveness! Christ Mediator died for our sins! Now you just squinch yourself back over here, all right?”
“Legget thegge weggomeggan leggeam eggin seggileggence,” Urban commanded. “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.”
“Urban, you come on, now!”
“But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. I Timothy 2:11–12.”
“I’m going to come out there after you! Or I’ll call the Fire Department!”
This brought a bitter laugh from Urban.
John started over the railing, wondering why he was doing this. Maybe he was still showing off for Bonnie. Only the bandage on his right knee seemed to restrict him at all, as though the rest had healed. The night was chilly, the roof tiles cold. Bonnie plucked at his Ike jacket, trying to make him stay, but he paid no attention. He placed his hands on the ridge and inched out toward Urban, Bonnie still forbidding him to do so. I’m just a-squinchin’ on out, he thought with a touch of hysteria. The roof was a steep cliff on either side, and the tiles clinked loosely as he moved along. The dark roofs of trees and somnolent houses seemed far below.
He came up to Urban as if each were on horseback, or maybe on the same horse. Urban wore his Army Air Force uniform—ribbons, hashmarks, wings, insignia, garrison hat and all. In the hazy moonlight, or the beginning light of dawn, John saw that he had been a staff sergeant, that there were several battle stars on the pale ribbon of the Pacific Theater and that among the ordinary ribbons were those heavy ones, the real ones. Though it had been the general instinct to throw away and forget the uniform, or to use up what could be used, like his own Ike jacket, its cuffs soiled by grease, he could not deny the sudden and surprising rise of emotion borne in him by these signs. The flattish tissues of Urban’s wounded face reflected what light there was, the mouth and eye holes black.
Urban’s housekeeper called, “Urban! Urban! Qué te pasa?” And Bonnie called too, asking for rational behavior in some upset manner or other, her words like chimes.
“My belief is it all got out of hand,” Urban said. “Which don’t rule out the Leggord’s vengeance, even if Heggee fucked up. Would that make Heggim less pissed? Oval says different, he says none of it has to do with Heggim and it’s all some mistake or something, and the Leggord is some kind of a nice guy who’s not going to take it too hard. I can’t get my mind around that. Now you been to college—what’s your belief?”
Their perch on the roof peak, the loose tiles and this question seemed equally precarious. He had no impulse to explain belief he had never formulated in the first place. If he was here to talk Urban off the roof he would have to be skillful and inventive indeed, and it was probably mental laziness that made him reject that path. He could only be sincere, for better or worse—the easy way that probably wouldn’t work. As the light gave a blink toward increase he saw with a complicating apprehension that beneath the skirt of Urban’s blouse was the familiar brown leather holster for the service .45.
“I’m not sure what I believe,” he said with a fatiguing sense of inadequacy.
“You can’t not be sure of what you believe,” Urban said. “You can not be sure of what you think but you can’t not be sure of what you believe.”
“I’d like to get you and me down off this roof,” John said.
“I want to know what you believe. I ain’t going to get mad, no matter what it is, so spit it out.”
“In college I never studied in order to believe anything. When I read philosophers or theologians it was just to find out what they believed.”
“What kind of critter are you? A man’s got to put it all together and come up with an answer!”
“I guess I’m still trying to put it all together.”
“You ever kill a man?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. We just fired at areas, where they told us to.”
“You ever see dead men?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever see a man die?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
Maybe he was here to stall Urban, who hadn’t mentioned the end of the world; maybe Urban was asking to be stalled, and talked to, so he told him about the patrol through the scrubby woods where the terrified Okinawans had hidden shoulder to shoulder for days and the ground was covered with shit so close together they had to step in it, big piles and little baby poops and dysenteric splashes and drips and clumps of shit everywhere. Was he trying to be amusing? Somebody, while they could still speak, said that was fear shit, it smelled worse than regular shit. The spirit of that shit got into their bodies and clothes and hair. The 1058 were going over them with that rushing flutter that was so loud you always thought you had to be able to see the shell itself, but you never could, and they all confessed afterwards that they were most afraid there’d be some incoming because there was no place to hit the dirt and they’d have to dive straight into shit. Somebody said as for himself he hadn’t had an un-fear shit since he got on the boat in Seattle.
Then he was, for powerful reasons signaled first in his throat, putting off what he’d next seen. Maybe it wouldn’t be good for Urban, or for himself, to tell it. He’d described the thing before but never in anything like these crazy circumstances. His constricted throat was telling him that he might not be able to tell it this time because he might be surprised by some terrible significance he’d always overlooked.
“Hey, man,” he said. “What are we doing up here?” His eyes were wet and his voice was full of uncontrolled-sounding passion he didn’t trust because he might be putting on an act for Urban, to show him he cared for him and his life beyond all of his theories.
Urban stared at him through his mask. “Then what?” he said.
“We came out of the woods and went down to the shore, on the rocks, and sloshed our feet in the ocean.”
“Yeah?”
“The squad leader was pissed off and kept yelling at us, but in a little while he came down and sloshed his boots around too. Then somebody noticed these civilians a couple hundred yards up the shore, on a bluff over about a fifty-foot cliff, throwing what looked like clothes off there. You’d see a guy in a white shirt and dark pants go over somewhere and come back with a bundle of what looked to us like laundry and he’d toss it over, and others would do the same thing. Then a woman did the same thing and jumped off the cliff herself. That’s when it dawned on us what the bundles were.”
“Sure,” Urban said.
“They were afraid of us. I don’t know what they thought we’d do to them. I mean, Americans, for Christ’s sake.”
“Oh, yeah,” Urban said. “Just a bunch of Boy Scouts.”
“Some of us probably were Boy Scouts. I was eighteen and so were the other three replacements. We’d only been in Able Company a couple days. Anyway, we started over there. The rest of the company was
up on top someplace and there was no firing. The 105 rounds were going in about five hundred yards farther on. ‘Crazy Japs,’ we were saying. The only ones I’d seen before were dead, sort of khaki-colored all over, dusty and faded-looking, like they’d always been that way. But the idea that those civilians were alive and throwing their children and themselves off a cliff, as busy as if they were doing an ordinary job or project or something, mothers and fathers just throwing their kids down onto the rocks, that was insane in a way I’d never even thought about before. In my life that just never happened, so all the time we were going over toward the cliff I thought what we had to find was just laundry.
“Some of them weren’t dead. The cliff wasn’t high enough. One kid about ten years old had a bone sticking out of her leg. It was a girl—I saw her bare little pouch when I turned her over. She was making a constant thin whine, as if she never had to take a breath, and for a minute I couldn’t figure out just how to pick her up. Henry Reppert carried my rifle and web belt. Her leg was black—I’ve never seen such a bruise. We carried the live ones up where the rest of the platoon was, and the medics came along. I never found out if any of them recovered.”
“So it does no good to say it wasn’t your fault,” Urban said.
“Well, it wasn’t my fault.”
“You think you’re any different from anybody else?”
“I didn’t make it happen!”
“Yeah, and you wish it never happened, but that kind of contrition won’t do you no good. You got to pay seventy and seven times for every pimple’s worth of pain you caused. You think just because you’re sorry it means a rat’s ass to the Leggord? You going to plead your own case? You think you can plead innocent ’cause you were just a poor little dogface obeying orders? You think Heggee gives a fart in a whirlwind whether you’re American or not? You think ignorance of the law is an excuse? It don’t make sense at all if any shit-for-brains guardhouse lawyer can argue before the Leggord! You tell Oval that. You be sure and tell him. Tell him he was a friend to me and it’s no fault of his I can’t get my mind around all that forgiveness crap he dishes out. Tell him I respect him as a man, but the Leggord’s no candy-ass. You tell him that!”
The Moon Pinnace Page 27
