Sure. He could hear the cold, joyful voice down in there: I’m an American! They said we were decadent once before; they said we couldn’t fight; we were yellow; we rode on our fat behinds too much. Well, watch out! Because we’ve always fought you on your ground, and we still beat the piss out of you! Just don’t push us too far. Just don’t try us on our own ground, Buster! I’m an American! do you understand? You got to kill me first! Over my dead body! Stand up! Come on out back! Put up or shut up! Put your money where your mouth is!
And with the words came such sweet relief. Ah, he could feel too easily the solutions of the Bugle-Union, feel them in his muscles and in his strong hands, yearn for them and at the same time know that they meant death, only death.
Robert Francis Stiles, Phi Beta Kappa, Assistant Professor of English, Doctor of Philosophy, scholar, killer.
Alice turned her head toward him and blinked in the level sunlight. Her eyes were pale blue, and the pupils were black dots, deep where the light went into them and was lost.
“Bob, may I lie down next to you?”
“I don’t see why you want to. But I want you to.”
She put the ash tray on the table and smoothly turned on her spine so that she lay lightly beside him, her hand on his chest.
“Do you think I love you?” he asked in such a way that she would know the answer.
“Yes.”
“Don’t we know each other?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured into his ribs.
“I’m so sorry I hurt you.”
“I know.”
But how well did she know? He held her against him, his hand tight against the base of her spine where he could feel the little rise of flesh, his thumb over her hip bone. He held her at her center of gravity, her balancing point. If the bed had suddenly turned right up on its side he would still have held her there, for his other hand grasped the bed frame on the other side.
Did she think he was so sorry he would shoot himself? Well, was he? No. Therefore the suicide business had in a way got him off the hook, hadn’t it? And he did not deserve her forgiveness: Thou ne shalt eek make no lesynges in thy confessioun, for humylitee, peraventure, to seyn that thou hast doon synnes of which thou were nevere gilty.
Not quite the way the Parson meant it: he was not guilty of the sin of trying to kill himself, and yet he would, he now realized, let Alice believe this—let her believe it out of his love for her, which had never before been quite proven to him. I make lesynges, he thought; I make lies because, being the monster I am, I have to lie for love.
“Let me see where I hurt you,” he said.
“It’s nothing.”
“Let me see it.”
“Bob, it’s nothing. You didn’t hit me hard, really. Now, forget it.” She was almost crying again, and he could hardly get a breath.
“I could…” he began, then realized that he was about to say that he could kill himself.
Morning: gray light through the high windows, mixed with the blue of the as yet sunless sky. The delicate little lights of the windows were just becoming distinct; the wind belled the white curtains and held them tense and trembling, then slipped out from under to let them fall softly back against the sills. Alice still slept, on her side, her hands in a childlike pose, palm to palm beneath her cheek. There were the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes, just becoming visible in the increasing light, and the slightest haze of blonde fuzz on her upper lip, and the mole on her neck with the one thin dark hair growing out of it, and beneath her flesh slept the bones that never changed. He moved his face toward hers, and smelled her breath—warm, half-sweet; the slightly bitter breath of morning. Carefully he brought his arm up, up, so as not to move the bed at all, and softly pulled her nightgown away from her shoulder.
Already the bruise was as dark in the center as a plum, and from that dark center were threadlike scarlet radiations of tiny ruptured vessels, and a green penumbra fading into a yellow so angry it, too, would turn through green into the color of ripe plum. She slept on.
He put his hand beneath her nightgown, on her hip, then slid it down into the valley of her waist, and her elbow rose even in her sleep to let his hand rise up the stations of her ribs to the smooth muscles of her side and back. She sighed and turned, half-convulsively, and his hand lay on her breast that was soft from sleep. Still she slept.
The breath of a jet plane softly grew in the air as though it were somehow related to the morning, to the growing light and the wind that belled the curtains and moved a curl of Alice’s soft hair. It came on, louder, from no direction, soft to harsh; then louder until it was the wind-sound of a tornado, seeming to have in it grinding stones and breaking wood. He’d never heard a plane so low here—if it was just one plane. It might have been a hundred. The ash tray on the table jumped and rang, and Alice came awake as he jumped over her. He ran toward the window, fearing like a child that whatever it was might be coming just for him, right at the window. But even at the height of sound the sky was clear and blue—insanely clean and empty—, so immaculate an October blue the sound must be in his head. As the sound faded—as quickly as it had come—he turned to Alice in panic lest she hadn’t heard it too.
“Did it crash?” Alice said. She held the covers up to her chin as if for protection, and he was relieved to see that she had heard it too.
“I don’t think so,” he said. He could just hear, by holding his breath, the fading breath of the airplane. He thought of the sad major, and hoped the plane was not in trouble. “I hope he gets home all right.” But then he began to do some triangulations in his mind—the new east-west runway and its residue of stumps, the University, the air base, which wasn’t far away as the crow flies. If one made an equilateral triangle with a base of twelve miles representing the distance between the campus and the air base? A possibility, but he didn’t mention it to Alice, and that, too, was a kind of triangulation: he would not tell Alice of this possibility because she might not think he could take it. Anyway the plane might have been doing a below-radar attack exercise, or something like that.
“I thought for a second it was going to get right in bed with us,” Alice said.
Now all they could hear was the wind: it was going to be another of those days of sharp, clear air and high wind, warm and violent—the kind of day, he had heard, in which unstable people tended to go ’round the bend. But a beautiful October day. The leaves were reaching their peak of color, and even the scrubby little gray birches that grew like weeds across the land he wanted cleared were a pale and fragile yellow, bending in the wind like long-stemmed flowers.
“A beautiful day.”
“Oh, yes!” Alice said.
At breakfast she told him that it was Geoff Lubie who had called. “He was in a state. He was afraid you hated him.”
“I don’t hate him.”
“I told him that. I told him you were fine.”
Later, when Alice had gone into town to get the Sunday New York Times, he sat in the kitchen having another cup of coffee. He heard Forrest Sleeper’s red-and-white, or operational, Buick start up, the holed muffler sounding like someone coughing down a well. Then someone was knocking loudly on the front door. He went through the house toward this knocking sound, and opened the big door. It was Forrest Sleeper, and the big red man grinned down at him in a friendly, but somehow hurried, yellow-toothed fashion.
“She must of broke her crouper bone,” Forrest Sleeper said, then waited.
Robert finally said, “Yes.”
“The bomber scairt her right off her chair. Now her water broke.” Forrest Sleeper grinned and waited.
“Oh,” Robert finally said. Perhaps the man was mad. He seemed in a hurry, but he had to be answered as if, even in whatever emergency he felt himself to be in, friendliness demanded it.
The red-and-white Buick sat rumbling tubercularly in front of the house, and in the front seat, her soap-white face grinning at Forrest Sleeper’s back, sat the woman. Some front teeth we
re missing, and the black slots looked too deliberate to be real; her face was so rigid it might have been a paper mask. Then he saw that this was not a smile but the rictus of terrible pain.
“She ain’t due for two-three months yet,” Forrest Sleeper said, then waited. What answer did he want?
“All right,” Robert said, with a kind of inane wonder.
But this seemed to satisfy Forrest Sleeper, and he turned and went to his car. He waved as he slid down between the door and the seat, and as the car moved away the reason for it all became somewhat clearer; the car’s red-and-white side moved horizontally, like a screen, to reveal a playpen set on a crazy slant, and in the playpen, its little fingers grasping the top bar, its face just over the edge like a shmoo, was the child. This time the eyes were not so dull, and they looked, out of a head too impossibly round—round as a muskmelon—right across the road at Robert Stiles.
There they stood, Robert in his front door, the child in his bailiwick. The child stared and stared, then gave one sob that sounded less mournful than habitual. His pants, a loop of rolled, yellowed material, sagged so low that Robert could see, below his round belly, the root of his tiny penis. As Robert stared, the damp loop of cloth slid down the child’s bowlegs to his ankles, and he urinated with complete unselfconsciousness, the yellow stream pointing straight out in front of him except for an edge which hit a bar and splashed, a tiny sunburst of gold. Perhaps there was a certain folk wisdom in the slanted floor of the playpen.
Robert made himself walk to the very edge of the road, and there he stopped. The branch of the pasture pine above the playpen dipped low in the wind, yet the child continued to stare. Early-fallen leaves flew twisting and tipping between their eyes. Finally the child, with his stubby arms, rattled the bar as hard as he could—as if he were outside the cage of some animal he wanted to rouse. Robert, however, was incapable of moving. He couldn’t go back to his coffee; was he responsible that the child have its pants—or whatever that yellow glob of cloth was—modestly up? Alice should be home soon, he thought desperately.
One of the bowlegs moved, and one pigeon-toed foot came up, then down upon the pants. The foot raised itself again, and the pants came hideously up with it, only to fall back, revealing the nature of the adhesive. The child didn’t seem to notice this, and the foot, for lack of any particularly better place, stepped back down into what was in the pants.
Then the child moved its body quickly up and down from the knees, and smiled. Robert was shocked. Was it old enough so that he would have to smile back? If he had to, his smile would have been nearly as painful a rictus as the woman’s had been. He was simply, basically horrified by this homunculus, this natural sub-man in front of him. He had never been very near babies—in fact had never had to pick one up. The idea (aside from what accumulated in their diapers) made him shiver with near-pain. He might tear the precarious flesh apart, like overbaked chicken: he would look horrified at his own hand holding out an arm that had slurped out of its joint.
He looked down the road, but no Alice.
And suddenly the bomber was upon them, as if it had been hiding behind the pasture hill only to leap out into the sky. A million whistles, and the heavy shock waves of fractured air. There it was, stretched out across the earth, and it seemed to hang there, solid as a rock, as though the huge tearing sounds it made did not come from speed but from some terrible voice within it. He wanted to yell; then he looked over at the playpen and saw what he had never seen before, the constrictures, the mechanical virtuosity of pure terror. The child’s fists were in the air, the mouth split the face, angles appeared where there had been only pale turns of baby fat—it was as if he saw the bones within the head.
Then he was standing over the playpen while the child, with the instinct of a burrowing animal, thrashed itself and its loop of diaper into the lowest corner, where it tried to squeeze itself between the wooden bars. As the sound of the plane diminished the child’s single high note became audible, and Robert feared for its breath, because the one note wouldn’t stop.
Would it calm down now? It didn’t. The bowlegs kicked in the air like a swimmer’s, and only the knees occasionally found purchase on the faded board floor of the playpen. Like a dreamer Robert saw his own hand going down as though it sank in water, going down into the pen toward this animal. He took hold of its shirt in order to turn it around a little, and the body jerked in his fingers like a wild thing, a fish on a line: a thrill of horror that it was so alive. He held to its shirt and tried to turn it so that he might take it safely by its trunk somehow, but then the next bomber hung above them as stunning and rocklike as the first, and he scooped the rigid child anyhow into his arms and held it against his chest. The huge airplane moved ahead of its multiple shriek flat across the sky, and in his arms the child’s spasms shook him; its more frightening scream wouldn’t ever stop. He must talk to it. He didn’t know its name, but words came to him—words that didn’t seem strange at the time, or ever, really, coming as they did from his limited vocabulary of tenderness. “You ain’t shit,” he crooned. “You ain’t shit, you ain’t shit,” as its spasms subsided and it began more rationally to clutch him with its little arms and to try to hide its head in his armpit. Its heart beat against Robert’s fingers as though it tapped at him through something as thin and tough as the wall of a tent, and the scream, like the child’s fear, was muffled and smothered against his chest.
In his arms was the weight and tinyness of the living child; there was the perfect hand that clutched his sleeve, and precise articulations of the little fingers, the tiny nails thin as flakes of mica, yet not random. Fear left it, but this process was a function of Robert’s arms; he killed the child’s fear, he could feel it. A weird symbiosis, for the child’s body and his body in that long moment seemed to be just one body, and in a way that was mindless and yet complicated beyond his understanding he took the child’s fear inside his own chest and killed it there. Killed it, whatever it was, he thought exultantly.
The wind came in bursts so strong they swayed him on his feet, and he had to side-step in order to keep his and the child’s balance. A maple leaf dragged its claw across the trodden ground.
Would there be another of those monstrous airplanes come over the hill to beat them down? He held on to the child. But no more came, and when he turned back toward his house Alice stood beside the car with the thick batch of newspaper in her arms.
“I’m babysitting,” he said. “His mother had some kind of accident and Forrest Sleeper took her to the doctor.”
As he brought the child toward her she neither frowned nor smiled, but on her face there was an expression he couldn’t remember having seen there before—surmise, a flicker of warmth, perhaps, as though she were making a discovery that was sweet but incommunicable.
“The poor woman!” she said, but still she was preoccupied; still with the face of a dreamer she watched the child comforted in his arms. Behind her rose the high white house, and the leaves of the rock maples billowed dark red before it, violent as fire.
The Buck in Trotevale’s
I watch my son pursue an apple across the floor. He is seven months old. He grabs the shiny globe with both hands and puts it to his mouth: squeak, squeak, he gums it. There it goes, rolling bumpily beneath a chair, while he gravely watches. Onward! He’ll corner the damned thing. Some day he’ll get his teeth into such promising fruit. Meanwhile, he tries. And tries again—he won’t give up. I am sure that I was never so determined. Although his eyes are mirror images of mine, I am uncomfortably aware of an alien deepness there, as if even now he were governed by a discipline I have never known. He works at his apple as he does at his world, single-mindedly, until it either accommodates him or shows itself to be impervious. Now the apple has escaped him again, and he watches it until it stops rolling, marks it well before arranging himself for the long crawl toward it. He rarely cries…and I wonder, knowing that they will always be mine, at the injustice of this stranger’s inevitab
le wounds.…
When I was fourteen, coping with that world of benevolent rulers—coping with an instinctive directness much like my son’s—Mr. Brown rented our furnished room. Now, I believe Mr. Brown to have been a kind of Yankee, although I didn’t at first because he came from the South—from Massachusetts, where all those Massachusetts hunters come from, the ones who park in the middle of the road and shoot heifers for deer, not knowing the difference; proudly (it is said every year) bearing their pied trophies through Leah Town Square on the fenders of their Buicks, deer tags fluttering from bovine ears. I never saw this, myself, but at fourteen, New Hampshire boys are careful license-plate watchers. Massachusetts. I still hear some disapproval echoing in my older voice.
I didn’t know Mr. Brown very well at first. He was very quiet, and had a talent for missing squeaky boards and squeaky stairs. I’d see him in the upstairs hall once in a while, between his room and the bathroom. He’d come home from work, wash, and change his clothes before walking downtown to the Welkum Diner for his supper. I can see him walking down Maple Street: tall, superbly balanced, each foot reaching the sidewalk as if searching carefully for purchase. His heels rose lightly before each step, and I believed that if the sidewalk had suddenly tipped right up on its side, Mr. Brown would have been ready for it. He was in his late sixties, I suppose—an almost too handsome man with his tanned face and thick white hair, his straight shoulders—and yet I like to think of him as being in his seventies. Seventy-seven makes me think of him: the two numerals spare and lean as the man, trim as are most men who grow old and active. He walked a lot. He even skied, and on winter Sundays we would see him on Pike Hill doing his graceful old-fashioned Christies on the unbroken snow, each long ski under control, his ski clothes fresh and dry. In the summer he hired a high-school boy and a motorboat and water-skied on Lake Cascom. His age was a little more apparent when he wore bathing trunks, of course. His belly bulged out. But even then, seeing that taut little pot, you knew that it contained only enough innards to run the lean body. There was no surplus about Mr. Brown.
A High New House Page 7
