Pricksongs & Descants

by Robert Coover

  ○ ○ ○

  4

  In a Train Station

  At 9:27 Alfred purchases a ticket from the Stationmaster for the 10:18 Express Train to Winchester.

  Here’s Alfred: squat, work-stooped, thick white moustache on his upper lip, pale blue eyes, white hair nearly gone on top, face and neck tanned and leathery, appears to be about fifty-two. He wears an unfashionable gray suit, loose on him and stained from the knees down, a blue checked shirt buttoned at the neck without tie, bulky thick-soled brown shoes caked with field mud. In his left hand (gold ring on it) he carries his squarish soft-billed cap, while he conducts the ticket transaction with his right. He stuffs the ticket into his coat pocket, then picks up the small bag at his feet.

  The 10:18 Express Train to Winchester: it is not now in the station, and little need be said about it. It is mainly for passengers and happens to be electric. It leaves always at 10:18 from Track 2.

  Now, assuming both Alfred and the Express Train to be real (to say nothing of the contract of the ticket), it will perhaps seem strange to some that when the train departs for Winchester exactly fifty-one minutes after Alfred buys his ticket—that is to say, on time—Alfred is not on it.

  But to return...

  After obtaining his ticket, pocketing it with that old man’s whole-hand-into-the-pocket gesture, and picking up the small bag, Alfred shuffles heavily a few feet from the ticket window to a bench which faces the gate to Track 2 and the clock over it. The station is empty except for Alfred and the Stationmaster. A couple ceiling lamps glow dully. A bare bulb umbrella’d by a green metal shade brightens harshly the Stationmaster’s small office. The station smells of musty wood.

  Alfred puts his bag on the bench and sits down beside it. As he sits, he sighs, as though the mere act of sitting is an awful strain on him. Once seated, he sighs again and gazes straight ahead of him at the Track 2 gate, his cap in his lap.

  Behind him, the Stationmaster writes something in a large elongated ledger, and as he does so, glances up at the clock over the Track 2 gate. 9:29. “Nice evenin’,” he says.

  “Yep, nice enough at that,” says Alfred. “May rain tomorra.”

  “Low pressure area movin’ in, I hear tell.”

  “Yep, Good for the crops, though,” says Alfred.

  “Been doin’ much fishin’ lately?”

  “Nope, I ain’t. Been too blamed hot for fishin’.”

  “What d’ye catch mostly?”

  “Oh, smallmouth. Bluegills.” All the while, Alfred continues to stare at the gate to Track 2, sitting slumped and expressionless, his cap in his lap.

  “Oh, that so? Fish for bluegill, do ye?”

  “Yep,” says Alfred. “They’re small, but they make good eatin’.”

  “Yep, so they do. Well. And how’s the family ?”

  “Cain’t complain. Wife’s been a bit poorly, but she’s gittin’ on better, now the summer’s come on.”

  “Oh? Ain’t been nothin’ serious, I hope.”

  “Nope,” says Alfred. “Jist female troubles.”

  “Them’s pretty fine lookin’ vittles,” the Stationmaster continues, his voice pitched slightly louder. “Your wife put ‘em up for ye?”

  Alfred fumbles nervously in his bag, produces a greasy brown paper sack. From it, he now draws an apple, an egg, a jackknife, and a small chicken leg wrapped in wax paper. He puts the apple, the knife, and the egg in his upturned cap, drops the paper sack beside the bag, and unwraps the chicken. It has already been partly eaten. His hands are trembling. “Yep,” he says faintly. “She’s one good cook.” He hesitates, then bites resolutely into the chicken.

  “That’s a lucky man who’s got him a good woman and good food and good work,” the Stationmaster says.

  Alfred tears off a bite of chicken leg and chews it slowly, absently. So far, he has not veered his gaze from the gate to Track 2. The clock above it reads 9:33. He stops chewing, opens his mouth as though to speak, but does not.

  The Stationmaster looks up at him through the ticket window. After a moment, he says: “And a…”

  “And a...” says Alfred, his mouth still full of half-chewed chicken leg. But his eyes are puzzled and he does not continue.

  “And a good...”

  “And a good wife!” cries Alfred. Both men laugh. Alfred re turns to his chewing. “Well, it looks like the old 10:18 will be in on time tonight,” says the Stationmaster, returning to his ledger.

  “Good,” replies Alfred. “Good. Don’t wanna git home late. Not on a Sattiday night.” He wraps the leg of chicken in the wrinkled wax paper, returns it to the paper sack, along with the apple and the egg. The apple has a few bites taken from it and the cavities have turned brown. It has been a long time since the apple has been tried. The egg is still whole. He reopens the canvas bag on the bench beside him, peers inside, stuffs the paper sack back into it, closes the bag. He sighs. Then he notices the jacknife still in the cap in his lap. He stares sullenly at it. Then, suddenly, as though terrified, he grabs up the knife, reopens the bag, thrusts the knife inside, snaps the bag shut. Visibly shaken, he sits back and, staring once more at the Track 2 gate, continues to chew mechanically on his unswallowed bite of chicken leg.

  Both men are silent for a while. The Stationmaster, finally, closes his ledger, squints up at the clock. 9:42. “How’s the tomaters doin’ this year?” he asks.

  “Aw, well as kin be expected. Need a—look!” Alfred spins suddenly around to confront the Stationmaster, his pale blue eyes damp as though with tears. “Don’t ye think this time I could—?”

  “Need a little…,” intones the Stationmaster softly, firmly.

  Alfred sighs, turns back toward the gate, works his jaws over the chicken. “Need a little rain,” he says glumly. “Whole area could use some rain,” responds the Stationmaster. Just then, at 9:44, the door of the station bangs open and a man stumbles in. He is tall and thin with uncombed dark hair, a couple days’ growth of beard. Khaki pants, gray undershirt, tennis shoes, the laces broken and reknotted. He introduces with him a large odor of stale alcohol, and his eyes, though blue and as if thoughtful, focus on no fixed thing. He lurches for a bench, misses, smashes up against a wall. Leaning there, he breathes deeply, his eyes rolling back.

  Alfred, all the while, is watching him. His face has blanched, his hands quaver. The Stationmaster is watching Alfred.

  “Belovéd!” cries the intruder, grinning foolishly, heaving himself away from the wall. He weaves. “The su’jeck f’my dishcoursh is...” He slams back against the wall again, gasping brokenly. Alfred watches, paralyzed. “The su’jeck ... the su’jeck... aw, fuck it!” and the man careens away from the wall, collapses over the back of the bench nearest him.

  Alfred glances anxiously at the Stationmaster, who is still observing him calmly, back at the tall man folded over the bench, up at the clock (9:54), back at the man.

  The stranger slowly lifts his head, braces himself half-erect with his hands against the bench, looks toward Alfred, but blearily, without focus. “Our father,” he cries out, then sucks the spittle off his lips and swallows it, “our father whish art ‘n heaven... ‘n heaven... is eating hish own goddamn chil’ren!” And, staring down appalled at the bench under him, the man vomits all over it, rolls off to the floor, lies there with his hands over his face.

  Alfred, chewing frantically, fumbles with the bag, looks up at the clock. 10:01.

  The man on the floor shudders, then with great effort pulls himself to his feet. His eyes cross and a string of vomit drips from his mouth. He wipes his mouth, then drops his hands limply to his sides. He twitches as though with unresolved retchings. His face is white. The stubble on his chin glistens. He takes an uncertain step toward Alfred, pauses, takes another. Alfred unsnaps the Hag. “So help me!” cries the tall man, focusing that instant on Alfred—then he reels, his eyes rolling back, and topples over toward Alfred. Alfred drops the bag, reaches out, catches the man in his fall, eases him to his back on the floo
r. In the excitement, he has unwittingly swallowed the bite of chickenleg. He looks guiltily at his own hands, then down at his feet. His lower lip is trembling.

  “Alfred!” scolds the Stationmaster. “Alfred! Shame, shame!”

  There are tears in Alfred’s eyes. He turns his head upward toward the clock, brushes the tears aside. 10:13. He utters a short pained cry, grabs up the canvas bag, scratches desperately through it. He tears out the paper sack, pokes inside it, pitches it away. Again he searches through the canvas bag, draws out the jackknife, throws the bag away, crouches over the fallen man. 10:14.

  “Well?” demands the Stationmastcr harshly. “Well, Alfred?”

  Alfred squeezes shut his eyes, takes a long desperate breath. Opening his eyes again, he drops quickly down over the man on the floor. He clicks open the knife, grasps the fallen man’s hair. The man is sleeping fitfully. Under his white moustache, Alfred’s lips arc parted, his teeth clenched. A faint whining animal complaint escapes between them. As though struggling against an unseen hand, he presses the knifeblade downward, touches it finally to the man’s throat, but, with a short anguished cry, withdraws it.

  “It is 10:16, Alfred,” announces the Stationmaster quietly. Outside, one can indeed hear the 10:18 Express Train to Winchester arriving.

  The knife drops from Alfred’s hand. He is crying. He presses his hands to his face. The Stationmaster emerges from his office, kneels down beside Alfred, picks up the knife. “Now, watch, Alfred,” he says. “Watch!”

  Alfred peeks through his hands, weeping, whimpering, as the Stationmaster severs the tall stranger’s head with three quick strokes. The eyes on the head pop open suddenly and the body jerks spasmodically for a moment. Blood gurgles out of the man’s neck, staining Alfred’s trousers where he kneels on the floor. Alfred continues to weep beside the long body, which twitches still with small private reflexes of its own, as the Stationmaster carries the head into his office. He returns, lifts the body up on his shoulders, and carries it out the door. The carcass can be heard tumbling down steps.

  When the Stationmaster returns, Alfred is still kneeling on the floor, weeping. The clock above the gate to Track i says 10:18, and one can hear a train outside sound its whistle, then pull away. The Stationmaster looks down at Alfred, sighs shortly, shakes his head, then walks over toward the Track 2 gate. There is a chair there, which the Stationmaster now slides under the clock. He stands on the chair, opens the glass that protects the clock dial, moves the hands around until they read 9:26. He steps down from the chair, slides it back to its former position, returns to his office. Alfred studies the clock, shudders, wearily gathers up his scattered possessions and places them once again in the canvas bag. The Stationmaster reopens the ledger. Alfred walks up to the ticket window, his cap in his hand.

  ○ ○ ○

  5

  Klee Dead

  Klee, Wilbur Klee, dies. Is dead, rather. I know I know: too soon. It should come, after a package of hopefully ingenious preparations, at the end: and thus, gentle lector, Wilbur Klee is gathered to his fathers. But what’s to be done? He’s already gone. The city clerk has, with customary dispatch, shifted his file, just before lunch in fact, and the city clerk, public toady that he is, is not one to suffer any meddler’s disturbance of things as they are and—as he would put in—must be. Not even for a bribe, certainly not for any kind of bribe that I could offer, not even for tickets to the circus. The city clerk, in short, is a surly sonuvabitch, quite beyond the touch of human sops; and so Klee is, irretrievably, dead.

  In some languages, it is possible to say: to die oneself, as in: I die myself, you will die yourself, he would have died himself, and so on, cunningly planting the idea that one’s own hand was perhaps involved. (Which, if I may say so in passing, would seem to have been the case with Wilbur Klee.) But unluckily I don’t know any of these other languages—God knows I wouldn’t be bludgeoning you with my insufferable English if I did—and even if I did know them it would be inconceivable I should know them well, conjugations above all, in which case my circumlocutions would only make you laugh and forget that the point of the matter is that Klee is dead and he quite lively did it himself, to hell with friends, family, lovers, employers, gods, countries, and anyone else who had designs on him. Providing he was in fact encumbered with any of these, and who on this earth can doubt that he was?

  Yet, contrarily, old Millicent Gee is not dead, either by her own hand or any other. Perhaps you don’t know Millicent Gee...? Well, I can’t blame you for that. She lives, in a manner of speaking, on State Street between Twelfth and Fourteenth Avenues, the absence of a Thirteenth Avenue being a preclusion, not an oversight, of our City Fathers who had every reason to expect a little bad luck, lives there in a multistory unrenovatcd brownstone. Millie, a believable if somewhat scabby old lady, well into her dotage, keeps house alone in the basement, along with her old ram whom she tactlessly calls Lothario, her stagnant aquariums, and her vast—and for our purposes, nameless—assemblage of interfiliated cats, who provide Millie a little vicarious pleasure to lighten the daily press of care: little fuckers! Millie has been heard (her windows are always open, winter and summer, little square windows down at ground level, yet, from the inside, above Millie’s reach, which helps account for the fact she has never closed them—what, in this makeshift world, is not hopelessly flawed?) to cackle from time to time, and one must assume she is referring to the cats. The fish have been dead for some time.

  What Millie keeps on the several floors aboveground can only be guessed, and for my part, it’s her own business. Rumors are rife, but not to be trusted. Above all: not to be encouraged. The Constitution says enough about the promulgation of rumors, no need for lectures here. Thank God for the Constitution, Whatever she keeps up there, though, one thing is certain: it is not likely to be or to have been human. Millie wouldn’t stand for it. And perhaps there is nothing up there at all. To be sure, we seem impulsively driven to load up empty spaces, to plump some goddamn thing, any object, real, imagined, or otherwise, where now there might happily be nothing, a peaceful unsullied and unpeopled emptiness, and maybe that’s what she hides up there, who knows?

  But, not to be taken in by our own biases, this much needs to be said: Millie, all efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, is not entirely divorced from humankind, and there is reason therefore to doubt that she has let all that upper space go for nothing. Her son—God knows how she came by him—has no part to play in her life, apparently his own choice. He no longer lives with old Millie, but resides elsewhere in an efficiency apartment. He passes by here occasionally to attend the seasonal devotions, in which he participates in all good humor and kindness, finely done up in his clover-green suit and stovepipe hat with its ostrich feather, which, I’m told on good authority, has something to do with his profession and is not, therefore, to be laughed at. There is no point saying much more about him, even were I capable of it, he never visits his mother, smiles at the idea of duty or oblations, and perhaps is not really her son at all, merely the victim of well-intentioned but wrongheaded gossip. To tell the truth, I wish I hadn’t brought him up in the first place. Please forget I mentioned him, if you can. What’s more, I’m not entirely sure why I told you about Millie. Certainly, she can have nothing to do with Wilbur Klee. In fact, I smile to think of it, that unconscious old nanny. Perhaps it was merely to demonstrate, before facing up to Klee, that I could tell a story without bringing the hero to some lurid sensational end, and who but Millie could that hero be? In any case, whatever it was led me this way, let me say in conclusion: God preserve old Millicent Gee! it’s the least I can do.