He dried off the scummy ponds with a series of cotton balls, then began to apply the half dozen lotions he used, gently spreading each until it was a glistening film. Next, he wrapped the hand in fresh gauze, working expertly now, his left hand and teeth well practiced. After this he dribbled on the peppermint extract and then, finally, pulled on the glove. This was his umpteenth pair. He had a cardboard box in the basement filled with their unused mates. For some reason he couldn’t bring himself to chuck them out.
As he worked he stole a glance at the last of the photos. Susan. The one member of the jury who hadn’t decided on his guilt. Impossibly beautiful against the ethereal blue Sears background. A coltish little girl when he’d gone off to fight; a gorgeous dreamy teenager when he returned. Almost as old as Irma when he met her. For a moment he let himself get lost in that, the thought of his wife at eighteen, straddling a battered bicycle, her cheap dress hiked up over her knees, revealing swatches of snowy thigh. God, those thighs. Staring at him, haughty and horny and not knowing two words of English, as he walked toward her through the hot German summer with two melting ice creams in his fists.
He cleated the dressing and called home, riding that wave of nostalgia. Irma answered on the fourteenth ring, her tongue thickened by schnapps.
“Ja?”
“Say hello, Irma.”
“Hello, Irma.”
Truax looked at her photo on the desk.
“So how are things there?”
“Just peachy.”
She laughed bitterly. Peach brandy was her current daytime poison. The whisky sours were for night.
“What are you doing?”
“I was looking at the Vatergate.”
“The girls around?”
“Darryl’s out. Susan’s in her room.” There was a pause, a sip. “She wanted to go down to the jungle with the panther. I said no. So, she pouts.”
Truax said nothing.
“John, we really have to do something.”
“We’ve talked about this, Irma.”
She muttered something in German. Words he couldn’t understand.
“What?”
“Say good-bye, Irma,” she said in an accent that was pure American.
Her phone rattled like dice in a cup. He waited for the dial tone, then replaced his receiver. His wife was beginning to frighten him. There had always been anger in her and he liked that. Always been a sharp tongue and he’d liked that as well, especially when she was young and hungrier than any woman he’d ever known. He’d figured you couldn’t have one without the other; that anger was just passion that hadn’t ripened yet. But now there was no hunger, no passion. Just bitterness, an emotion primarily directed against their eldest daughter. Irma’s hostility toward Susan had shocked him upon his return. It was like walking into an ambush. The screaming fights and slammed doors; the piercing hateful looks and contemptuous names. There was no reason he could see for this war that had started to rage just as his own was ending. Irma saw evil in the girl’s soul; claimed she was lazy and conniving and promiscuous. Susan reacted in kind. The true source of his wife’s feelings hadn’t become clear until this winter, when Truax had stood in his garage on a bitterly cold evening and watched Susan bicycle into the driveway, her hair tucked into a woven hat she’d found among Irma’s old things. And it suddenly struck Truax that she was the picture of her mother on those frozen Sundays back in Frankfurt, when Irmagard Westphal and PFC John Truax would flee the city on the bike they borrowed from her postman father, looking for a place to make love. They would tumble into the first barn or bombed-out house they found, not caring how cold it was, generating so much heat between them that they forgot it was January in a country that seemed to have no warmth left. The moment he saw this he realized that Irma was standing next to him in the garage, watching their daughter as well. He could see from the twist of her eyes that she was thinking the same thing—that Susan had become the girl she once was. And Truax knew that she hated her for it.
So the girl had to be punished. At first the onslaught was limited to sarcasm and petty prohibitions, interwoven with hysterical eruptions of doting affection. And then, when none of these managed to sweep away the fact that Susan was young and beautiful, came the real attack. Irma’s strategy was clear—she would stop her daughter from being with the charming, good-looking kid who was proving to be her first true love, a boy from a different culture who had become the object of the same rebellious passion Irma had focused on her American twenty years earlier. If Irma couldn’t be young, then neither could Susan.
Only, there was nothing wrong with the boy. He was bright and clean and polite. And he was Earl Wooten’s son. With any of the others Truax could have gone along with Irma simply to have some peace. The Steves and Lances with their long hair and slouching rudeness, their mysteriously runny noses and vegetal whiffs. But Joel Wooten was no Steve or Lance. And it wasn’t just because his father was a big shot. Joel was everything you could ask for in a boy, especially these days. College-bound. From a good family.
But black. Deeply, radiantly, undeniably black. Not Harry Belafonte black. Not O.J. black. No, he was Jim Brown black. It wasn’t that Truax gave a damn—the thing about being in the service for so long was that you had to make up your mind about black guys. Either you had a major problem with them or none at all. Truax had gone the latter route. Sure, some of the bloods, with their head scarves and black power regalia, could be a royal pain in the ass, though truth be told they were no worse than the white draftees. Better—at least they could fight. Irma, on the other hand, had hit the roof the first time she saw Joel. Truax could feel her simmering rage as this amiable kid drank iced tea in their kitchen that day last October when Susan finally unveiled him. The strength of Irma’s disgust had taken Truax by surprise. She claimed the idea of Susan kissing him made her sick to her stomach. As if she and her friends hadn’t chased black GI’s. When the schnapps flowed it all came out. Talk about black cock and jungle bunnies for grandkids. Her rage at Susan’s youth compounded by the fact that the girl had chosen someone who was at once perfect and forbidden. Chosen, and then refused to apologize for it. Just as Irma did a generation earlier, spitting in the faces of her we-were-never-Nazi parents.
She could get nowhere with Susan, of course. Any common ground mother and daughter shared was too poisoned for even the most benign conversation about Joel. So she got to work on Truax instead. Telling him it was his duty as a husband and father to end this thing. Even though he liked Joel more every time he saw him, even though he knew that crossing Earl Wooten would be suicidal, Truax tried, simply to placate the raging woman who shared his bed. But it had been a miserable failure. Susan, usually so passive, suddenly had an answer for everything. She didn’t want to see anyone else—was he really suggesting she go back to the Lances and the Steves? Yes, it was true, she was serious about Joel, but weren’t they always telling her she wasn’t serious about anything?
“Why is it now I’ve found something I care about, you guys want to take it away?” she demanded, forty-nine-cent mascara streaking her cheeks.
Which, she accused, left only one reason—skin color. If Joel hadn’t been Earl Wooten’s son, Truax would have toughed that one out as well. If the kid were some transplanted Baltimore brother up in Renaissance Heights or even the son of one of the dozen good black families he’d sold houses to this past year, he would have just gone ahead and given him the boot, taken whatever heat needed to be taken for a prejudice he didn’t possess. If they wanted to call him a bigot, fine. He’d been called worse. But if he pulled a stunt like that with Wooten’s son then he’d be finished at EarthWorks. This was the city of the future and the future, Truax knew, did not involve giving polite, respectful, college-bound suitors the boot because they were black. Truax had thrown in his hat with Earth-Works. It was his outfit. If he screwed up here then finding a decent job elsewhere would be impossible.
In the end, having run out of arguments and fatherly persuasion
, he’d simply given up. Two weeks ago he’d told Irma that he saw nothing wrong with Susan and Joel dating. He explained that her reasons for disliking the boy were wrong and, even if he accepted them, his hands were tied. They would just have to live with it. Besides, Joel was off to college soon, while Susan still had her senior year left. Let them have their summer and then nature would take its course. He was the head of the family and this was the best decision for them all. Period.
Irma’s reaction surprised him. She seemed to take the news in stride, saying nothing for the first few days. But then, one night in bed, after he’d wrapped a bandage on his hand and was just about to fall asleep, she started.
“They’re fucking, you know.”
He raised himself to an elbow.
“What?”
“That buck nigger’s fucking your little girl.”
Irma’s knowledge of English improved markedly when the subject was hate.
“Don’t say that, Irma.”
“It’s true.”
“Of course it isn’t.”
“Up the ass. In her mouth. You know them. They mark their bitches with cum.”
“How can you say these things?”
“I can see it in her eyes. She has fucked eyes. You know? Like this.”
Irma screwed up her face into a grotesque pornographic sneer.
“I don’t believe you.”
“If they were, would you break them up?”
“I’m not going to talk about this.”
“Answer me, John. If you knew for a fact they were having the sex, would you put a stop to them? Or are you going to pimp for Earl Wooten?”
“Of course I’d stop it,” he said softly.
She said nothing more about it. Not that night, not the next day. Truax had begun to put the whole unhappy conversation down to just another drunken outburst when, three days later, Irma stopped him as he passed the laundry room on his way to the garage.
“John, come in here for a moment, please.”
It was that please that sent a chill through him. She stood next to a clothes hamper, holding a pair of Susan’s panties. She raised them up to him.
“Smell.”
“Irma …”
“Riech doch mal!”
He had just begun to shake his head when she reached up with sudden ferocity, clinching the back of his thick neck with her left hand and pushing the underpants against his nostrils. She caught him just as he inhaled. He pushed her violently away, but not before he realized that this was not piss or shit he was smelling. He’d whiffed enough feces in his day to know it when he smelled it. Rising from poorly built latrines, the K-ration gruel smeared on Stars and Stripes or fat plantain leaves. Leaking from the trousers of dead or wounded or just plain scared soldiers. The enemy’s sweet, rice-studded scat, smeared on the tip of a pungee stick. Buffalo shit and dog shit and rat shit and pig shit—Sergeant John Truax knew shit. This was different. A sweet organic rot, thick enough to chew. An odor he fleetingly associated with Tu Do whisky bars and the highland Quonset huts fronted by fast-talking teenage pimps. A heady cocktail of pussy, jism and sweat every soldier claimed to know as well as the stink from his own pits.
He pushed his wife’s hand away.
“Do not do that to me again.”
“You know, John.”
He shook his head. Not thinking about this. Not ever thinking about it.
He checked his watch. Almost three. Time to close up and head home. Nobody would be coming now. Nobody serious. Not when there were brand-new houses for sale in the outer villages. He’d pick up a six of Schaefer at Giant after stowing his stink in the Dumpster. The Orioles were at home for twi-night against the Angels. Palmer and McNally on the mound. There were going to be some 0-for-8’s in the visiting dugout.
But there was one more thing he had to do before calling it a day—phone Swope. He’d been putting it off long enough. He didn’t want to arrive at Saturday’s party without having made contact. That would look bad. Opportunistic. Besides, it had been almost two weeks since their meeting. The trail was growing cold. Other salesmen made follow-up calls when they were looking for new jobs. They were always yapping about how long you had to wait before making one. Evidently timing was everything. Truax knew nothing of this. In the army someone told you to do something and you did it. That was all the timing that mattered. And there were no follow-up calls.
He’d gone to Swope earlier in the month to ask for another posting at EarthWorks. Something with a steady salary. Something with a future. His army pension was shit and, besides, he was still far too young for retirement. Forty. Practically a kid. So after learning that they didn’t want him selling houses anymore, he’d gone down to see the personnel people at Newton Plaza. A pipe-chewing black guy had given him some tests and then sent him up for a short meeting with Swope. The lawyer had been skeptical. Not that Truax blamed him. It was hard to see how he fit into the Newton puzzle. Even manual work was out with his bum hand. Sitting there in Swope’s big glass office, Truax suddenly found himself envying the grunts he saw around town, the long-haired, trouble-eyed men huddling at lunch trucks or slinging drywall. Keeping to themselves. Working for that minimum wage. Lurping through the day like ghosts; swallowing whatever they had to so they could make it through the night. Never having to wear company blazers or make small talk. But he could never be like them. His family kept him in the game. There were expectations. A mortgage and a job. Saturday afternoon barbecues with men he didn’t understand, dinner parties where news of his service was met by embarrassed silence. And, most baffling of all, the need to raise two daughters over whom his authority had dissipated like fog from a lowland jungle.
At the end of their short interview Swope had spoken vaguely about keeping him in mind for something in security. Given his military background, that might be their best bet. And that was it. Truax had been shown the door. Leaving the building, he felt just as he had nine years earlier, when Irma had nagged him into asking his battalion commander for a promotion. She was sick of noncom life—the thousand slights visited upon her by officers’ wives, the limited PX privileges, the dingy clubs and month-end cash panics. The meeting had been as short as his session with Swope. The major, a West Point burner younger than Truax, had cut him off after just a few sentences.
“John, I appreciate what you’re saying,” he said, his oak leafs flashing. “But I got to tell you, as far as the army is concerned, you’re where you belong. You’re a sergeant, John. Always will be. And there’s all the honor a man could want in that.”
But he wasn’t even a sergeant now. Not anymore. He was a house peddler with no houses to sell. And there was no honor in that. He plucked Swope’s business card from the corner of his blotter and dialed the number. A grim-sounding woman answered after the first ring.
“May I speak to Mr. Swope, please?”
“Who’s calling?”
“John Truax.”
“And might I know what this references?”
“Our … we spoke a few weeks ago about a job.”
“Truax, is it?”
“That’s right.”
Silence ensued. His family stared at him from the edge of the desk. Waiting. It took the woman more than a minute to return.
“Mr. Swope asked me to tell you that he has nothing for you right now. But feel free to check back at a later date.”
“Yes,” Truax said. “All right. Um …”
But she’d hung up before he could remember to thank her.
5
Susan was beginning to wonder what her mother was doing in there. It had been over five minutes since she’d entered the changing room. Maybe she’d passed out. Susan savored the thought for a moment, Irmagard slumped in a corner of the booth. Legs splayed. Dress twisted. Though it was too early for that. She hadn’t been at the schnapps yet. Besides, with the buzz she was riding from that morning’s coffee and Virginia Slims, it would be a long time before she lost consciousness. Maybe she’d acci
dently locked herself in and was too embarrassed to call out. That would be cool. There was no way Susan was going to lift a finger to help her. She could stay in there forever. Well, until closing time, anyway.
Susan looked around Newton Casuals. What a dump. Rags for hags. Cripple shoes. Prom dresses. The old bats who worked here wore the clothes off the racks, believing that enhanced the appeal. Susan shuddered at the thought of getting old. Chicken neck and varicose veins. Hair stiffening into a Brillo helmet. Tits down to there. But the worst thing was that your taste buds seemed to die on the vine. Like that lady by the door in the peach concoction. Jesus. She looked like a gallon of melted sherbet.
Susan caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored alcove next to the changing rooms. It would be a long time before she got old. There were three views on offer, two of which, she had to admit, looked pretty decent. Straight on and the right profile. Her legs curving snugly up under her butt. Hair flying out just a bit. Nose so small you could hardly see it. It was the left profile that was the nightmare. She looked as bad as her sister from that side, her beak the size of Mount Rushmore, about ten chins bagging up her neck. She hated her left side. Keeping Joel from seeing it was a number-one priority. Especially since he was right-handed and liked to have her on that side. But eventually she’d trained him to hold her with his left arm when they walked. That was one of the best things about Joel. It might take him a while to figure out what she wanted, though once he did, he was only too happy to oblige.
Like getting him to slow down when they balled. Not that she didn’t like him going wild above her every now and then. Those long muscles dancing beneath her palms. But that was only for once in a while. It was better to have him breaking like waves into her. One after the other. A whole ocean’s worth. She closed her eyes and started thinking about that. It’s what they should have been doing right now at April’s place down in D.C. If only her mother wasn’t such a bitch.
The New City Page 8