Through the windows that opened over the street, and through which they were observed until the novelty passed, the commonplace noises of the everyday world blew in and out. The state of the world, the ball-game at Shibe Park, organ music for eating, band music for dancing, string music for relaxing, soft music for listening, with the background music of the pianola in the penny arcade. Life went on. Nothing seemed to have stopped. Wolf calls, police calls, fire calls, commercials, the crack of the rifles in the shooting gallery, the click of the balls, the ringing of the bells in the pinball machines. Trains came up from Washington, down from New York, the legs and hips were added to a girl on a signboard, and a giant in red pants, advertising bone meal, tossed packages of flower seed through the windows. A helicopter made a landing on the station roof to speed the mail. A peddler sold rubber monkeys, copulating, but hearing-speaking-seeing no Evil, and plastic walnuts for the shell game to swarthy sailors from the Argentine. Business as usual, as aimless and as pointed, and what had seemed so depressing to Foley in the morning, the shapeless, extravagant waste of living, looked almost beautiful to him in the afternoon. Were they free, these people, to do as they liked? To eat foot-length hotdogs, hoot at the girls, crank the handles of machines with caged fan dancers, or make love in the seats of cars at the back of parking lots? Unaware, or if aware not caring, that men like themselves, brothers and keepers, were parading like molting storks in the loft of a building where the signs fined you for Spitting and men stood in line holding pint milk bottles of warm, cloudy piss.
A commonplace day, like all others, the sun rose and set, like the others, but not on the one in the limbo of Foley’s mind. That day had the durable, changeless pattern of Dante’s hell. The same faces appeared, the same scabrous bodies, and the same hoarse croaking of voices. All there but the Leader. In place of the Leader was the line. It went out through the door ahead, came in through the one behind.
At Foley’s rear was a Mr. Folger, Andrew Folger, a farmer, who had got up at dawn and driven in with baskets of sweet corn. The corn could be seen on the truck in the parking lot. One of the tires was low, and Mr. Folger often referred to it. A middle-aged man. His hands and face, including the dark patch at his throat, seemed to have come along with his body through some mistake. They were brown and weathered, while his body was pink and white. A nest of auburn hair lay on his chest, dangled a vinelike streamer on the curve of his belly, then ended abruptly where the friction of his belt had worn it off. He stood with his arms folded on his chest. This concealed the brown hands in his armpits, but there was no place to hide his head, or his face, clapped on the white shoulders like a carnival mask. Spots were found in one lung, sugar in his urine, and cavities in his teeth. On the parking lot his tire went down and the sweet corn dried in the sun.
At Foley’s front was Mr. Fogarsi, or Fugarcy, or Focharsi, since it was spelled two ways on his papers and he wasn’t quite sure himself. A Latin lover, with blue-black hair and a fawn-colored sport coat with built-in shoulders, Mr. Focharsi wore charms on his ankle, at his wrist, and around his throat. A woman’s hair was braided through them all, and they would not slip off. Mr. Focharsi had teeth like ivory but was not able to remove his socks. They had become, over the months and years, part of his feet. Athlete’s foot had made them a living part of himself. When this was clear, and when his feet had been dipped in a solution to reduce the odor, he was permitted to put on his patent leather shoes and wear them around. They had loose cleats, for tap dancing, at the heel and toe. Mr. Focharsi could dance, which he did for a living, putting down “dance man” as his vocation, but in the setting-up exercises it was found he could not bend at the knee. When the intern cried “Down,” and they all went down, Mr. Focharsi stayed up. On his face was the expression of a man whose heart had stopped. It was thought that the meaning of the word was not clear to him. Other words were tried, several of them suggested by Peter Foley, the learned professor, but Mr. Focharsi’s knees did not understand one of them. When the call came his head went down but his knees stayed up. He was taken from the line for further experiments.
Foley could bend at the knee, his lungs showed no spots, he read the lines off the cards and heard the ticking watch, but his pump, as the intern described it, was not so good. It clopped. When he did the bends it clopped and leaked. It was not a piece of plumbing the army wanted on its hands.
Foley received this news around eight o’clock, a little more than ten hours after he had entered, statement in hand, the door he was now free to go out. He felt nothing. Nothing that he thought he should feel. The shock had worn off, but he did not even feel relief. Nothing. So he had come to know, in spite of himself, what hell was really like.
He put back on the clothes he had carried all day, pulled the clean socks over his dirty feet, waved to Mr. Focharsi, and went down the stairs to the street. The everyday street, full of the commonplace, everyday scene. The neon signs flickered, the traffic was noisy, the sailors in the penny arcade gulped hotdogs with the gaze of men one hour from the battlefield. A commonplace scene, as American—as the book jackets said—as a filling station, but Foley found it stranger than the nightmare he had left at the top of the stairs. More unreal. Harder to account for, that is. Given man for what he was, his corps mis à nu, how had he ever put together anything that worked, or woven socks that would slip on and off a man’s feet? Where did he get the lips that would smile, and the legs that would bend at the knee? Mr. Focharsi put the question. His knees put it, that is. Faced with the baffling commands of life, they refused to bend. They held fast. Mr. Focharsi seemed to be willing, but his limbs were not. Froglike, he was caught midway between a hopper and a man.
Foley had walked the eight or ten miles back to his room: he had taken the long way, following the river, crossing and recrossing all the bridges, as if a leap into the river was what he had in mind. He did. He thought about it. But the thought passed. It seemed to be as pointless as the other thoughts he had.
Long after dark, after midnight, he had reached the sleeping college campus, where he sat on the wall along the pike and took off his socks and shoes. The socks in his pocket, carrying his shoes, he had wandered barefoot around the moonlit campus, sitting for a while in the empty bleachers of the football field. Along toward morning he had gone to his room, but not to sleep. He lay out on the bed listening to the clopping hammer of his leaky pump. He had often suspected the worst, and now he knew. One day, like Mr. Focharsi’s knees, he would bend no more.
In this state of mind, or absence of mind, he turned to a thick book he had been reading—had bought, in fact, to read at his leisure while in jail. He opened the book—toward the end, for he thought he might not live long enough to read it—and found himself scanning, with professional detachment, several lines of verse.
There flies a gray bird, a falcon
From Jerusalem the Holy
And in his beak he bears a swallow …
Something about these lines, the gray bird, the falcon, and the day he had just passed at the induction center, gave him the feeling he had stumbled on some strange revelation, some gift of prophecy. So he had read on, some thirty lines of it, which turned out to be a poem, a Serbian poem, dealing with the Tsar Lazar and his defeat at Kossovo by the Turks. Of this Tsar Lazar, Foley had known nothing, nothing at all until that moment, but this gray bird, this falcon, seemed to fly like a portent through his own life. This Tsar Lazar, whose destination was heaven, was asked to choose between the heavenly or the earthly kingdom, and of course he had chosen the heavenly. The price of this kingdom, this eternal victory, was that he and his army of seventy thousand men would be slaughtered by the Turks on the field of Kossovo. This had occurred, and the poem closed:
All was Holy, all was Honorable,
And the Goodness of God was fulfilled.
These words should have quieted Foley’s troubled heart, but the clopping increased. He gulped for air: despair seemed to smother him like a hood. What did he feel? When h
e was able to feel, he felt sold out. Sold down the river with the Tsar Lazar and his army of seventy thousand. Down the river with Saint Lawrence, the self-slaughtered matador, down the river with Brother Proctor, the self-styled martyr, and down the river with Sister Baker, who kept the chronicle straight, like the Venerable Bede. Last but not least to be sold down the river was Foley himself. Crouched on the battlefield, as if in hiding, or about to leap into the arms of God, but, like Mr. Focharsi, unable to bend or flex his knees. A true symbol of the froglike passage he had made through the earthly life.
Did they lack conviction? No, they had conviction. What they lacked was intention. They could shoot off guns, at themselves, leap from upper-floor windows, by themselves, or take sleeping pills to quiet the bloody cries of the interior. But they would not carry this war to the enemy. That led to action, action to evil, blood on the escutcheon of lily-white Goodness, and to the temporal kingdom rather than the eternal heavenly one. That led, in short, where they had no intention of ending up. The world of men here below. The godawful mess men had made of it.
In this peaceful manner the Prince of Darkness ruled everywhere. The bloody plain of Kossovo was as wide as the world. Everywhere that men of good will could be found they stood in queues of happy victims, waiting to spill their pure blood on the field of Kossovo. Black lamb and gray falcon, a gut-deep urge that in surrender was the moral victory, in death and defeat the lasting possession of the lasting world. But this one, this bloody cockpit, this temporal kingdom and battleground, could be left, must be left, that is, to shift for itself. The Proctor-Foley salvage operations applied to vermin, not to men.
Foley suddenly remembered, with shame, the pious meetings of the pacifists he had attended, where it was known that the doing of good, or of evil, was a devil’s snare. The doing of anything led to action, all action was blended with evil, but one could be good, one could only be good, by sitting on one’s hands. Otherwise they would get bloodied in an earthly, temporal fight of some sort. Settling nothing. For what was ever settled here on earth?
A cold draft blew on his neck, and Foley turned to see a young GI, carrying a trench coat, push through the door and weave down the aisle to where he sat. His uniform was soiled, where he had just been sick, and there were drops of water on the tin horn of his bugle. One side of his face was still colorless and bruised with sleep.
“This yourn?” he said to Foley and held the trench coat out over the aisle.
“Why, yes,” Foley replied, “thank you very much,” and the young man tossed the coat over the back of a chair. A fold in the skin cut across the bruised side of his face like a scar.
“Like a drink?” Foley said to be friendly, and the young man closed his eyes as if to think.
He thought, then said, “I’m gettin’ off here,” but he did not leave. “I’m gettin’ off here,” he repeated, then furtively, as if his fly were open, he spread wide the flaps of his topcoat and groped for the handle of the pistol he had thrust, like a pirate, between his pants and his belt. Before handing the gun to Foley he sniffed the barrel.
“Ahhhhhh,” he said, as if it gave off an incense, then placed it carefully on the table.
“An heirloom,” Foley said casually. “In the family for years. I’m very much obliged.”
The young man belched, bowed with a sober, military air, and started away before what Foley had said penetrated his mind. He stopped, centered in the aisle, and began to smile. A secret smile, from the way he blushed, but one that Foley knew very well. An old smile, the shameless smile of Proctor smelling bullshit. The young man did not speak; he stood remote and erect, as if digesting the smile with pleasure, then he lurched off as if hidden gears had suddenly meshed. It was clear that he hoped to reach the door before he laughed. He managed, thanks to the conductor who had propped the door open, then it slammed behind them as the train braked to a stop.
A moment later Foley saw him on the train platform, seated on his duffle bag. He held the bugle clasped in his hand, and as the train began to move he spotted Foley at the window, wildly waved the bugle, then held it to his lips. There was no sound, but a flaming paper streamer with wagging fingers at the end leaped toward Foley, struck the glass, and thumbed a red-paper nose. Then it returned, with a snap, into the mouth of the horn. The young man threw up his arms, rocked over backward, as if the recoil had been too much for him, and as the train pulled out Foley saw his polished boots waving in the air.
That was all, but at the back of Foley’s mind, glowing like a lantern slide, he saw another bugler. One that wore, in the fog-strewn evening, a canary-yellow slicker, a nautical hat, and the air of a man riding to the hounds, while he solemnly chanted:
“Strawberry shortcake
Huckleberry pie
Girls go to Oxy
I wonder why.”
At the moment of crisis, as the signals floated up from the huddle at the goal line, the young man took the horn from his slicker, stood up, and sounded a blast. No bugler, the sound that he made was not of this world. More like a shriek, a loon’s cry in the darkness, so that players, umpires, and spectators wheeled to see what comet, unknown and unpredicted, crossed the night sky. As one had. Perhaps, as one always would. Cruising around in the dark, in the void, just for the hell of it.
Foley slipped on his coat and walked through the car to the rear platform. They were crossing the Schuylkill. On the water he could see the band of coach lights. Down the river the flicker of car lights on the bridges, the neon glow over the city and the moon, lit up from below, as if part of it. A signboard that had been turned off for the night. No longer a goddess, not much of a wonder, more of a tide-making mechanical marvel—and yet it was still, like Foley himself, part of the night. Destination unknown, resolution uncertain, purpose unclear, source undetermined, but a slit in the darkness where the eye of the chipmunk might peer out. A crack in the armor where the bugler sounded a wild, carefree note. An island in space where young men were still careless with themselves. Casually, as if flipping a coin, Foley tossed the heirloom over the railing, but he did not hear it splash or see white water where it fell. The rails clicked, the train left the trestle, and as they pulled into the Philadelphia station the conductor stepped out and reminded him that this was his stop.
He went along with the ten or twelve people who got off. He used the escalator, followed them up the ramp, and found the last train waiting on the local platform. In the smoker he took out and lit up an unfinished cigar.
At his station—within the station (the insects were getting to be a nuisance)—he saw the tramp he had passed in the morning stretched out on a bench. He lay facing the wall, his head resting on the bundle tied up with the rope.
Lights burned in the dorms, and as he circled the pond he heard birds stir on the water, rise flapping, and drip water on his face as they passed overhead. In the window where, early that morning, he had seen Mrs. Schurz in a cloud of gray flannel, a lamp now burned, lighting up the tiles on the porch roof. That would be, he knew from experience, something about the cat. Mrs. Schurz did not wait up unless there had been trouble in Paradise. Unless God’s half acre, by cat or man, had been disturbed. He went around to the back, hoping to miss her, but as he turned the key in the lock the window directly over his head went up.
“Oh, Mr. Foley?”
“It’s me, Mrs. Schurz,” he replied.
“A man was here to see you,” she said. That was all.
“A man?” he asked.
“He wouldn’t tell me his name or a thing, Mr. Foley. He just said he had to see you personally.”
“I see,” he replied, opened the door, stepped out again as Mrs. Schurz called, “Mr. Foley, I want you to know that I don’t give snoopers any satisfaction. If he got any, I want you to know it wasn’t from me.”
“I appreciate that,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
“It was none of my business, and I told him I didn’t think it was his.”
“Thank you kindly
,” Foley replied, closed the door, set the lock, paused in the dark hallway leading back to his room. Mrs. Schurz lowered her window, water dripped on a saucer left in the sink. Drop, drop, drop. I am eroding, the witness had said. Leaving bedrock. A white scar across the mind indicating where the anchor might have dragged. A broken link in the chain where a man had been torn from his captive past.
He heard Mrs. Schurz sag into her bed, then he walked down the hallway to his study. The smell of the orange he had peeled in bed was strong in the room. A sprinkling of moonlight and soot lay on the yellow pages in the fireplace. He struck a match on the hearth, took from the pile of yellow pages the sheet lying on top, the last page of the book, and saw that the morning splatter of bird dung had dried. He left it. Proof positive that there, at that point, the book had stopped.
The match that he held burned down to his fingers, blackening the nail. He cupped the flame to his face, as if he might see, within it, a moment of truth. A draft down the chimney brightened the flame, sprinkled more soot on the yellow pages, and the reflection that he saw in the study window smoked like a flare. Cupped in his hands was not the dying match but a smoking smudgepot. Into the flame Lawrence dipped his hand, and with the sightless smile of an antique statue he turned and gazed into Foley’s face. The lips silent, the gaze already remote, he peered toward Foley from a sacred wood that slowly receded into the changeless past. A blurred, shadowy figure, caught by the camera, nameless in a scene that seemed immortal, like that woman of mystery in the postcard view of the Seine. Suspended in time, like the ball that forever awaited the blow from the racket, or the upraised foot that would never reach the curb. A permanent scene, made up of frail impermanent things. A lover like Lou Baker, a saint like Lawrence, a martyr like Proctor, and a witness like Foley. So much fire and water, so much fear and wonder, so much smoke and sprinkling of soot. But in the burning they gave off something less perishable. How explain that Lawrence, in whom the sun rose, and Proctor, in whom it set, were now alive in Foley, a man scarcely alive himself. Peter Foley, with no powers to speak of, had picked up the charge that such powers gave off—living in the field of the magnet, he had been magnetized. Impermanent himself, he had picked up this permanent thing. He was hot, he was radioactive, and the bones of Peter Foley would go on chirping in a time that had stopped. No man had given a name to this magnet, nor explained these imperishable lines of force, but they were there, captive in Peter Foley—once a captive himself.
The Huge Season Page 24