Escape Velocity

by Charles Portis

  I wandered around in my socks. This shoeless, padding-about policy had to do with preserving quiet, rather than from any Oriental sense of delicacy. Eavesdropping is a big part of my trade (I hold a master’s degree in tale-bearing from one of the better Ivy League schools), but I saw no opportunities here. All was pecking with this crew, or a furious clicking.

  White placards were posted along the walls exhorting the monkeys to STAY IN YOUR SEATS! PLEASE! At the upper end of the long room, on a dais, a string quartet was playing, softly, a medley of Sousa marches. Above the musicians, high on the wall, there was an oil portrait of the poet and billionaire widow herself, Mrs. Hazel Perkins Jenkins, in her signature white turban. She smiles down on her workshop monkeys.

  Mrs. Perkins Jenkins is, of course, their patroness. All of these Pecking Centers—thirty-seven, to date, nationwide—are lavishly funded by the Hazel Perkins Jenkins Foundation for the Arts, in Seattle. She is a widow many times over. Of her five husbands, all rich and all now dead, only one, Jenkins, professed any love for—or even the slightest interest in—poetry. After his death she was saddened to learn, on flipping through his diaries, that Jenkins himself had been faking the passion all along. “I don’t get it,” he had confessed, in a number of entries. “But then men were deceivers ever,” she said, taking the disappointment in stride. “Poor Jenkins, yes, it now seems that he too had a tin ear, but he was only trying to please me. He had his quirks, as we all know.” This was a vague reference to the declining days of Jenkins, when he annoyed ladies on city buses as he roamed aimlessly around Seattle.

  There, in the drizzle of Puget Sound, atop the Foundation’s south tower, is the famous Shakespeare Countdown Clock, some thirty feet in diameter. The minute hand stands, or appears to be standing, at eight minutes before midnight—and The New Day. A few veteran observers say they can perceive constant, unbroken movement of the hand, though conceding it to be slight.

  As it happened, I was looking at my own watch when, at 10:15 sharp, the musicians stopped their scraping abruptly in mid-passage, and there came two blasts from a Klaxon horn. I gave a start and an involuntary and embarrassing little chirp of alarm. It was the morning break. The peckers rose as one and stepped away from their stations. Heads thrown back, mouths agape, they squirted soothing drops of balm into their eyes. They flexed their simian fingers and twisted their necks about. They performed a few side-straddle hops in unison.

  Trolley carts appeared, laden with bananas, grapes, and assorted nuts, less than fifty percent peanuts. There were small club sandwiches, crustless and elegant, and pitchers of organic fruit juices.

  These monkeys were, for the most part, good-natured little fellows, proud of their work and eager to talk about it. They are paid, I learned, by the “swatch,” this being a standard print-out sheet densely spattered with letters of the alphabet, numerals, and the various punctuation symbols. The peckers are penalized (token fine) for leaving spaces between the characters, and rewarded (token bonus) when one of their swatches, seen from a little distance, gives the appearance of a near-solid block of ink, similar to The Congressional Record.

  Their work is transmitted instantly to Seattle, where it is given intense scrutiny, line by line. And there is a redundancy arrangement to insure that nothing pecked is ever quite lost, into the void. For backup swatches are also printed out in the local Pecking Centers, then gathered, compressed, and bound into bales, like cotton. These monstrous, cubic haikus are shipped out weekly, air freight, to the Foundation’s 2A Clearing House, which is a hangar leased from the Boeing company.

  It is there that the American pecking harvest undergoes a final scanning, in the search for words and coherent snatches of language. A long white banner hangs across the cavernous work bay, reading, THE WIND BLOWETH WHERE IT LISTETH. The scanners, known as “swatch auditors,” are 720 elderly men in baseball caps. They work in three shifts around the clock. They are paid well and seated comfortably on inflated doughnut cushions.

  During breaks the auditors play harmless pranks on one another. These antics once caught the indulgent eye of Mrs. Perkins Jenkins, who was looking on from an observation gallery, and thereby hangs the tale of how her most celebrated poem, and by far her shortest one, “just popped into my head.” It was not, that is, fabricated. The two stanzas simply came to her, suddenly and all of a piece, complete with title, “The Levity of Old Men.” She dictated the words to her secretary at once, before they could evaporate. Such was the origin of this gem of the modern anthologies, and thus the grand old lady’s unwavering trust in her muse.

  My interviews went well enough until I came upon another touchy mandrill, Red Kilgore by name, as I could see by the prism nameplate on his pecking stand. He had been watching me, glowering.

  “So,” he said. “What is this thing you have about monkeys?”

  “Well, I do, you know, associate monkeys with chattering and gibbering and shrieking.”

  “You don’t approve of chattering?”

  “I approve of chatting.”

  “Cute distinction. Do you find me gibbering now?”

  “Not at all, no. But there on your screen, just a minute ago, I did see something that appeared to be, excuse me, gibberish.”

  “How many of our swatches have you actually read?”

  “Some. A few. I extrapolate freely, of course. Like poll takers. It’s an accepted practice.”

  “I suppose you think all that stuff you churn out at your paper is a lot better than the stuff we churn out here.”

  “Well, it is better, yes. But then we still use typewriters at the Blade.”

  “Say what?”

  “Manual typewriters. They don’t hum at you like the electric ones. And the ribbons are cheaper.”

  “But typewriters.”

  “They give you black words fixed hard on white paper.”

  “And that’s good in some way?”

  “Good enough. There are critics who say that things written with quivering cathode rays on greenish luminescent tubes have a different tone altogether. A loose, thin, garrulous feel.”

  “Tone. Feel. You seem to be saying to me that all those old Smith-Coronas in your office are so many Stradivaris.”

  “We use Underwoods and Royals.”

  “When will this report of yours be in the paper?”

  “Tomorrow, with any luck.”

  “Will my name be in it?”

  “Yes.”

  “On what page?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What will the headline say? So I don’t have to wade through all the other junk.”

  “Again, not my department. Probably something like ‘Monkey Business.’”

  “Look here, I know I’m wasting my breath, but let me try to explain something. Are you familiar with the law of large numbers?”

  “That law, no, it doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Well, the idea is that a great many little uncertainties—a long series of coin-flippings, say—will miraculously add up to one big certainty. You will get half heads and half tails.”

  “How does that apply?”

  “Order from disorder, you see. The moving finger of grace, unseen.”

  “Then you are in the disorder business here.”

  “We are in the volume business, sir. Moving product. And allow me to tell you this, that a certain brute quantity can attain a special quality all its own. We are not the least bit interested in your old elitist notion of writing as some sort of algebra.”

  “But Red, listen to yourself. Here you are speaking to me in that algebra.”

  “Not for long. Vamoose.”

  My article—this article—was much longer. Two editors slashed away on it, turn and turn about. But it was not spiked. What remained, now somewhat garbled, was actually set in type and scheduled to appear in the Sunday feature section. I was delighted. On Friday, however, the Blade went broke and out of business. There was no Sunday edition. Neither was there any money left for our final
salary checks, let alone severance pay.

  The closing out was poorly managed, over all. A scrap-iron dealer hauled away our typewriters. They were flung into his dump truck from a third-floor window of the city room. Even some of our clothes were seized, with the lawyers for the bank declaring them to be “workplace specific apparel, i.e., company uniforms, and as such, Blade assets.” Can you imagine—making off with the old coats and ties and shoes of newspaper people? Frankie retaliated by stealing the blue Gremlin and keeping it hidden under a tarpaulin in some woods until the legal dust had settled. It was the pick of the litter. The blue one still had two or three hubcaps. It had come to this pass then, with the Blade’s ancient flotilla of Gremlins, once so jaunty, and always great favorites of the crowd when they cruised down Main Street in attack formation with the floats and fire trucks of city parades. Frankie picks me up every weekday morning at 7:40 in that blue car. She gives five or six impatient toots of the horn, when one light toot would do. We are both working now as peckers, level three, at the Pecking Center on Warehouse Road, not far from the Loopdale Cutoff, and happily so, I may say. The sheer abandon of it all. A revelation. I had no idea. The joy of writing in torrents. In swatches! By the bale! My master of arts degree means nothing at all to these monkeys and I have come to share their indifference. Red Kilgore was on to some thing. There is much to be said as well for the largesse of Mrs. Hazel Perkins Jenkins.

  At odd moments, Frankie and I will pause in our work and look each other full in the face, then break out laughing again, over our old nonsense of writing by design. All that misplaced striving. We laugh till our eyes water up. Ever bold, Frankie said her formal goodbye to artifice some weeks ago, and this, today, is mine. We may have another little announcement quite soon.

  Oxford American, Winter 2005

  Four

  MEMOIR

  Combinations of Jacksons

  I made my first experiments in breathing underwater at the age of nine, in 1943. It was something I needed to learn in life so as to be ready to give my pursuing enemies the slip. At that time they were Nazi spies and Japanese saboteurs.

  The trick looked simple enough in the movie serials, which pulled me along from one Saturday to the next with such chapter titles as “Fangs of Doom!” and “In the Scorpion’s Lair!” First you cut a reed. You put one end of the reed in your mouth and lay face up, very still, on the bottom of a shallow stream. The other end was projected above the surface of the stream, and through this hollow shaft, as you lay buried alive in water, you breathed.

  Agents of the Axis Powers were never far behind me. I could slow them a little with pinecone grenades, but I couldn’t stop them. They came crashing through the woods firing their Lugers at me as I raced barefooted for the reed beds of Beech Creek, a last hope. If I could get there in time to make my arrangements, then the agents in their stupid fury would overlook the life-giving reed, one among so many, and, with their boots splashing down eight inches away from my rigid underwater body, go stupidly on their way downstream.

  My attempts to bring this off took place in Cypress Creek and Smackover Creek, too—“smackover” being an Arkansas rendering of “chemin couvert,” covered path, or road. These and Beech Creek were the swimming streams nearest to my home town, at the time, of Mount Holly, in Union County, Arkansas, which adjoins Union Parish, Louisiana. The name dates from the territorial days of the 1820s, when “Union” had a pleasing ring to it in the Jacksonian South, where the many sons of Jack came to settle and multiply.

  Reeds grew here in abundance, in ponds and swamps and along creek banks, or what I took to be reeds, but they were the wrong kind of reeds, if in fact they were reeds. The green ones weren’t hollow. The brown ones, the dead and withered stalks, were somewhat hollow but too thin to carry much air, not even enough to sustain a gasping kind of life in a skinny little boy. They also tended to collapse, like wet paper drinking straws, with the first sharp intake of breath. In or out of the water, you couldn’t breathe through our reeds.

  Our quicksand was a bust too, or I would have lured those running men to their deaths in the slough near Cypress Creek. Not Cypress Slough or the Slough of Despond or of anything else. That dark marsh wasn’t big enough or distinctive enough to have a proper name; it was just “the slew.” When I had led the men there and they were stuck fast in the gray mud, I would have looked on from a hump of firm ground, deaf to their pleas, refusing to hold out a pole to them, waiting—will these spies never sink?—until the earth had swallowed them whole. It couldn’t have worked out that way though, because our quicksand, or quickmud, while quivering nicely underfoot, had no lethal depth, and may even have been slightly buoyant, and therapeutic to boot. I could never manage to sink more than about knee-deep in it.

  Bamboo (“cane,” we called it) was more promising than reeds, and we had plenty of that in the canebrakes. These woody shafts were thicker and stronger than reeds, and almost hollow, if not quite. Inside, at each circular joint, there was a partial blockage of some white pithy matter. With a long rattail file and a good deal of poking and blowing, it took me about five minutes to clear the pith. This was more like it. Now I had a sturdy and serious breathing tube, made on the spot from the materials at hand. I was man, the toolmaker.

  Still, questions remained. My knife would be there, ready, in my pocket (or one of a series of knives, two-blade Barlows mostly, which I kept losing)—ready for cutting reeds and cane, for carving crude, non-returning boomerangs, for slicing two neat little drainage Xs across snake-bite punctures, for cutting off the sputtering ends of fuses leading to well-marked kegs of BLASTING POWDER planted in the bowels of hydroelectric dams, for cutting loose the ropes from any female reporters I might come across who had been left bound and gagged in remote cabins—ready for any wartime emergency. My Barlow was at the service of the nation. So much for the knife.

  But was it likely that I would have a rattail file handy? Or—with a pack of killers at my heels, led by a tall man who ran with his monocle in place—the necessary five minutes, undisturbed, for all that reaming and poking of pith? Making every allowance for that, would my bamboo breathing tube, standing stark upright in the shallows of Smackover Creek, really fool anyone? It looked just like a breathing tube.

  The war was much on my mind in those days, and it was almost entirely the one being fought on movie screens and in the pulp pages of “funny books,” known as comic books in other parts of the country. Both names were misleading for the kind I liked, the ones featuring costumed vigilantes who made violent swoops on spy rings and gang hideouts, with no Miranda palaver. Along with Superman and Batman, there were many others, now largely forgotten, such as Bulletman, Plastic Man, The Sandman, Doll Man (a fighting homunculus about six inches tall, in a red cape), The Human Torch, Daredevil, Blue Beetle, Captain Marvel, Captain Midnight, and Captain America. Under any name the books were quite a bargain early on, at sixty-four pages in color for a dime. Or a kind of color. The palette was limited; Superman had blue hair. I never tired of the repetitive stories or the familiar scenes that were enacted over and over again.

  LOIS: But wait, Superman! What about my scoop?

  SUPERMAN: (Bounding skyward) No time for that now, Lois!

  I’m off to scramble some—YEGGS!!

  LOIS: (Tiny fists on hips) Well, of all th—!!??

  * * *

  The course of events in the early part of the war, the real war, was much too confusing for me to follow. My picture of the fighting in Europe, vivid if false, was of two great armies, and only two, facing each other at some one fixed place. Like many generals, I was fighting the last war. The armies were locked in constant battle, night and day, winter and summer. The din never ceased, and there was a lot of smoke. I may have picked up the smoke from a popular country song of the time, which still chimes out in my head every two or three years, as though from a long tape loop.

  There’ll be smoke on the water

  On the land and the sea

 
When our armee and navee

  Overtake the enemee.

  The only movement was a certain ponderous wavering of the battle line. One side would at last falter and give way altogether, and that would be the end. I knew we would win. A great-uncle by the name of Satterfield Fielding had assured me of that.

  I was only eight years old but I remember the day well, early in 1942, when he told me the war would be over in ninety days—that we would sink the Japanese fleet in no time, just as we had taken care of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in 1898, the work of a few hours. He also told me that if I would dip a brand of snuff called Garrett Scotch, I would never get TB, but that Garrett Sweet was no good and I would do well to leave it alone.

  Uncle Sat shot deer the year round, like Robin Hood, in season and out, as the whim or the need moved him, and he may well have been the last man in America who without being facetious called food “vittles” (“victuals,” a perfectly good word, and correctly pronounced “vittles,” but for some reason thought to be countrified and comical). He was a strong and fluent talker with far-ranging opinions. Attention wandered in the family as he ran on, except when he spoke from experience. There would be bits of hunting lore (“A real turkey could never win a turkey-calling contest”) and tips on growing unfashionable corn (nonhybrid) and bumblebee cotton (hill cotton—stunted, unfluffy bolls) and on the best ways of dynamiting fish (“dinnamite,” he called it) in the Saline River and Hurricane Creek.

  There was some sort of family gathering on that day at his farm, small but his own, in the backwoods of Grant County, Arkansas, and everyone was scoffing and laughing at his notions about the war. Always impatient with him, groaning and rolling her eyes, his sister Emma (my grandmother) could be counted on to check him in his longer flights with “Oh, why don’t you just hush, Sat. All you know is what you read in The Sheridan Headlight.” Wounding indeed, if true.