The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  ‘The casino? Belongs to the Onyatakas. Biggest thing in the four counties.’

  ‘There used to be a bingo hall there I think.’

  The driver shrugged and the truck wobbled at speed. ‘Used to be, should be, could be, makes no matter to my way of thinking, nothing changes what is and what is is usually shit. I’ll drop you off here, young feller. Careful how you go.’

  Edgar tried to get a ride by standing with his thumb out by the fountain at the casino entrance but no cars seemed to be leaving: all the traffic was one-way—busloads of old people, contractors’ vans crammed with men in blue overalls, coming to gamble in the casino or build more of it, beaten-up sedans that reminded him of his father. The casino was a collection of grey concrete blocks, surrounded by parked cars baking in the sun and grassland and construction areas. He watched a casino cart slaloming wildly around pyramids of silt along a half-laid Tarmac road and then he recognized the driver and called out his name.

  The cart veered around and stopped by the fountain. Sky’s hair was still long but thinner, the scalp visible through the yellow hard-rocker strands. He wore the short-sleeved purple and yellow shirt of casino employees, and held a crackling walkie-talkie to his ear.

  ‘Hey, Sky.’

  Sky stared at him with the old dreamy incomprehension that carried reserves of implied threat.

  ‘Edgar,’ Edgar said.

  ‘Edgar? That weird British kid? Is that you?’

  Edgar admitted that it was. The way that Sky was looking at Edgar was probably the same way Edgar was looking at Sky, as if neither could quite believe the changes that time, or decay, had exerted in the other.

  ‘Way to go, Edgar.’

  ‘You work here.’

  ‘So long as they ain’t fired me yet.’

  ‘Do you still play music?’

  ‘Not really. Now and again. For my own pleasure.’

  ‘What’s happened to the others?’

  ‘Doug and Rocky they both work in the oil industry.’

  Edgar was impressed. He said so. He asked after Ray Newhouse. If biology was destiny Ray would have been using his jail time to construct ingenious mechanical models or else acquiring professional qualifications. Most of the doctors and lawyers in this town had been called Stone or Prindle or Newhouse.

  ‘Sells pot and elephant tranquillizers to college kids from Syracuse. The pot he buys from Onyatakas on the reservation. He gets the chemicals from an English guy, actually, fellow named Pete, maybe you know him?’

  ‘I don’t think I do.’

  ‘You live in London? I think he’s from London also.’

  ‘London’s a pretty big place.’

  ‘Guess so. Been meaning to make it out there one of these days.’

  ‘And Marvin?’

  ‘College guy. He’s like doing a doctorate in the history of science or the science of history or something. Husky Marvin. He could sing, couldn’t he? Joined up with the video boys, they had a couple of hits, can you believe it, on the college circuit? Then they got rid of him, it’s all machines, and guest vocalists, chicks with that kinda breathy voice that the kids like. Not sure where he lives now. Maybe Syracuse. Ithaca? I don’t really see him around. You should see Ray, though. He’s even more of a case than he used to be. He’s got all these medical problems. Last time I saw him was at Onyataka Depot, dripping piss from a plastic bag across the platform, his urine sample was leaking.’

  ‘Maybe that’s his punishment.’

  ‘Punishment for what?’

  ‘You know, karma or whatever the Indians would call it. For burning down the bingo hall.’

  ‘You believed that? Probably the only one who did. Ray never burned down the bingo hall. It was another bunch of Onyatakas, from Wisconsin or Canada or somewhere, trying to muscle in on the action. Everyone knew that but they let Ray take the credit because it made him feel good. Hey. I’ve got a number in my pocket. You want to drive out on the golf course and get high?’

  The golf course was a notional place, clods of earth, mounds of turf. They sat on some hard rubble, which Sky referred to as the seventeenth green, and smoked a thin wet joint. Sky’s walkie-talkie crackled away.

  ‘I get a pretty easy ride here. They have this quota policy, got to hire sufficient locals, in the interests of public relations and keeping the Governor in office. I’m lucky to have this job, there’s a lot of unemployment around. But I tell you, Indians are fucking made here. This place prints money. But though this has been nice, I got to pretend to do some work. You should take a look around. Something for everybody.’

  Sky dropped him back at the fountain and Edgar went into the casino. The crowds of gamblers made the place look as if it had been triple-booked by a fat people’s convention, a senior citizens’ stool-sitting holiday, and a get-together of all the remaining cigarette smokers in America. Walking through the nightmare lights and ching-ching-ching of the casino floor, Edgar had no money in his pocket, and felt therefore, for maybe the first time in his life, free. He wondered if he would see his father here. He thought he recognized Coach Spiro, sitting coiled and vigilant in his shades and shorts and letter jersey, in a corner of the poker room. He did find Jerome, in a wheelchair, with oxygen tank and drip tubes attached, at a slot machine feeding in coins from a bucket.

  ‘Hey Jerome.’

  No response, mechanical movements, coin into slot, handle pulled, coin into slot, handle pulled, as if the wheelchair was making love to the machine, and the wreckage of the man who mediated between them was wasting away with the passion of it. Edgar repeated Jerome’s name in a variety of intonations and finally brought himself to touch him on the shoulder. Jerome turned slowly around and when he focused on him he was the first person Edgar had met on this American trip who seemed indifferent to Edgar’s appearance, and unsurprised.

  ‘Hello, Eddie. How you making out?’

  ‘Like a bandit, Jerome.’

  ‘Haven’t seen you for a while. You been sick?’

  ‘No. I was in London.’

  ‘Well that explains it.’

  Jerome turned his attention back to the machine. He inspected each wheel in turn, then put in another coin.

  ‘Do you ever see my father?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jerome’s fingers twitched. His eyes flicked nervously to the slot machine. ‘Mike? No. I haven’t seen Mike.’

  ‘Do you still do your researches? Into the Association?’

  Edgar had to repeat his question several times before he managed to get Jerome to, irritably, shake his head.

  ‘So what else do you do with yourself? Apart from this, I mean.’

  ‘Sometimes I play blackjack. They’re very thoughtful here. They have a special table which is extra-wide for wheelchairs. But mostly I play the slots. I like the slots best. Last week I hit a jackpot.’

  ‘That’s great Jerome. Congratulations.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s right.’

  In a philosophical frame of mind, Edgar walked to Creek and Vail along a sun-dazzled road that had no sidewalk or verge to protect him from the complacent brutality of afternoon cars. Route 5 took him through Onyataka and on to Creek and there was the factory building, except the factory building was boarded up and closed down now, and the Silver City Diner, and Georgie’s Dance Studio (containing also Luscious Nails and Tan Your Can!) and the Campanile, and a second gas station, set at a diagonal from the original one, and an Indian gift store and cultural centre, where Dino’s pizza parlour used to be.

  Most of the houses in Creek had American flags outside. There’s the book store that never opens, the video store, there’s the softball pitch and the Stone Park bleachers where he held hands with Husky Marvin, and the memory of that had the power to make Edgar blush, which inspired him, maybe things weren’t so irretrievable and faraway after all. Over the bridge he goes, past the Company building, and there’s the Mansion House and the Pagan House opposite it, better cared for than its neighbours, and sterner with it. />
  Warren’s house had no doorbell any more, and no television aerial to spoil the antique lines of chimney and gable. The old station-wagon parked on the grassed-over drive was the only modernity that would have baffled George Pagan. The screen door had been removed.

  Edgar knocked. This should have been his house: he was in direct line, from George Pagan to George E. Pagan to Wilber to Spanky to Mac to Fay to Edgar. He had been bred to it.

  He could invent himself anew, in holiness, a mendicant, honouring houses with his presence. Edgar blessed the lawn. He blessed Vail and Creek. He blessed the bluebird in the hedge. He blessed the girl swooshing past on a skateboard even as she changed direction and crossed to the opposite sidewalk.

  Warren, in his old uniform of pressed jeans and blue T-shirt, opened the door. There were lines of silver in his black hair.

  ‘Hello?’ Warren said.

  ‘Hello,’ Edgar said.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  He hadn’t envisaged this. He hadn’t thought he would need to announce himself. Edgar clasped his hands together in holiness. ‘I’m looking for somewhere to stay.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. You can find rooms to rent in the Mansion House across the way. But they’re quite pricey. Otherwise there’s a hostel in Onyataka. That’s probably the nearest place.’

  ‘I’ve just come from there.’

  Warren screwed up his eyes and tilted his head to the side and looked at Edgar and slowly he saw him. ‘Eddie? Is that you?’

  ‘I didn’t know if you’d still be here,’ Edgar said.

  ‘Most of the time I’m not,’ Warren said.

  Edgar looked at Warren with what he hoped was the sharp scrutiny of the implacable detective. Warren did not flinch.

  ‘It’s great to see you,’ Warren said.

  ‘I thought I’d stay a few days, if that’s okay.’

  ‘For as long as you like, Eddie. It’s what Fay wanted.’

  ‘Edgar,’ Edgar says.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘It’s what I call myself these days.’

  ‘Edgar.’

  ‘Edgar.’

  There were more mementoes of Mary Pagan than of Fay in the house. In the kitchen, having turned down the invitation to bathe, Edgar sat below a poster advertising Warren’s opera, Husky Marvin as the most shyly diffident Stone with stuck-on beard, Marilou Weathers in her wild-eyed incarnation of Mary Pagan. On the sideboard stood a row of Onyataka Ltd dinner plates. One of them, pale bone, with a faded yellow ring just inside the rim and a child’s sketch of a steamship at its centre, was from the very first production line.

  Warren sat across from him; both were holding mugs of tea, blowing on the steam.

  ‘Are you hungry? I can fix you a sandwich, or something more substantial if you like.’

  Edgar was very hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since New York except for half a peppermint patty that a child had dropped on the concourse at Syracuse bus station and which his mother had forbade him to pick up. He accepted a sandwich and refused anything more substantial, hoping that this compromise did not put him too much in Warren’s debt.

  ‘It’s really terrific to see you,’ Warren said, perhaps more doubtfully than he intended. ‘I like your, uh, look. So what are you doing with yourself these days? You were at college last I heard.’

  ‘That didn’t exactly work out.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Okay. Your mother? How’s Monica doing?’

  Warren was ruthless. His questions would persist, leaving no space for Edgar to aim his own investigations at, and they all seemed designed to remind Edgar of his boyish, and therefore powerless, status.

  ‘She’s good,’ Edgar said, falling easily into the local language. ‘She went back to university, did another degree.’

  ‘Your mum’s terrific. She’s got a lot of life.’

  Edgar pondered this remark, inspecting it for meanings both hidden and apparent.

  ‘And how’s Jeffrey?’

  ‘He died,’ Edgar said. ‘On his stag night, he had some kind of cocaine binge, and his brain and heart sort of exploded.’

  This was not true. Jeffrey was Professor of Popular Culture at Huddersfield University. His brain and heart were intact, or functioning at least. But Edgar invented a different Jeffrey, who had lingered on in a wheelchair at a nursing-home, looking at the world through hate-filled damaged eyes until a bout of pneumonia provided a merciful release. Even in fantasy he was a disappointment. He should have been a saintly Jeffrey, performing holy works with the reckless innocence of a simpleton, lying down with lepers and lambs, opinion-free. Or a monkey man, gibbering and drooling, devouring peanuts and bananas while muttering imprecations in a strange original language. Edgar examined himself for feelings of sympathy for Jeffrey, alive or dead, and was a little annoyed to find some.

  ‘Oh that’s awful. I’m so sorry. I know how fond you were of him.’

  ‘Sometimes my mother thinks we should have, you know, let him go earlier.’

  Warren didn’t respond in the way that he was meant to. Gravely he nodded and asked Edgar if he had seen his father yet.

  ‘I don’t even know where he lives to be honest.’

  ‘He’s in Rome last I heard.’

  ‘But he hates Europe. Don’t say he’s discovered religion.’

  ‘Not Rome, Italy, Rome. It’s a town near here, other side of the casino. I have his address around here somewhere. You can use the station-wagon to visit him if you like. I keep the keys in the ignition.’

  ‘Where else do you spend your time? When you’re not here?’

  ‘And how about Frank and Lucille? You ever hear from them?’

  It was easier to answer Warren’s questions than to persist with his own. ‘No, but I saw Michelle and Paul last summer.’

  They had been backpacking around Europe and stopped off in London, expecting Edgar’s cousinly hospitality. But Edgar had been Mental Eddie then and he lived in a derelict town hall in Limehouse, sharing a room that had once been some kind of clerk’s office and now, like the rest of the building, had sleeping-bags on the floor and piles of books and clothes and sound systems, some of which worked, and many computer terminals and screens. ‘We just like to take heavy drugs and mess about with programming,’ Edgar had explained, in a lucid moment. ‘If you fit in you can stay.’ He had seen Michelle around the place now and again, smudgy and sleepy, usually curled inside someone’s sleeping-bag, but Paul had gone off on his own and suffered some inelegant mishap. Mon had had furious communication from Lucille and berated Mental Eddie with it, who hadn’t listened or cared. He had just achieved his greatest triumph, of hacking into the House of Commons computer so that ‘is a cunt’ was added every time someone in the system typed in the words ‘The Prime Minister’. But he was Edgar now, again. He was drug-and computer-free, and in their absence he had adopted his old Edgar habit of making rhythms on any available surface.

  ‘I expect you’ll be wanting to see your old friends here.’

  ‘The house looks good!’ Edgar yelled, pounding his mug of tea hard down on the table-top signifying that it was his turn to take the interrogator’s chair. ‘You’ve done a lot with it! Haven’t you?!’

  ‘Why don’t I take you on the tour?’

  The house looked very good. A kind of formal dining room was where the snooker room was meant to be. The record-player and albums were gone from the Music Room, replaced by a harmonium and sheet music on stands, and a line of Association clothes hanging on a rail, like in a vintage clothing shop, all the hangers neatly facing the same way. There was no swimming-pool in the back garden, but the pond had been widened and now had a fountain in the middle where frogs played. The place looked as George Pagan might have wanted it, except for the absence of children. There had been few children in this house and Edgar had never believed in his father as one of them.

  ‘You’d probably like to stay in the sun porch. You must be tired after your journey.’

  Teens walked giggling past the ho
use, the younger sisters of Paul’s admirers, wearing sports tops pulled down by fists, blonde hair reddish-gold in the streetlights. He could just about make out the sign on the Mansion House lawn advertising the Blackberry Festival.

  ‘Nothing changes,’ Edgar said.

  ‘Things change,’ Warren said. ‘Why don’t you freshen up and then we’ll have a chat in the parlour?’

  The parlour accorded with Mon’s old vision of what should be more than Edgar’s. Fay’s wallpaper had been stripped away from the wood panels, which Warren had varnished and hung with Grandma Bridie’s silk braidings (See the gay people/Flaunting like flags/Belle in the steeple/Sky all in rags). The room was dimly lit as if electricity was a new and possibly dangerous resource that should not be squandered or challenged. The furniture was all comfortably venerable. There was nothing here to surprise George Pagan, except for the colour photographs of women and houses on the mantelpiece. Edgar sat in the horsehair chair that had been Spanky Pete’s favourite whipping post.

  Warren looked at his hands. He looked at them as a quietly proud technician would look at his tools. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Edgar.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Maybe I can persuade you to stay longer. The house needs someone in it and I’m pretty busy elsewhere these days. I’ve tried lodgers but that hasn’t really worked out.’

  This was not the conversation they were meant to be having. Warren should be reeling under the blasts of Edgar’s questioning. Warren should have his hands up to his face in impotent protection as Edgar relentlessly forced him to admit his guilt.

  ‘Syracuse has some good programmes, I understand. You could enrol there if you fancied starting college again. Get some bartending work or something, live here, you’ve got the station-wagon. See how it grabs you. You know, start again.’

  To start again was just what Edgar wanted. He was infuriated that Warren saw this in him. ‘What keeps you busy elsewhere?’

  Warren frowned, disappointed. He had thought Edgar a creature of greater tact. ‘It’s what Fay would have wanted. She wanted you here. She liked you. And you’re the next in line, so to speak. You know, she was a great believer in the afterlife. She was sure that she would be up there, down, wherever, reunited with everything she loved, looking down on us.’