The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Travis welcomed the chance to get away from the reading that usually filled his Sunday afternoons, and he was an “old hand” at the full repertoire of hiding games. His playmates here included a number of his cousins and neighbors, all of them of the same social class, rural poor, without any mixture of the children of the outsiders (ex-hippies and other subculture arty types). Some of the players were as young as eight or nine; those younger than that were really not clever enough to play the particular game they chose, but there were players as old as fifteen or even sixteen who had grown up playing it.

  “Didje ever play I-draw-a-snake-upon-yore-back?” Travis asked me, and when I asked him how it was played and he told me the basics of it, I remarked that it was like a variation on the basic hide-and-seek and struck me as remarkably similar to games that I had known in my childhood in Svanetia, usually variations on ligwebupgosh, as the universal game was known there (it translates roughly as “finding-the-secreted”).

  The essence of the variation is that it increases the “foreplay” (if I may be forgiven) of the basic hide-and-seek: whoever is “It” must turn his back on the others and bury his face in his arm against a tree while the leader slithers his finger down It’s back, intoning, “I draw a snake upon your back. Who’s gonna put in the eye?” and then a volunteer steps forward and pokes It in the back, “putting in the eye.” It must then turn around and attempt to guess who among the other players has poked him.

  He is not told, yet, if his guess is correct. He must first set a task for the other to perform, ideally a difficult, time-consuming task. Once the task is suggested (such as climbing a tree to its top and back down, or running around the house twelve times, or running down to the creek and bringing back a live crawdad), the identity of the poker, the eye-putter, is revealed. If It has guessed him or her correctly, then that person must perform the task, while all the others run and hide (and from that point on, the game reverts to conventional hide-and-seek).

  But if It has missed the guess, then It must perform the task himself or herself while the others run and hide.

  After the counting-out rhyme-chant of “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,” etc., a fourteen-year-old girl named Denise McWalter (!) was designated as It. After the snake had been drawn and “dotted” on her back, she guessed the poker to be her best friend, one Amy Murrison, and then she teasingly assigned as the task to be performed the deflowering of Travis Coe. “Take him to the bushes” was the expression. There was much giggling and joking about the task, and some of the older boys protested that they hadn’t been selected instead. “I’m three years older than Lum and I aint never done it yet myself,” one lad complained.

  As it turned out, Denise’s guess of Amy was wrong, and thus she herself had to carry out the task, which, Travis surmised eventually, was what she had been hoping for all along.

  “It won’t take but a minute,” Denise kept saying to him as she led him not into the bushes but out behind the barn and then through one of its rear doors, into a stall floored with straw.

  In the conventional playing of the game, the task assigned should take only long enough for all the others to run and find a good place to conceal themselves. But long after everyone else had hidden and someone kept crying, “All hid, all hid,” Denise and Travis did not return. It took much more than a minute. The others eventually gave up on them and selected a new It and resumed playing without them.

  Three things in Travis’s memory of that episode remained strongest in his mind, all three of them part of his education about females: One was his first sight of Denise’s pubic hair. He had just begun to grow the first peach-fuzz of hair around his own genitals and wasn’t sure it was normal for himself, and he had no inkling that girls had hirsute groins. Denise, who didn’t at all mind removing her jeans and her panties, surprised him not just with the swelling of her hips and the thinness of her naked waist but with her dense, thick, dark pubic hair, which did not frighten him so much as arouse his compassion, because he assumed, but dared not inquire, that something in that growth was abnormal and atavistic. For months afterward he puzzled about it to the point of obsession, until he discovered that I too had the same luxuriant mass of hair down there.

  A second thing that would not leave his memory of the experience was his discovery that girls are capable of an intensity of feeling analogous to that which happens to the boy when he ejaculates. Girls don’t exactly ejaculate but they do, to use Denise’s expression, “start falling apart.”

  “There now,” Denise had said to him, once she had guided him into her. “Now you aint a virgin no more. How’s it feel?” (And what most inflamed me with jealousy was her privilege of being able to ask that question.)

  He was uncomfortably aware of the texture of her pubic hair pressing against his groin, but that awareness was almost overwhelmed by the sensation of his penis adrift within the moist chamber. “Okay, I guess,” he managed to allow. “How’s it feel to you?” He solicitously wondered if the hairy growth was painful.

  “Super,” she said, and cooed, then groaned and began moving, tossing her hips. This was his third surprise, for, although like any country kid he’d had plenty of opportunity to watch the mating of animals, from barnyard fowl to enormously hung horses, he had never seen the female of any species devote any energy of her own to the ritual. Absolute passivity was the norm, and here again he suspected that Denise must have something wrong with her, that she was bucking and heaving as if she thought she was supposed to do all the work. He urgently tried to subdue her movements by the velocity and intensity of his own, but this only served to increase her ardor, until she was gasping and crying, “I’m gonna turn inside out!” Her warning slowed him only for a moment of wonder, because he felt as if he were turning inside out himself and wanted to complete the process, and tried hard, and did.

  “Ohhhhh!” Denise sighed loudly as she let go, falling apart and turning inside out, and I involuntarily found myself sighing Otttt! in my Svanetian throat as I listened to Travis finish the story.

  IV

  For the longest time after he finished and I sighed my sigh, I was unable to say anything more, consumed as I was with jealousy. I had never felt this emotion before, not with Islamber or Dzhordzha or Kenny or any of the several others, all of whom had lost their virginity with me. My depression and anger over the thought of Denise as my rival, nay, as my predecessor in the indoctrination of Travis into the mysteries, made me ask myself the question that the Paris Review’s Barbara Phillips would ask, “Do you honestly know why it is so important to you that your boy be a virgin?”

  To which I answered, simply, “If he is not, it is as if the novelist discovers that someone else has already told his story. And perhaps done it better.”

  I think I must have gone into a kind of sulk or funk that lasted for most of the rest of the morning. I did not do any work on Le Garçon Georges that day.

  “Did I mess up, or something?” Travis asked at lunch. “Have I done went and made some fool mistake?” I shook my head, but morosely, and he went on, “How come you’re so standoffish, all a suddent?”

  “Last night,” I said, “throughout it, I was under the impression that you and I were doing all those things for the very first time.”

  “Huh?” he said. “You mean you never did it when you were a kid?”

  “Not with you,” I sighed, and I could not stifle a sob.

  “Huh?” he said again. “When you was a kid I wasn’t even born.” This struck me almost as a repudiation of the sweetness of his earlier “I could blink my eyes and play like you wasn’t a bit older’n me,”

  “But last night,” I complained, “last night I was trying very hard to pretend that we were doing it for the very first time, together.”

  “Shoot, most of that stuff we did last night I never even thought of doing with Denise. She never thought of it. Golly Moses fishhooks, I never even knew there was such things to do! Not with no splishin and splashin and sploshin and all!”
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  I managed to smile lamely and brush away a tear. “Still, you had intercourse with her. Did you do it again?”

  “Well, yeah,” he faltered, as if reluctant to get himself in any deeper. “There was a good few other Sunday afternoons, but then she had this boyfriend, see, and Bobby Joe found out about it, and he’s maybe five years older and bigger’n me, and he said he’d break ever bone in my body. That was jist one of the reasons I left home.”

  “How many times altogether did you do it with Denise?” It was like I was a novelist masochistically checking the library to see how many other novels told the same story I’d thought was my original invention.

  He tried to remember and came up with a guess. “Oh, if you don’t count a couple of times we had to stop because we heard somebody a-comin, maybe eleven or twelve, all told.”

  He was breaking my heart. I narrowed my eyes at him, matching his crafty squint, and said, “That day we first met, when I was about to hire you as my houseboy, I asked you if you’d had any sexual experience, and you said you hadn’t.”

  “You ast me if I’d ever slept with a gal, dammit, and I said no I aint, and that’s the gospel truth.”

  “But you fucked her!” I cried, speaking the English verb for the first time in my life. “You fucked her, and you were only twelve years old!”

  “Heck, I’m still only twelve,” he pointed out, “and you fucked me, and vice uh versey.”

  I could say nothing more, retreating once again into my sulking silence. I realized that he was hopelessly, to borrow another expression of his people, “used goods”: he was pawed over, secondhand. I could never feel the joy of having ushered him into the first experience of sex, as the novelist wants the joy of introducing his reader to a unique story. The novelist cannot say, “Pretend you’ve never heard this before.” The novelist cannot even say, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”

  All that the novelist can say is, “Okay. That’s it. Good-bye, Travis. I wish for you much happiness. I wish for you that you will stay out of trouble, perhaps go back to school, be a good boy.” It was not until after I heard myself speaking the words that I realized I’d said the same thing to Kenny Elmore.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “Leave,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t use you anymore.” I stood up and fetched my purse and took out my wallet and gave him five twenties: a hundred dollars. “Here,” I said. “And you may take all of your new clothes and shoes with you.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me for one last time. Then he left a dependent clause dangling: “If that’s the way you feel about it.” He gathered up his things. He had a final request: “Could you see your way to letting me keep a copy of Georgie Boy?”

  “I thought you’d finished it,” I said.

  “I need to read it again,” he declared. So I gave him a copy of my book. I even wrote something on the flyleaf, nothing special, Very Best Wishes to Travis, Kat, something like that.

  And he left me. All he left behind, I discovered later, was his copy of Wah’kon-tah. But it wasn’t his. After I read it and discovered how much I didn’t know about the Osages, I’d have to return it for him to the library.

  22

  I

  For at least a whole day after he was gone I cried. Not even the arrival in the day’s mail of the proofs of Schorschi, ein Knabe, the German edition of my novel, could console me or distract me from my grief. That grief, I was quick to realize, was whimpered not over his leaving but over his prior loss of virginity, over my missed chance for the privilege of being first in his history.

  Not as an act of retaliation against my rival but as a rite of exorcism, I began to create Denise McWalter, as I once had created her namesake Cathlin McWalter, as I kept on creating Ekaterina; I gave Denise an appearance and a personality and even a history: a drunken father divorced from an abusive, foul-mouthed, unfeminine mother, an infancy and childhood in a squalid mobile home, a keen mind squandered upon television soap operas and movie magazines, an ennui more acute and restless than that of her few girlfriends, a precocious sexuality that had her chronically playing with herself from the age of seven until she was deflowered by Bobby Joe at the age of ten, a totally unsatisfactory five-year romance with Bobby Joe punctuated and relieved by one summer’s search for and finding of an “ideal” boyfriend two years her junior in the form of an unspoiled Travis, whom she proceeded to spoil.

  Loneliness, lust, and self-doubt are the three key ingredients to a climate for creative activity, as I told the Paris Review’s Barbara Phillips, and the weeks following Travis’s departure from the Halfmoon were like a spawning of those three elements to prepare the spores in the leaf litter of my life for the mushrooming of the many fictions that sprang up out of my imagination that spring, beginning with the much-anthologized short story “I Draw a Snake upon Your Back,” the first of the several pieces in what would become my second published book, not a second novel but the collection The Names of Seeking Games.

  Travis had not been gone three days when I sat myself down at my desk and began writing the story, not in Georgian but in English—or, more accurately, I wrote the first page in my familiar, comfortable Georgian but was reminded thereby of how I’d had tirelessly to translate Georgie Boy from the Georgian with the “help” of Daniel Lyam Montross and his old unabridged dictionary, which still remained at my elbow; and, opening it, I felt that his spirit was with me again. To test it, to see if he was “still there,” I translated that first page into English on the spot, having only a little difficulty finding one word I wanted, altruism; then, having found it and replaced the Georgian equivalent, I crumpled and tossed the Georgian original page and resolved thenceforward to do all my writing in the same uncomfortable but expressive style with which I essay these memoirs.

  “Thanks, Dan,” I said aloud, the first words I’d spoken since I’d bade Travis Coe farewell. Morris, more accustomed to the silence he’d enjoyed since I stopped crying, jerked his head up from his nap and stared at me. “I wasn’t talking to you, Morris Cat,” I said. But he didn’t return his cheek to his paws: he continued to stare deeply into my eyes, almost as if he had never seen me before…or, I think, as if I had never seen him before and was just now, in the desperation of my loneliness, recognizing him for who he was. Could a “spirit” such as Daniel Lyam Montross, I wondered, take possession of the body of an animal? Would a spirit want to inhabit a living creature such as an old cat more comfortably than an inanimate object like an unabridged dictionary? “Or maybe I was talking to you,” I said to Morris. “Are you really Dan, Morris?”

  Any owner of cats knows that they are indifferent to human speech. Some of the less intelligent cats will appear to respond to their names by coming when called (truly intelligent cats never respond in any way to human speech), but the baby talk with which many humans address their cats (the person who asks “Does snuzzums wanta eat brekky now?” should realize that the cat’s answer of “Now!” is just a reflex mewing) will cause only an aggravated tail twitch or ear lowering in the more stupid cats and will produce no response whatever in bright cats.

  So I was not surprised that Morris’s cool, leonine face only regarded me dispassionately and impersonally, even insouciantly, albeit with a glimmer in his slanted eyes that could only have been a wise human’s. But then…then, I swear, he reached out with a paw and plopped it down on the opened page of the unabridged dictionary where I had been looking up altruism. He left his paw on the page long enough for me to peer closely to see the word he was indicating, his foreclaw resting upon it: always. Then, with the faintest trace of a smile (or did I just imagine the smile?), he removed his paw.

  “Always, Dan?” I asked. “Are you saying, Morris, that you are always Dan?” But he betrayed not a twitch of any expression or response, just that profound but inaccessible depth of his eyes. “You know,” I went on, feeling not at all silly, “I’ve suspected for a long time that you really do exist, Dan, but this is the only attempt you’ve m
ade to confirm it. Would you kindly, if you are Dan, Morris, just nod your head? Just once? Just make the slightest little nod?”

  But of course he would not, and I was left with only that always, which could have been purely an accident of the placement of his paw. Later, as I resumed writing my short story, I opened the dictionary to the correct page and asked Morris/Dan, “What is the backwoods f-word I want for a girl like Denise McWalter who’s flirtatious, fast, and frisky?” I waited and silently prayed that my cat would drop his paw upon feisty but his only response to my continued talking was self-conscious licking of his paw and washing himself with it.

  “All right, Dan,” I said at length, “be that way. But I know you’re there.”

  I wrote six or seven pages of the story “I Draw a Snake upon Your Back,” conscious that Morris had not returned to his slumber, or that although he feigned his customary napping posture he was keeping one eye slightly open and upon me. It was perhaps my sense of his Muselike presence or inspiration, if not his actual help, that made the beginning of the story so enticing and promising, what dear friend Larry Brace would much later comment upon in his piece “Poetic Structure in the Prose of V. Kelian’s ‘I Draw A Snake upon Your Back,’” published in Studies in Contemporary Fiction, when he pointed out that the entire first section of the story is a kind of verbal foreplay matching the foreplay of the game. How surprised Larry would be when I told him that I’d written that part “under the influence” of Daniel Lyam Montross, whose life and work had come to obsess Larry totally at that point of his career.