Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘I had to swear an oath,’ said Walker.

  Bourbon turned off the main highway, which disappeared back into barren land, and on to a dirt road, saying, ‘It don’t mean nothing, lots of the college kids come out there and perjure themselves black and blue.’

  A mailbox with an ironwork coach and horses and the name BOURBON worked into it showed beside the ruts and Bourbon drove through high grass into a clearing before a long, low, modern house of a kind that Walker had learned from the billboards to call ‘ranch-style’. Mrs Bourbon got out of the car and said, ‘Come on in.’ They walked across the gravel; at the same time, from somewhere close by, shots rang out. Walker nearly dropped the bottle he was carrying. ‘Crispin’s home,’ said Mrs Bourbon without concern, and opened the screen door. Inside the house was dark and cool. ‘We want you to think of this as your home,’ said Mrs Bourbon. The proposition was quietly laughable; the house existed in a different economic universe from anything Walker had ever known. The decor was modern; baffle-board ceilings and oiled wood walls showed themselves. The walls, throughout, were decorated with masks and other atavistic items. Walker’s bedroom proved to be on the ground floor; Mrs Bourbon led him into it and sat down on the big bed, neatly coverleted in flower-sprigged nylon. She patted a bath towel, two hand towels and a facecloth in matching floral design, and said, ‘The guest set.’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Walker.

  At the bedhead was a bookcase containing a row of novels by Zane Grey and the complete works of Carlyle; they were in matched bindings, as consistent as the guest set. Beyond the screened window in the luminous light was a view, uninterrupted by a single human object, of the wigwams of the Rockies. Walker stared for a moment until suddenly, all interruption, there came into it a youth in jeans; he was firing a large gun into the undergrowth in a desultory, inhuman sort of way. ‘That’s my son,’ said Mrs Bourbon in tones that mingled pride and disgust. A moment later Dr Bourbon came into the room, unpuffed, carrying Walker’s suitcases suspended round him. The off-colour rugs, their tentative unfinished patterns suggesting they had been woven by incompetent Navajos, slid beneath his feet on the vinyl-tiled floor. ‘Dern it,’ he said, his deep voice booming off the soundproofed ceiling, ‘These all, boy? You travel mighty light for a stranger.’

  ‘Well, you never know when you might have to run, do you,’ said Walker.

  ‘Guess not,’ said Bourbon, taking the remark rather coolly.

  ‘Well, Mr Walker will want to take a shower,’ said Mrs Bourbon. There was, in fact, nothing further from Walker’s thoughts, but he knew a hint when one was given.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well, come and join us in the conversation pit when you’re all washed up.’

  Walker didn’t understand this but said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘The bathroom’s right here,’ said Mrs Bourbon, opening the first door in the passageway and switching on the light. Immediately a frantic whirring and buzzing and whirring began in the room; Walker jumped back. ‘It’s just the extractor fan,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘It’s activated by the light. You’ll find us through here.’

  When they had gone Walker locked the door and took off his clothes, which smelled of Pullman. He piled them in a corner of the bathroom and got under the shower, turning the handles. A blow of hot water made him jump out again. He reached through the shower curtain and fiddled with the taps until the water was slower and cooler. Now he got in and stood passively while pins of water bored gimlet holes in his head. Getting out, he found that the shower water had soaked the bathroom and all his clothes. For decency’s sake, he clad himself in his dirty wet underwear and his trousers and ran back along the corridor to his bedroom, clutching the rest of his outer gear. Here he stripped again and began to unpack his cases, looking for his underwear and thinking that he must really write to Elaine. This thought stirred up a complex of emotions that he did not know what to do with, so he sat on the coverlet and peered out through the window, only to discover a small round female face looking curiously at him from outside. ‘Hello,’ said Walker. The child pointed coldly at Walker’s private parts and said nothing. ‘Go away,’ said Walker. The child puffed out a large round globule of bubble gum, shrank and enlarged this for some moments, and then walked off. Walker drew the drapes, completed his toilet in some unease, and tried to restore his hair, which adhered in a thick wet cake on his pate, before entering into company. He found Mrs Bourbon in a large room quite big enough for a dancehall, sitting surrounded by space and time, time and space. She sat on a bergère settee, stroking a Siamese cat and reading the supermarket advertisements in the Party Bugle; before her, tea was laid.

  ‘Here comes Mr Walker,’ said Mrs Bourbon to the cat, which went away. ‘Hullo, feeling fresh?’

  ‘Very fresh,’ said Walker.

  ‘Good. Do take a seat, please. Harris is just frying us up some steaks. How do you feel about outdoor cuisine?’

  ‘Oh, I like it,’ said Walker, who could not remember having eaten anything outdoors other than fish and chips.

  ‘It’s adventurous, we all do it out here.’ While she spoke, there appeared, through an aperture which in England would have been blocked by a door, a small child, wearing a confederate general’s hat and pedalling a tricycle. ‘Charge, man, charge, wipe out the enemy,’ he cried, speeding dramatically across the room until he slapped hard against the opposite wall, which dismounted him and cracked open his tricycle wheel.

  ‘Don’t show off, Alphonse,’ said Mrs Bourbon from the conversation pit. ‘Are you all intact?’

  Alphonse, dry-eyed, said, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Come over here and show me how intact you are.’

  Alphonse went over and sat on his mother’s knee, staring fixedly at Walker as he did so. ‘What you want to go and do that for?’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘Didn’t I tell you not to ride that thing in here?’

  ‘I wanted to see the crazy Englishman,’ said Alphonse. Walker felt a shiver of foreboding. ‘What’s your name?’ getting off the knee and coming over to stand by Walker, said Alphonse, looking hard at him. ‘And talk fast – or I’ll let you have it.’

  ‘His name’s James Walker,’ said Mrs Bourbon, ‘and he’s come over from England to be in Harris’s department, and he’s staying with us for a few days. How’s that?’

  ‘Crazy,’ said Alphonse. ‘His name’s James. James likes dames and games and pames and mames and bames . . .’

  ‘Come here,’ said Mrs Bourbon to Alphonse, who took no notice; instead he said to Walker, ‘Are you from England?’

  Walker risked speech; he said, tentatively, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Alphonse, ‘well your teeth are all crooked. Whydya got such crooked teeth? Whycha go get ’em straightened? Whycha wearing a brace like me?’

  ‘Cut that out, Alphonse,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘Look, isn’t it time you were hitting that old sack?’

  ‘England’s a nutty crummy country,’ said Alphonse.

  ‘How do you know?’ said Walker.

  ‘That’s the word,’ said Alphonse.

  ‘It’s time you were in your bunk,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

  ‘Okay, okay, I’m just going. But I’m hungry. Can I take a piece pie out the icebox?’

  ‘Yes, just one piece, and then get right undressed.’

  When Alphonse had gone, Walker stroked his eyebrow with one finger and said, ‘And do you have a small daughter also?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘My twins. Do you have children too, Mr Walker?’

  ‘Yes, one daughter.’

  ‘I’m afraid we haven’t made too good a job of ours.’

  Alphonse passed by the entrance space, carrying a whole pie and shouting, ‘Nutty crummy Englishman.’

  ‘I always felt that if I’d brought them up in England . . . they wouldn’t, you know . . . have been such bastards.’

  ‘Oh, you can’t say that,’ said Walker, much excited to discover in nuance that same mythical England to which sev
eral people had already referred, fulcrum of moral sanity, fine and formal society.

  Outside the house a gong boomed sonorously. ‘Come and GIT it,’ cried Dr Bourbon’s booming voice.

  ‘He loves the kids,’ said Mrs Bourbon. She got up and led the way out on to the patio where Dr Bourbon stood in an attitude of warm anticipation, like a big amiable dog, wearing a chef’s tall hat and an apron with Danger: Not Recommended by Duncan Hines inscribed upon it. Smoke was rising in some quantity from a barbecue grill of modern design. Beyond the eating pit Walker noticed a small kidney-shaped swimming pool, in the blue water of which a small kidney-shaped girl without clothing lay on an inflated air mattress. ‘I thought you were in bed, Brandy,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

  ‘Aw, go jump in the lake,’ said the girl, whom Walker recognized as the Face at the Window.

  ‘Time you was bedded down, Brandy baby,’ said Dr Bourbon. ‘Come ’long now for yer paw.’ The child tipped off the float, swam to the steps and padded in past Walker. ‘Huh,’ she said. Mrs Bourbon followed her in.

  ‘Don’t lit your steak git cold, sweetie,’ cried Dr Bourbon after her.

  Then Walker and Bourbon ate their steaks together silently in the half-light, while monstrous flies pierced holes in Walker’s leg and tapped the vein. The steaks were on paper plates and were intensely flavoured; Dr Bourbon had apparently been overly generous with a bottle labelled SMOKE: Gives That Real Smoke Flavor to Your Bar-B-Q. Finally Mrs Bourbon came back and began to eat. The night was clear and cool and the mountains were still visible. They seemed to speak of a world away from families, a world away from mankind altogether, a world of pure action and pure being. The threads and frenzies of family life that he had met in the Bourbon household reminded him of home; but the mountains suggested something better, the thing that had summoned him away. And thinking in the darkness, Walker brought his mind round to a thought that had been hunting through his mind since the day he left home, and which the mountains had brought to fullness. He looked up and said, ‘I wonder if I might send a telegram, Dr Bourbon.’

  Dr Bourbon swallowed and said, ‘Sure, boy, go right ahead.’

  He reached down, lifted a large stone, and produced an extension telephone in a pleasant shade of light blue. ‘What do I do?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Call Western Union and give them the message,’ said Bourbon.

  ‘What’s the number?’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Bourbon, putting a last morsel down his throat. ‘I’ll git ’em for you.’ He hooked his long fingers into the dialling mechanism and presently said, ‘Hi there, Western Union. Hold the line, I got you a customer.’ Then he nodded to Walker and passed the mouthpiece over to him, saying, ‘Just talk into this bit right here, and the girl who’s on the other end will take your message. It’s pretty simple.’

  ‘I wonder . . . it’s rather personal, this,’ said Walker.

  ‘He wants us to go inside, Harris,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

  When they had disappeared inside and shut the door behind them, Walker, speaking quietly but firmly, dictated his message to the girl who was treacling on the other end of the line. The message said ARRIVED SAFELY STOP WILL YOU GIVE ME DIVORCE QUERY MARRIAGE UNSUCCESS STOP LOVE JAMES. The operator, without concern, repeated the message to a Walker now shaking all over with it. ‘That’s it,’ said Walker.

  ‘I guess from the nature of the message you’ll want it reply-paid?’

  ‘Oh yes, please,’ said Walker.

  ‘Address for reply?’

  Walker thought for a moment and then offered the address of the English Department at Benedict Arnold; a wise caution told him that Dr Bourbon might not like to receive this kind of message at his home. After he had replaced the receiver and put the apparatus back beneath its stone, Walker sat back and found that he was feeling very upset indeed. And he realized something else also. The tall lanky youth in jeans, the one who had interrupted the mountains a little earlier, was sitting in a patio chair behind him. He was smiling and directing at Walker a pair of hostile sunglasses with mirror-faced lenses in which Walker could see only two shrunken images of himself. It was Crispin, the Bourbons’ third child; Walker looked blankly at him. ‘Boy, oh boy, oh boy,’ said Crispin, grinning. ‘What a story . . . boy, oh boy.’

  5

  THE FALL SEMESTER at Benedict Arnold had not begun; there were four more days of peace before it did. Party and the campus rested on in the summer sunlight, and the mountains sat quietly behind them all. In the university buildings, classrooms stood empty and cavernous, their desks with little curved writing arms waiting to be filled. The soda fountain in the union contained only faculty members in nylon shirts and the campus maintenance men and policemen. In the university bookstore, behind a display of university pennants and sweatshirts with cartoon characters on the bosoms, a single, bored clerk read, for curiosity’s sake, Up from Liberalism, a required text in the sophomore course on International Affairs in the Modern World (Dr Jochum). Only a few small faculty children bathed noisily in the lake. In the driveway of the Sigma Chi house the fraternity’s red fire-engine, an assertive symbol of manhood, awaited the return of the residents from the delectations of the fifty states and Bermuda and Europe. The clean air sang. In the mornings, before the sun grew hot, the day came up fresh, bright and cool. People stirred early; at the Bourbon household Dr Bourbon was up with . . . if not the lark, then the vulture. Clad in a handsome Japanese kimono, carrying about a peanut-butter sandwich, he did half an hour of push-ups on the patio and turned on the sprinklers before going into his study to write, before breakfast, a thousand words of Marston: the Man, the Moment and the Milieu. The keys of the typewriter flicked; the pages of reference books flipped; and new horizons of Marston thinking opened while the sprinklers bubbled outside. The carillon on campus began a morning rendition of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’. The garbage cart coasted down the street. In bed James Walker slept further on into the day.

  The heat thickened. The mountains grew hazy. Late night adulterers walked quietly home. Crispin, the Bourbons’ maladjusted son, rose, showered, pulled on his Levi’s and a sweatshirt, fixed himself some fruit-juice, got into his hotrod car and roared away in a scurry of dust, heading for town to exercise his devil. The carillon played ‘These Foolish Things’. Walker stirred but slept on. The sun rose higher and the areas of shade disappeared. Mrs Bourbon, in a Japanese kimono that matched Harris’s, got up and went into the kitchen to ladle out breakfast, a feast habitually used by Alphonse and Brandy as missiles in substitute for other forms of communication between them. The carillon rendered ‘Bless You for Being an Angel’. And Walker stirred and began to heave himself into consciousness. The day shone bright into the room, penetrating the vestigial drapes. The light had a colour and vigour that he was not used to and he found himself meeting it – was it the light that did it, or something else? – with expectation. His dreams seemed curiously energetic; his body, this last few days, seemed to be taking on new power. He no longer needed sleep so much; he no longer felt away from where he belonged, and he no longer awoke missing Elaine’s big bulk beside him. In the mountains the train whistles echoed and America seemed to him a landscape of excitement. He got out of bed with some pleasure, ready for the day.

  Downstairs he could hear the skillet, frying those absurdly thin rashers of American bacon that crisped into tiny autumn leaves of food, and also a strange booming sound – it was the sound of Dr Bourbon singing lustily to himself at the typewriter. Walker, who had already adopted the American custom of sleeping in his undershorts, and was already viewing his own body with a good deal more interest as a result, padded through to the bathroom and took a shower. It no longer annoyed him; now it cleansed and neatened him. Because it wet his hair, he had resolved to have it all cut short; perhaps that would thicken it up, too, like turf. The extractor fan, whirring mercilessly over his head, no longer irritated him either. When he had showered he stood naked on the bathroom scales and looked at the measure; he was
going to watch his weight. He opened the medicine cabinet and took, from among the rows of deodorants and dandruff remover, anti-congestants and purgatives, eyewash and shower talc, Dr Bourbon’s dental floss, now his favourite method of cleaning his teeth. Then he sat on the lavatory pot and lit one of Dr Bourbon’s cigarettes, which lay on the flushing mechanism, and read a few pages of Bourbon’s lavatory book, A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy. Outside, the noises of Alphonse and Brandy, drowning one another in the pool, could be heard and in the distance the carillon played ‘I’m Sitting on Top of the World’. ‘In the circumstances where we see his hero placed,’ he read, ‘his tragic trait, which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have given, but which the hero cannot give.’ He put a match in the place to mark it and got up, finished his business, and went back into the bedroom. His clothes lay in piles about the room. He put on trousers and a shirt, gazing out as he did so at the high furry peaks in the distance, the sprays of water rising from the sprinklers on the lawn, and the Japanese wind-chimes that tinkled in the breeze where they hung under the house-eaves. When he was dressed, he opened the door and paused for a moment in the corridor, taking a deep breath to ready himself for the generous syrup of American hospitality that he knew was to be poured over his head.

  The Bourbons, from the first, had been poised to be kind to him. As soon as he reached the kitchen, Dr Bourbon, Japanese robe open to a furry navel, appeared at the door of his study. ‘Guess that puts me ’bout two thousand wuds ahead this morning, boy,’ he said cheerfully, cracking two eggs into the skillet with a practised and professional motion that came from doing, apparently, all the household cooking. ‘How’d you like ’em? Done both sides?’