by Peter Orner
5
IN THE COUNTRY OF DEAD LEAVES
February 3, 1945
I bought you the perfume and stockings in Panama—Well, I have to say, Colón is some spot—girls—everywhere—White, black, brown, cream, every other color you can imagine—Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Brazilians, Indians, Africans, Cubans—One waiter even pointed out a Russian—They all speak about ten words in English—We were all drinking something they call a Blue Moon—They call it that because it makes you think the moon is blue—It was strong enough to eat cement—Most of these girls are very young—Of course, they’re all good and all have their crosses around their necks—Finally the pretty one sitting next to me said, “Me pussy—Doctor says O.K.”—She had been acting so dignified and then this “Me pussy” business—Then the tag line—She wanted $15—I must have made an impression on her because the other fellows couldn’t do any better than $25—There’s life in the Navy for you—Of course, darling, I didn’t indulge—What kind of s.o.b. do you take me for?
38 SYLVESTER PLACE
Summer and chaos in the trees. Carcasses rain from branches. Lawns wear coats of brittle, crunchable bodies. Pebbles of eyes stare up at the sky. Over breakfast, Miriam explains their sudden appearance. “These harmless insects emerge out of the ground every seventeen years in order to have intercourse. That’s enough sugar in your cereal, honey. Then they die. In Mexico, people consider them a delicacy.”
“Intercourse means screwing,” Leo says.
“Leo, stop educating your brother. You don’t want him to resent you when he’s older. And remember, the only certain thing is you’ll be brothers forever.”
Far freakier, though, is the noise that is beyond noise, an hysteria, a never-ceasing throb that rises and falls all day, all night, a perpetual seethe. They sleep to it, wake to it. And yet after a few weeks it is as though this has always been the sound of all the days and nights, and the truth is, they have always been here, lurking beneath, waiting, biding the years patiently before it is time to crawl out of the ground, whoop it up, and screw and screw and screw—and then die happy.
Nobody ever went into the living room of Bernice and Seymour’s house on Sylvester Place. It was a room for entertaining in an era that was over, a no-man’s-land of too thick carpeting, crowded with unused furniture. There was a plush rose-colored sofa. If you sat on it, your assprint was impossible to rub away. Rub the cushion all you wanted, it still looked sat on and would be proof that you had crossed the border from the den into that forbidden zone. There was a fireplace with old, unswept ashes. On the wall was an abstract painting made up of red and brown slashes. It was said to be by someone well known. There were heavy drapes that allowed no light.
One night, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., had sat in that very room. Sinatra was supposed to come, but sent his regrets. Milton Berle, Dinah Shore, Ruth Roman, Raymond Burr, Nipsey Russell, Danny Kaye, Barney Ross, the boxer. Former Vice President of the United States, Alben Barkley—all, at one time or another, had graced the living room. Cloris Leachman also. Bernice said she had a snorty laugh and that she fell asleep on the plush sofa. Cloris Leachman slept through the party. All this fame and fortune in the house because back in the day Bernice and Seymour were grand pals of a famous Chicago gossip columnist Sid Kaufman and his wife, Babette. Sid Kaufman knew anybody and everybody, since anybody and everybody has to, at least once in a while, grace Chicago with their presence. And when they do come, someone has to write about them. So: who didn’t love Sid Kaufman?
Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who’s got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It’s a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso’s a Picasso.
During the period of this long friendship, the Poppers themselves often appeared in Sid Kaufman’s column… We hear that old man of the sea Capt. (and insurance magnet) Sy Popper caught a 150 pound blue marlin off the coast of Bimini, but we’ll have to see the pictures and the official measurement data to believe it, as the good Capt. is prone to exaggerate… In the bibs and diapers department, it’s a boy! Leo Morris, to Philip and Miriam Popper (née Kaplan) of North State Parkway… Heartbroken young men of Chicago, unite, the beautiful Esther Popper’s engaged to a doctor, hear that, boys, Aphrodite’s off the market… Philip Popper has been recognized by the Cook County Bar Association as one of the Chicago legal profession’s Next Generation Leaders, our hats off to this young Brandeis…
And back in those days Sid would sometimes want to show his famous friends and clients the view from the North Shore. He’d call Bernice in the afternoon. Beanie, listen, Tony Bennett’s in town, says he wants to meet some real people for a change, some flesh-and-blood people. Eleven-thirty all right? We’ll come after the show at the Airie Crown tonight. Oh for God’s sake, Beanie, forget the beauty parlor, your hair’s terrific stuff.
All that years ago. The friendship ended. Sometime in the mid-sixties Sid and Babette dropped the Poppers from their set. It was said to involve money, but who ever knows? Friendships, like friends, they die. All those gone nights of witty conversation, all those nights of lots of laughs.
In the summer of ’76, his grandparents went up to New Buffalo for a few days. Before they left, Bernice asked Miriam to check on the house. To Popper, the long-since-sold house on Sylvester Place remains a rambling, endless place with yet-to-be-discovered walk-in closets. The laundry chute where he and Leo practiced Morse code. The upstairs with all those small boarding-house bedrooms. That house, even when it was filled with people, had always felt like a lonely hotel. Drawers still filled with Philip and Esther’s old clothes. The master bedroom. Bernice’s beauty table with those little lights he loved to unscrew and those two rock-hard twin beds separated by a nightstand. The alley between those beds. Seymour’s paperbacks stacked on the nightstand. The Case of the Borrowed Brunette; The Case of the Screaming Woman; It’s Loaded, Mr. Bauer; The Girl in the Turquoise Bikini; Death Commits Bigamy.
A quick check of the house and all is well. No gang of thieves has broken in. The Zenith is still lording in the den. There has been no explosion, no gas-main leak. No flood in the basement. A tree has not fallen on the roof. Popper leaves his mother in the bedroom, where she’s picked up one of Seymour’s books and begun to read. He goes downstairs and takes his shoes off and creeps into the living room. To say hello to the forgotten, the dead, the has-been, the hardly ever known, and there is something about the dark that is moving. Another step and the carpet itself is writhing beneath his toes. The drapes, the sacred sofa; they are scrawling across the slashes of the painting, now up and down his own arms. He stuffs his fist in his mouth to keep from screaming, but he’s screaming screaming screaming.
Later, they found out that Seymour had left the flue open. In a room that was never used. How many years had that open chimney been waiting for those patient bugs? Who needs a gossip columnist? Decadence returns. The yuks and then some—it all comes back around to an abandoned room.
If the Bolsheviks are going to blow us up anyway, I say why not a little batta batta bing while we’re waiting! You know what I mean, hey?
Oh, Seymour, even the bomb wouldn’t inspire you to—
Me? Inspire me? You haven’t been in the mood since Hoover.
Hey, Tony B, didn’t I tell you the view from here was real?
People bleed easy. Cicadas, even when you stomp on them, don’t bleed. You can’t violate their corpses short of plucking out their beady eyes and ripping off their wings. And even then they don’t care. Why should they? We’ve had all the fun that’s to be had on earth. Do what you want with us. You think you can take away our ecstasy just by murdering us?
Miriam put on Seymour’s gardening gloves and began dropping them all, the living and the dead, in garbage bags.
MISS PATEL
Potawatomi Trail School. It was her first year teaching. She tried to love them all equally. She was like a new mother with twins, kissing one of them and then the other. Her nose didn’t point straight. She didn’t waste a hell of a lot of time on math. For Valentine’s Day, they made decorative napkins for their mothers. They studied the insects of the Midwest: American cockroach, earwig, periodic cicada, stinkbug. Miss Patel’s breasts were like small anthills that Popper’s hands craved smoothing. Her hair was short, but got in her eyes anyway. She said she hated chalk, but for them she would write on the board. She said tornado drills and even tornadoes themselves were bosh. She said in Pakistan nobody ever heard of a tornado. The proper word was typhoon. She never ate anything herself, but she liked to feed the fish. Think about the way she sprinkled the food with both hands, her fingers rubbing together. Her one mistake: she taught Popper how to read. Other days her breasts were more like upside-down cereal bowls.
Also, you were kind to him when he crapped in his purple corduroys.
Miss Patel.
WILMOT MOUNTAIN
There they froze their gonads off. Not a mountain, or a hill either. Wilmot was a blump of old trash mounded on the prairie. Up the chairlift, down the treacherous ice. There must have been a ski school instructor around somewhere whose job it was to instruct them on how to widen their snowplows. Pinch in your knees. Don’t drag your poles. Try and go down the hill a little, not just across it. Someone must have told them how to manage the rope tow without hanging themselves. But this, all for show. Miriam must have paid somebody for something. She thought they should learn to ski because it was something that she herself never experienced, and above everything, Miriam wanted them to have experiences. From the chairlift, slumped, they look out across the fields, the tall grass poking up out of the Wisconsin snow like scattered pepper. And they muttered to each other through frozen spit-encrusted ski masks. Leo wondered what unknown sin they must have committed in some previous life to deserve this. The answer came the same way their feet later shocked to life in the warming hut after being so numb for hours—you think you’ll never feel your toes again, and then all of a sudden life, damaged, stiffened, clammy, but life, dog-eat-dog life! We have done not a single thing to deserve this. Ski boots like lead weights, the lacerating wind; the two of them half-blind snowsuited nomads.
“I feel like Doctor Zhivago wandering the steppe,” Leo said.
This Midwestern gulag their birthright. Their frigid hands, their frigid feet.
HOLLIS
For his sixth birthday, Hollis bought Popper a subscription to Sports Illustrated, and he remembers stretching out on the kitchen floor while Hollis was trying to mop it and flipping through the magazine, hoping to prove how much he loved baseball and Willie Stargell.
“Get out of here.”
“Mop me, why should I care?”
Hollis shadowing over him. “I’ll wash you to Cuba. Who’s raising you?”
“You are.”
“All right, then. Let’s start with your toenails. Never have I seen anything so foul in my—Go get the clippers—”
“Adopt me, then. No one will notice. I could come back here with you on Tuesdays. Where do you go on weekends and Mondays, anyway?”
“Where do I go?” Hollis stepped away, surprised, thinks about a west side apartment where he came and went, never much stayed, never much thought about. “Interesting question. On weekends and Mondays, I, allegedly, go home.”
“Home?”
“2323 West Monroe. Apartment D.”
Hollis in his room in the basement listening to his radio in his sleep. He never seemed to get into bed; he always slept on top of the sheets. And he never seemed to really sleep, either. You could go to Hollis at any time of the night and say, “Hollis?”
His head hidden by the mound of his stomach. “What do you need, Zander?”
“Cough medicine.”
“In the kitchen cabinet above the spices. I’ll get it. Don’t wake your mother. Or him. Wait for me.”
PHARAOH DRAWING
His boss, his alderman, his Kaiser, his Ayatollah, his Colonel Mustard—Okay, listen, Alexanderplatz, you be the Jews on the run, I’m the Pharaoh. Flee! Run for your lives! Go! Take off!
He flees to his private place in the backyard, in the left-hand corner. A place where nobody cut down the bramble or the stunted sun-starved trees and nobody mowed the long stalks of prairie grass into submission. A tiny wild corner where Hollis stored the storm windows under an old green tarp. There was an upside-down wheelbarrow and a rusted-out jungle gym like a mangled octopus. You got there through a gap in the azaleas, and Popper used to dig himself a cave in the mound of raked and forgotten leaves. Pharaoh knows where the Jews are. Pharaoh always knows where the Jews are. What are Jews to him? No, what this Pharaoh wants is to be left alone. No game, only the ruse of getting rid of a brother. But wouldn’t it be polite to at least look a little? No, Pharaoh only draws; Pharaoh lies on the grass with his notebook and his pens and he draws.
Popper, waiting, breathes up the smell of fermenting leaves, a sweet combination of wet dirt and rot and worms. The Indians used to bury their dead in mounds around here. In the Hoynes’ yard around the corner there’s a lump in the lawn that you can see isn’t right. His father showed it to him. A mass grave, Philip said, God only knows what these dead Potawatomi think of Highland Park now. We were massacred so you greedies can have three-car garages?
Popper waits for Pharaoh. He’s learned how. Waiting is different from having patience. Patience he’ll never learn. But waiting. All you have to do is lie back in the rot and breathe. You can even sing a little to yourself. Chew on a leaf. He wonders if a grave, any grave, is only another place to hide in plain sight.
A second-floor window shoves open. Hollis leans out and booms to the neighborhood: “I have in my possession an item of soiled underwear that was found under a certain delinquent’s bed wrapped in newspaper. Please explain this behavior. In Korea, in their little mud huts, even those people wouldn’t—you want me to call my lawyer?”
“Kid,” Leo says, not looking up from his drawing, “Hollis wants you.”
MANNY’S HOUSE
Saturday, and Popper is riding his bike to Manny Laveneaux’s house, the greatest of all houses, through the woods and across the little bridge over the ravine where he and Manny and his sisters sled in the winters, that long, snaking canal of leaves—when out of nowhere two high hippies in floppy Dr. Seuss hats jump out from the dry leaves under the little bridge and grab hold of Popper’s banana seat and breathe, Where do you think you’re going, little bourgeoisie fuck? Yanking his bike back and forth and breathing in his face, and he’s staring at them, dumb and shivering in June. I’m only going to Manny’s. Finally they get bored with scaring the hell out of him and let him go, and now Popper thinks of his bulbous-headed self, pedaling away so fast to freedom his left shoe fell off. And the way that grand old paintless house looked when he came out of the woods. An old wreck of a colonial mansion, boarded-up windows, like nailed-shut eyes. He rides up the crumbling driveway, a vision of the lake just over the lip of the bluff. He goes in the back door because the front door is also nailed shut. The way Manny’s grandmother, past eighty even then, looked standing in the dark cavernous kitchen beside the long metal table Manny said was for dissecting bodies when the richest of the rich still lived there. She was taller even than Manny’s father, and hadn’t spoken a single word of English in the three years since she’d come from Port-au-Prince, but after Popper burst in the door—he’s never burst in before, he’d always knocked—she walked over to him and knelt and said something in Creole, because she must have seen something in his eyes and understood. Pas peur, she said. Pas peur. The only time Manny’s grandmother ever touched him, two long untrembling fingers pulling the bottom of his chin before he scrambled up the winding staircase with the hundred broken balusters to tell Manny and his sisters about the two Charlie Mansons under
the bridge, like a couple of trolls down there waiting for anybody.
February 4, 1944
And another thing, don’t believe all this travel folder talk about how stimulating the salt air can be—Already I’m so damn sick of the rolling I could cry—You spend all your energy balancing yourself unconsciously—sitting, standing, walking, even sleeping—So far we haven’t seen much outside of a school of porpoise—But last night toward sunset—the biggest shark I ever saw—a real monster, about 16 feet long, jumped out of the water about ten times just off our stern—God, I wish Sid was here to see it—His eyes would have popped out of his head—That would have given him something to write about, boy—I think he was dying though, because he kept falling on his back—
PHILIP AND SEYMOUR
In the plum, thickly carpeted, Standard Club dining room, Philip and Seymour are finishing their steaks. Philip is doing well. Just recently, he took on two new partners and moved his firm to the sixteenth floor of the Monadnock Building. Seymour is moving, inexorably, in the other direction. It’s still in question how long he’ll be able to hold on. Still, his slow bankruptcy has only made Seymour more Seymour. He remains free with unsolicited advice. Today, though, is different. He has news, astounding news, and he’s waited patiently until after their sirloins and creamed spinach to tell it. Inhaling hugely, Seymour releases a potent cloud of meaty breath and announces, softly:
“Phil. Listen. Melvie Kaufman’s been kidnapped. Ransom. A hundred thousand.” Seymour pauses and awes: “Cash.”