Wild Nights!

by Joyce Carol Oates

  So badly he wanted to write of these mysteries. The profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him. Yet he waited, patiently he waited and the words did not come. The sentences did not come. His stub of a pencil slipped from his finger and rolled clattering across the floor. Clotted and putrid his desire was backed up inside him. He must discharge it, he could not bear it much longer. Old burn wounds, old scars. His flaking skin itched: erysipelas. There was a word!

  Downstairs, there was the woman on the phone. Which of them she was betraying Papa with this time, Papa had no idea.

  …a nice private life with undeclared & unpublished pride & they have shit in it & wiped themselves on slick paper & left it there but you had to live with it just the same, such shame was not a construct of artfully chosen words that came to an abrupt and inevitable end but more in the way of the damned wind out of the mountains that seemed never to cease, by day, by night, at times a raging demented wind, a bitterly cold wind, a wind to snatch away your breath, a wind to make your eyes sting, a wind to make outdoor walking hazardous if you were stumbling with a cane, a wind tasting of mineral cold, a wind smelling of futility, a wind to penetrate the crudely caulked window frames of the millionaire’s mountain retreat overlooking the Sawtooth Range, a wind that penetrated even sodden drunk-sleep, a wind bearing with it muffled jeering laughter, a wind of no rest.

  At the grave site between the tall pines this melancholy wind would blow, forever. In that he took some solace after all.

  By the rear door he left the house at 6:40 A.M. He’d had a bad night.

  The woman had taken him out to dinner, with Ketchum friends. They had gone to the Eagle House in Twin Falls which was Papa’s favorite restaurant. Papa was suspicious from the start. Papa distrusted the woman in all things. Papa was nervous, for all that day work had not come to him. What was pent-up inside him, roiling like churning maggots, he did not know. At the Eagle House, Papa wished to be seated in a booth in a far corner of the noisy taproom. Once Papa was seated in the booth with his back to the wall, Papa became agitated, for he was facing the crowded taproom, and was being observed. The woman laughed at Papa assuring him that no one was observing him. And if someone was observing him, glancing at him with smiles, it was only because Papa was a famous man. But Papa was upset, and Papa insisted upon trading places with their friends so that he could sit with his back to the room. But, once they’d traded places, Papa became uneasy for now he could not see the room, he could not see strangers’ eyes upon him but he knew that strangers were observing him and of these strangers several were FBI agents whose faces he’d been seeing in and around Ketchum since the previous winter. (Certain of Papa’s old writer-friends-turned-enemies had denounced him as a Communist agent to the FBI, he had reason to suspect. Hastily typed out letters of accusation he’d sent to his enemies had been handed over to the FBI, a terrible misstep on Papa’s part he could not bear to acknowledge.) Papa could not eat his T-bone steak, Papa was so upset. Badly Papa needed to use the men’s room for his bladder pinched and ached and of all things Papa feared urine dribbling down his leg, from the poor lacerated penis that dangled useless between his shrunken thighs. Somehow it happened, on his way to the men’s room, being helped by the woman and the Eagle House proprietor who knew Papa and revered him, Papa was approached by smiling strangers, visitors to Idaho from back East, and paper napkins were thrust at Papa for him to sign, but Papa fumbled the pen, Papa fumbled the damned paper napkins, crumpled them and tossed them to the floor and afterward Papa began to cry outside in the parking lot, in the pickup, the woman was driving, the woman dared to take hold of Papa’s fists where he was grinding them against his eyes, his eyes that were spilling tears, and the woman said he’d be fine, she was taking him home and he would be fine, and the woman said Don’t you believe me, Papa? and Papa shook his head wordless in grief for Papa was beyond all belief, or even the pretense of belief.

  The woman said So many people love you, Papa. Please believe!

  Now by the rear door he stumbled from the house, Papa was eager to get outside, and away from the house which was his prison, where work would not come to him. He was not certain of the exact date but believed the day to be a Sunday in early July 1961. His sixty-second birthday loomed before him icy-peaked even in summer.

  He’d found his cane, one of his canes. It did help to walk with a cane. Papa’s daily walk. Sometimes, twice-daily. Locally, Papa was known for his walk along a half-mile stretch of Route 75. An old man but vigorous. An old man but stubborn. An old man who’d bought the millionaire’s hunting-lodge house outside Ketchum, that had a curse on it.

  What is this curse? You are such a bullshitter.

  Bullshitter is my occupation. Hell’s my destination.

  Damned uphill climb to the grave site on the hill. Papa’s lips twitched, his revenge would be this climb, pallbearers straining their backs, risking hernias.

  There was no visible sun. Papa wasn’t sure if the season was summer. He was wearing a black-and-red checked flannel shirt, haphazardly buttoned. He was wearing a cloth cap for he disliked the sensation of cool air at the crown of his head, where his hair had grown thin. No visible sun, only a white-glowering light through skeins of rapidly shifting cloud-vapor overhead. Beyond this cloud-vapor there appeared to be no sky.

  His weak, watering eyes could not make out the mountains in the distance but he knew that the mountains were there.

  At the grave site he paused. He breathed deeply, here was peace. This place of beauty and solitude. The world wipes its shit on most things but has not yet despoiled the Sawtooth Mountains. He saw that one of the heavy rocks he’d positioned to mark off the grave site was out of place by several inches and his heart kicked in fear, and in fury. His enemies conspired to torment him into madness, but he would not succumb.

  What had happened back at the house, when the woman had called to him in her harpy voice. He would not allow to upset him.

  For the grave site was his place. There was a purity and a sanctity here, of all the places of the world.

  It was rare, Papa and the woman went out with friends any longer, as they’d done the previous night. For Papa did not trust his so-called friends, who were the woman’s friends primarily. More rarely did houseguests come to Ketchum now. You did not have time and energy and patience for the bullshit of playing host. No more interviewers. No more “literary journalists” with straying eyes. No bloodsuckers. For there were bloodsuckers enough in Papa’s family, he did not require bloodsuckers from outside the family. Much of the large house was empty, unoccupied. Rooms were shut off. The purchase of the house in Ketchum had been Papa’s idea and not the woman’s yet it had come to seem to Papa, the woman had manipulated him into making the purchase, to have him to herself. The woman was a harpy, the woman had a beak. That thing between a woman’s legs, inside the softness of the woman’s cunt, was a nasty little beak. You did not need so many damned rooms where there are no children in a family. The woman had hinted of children, that the woman might be a triumphant rival over Papa’s previous wives who’d borne him children. Now the woman was too old, her uterus was shrunken, her breasts sagged on her rib cage. Papa would have his children with Gretel, or with Siri. But Papa had grown up in a five-bedroom Victorian house in Oak Park, Illinois, that was crowded with children for Mrs. Hemingstein had been a brood sow, who’d devoured her young.

  Mummy-Grace! Papa liked to think Mummy-Grace was buried in the ground in a Christian cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee, and could not get loose. Damned glad Papa had been when he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954, for Mummy-Grace had “passed away” in 1951 and had not been alive to gloat and boast and give coy interviews in which the mother of the renowned writer spoke with veiled reproach of her genius son. Mummy-Grace chose to know little of the genius son’s life nor even of the son’s present whereabouts unless in Hell this news had spread.

  Papa laughed, a deep-gut laugh that hurt, it wo
uld not surprise Papa that his name was known in Hell and in Hell his most ardent admirers awaited him.

  He walked on. He walked using his cane. By degrees the day was warming. His mind worked swiftly. Stopping by the grave site gave him hope as always. He would continue to ascend this hill for several minutes and then at the crest of the hill he would seek out the faint, overgrown path that looped downhill, now gravity would ease the strain on his heart and legs, and then the service road out to the state highway, and so back to the house. He did not wish to return to the house but there was no other destination.

  Before the woman had called to him on the stairs, he’d had a painful time on the toilet. Swirls of blood from his anus, bloody little turds hard as shrapnel. The pus had gotten into his bowels. Very possibly, he was being poisoned. The well water that came with this accursed property. The woman had every opportunity to mix grains of arsenic into his food. The silver flask he carried in his pocket, the woman had surely discovered. He’d been wondering what had become of his father’s Long John pistol. That crude firearm! Civil War artifact. Maybe his brother Leicester had it: they’d joked, Papa and his younger brother, the good uses you could put that gun to. Papa himself would not have wished to use it for it was a crude firearm by modern standards. And you would be a reckless fool to risk a single bullet to the brain even if your aim was steady.

  Since he’d returned from Minnesota, the woman had kept the gun cabinet locked and the key hidden away but now, more recently the woman had been leaving the key on a windowsill in the kitchen.

  Saying, a man has to be trusted. A man has to be respected, in his own house. A man like Papa who has grown up around guns.

  The key he’d taken, closing his trembling fingers about it.

  On the stairs the woman called to him Papa no!

  The positioning of the shotgun. The angle of the muzzle. You must rest the stock firmly on a carpet not a hardwood floor, to prevent slippage. He would sit in a straight-backed chair. He would sit in a straight-backed chair in the living room in front of the plate-glass window overlooking the mountains. The living room had a high oak-beamed ceiling and oak-paneled walls covered in animal trophies and framed photographs of Papa with his spoils, dead at his feet. The living room was a drafty room even in summer with a massive stone fireplace inhabited by spiders and matched leather furniture that had come with the house that farted and sighed with mocking intent when you sat in it.

  It was crucial to lean forward far enough. To rest your chin firmly on the gun muzzle, or to take the muzzle into your mouth, or, more awkwardly, to press your forehead against the muzzle even as with your bare, big toe you grope for the trigger and exert enough pressure to pull it yet not so much pressure that the gun is dislodged and the muzzle slips free and the blast blows away only part of your head and damages the damned ceiling.

  After the Austrian offensive he’d been astonished to discover that the human body could be blown into pieces that exploded along no anatomical lines but divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive shell. He’d been yet more astonished to discover female bodies and body parts amid the smoldering rubble of a munitions factory that had exploded. Long dark hair, clumps of bloody scalp attached. He’d been nineteen. This was in 1918. He’d been a Red Cross volunteer worker. They had given him the rank of lieutenant. Later, he’d been wounded by shrapnel. Others had died near him but he had not died. Two hundred pieces of shrapnel in his legs, feet. They’d given him a medal for “military valor.” He had to suppose it was the high point of his life at age nineteen except there was the remainder of his life awaiting him.

  The woman shouted Papa no! struggling with him for the shotgun and he’d shoved her away with his elbow and turned the barrels on her and the look in her face was one of disbelief beyond even fear and animal panic. For that was the cruel joke, not one of us truly expects to die. Not me! Not me. Even creatures whose lives are a ceaseless effort to keep from being devoured by predators fight desperately for their lives. You would think that nature had equipped them with the melancholy resignation of stoicism but this is not so. Terrible to hear are the shrieks of animal terror and panic. The shrieks of the mules at Smyrna where the Greeks broke their forelegs and dumped them into shallow water to drown. Such shrieks Papa can hear in the night, in Ketchum. The shrieks of the wounded, animals hunted down for their beautiful hides, their trophy heads, tusks, antlers. Hunted down because there is such pleasure in the hunt. In his life as a hunter he had shot deer, elk, gazelles, antelope, impala, wildebeest, elands, waterbucks, kudu, rhinos; he had shot lions, leopards, cheetah, hyenas, grizzly bears. In all these, dying had been a struggle. The hunter’s excitement at the kill had been fierce and frankly sexual as the wildest of copulations and he recalled with wonder now in his broken body how he had been capable of such acts. Snatching life out of the heaving air, it had seemed. Devouring life with his powerful jaws. Yet their dying screams had lodged deep inside him, he had not realized at the time. Their dying, expelled breaths in his lungs he could not expel. For the breath of the dying had passed into the hunter and the hunter carried within him the spirit-breaths of all the creatures he had killed in his lifetime from the earliest years shooting black squirrels and grouse in northern Michigan under the tutelage of his father and his father’s death too was part of the curse.

  On safari, he’d always brought a woman. You needed a woman after the excitement of the kill. You needed whiskey, and you needed food, and you needed a woman. Except if you were too sodden-drunk for a woman.

  Walking in the woods above Ketchum, God damn he was not going to think about that.

  In this place of beauty. His property. He did not want to become agitated. The need to drink he preferred to interpret as a wish to drink. It was a choice, you made your choices freely. In the hip pocket of his trousers he carried the silver flask filled with Four Roses whiskey, its weight was a comfort. On this walk he paused to remove the flask, unscrew the lid and drink and the old pleasure of whiskey-warmth and its promise of elation rarely failed him.

  For a long time he’d carried a single-edge razor blade in a leather holder, in a pocket. You make the cut beneath the ear and draw the blade swiftly and unerringly across the big artery that is the carotid. In Spain, at the time of the civil war, he’d acquired the razor blade for it was a way of suicide more practical than most. He had been assured that death would come within seconds and that such a death if properly self-inflicted would involve no pain. But he had not entirely believed this. He had witnessed no one dying in this way and did not trust the reputed ease. And the matter of swiftly bleeding out was doubtful: you surely would not die before registering the enormity of what you had done and that it was irreversible and you would not die without witnessing a gushing loss of blood and in those terrible seconds you would peer over the edge of the earth into the chasm of eternity like the cringing mongrel dog in that most horrific of Goya paintings.

  He could not bear it, the mere contemplation. He drank again, the whiskey was a comfort to him. Spirits is the very word, you are infused with spirit that has drained from you.

  In his pockets were loose pills, capsules. No damned idea what they were. Painkillers, barbiturates. These looked old. Lint stuck to the pills, if you were desperate you swallowed what was close at hand but Papa wasn’t desperate just yet.

  High overhead geese were passing in a ragged V-formation buffeted by the wind. Canada geese they appeared to be, gray, with black markings, wide powerful pumping wings. The strange forlorn honking cries tore at his heart. The great gray pumping wings and outthrust necks. For some time he stood craning his neck, staring after the geese. Their cries were confused with the ringing pulse of his blood. He could not recall if the woman had cried out, in that last moment. The scolding whine of the female voice, bulldog-Mummy voice was most vivid in his memory. The woman’s hand feebly raised to repel the buckshot blast from a distance of six inches. You could laugh at such an effort, and the expression
of incredulity even as his finger jerked against the trigger. Not me! Not me. The kick of the shotgun was greater than he had remembered. The blast was deafening. Instantly the soft woman-body went flying back against the wall, an eruption of blood at the chest, at the throat, at the lower part of the face and what remained of the body softly collapsing to the floor and blood rushed from it and instinctively he drew back, that the quickly pooling blood would not touch his bare feet.

  He glanced down: his feet were not bare, but in boots. He was wearing his scuffed leather hiking boots, he’d bought in Sun Valley years before. Yet he could not recall having taken time to pull on boots. Or to pull on this shirt, these baggy trousers. This was a good sign, was it? Or a not-so-good sign?

  On the service road through the woods, he’d emerged onto Route 75. The woman did not like Papa “tramping” through the woods. Especially the woman did not like Papa “making a show of himself” on the highway. What brought Papa happiness here in Ketchum in his old-man broken body was begrudged by the female in her heart. He’d blown out the heart. Bitterly he laughed, there was justice in this.

  It was nearing 7:30 A.M. On Route 75, on the shoulder of the roadway he walked. In the wake of a passing flatbed truck bearing timber his cap was nearly blown off. He felt that the wind might stagger him if he did not steel himself against it. His custom was to walk facing oncoming traffic for he needed to see what was coming at him, passing beside him at a distance of only a few yards. Trucks, pickups, local drivers, school buses. Sometimes on both his morning walk and his afternoon walk Papa would see carrot-colored Camas School District buses hurtling past him and without wishing to betray his eagerness he would lift his hand in greeting like one conferring a blessing, he would hold his breath against the terrible stink of the exhaust and smile at the blurred child-faces in the rear windows for such moments brought an innocent happiness. To smile at the children of strangers whose faces he could not see clearly, to see himself in their eyes as a white-haired and white-bearded old man who carried himself with dignity though walking with a cane, an old man of whom their elders had told them That is a famous man, a writer, he has won the Nobel Prize, gave him pleasure for there had to be some pleasure in this, some pride. And so he anticipated the school buses and tried to time his walks to coincide with their passing and at the appearance of the carrot-colored vehicles at once Papa’s backbone grew straighter, he held his head higher, his frowning face relaxed. He thought All their lives they will remember me.