A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  He watched the woman now as she opened the trailer’s narrow door and threw coffee grounds from the cuplike sieve of a percolator. But she’d forgotten to remove the little perforated plate that fit over it, and this flew out with the grounds that landed in brown gobs and chunks in the trodden-down blackberry stalks. She had to go after it, and as she knelt, her wrap-around maternity skirt folded away in back and he saw the wide white slab of her buttock, and black hair in the crack that hid the complicated female plumbing and parts that worked so well. A mind of their own. She was probably Forrest Sleeper’s woman, too—the man wasn’t very old, and there was the plumbing functioning perfectly well on both sides, and man plumbed if he had the opportunity. Like the famous local story about the woman who lived in a similar encampment with her seventeen-year-old son: “He seems to like it, and it don’t hurt me none.” Do it, do it, and let the morons drop where they may.

  “Have you seen him?” he asked, finally.

  “Forrest Sleeper? I saw him when they moved in. He’s not very old, I don’t think—about fifty.”

  “I saw him taking a leak on a tree last night when I went out.”

  Oh, he thought, it was all so cold; nothing came into focus with them any more. Each spoke as though the other had some kind of language difficulty. He seemed to remember a time when they had communicated more fully in silence.

  It was Saturday, and he had only the one nine o’clock class, but he felt a terrible weariness at the thought of facing those freshmen, of organizing his ideas so that they might learn. It seemed a terrible joke that he should try to teach anybody anything. Maybe he should cancel the class; he could call up the English secretary and have her dismiss them all. Good-by, go home for the weekend (Yippee! Yay! Hallelujah!). No, he should go in and dismiss the class himself, and send them home with some words of advice—the blind enlightening the blind: Miss Goodwin, speak! or forever be a C. C for cipher; C for the mediocre soul I’m terribly afraid you are. Mr. Morrow, what good is your quivering sensitivity if it doesn’t reveal intelligence? Mr. Carter-the-engineer, don’t be a screwdriver all your life. Mr. Neilson, what are you going to do when you find that dropping a Pontiac Bonneville engine into a Chevrolet Impala Convertible is not as satisfying as it now seems? (Sotto voce: or, God! God! what if it is?) In fact all of you—don’t be dopes, dolts, drips, dullards, dumbheads, dunces, dumbbells, deadheads, dimwits and drib-blebrains, please, please, for my sweet, long-suffering, broken ass!

  Or he could go in and ask Mr. Carter, for instance, what he thought of the short story they had just read, and Mr. Carter would say again what he had said about Joyce’s The Dead: “I didn’t like it because I’m in technology.” “All right, Mr. Carter,” he would say this time, “that’s a very good answer. A very good answer.”

  Alice’s voice: “Bob! Bob! What’s the matter with you?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not being fair to that class.” There is Miss Wilson in that class, and Mr. Henry, and Mr. Widgeon, out of whose eyes shine intelligence, and intelligence’s usual engagement with ethics, and generosity, and the possibility of love. But what strange things I’m asking for!

  “What class? What are you talking about?” Alice said.

  He turned toward her and said, “I don’t feel good, Alice. I don’t know what’s gone wrong with me lately.”

  “Oh, Bob!” Such undeserved love, strong enough so that even he could hear it.

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” he said in a voice so cold it shocked him. “It’s nothing.” Colder yet. “I was just thinking about my class. I’ve got to get going.”

  Suddenly he remembered the major’s name: MacCleave.

  “No, it’s all right, Alice. It’s OK. I really didn’t mean it—what I said about not feeling good. It’s just this Forrest Sleeper business right in our lap.”

  “Bob, that doesn’t really matter, does it?” Alice said, lying for him.

  “No,” he lied, “it doesn’t really matter.”

  He might have predicted that the class wouldn’t go very well. Mr. Widgeon was absent, and Mr. Carter was deep in a text for another course—probably trigonometry. Miss Wilson, whose precise questions often sustained him, wept silently into one pulpy Kleenex all period long. Mr. Henry, who though bright was at times liable to want to go off on tangents, wanted to, and Robert’s chiding hit him a little too hard. For the last half of the class he looked hurt, and obviously thought about nothing else. There were good people in that class, though, and some days a tone would develop right from the beginning, a tone of intense interest and attention. But not today; it was jerky, mechanical, the transitions between ideas were simply hesitations. After class he walked downstairs to his office with the dead feeling that no one had exercised his intelligence very much at all.

  He sat at his bare desk, and stubbed his one-millionth cigarette into the creosote-stained glass ash tray. “Something is bugging me,” he said, then looked quickly toward the door. Geoff Lubie would be coming down from his class soon. He aimlessly opened a drawer, and three bundles of in-class themes presented themselves: seventy-nine papers folded lengthwise, with a rubber band around each fat bundle. He pulled one paper out, the little shreds of spiral notebook edging sifting down into the drawer. Lo, it was Mr. Neilson the Pontiac Bonneville engine-dropper, whose handwriting bent backwards at the precise angle that always gave Robert a stiff neck: “They won’t let us race on sideroads even at 3:00 A.M. in the morning. What I would like to ask them is that nobody else has any business out at 3:00 A.M. in the morning.”

  What fine logic, Mr. Neilson! Your mind refreshes me with its clarity and charity!

  He stuffed the paper back under the rubber band and shut the drawer. The fact, he thought, the fact the bloody fact (always omit the phrase “The fact that”) is that there are many things bugging me. But there are always many things to bug one; that, Robert, is life. Little bugs should be ignored. But what happens when somewhere in the shadows lurks a bug as big as a house, and you don’t know just what kind it is, or what it eats? Is it a kind of composite bug made up of monstrous airplanes that go too inhumanly fast on their inhuman business? Of the Bugle-Unioneers who find joy only in hatred and exclusion and death? The Mr. Neilsons who have no pity and no logic? Or is it a kind of despair bug, because love, if such a thing exists, is so fragile, and Alice is unhappy because she is childless, and the morons proliferate, and you are afraid of imbecility. So you try to build yourself a little shrine to precision and logic, and you line your little shrine with books in which serene minds speak calmly. But then you look out the window and you see a mattress in which humans like yourself have willingly lain in filth. And you read a newspaper once too often.

  So if you are a good man, why must you be bugged? Good men don’t get bugged: that thought is un-American.

  Because you are not a good man.

  Who says so?

  I do.

  Prove it.

  I stole a plug in the shape of a frog, with three treble hooks.

  Cut that out.

  I do not love.…

  Repeat that.

  I do not love.…

  What don’t you love? Who don’t you love?

  Whom don’t I love.

  Cut that out and answer the question.

  I do not love the human race; I do not love its ugly face.

  Very funny. Then blow your brains out.

  Lubie came talking and gangling into the office, followed by several students, to whom he gave corrected papers.

  “Gloria,” he said to one girl, “you can do better than this. What was the matter?” His voice was sad: Why hast thou forsaken me? Gloria was sad, too, and vowed to do better next time.

  “I was nervous and upset that day, Mr. Lubie. I know this isn’t a good paper.…”

  “I won’t count this one, Gloria.”

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Lubie!” Gloria’s big brown eyes were full of glints and extra highlights, and her red lips trembled as she smiled. />
  When the students had gone Lubie suddenly turned his chair around toward Robert. His half-formed face was worried; his fringe of shredded wheat looked as though it had the mange. Christ must have looked more like an Italian nobleman, Robert thought; those Renaissance painters were right after all. Lubie began to speak, but just then the dark hush of a B-47 came over the sky like wind through a cave, and for those long moments Lubie stared on, worried, involved, straight into Robert’s eyes until it all became impossibly embarrassing, and Robert turned away.

  “Bob,” Lubie said kindly, when the airplane had passed,

  “I got a call just now, from Alice.”

  “What?” The back of his throat felt for a moment as if it had dissolved. “What?”

  “She was worried about you, that’s all. She asked me to watch you and see if you were all right.”

  He felt relief so terribly strong it was painful. But what awful thing had he expected? After the relief came a hard point inside his chest, a cold little epicenter of anger. This slopbrain was his keeper, was he? This loose-jointed jerk with diarrhea of the emotions?

  “What else did she say?” he asked coldly.

  “That’s all, Bob—just that she didn’t think you were feeling very well.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Then why are you getting mad?”

  “I’m not getting mad, so lay off!”

  “Bob?”

  “Just lay off. Is that too hard to understand?”

  “Bob…”

  Christ, you couldn’t even insult the bastard.

  “Bob.” The deep wet eyes searched for his.

  “Stop loving me, you asshole!” And he got up and went out of the office.

  He went to the men’s room and looked at himself in the mirror.

  “Tough guy, huh?” he said to himself. “You lookin’ for trouble, Mac?” He brought his hands up to his chest, and the muscles in his arms felt like steel. He could break that piece of human spaghetti into segments with one short left. “Why didn’t you drop the bastard? Why didn’t you cold-cock him?” he said to the square, hard-eyed face in the mirror. What bright eyes! How clear and clean were the shining eyes of stupidity! Then he heard the outer door open and he began to wash his hands.

  “Bob.”

  “Oh, my God!” he said, and pushed out of there with his hands still wet.

  He went home. There was the carnival across the road. He left the car out in the driveway; what the hell? Alice met him at the kitchen door.

  “Bob, are you all right?”

  “Christ, yes I’m all right, so shut up!”

  She began to cry, and he felt rage, like a bucket of water down his neck. His ears popped, one after the other.

  “Slop!” he yelled. “You’re either cooling—killing!” His incoherence infuriated him. “Or you’re slop sauce! Wet sauce! Morons!” He screamed the last word in such a high, clear voice a cool part of him realized that if he’d been a musician with absolute pitch he could have identified that note.

  Alice bawled and her face was all screwed up. Girls her age looked like skinned hams when they cried—red and white and slimy-shiny.

  “Bob, Bobbobbob,” she stuttered.

  “Shut up!”

  “Bobbobbob.”

  He took her arm up close to the armpit and closed his hand like steel on it so that he had a good hold of the very bone that ran down the middle of it toward the outside. That stopped her all right, and she turned all white and cold.

  “That hurts!”

  “Well then shut up and mind your own Goddamned business and don’t go telling every stupid slophead there’s something wrong with me! I won’t…”

  “Let go of my arm!”

  “Don’t go around telling every slophead ass! I won’t be! I won’t be…beholden to…”

  “Let go of my arm!”

  Oh, he wanted to hit her. His arm ached to hit, his fist ached to go. Right there. Right there. He let go of her arm and she said, “You bastard. You cruel bastard,” and he hit her somewhere and she fell down on the floor, crying again right away. Alice.

  He was in his study. What happened outside of his study didn’t count. It was difficult to imagine that anything had happened outside of his study. He pulled out the deep drawer of his desk, and it ran smoothly on its runners. In back was that dark thing snug in its smooth shiny leather like a hand in a glove. Heavy. He pulled out the double handful of luminous holster and put it on the desk. It was dark, and went quite well against the leather insert of the desk top. U.S. was stamped on the flap. He unsnapped the brass tab and pulled the gun out by the greasy olive-drab G.I. sock it had been wrapped in for fourteen years. Pulled it deep-black out of its sock, thick across the butt; no rust. The wood grips had been worn well by his young hand; the grip safety moved willingly in its groove. He took out his handkerchief and polished away any little ridges of cosmoline until the rainbow colors faded into midnight on the slide. The clip release worked smoothly, and in the long clip the four little fat-bellied cartridges (only four so the spring wouldn’t tire) put up their coppered heads. The clip slid in click, and the slide came back slick-slack, closed then, picking up a cartridge in its teeth and placing it deep and solid in the chamber. An instrument of such precision.

  He could see his eye in the polished, re-blued slide.

  Would you even consider it? he thought.

  You are considering it.

  No, I’m not. Not really.

  Where would you place the muzzle of the gun?

  If I did it, I wouldn’t want to funk it.

  Well, where would you place it? The safety’s on, so there’s no danger.

  Right against my eye.

  Good. The temple’s too dangerous—you might just blind yourself. But if you point it straight at your eye, just a hair in toward your nose, the bullet will enter your brain through your optic nerve hole.

  I could hold the gun with my thumbs on the trigger.

  Then you’d have to work the grip safety with your fingers, and there’d be too much danger of the muzzle swinging out.

  I’d place the muzzle firmly against the tear duct of my right eye.

  Good. No hesitation shots, though. You don’t want to funk it.

  He put the pistol lightly on the desk and looked at it. Dark, dark blue it was; so final-looking. It was darker than the room, darker than the sky at night.

  He’d hit her so hard. He never hit a man that hard, and he’d hit men hard. In Zama he knocked that Kanaka half silly, even if he didn’t knock him out. Once he hit a sailor and the man ran away, after all his big threats and noise. But he hit Alice on the shoulder. It might have killed her if he’d hit her that hard in the head. Her tender flesh. He’d heard her go upstairs. She wasn’t crying any more.

  That was Alice he hit. He hit her because he hated her, because he was a monster.

  You shoot yourself when nothing is pleasanter than something.

  I am not even considering it.

  You shoot yourself when it doesn’t feel good any more to be alive.

  He picked up the gun, not intending to shoot himself with it, and he heard a soft opening noise and breath like chalk screeching on blackboard and a cat was on his back pulling him down. Arms scrabbled around his neck and locked with the strength desperation gave them. His legs came up and kicked the desk but he couldn’t keep from going over backwards. He did just have time to place the pistol back on the desk before he went over crash on the chairback and on Alice, arms and legs and squeezed flesh. She got a scissors around his waist and her arms around his head and pulled his face against her as hard as she could.

  “Bob! Bob! Bob!” she kept crying, like a little girl who was scared half to death.

  It was late afternoon, and he lay on their bed. His watch was on the bed table, and by moving his head he could see its stem and bezel and the two little half-moon bridges of its strap, but he didn�
�t feel like moving. The idea of time had occurred to him only because a few minutes ago the telephone had rung their number of shrill rings, and Alice had run down to silence it. She was still scared for him, and who could blame her? He had so neatly framed himself. As she’d got up he saw her being afraid that the telephone would irritate him too much.

  He hadn’t wanted to go to bed, but how could he convince her that he hadn’t meant to shoot himself? Like a lawyer he went over the case against him; he found it incredibly ridiculous and damning. He must prove to her that his interest in the gun was more a sort of research into the past, that it represented a part of him he had nearly successfully discarded (Oh, sure—especially after he’d savaged her at the kitchen door). But he hadn’t intended to shoot himself, not at any time. He wasn’t that sort of man. The pistol he kept only because it was much more deadly a machine than he himself, and it reminded him—even its weight back there, which he could feel every time he opened the drawer—that his talent for violence was useless, and that if he wanted to be a man he’d better prove himself in other ways. He hadn’t been in a fight for years and years, and hadn’t wanted to be in one, hadn’t wanted to hit anyone.…

  Alice came softly up the stairs, across the hall and into the room. She sat on the bed and leaned against the huge spindle of the footboard. The low sun came across and printed two of the window lights against her blouse, and went into her hair as if to illuminate it from the inside. Dark gold. She balanced her ash tray on her knee, and the smoke from her cigarette was blue and convoluted as it rose up into the sun.

  He could remember the ecstasy of violence, those quick answers he had been so good at giving back to any challenge. And he thought, If only I had been weaker, even as a little boy, then this damned reaction wouldn’t happen in me, because as a boy I would have figured it all out and made the rational decision only a boy can make, because he has to.

  Then his first reaction to something he didn’t like wouldn’t be to kill it. He wouldn’t have this growth, this thing that had metastasized itself onto his…what? Soul? Somewhere, anyway, inside him was a genuine red-white-and- blue Bugle-Unioneer: kill the bastards! Show the bastards! Stop all this talk-talk-talk-think-think-think and get it over with! Send in the marines! Grab Castro by his goddam beard and shove his cigar butt down his throat! Khrushchev, that bullying punk, that fat wart hog, that clever stupid liar, show him!