Atlantis: Three Tales

by Samuel R. Delany

  “Oh, I’ll teil ’im!”

  Eric’s boots scudded on gravel. (In my mind I saw him vault.) A moment on, cap in hand, he swung up into the cab and slammed the door. “Bye, now, sir!” With one hand back and the other front, he tugged it over spiky hair the color of light coffee. “Bye, now—so long, sir!”

  “Bye, Eric!”

  Eric grabbed wheel and gearshift.

  The motor revved beneath.

  We started again.

  “Now we’re fuckin’ outta here, boy—like pig-balls on butter! Let’s get the fuck on the road!”

  We jogged along awhile. Eric kept up his banter. I remembered Robert’s awkward curses yesterday. By now Eric’s sentences seemed just as awkward when curses were missing. For, during this stop, I’d heard, as I hadn’t at Robert’s farm, the faint halts and false starts you couldn’t really write without burlesquing, that nevertheless told where a fuckin’ or a shit dearly yearned to fall.

  “You know—” We went round another curve, with Eric’s near elbow getting my ribs and me pushing Robert against the door (tools rattled in metal below the seat)—“when I throwed up the goddamn Navy an’ come the fuck home (Oh, they fuckin’ wanted me to stay but I told ’em to get fucked, I knew where I fuckin’ lived!), I shoulda gone the hell to Texas and been a goddamn cowboy, herdin’ fuckin steers and ropin’ fuckin’ calves—then I bet you little scumbags would really like shittin’ around with a wild-ass bastard like me!” He put his head back and sang out: “Whoopie-Fuckin’-Tye-Yi-Yippy-Shit-Ass-Yay! Well, now, hey—” His gold-stubbled cheeks filled with air as he whistled, then his chin came down as we bounced over another stretch of broke-up macadam—“I bet I’d be a fuckin’ movie star by now, with fuckin’ fine music every time I turned the knob—that would be a goddamn sight better than rustlin’ fuckin’ milkcans for a bunch of shit-machine cows, you better believe your fuckin’ balls when they spit on ya’!” We bounced down the straightaway. “But it ain’t that fuckin’ bad around here, now, is it? You an’ your ma keep comin’ the fuck back.”

  A few minutes later Eric pulled over again.

  “Now don’t you two little peter-heads get all excited—we ain’t got there yet. I’m just takin’ a fuckin’ break to do somethin’ you can’t do for me.” He opened the cab door, dropped down to the shoulder, strode a few feet into the undergrowth, half squatted, then stood again. Rasping down his zipper, he hauled himself out, testicles and all, and began to spray grandly, goldenly, over leaves and logs and paired birch saplings. “Pick up the fuckin’ milk, then have to jump out an’ take me a fuckin’ leak—I do it ever’ mornin’, and ever’ mornin’ I’m goddamned for a sinner if I don’t fuckin’ forget.” Swinging his stream around, he turned to us, grinning.

  The amber arc glittered through coppery leaf-dapple.

  “You two assholes wanna come down here and have us a pee fight? I’ll drown the both of ya’, one ball tied behind my fuckin’ back!”

  “No!” declared Robert, happy as I was. “You’d win!”

  “I fuckin’ wouldn’t!” Eric protested as his stream lost its arch. Like Vladdy back in school, Eric was uncircumcised. Unlike Vladdy’s though, Eric’s cuff hung loose down over his knuckles, so that as it slid forward, the top interfering with his water, he splattered like a bright umbrella. Then the umbrella closed. Urine dribbled from his fist, wet his grimed fingers, dripped to the dried mud on his boot toe. “’Cause I just ran out of fuckin’ piss, an’ I don’t got me no more!” Shaking himself, he stuffed himself back in his pants. “Come on now, the two of you little bastards. Get on down here and irrigate some trees. I don’t want you sons-o’-bitches havin’ to go when there ain’t no fuckin’ place to do it at.”

  So we got down and left our puddles in the ditch beyond the shoulder, then returned to the cab, where Eric sat, elbows on the wheel, sucking at his knuckles, biting at his cuticles. He glanced down at us from under his red visor.

  “Get the fuck back on up here, now, ’fore I wail the piss out of you little shit-asses!” His grin held not a jot of aggression.

  We climbed back into the cab, and Eric drove again. He talked about “. . . Jew-bastards. I guess some of them is as bad as ever’body says. But I knowed some that weren’t a hell of a lot worse than anybody else—though if I said that in the fuckin’ bar, some guy’d wanna pull me apart and shit on the pieces.” He talked about “wops.” There were, I guess, a lot of them in the Navy with him. “I just never understood the fuckers, is all. They all them Catholics an’ stuff,” and he shook his head. He talked about “niggers—Ooops! . . . Oh, shit! I done forgot. His momma told me, yesterday on the phone—you a nigger too, now, ain’t you?—to get me all prepared, so I wouldn’t start talkin’ no nigger shit: like this. Well, you sure as hell don’t look it—you could be a little wop kid, though. Or one of them Puerto Ricans. Well, now, it’s gonna always be like that with me: I open my fuckin’ mouth an’ I’m gonna stick my big toe—cowshit an’ all—right in it, till that ol’ fucker come out my fuckin’ ear like ya’ goddamn dick left hangin’ out ya’ pants and you don’t even know it!” He hauled on the wheel, went round a leafy curve, and leaned over to show us the side of his head. “See it there, that fucker wigglin’ out my ear? You look, you can see it. There it fuckin’ goes! Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle!” But, whether it was a penis or a toe, Robert and I were beyond offense and simply howled.

  I wonder if the man thought it was his inane jokes that kept us in hysterics, or if he realized it was his scabrous vocabulary tickling us to our boyish cores. Could, indeed, we have made the distinction? Eric cussed out more potholes, more drivers, and speculated at length on the sexual habits of the waitress at the diner who’d served him breakfast that morning. (“Shit on a fuckin’ shingle, that’s what she gave me, I swear. Goddamn, it’s a fuckin’ miracle I’m still fuckin’ alive!”) His invective involved her with toothless octogenarians and several large barnyard animals, at a specificity quite beyond our nine-year-old minds to follow: “I’m sittin’ at the goddamn counter, being fuckin’ polite and thinkin’ ’bout my face full of pussy . . .” evoked a picture of Eric on a counter stool with a kitten trying to climb down from his head—while his speculations on whether the waitress was or wasn’t the sort who’d “give a fuckin’ donkey head with rusted-out braces an’ rotten teeth till the hairy bastard hee-hawed for mercy . . .” sailed by in an image worthy of Un Chien andalou, but devoid of information for Robert or me—though enough big monster-mule and little wormy pig dicks got sucked off, cut off, and rammed down this or that cocksucker’s throat, Lord knows, to make up for it. We couldn’t stop laughing anyway, as it all swirled around us in phallic confusion, a surreally mis-imagined haze.

  Nor was it entirely monologue. Eric asked us more questions about life in the fuckin’ city, professing to each answer we gave his own smilingly indulgent terror of that fuckin’ place:

  “When I was in that goddamn Navy they wanted to put me on a fuckin’ plane. I told them right the hell out, there was no fuckin’ way they was gonna get me up in one of them fuckin’ things! Well, I feel the same way about fuckin’ subways. I want the wheels on the fuckin’ road. Not twenty feet under it, or half a mile above it. On it. An’ that’s fuckin’ it!”

  When the truck crunched onto the gravel beside the dairy, a guy in a blue uniform with white piping across the pockets and down the sides came out and, as Eric opened the cab door, called:

  “Well how the hell are you?”

  For a moment, as Eric climbed out, I thought we were entering some unimaginable world where all males talked like this. (“Got some kids with ya’,” the uniformed guy observed. “Yeah, I remember Robert, from last time.” And, to both of us, as we dropped down: “Hi, there.”) But the occasional hell, dang, damn, and goddamn we heard from the rest of the dairy workers as the morning rolled on were no more than ordinary, civilized slips, that vanished against the profane transgressions of Eric’s dithyrambic scatology.

  Standing in the
sun, I looked down at the gray stones graveling away before the building, thankful for my shoes as only a city child can be.

  Grinning, Eric motioned to me. “Get over here, ya’ little shit-ass bastard.” Beside me, he bent and put one hand on my shoulder. “You stay the hell back, now, while me and a couple of these other cocksuckers unload them shit-ass milk cans down onto that fuckin’ chain-linked conveyer, right there—see?” He pointed with the other. “They carry the shit—” clinking and wobbling, half a dozen, already on it, moved by the red brick wall—“till they go right through that fuckin’ archway, over there—you see it, now?” He smelled of earth and machine oil. “So you stay the fuck outta the way.” Then he dropped his hand, stood up, and went around to the truck back. “God-damn, get that big ol’ shit-ass fucker!” he’d shout, standing in the truck bed, leaning a can out to one of the men below—till finally one of the loaders objected:

  “Come on, now! You better quit talkin’ like that, Garbage Mouth. You got kids around here! And they ain’t even yours. Maybe they haven’t been brought up to hear that kind of thing!”

  From the truck, Eric grinned over at us: “Sorry, there.” He went back for another can. “Whyn’t you two go look around. We don’t want your goddamned little ears to wither up and fall off from the fuckin’ heat, listenin’ to our shit.”

  “Your shit!” the other loader said sullenly, standing below. “Come on, now!”

  So Robert and I went off to explore inside the building.

  Robert had been here before and explained to me how everything had to be kept real clean—then let me wander off to see something on my own that didn’t much interest him. I strolled past tall aluminum equipment, slanted with salmon sun through high levered-out windows, to amble over the red, tessellated flooring slurred with milky spills—wondering what it would be like to walk through the white puddles barefoot. I probably looked like any ordinary kid, loafing around, gazing at the pasteurizing tanks, the homogenizing tubs, the cooling vats, the angled pipes and arching hoses that ran between gauges like clusters of clocks. I was still in a kind of profane trance, separated from the overtly sexual, at least in me, by a barrier no more substantial than a misty breath breathed out on a chill April dawn.

  Once, in an empty corner (other than a few loaders and a foreman or two, all outside now, the workers didn’t come in till eight-thirty: so the dairy proper was deserted), I stopped by bare brick. Asbestos-covered pipes ran up to the high roof. Then I felt down inside my pants. What, before, I’d suspected, now I confirmed: back in the truck, about when Eric had scorched the Texas plains, I’d wet my underpants with that mysterious discharge that came more and more frequently these days—and which sometimes I could even make happen by various pleasurable frictions.

  Immune in his youth to genital joy, could Robert have undergone a less sloppy, if similar, reaction?

  Eric did not have an iota of the child molester in him. (I’ve known a number of Erics since: all heart and mouth.) He would have been outraged by any such idea. In a sense, the man who kept his cussedness under control with respectable women and men probably gives a better picture of him than his verbal excesses of the road. But if he had been so inclined, the sad and simple truth (at least I thought so then) is that I would have been the happiest, most willing, most gratefully molested child one might have asked for.

  There was simply no sexual act, whether or not I’d tried it already with the guys after swimming, I wouldn’t have happily performed with him.

  Soon I was in the truck again, between Eric and Robert.

  The ride home was equally glorious, obscene, and innocent. Back at the farm we got down from the cab, said hello to Robert’s mother, who came down the kitchen steps drying her hands on a dish towel, while Eric swung the empty milk cans from the truck bed. We called our thoroughly inadequate goodbyes to the amazing man whose cussing caused such marvels.

  He called back: “Bye, Robert. So long, little guy.” (I realized he’d lost my name on our trip.) “We had fun, didn’t we?” Then he slammed the cab door after himself. “Hope you come up and we do it again. They were real good, ma’am. Both of ’em, real good. Bye, now, ma’am. Weren’t no trouble at all!” Then he pulled his head back inside the window and the truck rolled off.

  But I was still in a transgressive haze—that, frankly, if it had come down to it, I’d have traded my after-swim pleasures for any day.

  “I told you Eric was a great guy,” Robert said, while his mother waved after the rattling tailgate.

  All I could do was nod, and remember Eric’s big hands, his dirty boots, his cap—and his wondrous cussedness.

  I never saw him again.

  A few days later, I was back in the city.

  And at school.

  Robert wanted to be a scientist.

  I wanted to be a scientist.

  In Hugo’s classes we worked wonderfully hard at it. Or at least Robert did. I wanted to work hard. But it was so easy, especially with Robert around, in the midst of some lab experiment to get into talking about some fancified possibility, some speculative what-if . . .

  Hugo’s assessment of me, once our first year together was over? In one of his biannual reports to my parents, he wrote:

  “Sam is bone lazy.”

  He was right.

  I still am.

  That’s probably why I’ve never been able to work at more than one thing at a time. And while—sometimes—I worked at my science, in those years art was something I didn’t work at but merely imitated from other people, other books, other pictures—even if, because of an imitative knack, occasionally, in or out of Gwenny’s class, I got more than my share of praise for it.

  A year or so after my father’s death, I, my wife, some cousins, and some friends all went for a last weekend to our own country house—just before Mom sold it. In the attic’s evening nostalgia, from a small green table set up against the chimney brick, I picked up some dusty sheet music: “September Song”—though when and why my father had brought it up here, I didn’t know. But this time, what I saw was not a contested progression of notes. As I turned back through the gritty pages to the opening, what I noticed now was that the French lyrics, running between the speckled staves in italic type, were by the poet Jacques Prévert, whose little volume Paroles had been published in part by the Pocket Poets series and, back during my high school years, had joined, along with Ginsberg’s Howl, Corso’s Gasoline, Ponsot’s True Minds, and Williams’ Kora in Hell, my most cherished volumes.

  “Les feuilles mortes qui nous ressembles . . .” Prévert had written; just as surprising, the translator and crafter of the American lyrics had been (I read at the music’s top) the humorist poet Ogden Nash: “The autumn leaves drift by my window, the autumn leaves of red and gold . . .”

  The piece of music beneath it on the table, that showed the yellowed right angle where, a bit askew (for how many years), “September Song” had lain, was as great a surprise: a frothy tune, wildly popular during some season of my childhood, it was, “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake!” The writer of this, I learned for the first time from the name at the top, was the playwright and popular essayist, William Saroyan.

  Had my father been aware of any of this? And how, now, could I ever know?

  But—as I said—that was later.

  Gwen had been our art teacher for several years.

  What goes into a picture?

  Shape, Line, and Color . . .

  How are they put together?

  In relationship to the outside edge.

  By the time I reached the Eighth Grade we’d repeated it so often it had almost no meaning. As happens with all dogmas, sometimes we’d laughed at it. Frequently we’d mocked and made fun of it. But, as dogmas will, sometimes it had astonished me with its explanatory force. There were even moments when it seemed to relate as much to music (Mrs. Wallace had only that week handed me the solo score to the Mendelssohn Concerto: “This is probably hopelessly outsid
e the realistic frame of your abilities. But there’re parts in it I’d just like to hear what you did with . . .”) as to the most functional architecture, to theater, to dance (Wendy was already telling me all about Martha Graham, José Lamon, and that there was a wonderful choreographer at the City Center Ballet named Balanchine, some of whose works a few people liked to say they couldn’t understand, though they certainly made sense to me!) —as to sculpture (the easy transition) and to art.

  Then there were those odd moments down in the third floor library—which, with permission, the Eighth Graders were allowed to use. The world globe stood beside me in one corner and the scrolled dictionary stand sat across from me in the other. (The dictionary did not contain, I knew because I’d looked them up, a number of the words Eric had used three springs ago—though some surprising others it did.) I looked over the analytic geometry and calculus text I was pursuing on my own, and for seconds Gwen’s dictum seemed to explain the more amazing parts of mathematics and science as well . . . though that insight I could only hold in my mind for a heartbeat.

  That must have been the year, when we were working in the art room one April afternoon, that Robert became wholly, intently, and surprisingly involved in one of his pictures. He painted with his brush held in both hands, the way he used to hold his pencil when he was six or seven, and he seemed to fight the paper—rather than paint it. Blues and reds and grays swirled around each other, the colors getting angrier and darker as he got closer to the center, where, in his energy, he’d already torn the paper—and was still painting at it.

  We used the tops of the old paint cans for our colors. Robert’s brush swept down across the one, licking up red, the other, lapping up blue. Then brush hairs smashed again into the saturated paper.