by Ron Carlson
“I said, ‘Ouch!’”
“Sweet Lord.” He sighed. “What are you going to do?”
“Watch the movie. I hate these intimate interviews.”
“‘Ouch?’ You need help.”
“Not yours. Not now.”
The elephant had a good grip on the Alien Visitor’s right arm as they wrestled outside the huge circus tent, and he nearly flipped the monster onto his head. Ribbo came bursting back in.
“The pigs here yet?”
“No. Sit down and watch the movie.”
“They can’t invade your private abode without a search warrant.”
“Shhh, Ribbo.” I pointed at the screen.
The Alien Visitor circled the elephant in a crouch like the one Krusher Kowalski does, head down, arms out. He slapped a double hammer-lock on the screaming pachyderm, and quickly flopped the beast over on its side. Cleverly for this part I turned the volume up full blast: Raahhrrr! Eeeeaaahhh! Rreeaarrk! Rak!
Knock Knock. Our neighbors in the next apartment, a young engineering student from Thailand and his wife, came over to see if our pets were okay. We didn’t have any, so they were fine.
“Sure, please come in.” They chose to share a beer and sat on the floor, happy to be at the movies. Fire and advance became the army’s tactic. Volley after irritating volley drove the Alien Visitor, no kidding, up the Colosseum. The ending of the film is a parallel with King Kong, except beauty doesn’t kill the beast, just an inability to understand his environment. And vice versa.
At this point, obviously gone crazy in his booth, the projectionist turned the projector out so the beam shot under the open window, across the yard and the film image fell blinking against the leafy texture of the tree. It then looked more like the impressionistic film that it was. Everyone’s heads followed the film, and we all climbed out onto the roof for the ending.
“This is funny,” Evelyn said. “I’ve never seen a movie this way before.”
The Alien Visitor appealed heavenward a moment, leaning on his tail, arms flailing, face looking for an answer. Is there help anywhere? Finally a particularly salient volley knocked the amphibian Alien Visitor back where he missed a step, and he fell like the last gladiator onto his scaly head on the pavement.
“Oh no!” Eldon spoke for all of us, and lofted his beer can through the beam, as we all did, the cans landing with a soft tink on the front yard. Of course then we heard the sirens, and the police car pulled up in front under the tree as the last closeup tableau of the jeeps and the monster and the commander sighing his grim relief showed on the tree.
“What are you doing up there?”
“Watching the tree.”
That brought him right up the stairs just as our Thailand neighbors ducked next door. I forced Virgil Benson to go with them. The policeman took one look around and decided to take us downtown.
“Why Ward Sawyer, how nice to see you again.” Bunny smiled.
“Miss Lancaster! Why are you here?” The policeman took his hat off. “You’re not disturbing the peace with these punks. Why don’t you just slip home.”
“Watch your language, Pig!” Ribbo had to say. The cop came forward, toward Ribbo, putting his hat back on, but Bunny interceded.
“I know it’s not my usual, Officer Sawyer,” she said, “But, yes I guess I was disturbing as much of the peace as these boys.”
“Disturbing the peace!” Ribbo said, “There is no peace!”
“Look, you. Your mouth is in for trouble.”
“Yeah?”
“Look,” I said, “Officer Sawyer, could we just set the customary wheels of justice in motion and proceed?” Then to Ribbo, “Cease this petty harassment of our law enforcement officials.” He glared at me. “Or I’ll do your nose. Save the revolution for something a little more meaty than this cinematic infraction.”
“Sell-out.”
We all went downtown. Bunny insisted on coming. After leveling a twenty-five-dollar fine against the projectionist, and delivering a warning lecture that reminded me of the way Wesson talks to me, Officer Sawyer released us to our own recognizance, our own custody, which I thought was a fairly amazing thing to do. “Gee, I hope I don’t do anything wrong, I’m in my own custody.”
Thinking Eldon was a smartass freak, Sawyer had made him remove the helmet, and on the way back down the stairs Eldon put it back on and grabbed himself sternly by the bicep, saying, “This way Robinson-Duff. Don’t get any ideas!” I had myself by the back of the collar and walked along in pain, in custody. Evelyn followed, laughing.
“That wasn’t too bad, was it, Ribbo?” Bunny asked him.
“We still should’ve got to do a lawyer.”
“I’ve never been in jail before.” Evelyn said.
“Say do you folks want to do breakfast at my house?”
“I don’t think so Ribbo. It’s a bit early. How are the dishes?”
“I threw them out. I’m doing recycled paper plates now.”
“Thanks just the same.”
“Right, well I gotta go then and help with the election. See you later.”
“Best of luck.”
“Yeah, well it doesn’t really matter. If the system doesn’t work, there are alternatives you know.” He walked off in a stride very like people who are attempting to continue trucking.
7
My watch said six-thirty. We went back to the apartment, walking up the stairs through the filmic debris. Empty, the room looked awful, mainly cans and ashes. The worst detail was a purple-red stain growing on the carpet outward from the kitchen. I found an overturned gallon jug of Paisano.
“Yeech!”
“Make some coffee, will you Larry?” Eldon said, carrying the chairs back out of the bedroom.
“Sure.” This is when I reached in the fridge, found an opened, but cold can of coke and took a huge slug, hoping to alleviate the furnace all the beer was making out of my body. There was a cigarette butt in it; I puked into the sink. There are times when I rejoice that I am not my body. After several antiseptic, hot-water minutes I had the kitchen sparkling, and the coffee pot gurgled in my little version of order. I felt better, but I knew there were things unpurged.
“What are you doing in there?”
“Cleaning up. Coffee will be ready in a minute.”
Evelyn went next door and retrieved Zeke, who then slept on our bed. Bunny came back over and handed me a bottle of ginger ale; it wasn’t Right Knight, but it was exactly what I needed.
Then the four of us sat in the littered front room, as if we were bemused about the hopeless state of domestic help, and tried to sip our steaming coffee. Eldon removed his helmet and his fragile wire glasses and rubbed his eyes. I was always afraid he was going to rub too hard. He told us a little about his book, about one extended metaphor where he compared the Vietnamese with American Indians, but he wouldn’t really go beyond that because, “It’s too depressing.” I told them about my story idea about the rest home. They seemed to like it. Then Evelyn told a very simple reverential story about her husband and how he was killed at a lumber plant in Fredonia, just south of Kanab. He’d been buried in sawdust when a chute broke open. She didn’t say much about it, but the way she talked was beautiful.
“Why don’t you have a girl?” she asked me.
“He does, Evelyn.”
“You do! What’s her name?”
“Lenore.” Eldon seemed to be answering for me.
“That’s a lovely name. Are you two serious?”
“He’s only serious about Scott Fitzgerald.” Eldon pointed to the portrait of Fitzgerald I keep on the wall. “They’re engaged.”
“Ignore him.” I said. “We were serious.”
“Oh, you ought to get married.”
“You think so?”
“Sure!” Eldon interrupted, “Scott is dead; Lenore has walked out: that leaves Dotty.”
“Dotty?” Evelyn asked.
“Dry up, Robinson-Duff.”
“You see,
Evelyn, Larry here is a romantic. He’s very, very different from you or I. Why I might marry an intelligent, beautiful lady (who I might add is in med school), if we were in love. Yes I might. That just shows how stupid, insensitive, and unromantic I am. Larry, here, the romantic on the other hand, prefers instead to marry his dream. You see, he’s …”
“Robinson-Duff sometimes you talk just like the disabled American Veteran that you are. Perhaps you should replace the helmet, in case I begin hurling my books once again.”
We heard crying in the other room. Zeke woke from a nightmare. While Evelyn was in the bedroom comforting him, the three of us sat in silence. When she returned we all settled further, realizing we’d broken the night’s back and each minute now was ascension toward morning. Bunny smoked Salems, a mentholated product I learned to dislike later in another country, but I had one that night too, as if to foreshadow the smoldering months to come. Eldon, then, left me alone, and started talking about things he’d never told me before. The entire time he spoke, I was mesmerized by the vision of his soft, tousled head and the coffee vapor on the window.
“I heard them say in echoes, ‘a cupful of blood, a cupful,’ and when I woke Evelyn was there, swollen to the limit, pregnant.”
“With Zeke,” Evelyn added. “The first thing he did was point and smile. I think he thought I was in trouble.” It became clear that Eldon and Evelyn were having a private conversation, saying things they’d never discussed before, and they needed Bunny and me there so they could pretend it wasn’t as important to them as it was, so they could talk this way.
“I did.” Eldon said. “Everybody’s in trouble; pregnant ladies just have company. Anyway, fat Evelyn made some flash cards with the word on one side, you know, ‘Chair,’ ‘Dog,’ and the picture on the other. The artwork was fantastic. Grandma Moses-like. Clear. And she’d flash these goddamned cards at me two hours a day. Dog. Chair. Hand. Eye. Bird. Rain. That was a good card. She had a cloud raining this slanted blue rain onto a little stick figure girl with an umbrella. I thought that card was ‘Girl’ for the longest time. She’d flash that card and my mind would slip one gear. I mean at the time I could feel my mind slip, click, and I’d dream about walking with that girl. The rain. The smell of the girl’s sweater. Coming to her house. The porch.” Eldon paused. The four of us didn’t look at each other, just out at the long purple-grey dawn.
“It’s kind of a trite picture, I know,” he said, “But, god, it was real to me …” He paused again.
“Yeah. Then cards. Every day. ‘Tree.’ ‘Shovel.’ ‘Man.’ ‘Flowers.’ Sometimes I could follow, pay attention. But mostly each picture was a trigger for strings of images. I could remember the accident vividly. Arnold yelling ‘Heads!’ and ducking by the wing, the bomb in its sling swinging back out of the plane, slowly, my only thoughts were that it wasn’t supposed to do that and how fast accidents happen, how they change things. I didn’t see it hit me. And I’d come back to the cards. ‘Car.’ ‘Boat,’ with ridiculous water skiers. ‘Plane.’ ‘Train.’ Most of Evelyn’s pictures had people in them.”
I looked over at Evelyn. She was staring out, and in the slight light she looked ready to cry. I could imagine how desperate she must have been, how much she loved her brother.
“Then it all got better fast. It was like skipping grades. I’d try to talk. I knew the words, and thought I’d say them, just like that, but each time I’d get the mouth open: nothing. Evelyn would stop with the card she had up: ‘Mountain.’ Her face would get so excited—god! She’d hold it up for me more, closer, pointing to the syllables, saying them for me, turning over to the picture with the snow peak, the tree line, wildflowers, talus, two hikers holding hands, then back to the word itself, but I said nothing. She’d back up a few cards. ‘River.’ She’d say it. Riv-er. Riv-er. But the mouth hung there slack. It wouldn’t work. Then the mouth would shut. God what a strain. We’d both sit back and Evelyn,” Eldon interrupted himself here. “Evelyn is it okay that I talk all this, tell all this stuff?”
“Yes, please.” She was crying, not moving.
“We’d both sit back breathing and Evelyn would start to cry holding up ‘Lake.’ ‘Fish.’ ‘Cloud.’ ‘Hat.’ The man in ‘Hat’ had a wicked mustache, remember Evelyn?” By this time Bunny was crying too.
“Can you see it?” Eldon went on, “She came every day. Two hours. It took five weeks. The thoughts came across my mind first like birds in an alley; I couldn’t stop them, any of them, to consider them. Watching some, I’d lose sight of the others. I couldn’t grasp them. The mouth would open, but I couldn’t get anything out of it.
“Then they became longer and slid in line like tigers and rabbits at a shooting gallery in a penny arcade. One of those machines that uses two mirrors to make them look way way out there. But still for a while, they’d come up and swish, gone before I could nail them. I’d even wait for every third one purposely letting some go by, moving my inner eye.
“Toward the end I could see every one; see the grain of the fur, the cock of the eye itself—until I held them still. ‘Cat.’ ‘Hat.’ ‘Boat.’ ‘Coat’ … ‘Mountain.’” He paused. “‘Mountain.’ I spoke words. Evelyn was the teacher.”
“And do you know what word he said first?” Evelyn spoke, still crying a little, from where the first sunslant clipped her face, eyes. She seemed fine.
“Rumpelstiltskin?”
“Pigs. He said ‘pigs.’ Then ‘pigs in the mud.’ He took the card from me. It had three pigs in the mud …”
“By a white fence.” Eldon added.
“By a white fence,” Evelyn continued, “And he said ‘pigs in the mud.’” Bunny was crying and laughing now, or some combination of those things. “And then he pointed at my stomach and he said, ‘trouble.’” Evelyn had stopped crying now, but her eyes and face were all wet so I gave her my handkerchief. We sat a long time letting the sun sweep the room while people wiped their faces.
I was lost myself for a while remembering when I first knew Eldon, and we moved in together and how he was always sleeping, staying in the bedroom because of the skull brace they made him wear. When he was up, he would loiter around the apartment in his pajamas and an old grey sport coat that had been my father’s. Then he began the writing, and we began the fishing, and things improved fast.
“Come on.” I said at last. “I’ll buy you all breakfast. Let’s get Zeke up and get out of this wreck.”
8
On our way out we met two of the chicks who had left when the military had arrived. “We left our shoes and some things.” one explained.
“I put your bra in my bedroom,” Bunny said kindly to the other girl who stood arms folded, up way too early in the morning, “Go right in.” The girl’s mouth quivered slightly.
Everybody climbed into the rear of the truck and I drove us, in a fresh-air frenzy, down to Roberto’s, home of the steamy plate-dwarfing onion omelette. Roberto’s was crowded with mailmen and bus-drivers, as always, and it was a little too warm in there and I sank into the kind of reverie that has caused others to be put into safe, sanitary places. Things sink in. I started rethinking the big picture. Recent events flew through my head like raining, red-hot asteroids. I was going to review my options, but I couldn’t recall seeing them in the first place. Evelyn and Bunny and Eldon, who sat around me talking like the best human beings possible, all had been disconcertingly enthusiastic about my novel idea on the rest home. As I sat there outsized in the big red naughahyde booth, monstrous thoughts strolling freely about my rerinsed mind, trying to discern the definite shape of the waitresses’ underthings, an idea I’d had two days previous revisited my mind.
Two mornings before, while driving home from the power plant, I fell behind a stationwagon, two kids in the back. One kid, a blond, crewcut, climbed over the seats until he was right against the back window. When he got there and saw me, the kid raised his chin in a face of unparalleled ugliness and at the same time he flipped the finger at me with both of his n
ine-year-old hands. At that moment, as at the one I endured at Roberto’s, staring at an omelette whose very onion complexion brought tears to the eyes, I decided to leave the country. Drastic measures. Morning of an author.
When we left the restaurant, I selected half an inch of Roberto’s postcards, the picture showing a family of four smiling over their Round the World Roberto’s Special Omelette Deluxe. I wrote one word of the following sentences on each card: There-are-a-million-loves-in-this-world-but-only-the-right-love-twice.-The-novel-will-be-for-you-Zelda.
I mailed them all to Lenore.
9
A television actor once told me, “Beauty is all in the chin line.” Maybe so. But I knew as that day bore on that ugliness must have a good deal to do with eye sockets. Mine were going from light brown to deep grey, my eyes receding all the while. Eldon took Evelyn and Zeke to the bus, while I backed my truck under the window and commenced to clean our apartment. I was really sorry to see her go. She had the largest capacity for hope of any woman I’ve ever met living in the real world. Even more than Bunny.
At 2:15 when I was sure Banks was in his second class (he teaches like many, the same thing twice; this is known in the department as mileage), teaching the tattered gothic remnants of grotesque Dick III and giving each student an acute awareness of his or her own potential mediocrity, I stole up to school, truck full of junk, and into the teaching associates’ office. Susette Bedd, the croquet coquette, was on duty, tweezing her eyebrows. “Hi, how’s Banks?” She gave me a very serious “Oh You.” look and held the tweezer up like a knife. “Careful, Babe,” I said, “one of those beautiful eyebrows is anchored by the brain, you know.” I continued over to my desk and started throwing my junk into the fishing creel I’d brought. I cleaned out all the drawers, leaving the lint and paper clips, and then made the mistake of taking down my Lon Chaney poster. This is the sign by which the alert Wesson came to know I was in withdrawal.
“Listen, Honey.” I said to the secretary, leaning dangerously close, dropping my phone number on her desk. “When my last two students bring in their papers and leave them on that desk over there,” I pointed, “the one that used to be mine, please call me and let me know, okay.”