Or, Daddy was a coward. Daddy had always been a coward. You were ashamed to think of such cowardice, blood of your blood.
He’d been worried about his health, Mummy said. Many frantic worries Daddy had had. An unmanned man has many worries as a way of drawing his attention from a single shameful worry. Yet he’d had unerring aim. He had not dropped the gun at the crucial moment. He had not hesitated. You would think that at such close range you could not miss your target but it can happen that in fact you miss your target inside the brain and must ever afterward endure a shadow-life of brain damage and utter oblivion and so the old man’s act was a risky one, or a reckless one. Perhaps it was courageous. Or, more likely it was the coward’s way out.
The son was in anguish, he could not know which. The son was never to know which.
The mother was no longer Mummy but Grace by this time. The son so despised Grace he could not bear to remain in any room with her. He could not bear conversation with her unless he was damned good and drunk or could console himself with the imminent possibility of being damned good and drunk. The son returned to Oak Park, Illinois, to oversee the funeral. The son who’d ceased to be a Christian let alone a member of the Congregational Church returned in the somber outer guise of a dutiful son to Oak Park, Illinois, to oversee the funeral services in the First Congregational Church. Afterward he did in fact get damned good and drunk and the drunk would last for thirty years.
Afterward he requested of his mother that she mail to him the family-heirloom “Long John” revolver that had originally belonged to his father’s father and this Mummy-Grace did, with a mother’s blessing.
For a long time his favorite drink was Cuban: “Death in the Gulf Stream.” Dash of bitters, juice of one lime, tall glass of Holland gin. He liked the poetry of the name. He liked the taste. He liked the glass chilled, tall and bottomless as the sea.
More recently, in Ketchum he had no single favorite.
He’d practiced with the (unloaded) Mannlicher .256. Sit in a straight-backed chair barefoot and place the butt firmly on the floor and leaning forward he would take the tip of the gun barrel into his mouth and press it against his palate. Or, he would settle his chin firmly on the muzzle, leaning forward. He would concentrate. Always now there was a roaring in his ears like a distant waterfall and so concentration was difficult but not impossible. He would breathe deeply and deliberately. It was a careful procedure. There is a technique to using the shotgun for the purpose of blowing off your head. You would not wish to fuck up, at such a moment. Like fucking, like writing, the secret is technique. Amateurs are eager and careless, professionals take care. No pro trusts to chance. No pro tosses the dice to see how they turn up, a pro will load the dice to determine how they turn up.
With his big, bare toe he fumbled for the trigger. The click! was deafening to him. The click! echoed in the oak-paneled room where on the walls were glossy framed photographs of Papa with his trophy kills: gigantic marlin, fallen but massive-headed male lion, enormous antlered elk, enormous grizzly bear, beautiful slender leopard with tail stretched out at Papa’s feet and Papa cradling his high-powered rifle in his brawny arms, bearded-Papa, grinning-Papa, squatting above his kill. Click! click! It was against his chin he’d pressed the shotgun muzzle and for some time he rested his head against it and his eyes fluttered shut and his wildly accelerated heart began gradually to slow, like a windup clock running down.
…summers in northern Michigan at the lake. His first kills, and his first sex. Sighting the old man’s head through the shotgun scope and that night with the slutty Indian girl drinking whiskey and fucking her how many times he’d lost count. Sticking his cock into the girl, deep inside the girl, any girl, the rest of it did not matter greatly, the face, the name of the face, it was purely cunt that excited him, his cock deep inside the fleshy-warm, slightly resistant cunt that opened to him, to his prodding, thrusting, pumping, or was made to open to him, and coming into the cunt left him faint-headed, stunned.
Sweet as your finger on a trigger, squeezing so there’s no turning back.
…greatest writer of his generation and he’d set down his drink bursting into deep-chested laughter, rose to accept the award, the heavy brass plaque, the check and the excited applause of the audience and the handshakes of strangers eager to honor him and he was still laughing to himself after the ceremony amid a flattering mêlée of camera flashes convinced what he’d heard in the citation was the greatest hater of his generation.
Had to concede, that might be so.
The woman was uneasy asking, Why? This remote place where no one knows us, when you’ve been having health problems, why? The woman was one in a succession of cunts in defiance of Mummy-Grace. She was the fourth wife, the widow-to-be. Naively and with a childish petulance she spoke of us as if anyone other than Papa mattered.
Mornings when work did not come, and there was no drama of a slender young stag desperate to be rescued by him, Papa brooded: if the woman interfered when it came time, maybe he’d blow her away, too.
Thirty years, the Papa-spell held him in thrall.
Before even his father killed himself, as a young man in his late twenties he’d been Papa in the eyes of adoring others. Why this was, why he seemed to wish his own life accelerated, he had no idea. Papa was intoxicating to him: sexual energy, joy. Joy mounting in a delirium to euphoria. You drank to celebrate, and you drank to nurse your wounds. You drank to nurse the wounds of those you’d wounded, for whom you felt a belated and useless and yet quite sincere remorse.
There was his writer-friend, his fellow Midwesterner he’d denigrated in his memoir of their youth together in Paris. His friend he’d unmanned after his death with sly Papa-gloating and scorn: claiming that his friend was so sexually insecure, he’d asked Papa to look at his penis, to tell him frankly if his penis was inadequate as his wife claimed. In the memoir Papa described the two mildly inebriated men entering the men’s room at the Restaurant Michaud and unzipping their trousers to “compare measurements” and Papa portrayed himself in a kindly if condescending light assuring his anxious friend that his penis appeared to be of a normal size but Papa would not add how stricken with tenderness he’d felt for his friend at that moment, how the rivalry between them seemed to have faded in the exigency of his friend’s vulnerability, what emotion he’d felt for the man, how badly he wanted to touch him; to close his fingers reverently about the other’s penis, simply to hold him, to assure him with his touch what Papa could never bring himself to utter aloud I am your brother, I love you.
This confession Papa would never make. In the cruelly bemused pages of his memoir, tenderness had no part.
Why, the woman wondered. As others wondered.
Why leave Cuba where he was Papa to so many, admired and adored. Why leave the warmth of the Caribbean to live in isolation in Idaho. From a millionaire “sportsman” and fellow drunk he bought an overpriced property of many acres in the beautiful and desolate foothills of the Sawtooth Mountains. Close by was an old mining town called Ketchum. Here he would do the great work of his life as a writer for he believed that the great effort of his soul was yet to come; no single work of his had yet embodied all that he was capable of. Though the world acclaimed him as a great writer, though he’d become a rich man, yet he knew that he must go deeper, deeper. Descending into the ocean through shimmering strata of light, sun-filtered greeny water darkening gradually to twilight and to inky-blue and finally to night and the terrible obliteration of night. In accidents, in mishaps, in tropical illnesses and in the drinking bouts for which Papa was fabled he had worn out his health prematurely and yet: he was capable of this descent, even so. He was capable of descending into the terrible obliteration of night and of ascending in triumph from it. He knew!
Nights when he could not lie in his bed but, for the wild erratic pounding of his heart, had to sit up in a chair in the darkness he heard the murmur May the Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from the other that ha
d once so enraged him, filled him with a son’s contempt for a weak-womanly father and now he was sixty years old and nearing the end of his own life made to realize that his father had loved him tenderly and passionately and these words he’d despised were words of paternal solicitude. How had he so misunderstood his father! How had he attempted to replace his father with bluff-blustery Papa, who scorned masculine weakness! He was stricken with remorse, his eyes stung with tears like acid. He was made to realize how much older he was than his father had been when the distraught man had killed himself in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1928 with that single bullet to the brain.
His life was stampeding past him like a herd of maddened wildebeest. So many thunderous hooves, such a frenzy of dust the hunter would not have time to reload his rifle and shoot quickly enough to kill all that he was meant to kill.
Belatedly he’d come to love his father. Or some memory of his father. But Mummy-Grace, he would never cease to despise. Mrs. Hemingstein he had a sinking feeling he’d be greeted by, with the bitch’s reproachful smile, in Hell.
Drinking is the affliction for which drinking is the sole cure.
The sirens had come for him. The woman had betrayed him. He’d been strapped down. Electrodes had been attached to his head. He’d been shocked. He’d been zapped. His brains had fried and sizzled as in a skillet. What they’d dripped into his artery stung like acid. There was talk of a lobotomy. There was talk of an ice pick being inserted into his eye socket. At angle upward: frontal lobe. There was talk of “miraculous cure for depression.” There was talk of “miraculous cure for alcoholism.” He was restrained in his bed. Papa was the greatest writer of his generation, restrained in his bed. Papa was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, restrained in his bed. In his bed he would piss. He would void his bowels. He would flirt with the nurses. Papa was one to flirt with the nurses. Here is Hell nor am I out of it Papa entertained the nurses with his classy Brit accent like Ronald Colman. Papa won their admiration and their hearts. The last and most ignoble of a man’s vanities is his wish to entertain and impress the nursing staff that they will remember him kindly. They will say that he was brave. They will say that he was generous. They will say that he was a damned good sport. They will say that he was a remarkable man. They will say you could tell he was a great man. They will not say he was a pitiful specimen. They will not say that he was a wreck. They will not say that his penis was limp and skinned-looking like a goiter. They will not say he was so frightened sometimes, we had to take turns holding his hand.
They will not say He was raving, praying God help me.
Such adventures he had! Slipping from his captors.
On their way to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, they’d landed in Rapid City, South Dakota, to refuel. Papa walked briskly out onto the runway. Papa walked with purpose and unerringly. Papa did not appear to be limping. It was a fine clear windy day. The airport was small: a single dirt runway. Papa had not known why he was slipping away from his captors until he saw: a small plane landing on the runway. Taxiing toward the airport. A single-propellor plane taxiing in his direction. More rapidly he began to walk. Almost, he broke into a trot. The pilot could not have said if Papa was smiling at him or clench-jawed like one clamping down on a towel. When Papa was about three feet from the noisily spinning propellor, abruptly the pilot cut the engine. The woman was crying Papa, no. Papa, please. They came for him then. Very still Papa stood in front of the slowing propellor. He knew not to resist, his defeat would be but temporary and his revenge would come in time.
Back in Ketchum she’d locked the guns up in the cabinet downstairs. She’d locked the liquor cabinet, too. The woman was his jailer. The woman was his succubus. The woman was his widow-to-be. The woman had tricked him with legal maneuvers. The woman had managed to get him “committed.” The woman had allowed FBI technicians to enter the house and to wiretap the telephones. The woman had turned over his income tax records to the IRS. The woman spoke frequently with “his” doctors. The woman kept a diary of his behavior. The woman colluded with the sheriff of Camas County and his deputies. The woman alerted these deputies when Papa was driving into town. For Papa’s driver’s license had been revoked. For Papa’s eyesight was so poor, the headlights of oncoming vehicles at dusk glared in his squinting eyes like deranged suns. Papa had reason to suspect that the woman was in intimate communication with Fidel Castro who had been her lover at one time and who had expelled Papa from Cuba and appropriated Papa’s property there. He had reason to suspect that the woman knew more than she would acknowledge about Papa’s mail that was opened and crudely reglued shut when he received it. Nor did the woman acknowledge the deceit of his lawyers, or his publishers in New York City who’d defaulted on his royalty statements, or officers at the bank in Twin Falls where he kept his money. The woman refused to drive out with him to check the several billboards on the road to Boise another time, that made cryptic use of Papa’s famous likeness, in gigantic posters containing mysterious words and numerals pertaining to Papa’s masculinity and his association with the Communist Party. Though the woman did not object when Papa wore dark-tinted glasses in public or when, at Papa’s favorite restaurant in Twin Falls, Papa insisted upon sitting in the most remote booth, the brim of his hat pulled low over his forehead.
Revenge is a dish best served cold as the Spaniards say. The sweetest revenge, the look in the woman’s face when he blasted her back against the wall.
This most delicious revenge: Papa’s new love.
At the Mayo Clinic he’d seduced the youngest and prettiest of the nurses. How like Papa this was to seduce the youngest and prettiest of the nurses. Gretel was the girl’s name. Papa and Gretel were in love. Papa and Gretel had plotted, how Gretel would arrive in Ketchum and come to work for him. How Papa and Gretel would be married and Papa would change his will and leave Gretel all his money. How the woman, Papa’s aging-bulldog wife, would be furious. How Papa would deal with the aging-bulldog wife. Gretel had come to Papa in the night in his private room. Gretel had pleasured Papa with her mouth and with her soft caressing hands. Gretel had sponge-bathed Papa’s body that reeked of his sweat. Gretel had laughed and teased calling him Grand-Papa. But also there was Siri. Papa was not certain which it was, Gretel or Siri, who would come to Ketchum to work for him. He could not recall the last names of either Gretel or Siri and only vaguely could he recall the Mayo Clinic where his brain had fried and sizzled as in a skillet and his penis had been so crudely catheterized, he passed blood with his leaky urine.
Mornings when work does not come are very long.
My father shot himself he’d used to joke to avoid torture.
In his delirium strapped in his bed he’d tried to explain to the young nurse, or nurses. How his father had worn long underwear and so rarely changed it, the underwear stank of his father’s sweat even after being laundered. Tried to explain to whoever would listen to him, that it was not a cowardly act to kill yourself to avoid torture for if you were tortured you might inform on your comrades and a man must never betray his comrades, that is the single unforgivable sin. May your soul rot in Hell forevermore if you betray a comrade he’d begun to thrash against his restraints and to shout and he’d had to be sedated and would not wake for many hours.
Mornings here in Ketchum. Seeking words he leafed through the dictionary. For words did not come to him now, he was like one trying to pick up grains of rice with a pliers. He avoided the typewriter for a typewriter is so very silent when its keys are not being struck. In longhand he meant to write a love letter to Gretel, or to Siri. It had been a long time since Papa had composed a love letter. It had been a long time since Papa had composed a sentence that had not disgusted him with its banality. The composition of a sentence is a precise matter. The composition of a sentence is akin to the composition of steel: it can appear thin, even delicate, but it is strong and resilient. Beyond the sentence was the paragraph: an obstacle that confounded him like a boulder that has rolled down a mou
ntain and into the road blocking the way of your vehicle. At the thought of a paragraph he began to feel dizzy. He began to feel light-headed. His blood pressure was high, his ears rang and pulsed. He could not recall if he’d taken his blood-pressure tablets and he did not wish to ask the woman.
So many tablets, capsules, pills. He swallowed them in handfuls, unless he flushed them down the toilet. His silver flask, he carried with him in his jacket pocket. The woman had locked up the liquor cabinet but he’d been buying pints of Four Roses from Artie who came out to the house to do repairs.
Like such place-names as Sawtooth, Featherville, Blizzard and Chilly, that exerted a curious spell on him when uttered aloud, like fragments of poetry, the words of the dictionary were mysterious and elusive and required a fitting-together, a composing, of which Papa was no longer capable. The neurologist at the Clinic had said that his cerebral cortex had shrunken as a consequence of “alcohol abuse.” The internist had said that his immune system and his liver had been “irreversibly damaged.” The psychiatrist had diagnosed him as “manic-depressive” and given him oblong green tablets he had mostly flushed down the toilet for they made him groggy and coated his tongue in gray scum and the woman shrank from him, his breath so stank. In the mirror at the Clinic he’d first seen: the shock of his father’s face. For there was his father’s terribly creased forehead. There was his father’s heavy-lidded vacant eyes. There was the curved set of the lips. There were the clenched jaws, the strain in the cheeks. His hair was whiter than his father’s hair had been. His hair was dismayingly thin at the back of his head (so that others could see his scalp, but he could not) though still thick above his forehead. Anguish shone in this face. Yet it was a handsome face, the face of a general. The face of a leader of men. The face of a man crucified, who does not cry out as the nails are hammered into the flesh of his hands and his feet. It was an astonishment, to see his father’s face in his face and to see such anguish. And how strange, the wave of the hair, the waved furrows of the forehead, even the dense wiry wave of the beard and the mustache were all to the left. As if his body yearned to the left. As if a cruel powerful wind were blowing relentlessly to the left. What did it mean?
Wild Nights! Page 16
