Peru

by Gordon Lish

  This is what his camp has a specific emphasis on, they have it on water-skiing with speedboats and water skis and with those special life jackets water-skiers wear, they have that as the specific emphasis up there, the camp is specifically set up for it.

  They couldn’t be bigger on it up there than they are on water-skiing up there.

  SHE SAID, “It takes all kinds to make a world.”

  I thought to myself that it might be a game, that it might be a trick, that it might be a secret between all three of them, that the way he was talking might really just be a secret which all three of them, which they were all three of them actually having against me.

  I thought to myself that he had been inside, hadn’t he? I thought to myself that if he had been inside, then didn’t this probably mean that he was in on it all, that now he was in on everything, in on the secret of the meat pattie and of the eggcup and of the maid.

  I’ll tell you one of the things which made me feel the worst I have ever felt—namely, it was this—that Andy Lieblich actually probably knew things about baseball and about who Johnny Mize was. My God, it made me feel the worst, Steven Adinoff in on the secrets of things.

  She said, “All this child is doing is just trying to join in like any normal undeformed child.”

  The colored man came around. I watched him hook the hose up. He let the hose fall down from around his arm and dumped it down on the ground under the faucet and then the colored man faced his back to me and hooked it up.

  It was all so hot and so slow and so itchy. It wasn’t the way the Lieblichs’ was. She was right—there were too many boys and it was too hot and things were too itchy and too suffocating and all at sixes and sevens.

  She said, “Raise your hand if you want to be one of the boys who plays in the sandbox today.”

  It made a hissy sound. It made a sound like when you hear the frying in a frying pan sizzling from far away.

  She said, “I am just one woman alone—I can’t undo the nature of everything.”

  It was like being upstairs and like listening to her downstairs in the kitchen.

  I said, “If Andy gets the shovel, then can I have the hoe and then that boy has to have the rake?”

  It was the sound of everything sizzling.

  She said, “I am just one person alone—people cannot expect me to change the nature of everything.”

  YOU HAVE TO STOP to realize that it could have happened to anybody, the kind of accident which happened to me on June whatever it was, late last June. I mean, it was really just an ordinary thing, a totally but totally ordinary situation and a totally ordinary thing—with the two exceptions of, first, the name of the cab driver and where the cab driver came from, and, second, of the fact that nobody but a total fassbudget would have reached back in the first time and then gone ahead and instantly done the same idiotic thing all over again almost in the very next instant.

  But did I have my wits about me? How could I have had my wits about me? There was no way for me to have had anything like my wits about me!

  No, I definitely but definitely did not have my wits about me, and I think that we can thank the night before for this—this plus the fact that I kept thinking to myself that in this one specific instance a taxi was needlessly spendthrift and that it might have been nice for Henry to get a chance to show off in front of the other boys, let them see what lifting weights had done for him over the winter, let them see him managing to walk his gear over and so on and so forth—all of the things that are supposed to matter to boys.

  You know what thirteen-year-olds are like. Because this is what thirteen-year-olds are supposed to be like.

  It is really the worst age for comparisons.

  Theatrics, hysterics, the whole thing was all of it just a question of theatrics and of hysterics, and yet at the time, I tell you, at the time I think I actually but actually thought to myself that it was curtains, that I’d gone ahead and got my brains bashed in by some cab driver just because I couldn’t bear to see a little snippet of something stuck to the top of a footlocker, some kind of little tiny bit of plastic tape or something—probably some kind of something from when Florence taped the inventory up inside of the lid of Henry’s footlocker or something.

  My God, my God, my knees actually buckled. For the first time in my life I actually felt what it feels like to have your knees buckle. Because it’s amazing, they really do, they really buckle—it’s actually comic the way you can feel your knees buckle like that and then think to yourself, “My God, look at that, my knees are buckling.”

  I’d been up all night.

  I’d been up at least half the night.

  Had I gotten even a wink of sleep?

  I mean, even if you set aside what I had seen on television, even if you take what I had seen and then set it aside, just the mere fact of expecting Henry to take off for camp in the morning, even if you just take this fact alone, don’t you think it would have probably been more than enough for it to keep me up all night any night long?

  THE WAY HE GOT UP was like the way they got up on the television on the roof.

  Or the way at least one of them did. But maybe they both got up again like that—or even the third man did, if there really was such a man as such. He was almost all dead himself, but he got up to walk around and put his hands in his pockets and then get the rake again and then try to get me with it even though he himself was already so far gone that it was not even funny anymore, even though he was probably almost already completely dead by then.

  But he put it back down again and then he went ahead and lay back down again and then lay there like he was waiting for something.

  You know the blood I noticed the most?

  The blood which was on his buttons!

  He said, “Nyere’s Nyonny Nyize?”

  He kept putting his hands in his pockets and feeling all around inside of his pockets and then taking his hands back out and then putting them back in again.

  He said, “Nyi nyost Nyonny Nyize.”

  He kept walking around.

  It was unbelievable to me. I really could not figure it out how he could walk around like that anymore, but he kept walking around like that—in the sandbox, out of the sandbox—he just kept it up and kept putting his hands in his pockets and feeling around in them and saying all of these various different things about the baseball card.

  I didn’t have the baseball card!

  I never touched the baseball card!

  I wouldn’t have touched anything which Steven Adinoff had touched even if you had paid me!

  Even any of the sand which Steven Adinoff touched—even when it was the sand which he had put in his pail and then gone ahead and dumped it out on the grass—I would not have touched anything which Steven Adinoff had been anywhere near—even sand, even the sand which he dumped out of his pail on the grass or raked out—even when the nanny said that if somebody did not go get it right back up and get it right back in, even when the nanny said that if somebody didn’t, then that she as the nanny was going to stop the game.

  The nanny said, “Pretty is as pretty does.”

  His eye, his eye!—the way it gave you the idea it was looking straight down in a straight downward direction, that because of the way his cheek was the eye just got to look like as if it was looking downward that way. I know it really wasn’t, that it really couldn’t, that if you could just put back what was missing from the cheek, then the eye would not keep giving you this particular impression of which direction it was looking in, that it was just an illusion, or an optical illusion, because it could not actually have been looking straight downward like that, no eye could have, no eye can look anywhere in a straight downward direction like that, can it?

  Like a peach pit with most of the peach bitten off of it—I can’t think of a description which would be better at being descriptive than this one, except for the fact that it was from the hoe, that it was a hoe which did it and not teeth which did it.

 
It was like a trench. You could hear a squelchy sound.

  Everything was sizzling.

  There were the rubber bands.

  I bet I was probably going something like—“It’s a hoe,” “It’s a toe,” “It’s a show,” “It’s a dough.”

  You know.

  Think back.

  You thought you could start anywhere, start with anything, and that you would not ever come to a stop until all of the words were all over.

  Or you choked.

  You know what?

  He was just as interested in watching it as I was.

  It was like he wanted to lie back but also keep himself up enough on one elbow for him to keep looking at me look.

  He said, “Nyou nyon’t nyave nyoo nyill nyee.”

  He said, “Nyou nyidn’t nyave nyoo nyill nyee.”

  But in all reality, did he really mind?

  He probably only really minded it when it was after the hoe part had broken off and it was just the stick itself.

  You don’t understand.

  I myself didn’t.

  Not until I saw them on the roof.

  It took me forty-four years for me to see it again—and you know what? Now I am not going to see anything else.

  I heard him go, “Ahhh.”

  Only it was really like—“Nyahhh.”

  In the case of me, however, when I myself got clunked, in my case not by a toy hoe but by the top of a trunk, by the lid of the taxicab’s trunk, I don’t think I made a sound so much as just thought to myself that my knees had just buckled, that for the first time in my life I had actually but actually felt them buckle. But then I looked down at my knees to see what buckling knees would look like, and when I did this, when I bent over and did it, guess what. Because I saw the blood come dropping down in what looked to me like almost like a spout of it—and this was when I screamed, I screamed—when I saw it drop in like a long spill of it like this, like it had been in a pail up on top of my head and then the pail of it had tipped a bit and a long splash of blood was spilling out—because—Jesus Christ—because when I saw the first long splash of it go past my eyes in one long stream of it and then splash the street and splash my shoes—I screamed, I screamed!—I screamed, “Jesus Christ, I’m killed!”

  You don’t understand the situation yet, you don’t understand—because it wasn’t just a question of me getting myself whacked in the head like that, it was also a question of a million other things—for instance, what about the footlocker, what about the duffel bag?

  Or of Henry not getting on the bus?

  Or even of her seeing my head?

  She was on the stairs.

  Then she went back up and got a washcloth wet and then she came back down with it and just sat down with it and then fell down with it like sticks.

  She was on the stairs when I came in the door.

  With my shoes and socks on?

  Without my shoes and socks on?

  I don’t know.

  I am not ever going to know.

  You don’t understand yet, you don’t understand yet—Henry and I had taken the footlocker down and taken the duffel bag down and then he himself had gone back up to tell Florence to hurry up while she was getting the rest of her face on and I myself was down in the street still trying to get a taxi.

  Or get a cab.

  I want you to know something. I want to admit to you something.

  I did not want the doorman doing it because is it worth it to you fifty cents, plus whatever else you would have to hand over to the fellow for him helping you get the footlocker in and get the duffel bag in when a taxi came toodling by because he blew his whistle for it?

  Or for a cab?

  This is the reason why I was up at the corner of Ninety-first and Fifth and not right in front of the building. This is the reason why I was up there with my head split open and with the footlocker in the trunk and the duffel bag on the backseat and with the cabbie and me both running up and down and not knowing what the next move for us was supposed to be. I mean, okay, do I get him to drive me up to Mount Sinai to the emergency room and therefore, as far as Henry and Florence are concerned, do I just vanish? Or do I wait there in the street and bleed to death? And if I wait, then won’t Henry come down and have to see me with my head wide open? But if I don’t wait, then what happens to Henry’s things? Do I just take all of Henry’s camp things or leave them in the street?

  But then right in the middle of all this, then with all of this going on with me right in the middle of this, then—it’s fantastic, it’s really fantastic—I let him slam the door on me on my fingers, so that the door gets slammed on me on right the ends of these two fingers!

  You should have seen that coat. You should have seen that sport coat. And I want you to know something—that morning, the morning of, it was the first time I had ever had it on, aside from when I was picking it up at Dunhill’s and put it on to check on the job they had done on it altering it.

  And the necktie—never worn before, purchased for just that morning, purchased just for the morning of, and both a total loss, not a thing to be done for either one of them, sopping wet, drenched through and through, a waste, a wreck, a total mess, ruined, everything—except for, because of the Vernax, the shoes—ruined.

  On the television, on the roof, you know what they were wearing?—not the shooters, of course, not the men shooting, but the ones who were getting stabbed and were stabbing, those two or three—I don’t know how many, I couldn’t tell how many—of them?

  Like pajamas—like a big white kind of pajamas!

  Like these big loose white kind of pajamas.

  So that whenever bullets hit them, it looked like rain was hitting them—like the way the white popped up, like little pops of it.

  Except our television, it’s not a color one, it’s a portable one and just a black-and-white one, so that maybe they were just light-colored pajamas and not actually really white ones.

  I think I said, “Don’t look!”

  I think I just automatically said, “Don’t look!”

  But I don’t know. I don’t remember anything of what I said after I first saw it, after I first looked up from packing my son Henry’s footlocker up and saw it. I don’t remember anything of what I did or didn’t say to Florence about it. Going to the telephone and calling the television station, I remember what I said to the woman who answered the telephone for the television station, but this is as far as it goes. I mean afterwards, when Florence and I went back to finishing the packing and then finally both actually went to bed, I don’t think I said anything about it, unless I am just automatically forgetting that I did.

  Don’t ask me how, but I am telling you that you could just tell that it was on a roof, that it was a roof which you were looking at it on, that all of them were on a roof, the two men, or the three men—namely, the men who were getting stabbed and were stabbing, plus the men who had the little machine guns and were shooting them, who were all of them shooting the men who were not paying any attention to them because they were so busy lying down and getting up and then switching around and going through this same whole funny kind of a routine all over again, this thing of getting stabbed by each other and then of sometimes sort of waking up and stabbing people back for a little bit, and then of lying right back down again and of looking back up and watching for the person stabbing you to take the next turn, of waiting for the other person to get himself up and for him to take the next turn, and neither one of them, or not any of all of the three of them if there were in fact ever all in all actually three of them, neither one of them paying even the slightest attention to all of the bullets that keep shooting into them, all the little puffs they make, like rain popping all over the big loose light-colored pajamas which the prisoners have on, like rain, like rain!

  Unless I am wrong to call them the prisoners.

  I really don’t know who was what—except that two of them had little machine guns and two of them had little knives—or
three, three had knives, that the three men in the pajamas had knives—if it actually just wasn’t that I only thought I saw a third one with a knife and it was really only two knives or, you know, two men.

  Not that I don’t realize that some of this probably just has to be my imagination filling in things in for me, not that some of this maybe wasn’t more or less imagined on the spot or just automatically thought up about everything afterwards, or more or less seen at the time with all sorts of tiny little inaccuracies in it, little things not seen too clearly at the time, not seen so clearly at the time because let’s remember the particular circumstances—the hour of the night, the exhaustion, my exhaustion, plus the fact that I just looked up and there it was without me having any warning it was, that the thing was already going on and that no one had ever even given me the least warning it was, the volume off and no announcer and no explanation, and make no mistake of it, make no mistake of it, our screen is not all that big of a screen in the first place, it is actually a fairly small screen, a fairly small television screen, since there is absolutely but absolutely no point in you always just having to fork over for the kind of repair costs which they just love to smack you with when you come to them with the whole thing of it broken.

  I take it back about the fringe.

  I cannot swear to the fringe.

  I feel it right now, a granule under a fingernail.

  Here’s a laugh for you—namely, that I didn’t even lose them—the fingernails on these two fingers. I can’t even say I lost even the fingernail on either one of these two fingers.

  THE REASON WHY I SAY IT WAS A ROOF, what convinces me, the things which gave it the look of a roof to me, which made it look this way to me even though it was a flat place, even though what the man with the television camera was taking a picture of was just of a big-looking flat-looking place, were things like this—things like flues and funnels, for instance, things like these different kinds of chimney things, like these big industrial-like exhaust things, ventilator things, these like ribbed crownlike like sheet-metal things which turn around from something, which rotate around or spin around from the wind or something.