He went back into his bedroom, rummaged in a drawer and found his military papers, and lifted out the pressed flower, dry pink petals with streaks of mauve. He held it to his nose. There was no smell. He began to cry, remembering Mellens’ laughter in the park, the sweet mournful look in his eyes as he’d talked about his wife, talked about how beautiful she was. “She came out of nowhere to me,” he’d said. Then Sadine laughed as he lay down on his bed, seeing the spindly legged Mellens coming out of nowhere through the park gate, wagging his walking stick at him in the air. “I wanted to know why my neighbour sleeps with a light on in his house all night.” Sadine got up, went into the bedroom, and turned off the light. “Fuck you,” he said.
10
As Sadine walked into the park, Mellens was standing by the honeysuckle bushes, singing happily, quietly to himself:
There’s a husky dusky maiden in the Arctic
And she waits for me, but it is not in vain,
For someday I’ll put my mucklucks on and ask her
If she’ll wed me when the ice worms nest again.
“What kind of song is that?”
“That! That’s you. You’re from here, this country, that’s your heritage,” Mellens said, and immediately put his head down and went to work on the motors. Sadine stood back. The sun was shining brightly, so he put on his dark flight glasses. “Heritage, my ass.” He’d been watching old war movies on television the night before. He was tired, and he was irritated because an elderly couple had begun coming to the park, sitting on a bench close to a clump of lilac trees. They sat watching Sadine every Saturday, pointing at the planes, laughing. Mellens completed the fuel injection. Sadine sent the radio-controlled planes up into the air. The planes, swooping and dipping, rose and circled the rim of tall spruce trees around the park till he checked his stopwatch for fuel time and drew two of the planes down to a safe landing. The old couple under the lilac trees applauded, but they snickered cruelly when the last plane ran out of gas and plummeted to the grass, crushing its nose cone and a wing. He couldn’t stand the way the old couple giggled. Mellens, wagging his cane, said, “Don’t let those crazy old coots get to you.” Sadine nodded. “Okay,” he said as Mellens picked up the fuselage and then carried the broken pieces of the plane back to Sadine’s garage.
11
In the garage, with rows of model planes parked behind him on plain pine shelves, Mellens stood staring up into the stillness of wings suspended from the ceiling by black linen threads. “You know what this is like? It’s like staring up into Alaska,” he said.
“I’ve never been to Alaska,” Sadine said.
“You should go.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“I went for a cruise once to Alaska,” Mellens said. “All sorts of people sitting there in chairs beside windows that were sealed up so you could see the big high slopes full of trees but you couldn’t smell the air, sitting there sealed in amber. I sat down to say ‘Hello’ to some of these kindly folks in their golf shirts and pretty soon the man beside me, he said, ‘Well, there are a lot of them trees out there,’ and he rubs his hands together and says, ‘Do you think that those trees is natural or man-made?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, they must be natural.’ So he says, ‘Now that’s what I was saying to Edna, they gotta be natural, because if they was man-made they could never of got ’em that close together.’”
Sadine laughed. He felt a pang of envy, wondering why he’d never had such easy conversations with strangers, or if he had, why he couldn’t remember them. His memory never seemed to give him what he wanted. He could hardly remember anything his mother or father or the nurse had talked about, and when he visited the managers of his dry cleaning stores he had little or nothing to say. Only the week before, a prominent funeral director at a curling tournament supper for funeral home handlers and embalmers had patted him affectionately on the shoulder. “Our man’s a born listener. It’s a gift,” he said. “Now if only my wife had the gift.”
“I wish I could remember a joke,” Sadine said to Mellens.
“You do?”
“Yeah,” he said as he laid a line of clear glue along a balsa wing-strut and secured a joint, searching his mind for a joke. “I remember at this curling tournament they asked me what I thought about curling and I said it looked to me like a bunch of caretakers with attitudes sweeping up the ice. They thought that was pretty funny.” Mellens howled with laughter. Sadine was taken aback. “You want to talk about ice,” Mellens said, “the miles and miles of ice up there in the glacier bays? Sometimes when the air is squeezed out of the ice the ice absorbs all the light into pockets of turquoise. It all looks like the broken fingers of the earth. That’s where only the ice worms live. It’s a big brutal serenity out there…”
There was a drop of glue on Sadine’s forefinger. “That’s funny,” he said as the glue began to harden.
“What?”
“I just remembered something else.”
“What?”
“Something I did. Like what you’re saying.”
“What’d I say?”
“Where you were, a big, brutal serenity, except this was out on the prairies.” He peeled the glue from his fingertip. “Empty space, that’s what it was. Whatever that great big thing was, it didn’t care a hoot about me. That’s what I remember – an emptiness so tight in my chest I was almost afraid to breathe.” He paused and then winced, as if he’d got a sudden pain in his side. “I hate my father,” he blurted out. “I hate the prairies and I hate my father.” He moaned, staring up into the dark well of the garage, into the wing spans. Mellens said nothing. Sadine took a deep breath, shrugged, and said, “He was a kind of caretaker and he sure had an attitude.”
He did not go on to tell Mellens how afraid he had been of that prairie emptiness, how he had walked up and down the streets of the town, filled with panic. He’d hired a hooker at the hotel and taken her to his room, and there she’d led him into the bathroom so that she could wash him. “A girl’s got to keep clean,” she’d said, and the fondling with warm water and soap had aroused him. The girl had held him in the palm of her hand. “You can play with that,” he’d said. “Sure,” she’d said, “and I can whistle a happy tune on it, too.”
Mellens, lifting one of the fragile planes from a shelf, turned it over in his hands, a Stuka dive-bomber. Sadine remembered how grimly he had made love to the hooker, till he had rolled over exhausted and heard her say as he fell asleep, “My God, ain’t you something.”
He had wakened in the prairie hotel feeling so refreshed that he didn’t care when he found out that the girl had taken fifty dollars from his wallet. “She was damn good for me.” After that, every Friday night back home, he had booked a room and a hooker at the King Edward Hotel, and always had a dozen chrysanthemums delivered to the room. He liked the lush expansiveness of flowers. Sometimes he tore a handful of petals from the flowers, spread them on a pillow, and then went into the bathroom. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” he said, laughing as he stood by the sink, wearing his flight glasses, waiting to be washed. “Up up and away,” he said, aroused.
Mellens held the frail body of the Stuka against the garage light, running a finger along the wing tips. “I’m glad you’ve come back,” Mellens said.
“What?”
“Wherever you went in your head.”
“I was thinking.”
“I am sure you were.”
“I was.”
“Thinking of what?”
“Soap,” Sadine smiled.
“You were thinking of soap?”
“I was,” Sadine said.
“Soap.”
“Yep.”
“I was in the war, too,” Mellens said. “You know that?”
“I didn’t know,” Sadine said.
“Not your war. The World War.”
“You’re kidding. That makes you old enough to be my father.”
“Not quite.”
“Where’re you fr
om?”
“Riga.”
“Where’s that?”
“Latvia. I ended up in the gulag. Hard labour. What was hardest was to live with how filthy everyone was. Shit. Lice. You don’t know how lousy life is till you know you’ve learned to actually sleep with your own lice. To lie in shit and sleep with your lice. Nobody dreamed about whipped cream and eclairs in there, we dreamed about soap. And one day, a particular guard said to me, ‘My garden is dying. You fix my garden and I will get you a box of soap, a big box.’ I fixed his garden and I got this box of a dozen bars of soap.”
“So you became a gardener.”
“Me and the worms, we made a life.”
“And here, too?”
“Right. Here.”
“In my mind, in worm country. Wherever the ice worms are, up in Alaska. Anywhere. That’s where I am. Ice makes you wonder, you wonder about wormholes,” he said, holding a slender Phantom F-4 up to the light. “The physicists, they say the universe is a great big transparent sac like a skin and there we are in this sac except there are wormholes out there, holes that go right through the world’s skin out into other worlds.” He circled Sadine, saying, “We could get out of this life alive, we could almost get out of this world alive if we could find the wormholes.” Sadine heard a sharp, brittle crumpling sound and Mellens, with a sheepish smile, held up the Phantom F-4, the belly spars collapsed in his big fist. “Damnation,” Mellens said, “now that’s dumb.” He handed the broken plane to Sadine, who yelled, “You’ve broken it!”
“So, it can be fixed,” Mellens said, shrugging.
“It’s broke,” Sadine said, surprised that he was so angry.
“If it’s broke, fix it.”
“Fix it. The man says fix it. He’s got no shame,” Sadine cried. “You’ve got no shame.”
“Shame,” he said. “You want to talk about shame?”
“No. There’s nothing to talk about,” Sadine said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Then shut up,” Mellens said. “It’s a paper plane, for Christ’s sake. There are bigger things,” and as he turned to leave the garage he laughed and sang,
She’ll be waiting for me there
With the hambone of a bear
And she’ll beat me
’Til the ice worms nest again.
12
A week later, Sadine had to go downtown. He needed to get new leather soles put on his shoes. He took a taxi rather than walk past Mellens’ house. In the shop, a man at the counter said he wanted a pair of riding boots repaired. He was wearing a red hunter’s jacket, a hard, black riding cap, and was carrying a bugle. Sadine spoke to him and the man explained that he was the bugler at the racetrack, that he took the bus out to the track every noon hour, going in full dress because it meant curious people always talked to him. He liked to talk to strangers. “Never had a lonely bus ride yet,” he said.
“How hard is it to learn to play the bugle?”
“Learning to blow is one thing, learning to play the bugle is another.”
“My father left me his bugle. He left it under his bed.”
“No kidding,” the bugler said. “The only time I put my bugle under a bed, it was a woman I loved so much I never wanted to get out of her bed.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Look, learning to play your father’s bugle, that’s nothing. It’s the bed that’s a problem,” the racetrack bugler laughed.
At home, Elmer put the bugle to his lips. He had the peculiar feeling that he was kissing his father for the first time. He blew into the bugle, making a loud, braying flatulent sound. “Fat fucking chance I can play this thing,” he said and laughed. He went downstairs and out to the garage and began to rebuild the Phantom F-4, paring the balsa strips with his X-Acto knife. When he was done, he set the plane on a table. He stared at it a long time and was surprised that he felt no satisfaction. He felt grim. He felt he was being watched. He was sure he’d caught a glimpse of his mother’s face in the overhead well of wings. “What are you doing there?” he screamed. He brought both fists down on the plane and crushed it, shaking his head because he felt a sudden tiredness, a lethargy so deep in his bones that he wanted to lie on the floor and cry. He wondered if he had actually killed anyone on that night when he’d fired into the shanties by the lagoon.
On Saturday, he went to the park with only one plane. He flew an F-86 in low circles over the trees. The old couple, seeing how grim and tight-lipped he looked, left him alone. Mellens did not appear. The air was humid. The plane had no lift. It crashed. Sadine walked home carrying the broken wings, disheartened, his eyelid fluttering. “Some goddamn pilot,” he said. He was astonished that a stupid argument with Mellens had left him so troubled. He poured himself a drink and opened his mail and was startled by a big white pamphlet that had 999 embossed in bold black on the cover. He remembered telling the reporter that all he believed in was the number 9. Then he realized he was holding the pamphlet upside down, that it was an evangelical tract promising the imminent end of the world under the sign of 666 – the numbers of the apocalypse. “Three 6s are 18,” he mused, “and 9 and 9 are 18, so maybe it’ll all even out.”
He opened another Sadine’s Dry Cleaning store and then went to the bank with a large unexpected dividend cheque that had come in from the funeral home company he had incorporated. “Boy, the dead are really dying,” he said. He was so pleased he booked a room in the King Edward Hotel in the middle of the week. The girl turned out to be very young, probably too young, which was dangerous, but Sadine felt incredible arousal as she crouched on her hands and knees and he mounted her from behind. Then, almost immediately, he became preoccupied with the taut smoothness of her skin and his own flabby paunch, and though he thought, I’m still young, he heard himself wheezing for air. He wondered if he was bored. He wondered what had been in the green capsule that the nurse had swallowed in Saigon. He decided he would ask for two girls on Friday so that he could watch them. “It was just something to do,” he remembered the nurse saying. With a loud laugh, he gave the girl a hard slap on the buttocks, and then another slap. The girl leapt up. “None of that fucking shit,” she yelled. “None of that fucking shit, man. Nobody hits me,” and she gathered her clothes, dressing so quickly that Sadine, still on his knees with his eyes closed, didn’t realize she was dressed until she was at the door. “No, wait,” he cried.
“Wait for what?” she said, her hand on the doorknob. “This bitch is on wheels, man.”
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“Who the fuck cares?”
“I do.”
“Don’t give me that shit, man. You gonna beat on me? You think I was born yesterday, man?”
“No, I was,” he said.
“Very funny.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s not funny at all. I wish it was funny. I wish I could tell you a joke.”
“This is a joke, this whole fucking night’s a joke.”
“No, it’s not,” he said.
“So what d’you want?”
“I usually get washed.”
“Washed?”
“Yes. With soap.”
“You want me to wash you?”
“If you want.”
“No, no, no, no man. It’s what you want, not what I want. It’s what you pay for.”
“I don’t care anymore. I’d just like you to stay, that’s all.”
“What’re you gonna do if I stay?”
“Nothing. Talk. You can talk to me.”
“I don’t talk. I fuck.”
“Try talking.”
“What’s to tell. It’s all shit. I don’t shovel shit for dead men.”
“Nobody said I was dead.”
“I didn’t mean you were dead, man. It’s just a way of saying. Don’t take it personal.”
She came to the side of the bed. She looked at him very shrewdly, smiled, and stepped out of
her high heels. “I ain’t telling you nothing, man. I bet you could do me dirt. I ain’t telling you nothing about me.”
“So don’t.”
“Nothing.”
“Whatever you want,” he said.
She took off her dress and lay down beside him. “I can tell you about tricks, all the lunatics I meet,” she said.
“Whatever,” he said.
“Like you,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re a lunatic.”
“Is that true?”
“That’s a maybe.”
13
When Mellens came through the gate, Sadine was embarrassed because he knew he was smiling warmly, but he didn’t mind being embarrassed. Mellens, striding across the grass, began to talk at the top of his voice, wagging his grub-handled cane. “What a trip, what a trip. People of our kind, Sadine, our kind, successful, big rolls of fat under their arms and under their chins. They play bingo! They play bingo. Can you believe it? All afternoon in that cruise ship, not caring about the sea, and when the bingo caller called out, ‘Under the I, two little ducks – 22,’ they all cried, ‘Quack, quack.’” He hooted with laughter. Sadine quickly sent a Hurricane fighter plane roaring straight up into the air, driven by a new booster motor.
All the Lonely People Page 41