Let me warn you, however, that her sex life with Spider—no mystery to any friend—was sordid, even for us. Somewhere along the way, Nissen had hurt his back and now had a serious slipped disc. Every few months he would have to take to the floor for a couple of weeks, do his writing there, his eating, and his fornicating. I think the worse his back began to treat him, the more he went at it, which had to make his spine worse. First he ground the meat and then the bones, and finally the tripe and offal of their attraction for each other as if during the length of this incarceration on the floor—speak of flattening time!—he had to keep plucking the one banjo string left to him until either his back would break, his mind would go screaming into outer space or she would slit her wrists. He used to make video tapes of them fornicating. Maybe as many as a dozen of us had been shown them. She would sit among us like a nun, silent, while he demonstrated his slipped-disc techniques. They consisted mainly of Spider on his back while she (and he was proud of her bone-slender body when it undulated on him) did all sorts of turns. They usually ended with her mouth clamped on his joystick and the crimp in his back vibrating like a dog’s tail as he gave it all to the video camera, coming at last in a flash, one spasm, no more, last thread of the last visible semen in a man who for want of other diversion had been screwing all day. It was awful to watch. He used to urinate on her, there also for us to see on the TV screen. He had grown a wispy light-brown D’Artagnan mustache which he would tweak like a villain while he hosed her down. You may ask why I watched, and I can tell you: I knew the great vaults of heaven were for the angels, but there were other conduits in the sky, and underground railways for the demons, and I used to feel as if Nissen’s house (although the owner’s name was hers, White, Beth Dietrich White) was one more station on the line. So I stayed to watch, not knowing if I was an acolyte or a spy, until at last his back, thank God, got a little better over the months, and he eased off from all that insane crossed-wires short-circuit fucking. Of course, in compensation, he now wrote long detailed descriptions of how he got it on with Beth, and he would lay this on you and you would read it and discuss the merits. It was the ultimate literary workshop.
I could have endured him, this Spider, this monster, who shared with me the feat of climbing seven eighths of the way up the stone phallus of the highest monument between here and Washington, D.C., if only he had believed in God, or the Devil, or both. If he had been a soul in torment, or wished to murder the Lord, or had kissed the Devil beneath his tail and was now a slave, I could have put up with heresy, fallacy, perjury, antinomianism, Arianism, emanatism, Gnosticism, Manicheanism, even Monophysitism or Catharism, but not this damn atheist who believed in spirits that came in electronic streams. I think his theological view came to this: there might have been a god once, but now, for whatever reason, It was gone, and had left us a cosmic warehouse where we could rattle around and poke our fingers into the goods, tap into all the systems. Yes, he was in the vanguard of the cerebrates.
On this day, as I came in, their living room was dark, the shades were drawn. Spider and two other men, whose faces at first I could not see, were watching the Patriots try to score from the ten-yard line. It had to be Sunday, a sign of how far I was removed from all about me. I had not even known. On any other Sunday in November I would have made my bets after much consideration and would have been ensconced here from the kickoff since, I confess, that no matter how I disliked Nissen, and did not take to watching TV for hours inasmuch as it leached me out as thoroughly as a dose of salts, still, if you were going to, there was no place for watching television like Nissen’s small parlor. The odor of stale socks and old spills of beer blended with the subtle scents of video equipment—scorched wires, plastic boxes. I could feel as if I were in a cave out there on the edge of the future civilization—out with the new cavemen of the cerebrates, anticipating the millennia to come. If Sunday afternoons were spent in the deep if much depressed peace of dissipating time, still the seasons could go by and I would know a dull happiness watching the Patriots, the Celtics, the Bruins and then, in April, the Red Sox. By May, the atmosphere changed. Our winter was over, the summer was in our minds, and Nissen’s living room would no longer seem like a cave so much as an unaired den. Now, however, we were at the beginning of hibernation. If this had not been so unusual an autumn for me, I might have enjoyed (in a sort of gloom) bringing a six-pack or quart of bourbon as my contribution to the cave and would have flopped without another thought on one of his two couches or three broken-down stuffed chairs (all of this crammed into a living room not twelve by sixteen!) stretched out my brogans on his rug to make myself one with all the colors in the room—the walls, carpet and furniture having by now faded, darkened, been bleached by spills and turned by stains into the ubiquitous colorless color of them all which was neither ash-gray nor washed-out purple nor dulled-down green nor a wan brown, but the mixture of them all. Who cared about the color? The TV screen was our altar of light, and all of us watched it with an occasional grunt or sip of our beer.
I cannot tell you how soothing this felt to me now. To someone living like myself these days, it was honest relief to sit among Spider’s guests, two dudes I could do without on better occasions, but today they were company. One was Pete the Polack, our bookie, who had a last name nobody including himself would pronounce twice in the exact same way (Peter Petrarciewisz may be the spelling) and I disliked him for being an unfair son of a bitch full of greed since he put a vigorish of 20 percent on all losing bets instead of the 10 percent you could get from the Boston books (“Make a phone call to Boston,” he would say, knowing his clients could get no credit there) and besides, he shifted the line against you if he had a clue which way you’d bet, a big surly kid with a sour face, an all-purpose ethnic: you would have taken him for Italian, Irish, Polish, Hungarian, German or Ukrainian if that was what you were told. He disliked me as well. I was one of the few who could get credit in Boston.
That Pete the Polack was here today could only mean Nissen had bet a lot on the Patriots. It was disquieting. Nissen might be unsentimental enough to piss on his slave woman, but he’d lick the shoelaces of any athlete godlike enough to play for the Pats. His paraplegic detective might be able to penetrate CIA computers and roll up friend or foe with equal panache, but Nissen was so metaphysical about his allegiance that Pete could make the team a six-point favorite on a day when I only had to give three in Boston. How many times the Spider had been trapped in the middle! I assumed the bet today was so large that Pete was here to collect if he won, and after five minutes knew I was right; the Spider soon began to shout at the set. Before long I was convinced he must have bet at least the value of his motorcycle on the game, and Pete was here to wheel it away if Nissen lost.
It is also worth stating about Pete that he was perfectly capable of letting Spider run up his losses in return for promises—“Carry me another week and I’ll take you out to where Madden keeps his product.” The stash had to be worth a couple of thousand dollars and Nissen knew it: he would not be above offering it as collateral.
The other man in the room I hardly knew. You would have cast him for a greaser. He had tattoos of eagles and mermaids all over his arms, and straight black hair, a low brow, a dented nose, a mustache and a couple of missing teeth. Everybody called him Stoodie because he used, when an adolescent, to steal nothing but Studebakers all up and down the Cape. That was the legend, and it was untrue—he stole all kinds of cars—but they called him Stoodie because it was a Studebaker he had been busted on. Now he collected on losing bets for Pete, and, as I had heard, was a machinist and metalworker (all learned in the pen at Walpole) good enough to change the serial numbers on the engine blocks of cars other people had stolen. However, he, I assumed, would not know of my small part of the Truro woods.
I mention this because like John Foster Dulles, who—whatever his sins—gave us the phrase, I was going through an agonizing reappraisal. I liked to look upon myself as a writer searching for a somewhat
larger view of man. It did not please me to reduce everyone I encountered to the ranks of those who knew and those who did not know where Timothy Madden might keep his stash.
Now, however, my mind was nothing but this list. Nissen knew, and by extension, Beth knew. Patty knew. Mr. Black knew. For all I knew, I had taken Jessica and Mr. Pangborn there. Regency seemed to have a clear notion. I could think of others. I could even add my father. He had made unsuccessful attempts over the years to cut out drinking by the substitution of marijuana. Once, over a year ago, on the last visit to Patty and me, I had taken him out to my clearing and tried to get him interested in the crop. I figured if he saw the plants, he might respect them as much as hops. So, yes, add my father to the list.
But that was like urinating on Beth. Abruptly, I recognized the monstrousness of my new mental preoccupation. Everybody came out as items on a computer list. Was I becoming a cerebrate? So much had this activity taken over my head that I felt like a computer trembling on its foundations. I kept kicking my father’s name on and off the list. Give me, in preference, a storm at sea.
I watched the football game for as long as I could. At last, on a time-out in the beginning of the second quarter, Nissen went to the refrigerator for beers. I followed.
There was only one way to treat him and that was with no ceremony. Since he could show his wife and himself in a confetti of electronic dots, or ask you in the middle of biting a sandwich if you were constipated, I had no compunctions about injuring him with a quick question. Therefore I said, “Spider, remember the séance?”
“You forget it, man,” he said. “I can’t.”
“It was weird.”
“It was pure horrendous.” He sloshed his beer around a missing molar in his mouth, gulped the fluid and added, “You and your wife can go for that shit. I won’t. It’s too disruptive.”
“What did you see?”
“Same thing your wife saw.”
“Well, I’m asking you.”
“Hey, don’t lay it on me. Everything’s all right, right?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“Sure,” he said.
“So why don’t you tell me?”
“I don’t want to get into that place again.”
“Listen,” I said, “you got to keep yourself pure today. You have a big bet.”
“So?”
“I’m asking a favor. Keep yourself pure with your buddies. Your team will cover the bet.”
“Don’t give me that mystical sauce. It went out with LSD. I don’t have to fucking keep myself pure by telling you what you want to hear. That’s desperate betting, man, that’s degenerate. I pick the Patriots on their merits.”
“You need my help today,” I said, looking into his eyes as if I wouldn’t relent.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “How many hundred thousand people betting on this game, two million probably, and I got to get myself pure with you—that puts the result where I want it? Madden, every one of you potheads is tipped. Cut yourself a little coke.” He slammed the refrigerator door. He was ready to go back to the game.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “You and me can help them cover if I am able to put my mind right alongside of yours.”
“I get no input whatsoever from you.”
“Well,” I said, “I hate to bring it up. But you and me have this one thing in common that two million other bettors don’t have.”
“All right.”
“We’ve been one special place together.”
As I said this, the most peculiar phenomenon occurred. I had never told it to anyone, not even quite to myself, but in that hour I was trapped beneath the overhang, the most terrible odor oozed out to me from—I do not know if it was the rocks or my own sweat—but a dreadful odor of corruption came up nonetheless, the way perhaps a battlefield of many dead would smell, or was it—and this was my fear—the nearness of the Devil waiting to receive me? It was, in all events, so terrible a smell that once I was down on the ground it remained the worst fear in days to come until I told myself, and for all I knew, this is true also, that I was sniffing no more than some old guano of the gulls magnified by my own terror into the stench of a satanic beast. But now, even as I said what should have remained unsaid, “We’ve been one special place together,” so did a whiff of that incredible odor come off of Nissen, and I think we both knew that the experience had been equal for both of us.
“What did you see,” I asked again, “at the séance?”
I could feel how he was on the edge of telling me, and had the good sense not to push further. I could feel the truth coming forth even as his tongue picked at his lips.
During the séance we had been six of us about a round oak table, our hands flattened out on the surface, our right thumb touching our left thumb, and the little finger of each hand in contact with the little finger of each person to left or right. We were trying to get the table to tap. Let me not even speak now of our purpose, but in that darkened room by the back shore (for we were all at a rich acquaintance’s home in Truro and the ocean waves were tolling on the back shore not two hundred yards away) it seemed to me that with each question asked, the table was actually coming closer to some small quiver when, right then, our communal senses were shattered by Nissen’s fearful scream. Having brought this much back for myself, I must have returned the memory to him as well, for now he said, “I saw her dead. I saw your wife dead and with her head cut off. The next fucking moment, she saw it too. We were looking at it together.”
In this instant the smell that came off him was overpowering, and I could feel a reverberation of my fear beneath the overhang. So I knew that no matter how I might like to banish the impulse, I had no choice: I must go back to the tree on the sandy ridge and discover whose head was in the burrow below.
Yet in this moment a look of incredible spite came into Nissen’s face and he reached over and squeezed my right arm beneath the shoulder with fingers that dug in like five spikes.
As I winced he laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “you got a tattoo. Harpo told the truth.”
“How does Harpo know?”
“How does he know? Man, you are so fucking spaced out that you need your wife. She better come back.” He snorted as if some grains of coke were leaking out of his nose. “Hey,” he said, “yeah,” he said, “I’m pure. Now, you get yourself pure.”
“How does Harpo know?” I repeated. Harpo was a friend of Nissen’s and raced motorcycles with him.
“Well, mate,” said Spider, “he gave you the fucking tattoo.”
Sven “Harpo” Veriakis. He was a short blond Greek-Norwegian on his father’s side, Portuguese by his mother, and built like a fireplug. He had been the third shortest man ever to play in the NFL (even if he only lasted for a season). Now, Harpo had moved to Wellfleet, and one didn’t see him often, but he had conducted our séance, that I recalled. “What did he say?” I asked.
“Who knows,” said Nissen. “I never can figure out what he’s saying. He’s a space cadet like you.”
Cries came out of the living room then, and imprecations. The Patriots had just scored again. Spider whooped and led me back.
In the intermission at half time, Stoodie began to talk. I had never heard him say as much before.
“I like to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds in the street,” he said to Beth. “There’s a lot of significance then. You must provide yourself with the proper framing of mind, and that makes it all pregnant with space. Pregnant with grace,” he amended, and nodded, and nipped on his beer. I was remembering something I had heard about Stoodie. He used to tie his wife by her ankles to hooks he had put in a ceiling beam. Then he would caress her. In his fashion.
“I admire the natural situation of the Cape,” he now said to Beth. “I will take an Indian summer over all. Strolling among our dunes, I have had the privilege of seeing another someone, a male or female person on another dune as much as half a mile away, but the glow of the sun is on them. They are
feeling just as full of love for all this golden goodness as we are in our own feelings. That’s God’s blessing right there. No escaping it. Beauty inexorable.” He took a breath. “I mean beauty exalted.”
It was here I made the decision to add Stoodie to my list.
FOUR
Idid not learn that afternoon who won the game, for I left Nissen’s house at half-time (the Patriots were ahead) and drove the fifteen miles to Wellfleet to see Harpo, who lived in a loft over a dry-goods store on one of the off-roads. I say “off-road,” but then, no street in Wellfleet ever seemed to bear relation to any other, as if on founding day some two hundred and more years ago five sailors, each swigging his own keg of rum, had meandered out from the bay shore along the streams and around the bogs, and people followed to mark each road by the vagaries of each sailor’s promenade. As a result, no one I knew in Provincetown could ever find anyone in Wellfleet, and indeed we did not often try. Wellfleet was by now a proper town, and none of us ever saw a Yankee there who did not have a nose long enough to serve as a rifle barrel siting you in his mean nostrils’ cross hairs. Some of us, therefore, used to ask Harpo how he could ever have left Provincetown for Wellfleet and he replied, “I didn’t like the warp. The warp was getting to me. I had to move.”
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