Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  Building the house brought out the best in Jean. He threw himself into the planning with uncharacteristic fervor, making hundreds of crude drawings and designs, struggling with figures and lists. Profoundly anti-traditional, his answer to the problem of building a house was not to see how other men had done it, but to start completely from scratch and work it out on his own. His theory that the intelligent layman could do a job better than someone who’d been trained (trained = brainwashed) was to be applied in the construction of his own home. Unlike the rest of us, he was more interested in the act of building the house than in the house itself. Minor innovations in design struck him as major conceptual breakthroughs, small technical victories ballooned into great philosophical verities. Every nail and stick of wood became endowed with his persona, and as a result he worked hard. Harder no doubt, than he ever had before.

  Reclaiming the land came first. Small trees and underbrush had to be cleared. The young pines fell easily under a sharp ax or machete, but the palmettos were more difficult. Showing only a knee-high fringe of palm above ground, these plants were in fact immense subterranean growths of appalling toughness. Their fat, hairy roots joined together deep in the sand, so that when you’d worked your way down to the bottom of one plant you sometimes had to work your way back up along another. And if they didn’t go down they ran horizontally, interweaving—ten or fifteen feet of root as thick as a man’s waist. I became a specialist in extracting them, a job I enjoyed because it was tough. No one else had the patience. It took days to clear even the small plot where the house would stand.

  In the terrific heat we drank case after case of Nehi orange soda kept cool under fifty pounds of ice in the trunk of the Ford. Even Jean, a food faddist, forgot his principles and guzzled it down with relish. Our bodies glistening with sweat, we took salt pills twice a day and ate sandwiches of white bread and lunch meat. A preparation called 6-12 kept the mosquitoes under control, but clouds of gnats swirled continuously around everyone’s head. Sometimes at night we’d work by Coleman lanterns, and flying roaches, drawn by the brightness, would smash against the hot glass with a metallic snap.

  It was an exciting scene at night. Great stacks of lumber looming at the edge of darkness, hammers and axes throwing sparks into the air. In the sharp-edged light, faces changed mysteriously, and each figure spilled a huge shadow over the underbrush.

  Notwithstanding Jean’s self-representation as an original thinker, he had the foresight to design an extremely simple building, perhaps unconsciously recognizing that the minor innovations he held in such high regard would lose their significance to the world at large if the house collapsed. He was led, inevitably, to one of nature’s strongest and simplest forms, the cube.

  We built the floor first, a twenty-five-by-twenty-five-foot platform set on concrete blocks in the sand. I remember some nervous discussions about anchoring the house. It was finally decided that gravity would anchor the house and no more was thought about it. Problems in construction were solved as they arose. Jean and my mother sounding like philosophers at work on first principles: “If this holds up that, then what holds up this?” “Why, that, of course!” etc. After the floor came the framework of the walls and roof, then the lathing, roofing, windows, and finally two coats of paint outside. The interior was never finished.

  The house was actually one large room. The kitchen was hidden by a curtain and Alison and I slept in a double-decker bed behind a partition. There was a pump in the yard and a privy in back.

  I don’t remember everything about meeting Tobey. One day we faced each other in the middle of the white coral road, hesitating to speak, staring. We were the only boys for miles around. I remember wondering how he could walk on the hot, sharp coral without shoes.

  “Don’t your feet hurt?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Do you live around here?”

  “Back there. Around the corner.”

  “Hey, that’s great. I live in the new house by the woods.”

  “I saw you working on it,” he says.

  “We ought to get some wire and a couple of dry-cell batteries and string it up between our houses. We could learn Morse code and send messages.”

  He looks up from the road. “You think we could?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you got a bike?”

  “Yes.” I had just gotten it.

  “Let’s go swimming. I know a rock pit back in the woods. It’s got an island in the middle.”

  “Okay. I’ll have to get my bathing suit.”

  “Hell, you don’t need a suit. There’s nobody around.”

  “How far is it?”

  “A couple of miles. It’s a great place,” he says.

  All that summer we were together. My days started with Tobey calling from the road. “Fra-yunk ... hey, Fra-yunk ...” I’d swallow some milk, grab a piece of bread, and rush out, the screen door slamming behind me. There he’d be, straddling his bike, bare feet in the white dust, a brown arm waving, beckoning me out into the blinding glare.

  We spent most of our time in the woods. The first project was a tree-house built precariously high in a tall pine. The climb was difficult for anyone who didn’t know the secret hand-holds we’d constructed at the hardest parts. Lazing around in the sun we’d tell stories and pick the black pine tar off our hands and feet. Far below us the earth dozed. Occasionally we’d glance back to Chula Vista —when a car started, or a man on a roof flashed his hammer. (Down would come the arm in dead silence, then, too late, the sharp snap of the blow.) Above, the fat white clouds drifted in the blue. Great sedate clouds, rich and peaceful. We lay on our backs watching them, getting dizzy as they slipped along behind the branches, as if our tree was falling.

  On the ground we laid out track and field games. Hour after hour our bodies fell like bundles into the softened sand. Tobey once high-jumped his own height. We kept a record in a nickel notebook, carefully noting down our performances and progress.

  We had caches of canned food and comic books at different places in the woods. We rarely used them; it was the idea that pleased us.

  Best of all was the rock quarry. Down the long white coral road on our bikes, mile after mile into the deserted woods. Leaving the bikes against a tree we walked across the sand. The air buzzed with sun and sleepy insects. If we saw a king snake, all six feet wrapped black and shiny in the shade of a palmetto, we’d break off a pine branch and kill it, smashing the small head till the blood ran. Rabbits were rare; if we saw one we’d throw a stick.

  Once we found a dead mule, bones picked almost clean, ants streaming through the eyes. The stench was too much for us and after poking the corpse we ran away, gasping for breath. We talked about that mule for weeks. What was its fascination? Death dramatized, something of unbelievable importance being revealed right in front of us. But something else too. We rambled over a tremendous amount of space every day, over vast areas of silent, empty woods (a pine woods on sandy ground is more like a desert than anything else), rambled over miles of wasteland trying to find the center of it, the heart, the place to know it. We sensed the forces around us but they were too thinly spread, too finely drawn over all the miles of woods for us to grasp them. The forces eluded us. We would run into a clearing knowing that just a moment ago, in that instant before we had arrived, something of importance had happened there. But when we found the dead mule we knew we were close, suddenly very close. Those forces spread like air over the woods had converged here, on this animal the moment he died, and were not yet altogether gone.

  We could see the abandoned quarry behind the trees, the tall white island in the center seeming to move as we ran. Two black hawks lifted from the pinnacle, swerving away over the water and up into the blue air, their wings beating slowly, synchronized in movement like a double image in a dream. Impossibly still, the water lay against the shining coral shore like brown glass. We ran to the edge, shouting to break the silence.

  “Yodela-ay! Yodelay-io!”<
br />
  “Ali-ali-ali-ali-ali-in-free!”

  Or just “Yay!”

  We did a lot of shouting—phrases from childhood games, dirty words, satisfying noises of all kinds. We were afraid, but only a little afraid, of the silence around us. Usually there was enough breeze in the tops of the pines to make a faint rustling noise behind the day, but I remember times, hot, airless days, sitting in the woods alone in perfect silence, paralysis creeping over my limbs, my ears deaf without sound to hear, my eyes frozen without movement to watch. We shouted in joy and fear, sending our voices ahead to animate the bleakness, supremely conscious of ourselves as pinpoints of life in a world of dead things, impurities that sand, coral, water, and dead mules were only tolerating.

  It was easy to undress. We wore only blue jeans. I remember a mild shock at the absence of anything but air against my skin. Running to the edge of the bank we threw ourselves into the water, instantly setting the whole broad surface alive with movement and dappled light. Our legs kicked up thin sheets of water that sparkled in the sun and the slapping of our cupped hands echoed away into the woods. The water was always warm.

  Neither one of us knew how to swim properly. We’d simply crash through, with a tremendous amount of wasted movement, toward the island, our progress slow but steady. We never raced, knowing, I suppose, that as bad as we were it was pointless. Halfway across we’d tread water.

  “It’s great nobody ever comes here,” I’d say, spluttering.

  “I bet nobody even knows about it except us.”

  “If any kids from Dania find it we can put up signs saying the water is poisoned.”

  “Hey, maybe it is!”

  We’d laugh.

  “You know that big old turtle we saw on the bank?”

  “Yes?”

  “I bet he could take your peter off in one bite.”

  “Jesus Christ!” I’d yell, only half joking, my legs propelling me up in the air. “Jesus Christ!”

  At the highest point of the man-made island a bed of soft green moss had grown over the coral. We’d lie with our chins in our hands looking out over the miles of pine woods, the sun hot against our backsides.

  “We ought to build a shack out here.”

  “Have to carry all the wood.”

  “We could build a raft and float the stuff over.”

  “Hmm ...”

  Often we’d fall asleep, tired from the long ride and the swim, a drowsy, dreamless half-sleep in the sun. When one awoke the colors of the world had deepened, as if the whole scene had just been created.

  Riding back we’d keep an eye out for cars parked in the woods. Two or three times we spotted one, and hidden in the tops of nearby trees had watched the gentle rocking motion of the chassis on its greased springs, silent and comically sinister. We were too scared to get close enough to see anything, except a heart-freezing glimpse of a woman’s arm being raised, or the sudden flash of sunlight on a bald pate. We knew what we were watching, but somehow we could never quite believe it. From the safety of the trees we’d whistle and screech till the car drove away. Scrambling down we’d race over to find the prophylactic, holding it up on the end of a long stick, grimacing with disgust. Neither of us knew exactly what it was, accepting it nevertheless as proof that the unbelievable act had taken place. We hid our ignorance from each other, making oblique wisecracks to cover it up.

  Jean. At about this time our fates, his and mine, began to affect one another. And fate is the appropriate word. He dropped from nowhere to become my father. I emerged from behind my mother’s skirts looking, to his eyes, something like a son. We had in common that we were male inhabitants of the U.S.A., and my mother, and nothing more. Life had placed us together. We faced each other like two strangers trapped in an elevator.

  Jean was one of three brothers. His father, a professor of chemistry, died young and left the family almost nothing except the house they lived in. The mother was charming but somewhat scatter-brained. The boys, particularly Jean, were too much for her and ran wild. All three—Dan the youngest and most self-effacing, Victor the most earnest, and Jean the wildest—led difficult lives as if they shared a common psychic wound. The most obvious characteristic of each man mushroomed uncontrollably, rushing to fill a vacuum, and each man grew lopsided and awkward with the weight of it. Victor’s puritanical earnestness led him to alcoholism, Dan’s self-effacement to loneliness and misanthropy, and Jean’s wildness to the private dreamworld of the mentally unbalanced.

  Jean left school early and began a long series of jobs, never staying long in one position. He went to sea, was a longshoreman, floor-walker, counterman, male model, carpenter, migrant laborer, waiter, dancing teacher, and on and on. He’d been married twice before he met my mother, very briefly to a New Orleans debutante and then to a young girl who eventually lost her mind, leaving his bed for a padded cell. The third marriage must have seemed his last chance at a normal life. Whether or not a normal life is something to be prized, and whether or not he ever truly wanted it, it turned out he was too fond of his old ways to risk a change.

  He brought us to Florida, and undoubtedly somewhere in his mind was the halfhearted desire to emulate Victor, the steadiest brother, who lived a fair imitation of the typical American middle-class life as a small-time real-estate broker in Fort Lauderdale. Unfortunately Victor’s alcoholism was progressive, and soon after our arrival the first ominous fissures began to appear in his tidy world. Before long he collapsed entirely.

  Asleep on the couch in Victor’s living room, drifting between the half-light of dreams and the reality of morning sun. A noise opens my eyes. Still asleep I see a tall figure pass the foot of the couch, a dark uncle, a fast-moving Victor figure crossing to the desk. I watch his back as he sits writing. Uneasiness creeps forward from the back of my head, waking me with a silent danger signal. Don’t move! Don’t make a sound! I watch his solid figure. In the early morning silence small sounds are magnified—the scratch of his pen, a bird outside, the creaking chair. Don’t move! It’s coming! The pen stops and his shoulders stiffen. My eyes widen slowly. Now! His arms jerk straight up into the air as if pulled on strings from above. The pen flies from his fingers and crashes against the ceiling. The chair clatters to the floor as his body lunges upward and his feet leave the ground. His hair seems to stand out from his head as though electrified. In space his mouth opens and his back arches, every muscle stretched to rock hardness. Stiff-legged he drops two inches, a petrified man. From somewhere inside his rigid form a scream materializes, a long sound that winds lazily up the scale, higher and higher till his voice breaks. The scream turns into something I’d never heard before. Emitting a steady, unwavering blast of noise his body falls backward, stiff as a board. When he hits the floor the house shakes. His eyes are rolled back in his head making him look oddly Japanese.

  I wish I could say I went to his aid. In fact I left the scene immediately, rising from the couch, hurdling the armrest, through the door and away in one continuous fluid streak of speed, arms and legs pumping like the shafts of an engine. Victor’s wife and son passed me in the hall going in the opposite direction. Amazed, I saw tears in Lucky’s eyes. He must have started to cry the very instant his father screamed, as if he’d been waiting for it. They barely looked at me.

  I was too scared to do anything but run. Perhaps my father’s dramatic visits home had given me a low tolerance for insane behavior. At the moment of breakdown Victor seemed less like someone I had talked and laughed with than the Wild Man of Borneo. He was possessed, and God alone knew what he’d do to me if he had the chance. I’d been too scared even to look at him, afraid somehow that his image on my retina was dangerous.

  Rushing from the house in my underwear, I streaked around a palm tree and ran full tilt into the back of a parked car. It was the primitive symbolism of the comic strips come to life. My head hit the trunk with a tremendous CLONG while stars and colored lights swirled in profusion. For one silly instant, listening to the huge sound r
everberating down my entire life span, it seemed I was a comic strip character, a cartoon somehow living out the plot and reading it simultaneously. Spread-eagled over the deck of the car, sinking back into a sleep from which no more than sixty seconds ago I had awakened, sinking as well from the trunk to the ground, slipping slowly off the hot metal, limp as a dishrag, it came to me that the world was insane. Not just people. The world.

  So Victor was no help to Jean. If anything the example of his brother confirmed Jean’s distrust of ordinary workaday life. He was damned if he’d get caught like so many others. Occasionally when money ran out he’d take a week’s work as a carpenter, but most of the time he puttered around the house or went to the beach. There was always a project in the future he could think about as he lay in the sun.

  Jean made a terrible mistake. Not only did he live off his wife (who worked far more often than himself), but worse, far worse, he lived off what were, symbolically at least, his children. Every month two checks arrived at our Chula Vista mailbox, two one-hundred-dollar checks from an old lawyer in Jacksonville, drawn against a trust belonging to my sister and me. The money was for our support. For eight years—in Florida, New York, and Connecticut—our support checks were Jean’s largest source of income. Without them he would have to have gone to work. Only a small fraction was spent on Alison and me. Jean and my mother spent many thousands of dollars before we were old enough to realize what was going on. (At seventeen years of age, when I had left home and gone to Europe, I unsuspectingly accepted forty dollars a month, on which I lived, while my mother skimmed off sixty for herself and Jean.) Had Jean been less proud he might have lived this way without hurting himself, but as it was, anger built up with every year. Some anger came out, but most of it went inside himself. He built a maze inside to keep the anger moving, to keep it bouncing in his head, its destructive energy trapped in a cycle of movement. He became a sort of emotional pinball machine.