by John Crowley
“What,” Spofford said. “Snatch her?”
Rosie made no answer. They both listened to the winter night and the silence of the house where Sam was not.
“It’s not just for me or her,” Rosie said, thinking of what Beau had said. “It’s more. I can’t explain.” She couldn’t explain because she hadn’t understood what Beau had meant, but she was willing to say it anyway, on the chance that it might move Spofford, as it had her; but she didn’t need to, he would have done it for her, he would have done it for Sam alone, which was the only motive that could actually succeed. But what was it, exactly, that he was to do?
“I just want her back,” Rosie said. “I want you to get her back.”
11
It was actually some years, several years, before Pierce saw Rose Ryder again, and they were very different people by then. It was in the Midwest, actually, which turned out to be quite unlike the place he had imagined it to be; he had never had occasion to visit there. They walked and talked together by the side of a wide brown river; it was night, but the water seemed to illuminate it with a glow it possessed, and there were lights too, far off where the river made a sweeping bend, toward which they went.
He wanted to know first of all if she was all right, of course, and it seemed she was; she talked of those days with a tolerant humor, it was a long time ago now. Pierce marvelled at the strength of human desire and aspiration, a hunger profound beyond all these schemes, greater than anything proposed to fill it. She shook her head, and flicked the end of her cigarette with her thumbnail (never had quit apparently) and told him how she had come through.
“I can’t complain,” she said. “Never complain, never explain. That’s my motto.”
What surprised him most about her now was that she had cut her hair short, he didn’t know when or why and was shy to ask; had cut it short and yes lightened its color too, it was almost blond, a tawny complex color he could not resolve in the night and the river light. He lifted his hand to touch it, and she suffered him.
“There’s just a lot you don’t know, Pierce,” she said, and he thought that yes so there was, and he thought without fear that he wanted to know it, he did: and in his thinking this his heart seemed to return again into his bosom.
They walked the dim towpath. This river, he knew, was a tributary of the same great river into which the river flowed that received the waters of the Shadow and the Blackbury far away. You could set out on this one and go back and back until you reached the juncture of those.
“I mostly wanted to say,” he said, “that I’m sorry I was such a. That I managed everything I was given to do so badly. That I failed. That I was so stupidly unkind.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said. “Anyway it wasn’t a bad experience. They taught me a lot.” A smile of remembrance or anticipation bloomed in her face, and she seemed to grow young. “Know what I can still do?” she asked. “Watch.”
She had taken out a match, a kitchen match of the largest kind, and held it up in the dark between them, and looked fixedly at its red head. He knew the look: he had just time in which to recognize it (hieroglyph of his damned state) when the match, untouched, burst into flame.
The furious hiss and flare of it woke him, mouth open and gulping, heart striking hard. Beau Brachman stood in his living room, holding a small paper bag and looking through the arch at Pierce lying on the daybed.
“You guys left that party quick,” Beau said. “I never caught up with Rose again.”
“She wanted to get some sleep,” Pierce said. He pulled out the makings for a pot of coffee. “She left pretty early. She had to be back for something.”
“What something?” Beau asked.
“I don’t know.”
Beau put the paper bag he carried on Pierce’s kitchen table. “You need something to go with that coffee,” he said.
“I’m not really hungry.”
“Ah,” said Beau. “Rosie says you’re not eating right.”
Once again Pierce was surprised, disbelieving actually, to hear that others thought about him, talked about him to one another. “No no,” he said. “No no.”
Beau had opened the paper bag he had brought and was considering its contents. “Granola,” he said. “We make this. It’s sold all over. Well all over the county anyway. This kind is …” He sniffed it. “This is Gone Nuts granola, I think. Or Totally Spirit.”
“Gee,” Pierce said. “Either would do.” He had in fact never eaten granola. He finished making his bitter brew.
“There’s something we’ve got to find out,” Beau said. “We need to know where Sam is.”
“You think Rose would know?”
“I hoped she was still here. So I could ask her.”
“I can call her later. I guess. I’m not sure she’d, she’d …”
“No. That’s not good.” He opened a cabinet and found a bowl suitable for cereal; examined it as though for flaws; and set it down beside the bag. “When were you going to see her again?”
“I think,” Pierce said, “I’m not going to. At all ever. That’s kind of my plan. I mean maybe someday, when … well.”
“You’ve told her this?”
“No.” She had genuinely delighted in the great Ball, in his attentions, in the fireworks, everything, drinking it in as though it were distilled just for her. And Pierce knew he would die if he didn’t break off with her.
“Beau, at the party you said,” Pierce began, and then paused, unsure whether Beau really had said this, in so-called waking life anyway. “You said that it wasn’t my fault. This. All this.”
“Yes.”
“But that it still might be mine to fix.”
“Yes.”
“I think that too. I don’t believe it but I think it.”
“The story’s about you,” Beau said.
“But why would I be so important, why me and not somebody else?” he cried. “It’s crazy to think that. It’s crazy to think something you don’t believe.”
“Look,” Beau said. “Why did you think it was, that you happened to appear here? Just here, in the Faraways? That day when you did, last summer, a summer ago. Didn’t you think it was strange how you came into this story?”
“Everything’s strange,” Pierce said. “Or nothing is.” But he thought of it, how on a noontime he had got off the bus on his way to the city of Conurbana; how he had sat in the shade of a great tree, a huge living thing, whose leaves had lifted in a breeze that passed through the valley then; a Little Breeze that stirred his hair and his heart. He thought he had been escaping, escaping at last.
“The world is made from stories,” Beau said, as though imparting a simple truth to a child, who was hearing it for the first time, first of the many times it would take to become a truth. “And right now it’s this one. And will be till it’s all told.”
“One story,” Pierce said. “That’s what she says. What they say. I won’t believe it.”
“You’re not required to finish it,” Beau said. “But you’re not supposed to give it up either.”
“See this is what’s crazy,” Pierce said wildly. “This is the craziness of thinking that the world is a plot, a game, something to be figured out or solved. Exactly the kind of sick, the kind of. No. No.”
“The world is a game,” Beau said. “And it’s also a world too.”
“I can’t go back there,” Pierce said. “Not to that city. I can’t.” “I’m not saying it’s not hard,” Beau said. “Dangerous even. Even if it’s only you who thinks so.”
“I can’t,” Pierce said. “I disagree in principle.”
Beau rose, and came to where Pierce stood. For a moment Pierce thought that Beau meant to embrace him, and he waited in dread and hope for this, whatever it might mean, whatever it would impart. But Beau only slipped his arm through Pierce’s, as though he thought Pierce might fall; he turned his hand, and took Pierce’s hand in a strong backwards grip.
“Well if you do go, if you go today to
find her,” Beau said, as if Pierce had entertained that possibility, even for a moment, which he hadn’t, “if you go, see if you can learn about Sam. Today. It’s important, and you’re the only connection now.”
When Beau was gone Pierce sat before the bowl and bag.
He supposed you ate this stuff with milk. It was all he had to eat. He got up and looked in the fridge, milk, how about that, and unsoured.
Sugar too, totally spirit, white as white.
He mixed all these things and lifted a heaping, dripping spoonful toward his mouth. It’s a game, and it’s a world too. What Rose had said: That was only a game. No matter; they had played for keeps. And now see. Not required to finish it, can’t give it up either.
He bit down. Instantly his mouth was flooded with a taste that was the exact cognate of a smell, one that for a brief time somewhen had ruled his life with an awful power but that he had not smelled since; now it, and all that time with it, rushed into his sensorium, he could see, taste, smell nothing else, though he could give it no name or place.
He bit again, shifting the awful bolus in his mouth, and there arose within him in all its detail the summer camp to which once, at age nine or even eight, he had been remanded by his mother and father, who somehow knew no better, thought maybe to get him out of the apartment and the city and his books for a while anyway; and the utter exile he had experienced there. Axel had not reckoned, and Winnie couldn’t have understood, that he didn’t know the first thing about ordinary boyhood, did not know even the rules of baseball in any but a general way, did not know how to do the Australian crawl or paddle a canoe; he had not dared to speak to anyone there lest these shortcomings be discovered, had hidden and skulked, had not even been able to ask where the bathrooms were and had peed his pants for the first days of his captivity there (earning the utter scorn and rejection of every other boy who came near him, but Pierce was too terrorized to regret or even to notice this, even now no single face came back to him of all those happy lads) until at last and by chance he had come upon the noisome outhouses, and realized nearly fainting with relief and revulsion what they were: and it was the odor of that row of shacks, their pits, their lime buckets, their soiled paper, whatever exactly constituted it, that overwhelming acrid odor, that had been released in this bite of granola that Pierce still held between his teeth, unable for a long moment either to swallow or expel it.
He stood, gulping, brimful of self-pity. How could they have, how could they. How could he, but he only a little kid after all, ah poor little son of a bitch. He realized he was to weep again, and the rage not to weep, to weep no more, made the sobs when they came out the more awful.
Oh that place. The dreadful company of his fellows, the penitential meals, the round of meaningless activity that could not be refused, rarely avoided. He had not, ever after, felt so whittled away, so at a loss, so subject to inescapable and unfeeling others, not until the army, which that camp resembled in every respect, down to the burr haircuts and the noise level.
No he had not gone into the army, what was he thinking. He lifted his head. He had not been a soldier, had made himself appear undesirable, undraftable according to the standards of the day, by what should have been a transparent ruse, but that he had made convincing maybe by his apparently frank cooperation—he had actually asked the recruiting officer if it were possible to appeal their decision to reject him.
Had he even gone to that camp? It seemed impossible that he could have.
He looked down at his inoffensive bowl of grains, but didn’t dare take another bite. A horrid thought fled through him: that Beau had given him the stuff for a reason. A pawn in a game of Beau’s own, he was caught now, captured. No now that was crazy for sure. What reason, anyway.
He sat again. He remembered how he had left the Army Recruiting Station on Whitehall Street in bottommost Manhattan and been unable to go more than a block, just out of their sight, before he had to sit down on the curb amid the crowds and weep in relief and gratitude. Out.
Unthinking he ate more of the granola. One bite, another.
Assent and escape. That had been his gambit with powerful figures of every kind, hadn’t it, not only with the army, the church, but with teachers and employers too, with his advisor Frank Walker Barr, his agent Julie Rosengarten: being too timid to deny, to dismiss, to fight back, Pierce had only assented, finding no reason not to assent. As he had to his uncle Sam’s commandments too, under whose rule he found himself without his choosing and yet without any reasonable grounds on which to protest; seeming to assent anyway, trying to assent, crafting the absolute dissent of his heart into something that looked like assent: cunningly, out of motherwit and doubletalk, metaphysical quibbles, extended metaphors and evasive anagogies, until it was convincing even to himself. And by that means escaping the judgment of those to whom he must seem to assent.
Of course there was One who could not be escaped by those means; and that One had taken his beloved, and embraced her, and now she was His, and beckoned Pierce too to assent; and he couldn’t, no more, not this time. And so he must turn away and hide, or stand and fight. Fight or flight. That was all.
Was he going to have to believe that?
It apparently didn’t matter what he believed, only what he did.
Well he would do it then. In the face of its impossibility and asininity, which was the very point. A fool’s errand, the only kind he would ever be sent on or chosen for; if he did not accept it he would be chosen for none.
So he went and washed and dressed warmly and put some whiskey in his flask, his silver flask, and left his house early that afternoon. He went out to his old Steed, spavined Rosinante, and took his place behind the wheel. Then he got out again, and went back to the house, for he had forgotten his car key.
The front path of my house is beaten by my own footsteps, there is no other.
The guardian trees are long gone if they were ever there. The cup I find is plain and much-used, and through it runs a dreadful crack; it is the one I asked might pass from me; I drink from it still, last thing before I go. The key is on the desk among my papers, and it is this one, the key to my car, that I need for the journey. Outside my back door is another path, the path we first came up together, going the wrong way; the water that is there is the endless river, it wells up amid the rocks and flows through the pumps and hoses of my house, the same river that runs far under the earth and in the heavens too.
He had not gone very far toward the highway when he chanced to look down at the gauges displayed on the dashboard before him, which he was not in the habit of consulting very often, and saw that the needle of the gas gauge was prostrate, pointing at E; he had no idea how long it had been lying there. There was, he knew, only one gas station between here and the strip beyond the Jambs, where there were several: a decrepit one-man operation just then coming into sight. Wolfram’s.
Gray and unpainted, Wolfram’s seemed as much junkyard as gas station; old cars and parts of cars, fenders, tires and radiators rusting, but a couple of refrigerators too and a weather-flayed Naugahyde couch. The brand of gas advertised on the big round sign was one not sold elsewhere, and Wolfram was rarely there; he trusted his customers to help themselves, and drop their money through a slot in his door.
Pierce had never pumped his own gas before. He had often seen it done though; had stopped here once with Spofford and once with Rosie and watched them. He could do it; he had to.
He drew the Steed up to one of the two pumps, aligning as best he could its rear end with the handle; got out filled with apprehension and dusted his hands together, ashamed at how little he knew, who was it that should have taught him and had not, or was it (of course it was) that he had himself assiduously avoided learning these things, as he had all sports and manly arts whatever, and now see; and thinking these thoughts, which he had thought before, he unscrewed the silver cap of his tank (newer cars had theirs hidden behind small doors). Warning himself not to forget to screw that cap back on
again, he pulled the hose from the pump. He remembered that what you did next was flick the handle on the pump’s side upright, which yes started the pump and reset the numbers on the front. He pumped; he finished, shut it off, gratified, remembered too to put the cap back on; went and put his money in the slot. Peeked through the dirty glass to see if perhaps Wolfram were after all in that den, observing; but could see nothing alive within.
Anyway he’d done it. The Steed however started sluggishly, as though its throat were clogged with phlegm. Pierce turned out onto the road; a terrible odor arose around him, black, burned, wrong. Something was wrong. Pierce had only power enough, foot to the floor, to get off the road, sat stalled then and gripping the wheel in bafflement. He raised his eyes to the mirror and looked back at Wolfram’s. He could see the two pumps, that they were mismatched, and realized that he had noticed this even as he had pulled up; and now saw that there was a sign hanging over one, the one colored red. When he got out of his car and walked back a ways toward the station, he could read it. It said DIESEL.
He had filled his car with diesel fuel. He stared at the little scene down at the turn of the road, the shabby shop and the two pumps, seeming to be shrugging and looking askance, not their fault. He thought it likely that no one had ever before done what he had just done, no one; he may have destroyed his car; he thought of abandoning it there forever. Walk home, never leave. He had not understood that there had been a choice to make, and he had made the wrong one. He thought This could not have happened.
And it had not; no it hadn’t happened. At the last second, as he stood at the pump holding the dripping nozzle (arm, nose and penis in one), before penetration occurred Pierce had noticed that the pump he had chosen was red and the other one blue, and had stopped, wondering why. Looked up to see that sign. And now, his tank replete with gasoline, he and his Steed went down the valley of the Blackbury, past the Jambs and out onto the highway; Pierce watched the speedometer rise past fifty, toward sixty, and after a time of straining ease off and coast, inertia carrying him forward.
