by Tom Robbins
Moreover, because he didn’t want to just sit there like a pimple on a pumpkin, because for some mysterious reason he longed to be accepted by these campus freaks, because he wanted to impress Charlene, and because a lot of this new information genuinely intrigued him, he commenced to spend afternoons in the library researching all manner of esoteric subjects. He managed to keep up his grades in automotive engineering (daddy’s idea), but his heart wasn’t in it. He was happier reading Buckminster Fuller, unorthodox reassessments of the Civil War, and biographies of Tesla and the Compassionate Buddha. The horizon of his world view was stretching like string cheese on a pizza.
At the Rhino, he’d always been liked well enough. The girls liked him because he was cute, gentlemanly, and kind of innocent (even the bohemian female is not immune to maternal instincts). Guys liked him because he let them drive his Fiat Spider and lent them money to score marijuana. His musical talents, minor as they were, lent him at least a modicum of hipness, and both sexes were secretly impressed by Charlene’s veiled allusions to the measure of his masculine endowment. Now that he could occasionally contribute something of real interest to coffeehouse conversations, he achieved his goal of fitting in with the misfits. However, any danger that his expanding persona might be getting too big for its shoes disappeared when on the first warm day in April, spring shooting out of the tender Carolina sod like goat genes out of a hose, Charlene split for Berkeley with an itinerant acid dealer named Gypsy, taking her peacock feathers, astrology charts, and Colette novels, leaving behind nothing but a patchouli-and-pussy-scented vacuum: not even a note.
Dickie’s heart was not so much broken as it was dehydrated. He felt like a potted plant in a haunted house. For seven months, he’d been diving into the waters of life—and now the finance company had repossessed the irrigation pump.
There was still a trickle in the ditch, still all those new areas of thought to investigate, but conditions were no longer right for diving. With the defection of his “coach” and the loss of any interest in conventional curricula, he felt the world had left him high and dry. Sensing that he easily could wither away in that state, and too happy-go-lucky by nature to succumb to paralysis, he forced himself to act. As soon as final exams were done, Dickie, over strenuous parental objection, enlisted in the air force.
“You’ll be shipped to Vietnam!” they squawked.
“I hope so,” murmured Dickie, and he meant it, though he was not exactly clear why—especially after all the convincing anti-war rhetoric to which he’d been exposed at the Rhinoceros.
In an introspective mood, he recalled the last night he and Charlene had slept together. They’d been lying on her narrow mattress, the sleeping bag that served as its duvet tossed aside, the better to facilitate their postcoital cool-down. He was going on and on about how the principles that govern the universe are not ones of matter but design, or some such business he’d gleaned from Buckminster Fuller, just going to town on it, when Charlene regarded him with a strange light in her eyes.
Years later he would see that same eye-light in Lisa Ko time and time again and would always wonder at it, wonder at how it seemed to seep from a distant, ancient, exclusively feminine place. It was a barely perceptible gleam that had, believe it or not (and cynics are free to jeer), a sacred quality—yet no pope or holy guru or actor playing a pope or holy guru could ever hope to project it. A vixen could project it to her kits, perhaps, but it was as absent as lactation in the province of the male. For that matter, it was rare in women, and Dickie might only have imagined its distant, arcane origins, though the World of the Animal Ancestors was probably beyond his powers of imagination.
At any rate, he perceived some sort of different expression in Charlene when she’d turned to him that night, shushed him, and said, “Just remember, man, that the head bone’s connected to the heart bone.”
“Huh?”
“You know, when I met you, man, you were really in touch with your feelings. That’s what turned me on about you, I guess. You were living in your heart. Now, you’ve packed up your khaki pants and polo shirts and moved into your head.” She propped herself up on one elbow. “It’s gotta be both, man. It don’t matter how sensitive you are or how damn smart and educated you are, if you’re not both at the same time, if your heart and your brain aren’t connected, aren’t working together harmoniously, well, man, you’re just hopping through life on one leg. You may think you’re walking, you may think you’re running a damn marathon, but you’re only on a hop trip, man. You’re a hopper. The connection’s gotta be maintained.”
Charlene yawned, kissed him, yawned again, and fell asleep.
When he looked back on it, as he was flying to Texas for basic training, he supposed she’d left him a note after all.
And he supposed that Vietnam was as good a place as any to hook up one’s head to one’s heart.
Knock! Knock!
“Who’s there?”
“The All-Controlling Agent of Destiny and Change.”
“Are you really the All-Controlling Agent of Destiny and Change?”
“Of course not, you ninny. There’s no such thing. I’m the Mindless Tosspot of Random Chance. If you detect patterns in my swath, in my wake, that’s your prerogative, I guess, but should you base important decisions on those ‘patterns,’ you could be in for a surprise.”
Well, whatever the terms upon which fortune is predicated—whether the storybook of our lives is authored by divine fate, pure chance, or force of will—it’s obvious that one thing does lead, however circuitously, to another; and in the narrative of Dickie Goldwire, the wheels of the future were gathering speed.
Dickie’s grandmother, who came from old tobacco money and had bankrolled the careers of several Carolina congressmen, pulled strings to have him accepted for Officers Candidate School. Dickie hadn’t sought a commission, he hadn’t really thought about it, but no stranger to privilege, he nonchalantly accepted rank as his due. Emerging from OCS a second lieutenant, he was then funneled into navigation school. “Okay,” he reasoned, “it’s good to know the smoothest way to get to where you’re going,” though suspecting all the while that Buckminster Fuller mightn’t necessarily agree. Upon completion of the course, near the top of his class, he was rewarded by being shipped off to war.
He’d stayed in Vietnam less than six months. Typical military illogic had him assigned to a ground air-control post, where, like so many other victims of Pentagon inefficiency, he was forced to function far below the summit of his potential. About the time he’d become acclimated to the steam and the rot, to the boom and the bugs, to the itchy white rashes that kept erupting under his skin and the red lightning that kicked like neon frog legs in the jukebox sky; about the time that he’d resigned himself to never hearing another discussion that didn’t revolve around gooks and doom on the one hand, cars, baseball, and girlfriends (real or fantasized) on the other, somebody somewhere woke up long enough to reassign him to a B-52 squadron in Japan. From then on, he’d only see Vietnam from up in the red-lit Wurlitzer.
After reporting to the squadron commander, he was escorted to his quarters by an orderly. The orderly helped him unpack, then pointed out the officers’ club and the day room. It was too early for a drink, so he ventured into the day room, at one end of which two rather unkempt individuals in rumpled Hawaiian shirts were arguing loudly but articulately over which was worse, conspicuous consumption or conspicuous non-consumption. They were visibly annoying a table of poker players and a solitary captain trying to write a letter home—and they didn’t seem to care. Dickie drew near the pair with a flicker of hope.
Both of the men were large, but one was tall, soft-faced, arrow-eyed, and crowned by a bush of hair whose length dangerously exceeded air force regulations; while his companion was short and burly, with sullen features that might have been hammered into his face, the hands of a stockyard skinner, and a broad forehead that seemed to shout, “Mush, you huskies!” to the hairs it was driving onward
, onward toward the backslope of his skull. By the time Dickie had settled into a leather armchair adjacent to their own, they had entered the finer points of their discussion. Specifically, they were debating the distinctions between: (1) nouveau-riche ostentation; (2) the compensating acquisitiveness of an adult who’d been deprived as a child; and (3) the extreme displays of the American Indian potlatch in which consumption transcended mere greed to become sport and surrogate warfare.
Without missing a beat, the taller man handed Dickie a beer (apparently it was not too early to drink), and began challenging his opponent to distinguish between the genuine ascetic and what he termed the conspicuously nonconsuming “poverty snob.” Foley (for that’s who he was) obliged, though he became evasive when Stubblefield (obviously) interrupted to ask on which side of the fence Christ would fall. Was Jesus an enlightened being who understood maya (the illusionary nature of the material world) and the folly of seeking happiness through wealth, or was he merely a humorless, undersexed, masochistic proto-communist with an olive branch up his butt?
At this point, the letter-writing captain turned scarlet. “Enough!” he bellowed, slamming down his pen. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to you blaspheme my Lord!”
Stubblefield smiled benevolently. “I’m sorry, Seward,” he said. “Forgive me. I hadn’t realized you were British.”
“What’re you talking about? I’m no Brit, and you damn well know it.” Captain Seward was fuming. The poker players were losing track of their aces.
“But, Seward . . .” Stubblefield’s voice was as mild as baby shampoo. “Didn’t you just say you had a lord? I thought a lord was a titled nobleman who exercises authority as a result of hereditary property rights. So if you have a lord—”
“Try reading the Bible sometime!”
“I’ve read the Bible,” put in Dern Foley. His voice was flatter, colder than Stubblefield’s. “I’ve read it in English, Hebrew, and Greek.” Everybody in the day room except the newcomer knew this to be true. “And Major Stubblefield’s right. The word lord didn’t exist in biblical times. It’s a British political term forced into the scriptures by King James’s chauvinistic translators.” He paused. “Interestingly enough, in Old English, lord meant ‘loaf ward.’ That is, ‘guardian of the loaf.’ Shows you how important bread—the food not the cash—has been in human society, I guess.”
Closing his eyes, Dickie saw a long white wrapper enlivened by blue, red, and yellow dots. Next to it sat a jar of mayonnaise.
“There you have it,” Stubblefield said. “So, you’re accusing me of insulting the guardian of your loaf. Well, Seward, I wasn’t aware there was a loaf keeper in your—”
“Oh, stuff it!” snarled Seward. “You’re so damn sophomoric. We’re talking equivalents here. How else could the English translators have referred to—?”
“They didn’t much refer to Jesus as lord,” Foley corrected him. “That’s a more modern thing, it’s not even from the King James Bible, where Lord almost always meant Jehovah. As for you, Seward, I suppose you could call Jesus your commander-in-chief, undercutting that oaf in the White House, but what Jesus was, actually, was an itinerant rabbi.”
“Exactly,” agreed Stubblefield. “A homeless Jewish peace activist. Tell me, Seward, knowing that, would you allow your sister to marry Jesus? How about your daughter? How would you like him moving in next door to you? Whores and publicans and sinners dropping by at all hours, him expecting your wife to come over and wash his dirty peacenik tootsies?”
Redder than ever, Seward had had all he could bear. He scooped up his writing material and headed for the door. Two of the poker players folded their cards (the other two were stifling chuckles) and made to follow him out.
“Oh, don’t go away mad,” Stubblefield pleaded. He sounded sincere.
Seward whirled on him. “I don’t get mad,” he said, “I get even.”
“Even, eh? Not me. I get odd.” With that, he stood, let his copy of Joyce’s Ulysses tumble to the floor and twirling his arms above his bushy head, commenced to dance the most bizarre little dance Dickie had ever seen. Stubblefield jumped around like a monkey with its tail in a grinder, occasionally becoming clinically spastic, complete with drool, only to suddenly execute a slow, controlled, entirely graceful waltz turn; and all this erratic movement miraculously in time with a Beach Boys tune that was playing at low volume in the background.
Foley, on the surface at least, more reserved, more introverted than the major, rose slowly and joined in, imitating Stubblefield’s gyrations in a lumbering fashion, like a circus bear following the lead of its trainer.
Seward slammed the door behind him. The card players, even the two who’d been offended by Stubblefield’s irreverence, shook their heads and burst out laughing. And Dickie fell in love.
Around Seattle, it’s said that summer begins on the fifth of July. That’s an imprecise observation, of course, yet not without general validity. It’s common for Seattle’s Junes to be chilly and wet, and its Independence Days are famous for soggy firecrackers and canceled barbecues. Yet, interestingly, inexplicably, maybe even unpatriotically, the sun often will abruptly break out the very next day, and like a wallflower gone accidentally drunk at the punchbowl, carry on brazenly for a couple of months thereafter.
The carrying on isn’t necessarily consistent, however. Sometimes, even after its motor is running, the long-awaited Pacific Northwest summer will proceed in fits and starts, as if driving in meteorological midtown traffic. There’ll be days in August when, with the “kiss of fall” in the air, sweaters are pulled over a million heads and shorts are packed away for the season. Then, a few days later, the pale gasbag of a sun will flare like a cosmic Molotov cocktail, and every top of every convertible will come down again in raggy unison.
In this particular year, for example, Bootsey’s cheery salutation to autumn proved almost embarrassingly premature. Summer was definitely out of retirement and back on the job on the end-of-August afternoon when Bootsey came home late from the post office (there’d been a union meeting) and dragged her shiny, panting body through the door as if she were lugging the Statue of Liberty in a plutonium suitcase. In point of fact, all she really carried was her purse, her Winnie the Pooh lunchbox, and a rolled-up newspaper.
“Whew!” she exclaimed, fanning herself with the paper. She stood in the doorway, waiting, perhaps, for Pru to ask, “Hot enough for you?”—a question posed to Bootsey, much to her delight, at least thirty times that day. Pru said only, “Hi, Sis,” and turned back to the six o’clock news, which was practically over.
Joining her sister on the sofa, Bootsey made an announcement. “It’s a warm one!” she said triumphantly. Receiving neither argument nor affirmation, she, disappointed, went on to inquire, “Any word?”
“If you mean word from our friends in Frisco, no, nothing. My sense is that Dern isn’t telling the Feds any more than he told us. And until something breaks. . . .” She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he’s protecting an international drug cartel—or maybe he’s just being Dern.”
Silently, slowly, distractedly, Bootsey loosened the top two buttons of her damp blouse. She gave herself one last fan with the newspaper and then unrolled it. “Okay,” she seemed to say, though it was more a sigh than a word. “Anyway, there’s a tidbit in here you might find interesting. I read it on the bus.”
Indeed, Pru did take some interest in the article to which Bootsey referred. It concerned the aftermath of the circus train derailment near Grants Pass, Oregon. According to the report, several apes and a lion had been recaptured unharmed and without difficulty, but the entire troupe of rare tanukis had escaped into the hills and simply vanished.
The Fan Nan Nan gorge: laden with space and mist, dizzy with emptiness, a wound in the green wind, a vault where tigers store peacock bones and the shadows of ancient elephants are stacked. A solitary wire spans the chasm like a string of spittle linking smooching deities. Two women, one in a wheelbarrow, teeter on th
e strand like ants negotiating a broomstraw between fire and honey.
Unlike her fiancé, Lisa Ko never failed to be thrilled by the wire walk. She was a circus girl, after all, and though no aerialist herself, she’d long rubbed spangled shoulders with those who embraced the Karl Wallenda creed: “On the wire is living, everything else is only waiting.” She didn’t look down, even Wallenda wouldn’t have looked, but she didn’t need to. The height, the abyss, the jealous throb of gravity, the audacity of the act, those things made themselves quite apparent, and precariously aloft in the morning ether, she felt a delirium of defiant freedom that no gull or falcon, protected by wings and instinct, could ever know.
Midway in the crossing, a smallish bird, neither falcon nor gull, swooped by and plucked a long black hair from Lisa Ko’s head. Wisely, Lisa managed to postpone exclaiming or flinching until they’d reached the bamboo platform on the opposite side. As for the aerialist, she parked her void taxi gingerly and refrained from so much as mentioning that she thought she’d seen the hair turn into a glowing noodle in the cuckoo’s beak.
Lan (or was it Khap?) admitted her to Villa Incognito and showed her to Stubblefield’s study. Bare-chested, his tiger resplendent, the big man sat in a pair of knockoff Armani trousers, sipping Roederer Cristal champagne, reading Baudelaire. Upon seeing her, he faked a cough to conceal his gasp and lowered his eyelids so he wouldn’t show surprise.
“Bonjour, maestro,” said Lisa Ko. There was no mayonnaise hand grenade, no flying loaf. “Your little protégée has returned.”
“You’ve got that backward, sweetheart. I’m the protégé. The only thing I ever taught you we can’t do anymore because you’re practically a married woman.”
She laughed. “You’re incorrigible. And humbug modesty doesn’t become you. Nor does bad manners. This is your statue speaking, Pygmalion, and you’d better get up and kiss her hand.”