by Paul Zimmer
CHAPTER 19
Cyril
What does Balaclava want with me now? Why is he here again? What will he do if he catches me this time—douse me with kerosene and set me on fire?
That fiend still has his ferocious gun, and he’s been robbing people with it. We are unarmed—except for Louise and her pearl-handled pistol. How can I allow this to happen—Louise to be my protector? Cyril, I say to myself, what kind of a wimp are you? For God’s sake—do something to fight this dragon!
I have always distrusted guns. I used to go nuts when hunting season started in the driftless hills—all the blasting and boom-booming, the pickups full of bloodied corpses of dead deer.
I remember the summer when I was hiding from my drunken parents and reading the book of Shakespeare plays. There is a character in one of the Henry plays named Hotspur who thinks he is tough, and is always acting angry and poor-mouthing guys who choose not to arm themselves, calling them “popinjays and cowards.”
Hotspur is like Danderman—a macho idiot. The percentages are literally dead wrong with guns. If you have a gun, there is always a more-than-even chance that you will shoot it sometime. When you shoot it, there’s always a chance that a bullet is going to hit someone or something, causing terrible damage. That’s the way I feel about it. Even my father, with his drunken temper, at least had the good sense to never have a gun in our house. I thank the Lord there was no family pistol for me to inherit when my parents died; I would have felt a responsibility to keep it in my sock drawer with some bullets—an American heirloom. Before I met Louise, feeling so hopelessly lousy and wracked with my ruined body, there were days when I would have considered rising from my bed and using a gun, if I’d had one.
But now, with Balaclava on the prowl again, apparently looking for me, I’ve got to do something, even if it’s just to show Louise that I have some substance. I am thinking about Louise when I head in to the lunchroom and look for her at our usual table.
Danderman is sitting beside her, trying to bend her ear. She has her head down over her plate of fish sticks and soggy french fries, and is pushing diced carrots and peas around with her fork. I don’t know whether it’s anger or anxiety I feel when I see Danderman sitting with her. Louise smiles at me, “Hello, Cyril.”
Danderman gives me his patronizing, ex-quarterback look, “Hey, chief,” he says, “I hear you got a bogeyman after you.” I’m surprised by this and turn to Louise. She shakes her head, meaning she’s not the one who told him—so the rumor mill in the home is grinding. Danderman gets to me. He is such an asshole I want to give him a whack up the side of his goddamned head with my cane. It would be good practice for facing Balaclava. But Louise is sitting there, urgently smiling.
Danderman feigns concern for me. “Who’s this guy who’s after you?” he asks. “If it’s a bill collector, maybe I could give you some help? Do you have a gun?”
The sneering gall of the guy! Hotspur! His whole life has been devoted to showing people up. I’m so angry I can barely speak, and end up saying something that sounds weak and simple-minded: “I think I can handle it myself.”
Now I’m wondering about the talk that’s been going around the home. The administrators have said they were going to try and keep a lid on this situation so that other residents wouldn’t become frightened, but there’s obviously been a leak, and I’m sure Danderman has done his part to promote the rumors.
He’s looking at me with his condescending smile, bordering on a sneer. “Maybe we could work up a posse,” he says. “We could call ourselves the Geezer Gang, or something.” He laughs aloud at his own stupid wit. “We’ll smoke this guy out and save your butt. Do you want me to see what I can do about organizing this? We could be the Crutch Crushers! The Mature Mob!” He laughs again and looks at Louise, hoping for a giggle from her, but Louise is looking at him as if he were a leprous skunk.
“This is not funny!” she says sharply. “Have you ever been stalked? You’d probably wet your security diaper.”
Whoaa—my Louise! Right in the teeth! Danderman sits up straight in his chair like he’s been coldcocked. He’s not lipping off anymore; he’s been nailed by a pretty woman. He’s not used to having ladies give him the bird. He doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Louise solves his dilemma for him. She rises from her chair, takes up her cane and taptaps away, leaving her dinner uneaten.
I get up from the table, too. Danderman looks stunned and overheated. I think about fanning him with my paper napkin, but instead I take my plate and dump the fish sticks and french fries into his. “Enjoy,” I say, and give him the crooked prong of my right middle finger, curl my frozen lip, and limp away out of the room.
There’s a hunting and sporting goods store in Viroqua, and I ask Louise to drive me there in the Dodge. I pull out one of the socks full of cash from under my mattress and take out a small wad. As always, we slip out of the home like fugitives, but I’m not sure our stealth is necessary anymore. The home staff is looking the other way—I think it is pretty well agreed amongst them now that they will ignore us until we really screw up. I suspect they might even know we are keeping a vehicle in the parking lot.
Before we go to the gun shop we stop by the bookstore to see how the Brontë sisters are doing. They are glad to see us and express concern about our situation. The presence of Balaclava has everyone on edge.
“It’s like having a Frankenstein monster loose in the community,” Charlotte says. “Where will he turn up next? I wish there were some angry villagers around to light torches and help us pursue him.”
I don’t tell the Brontë sisters about our encounter with the beast in the bushes; but, of course—being who I am—I pick up on the Frankenstein tag. “Did you know that when they were shooting the first Frankenstein movie Boris Karloff got a skin condition from wearing all that monster makeup for hours on end? He had back problems, too, and had a hell of a time hauling that heavy costume around with him. It nearly killed him. That’s kind of interesting when you think about it—the noble savage always trying to destroy his maker, even if it’s only with makeup in a Hollywood movie.”
I’m not sure the story about Karloff is quite true, but I thought it was interesting and sounded “literary” in the bookstore, and might help divert the Brontë sisters from being frightened.
Louise is browsing in the history section, but she turns around and gives me an incredulous look. But hell . . . for all I know it could be true! The Brontës like this sort of story anyway.
But I cut myself off before I can tell them about Karloff being born in East Dulwich, England, dropping out of Cambridge, and bumming around until he stumbled onto acting. The old dropout even recorded some Shakespeare in his day. I spare everybody these details.
I don’t want to speak too much about my experience in the gun shop, but I admit, it boggled my boggler to see all those weapons lined up on the walls, every kind of long gun, short gun, big gun, small gun, and handgun you can imagine. Colts, automatics, all varieties of scoped rifles, AK-47s and other assault weapons, muzzle-loaders, flintlocks, Lugers, shotguns of all varieties, and other violent-looking things right out in the open, lined up in rows on the wall for the public to see and buy. It seemed to me the store could arm a couple battalions and Viroqua could fight its own war. Maybe they could take on Westby or Soldiers Grove in pitched battle! The store stocks bows and arrows and even a few spears. Probably there are hand grenades under the counter.
When I see all this ordnance, all I want to do is get out of the place. But I came vowing to purchase a weapon to protect Louise and myself. Finally I let them sell me a pistol that I can manipulate with my arthritic right hand, a box of ammunition, and a shoulder strap so, if I choose to, I can wear the gun hidden under my jacket or shirt. I peel the money from my wad of cash. When the owner sees all the dough I am holding, he tries to also sell me one of his rifles.
No, no, no!
I have to fill out some registration papers for the gun, and my hand is
shaking. I don’t have a driver’s license, so I use my health card, which has an identification picture on it. I find a certain irony in this.
So now I am an armed man. Those people would have sold me any weapons I wanted. I could have become an archfiend with an Uzi. A mad sharpshooter in a bell tower with a scoped rifle. Now I could take little bullets out of a box, put them into my gun (which the proprietors have carefully shown me how to load), walk out on the street and kill as many people as I want. Blow them clean away. Six at least before I’d have to reload. I wouldn’t even have to think about the lives I was snuffing out. Just boom, boom, boom! It’s over for them. When you’re dead, you’re down and dead. You could be a politician, a violinist, a jeweler, a clerk, a bum, a lawyer, a liberal, a conservative, a poet, a gang leader, the best singer in the world. Boom! You’re dead, and I did it. You’re dark.
Who you lookin’ at, boy? Don’t you recognize Big Cyril? Know who you’re talking to, buddy! Boom!
Now that I have this thing, what am I going to do with it? Carry it around under my shirt in the shoulder holster like a hit man? It makes no sense to just leave it in my room if we are trying to protect ourselves. Louise is carrying her gat in her purse, too.
Louise and Cyril. Bonnie and Clyde.
Go ahead. Make my day. Boom! So long sucker.
My God! What will become of us all? Our species must have crawled out of the ocean onto the beach eons ago with guns already in our claws.
Arthur Koestler! Now there was a guy. Born in Hungary, he went through political and social hell; he escaped, adopted the English language, and wrote hard stuff about whether the human race was going to make it through. He’d seen it all. Someone asked him once, after reading one of his doom books—what might preserve our species? He suggested that we consider permanently tranquilizing the whole human race.
CHAPTER 20
Louise
Buying the gun has its curious effect on Cyril. It’s not that he grows surly, but he seems disappointed in himself, as if he has at last given in to the waltz with death, the violence in the world which has always horrified him, and at last tossed his lot in with the thugs.
It had been such an easy thing for him to do, walk into that shop and become an armed person. Before this, Cyril walked innocently in this world, sharing his brief lives with people, drinking his Leinenkugel, being his affable, reclusive self. Now that he has discovered how easy it is to become owner of a lethal weapon, he looks at other people differently, feeling certain that almost everyone is packing “protection” under their coats.
Dear, guileless Cyril, permanently maimed by his wretched childhood, he has made his life so vicarious. He has never been violent, but he has been on occasion fascinated by the aggression he finds in some of the brief lives he holds in his mind.
I have no idea whether Cyril has ever thought much about sex, or considered it as a possibility for himself.
But of course he has—of course he has. It always seems to excite him when he refers to it in one of his brief lives—but his brief lives are surrogate-like films or literary images. How can I help him?
I admit that much of my own life also has been displaced and lived remotely as a sort of solitary ersatz artist. I developed my own system of “brief lives,” living a quasi-artistic life in the remoteness of the driftless hills, entering the lives of the writers, musicians and artists whose work I love to witness. No one was ever aware of my artistic interests and activities—except for Heath, who was also in his way guileless, who stayed by me as much as he was able, cared for my well-being, always made strong efforts to understand what I was thinking and doing.
Now I want to show Cyril some of the true artifacts and products of the brief artistic lives that I have known and studied. I plan carefully for several weeks—then one day invite him for an afternoon tea in my room. “Let’s do something different,” I say.
Cyril knows this will be a special event, but doesn’t know quite what to expect. He appears at my door a little wary and nervous, with his sparse hair combed and boots shined, a new white shirt buttoned to his throat, and even a bright blue bow tie clipped crookedly to his collar. I am charmed. He has never been to a tea.
I purchased scones and good butter at the co-op grocery in Viroqua, and also prepared some cucumber sandwiches, cutting off the crusts. The tea is Earl Grey, with milk warmed in the pitcher, and there are cubes of sugar with little spoons. I have selected some poetry, art books and music cassettes that I think might interest Cyril. Things that are very dear to me, but unfamiliar to him. He is apprehensive.
Always full of lives, when he sees my tea tray he is somehow prompted to start telling me his brief life of Henry James, apparently because he knew James enjoyed small, civilized events like teas.
“Henry James came from a big family of very smart people,” Cyril starts. “He always felt a little inferior. After he finished law school at Harvard he fooled around for a while, then escaped from his imposing family and moved to Europe in 1875 and really bore down on writing fiction . . .”
“No, no, no, Cyril!” I protest gently. “Not today. No brief lives. You must be quiet and focus on what I want to show you. This is my afternoon.”
He looks chastened, so I hasten to reassure him, patting him on his crabbed hand—but I know he will be quiet now. I pour two cups of Earl Grey from the pot and pass him the milk and sugar. He puts in three cubes and splashes milk into his cup. His hand is shaking.
“Dear Cyril, please relax, this is not a test, and I’m not trying to intimidate you. We are friends forever, no matter what. I just want to try and share some of the things I love because I think you might enjoy them.”
I take up my well-thumbed copy of the collected poems of A. E. Housman, a poet lyrical and direct, who often wrote about the countryside. I don’t want to start with writing that is too complicated, and I don’t want Cyril to feel challenged. I hope that he will begin to hear things in the lyrics, sounds of the words and lines.
Cyril sees the writing on the book cover. “Ah yes,” he says. “Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, in 1859 and his stuff got really popular during the First World War . . .”
“Cyril!” I say emphatically, and silence him. “Please, please relax. Just listen to this. It is one of his poems, let the words and sounds come to you”:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
As I read it aloud, I am concerned that Cyril might not absorb some of the very British images in the poem—but he is quiet only for a few moments. He is thinking, then he asks, “Would you read that again?”
Bless his beautiful heart! I read the poem again. Cyril moves his right hand slightly with the rhythm as I read. When I am finished, he says, “That’s almost like singing a small song—your voice is beautiful when you read it. It’s quiet and watchful. Housman is not trying to give us a big story, but he shows a lot by just saying some of those words—bough, trees, cherry, bloom, spring, woodlands, and the nice surprise at the end with snow. There’s sadness in the poem about being young and getting old. It’s like he’s taking me by the hand and leading me through that English springtime. And you lead me, too, Lady Louise, under the boughs and cherry trees, with the way you read, I got the music with the words. That’s all pretty special.”
Oh, Cyril! Indispensable, hideously adorable Cyril! If I could live fifty springs more just to be with you, I would do it.
“Would you like more tea?” I ask him. “Try th
e scones. They are good.” I pour him another cup and he butters a scone and puts it on his plate.
He looks at my little stack of books. “Would you read some more, please?” he asks. I would hug him, but his tea would spill. Instead, I read a Robert Frost poem, a John Clare, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Neruda, I read translations into English of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Cyril gives me only very abbreviated biographies of each of these poets, then listens carefully as I read. I even include an Arthur Rimbaud poem, reading “Delirium” to Cyril in French, then translating it into English for him:
Ce fut d’abord une etude. J’écrivais des silences des nuits, je notais l’inexprimable. Je fixais des vertiges.
“At first it was experimenting. I wrote of silences in the night, I recorded the inexpressible. I fixed their dizzy flight . . .”
I read the whole poem to him.
“So that’s Rimbaud?” Cyril says in wonder when I finish. “Listen to that guy! He’s hustling danger in that poem, and fixing himself for a big fall. He must have been on opium all the time, and God knows what else. You can hurt yourself that way, you know, and I guess he did. But it was like he was trying to hurt himself. I know he was nineteen when he gave up poetry and took off for Abyssinia and tried to be a gunrunner. He got a dose there and didn’t live much past his midthirties.”
Precious, amazing Cyril, he knows the brief life of Arthur Rimbaud—but he has never read one of the poems. What a rare afternoon! The two of us come together like a locking jigsaw puzzle. Here we are, two American ancients reading the hallucinatory poetry of a precocious, perilous eighteen-year-old French boy written 150 years ago. And we are a team. Where else would such mysteries like this be happening in this large world, except in Soldiers Grove?
I read Cyril another section from Une Saison en Enfer, and he comments when I am finished, “That boy was giving us something when he stuck his head in the fire like that, almost as if he were feeding himself to terrible dreams. He seemed to want to explore all the possibilities and then go down with his ship and tell us about it before he grew old.”
