Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  “Um, can I think about it?”

  Ed looked at the football player incredulously. “Billy Dixon wants to go out with her and she has to think about it?”

  Madelyn had no idea what to say, so she panicked and said the thing that was expected. “Well, then, yes, I suppose.”

  “You suppose?”

  “Yes, then,” Madelyn said. “Yes.”

  *

  Madelyn’s parents were skeptical too, though not nearly as much so as her sister Julia. Julia was two years younger and more conventionally pretty than Madelyn; she had short, nearly natural blonde hair where Madelyn’s was red-gold and halfway down her back, breasts that had filled out much earlier and much further than Madelyn’s, a pout that was more studied than spontaneous, and none of Madelyn’s off-putting vocabulary. The boys in her freshman class were already chasing her, and Madelyn worried that Julia was not running nearly fast enough.

  “Why would anybody popular want to go out with you?” Julia asked. “Does he need help with his homework?”

  “He’s pretty bright, actually,” Madelyn said. “Which would also answer your first question.”

  “How far are you going to let him go?”

  “What?”

  Madelyn had spoken in shock; Julia took it, perhaps willfully, for ignorance. “On a first date, I don’t think you should let him get past second base, outside your clothes. In any case, you need to make up your mind before, and stick to it.”

  Madelyn had not considered the issue. She was not completely without experience, although her prior dates had involved a parent or two as chauffeurs and chaperones, boys with bad posture and/or glasses, a few sweaty and awkward dances in an echoing gym, and halting conversation in between. Whenever possible, she had double-dated with her best friend Hope, so she’d have someone to talk to.

  The invitation had been extended on a Monday with the dance that Saturday; neither time nor money was available for an elaborate costume. Madelyn’s mother helped her go through two trunks’ worth of old clothes in the attic, where they turned up a blue, short-sleeved dress, a white apron, and a sufficiency of petticoats to produce a reasonable facsimile of the John Tenniel drawings of Alice. Madelyn already had the black Mary Janes, and she added a black domino mask for a hint of mystery.

  “Dorothy, from Wizard of Oz?” Julia hazarded when she saw the finished product.

  When Madelyn explained, Julia said, “Nobody is going to guess that. Not in a million years.”

  The arrangement, brokered by Ed, was that Billy would pick her up at eight at her parents’ house. Only at 8:15 did Madelyn realize that she had no phone number for Billy, and no contingency plans. By 8:45 she understood that he wasn’t coming.

  They were all sitting in the living room pretending to watch nbc’s Saturday Night at the Movies. Madelyn could not have said what the movie was. Now and then her parents exchanged a worried look or glanced at her. Finally Madelyn stood up and said, “Daddy, would you drive me to the dance?”

  In preparation for meeting Billy, he was already dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and black tie. At the gym, he retired to the parents’ corner where cookies, ashtrays, and a pot of coffee had been provided.

  Considerable effort had been expended to decorate the gym with fake cobwebs and cardboard ghosts. The band was on break, the dance floor empty. Madelyn knew that neither Hope, nor any of her other friends, were coming. She told herself the domino mask would provide her anonymity; in fact, she knew that she was already invisible in her plainness, in her failure to compete socially, in her perceived braininess.

  She kept to the shadows until she saw Billy Dixon. He was with one of the cheerleaders, and they had circled up with other members of the track team and their dates. Madelyn watched him for ten minutes, while the band got up on the stacked risers and started to play again. Eventually Billy took his date’s hand and moved toward the dance floor. Madelyn triangulated an interception point and contrived to bump into him as if by accident. From his utter lack of embarrassment, she saw that he was not party to the scheme. The notes, then, had been forged. She and Billy both apologized and Madelyn turned to go.

  Ed and half a dozen members of various sports teams had lined up along the rear wall of the gym to watch. Ed was smirking and one of the others was straining so mightily to keep from laughing that his eyes bulged. Madelyn took care not to let her expression change as she walked by.

  Driving home, her father said, “I’m sure I know the answer to this already, but I have to ask. You didn’t do anything to Ed, even inadvertently, to trigger this incident?”

  “No, Daddy.” She paused, then said, “He’s in my Civics class. He’s… struggling.”

  “Ah.” They drove for a while in silence, then he said, “I think you were very brave to show up at the dance. I’m proud of you.”

  “Thank you, Daddy.” She stared out the window at the streetlit lawns of Highland Park, their dead leaves all raked and bagged and carted away, left with no cover for the coming winter. She was determined not to cry over having been deprived of something she hadn’t wanted in the first place. There would be laughter at her expense on Monday, and that would be the hardest part. That much she had coming, she thought, for being so naïve.

  As soon as they got home, she put on her pajamas and got into bed with the Andrew Odyssey and turned to Book One.

  “Tell me, O muse,” she read, and the rest of the world went away.

  *

  The next afternoon, she borrowed the station wagon to drive to Hope’s house. Hope had the twin afflictions of intelligence and excessive height. At five-eleven, she had learned that basketball players, the only boys who tolerated the latter, tended to be intimidated by the former.

  “I’m through with boys,” Hope announced, once they were in her room with the door closed. Madelyn, having told her on the phone about her humiliation, assumed this diatribe was at least partly in her honor. “I’m through playing dumb to get dates. I’m through having boys rub their hands on me like I was a towel.”

  “Well,” Madelyn said, “nobody wiped his hands on me.”

  “They might as well have. They felt they had the right to play their stupid games with you. You remember that Lesley Gore song?”

  Madelyn did. Nonetheless, Hope rummaged through a vinyl carrying case, pulled out a black-labeled 45 of “You Don’t Own Me,” and sang along at considerable volume and with a clenched-fist intensity that left Madelyn feeling as if her own suffering had been unfairly appropriated.

  Afterward, Hope said, “It’s true, you know. We are the property of our fathers, who loan us out to various boys until the official transfer of ownership, when they walk us down the aisle at our weddings.”

  “I don’t think my father feels that way about me.”

  “No? What about all those reading lists and quizzes he gives you? You’re like a…”

  “Like a what?” Madelyn said frostily.

  “Nothing.”

  “I hope you weren’t going to say, ‘like a trained dog.’”

  “It is a little weird, that’s all.”

  Madelyn stood up. “Thanks, Hope. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Wait,” Hope said. “I’m sorry. I love your dad, you know I do.”

  Eventually she let Hope talk her down, and they returned to Ed Wallingford and how Madelyn was going to deal with him. They agreed on silence and a confident smile, which Madelyn rehearsed in Hope’s mirror until she had it pat.

  Upon leaving Hope’s house, however, the sting in Hope’s insult returned. Was everything she did just to please her father? Where did that end and Madelyn’s own desires begin? The truth was that she didn’t know.

  1966

  On a Sunday morning in the middle of June, Cole’s parents dropped him off at the Tyler Motor Inn. Whitewash over a plywood exterior, a standard tourist court layout thrown together on the cheap for losers in transit. East Texas Crude, Inc., got a weekly rate.

  Alex had warned hi
m. “Talk about armpits,” he’d said. “It’s 1952 there. They’re still crying about Hank Williams and waiting to see if Eisenhower got elected.”

  Cole had no option but to make the best of it. “No distractions,” he’d said. “More time to practice.”

  Watching his parents drive away, he felt more elated than abandoned. His own place, for the first time in his life. A working air conditioner and maid service every Monday. As long as he kept the volume down, he could play guitar all night.

  Or as long as he could stay awake. In his first full week on the job, that hadn’t been much past nine pm. The work so far had been easy enough—he was too inexperienced to be on the drilling table with the roughnecks, the really dangerous job. Instead he cleaned up and carried and used his new driver’s license to run errands in a pickup that was the same age as he was, held together with coat hanger wire and coats of battleship-gray Army-surplus paint. What left him light-headed and stumbling was the damp, choking heat, the noise of the drill, the long hours on his feet.

  After a half-day on the rig Saturday morning, he was fresh out of the shower and looking forward to a steak and a few beers with two of his co-workers.

  He sat up in bed with his guitar and opened a loose-leaf notebook that had the name “Chevelles” painstakingly lettered on the canvas cover. Alex had picked the name, and he’d invested in a Gibson eb-0 bass guitar and Fender Bassman amp. He’d also recruited a veteran rhythm guitar and keyboard player named Mike Moss from Richardson High. Mike had met with him and Alex just once, in late May, at Alex’s house. They’d sat around with guitars and tried their voices together, and Alex had taught them the three-part harmony to “Look Through Any Window” by The Hollies, to see what they were capable of. The process took nearly an hour and when they were done they sounded so much like the record that it amazed them all.

  It changed something in Cole. The way he held himself, the way he saw the world. He felt initiated, powerful. It happened again when he and Alex made it all the way through “The Last Time” by the Stones and Cole got all the lead parts note for note. All the songs in all the world were his to command.

  He and Mike and Alex had put together the list that now made up the first four pages of the notebook—four 45-minute sets, totaling 60 songs. They’d started with Dylan, the reason the band existed. They’d quickly settled on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” which they knew they would have to shorten the way The Byrds had shortened “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Then it had been a free-for-all, all three of them calling out titles faster than Alex could write them down. After that they’d gone over the initial list and filled in the gaps, coming up with break songs, slow songs, the obligatory songs like “Gloria” and “Land of 1000 Dances,” relegating the Kinks and Beatles and Stones and Animals to no more than one song per set.

  The one unexpected argument had been over Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba.” Alex didn’t want to do it.

  “Are you kidding?” Cole had said. “When you and me both speak Spanish?”

  «Y yo también,» Mike said.

  “That’s exactly the reason,” Alex said. “I don’t want us getting typecast.”

  “From one song?” Cole said.

  “Every band in Texas does ‘La Bamba,’” Mike said.

  Eventually Alex had given in, but it reminded Cole that whenever he said something in Spanish, whether from habit or as a test, Alex always replied in English. Never making an issue of it, and never going along.

  The rest of the book was lyrics and chords, some of which Cole was still figuring out. Alex was doing about half the lead vocals, Cole a third, and Mike the rest. By the time Cole got back in mid-August, Mike and Alex were supposed to have found a drummer and started rehearsals.

  Cole sprinted through “Walk, Don’t Run” and “House of the Rising Sun” to warm up, still not getting his arpeggios as smooth as he wanted. Then he skipped around the list, ignoring the easy ones like “Louie Louie” and “You Really Got Me,” working his way up to “Do You Believe in Magic,” where the guitar part was tricky enough even without the harmony part he had to sing behind it.

  In the eight months he’d been playing, his hands had become the hands of a completely different person. Not just the calluses on the tips of the fingers of his left hand, not just the strength and flexibility. The intelligence behind his playing had moved from his conscious brain into the fingers themselves. He no longer had to listen to know how far to bend a note, rarely had to look down to find the right fret. Standing around at work, he would press his left thumbnail into the thick pads of callus, or bend his ring finger into a barred A against his thumb, the way a bodybuilder might flex and pose in front of a mirror.

  His ears had changed, too. He could hear major sevenths on the radio, hear the I-IV-V progressions behind most of the songs, hear a note and put his finger on the guitar neck at the place where it lived. He begrudged the years he’d spent doing anything else.

  He got in a couple of hours of solid practice before he had to get ready. Dress Levis and a brand-new green-plaid pearl-snap Western shirt he’d bought at Shepler’s in Dallas for camouflage. His work boots were too muddy to wear, so he made do with his loafers.

  A car honked outside. He checked himself in the mirror and was okay with it. The sun had dried out the two zits on his chin and no new ones had come up yet. His hair had started to grow out and the hard work had straightened his spine.

  Jerry and Donald, he noted, wore variants of his shirt and jeans. They laughed and whistled, however, as he walked out to Jerry’s black Ford Falcon.

  “Where’d you get them shoes, college boy?” Donald said as Cole climbed in the back seat. Donald was the driller on Cole’s rig, in his mid-twenties, a bit heavy and already losing his hair. “Jer, we got time to get this boy some proper footwear before dinner?”

  “I don’t see how we got much choice,” Jerry said. Jerry was the same age as Donald, tall and lean and cooked by the sun. He kept a battered straw hat pulled low over his eyes and a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth. He was the derrickman, working high in the scaffolding when they took the pipe in and out of the hole, and monitoring the drilling mud the rest of the time. “You and me might could suffer for being seen with him in such a disgraceful condition.”

  They’d been paid in cash that morning, and Cole had over $50 in his pocket. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  He resisted their efforts to get him into ostrich skin or caiman belly Luccheses and settled on a plain pair of Fryes with a walking heel. He felt like the bones in his feet were cracking when he put them on, though they felt fine once he was in them. They set him back $25, which the clerk said was an investment. “They’ll last a lifetime, if you break ’em in right. Don’t spend too many hours in ’em at first.”

  “What d’ya think, Jer?” Donald asked as they walked to the car.

  “Better,” Jerry said. “Needs a hat.”

  “Maybe next week,” Cole said.

  Gringo’s Steakhouse was full of smoke, some from cigarettes, the rest from grilling meat. Cole ordered a rib-eye rare and took more kidding over that.

  “Should have brung my sunglasses,” Donald said when the platter arrived. “I never did like the sight of blood.”

  “Go easy with that knife,” Jerry said. “I think I heard her moo.”

  Though Cole had never been much of an eater, he had no trouble putting away a 12-ounce rib-eye, home fries, salad, Texas toast, and a quart of iced tea. By the time he’d gotten on the outside of all that food, he was ready for a nap.

  Donald had other ideas. “Wagon Wheel?” he said as he pushed back from the table.

  “Wagon Wheel,” Jerry said.

  “What’s a Wagon Wheel?” Cole asked.

  The Wagon Wheel was a gigantic metal shed with tables salvaged from cable spools, rickety folding chairs, and a layer of peanut hulls over the concrete floor to catch the spills. The high ceiling made the level of tob
acco smoke somewhat less toxic than at Gringo’s. A row of carpet samples separated the tables from the dance floor that ran the length of the shed, and the dancers used it to wipe the peanut hulls off their feet.

  Cole had never seen that kind of dancing before. The couples faced each other as they circled the outside of the floor, the man’s right wrist on the woman’s left shoulder, opposite hands clasped. The better dancers glided like they were on ice skates, the women spinning almost continuously. Both sexes wore cowboy hats and jeans and boots and Western shirts, though the jeans, Cole noticed immediately, fit one sex much more tightly than the other. A dj provided the music from a long table at one end of the floor, alternating between two turntables and blasting the result out of a pair of Voice of the Theaters. The songs were vaguely familiar from Midland, where country music permeated the air as thoroughly as the smell of the refineries.

  “If I was to buy you a beer,” Donald said, having to shout over the music, “would you know what to do with it?”

  Lone Star longnecks were what was available. “I believe the narrow end goes in my mouth,” Cole said.

  “See there, Jer? I told you the boy was edjamacated.”

  “College boy,” Jerry nodded. Cole had given up his attempts to explain his actual academic status.

  Donald bought the first round, two each for him and Jerry, one for Cole. Ice chips still clung to the bottles, and the beer was so cold that it tasted like nothing at all. Cole watched the women glide by. Some were overweight, overage, or both. Many were neither.

  In the course of the next hour, a few roughnecks stopped by the table for shouted pleasantries that, between the background noise and the nearly consonant-free East Texas accents, Cole found unintelligible. He smiled and nodded, watched the dancers, and listened to what the guitar players did on the records.

  Cole was looking the other way when a voice said, “Evening, boys,” followed immediately by the sound of two pairs of boots hitting the floor as Donald and Jerry straightened up in their chairs. The voice came from a dark-eyed blonde in a straw cowboy hat whose brim was curled as tight as Cole’s toes at the sight of her. She wore a man’s long-sleeved white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the tails tied in a knot below her breasts, exposing a flat, tanned stomach and a pair of cutoff jeans that had frayed right up to the point where her long legs joined the rest of her body. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, and was probably a good deal less. She had one hand on Donald’s shoulder and the other on Jerry’s and she was looking at Cole.