by Chuck Kinder
Suddenly Lindsay confronts Ralph with everything Jim has told her. She asks Ralph to tell her the truth about the letters and his endless lies and his other ladies-in-waiting and, most of all, why would he tell Lindsay that Alice Ann had cancer?
Ralph, clearly caught off guard, splutters that to begin with, Alice Ann has had a touch of cancer, but might be cured any day now. In fact, if the utter truth be told, he has already more or less left Alice Ann recently. Ralph says that he is at a writer’s retreat, or somewhere like that, where he is pulling body and soul back together. And as soon as he does, which might be any day now, he fully plans to come to Lindsay at long last, to join Lindsay, and they will begin to live their life together. And then Ralph rails on and on about “that asshole” Jim Stark. Ralph says that Jim Stark is a legendary liar. Ralph implores Lindsay not to believe a single word about anything coming from the lying motormouth of that hypocrite deceitful running dog Jim Stark. Ralph says that Jim Stark would stab his own mother in the back if it would do him any good. Ralph vehemently suggests that for Lindsay’s own sake she take his advice and cross the street anytime she sees that Jim Stark character coming.
Too late for that, is what occurs to Lindsay. Whereupon she cuts the conversation with Ralph short and returns to bed, to find that Jim Stark character wide-awake, smoking dope in the dark.
White Men in the Tropics
1
Appropriately enough, Ralph first read Jack London’s 1913 alcoholic memoir, John Barleycorn, when he himself was drying out at a place called Duffy’s, which was a clinic and sort of rest camp for recovering alcoholics three hours north of San Francisco and, by chance, hardly a stone’s throw from London’s famous Valley of the Moon. The major characters in London’s book were London himself, a laborer, sailor, writer, a man of intellectual and physical vigor, impetuous, full of dreams and doubts and frustrations; his beautiful wife, Charmian, who lived with London in the Valley of the Moon; and John Barleycorn, alcoholism personified. Although London first got drunk at the age of five, again at seven, and drank steadily throughout his life, he proclaims at book’s end that although he will continue to drink occasionally, he has the Long Sickness under control. It will never afflict him again.
Ralph was at Duffy’s three days before he even tried to call Alice Ann (who had no idea where he was, for his student girlfriend had driven him to that sorry place, after a weeklong binge), enough time for him to get over the worst of the willies.
Alice Ann had not been at home then or any other time he had called since. Maybe Alice Ann just wasn’t answering the phone. That was possible. Twice when Ralph called he had gotten a busy signal; then when he called right back, nobody answered. Ralph, after all these years, was on to all of Alice Ann’s tricks. She was pissed, sure. All that other woman business. And Ralph had been hitting the old sauce a little too hard lately. Nobody had to tell him that. So sure, things had gotten a little out of hand of late. But Ralph had been under a lot of pressure, and he was just another weary human, after all. All Ralph really needed was a little peace and quiet, and some time alone to get body and soul back together.
Ralph just happened upon that copy of Jack London’s John Barleycorn in Duffy’s reading room one serendipitous morning. He read it through cover to cover that same day. Ralph realized that there was an important import for him, a terrible meaning, in the pages of that book, and he wanted to take it to heart, before it was too late for him, just as it finally got to be too late for Jack London, for all Jack London’s physical vigor and strength and worldly success. According to Jack London, his own drinking had gotten out of hand those two years he had sailed the Snark throughout the tropics, for white men in the tropics undergo radical changes of nature. They become savage, merciless. And they drink as they never drank before, for drinking is one of the many forms of degeneration that set in when white men are exposed to too much white light.
This Duffy’s was a high-toned joint, Ralph planned on assuring Alice Ann, if he ever got that woman on the phone. At Duffy’s you were treated like a white man, Ralph would assure Alice Ann. Unlike some of these kinds of joints he had tried out in the past. At Duffy’s they called you a patient, and a uniformed nurse was on hand. They let you taper off at Duffy’s. The first day you got a stiff belt every waking hour, every third hour the second day. They called these “hummers.” Finally, though, nothing. Finally, you were cast adrift hummerless, but a fellow probably would not go into convulsions on a program like this, Ralph would assure Alice Ann. Convulsions were Ralph’s greatest fear in life. He would lie awake at night, sweating, gritting his teeth, waiting for the worst. The least tingle, the slightest twitch in his shoulder, say, or neck, made him go rigid with regret. What Ralph feared above all else was the same death as his dad had suffered, his dad, whom Ralph had loved dearly, a drunken man who drowned in his own vomit.
Nights really were the worst times there at Duffy’s for Ralph. The shakes and sweats really were a scream. The willies primitive, uncanny. Doors slammed on purpose. Rats ran in the walls at night there at Duffy’s, although the staff swore there were no rats around for miles. There was no television in your room. No late- night movies to blur your life with as you changed channels as fast as you humanly could. Worst of all, there was no phone in your room. No late-night long distance in your life. You couldn’t even dial a goddamn prayer to keep you company. If there had been a phone in his room, Ralph knew he would live on it, dialing Alice Ann at all hours, letting that phone ring off the wall, half hoping almost anybody, no matter who, even a stranger, another man even, would answer. Some nights there at Duffy’s the air conditioner, a noisy, leaky contraption at best, would go on the blink. You boiled in your own juices like a lobster in a pot. You could ratde your litde claws against the walls all night for all the good it got you. You’d throw open a window. Moths would collect on the screen, their eyes swelling from their small, powdery faces, black, beady things, locking onto your every move.
Ralph spent most of that day he had read Jack London’s John Barleycorn book sitting out in intense sunlight beside a drained swimming pool. He sat there in a hot aluminum deck chair as though doing penance. His shirt and pants stuck to his skin. His feet sweat in his socks and shoes. Not unlike Jack London, Ralph was one weary human, all right, and he knew it. He slowly rubbed a wrist over his sweating forehead and then studied and sniffed at the moisture. He took off his sunglasses and gazed about hopefully for something, anything, to look at that might brighten his spirits, that might lift his dark mood. On the tennis court next to the drained pool two middle-aged men listlessly lobbed an orange ball back and forth. Both were bareback and had sort of bewildered looks on their faces, as though they had both woken up that morning astonished to find themselves where and who they were. Their jiggling flesh looked feverishly yellow to Ralph. They were attorneys-at-law, Ralph believed. Big-time attorneys-at-law. Any number of professional and business bigwigs were at Duffy’s, including that fellow who claimed he was the president of a bank and wept at meetings. A Stanford professor had the cabin next to Ralph’s. You never saw that fellow, though, just heard his sad, noisome traffic all night. Strange fellows, all right, the lot of them. Drunks every one of them, true, but not one real derelict on the premises, a fact which provided Ralph with some small measure of comfort.
Then this strange fellow sat down beside Ralph at poolside. Ralph wasn’t on the lookout for any company. Ralph had his own problems. The fellow had a helmet of white hair and a meaty red face. He was short and fat, and he wheezed when he talked. The fellow bummed a cigarette from Ralph as soon as he flopped down, and then, while he chain-smoked Ralph’s cigarettes as relentlessly as Ralph, he started right up. I don’t belong in this godforsaken dump, the fellow told Ralph. He had his drinking problem in a headlock, he went on, and he didn’t have any idea why he was buried away here in this Duffy’s place. He couldn’t really recall how he got there, true. He remembered getting off a plane and tossing a couple at the airport b
ar, then bang, the next thing he knows he’s buried here at Duffy’s. He felt like a man who had been kidnapped, held against his will. Held for ransom. It was his wife, the fellow said. She was somehow behind all this. She wanted to bury him alive.
I’m not a drunk, the fellow told Ralph. To call a man a drunk is a serious charge. That kind of talk could hurt a good man’s prospects. He was an important man who traveled to the four corners of the world on big business, he told Ralph. It was nothing for him to hop a jet to European capitals or, say, the Middle East, to meet somebody important on big business. He knew important people everywhere. Real earthshakers. He had bent elbows with the great and the near-great. Just who do you know, anyway? the fellow had suddenly asked Ralph out of the blue.
Who do you know big in London, Paris, Berlin, for that matter? Who do you know in Egypt? Ralph admitted he didn’t know a soul in Egypt.
2
That hot day by the drained pool, after the strange fellow had shoved off, the sad pock sounds of the tennis ball made Ralph uneasy. He could feel his heart racing, and there was a twitch in his neck. He thought something was about to go wrong and he wanted to head it off. He wanted to escape it. Just close his eyes and pray it would pass by, maybe happen instead to one of those big-time attorneys. Or to them both. What did he care? Why not them instead of him? How old was Jack London, anyway, when he kicked the bucket? A chill passed over Ralph and he shuddered.
Ralph pushed himself up from the deck chair and shambled over to the edge of the drained pool. Shading his eyes like a salute, Ralph peered intently at the dry bottom. On a scorcher like today a fellow could sure use a little dip, Ralph thought. There was no serious drought this year. The hills weren’t even baked brown yet. Here at Duffy’s they let you flush your toilet to your little heart’s content. So where was the swimming pool’s water, then? That was one big mystery here at Duffy’s. You had to imagine the worst. You had to imagine some poor devil, some so-called patient, found one morning floating facedown.
I am a patient, Ralph thought. He was a drunk now and then, too, but there at Duffy’s Ralph was a patient with a little drinking problem, that’s all. There was even an airline pilot at Duffy’s as a patient. A fellow who flew those big babies, those 747s, all over the world. Now, that was something. That made you stop and consider. So Jack London claimed he could do the work of five men even when he was drunk. So Jack London could navigate a vessel through the reefs and shoals and passages and unlighted coasts of the coral seas. Dose and doctor, pull teeth, pull some poor Polynesian sailor back from death’s door. One thousand words a day. Heave up anchor from forty fathoms. One thousand words a day rain or shine, even when he was drunk, was what Jack London claimed. But when it came to dosing and doctoring himself, when it came to pulling himself back from death’s door, Jack London had come up short. In the saving-of-his-own-life department, Jack London had turned out to be nothing but chopped liver.
Ralph flicked his half-smoked Camel into the drained pool. When Ralph was a boy, he could hold his breath underwater longer than anybody he ever knew. He would swim underwater, close to the bottom, for hours, it seemed. He would hold his breath and dead-man-float for so long people would panic. Ralph could remember his dad shouting and shouting to him once from a lakeshore. He remembered his dad, half drunk from an afternoon of beer drinking in the sun, splashing frantically toward deep water to save his son.
3
Brew a liquor from molasses and sugarcane and put pots of it out in the jungle where the wild monkeys can find it. They get so drunk they can't jump. Catch those drunk monkeys and dress them up in red suits, then anchor them with small chains to posts in the garden. Their antics out there frighten all the other wild monkeys away. That is how the farmers of Paraguay make scarecrows.
That night the air conditioner went on the blink, and in moments Ralph felt like a monkey in a red suit chained in some foreign garden. Ralph paced his room, smoking like a stove. Sleep was a goddamn bad joke. Ralph felt nervous, irritable, less moral by the minute. Thank God, Ralph had a little something stashed in his cabin for snakebite. The quart of Four Roses was hidden in the toilet tank.
The thing about Duffy’s was, if a fellow backslid on the premises, got caught taking a nip, just one, that fellow was cast out on his own, cast out from Duffy’s forever. Ralph turned off the light and pulled a chair to the open window. He pinched aside the curtains and peered into the dreadful night. He could hear crickets and the traffic from a distant highway. Fireflies blinked from the hot dark like the cigarette embers of a posse.
Ralph splashed a finger of whiskey into a water glass and drank it down in a manful gulp. He poured another finger, then placed the bottle on the floor between his feet. Ralph wondered if there was a steady stream of traffic at his home in Menlo Park. Men coming and going. Truck drivers, bikers, sailors, marauders, hairy arms thick with tattoos holding his slender blond wife, monstrous acts of love. Ralph heard a door slam and his heart thumped. He clutched his chest. Somehow Duffy knew. The jig was up.
The toilet tank had been dumb. That’s the first place an old ex-drunk like Duffy would look. Ralph sniffed at the water glass, then hurried to the bathroom. He held the glass under water hot enough to scorch his hand. He sniffed the glass again, dried it, put his toothbrush in it, and placed it carefully on the sink. Back at the window Ralph held his breath, listening and staring into the night for the least sign. Ralph picked up the bottle, tiptoed to the door, pressed his ear to it.
The deck furniture around the pool had been put up for the night, so Ralph sat cross-legged on the warm concrete. He took a pull of Four Roses, then placed the botde before him. What he wouldn’t give for a smoke. He wiped a hand over his sweating forehead, dabbed at his stinging eyes with his shirttail. What he wouldn’t give for a little dip, some cool relief. If that goddamn pool had a quart of water in it, Ralph would take the plunge, clothes and all, what did he care, the heat was that intense. Ralph imagined himself swimming laps, up and back, on his way to nowhere, for hours, all night, until at last his old heart just caved in.
Ralph saw the glowing cigarette ember before he heard the footfalls in the road’s gravel. He flattened onto his stomach on the warm concrete. The person approaching was humming softly, humming a tune of some kind, like a little ditty, it sounded to Ralph. Sailors hum ditties, Ralph thought suddenly. Seamen. Duffy had been a merchant seaman in his youth. Ralph’s first thought was to sail the bottle of Four Roses out into the darkness behind him, letting it take its chances, hoping it would land softly on grass without a sound. But it wouldn’t. Not in a million years. That bottle would smash on the only rock in that dark field, an explosion that would wake the dead. Clutching the bottle before him, Ralph crawled to the pool’s edge. He stared down into that black abyss. The humming seaman approached. Ralph swung a leg over the pool’s edge; his foot found the ladder. The humming seaman approached. Grasping the bottle neck with one hand, Ralph descended, vanishing without a trace.
Ralph crouched with his back pressed into a corner of the drained swimming pool that desperate night at Duffy’s. Ralph watched the mysterious seaman who stood almost directly above him at the pool’s edge smoking, a black silhouette against the dark sky. Coastal storm clouds covered the stars, and Ralph could hear the wind stir in the trees along the gravel road. Ralph felt a drop of rain. He felt another. The mysterious seaman looked up at the sky and held his hand out palm up. The seaman flicked his cigarette into the pool, where it splattered in sparks near Ralph’s feet. Ralph gasped and slapped at an ember on his sock. Ralph shut his eyes. He held his breath and pressed even more painfully into the concrete corner. Moments passed. Minutes? Who could tell? Ralph opened his eyes and peered once again at the seaman’s dark silhouette. Ralph took a long, burning drink from his bottle of Four Roses and clasped a hand over his mouth when he about gagged. The seaman turned slightly, seeming to peer back toward the road and cabins, then he turned toward the pool. Then the seaman took a drink. He did! Honest
to God! He took a goddamn belt from a small bottle, or maybe flask, whatever, but he put it to his lips and threw his head back and drank like there was no tomorrow. Ralph could hear the gulps. So Ralph took a drink, too, in astonishment. Then the seaman fired up another cigarette, and in the lighter’s flare Ralph saw his face. It wasn’t Duffy at all. It was the fat, big-time businessman who knew important people as far away as Egypt.
Ralph buried his face in his hands. Tears squirted from between his fingers. He was breathless, choking with silent laughter. Then Ralph felt the rain again, its drizzle warm on his head. Jesus! Ralph gasped, and crawled crablike frantically from beneath the big-time businessman’s golden shower. Ralph gasped and gagged and whipped his handkerchief out. Ralph spluttered and muttered and wiped his hair and neck desperately with the handkerchief and then tossed the damp, horrible thing away into the darkness. Up above, the fat businessman stopped pissing into the pool and stood there stiff as a statue. Then he seemed to lean out over the edge of the pool and peer into the blackness below where Ralph hovered and held his breath. Then the big-time businessman clicked on a lighter and waved it over the dark, drained pool. In the flickering light the fat businessman’s mouth was agape with astonishment, and his eyes were bugged out like boils. Sounding not unlike the chains of a ghost, when he inadvertently tipped it over, Ralph’s bottle of Four Roses rolled rattling down the concrete incline toward the deep end. By the time the ghost of the haunted swimming pool had stumbled to the ladder and awkwardly ascended, the big-time businessman was a blur beneath the dark trees as he flew like a fat bat out of hell down the gravel road through the drizzle, running with all his heart in the general direction, it had occurred to Ralph, of Egypt.
