The Up-Down

by Barry Gifford

  THE

  UP-DOWN

  The almost lost, last Sailor and Lula story, in which their son, Pace Roscoe Ripley, finds his way

  BARRY GIFFORD

  Seven Stories Press

  New York

  This book is for Tita Sorcia—

  “en las estrellas que hay

  sobre el firmamento del Veracruz”

  Copyright © 2015 by Barry Gifford.

  A Seven Stories Press First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Excerpts from The Up-Down have appeared in the magazines Nexos (Mexico City), Hotel Amerika (Chicago), Vice (New York), and, in different form, The Chicagoist (Chicago).

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  sevenstories.com

  Cover painting “Woman with Mountain Lion” by Holly Roberts, 1985. The drawing of Pace Ripley is by Barry Gifford. The anecdote on page 188 involving Aurelio Audaz and the old Mascogo is credited by the author in part to Guillermo Arriaga and in homage to Jorge Luis Borges.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gifford, Barry, 1946-

  The up-down / Barry Gifford. -- First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-60980-577-7 (hardback)

  1. Young men--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.I283U73 2015

  813’.54--dc23

  2014004825

  Printed in the USA

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  “Death is nothing, nor life either,

  for that matter.”

  —Mata Hari

  “. . . if I turn mine eyes upon myself,

  I find myself a traitor with the rest.”

  —William Shakespeare

  Part One

  1

  Following the death of his mother, Lula Pace Fortune Ripley, Pace Roscoe Ripley, who was at that time living in New Orleans, was seized by a desire to turn his life in a new direction. Pace was fifty-eight years old and he had been engaged in the rebuilding of his home place of N.O. after the devastating damage done to that city due to the flood caused by the failure of the levees occasioned by Hurricane Katrina. Now that both his parents had passed, and with no really significant sentimental attachment to keep him there, Pace resolved to find a solution more personal and closer to his heart. He completed the renovation projects already underway, then dissolved his small construction company, said goodbye to those who had worked with and for him, and, without fanfare, left town.

  During the several weeks it took him to complete his affairs in N.O., Pace spent a considerable amount of time deliberating about which direction to go. Years before, he had read that in ancient times various societies, including the Irish, Chinese and Indo-European cultures, believed there were five directions: North, South, East, West and the Up-Down, which represented the navel or center. He had remembered this ever since he’d learned of it, and liked the idea of a fifth, mysterious direction. The center of things is where Pace decided to go. Having lived for periods in places as diverse as New York City and Kathmandu, Nepal, he knew that geography had nothing to do with it, that the signs of the Up-Down pointed inward, that it was time for him to figure out exactly what that meant, and that to get there he had to travel alone.

  2

  “I once knew a man whose senses were so acute that he could hear a flea dancing on a silk handkerchief.”

  Pace studied the face of the man who said this. He had introduced himself as Dr. Boris Furbo, of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, soon after Pace had sat down next to him on the City of New Orleans, the passenger train running between N.O. and Chicago. Dr. Furbo, who looked to be in his late sixties or early seventies, wore a yellow-and-white-dotted bow tie with a green seersucker suit. He had almost no hair on his head or on his face, including eyebrows, which were mere creases under his forehead. His rimless, blue-tinted eyeglasses were perilously sustained by a nose no larger than the thumb of a seven year old child. He explained to Pace that he was returning to Wisconsin from a conference on hysterogenics, which he defined for Pace as the study of the origins of unsuitable and/or uncontrollable sexual behavior. The doctor claimed that his clinic in Lake Geneva offered the only reliable treatment for this condition, the mandatory textbook being his own Guide to Furbotics: The Cauterization Theory and Its Uses, Including a Cessation Process Evidenced by the Eradication of Varietal Types of Caterwauling. Dr. Furbo dug a copy of the book out of a brown boarhide satchel set on the floor between his feet and handed it to Pace.

  “Here, my man,” said the doctor. “After you’ve read it, you’ll never think the same way again about Ingrid Munch’s Oslo Syndrome.”

  Dr. Furbo suddenly stood and picked up his satchel. Pace was surprised at how tall he was, perhaps six foot six or seven. Furbo strode to the far end of the car and went through the connecting door to the next. Pace did not see him again for the remainder of his journey to Chicago, which, excepting this brief encounter with the dubious doctor, was uneventful. As to the book, each page was entirely blank except for the word “Fin” on the very last, which Pace knew was French for The End.

  3

  Pace had saved some money from his construction projects in New Orleans and he had inherited a small amount from his mother upon her death, as well as Dalceda Delahoussaye’s house in Bay St. Clement, North Carolina, in which Lula had been living. Pace had contracted with a realty company in Bay St. Clement to rent the house, so he also had a little income from that. He felt a bit guilty for leaving New Orleans, but following Lula’s death for some reason he felt unusually restless, as if the spirits of both his parents were summoning him, calling from the Great or Not-So-Great Beyond, wherever or whatever that might be, to hurl himself off the cliff of Been There into the ocean of What Could Be. Other than his former paramour Marnie Kowalski, with whom Pace had remained on appreciably more than good terms, and Luther Byu-Lee, a musician whose house he had rebuilt in the Lower Nine, Pace figured there wasn’t anyone in N.O that he would miss spending time with more than the ordinary. He’d never been one for hanging on the telephone and he didn’t e-mail, text or tweet. Pace did like to send postcards, however, so as long as there was still a United States Postal Service he could keep in touch with those few individuals still on the prowl in the active file of his cerebral cortex.

  He knew nobody in Chicago and very little about the city except that it got extremely cold in the winter and the powerful wind that blew in off of Lake Michigan was called The Hawk. It was June now, so cold would not be an immediate problem; and even if it got hot and sticky the humidity wouldn’t have anything on summer in New Orleans. When he disembarked from the train at Union Station, Pace stood for a few minutes on the platform looking around and thinking about what he should do first. There was no sign of Dr. Furbo.

  Pace had a backpack and a roller suitcase. All of his other possessions he’d stored in a shed in the yard behind Marnie Kowalski’s house on Orleans Street. He walked to the taxi stand and asked a driver to take him to a not-too expensive but clean small hotel near the Art Institute. Pace had always wanted to see the original of Georges Seurat’s painting La Grande Jatte, which he knew was on permanent display there. This was one thing he’d long desired to do so it seemed like a good start. On the drive over, Pace hummed softly the tune “In a Small Hotel,” the way he’d so often listened to it played by the tenor saxophonist Stan Getz.

  “You ever been in Chica
go before?” the driver asked.

  “No,” said Pace. “Always wondered about it, though. Heard good things.”

  “Well, it’s a city like any other, only bigger than most. Some good things, as you say, some bad. Where you from?”

  “New Orleans.”

  “I had family in Louisiana,” said the driver. “Close by Baton Rouge. They all passed now, though.”

  “Did you ever get down there?”

  “Yes, sir, a few times when I was a boy, but that was more than forty years ago. Recall catchin’ catfish with my cousin Charles, with our hands. Charles showed me how to hold ’em without those sharp spears poke out both sides of their head don’t cut you up.”

  “That was good of him. Catfish cuts can be plenty nasty.”

  “Yes, sir. Poor Charles, though, he only made it to sixteen years old when he got shot bein’ in a wrong place at a wrong time, buyin’ a RC Cola in a convenience store when some fool tried to rob it. Clerk took up a pistol and kept firin’ until all the bullets was used. One of ’em hit Charles in the head. Robber got away.”

  “That’s a sad story,” said Pace.

  “Mm-hmm. I’ll take you to a little hotel two blocks from the art museum, the Blackhawk, named after the Indian chief lived around here back in the day. They call it a boo-teek, ’cause of the size, but it’s priced very reasonable and decent folks work there. My sister, Marvis, she works on the reception desk. Tell her Arvis brought you by.”

  “Arvis and Marvis, huh?”

  “Uh huh. Got a brother named Parvis, the oldest. Our mama had a real affection for rhymin’. She told me she’d had a fourth child, she would have named him Jarvis, or if it was a girl, Narvis. Here we are now.”

  Pace was checked into the Blackhawk by Marvis, who told him that her brother brought customers to the hotel only if he had a good feeling about them. She gave Pace a room on the fourth floor with windows overlooking the street. Pace lay down on the bed and immediately fell asleep. He dreamt that he was a little boy again and he was riding in the back seat of his father’s car. Sailor and Lula were in the front. Sailor was driving as night fell. “Daddy,” Pace said in his dream, “aren’t you gonna turn on the headlights?” Lula turned around and smiled at him. Her face was silvery blue in the dusk light. “Don’t worry, darlin’,” she said, “we don’t need them any more.”

  4

  The first thing Pace did the next day at the Art Institute was look at Seurat’s painting. It was much larger than he’d expected it to be and he was pleased to finally be standing in front of it, but he was disappointed that it was covered by glass and at certain angles was difficult to see properly. After he’d had enough of La Grand Jatte, Pace toured most of the rest of the museum, then went outside and stood near one of the lion statues at the entrance and watched the traffic crawl by.

  He thought about his parents, Sailor and Lula, and how impossible it seemed to him that neither of them was alive. As long as his mother was still on the planet, Pace felt that Sailor, even though he had preceded Lula to the promised land by fifteen years, through her remained near by, his spirit if not his consciousness embodied in Lula. She was forever “consulting” Sailor, as she put it, considering what he would do or say in a certain situation. At least Pace had had a good last visit with his mother when she and her dearest and most enduring friend, Beany Thorn, had driven down from North Carolina to New Orleans to see him. The fact that Beany had been with Lula when she expired consoled Pace some. Anyway, he was almost sixty years old now and he’d led an interesting life, from N.O. to New York, to Nepal, Los Angeles and back to N.O. The problem, Pace had realized for a long time, was that he had been marked so deeply by the mutual devotion of his parents. Their undying love was a kind of miracle, he believed, and the fact that he never found the Big Love he expected to show up made Pace wonder if his own life had been a failure. Perhaps if he and his ex-wife, Rhoda Gombowicz, had had children, he would feel differently. He’d loved Rhoda but their time had run out thirty years ago. She was gone now, too, of course. After they’d divorced and Pace had taken himself off to Kathmandu, Rhoda had gone back to college and become a primate ethnologist. While doing fieldwork in Rwanda, studying gorillas, she was killed by poachers who had in an effort to cover up their crime dismembered her body and buried the parts in different places in the jungle. Only Rhoda’s head and her left leg were found and returned by the Rwandan government to her parents.

  Pace had read about her death and the circumstances of it by chance in a month-old copy of The International Herald Tribune while he was recovering in Bangalore, India, from two broken ankles suffered during a trek in the Himalayas. Rhoda’s murder was investigated but the perpetrators had never been found. Harvard University, which had funded her research, apparently mounted a plaque in Rhoda’s honor on a wall in their anthropology department but Pace had never gone to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see it. He had, however, visited Rhoda’s grave, which, of course, contained only the remains of her head—one ear was missing—and one leg, in a cemetery at Montauk, Long Island, where her parents, Irving and Greta Gombowicz, had gone to live following Irving’s retirement from the New York City Fire Department. Engraved on Rhoda’s tombstone, other than her name and dates of birth and death, were the words: “Her Heart Is With The Animals She Loved.”

  It was time, Pace decided, while watching a red Toyota Prius being driven by a woman talking on a cell phone rear end a city bus, to get serious about the Up-Down.

  5

  Pace found a one-bedroom apartment on the far north side on Balkanski Avenue just off Clark Street, a few blocks from the town of Evanston, Illinois. It was a third floor walk up with two families of Ukrainian immigrants occupying the floors below. He had very little to do with the immediate neighbors other than to greet them on the stairs; Pace never heard any of the Ukrainians speaking English and they kept to themselves. Pace did also. Though ordinarily gregarious, he needed this time alone, to be virtually anonymous in a city whose population took no heed of him nor had need of him. For the first time in his life, Pace felt like a wandering ghost. Nobody was waiting for him and neither, really, was he expecting anyone to come along and tell him what to do. He had not felt so cut off from the rest of the world since he had been kidnapped at the age of ten in N.O. by a crazy boy named Elmer Désespéré; this was different though, because now he was alone.

  When he lived in Kathmandu, Pace had half-assedly studied Buddhist texts, but he was then too preoccupied with worldly things to give them proper attention. Sailor and Lula were not churchgoers except for Lula’s short-lived infatuation with the Church of Reason, Redemption and Resistance to God’s Detractors, which ended abruptly after the church’s corrupt preacher, Reverend Goodin Plenty, was gunned down by an unhinged member of the flock in Rock Hill, South Carolina. This incident took place in front of Lula’s eyes and she soon thereafter gave up on organized religion in any form. The assassination of Goodin Plenty occurred during Pace’s forced incarceration by Elmer Désespéré, so he had not known much about it at the time, and Pace had no specific religious instruction thereafter. His subsequent readings of various theories regarding ontology failed to impress him, though he considered the Old Testament of the King James Bible to be the granddaddy of all noir novels, and the New Testament to be the model for what popularly came to be known as science fiction.

  Sailor had his own oddball theory about reincarnation that he called “sprinkle bodies,” which Pace thought made about as much sense as anything else. Religion, Pace thought, either made people mean or kind, according to their interpretation of whichever book or teachings laid down the law by which they had decided to abide. He realized, however, that at this crucial point in his life he was in dire need of some kind of guidance, sign or revelation. If it were to come from within, the Up-Down, he had to figure out how to climb on that wave and ride until it or he gave out.

  Pace took to taking long walks
along the shore of Lake Michigan as well as through the simmering summertime streets. The people he encountered were mostly polite but not particularly outgoing, largely unwilling to engage or be engaged in the sometimes too-often overly friendly and confessional way people are in New Orleans. That was all right with Pace, though; his demands upon and expectations of the human race were rapidly diminishing. His happiest moments came when he sat on his back porch late at night looking out over the alleys and backyards listening to the sounds made by his neighbors in their kitchens, dogs barking and cats whining and wailing. Best of all was when it rained, especially if there was thunder and lightning, which was often spectacular. He loved smelling the rain in the wind and when the rain came Pace could almost forget about the terrible behavior going on all over the world. There had to be a reason to exist, he thought, other than only for the sake of existing. And how did death figure into the equation? Rhoda murdered by ape poachers, Sailor killed in a senseless car wreck, Lula passing at eighty of so-called natural causes. What was natural or unnatural about anyone’s demise? Weren’t all of them threads in an unfinished fabric? Here he was, most certainly in the final quarter of his earthly residence, sitting on a back porch in the midwest having a dialogue with the night and discovering that he was more curious than ever about the purpose of everything, and wondering why thinking about it made him feel so ridiculous.

  6

  Pace had kept the book Dr. Furbo had given him on the train, even though the pages were blank. Perhaps there was a point to the lack of content other than the French word for End. Pace removed the Guide to Furbotics from his suitcase and re-read the subtitle. Perhaps this bizarre creature Dr. Furbo meant to signify that people should just quit complaining; “the eradication of caterwauling” could be interpreted that way. Where was it that Furbo claimed to have established his clinic? Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, Pace remembered. He decided to call information in Lake Geneva to find out if there really was such an institution.