Landscape: Memory

by Matthew Stadler

  And Duncan's hands rougher still, pushing and pulling me furiously about the bed, us sweating so slick we slide across each other's bare skin and stuck together at our mouths and legs entangled. I'm blind and possessed now each night with the desperate hunger of it all, and not a conscious thought in my head, the whole of me filled by the indistinct all of it rushing through our skins and the musty slobbery slick push of him into me. I can't think past the roar rolling out my body, of sinking our soaked soft bodies as completely into each other as time will allow, then empty. Still and empty. The window is open to the night air. That soft sound is in me, and sleep. I am so simple, and nodding. A loll and lull all in me, and so soft and small all warm in flannel, the lull of song. (Mother's voice soft in song. I'm so small and warm and nodding, wrapped in warm flannel. And tiny little fishermen sailed, she sang, all on a moonlit sea, sailed out inside a wooden shoe, she sang, Winky and Blinky the dog.)

  15 SEPTEMBER 1915

  I've felt better since saying those confusing things I said to Duncan a week ago. I have no idea why. I don't know what more to say to him. I will not, I imagine, find the words to make myself clear. I won't find words that satisfy me.

  "I worry about this," for instance, is just wrong. "This worries me" gets closer. It suggests that I'm unable to stop the worrying. But it also looks to me like some "thing" hovering around me, kneading my flesh and soul like bread dough, with an evil grin on its amorphous face. "I'm worried with it" feels better because' it doesn't assign blame. Because "it" and "I" are together there is "worry." It's like a meteorological condition. The wet ocean air made cold condenses into rain. Just as I have blown in among these thoughts and become worry. Worry. Worry. Now that ugly sound has begun to fall apart. Really, what is there that ought to be held inside that sound? Is "worry" a physical feeling somewhere inside the brain? Is it a fidgeting of the limbs? A slight trembling below the throat that rumbles intermittently, hardly noticed until some still, silent moment? It worries me, this endless train of thoughts. It's a thread I began to pull, and now it's all unraveling.

  When it tugs at Duncan I start to fall apart. There are questions I cannot ask. It's like walking a mine field, fearing that the depths of this tender land will rip open and reveal something unfathomable. I stammer and stutter in the face of so many wrong things to say. I groan in my throat, that pure sound with my mouth pushed against his neck. I give that sound to him, fearing the dangerous words. I give him my tongue, often just to look at with my mouth open and empty, like I am speaking but no word could possibly fit. Maybe my throat rumbles like a baby's. I give him my tongue across his closed eyes and over his nose and lips. It says so much more by touch than by the words it could make.

  I give him my body and only then do I feel a sense of clarity. It is our way of speaking, the only language that can carry whatever it is we're trying to say.

  20 SEPTEMBER 19I 5

  "Wax: grand hg teday!! Ten, two, fire. 55. D.'' This is a note Mr. Dunphy left me, right with my laundry so I know it's for me. He's afflicted with some disorder, Mrs. D. tells me.

  Robert,

  Today the aeroplanes came and dropped chocolates. We're stacked corpses up to make parapets, covered by thin mud. Hands fall out to wave or brush across one's face when the artillery shakes the dirt down. They shell the middle ground into nothing and launch the gas and we follow, endless waves of men stumbling into a stinking muddy grave.

  A photo in the news. A bullet, many. Mortar ripping through a line of men. It will end as simply as it began, with a photo in the news.

  I lost to Unt in tennis today, finishing up the match by launching the salty little felt ball over the fences and leaping the net for a victory hug. Unt has a general recreation course in the Ladies' Physical Education program, and Mr. Wilson generously allowed us to recreate together this week, setting us up with equipment and a brief review of the rules up on the courts in Strawberry Canyon.

  The hills up back of the university are thrilling, particularly there by the canyon. Thick green groves rise up the steep hills and then the yellow brown grasslands lift out beyond the tree-tops. We played in the early morning so the mists still hung in the trees. The sun cut clean across everything, giving a wash of warm light to the air and the sturdy buildings, jumbled about on the low stretch of hills west of us.

  I held the salty felt ball up to my nose and smelled its lovely smell.

  (What was that soft song she sang? I held the salty felt ball close to my nose and it rolled around so deep inside me, calling at that song ... a tiny little fisherman sailed on a moonlit sea . . . and that salty felt smell, feeling it near my nose, my wet little mouth open. Winky, I know, and Blinky the dog, and damp on my dingle and Mother's sweet song.)

  29 SEPTEMBER 1915

  12 OCTOBER 1915

  I went to the city to get some of Father's suits, much to Mother's delight. I hadn't been at my old house since the spring and it made me feel queer. I walked along the ridge on Pacific up to Lyon, to where it all just drops off west to the Presidio and north to the Fair. The golden domes spread out like they've been there a thousand years.

  There was Mother, the parlor windows open and her warbling out into the misty air. She's been attempting famous arias since she first started singing, sometime before history began. I banged in through the front door and felt even dizzier smelling the familiar smell.

  "Pumpkin?" I heard her coming clip-clop on sharp-toed shoes across the hardwood floor.

  "Hello, Mummy," I called back. And then there was a moment, a long familiar moment.

  "You" she said, hugging me up to her bustle. "you're a perfect mess," and the moment passed. She rustled my wild, thick hair and looked me over.

  "Thank you," I replied cordially. "I'm perfectly starving too."

  "Oh, lovely," she went on, "what a fortunate coincidence. I'm a bit peaked as well." She looked to the kitchen thoughtfully. "Surely we can scrape up some small morsel from the larder," and she shuffled on through the dining room to find out.

  I looked around the parlor to see what had changed and what was still the same. Nothing had changed. I wanted to curl up on the davenport and have tea. I wanted Father to read Melmoth .

  "Fruit, tenderness?"

  I peeked in over her shoulder to see what fruit it was.

  "Yucko, nix on the melon." It looked fairly old and soggy, the little rind lips all curled in like an old man with his false teeth out.

  " 'Yucko,' pumpkin?"

  "Duncan says it, if he doesn't like something," I explained.

  "He certainly didn't learn it from his father," Mother observed pointlessly.

  "He didn't learn any English from his father," I said.

  Mother just looked at me and curled her mouth into a disapproving frown.

  "Cold roast beef?" she offered.

  "Yummo. With horseradish, please, and may I have some red wine?"

  "Are you perfectly serious about the wine. Maxwell? On a Tuesday afternoon?"

  "A hearty red is perfect with cold beef," I tried, mimicking Mrs. Dunphy's sensible explanation from the previous afternoon.

  "I'm sure it is, dearest, I was merely questioning the hour."

  "Just one glass then. Surely one glass will do me no harm."

  Mother got out the wine and beef and spooned a few hefty

  scoops of horseradish into a dish. "Cress?" she offered, her head plunged deep into the ice box. "Yes, thank you."

  We picnicked on our little lawn and discussed school, which I said was not much better, emphasizing, in particular, Hygiene and the trial of Latin conjugations. Pliny I enjoyed well enough, as it was not the boring Younger and his limitless epistles, but rather the quirky Elder and his queer little bits about magical trees and frogs with feet growing out from their mouths. But Cicero, I assured Mother, was even more tedious in the original, clacking along like a judicious cow, all moo and maw and anno domini and such sounds as a broken Italian, stumbling along over his fragmented syllables, might ma
ke.

  "The dead languages only come alive in the mouth of a true lover of the tongue," Mother explained obscenely, taking a wet lump of horseradish with just a sliver of beef. "Latin is as so much dust if one has no passion for the living culture it gave voice to. Perhaps your instructor has no feeling for Cicero."

  I cleansed my mouth with a sprig of cress and a splash of cold soda. "Duncan says I should try Greek."

  "Or learn Latin from someone who can give it spark."

  "But Professor Deutsch teaches all the courses that interest me." I sniffed at the heady wine.

  "Precisely, pumpkin." And then Mother paused, to great dramatic effect. "I've taken the liberty of sending for a few catalogs from schools back East."

  This was both good and bad. I rather fancied going back East, but I'd not yet gotten up the nerve to discuss it with Duncan.

  "Mother," I whined unconvincingly, leaving my precise feelings quite unclear.

  "Professor Wilson is still at Harvard, you know." This remark was typical.

  "Fine, Mother, Duncan and I will just go study with Professor Wilson," I answered sarcastically. I was glad for her help, but it seemed she was pursuing her own little fantasies and not mine. "The point is to find a way we can be in the same program and not have to waste time with frivolities like Hygiene."

  "Or Military Training," she added pointedly.

  "Right."

  "Your father is a Harvard alumnus, pumpkin, and that should help considerably."

  "And what about Duncan?"

  "I wasn't aware he was interested in Harvard, tenderness."

  "He's not. That's the point. I can't just make him go there."

  Mother gargled a bit of soda demurely and spit it into the grass.

  "There's no need to make anyone do anything, pumpkin. I'm only suggesting you consider Harvard as a sensible alternative to a situation which you yourself have led me to believe is unsatisfactory. If Duncan finds that alternative inviting as well, then he'll have to think about arranging it. I presumed he hadn't thought about it because he saw no need to."

  I pushed my finger deeper into the lawn, propping a bit of cress in the little hole I'd created by my nervous habit, filling it in with a bit of loose soil.

  "The point, Mother, is that I'm not going to Harvard, or anywhere else for that matter, without Duncan."

  She sat in silence for a moment, digesting this new thought.

  "Isn't that rather unreasonable. Maxwell? I'd think it would be an awful burden on him."

  "It isn't,'' I fairly yelled, barely getting out that crucial last syllable. "We want to be in the same program and that's what we'll arrange. Here or back East or whatever."

  Our little conversation dwindled away into a palliative series of ifs and waits and maybes and sees, and we licked our plates clean and went back in to get the suits.

  17 OCTOBER 1915

  That Men's Club fellow took me aside and charmed me into saying yes I would come along for their little festival in the woods. Actually I stood my ground, insisting that Duncan be invited as well, though no club members had met him, and we shook hands to seal the agreement. I was uncertain it was the right thing. In fact, I was fairly certain it was not, but flattery is never lost on me and really we both like the woods well enough to enjoy ourselves even if it is with a bunch of fat, boring men, as Duncan had described them.The way Fletcher described it (his name is Fletcher, though he allowed that I may call him "Fletch"), we were going on a picnic with delightful food and unspecified fun. He alluded to a game, a sort of treasure hunt, but withheld the details. We were to meet them at the corner of Euclid and Rose at five o'clock p.m.

  * * *

  The first thing they did was to blindfold us. Duncan had agreed to go because I was so insistent and I'd managed to make it sound like fun.

  "You didn't mention blindfolds," he said to me as we bounced about in the bed of the truck they'd picked us up in.

  "Fletcher didn't say anything about them," I answered. "He did say the game would be challenging. Maybe it's part of the game." We were sitting on the truck bed's dirty floor with seven or eight other boys our age and two or three of the elegantly sweatered men. All the boys wore blindfolds, I believe, and the men kept quiet. Duncan started talking to his neighbor, shouting over the roar of the engine and the noise of our bumpy ride up into the hills.

  "Have you been in the club long?" he asked from behind his blindfold.

  The one who answered had a voice I'd heard in Health class, though I couldn't remember the face that went with it. "I'm not in the club," he said. "I got a card once, but I never went." His face came back to me, a soft round face with blush on the cheeks and thin lips.

  "Same here," Duncan said to him. "We got a card but it seemed dumb to go."

  "Yeah," his neighbor agreed. "But this sounded okay. There's supposed to be food and a film."

  "A film?" Duncan shouted back.

  "Yeah. They've got a projector and the screen. That's why it has to be dusk and all. They're showing it in the woods."

  "Max," Duncan called, turning toward me. "What about this film?"

  I didn't know anything about a film. "What film?" It seemed an unlikely thing. Where would they find electricity?

  "This guy says there's a film." It was all too confusing. I didn't want to bother Duncan with it.

  "Yeah, the film," I improvised. "In the woods, right?"

  "Right. Why didn't you mention it?"

  "The film?"

  "Yeah, the film."

  "I didn't mention it?"

  "Max."

  But he gave up and we sat in the dusty truck bed, rumbling blindly along the winding road, on our way to the mysterious picnic.

  When the truck finally stopped we were in a cool, shaded woods, east of Berkeley I surmised. The ride had been uncomfortable and dizzying, and I felt a great sense of relief when they finally told us to take our blindfolds off It was indeed the woods that run by Wildcat Canyon. Duncan, just to be charming, at first refused to remove his blindfold. He stumbled around by the dusty shoulder of the road, bruising his shins on the truck fender and moaning as if he were an old man. It was just his way of telling them how stupid the whole thing seemed. Of course, his subtle critique was lost on them, and I finally convinced him to just take the damned thing off so we could get on with the fun part.

  The sun was hanging low to the west, its light dappling through the green branches. The dust that had lifted off the road hung in the air, illuminated by shafts of sunlight. We sat in a small grassy meadow just a few yards off the road. "Fletch," as he now introduced himself, began to explain the treasure hunt while the other men in the club handed out small flags to each of the guests. The flags, in fact, had been our blindfolds only moments before.

  "There is a treasure hidden in these woods. The picnic begins when it is found." I didn't much like the idea. Holding food for ransom is among the lowest forms of motivation. I harrumphed to myself and vowed to find the treasure pronto. "To find the treasure," Fletch continued, "you simply follow the markers in the woods." He stopped and smiled as if concluding his short lecture. But a few things had been left unclear.

  "What do the markers look like?" the round-faced fellow asked, anticipating my very question. All of the sweatered men looked at one another and chuckled. This was some sort of secret joke.

  "That," Fletch said, "is the hard part. You'll know them when you see them."

  "Do we have to be blindfolded?" Duncan asked, holding up the little flags we all held.

  "Those aren't blindfolds," the man who'd driven explained. "Those are flags."

  "You've got to keep your flag to stay in the game," Fletch added. "If one of us takes your flag away you're out." The game was beginning to sound like fun. I still wondered how on earth anyone would find a marker in so big a woods with no idea what the marker was going to be. But the thought of being chased and eluding capture was really quite appealing. Duncan raised his brow at me, evidently delighted, too, by this n
ew twist.

  "Once we find this treasure, then we eat?" I wanted to make certain everything was laid out straight.

  "If one of you finds it, you all eat."

  The sun had sunk into the treetops, visible every now and then through the thick branches. The club men were sitting by the truck chatting, passing a little flask around. I'd started off into the woods, wandering in the meadow with Duncan and two other boys. The ground was firm and grassy but quickly became bare as we left the meadow for the trees. I could hear quail cooing and what I thought might be the distant buzz of an aeroplane. Looking up, though, I saw nothing mechanical in the sky, only a wisp of a cloud and the blue sky. The soft bird songs were suddenly shattered by loud screaming, as the men came rushing down off the road at full speed. The game, evidently, had begun.

  * * *

  I bolted straight down a small drop and into the cool woods, Duncan running a zigzag path to my right. The other guests had gone off in a different direction, unwisely I thought, for the chances of eluding the men near the road seemed slight. Already a small handful had been caught. I could hear the laughing and derisive yells of the club men rippling through the trees. I kept steady on, running and leaping by instinct, not really thinking out my course or direction. I caught a last glimpse of Duncan as he jumped up onto a rock outcropping with two or three following him. The air was cool and full with the smell of eucalyptus. My footfall crunched the long dry leaves and peels of bark with every step. I could hear nothing but that and my breathing and the wind whistling past my ears.

  It was a thrill that ran through me like blood. The running and leaps and dodges, down farther and farther into these shadowed woods. It made me think kindly of Duncan's love of running, though I still couldn't fathom why he'd run on a track or a straight road. Careening through the wild woods. That's what thrilled me. Running like a cascading creek or like a deer. The blood was pounding in my ears. I could touch the trees as I flew past them, adjusting my direction in midstride and cutting back across to slip between two tall firs.