by Paul Theroux
Polski let this sink in, though I had braced myself for Polski screaming to let me hear what it had sounded like.
I said, “What did the son say to him?”
“Nuthun.”
“But why did the father scream?”
Polski worked his tongue over his teeth.
He said, “Because Mooney had bitten his father’s ear off! He still had it in his mouth. He spit it out, and then he says, ‘That’s for makun me what I am.’ ”
I saw Spider Mooney’s wet lips, the blood on his chin, the little wrinkled ear on the ground.
“Bit the old man’s ear off,” Polski said.
He stood up.
“ ‘That’s for makun me what I am.’ ”
I stayed on the shaking glider. Polski was done, but I wanted to hear more. I wanted a conclusion. But there was no more to the story. I was left with the image of the old man clutching his head and keeling over, and Mooney pausing at the gallows stairs, and the gray ear on the ground like a leaf of withered gristle.
“Your father’s the most obnoxious man I’ve ever met,” Polski said. “He is the worst kind of pain in the neck—a know-it-all who’s sometimes vight.”
Then, with all the sawdust in him stirring, he added, “I’ve come to see he’s dangerous. You tell him that, Charlie. Tell him he’s a dangerous man, and one of these days he’s going to get you all killed. Tell him I said so. Now finish that milk and off you go!”
Father was sitting in his hydraulic chair when I got back to the house. He was puffing a cigar. A cloud of smoke, like satisfaction, hung over his smiling face. He paddled the smoke with his hand.
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
Father was still smiling. He shook his head.
“Honest,” I said.
“You’re lying,” he said softly. “That’s all right. But who are you trying to protect—him or me?”
My face was hot. I stared at the floor.
Father said, “In twenty-four hours none of this will matter.”
7
THE LAST THING I saw as we drove away from home was a mass of red ribbons tied to the lower branches of our trees and hanging limp in the morning dew. It was the hour after dawn. Everything was furry gray in the warm dim light, except those bright ribbons. They were knotted there the night before by the savages.
We had been at the supper table and had heard voices and the whisking of feet in the tall grass. Father said “Hello” and went to the door. When he switched on the outside light, I saw more than a dozen dark faces gathered at the stoop. I thought: They’ve come for him—they’re going to drag him off.
“It’s the men, Mother.” He did not say savages.
She said, “They picked a fine time.”
Father faced them and waved them in.
The first one, who was tall and turned out to be the blackest of them, slouched in grinning and carrying a machete. I thought: Oh, Gaw. He carried it casually, like a monkey wrench, and he could have simply raised it and dinged Father into two halves if he had wanted to. The rest followed him, slipping catfooted though their shoes were enormous. They wore white shirts, with whiter patches stitched on, but very clean and starched. They mumbled and laughed and filled the room with what I knew was the dog smell of their own house, sweat and mouse droppings, and fuel oil. The twins and Jerry goggled at them—they were frightened, and Jerry almost guffed his supper from the smell.
But the men, even the one with the machete, looked a little frightened, too. Their faces were bruise-scraped crooked masks, and their hair as greasy-black as a muskrat’s tail, or in bunches of tight curls like stuffing from a burst chair cushion. Most of them were dark and hawk-nosed Indians, and the rest were blacks, or near enough, with long loose hands. Some had faces so black I could not make out their noses or cheeks. They looked at us and around the room, as if they had never stood in a proper house before and were trying to decide whether to tear it apart or else kneel down and bawl. Their silence, this confusion, steamed like fury in the room.
Father clumped the big man on the shoulder and said, “What do you troublemakers want?”
The men laughed like children, and now I saw that they were looking upon Father obediently. Their faces were shining with admiration and gratitude. When I realized we were safe, the men appeared less ugly and foul-seeming.
“This is Mr. Semper,” Father said. He used his handshake to tug the big man forward. “He speaks English perfectly, don’t you, Mr. Semper?”
Mr. Semper said “No,” and whinnied and looked hopelessly at Mother.
I knew this man Semper. His was the face I had seen crossing the fields at midnight. He had been carrying the scarecrow’s corpse in his arms. Now I noticed he had the scribble of a pale scar, like a signature, near his mouth. I was glad I had not seen the scar that night.
“See if you can find some beer, Mother. These gentlemen are thirsty.”
Soon each man was gripping a bottle of beer. Mr. Semper put his jaw out and chewed the bottle cap off with his molars. The rest did exactly the same, gnawing theirs and plucking the caps off their tongues. They took shy slugs of beer and kept their eyes on Father.
“What have you got for me, brother?” Father said.
Balancing the machete on the flat of his hand, Mr. Semper said, “Dis.”
“That’s a beauty,” Father said. He tried the blade with his thumb. “I could shave with that.”
Mr. Semper broke into the rapid chatter of another language.
Father understood! He turned to us and said, “They’re thanking us for the Worm Tub. Didn’t I tell you they were civilized? See, they’re real gentlemen.” He said something to the men in their language.
Mr. Semper screamed a laugh. His gums were molded marvelously, like smooth wax around the roots of his teeth. He watched Father with fluidy lidded eyes, and when Father passed a bowl of peanuts around, Mr. Semper nodded and split open his lips to mutter his thanks.
The wonder to me was that this crowd of men was in our house at all. For months I had watched them silently crossing the fields, first planting, then, when the asparagus crop was ripe, bent over it and cutting. I was sure these were the men I had seen that night carrying torches in that scarecrow ceremony. The men had seemed savage, their house had frightened me with its stink, their faces had seemed swollen and cruel. But here they were, fifteen of the queerest men I had ever laid eyes on. Yet they did not look savage up close. They looked poor and obedient. The patches on their shirts matched the bruises on their faces, their hands were cracked from work, there was dust in their hair. Their big broken shoes made their shoulders slanty, and their ragged pants made them seem—not dangerous, as I had expected, but weak.
Father said, “They want to meet you.”
He introduced us—the twins, Jerry, and me—and we shook hands all around. Their palms were splintery and damp, and their skin was scaly. They had yellow fingernails. Their hands were like chicken feet, and afterward my own hand smelled.
“I’ve taken the precaution of buying a good map,” Father said, and unfolded it and flattened it under a lamp. The men jostled to look at it. “A map is as good as a book—better, really. I’ve been reading this one for months. I know everything I have to know. Look how the middle of it is blank—no roads, no towns, no names. America looked like that once!”
“Plenty water dere,” Mr. Semper said, and traced the blue rivers with his finger.
The map showed a forehead of territory, a bulge of coastline with an empty interior. The blue veins of rivers, lowland green and mountain orange—no names, only bright colors. Father’s finger was well suited for pointing at this map as he said “This is where we’re headed,” for the blunt blown-off finger was pointing at nothing but an outline of emptiness.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us, brother?”
Mr. Semper showed his teeth, and his nostrils opened like a horse’s.
“They’d rather stay here and face
the music,” Father said. “Ironic, isn’t it? We’re sort of trading places—swapping countries.”
Mr. Semper laughed and clapped his hands and said, “You going far away!”
Father grinned at him. “I’m the vanishing American.”
Black veins swelled beside Mr. Semper’s eyes, straining the shiny skin like trapped worms, as he crouched beside us and one by one put his long arms around the twins, Jerry, and me.
“Dis fadder is a great man. He my fadder, too.” Mr. Semper’s grunts smelled damply of digested peanuts. “We, his childrens.”
It seemed to me a ridiculous thing to say, but I remembered that Father had been kind to these men, because they were poor. This was Mr. Semper’s way of saying thank you for the fire-driven icebox.
The rest of the men were silent. Father smiled at them and made passes with his hands. Then he mumbled something, and turned to Mother and said, “That’s Spanish for ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’ ”
“Talk about leeway,” Mother said.
When Mr. Semper had clasped Father’s fingers and murmured into Father’s face for the last time, and they were all whisking through the grass, Father raised the machete and slashed the air, using it like a pirate’s cutlass.
“Allie, be careful,” Mother said.
“I’m raring to go!”
“Trading places,” she said. “Those poor men.”
“That’s all they’ve got to trade—they don’t have anything else. And that’s just what we’re doing. I would never have thought of it, if it wasn’t for them. They inspired me.”
There was movement outside. The men had paused under the trees.
“But it’s a swindle,” Father said. “I feel I’m leaving them to the vultures.”
***
It was not until the next morning that I noticed the ribbons the men had tied to the branches. They were cheap red ribbons, but in the gray morning light they looked rich and festive, and gave a touch of splendor to the trees.
Soon I could not make out the ribbons or the house. Our homestead got smaller and slipped down, and the treetops followed it. Then everything was under the road.
Passing Polski’s farmhouse. I recalled what he had told me. But the Mooney story confused me. Did his earbiting mean that he realized his father had been cruel to him, or did it prove that criminals don’t change, and are still vicious on the gallows stairs? As for the rest of Polski’s rant, about Father being a know-it-all and dangerous, I could not deliver that message. Father knew I was lying. But who are you trying to protect—him or me? The answer was neither. I was trying to protect myself.
Now, nothing mattered. We were leaving Hatfield. Father had taken his Thunderbox and his Atom-smasher, most of his tools, some of his books, and all the things we had bought—the camping equipment. But the rest, the house and all its furnishings, we left—every stick of furniture, the dishes, the beds, the curtains, Mother’s plants, the radio, the lights in the sockets, our clothes in the drawers, the cat asleep on the hydraulic chair. And we had left the door ajar. Was this Father’s way of reassuring us? If so, it was a success. Except for some spare clothes in our knapsacks, we had not packed.
Father had woken and said, “Okay, let’s go.” He hurried through the house without glancing left or right. “We’re getting out of here.”
Only later it occurred to me that this was what real refugees did. They finished breakfast and fled, leaving the dishes in the sink and the front door half-open. There was more drama in that than if we had carefully wrapped all our belongings and emptied the house.
The house now bobbed up in miniature, between the fields a mile away. It had never looked more peaceful. It was our mousehole. And because all our things were in it, and the clock still ticking, I felt we could return at any time, and find it just as we had left it, and reclaim it.
So I did not mind going, but where were we headed? Because I did not know, the slowness of time made me sick. Once past Springfield, Father stuck to the highway, and cities and towns rose near the exits. We saw chimneys and churches and tall buildings. We got used to buses with dirty windows, and trucks whooshing past, the gusts of fumey wind and the black canvas flapping on their loads. The signs said Connecticut, then New York. We stopped for lunch at a Howard Johnson’s. Father said, “Everything this place stands for, I despise,” and would not eat. The fried clams didn’t even have stomachs, he said, and were probably made out of string. “Cheeseburgers!” he yelled. Then New Jersey. Here were the tallest smokestacks and dingiest air I had ever seen, and the birds were small and oily. People going by in cars, girls especially, gaped at Jerry and me. We yanked down the beaks of our baseball caps so they wouldn’t stare. I shut my eyes and prayed for us to arrive. Father’s speed on this fast road made me think we were escaping, hurrying away from following thunder, dropping down a long straight road past a landscape that was like a greasy sink. I had never seen flames like these spurting from chimneys. We could hear the flub-flub of fiery hair wagging from the black pipes.
BALTIMORE, a sign said, NEXT SEVEN EXITS. We took the third, and saw a shopping center just like the one we had left behind this morning in Springfield, and went through a suburb that reminded me of Chicopee, then entered the city itself. It was a hillier city than any in Massachusetts. The houses and hotels were bricked along sloping streets. On this early evening the twilight glanced from the nearby water, helped by the curve of pinky blue sky—nothing like the customary thickening I was used to in Hatfield, which was a moldy green sundown with shots of gold. Baltimore’s milky ocean brightness and its putty-colored clouds magnified a pale overhang of daylight unobstructed by trees. What few small trees I could see were struggling against the wind.
About five minutes later it was sundown, and different. One part of the sky was darkening with gray, the other dazzling red, a heap of claw-shaped clouds the color of boiled lobster shells, cracked and broken in just the same way. This brilliant crimson sky was new to me. I called to Father to look at it.
“Pollution!” he cried. “It’s refraction from gas fumes!”
He kept driving, nudging our truck through the traffic, making toward the lower part of the city. He parked in the wind outside a warehouse.
“What are we doing here?” Jerry asked.
Father pointed his knuckle at the top of the warehouse. He said, “That’s our hotel.”
It was the yellow-white bow of a ship, its nostril-like ropeholes bleeding rust stains. We could not see the rest of the ship, but judging from its bow it was huge. I did not say how glad I was that we had somewhere to stay. It was now dark. I had thought we were going to sleep in a campsite by the roadside.
We walked up the slatted gangway, and a seaman on deck showed Father where we were to go. We four children occupied one cabin, Mother and Father were in an adjoining one. Everything smelled sourly of drying paint. A cubicle with a shower and sink lay between our two cabins. We stowed our belongings under the lower bunks and waited for something else to happen. Morning in Massachusetts, evening on a ship—six hundred miles away. It seemed as if Father could work miracles.
“It’s a ship!” Clover said. “We’re on a real ship!”
Father put his head into our cabin and said, “Well, what do you think?”
The ship was being loaded. All night the cranes squeaked and revolved, the conveyor belts hummed under us, and through the steel walls of our bare cabin I could hear cargo being skidded into the hold.
We remained tied up at this dock while the cargo—stenciled crates and even cars on cable slings—was loaded. We ate in the empty dining room and during the day we watched the cranes swinging back and forth. There were no other passengers that I could see. And still Father refused to say where we were going. This worried me and made me feel especially dependent on him. I did not know the name of this ship, and no one I had seen so far appeared to know English. We were ignored by the crew. We were in Father’s hands.
One morning before we sailed, w
e left the ship and drove in our old truck through the city, crossing a bridge and heading toward the water where, at the end of the road, there was a beach. Mother stayed in the cab of the truck reading while we walked along the beach, skimming stones and looking at sailboats. Down the beach there was a broken jetty, some rocks in the water and others tipped in the sand.
“The tide’s coming in,” Father said. He chucked his cigar butt into the surf. “Who’s going to show me how brave he is?”
I knew what was coming. He had done this to us a number of times. He would dare us to go out and sit on a rock and stay there until the rising tide threatened us. It was a summer game we had played on Cape Cod. But it was still spring in Baltimore—too cold for swimming—and we had all our clothes on. I could not believe he was serious, so I said I would try, and expected him to laugh.
He said, “You’re keeping us waiting.”
A wave broke and slid back, dragging sand and pebbles. Without taking my clothes off, or even my shoes. I ran to a weedy rock at the surf line and perched there, waiting for Father to call me back. The twins and Jerry laughed. Father stood higher up on the beach, hardly watching. No waves disturbed me at first. They mounted just behind me, moved past me, and turned to foam and vanished.
“Charlie’s scared,” Jerry yelled.
I said nothing. I knelt there unsteadily, clasping the rock with my fingertips. It was like a saddle with no stirrups. I did not know if I was calling Father’s bluff or he was calling mine. A succession of waves soaked my legs and wet my shoes. A pool formed in front of my rock. Now the brimming waves numbed my fingers.
I was rehearsing an excuse for giving up when, in the sallow late-afternoon light, I saw Father’s silhouette, the sun beneath his shoulder. He was dark, I did not know him, and he watched me like a stranger, with curiosity rather than affection. And I felt like a stranger to him. We were two people pausing—one on a rock, the other on the sand, child and adult. I did not know him, he did not know me. I had to wait to discover who we were.
