October Light

by John Gardner

  Peter Wagner nodded.

  “In other words, I’ve been asked by the Captain … It’s not the kind of work I like—a scientist, you know, and a family man. But it’s a living, you see. When your Captain says he wants X done, if you want to keep your job you do X. I don’t mean I’m a murderer. Heaven forbid!” He threw his hands up, shocked at the idea. “I just thought, you see, if what you really wanted—that is, if after considered thought you went up there on the bridge tonight, if you follow me …”

  Peter Wagner looked down, considering the eels.

  “My hope was, actually, that you’d wake up, still half-unconscious, and get up and start to take a step …”

  He understood, now, the tied feet. If all had gone well he’d have gotten up and pitched into the eels. He wouldn’t have known what hit him. The whole thing was queerly touching. Nit was odd, certainly odd, but he had a devious humanity about him. Most people did, when you really got to know them. That, in a way, was what made the whole thing so depressing. But Peter Wagner had no time to think that through. Mr. Nit had been talking faster and faster, hands fluttering like birds, now to the sides, now back to each other to make knuckles pop. Mr. Nit was scared. Because of the Captain, of course. Poor devil, Peter Wagner thought. He wondered about Mr. Nit’s family, but there was no time to dwell on that either.

  “So if you wanted to save us a lot of trouble,” Mr. Nit was saying, his eyes imploring … “If you cared to be, for one brief moment in your life, a real American, a servant of others in the highest sense …”

  The key turned in the lock and the door creaked open. Peter Wagner glanced at the eels, but he couldn’t do it, not just like that, without even one good deep breath. And so it was too late. The old man stood peering in, incredulous, outraged, leaning fiercely on his cane as if to crush it. He came slowly, unsteadily into the room, and looked from Peter Wagner to Mr. Nit. Peter Wagner backed toward the eels.

  “What’s this?” the old man croaked.

  “Nothing, sir,” Mr. Nit said.

  The Captain looked back at Peter Wagner.

  And then the other two were there—the girl, Jane, and the muscular man, kindly looking, exceedingly distressed. He saw at once that those two had not been in on the Captain’s scheme. They could save him, and would; he had no doubt of that, if he wanted to be saved. But looking at the girl, with her fine square jaw, her cowgirl stance, her comic-book blue eyes and granny glasses, he decided, with sudden vehemence, on the eels.

  The Captain watched him with eyes like fires at the city dump.

  He would do it. They could toss him like a burnt potato chip into the sea.

  Hand over heart, eyes raised toward heaven, Peter Wagner said, “Farewell, cruel world! Another poor sailor goes down to Davy Jones.”

  “You’re a sailor?” the Captain said, screwing up his eyes.

  “I was Merchant Marine.”

  All four of them dived on him at once, and though he threw his arms with all his might, he could not quite get his hands on the nearest of the eels.

  ~ ~ ~

  6

  PETER WAGNER’S VISION

  “God bless you, sailor!” the Captain bellowed, pounding him somewhat violently on the back.

  Sally looked up, smelling cooking. Lunchtime already? She listened to her brother clumping around the kitchen, the cat meowing at his heels. After a moment she put her novel on the table and got up, slipped her feet into her slippers, and made her way up the attic stairs for three apples. She put the apples on the table beside the book, used the bedpan and tucked it away out of sight, then went over to the door and pressed her ear against it. James was whistling as he’d done when he went out to chores this morning. She scowled. “We shall see what we shall see,” she said aloud, squinting fiercely, half crooning it, sing-song. She smiled, distracted by her witch imitation, thinking of her friend Ruth Thomas crooning impishly-wicked poetry to children at the library. She had a wonderfully expressive face. She could do idiot looks, greedy looks, pompous looks—she could make her face do almost anything. Her eyes seemed to slant, and you’d almost have sworn that her dog-teeth grew longer when she recited the wolf poem.

  The Wolf is a very good watchdog, it’s true;

  The only trouble is,

  He considers all he protects, and you too,

  His.

  Ruth and her husband Ed had a cabin—more like a hunting lodge—in the mountains above East Arlington. Ed was one of those well-off farmers who could get away when he liked. Often she and Horace, and sometimes Estelle and Ferris Parks, had driven up there for a day or two. In the evening sometimes they would sing. Ed Thomas had a wonderful voice, of course; he was one of those Welshmen who would sing all day on his farm tractor, sing while he was milking or bathing in the tub, sing harmony with Ruth as they drove along the road. He was in church “every time they left the door unlocked,” Ruth liked to say—she was a great joker—“thumbing through the hymnal and tuning up his throat.” Estelle’s tall, handsome husband Ferris had a bass voice, thin compared to Ed’s but a pleasure to listen to, all the same. Horace’s voice was ordinary. She smiled. The cabin had no electricity. The Thomases had put up large Japanese lanterns, and they had candles, of course. They would all sit on the full-width porch in front on a cool summer evening, the dark, shallow river driving past them, rattling—it had always been a river just jumping with fish—and she and Horace would hold hands, as would Ferris and Estelle, and Ed Thomas would talk of the weather or of things he’d seen. She’d never known anyone like him for talking of the weather. It was like poetry. He would speak of otters playing in the river—otters as big as large dogs, he said—or he’d describe precisely how locking time came, here in the woods, or he’d speak of the past. He told of the British spy who painted murals, over near Marlboro village, and of the pig-iron days in Shaftsbury and halfway down Prospect. They would sit hushed, entranced, and once while Ed talked she had been aware that Ferris Parks was looking at her. She’d been a beauty in those days. Stood out in a crowd. Aware of his watching her, she’d smiled just a little, pretending she still listened, and she’d slipped off her shoes, and crossed her legs, moving one stockinged foot rhythmically, and she’d let tall, quiet Ferris Parks think whatever he might please.

  She put the apple to her mouth, lined up her dentures, and bit. Juice sprayed. Carefully chewing, she set the apple down and climbed back into bed. She pulled up the blankets and took up her book again. “Now where were we?” she said, and adjusted her glasses a little. Into her mind came an image of Mr. Nit, in his black cap and black sweater, talking of atheism and accidents. She saw that she was picturing him as her Ginny’s husband, Lewis Hicks, and it made her smile. And who was Peter Wagner? Sally couldn’t say yet, except that he was tall, with beautiful, sad eyes, and blondish.

  6

  PETER WAGNER’S VISION

  “God bless you, sailor!” the Captain bellowed, pounding him somewhat violently on the back. And then, apparently to those around him: “He’s alive. Just a bump on the nose where he met with the floor, ha ha!” They laughed, as filled with joy as the risen saints.

  Peter Wagner felt spray and headway wind. They’d brought him up on deck to revive him.

  “If we only had some whiskey to pour on his face,” the girl said.

  “There’s cold coffee in the galley,” Mr. Nit said.

  “Good!” the Captain said. “Get it!”

  Hastily, Peter Wagner opened his eyes and got up on his elbows. They were buried in fog, the engines running Full Ahead and nobody up in the wheelhouse.

  “He’s coming around,” Mr. Goodman said, leaning down, hands on knees to look at Peter Wagner.

  Peter Wagner groaned and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It came away bloody. He instinctively tensed himself to fight, but caught himself.

  “That was a nasty fall, sailor,” the Captain said. “Here, smoke this.” He reached down his pipe.

  Peter Wagner sniffed, winced back like
a cat, then reconsidered. It was pot. He took a puff. A more than physical calefaction spread through his broiling chest and head, and the contrasting chill of the breeze and fog made him shudder. All four of them saw it, watching him like sea-hawks. “He’s cold,” “He’s shivering,” “Get him inside,” their voices all said at once. Before he could avoid them, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Nit had his shoulders and legs and were carrying him up onto the bridge. He was too tired to resist. He let his arms drag, and puffed in and out, in and out, on the pipe. The violence in his heart evaporated.

  Then he was in a dim room—the Captain’s cabin. There was a flag on the wall, the red and blue slightly faded.

  “Welcome aboard, sailor,” the Captain said heartily. The others echoed it, and they slapped Peter Wagner’s shoulders so cheerfully that he would have fallen down if they’d given him room to. “Sit here,” the Captain said, and they forced him to a chair. Now they all had pipes. Blue smoke rose around him, thicker than the fog out on deck.

  “This is Mr. Goodman,” Mr. Nit said. “Mr. Goodman’s who saved your life.”

  Mr. Goodman beamed, childlike, and his pipe-charge burned bright red.

  “We’re like a family, here on the Indomitable,” the Captain said.

  “We have our little disagreements, of course,” Mr. Goodman said quickly, earnestly, as if it were very important that things be kept straight.

  The Captain laughed like an alligator and Jane patted Mr. Goodman’s musclebound cheek.

  “We’re like a society in small,” the Captain said, growing more philosophical, leaning back in the chair Mr. Nit had produced. A foghorn boomed, dangerously close. No one but Peter Wagner seemed to notice. The Captain appeared to be far away, almost invisible in the smoke. It was excellent pot, quick-grabbing.

  “Mr. Nit represents technology.” The Captain chuckled, delighted with himself, then pointed with his pipe to the smoky shadow of Mr. Goodman. “Mr. Goodman here is our moral guardian, as his name implies. The clergyman, the humanist, in his small way the artist.”

  It flickered dimly through Peter Wagner’s mind that in German “Fist” was “Faust.” Very interesting. Then he forgot again.

  “I believe,” Mr. Goodman said apologetically, as if slightly alarmed, “we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us. That’s the only true law, I feel.”

  The Captain chuckled wickedly. “And Jane here—” he began. He paused, seemingly at a loss, and leaned forward until his snaky eyes emerged from the murky smoke. “What was Guinevere to King Arthur’s court, or the Virgin Mary to the Christian religion? The coronet! The jewel that gives it all meaning!” He laughed till he coughed.

  “I see,” Peter Wagner said. It was fascinating, astounding, like an insight into modern physics. He was stoned. When he closed his eyes he saw brightly lit clouds with globes where wide beams of sunlight burst through, and standing on the sunbeams, waving to him like people in home movies, angels. Now there was music, some patriotic hymn, and the Statue of Liberty strode into the picture, carrying not a torch but the American flag, which was flapping grandly in the Technicolor wind. He was standing on the wide, gleaming deck of some ship—he saw the name in red and gold on a snow-white life-saver: The New Jerusalem. He opened his eyes. The room was dark and distorted and filled with smoke. Jane was sitting now on half of Peter Wagner’s chair, looking slightly cross-eyed down her pipe. She had her arm around his shoulder.

  “And you, sailor—” The Captain’s eyes were now inches from his own. His tone became ominous, as if brought from the midnight depths of the sea where unimaginable fish preyed on whales. “All is not well with the Indomitable.” He slid his eyes sideways, as if watching for ghostly spies. The others’ eyes slid sideways too, all inches away from Peter Wagner’s …

  Other things happened at the Captain’s party, but nothing Peter Wagner would remember.

  He dreamed that night that he slept with his wife, with whom he hadn’t slept in a year or more—except that, as sometimes happens in dreams, it seemed she both was and was not his wife. She stood naked in front of him, radiating light like Tinkerbell, as dream-women will, her breasts erect and pinkish with desire. He put his hands on her hips and pressed the side of his face against her belly. He had forgotten how it felt. Her lower hair was silky and, surprisingly, black.

  “It’s been so long,” he said. She tipped his face up and kissed him, then straightened up slightly and guided his lips to her nipple. The next moment (something had happened to time) he was between her legs, plunged deep inside her, his open mouth locked, laboring, on hers. The moment after that, as if it were the same moment, she was talking to him, murmuring gently in his ear as she had done when he’d first known her.

  “Why the bridge?” she seemed to say. “You’re so beautiful, so gentle. What made you feel you had to? Are you a Pisces?”

  “I don’t know,” he said; “it’s not the first time. Maybe it’s a habit.” He pretended to laugh. Groan, groan, groan. She laughed too, but lovingly, as if completely unafraid of him. She had changed. She was like a living Playboy foldout. “Tell me about it,” she said.

  It was as if they had met in some neutral place—a medieval garden with grass and flowers like a featherbed, and, over their heads, interlocked limbs drooping hazel and oakmoss. It was a place where they might try, for once, for an honest truce, a new beginning. “Rapist,” she had called him. “All men are rapists.” It wasn’t, he felt, true. Certainly he was more often the seduced than the seducer. Nor was her general thesis true. The Indian brave raping the wife of the soon-to-be scalped white settler, the settler raping the wife of the soon-to-be-massacred Indian, that was no proof, as she claimed—pompous and professorial and mired deep in facts—that womanhood was always the ultimate victim, the final enemy of Everyman. It made the woman the enemy’s chief revenge, his ultimate insult to the husband. With the same mad leap of the pervert heart, the Vikings had torn down cathedrals. She, his wife, had been thoroughly unpersuaded. Men beat their women, she pointed out, echoing, he knew, some women’s-center dyke; and men’s laws, for five thousand years, had forgiven it. “In Russia, peasants beat their ikons,” he’d said.

  “I want all the lives that are possible,” he said. “Not only for me. For everybody. I want to live everything that’s possible to live, a hundred thousand novels. I want everybody to. It’s—” He tried to focus her, but the dream-woman wouldn’t come clear. She was not, it seemed to him now, his wife. Her fingers moved, infinitely gentle, over his testicles and penis. It felt, as dreams will, too real to be a dream. He moved his hands on her breasts. She moaned with pleasure and again, little by little, he grew hard.

  “And what happened?” she murmured in his ear.

  “Long drunken talks late at night,” he said, “each of us trying to explain to the other, both of us feeling imprisoned and betrayed. Arguments; fights. I’d come to myself and she’d be lying on the floor, out cold, and I’d think she was dead. It was horrible; stupid. I never wanted to hurt her. I just wanted to live, wanted everybody to live—free, trying to find happiness, as innocent and simple as Dick meets Jane—live like crazy, like squirrels or deer or lyric poets, because everything around us was retreating.” The phrase gave him a subtle thrill, the rushing sensation in the plumbing of the chest that would lead, in a child, to tears. “But I couldn’t explain it, even at the moments when I believed it was true, because the possibility was always so obvious that maybe it was a lie, mere childish selfishness. ‘Do you love me?’ she was always asking, sometimes angrily crying, and I honestly didn’t know. She was always talking, disagreeing, quoting articles. I would storm off and leave her sometimes, late at night, when I’d drunk myself stupid and I knew there was bound to be a fight, or else we’d already have had the fight, I’d kicked her black and blue in some neighbor’s yard. I remember waking up in an old friend’s house once, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling as you do when you’re a child and don’t know where you are. The ceiling was papered, a re
nted house, and the design was busy, vulgar, faded—gray and silver, I think it was—and directly above my head there was a light fixture, harsh black metal. I started, and then suddenly I remembered where I was, and I felt free. Free enough to soar. I thought of friends I could visit that she hated. Thought of riding the motorcycle I’d just bought maybe a month ago, over her dead body—almost literally. Thought of living the way I was born to live, loose as a tramp, independent as a hermit, fornicating—like a rapist, you may say. The phone rang, and I heard the friend I was staying with talking in his bedroom. He told me that morning that it was my wife who’d called. She was crying, he said, and he dropped it. But I remembered—oh, bitterly!—all the times she’d cried, all the times it seemed to me that I was all she lived for—and all she lived on, like beetles on an elm—despite the other times … So I went out and took some sleeping pills—don’t laugh, though I admit it’s somewhat funny—and I laid myself down on the railroad tracks, and when I woke up the train was roaring by and some whiskered old drunks were leaning down over me, tisking, pouring water on my face.”

  She rolled over on top of him and lay kissing his eyes and nose and lips. She became still.

  “I used to be religious,” she said. “I’m still religious, some of the time, some ways. Anyway, I worry about it. Sometimes. Have you ever been to a party of freaks?”

  “That too,” he sighed.

  She said, “The first freak party I went to, the people all got undressed. Or some of them. They sat and lay around the floor smelling incense and playing strange instruments, a lot of them things they’d invented themselves. Two girls made love to one man, right there in front of us all, including this bearded Arabian with a turban. I went into another room—I still had my clothes on—and a boy named Berner and some girl whose name I didn’t hear were looking through this telescope at the stars. They told me they had his sperm on the lens, and they wanted for me to come look. I felt strange—horrified and disgusted—and yet I looked. It was ugly, grotesque, I thought. And yet I also thought it wasn’t. It was … strange. There were colors. I went back inside, and everything was crazy. There were people on the floor, doing things, you know, but also there were people sitting up in chairs, smoking and talking, ignoring the others—or not even that, dismissing all they did in what seemed a friendly, indifferent way. It blew my mind. There was a woman reading palms. I wanted to get out of there and I was ashamed to leave. A man in a suit with a lacy white shirt out of some other century came over and said, ‘My friend, you seem tense. Can I get you something?’ I shook my head. He looked at me, sort of friendly, harmless, for a long time. All at once he smiled and said, ‘Are you afraid the police will come?’ I hadn’t realized it was mainly that, but it was. I wanted to have a good record, you know? I nodded. ‘I don’t think they will,’ he said. He touched my hand. ‘But don’t stay if you’re afraid. Nobody here will be insulted if you leave. Nobody’s going to judge you.’ I laughed, because I believed him. It wasn’t true, actually. There were people there who were judging every second, but he wasn’t one of them. ‘Does this embarrass you?’ he said. I said, ‘No. I like it. I just don’t want to do it.’ He started talking about the public schools, about busing girls to schools when there were only boys. He had three children. We talked until the sun came up and it was, you know, nice. Part of the time he held my hand. Then his wife came—she’d been in one of the bedrooms and still had her clothes off—and the three of us talked. After a while they left, and then I left. I knew it was wrong, or something. I mean, it wasn’t normal. My mother would have died if I’d written her about it. She thinks if you smoke pot you’ll inevitably jump out of a speeding car. She hates the modern world. Filth and violence in the movies, dirty books, the pill … But I liked that party, when I thought back to it. I wished somebody would invite me again. It was like learning to swim, or flying—only scary in the beginning.”