Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  –Blind Boy Fuller?

  He nods.

  –I’d like to go up there someday and see the place.

  I don’t know if George A. ever went. I did, though. One day a month or two after the accident, on the way to Henderson I detoured into Durham following a set of Internet directions and found my way to Beamon Street, where Allen lived with his wife, Cora Mae, and later looked for Grove Hill Cemetery, getting progressively more lost as I went deeper and deeper into Durham. In the place where Blind Boy Fuller aka Fulton Allen is supposed to lie, I found a vacant grassy lot, unmarked, and at the edge of it, a playground with children laughing on a swing set.

  George A. re-sleeves the album now and turns off the stereo, and when he looks at me I can tell he’s thinking the same thing I am.

  –So, man, what now? I say. Avalon awaits. You want to go?

  –Not really.

  –Me neither.

  He smiles and I smile back.

  –Let’s do it then.

  –Let’s go.

  So he slips off his khakis and the filthy T and dons the Birdwell jams he’s wearing in the beach photo I later hand him in Vermont the night before we leave there. I had a pair myself, but their color has long since drifted through the sieve. George A.’s, though, are still right here: dark green with a double white stripe down the right side. They cover just the top third of his thigh and look like shrink-wrap applied with heat, as dated now as hot pants or the shorties we high school b-ball players wore back in the day.

  So down to Avalon we go, a four-mile out and back, through troves of shells that ring like easy money when the waves sheet through them over our bare feet. My practice for this month has been to pace him to the pier and halfway back, and then I fly, leaving him to follow my footprints as the waves erase them. Today, though, in the final mile, when I start to pull away, he picks up his pace. I glance over—Feeling feisty, are we?—and pick it up again; again, he matches me. Far too early, with a half mile left, I kick it into a full sprint. I can see George A.’s determination. He’s suffering now, but he keeps up. It’s getting serious. I’m suffering, too, and when I push, I find that I don’t have another gear. In the last hundred yards, he walks away, ending fifteen yards beyond me. I’ve given it my all, and George A.’s flat-out beaten me. We stand there panting in the wash, hands on knees, not speaking, as waves sheet in around us. When I look up, trying not to let my anger show, I find him trying not to grin at me.

  –Asshole! I say.

  I shoot him a bird, and George A. laughs and shoots one back at me.

  –Come on, he says, and we both dive into the ocean.

  By the time we emerge, Margaret and Jack are setting up their chairs and staking the umbrella.

  –Cheese, I say to George A., borrowing the camera.

  So, you see, he’s happy when I snap him and sticking it to the cameraman a little. I can take it, though. The truth is, when it comes to us, I want to crush him in the dust, but when it comes to anybody else, to the whole outside, other world, I want George A. to win. I want that for us both. And on this day I still feel no less sure of him than of myself.

  In the photo you can tell the boy’s an athlete of some kind. Six-foot-seven and 210 or 215, he’s lean-waisted, broad across the shoulders and the chest, more man than boy, though there’s still a spindly coltish something in his legs that marks him at the tremble point. From hoisting those heavy cans all summer, he has thick, good arms as “good” was then, in a more casual time, and I recall him sneaking discreet squeezes of his biceps when he thought no one was looking, or making a fist to see the vein stand in his forearm, a vanity I knew to watch for because I did the same thing. George A.’s proud of the body he’s achieved. In the way his arms fall at his sides, there’s a tad of the gunslinger pose. He’s like someone with a new suit he paid a lot of money for and doesn’t want to wrinkle in the wearing, or a cherry car he parks at the far edge of the lot to ward off dings.

  I thought my brother was the best-looking boy I ever knew, among the best-looking I ever saw. As I study this old photo, though, I think perhaps it isn’t Gable that I’m searching for, but those clean-cut all-American boys on lawns and beaches, posing for the camera with their girls and paste-waxed cars, before they went away to World War II. George A.’s smile extends a friendly confidence like theirs, but a little further back, I see something that’s prepared for disappointment, and it strikes me that George A., too, this day in 1975, is going off to war, an inward war no less real. It will last twenty-five long years and the rest of his short life, and George A. won’t return from it. This picture is the last glimpse I’ll ever have of him, which I guess is why I kept it and put it out in every place I ever lived in. Here’s looking at you, DP, he’s saying with that grin and little squint. This one’s for you. My reply in kind: Enjoy it while it lasts . . . Oh, do.

  Click, and over thirty years go by. Though George A.’s image in the foreground remains clear, time has faded the Atlantic at his back to a dull spectral pinkish bronze. The background looks less washed out than dematerialized or dematerializing, which makes it seem as if George A. is standing on the border of a world that isn’t this world anymore, and the moment after this he’ll have to raise his hand and go, and there’s a part of me that wants to reach out and hold him by main force the way our mother did for years, and is it love; I loved him, but there’s that other part, you see, that wished to beat him and was angry at the genius flank maneuver by which he threw the race and won by losing, and then he came to help me in Vermont and died and, see, I won by George A.’s dying.

  4

  So George A. returns to Woodberry, to concussion drills and double sessions in the August heat, I to Carolina, where I train to be a Poet, a not entirely literary undertaking. Early this semester, I dream of one of the black-water sloughs that line the highway in eastern North Carolina, the roads we always take to reach Four Roses in the summer. Police cruisers with flashing lights are parked helter-skelter on the bank as a wrecker winches a submerged car from the water. In the backseat is a body whose condition suggests the accident’s an old one. There with the law enforcement team, I watch the operation with a troubled feeling. I know something about this crime or am implicated in some fashion, only I don’t know how and don’t want to look into it too closely. As I wake, the dream feels as real as a recovered memory. I begin to write a poem I’ll work on for months and can never seem to finish.

  Two years ago, one of my professors gave me Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and Jung’s autobiography has become a kind of bible for me in this era, particularly his account of the events of 1912, after he broke with Freud and had a brush with what was probably psychosis.

  I lived as if under constant inner pressure. At times this became so strong that I suspected there was some psychic disturbance in myself . . . I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down upon me . . . I said to myself, “Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me.” Thus I consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the unconscious.

  And when the stone blocks came tumbling, what Jung’s unconscious led him to do was to start playing. On the lakeshore near his home in Küsnacht, he built a toy city out of stones and when he finished and placed the altar in the church at village center, a crucial dream came back to him from childhood. Everything he accomplished in his life, he later wrote, came out of the dreams and fantasies of this time and his decision to “consciously submit . . . to the impulses of the unconscious.” Somewhere he calls this letting the libido follow its own gradient, and, at twenty, this has become the first and greatest commandment of my personal religion. And what Jung did beside Lake Zurich, I’m attempting in my poems, using words instead of stones to build with. I see myself as on a treasure hunt that I don’t ha
ve the map to, and the treasure that I seek is my True Self, what Whitman calls “the precious idiocrasy.” Pursuing that is what it means to me to be a Poet.

  So while George A.’s running wind sprints in Virginia, you can find me in the stacks at Wilson Library, poring over Symbols of Transformation and working out my stanzas. Often at 3 or 4 P.M., I emerge with bleary eyes and tousled hair in the disordered ponytail I’m wearing, and I change and set out running west of Chapel Hill, out Calvander, past mown fields where lightning bugs blink over summer’s hay bales. I do six miles, sometimes eight at night, and twelve or fifteen on a Saturday or Sunday. I’m up to forty, forty-five miles a week now, and occasionally someone remarks upon my “discipline,” and I take the compliment with pleasure, but if discipline is doing something you don’t want to do because you’re supposed to do it, the truth is I have little or no discipline whatever. I’m doing what I want to do because I want to do it, which is something different, letting my libido follow its own gradient, and increasingly I’m doing little else besides that, opting out on calculus and poli-sci and macroeconomics. “I would prefer not to” becomes my catchphrase for a season, cadged from Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

  As regularly as I run or read, on Friday nights, I close my books and head downtown to Town Hall or He’s Not Here, some bar on Franklin Street, where I unwind with a few beers. And this is usually when I see her, the girl, across the bar, the one who interests me, she’s almost always Blonde and Insubordinate, a type as unlike my dark-haired, well-bred mother as conceivable—though Margaret, on consideration, when she snuck out through the hole in the back fence at St. Mary’s to join the Wolfman in his purple stovepipe corduroys, wasn’t exactly playing from the Miss Manners playbook, and, as noted, is not so solemn when she’s had a couple. So perhaps the insubordination in these girls is not entirely unfamiliar, something I might see if I ever actually looked at Margaret.

  As regards the girl, though, after six beers, maybe eight, I can allow myself to meet her eye and seek the signal and risk I may not get it. Sometimes I do, though. She smiles or holds my gaze for a few beats and I cross the room to join her, my feet bare in the sawdust and the floor beneath the sawdust tacky. We strike up a conversation, or attempt to. I speak to her, she smiles and shakes her head; she speaks to me, her lips move, I smile and point to my ear. Eventually we make our way outside to Franklin, where suddenly we can hear the cars whoosh by and there’s fresh air on our faces. Sometimes we go to her place, and once I wake up in a strange apartment with no recollection of the woman in bed beside me. I walk outside and shelf my hand over my eyes and do a slow 360, unable to identify a single landmark, uncertain whether I’m still in Chapel Hill or possibly in Europe.

  More often, though, she comes with me, we make the twenty-minute trek cross-campus, past Big Frat Court where the bands of black men are playing in the diorama. Along the route we sometimes rest on a bench or make out in a doorway. When we get back to Avery, my dorm, we climb the stairs to the room I share with Sal, a curly-haired Italian kid from Maple Shade, New Jersey, a scholarship wrestler who’s five-foot-three or -four and whose upper bod and chest are like a nest of pythons twitching underneath a flesh-toned tarp—his biceps have their own biceps. Once there, I might read her something from “Burnt Norton,” a shallow ploy that often fails and even turns off some girls who come here willing. But as one thing can be two things, a high one and a low one, I also read to show them what I’m up to, to see if among their number there might be a Spacegirl who’s on a space trip of her own or might like to take one with me to that different, better Earth I’m seeking without the poison in the wheat or in the water. I don’t want to go alone there, I want someone to love me the way no one ever has, the way I fear my mother didn’t, and I suspect that may be why I never look at Margaret in this era, because I don’t want to know this, that something went wrong between us somewhere so far back it’s like a shadowed grove in an ancient sun-drenched country. What happened I don’t know; the ring of trees conceals it. The idiocrasy I was was strange to her, not precious, and perhaps no one held hers precious either. I sense she sent me off to Exeter to become someone different, I’m not sure who, perhaps someone who dealt in timber, farms and profits like her father, only more so. And I came back this bright-eyed, long-haired boy whose feet are black and calloused from going barefoot from April till Thanksgiving, who spends his weeks in a carrel, writing poems and poring over Symbols of Transformation. And these girls I bring back to the dorm don’t get me either, some flee at high speed when I take down my books and others wait impatiently for me to finish reading so we can get on to the business we’ve contracted and contract it. And the truth is I don’t get me either, I don’t know Who I Am, and maybe that’s what’s in the backseat of the sunken car in my dream, my True Self, which I’ve been sent back to recover. How did it come to be there? The question seems to me the only one that’s worth pursuing.

  And one morning this September I wake up and look around and for a beat, perhaps two beats—one thousand one, one thousand two—I can’t nail my location. The place looks familiar and generic—a generic boys’ room, generic desks and bunk beds, generic albums in a fruit crate. It’s like the lair, like my old dorm at Exeter. The idea of a hotel floats up, but it’s not a hotel either. There’s a rectangle of daylight at the window and the blueness in the sky is not the blue of morning. Now I hear whistles and the snare drums, one thousand three, I get it. Avery, my dorm, just down from Kenan Stadium. It’s Saturday, game day. Uphill, the marching band has launched into the Tar Heel Fight Song, “Rah, rah, Car’lina-lina . . .”

  –Bullshit, I mutter, and I sit up, nauseated, in the top bunk, noting that I still have my clothes on.

  What happened? I don’t remember going to bed, don’t remember coming back here. I must have blacked out. Obviously I blacked out. As I look around, I have a bad feeling. The room suggests an oh-so-familiar crime scene, and I’m the detective who’s implicated in some way I don’t want to look into too closely. The clues are all around—bottles, amber, green and clear ones, and a half-full beer cup in which floats a cigarette butt with a lipstick stain the same red the cup is. And my Eliot is out and open. Seeing it, I flash to the girl—not her name or face, but just the fact that there was one.

  And here I am, hungover, with my clothes on, and it’s afternoon, the band is playing up the hill at Kenan. The girl? Was she a high-speed fleer? Maybe. Only I don’t think so. The platter of my AR’s turning and the album jacket standing in the cubby shows a youthful Springsteen fingering that scruffy ’stash he wears on The Wild, The Innocent & the E-Street Shuffle. The Springsteen belongs to Sal, who calls me “Hillbilly” or “Hillbilly Dave” and likes to accompany my entrances and exits with banjo music or the squeal Ned Beatty makes in Deliverance.

  And speaking of the devil, here is Sal now.

  –You got a phone call.

  –Me?

  –No, the other guy named Dave who looks exactly like you and is standing where you are listening to me as I’m talking.

  –Who is it?

  –One of your hillbilly relatives.

  –Were there fiddles playing in the background, or did you deduce his montane origins by other means?

  –He had one of those double names—Billy Bob, Ray Don. Something.

  –George A.?

  –That’s it.

  There’s something odd in Sal’s demeanor. He’s grinning like a Bad Wolf if not a very Big one.

  –What’s up, Sal? Why are you grinning like that?

  –What? Is there a law against it? I had a good night.

  –You had a good night . . .

  I leave a beat, inviting him to fill it.

  He doesn’t.

  –Was there a girl here when you got back last night?

  –Uh-huh. There was.

  –You saw her?

  –I “saw” her, he confirm
s, putting quotes around the verb that I, Detective, don’t want to look into too closely.

  –Go take your phone call, he says. I gotta take a shower. I feel a little gamy.

  And Sal—having had a good night and now having a good morning . . . make that afternoon—walks down the hallway, chortling a little.

  A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma!

  I pick up the pay phone in the corridor.

  –George A.?

  –Guess what?

  –What?

  –I made eleven tackles.

  –What?

  –Eleven, he says.

  –Fuck me! When?

  –Last night in the game. I’m starting!

  –Bullshit! You’re starting?

  –Hell, yes.

  –Eleven?

  –Eleven.

  –Well, fuck you, asshole! Fuck you, and congratulations.

  –Heh heh heh.

  He’s buoyant as he says it, and I’m happy for him and the roar comes down the hill from Kenan, and I can hear the shower running and suddenly I’m queasy. What is it? I have the clearest image of my old coach at Exeter, the one who tapped me for the JV team in my first year—I was the only freshman in the school who made it. That’s not it, though—the flash is from my senior year, when he took me aside to say, What happened to your heart, Payne?

  –Thanks for helping me, George A. says on the phone now.

  –What?

  –Thanks for helping me get in shape this summer.

  It takes a beat.

  –You’re welcome, man. You did it, though. I’m proud of you, George A.

  –Thanks, DP.

  For the big game against Episcopal, he tells me now, Margaret and Jack are driving up from Winston-Salem, and Bill from Phenix City, Alabama, and from Henderson the Paynes, our grandparents, Letty and Bill Sr., the Principal, and even Uncle Allen all the way from Philly.

  –I was kind of hoping you might come, too, he says.