For days at a time the thought of it never completely left his mind. He had never been to Canada, knew little if anything about the place save the bits of geography and civics any school kid learns. It was up North, way up North, and cold, very cold, and it had a parliamentary form of government, a prime minister instead of a president, or however it worked, and it had those famous Mounties, the fearless men in red, like Dudley Dooright, and it was still owned by the queen of England. Wasn't it? At that time he had never been farther north than Colorado and that was for a one-week vacation during which the five of them his parents, Dalrymple and his older brother and sister slept at parks in a rented pop-up trailer and saw the majestic mountain sights. His brother by then was headed off to college in Austin that fall and his sister would soon follow.
They both still lived over there in that bright clean little city with the noble capitol building at its center and all those sparkling suburbs. They were both married now, both slapping together grand careers and healthy families. At least thus it appeared; and his parents reminded him of it as often as possible. His brother was a lawyer, his sister a state senator's aide. Yes. They were successes; they were making their way in the world. He was the last, the baby, he the disappointment: a grunt salesman in a crummy little department store in one of the city's old and fading and almost forgotten neighborhoods.
The Heights.
In the boggy Bayou City, average fifty-two feet above sea level, calling it the Heights wasn't saying much. It was the kind of neighborhood his parents had spent their entire lives getting away from, away from the smell of fried food, the old and listing houses, the insolent men lounging in their undershirts on the sagging front porches, the women's crude shouts up and down the dusty alleys, the dirty children playing on the cracked asphalt of the narrow streets. From such a steaming stew of poverty and deprivation they had risen, and they wanted their get to rise with them, to go beyond. They wanted to forget. But he, Dalrymple, their youngest, their third chance to prove themselves worthy, he, their Clydie, with his paltry job, the people he associated with, his drive each morning across town to The Heights, their son was a sad reminder to them of what they had tried to leave behind, and they despised him for it. He knew; he could see it in their faces when they looked at him, his father especially. Not for the work itself all work was honorable, they said of course, and he had to work, he had responsibilities but they despised the intangibles, the sense of failure and the tawdry necessity of his being who he was. And now even his luck had failed him, had failed them all. Again.
Oh Lord, he prayed once that night, the night of the lottery, when fear and uncertainty and disappointment had overwhelmed his thoughts, why can't anything ever go right? In the next breath he said out loud, "I been fucked, man!"
5
Dalrymple's mother knocked on the door and slipped into his room. She looked like a ghost, her beige chiffon robe hovering above the floor, easing toward him where he lay in his bed. It was well after midnight and he had been lying there awake for hours listening to the whispering radio, a habit that had always served as a kind of salve when trouble caused his soul to fester up. Faintly from down the hall he could hear his father snoring in the instant the door was open. It was like a distant harmonizing echo of the air conditioner's deep gurgling hum.
His mother turned down the radio and sat on the bed beside him. He could barely see her in the glow of the radio's dial but he could smell her quite distinctly: the emphatic woman odors of cold cream and hair spray and lingering perfume mixed with the subtle mother odors of sweat and laundry soap and harsh old worry. He moved under his blankets to make room for her broadened hips. She waited for half a minute, said nothing, settled herself but when she spoke her voice spilled onto him in the darkness, covered him like a shield of reassurance.
"How's my boy?" she said, and he thought he saw her smile. Speckles of light glinted from her eyeglasses.
"Peachy, Mom, just peachy."
She sat for a long time gazing at him helplessly, trying to smile, trying to reassure. And something in the glints of light on her glasses, something in that fluid mother's voice, something in her general presence caused a grave bitterness to well up in his heart, and it made him cold. He shivered in the chill air, and his mother tucked the blanket around his neck.
"Can't sleep?" she said.
He didn't say anything.
"Got a lot on your mind?"
He was silent.
"Oh Clydie," she said. "Why you, h'm?"
"I'm just unlucky, Mom, that's all."
No you're not."
"Yes I am. Always have been. I'm one of the ones in the world who don't get life on easy terms. That's the best I can figure it. It's probably just as well, I'm doing nothing anyway."
"Don't talk like that, Clydie."
"How should I talk?"
She didn't reply. She sat still and gazed down at him.
His head felt heavy on the old feather pillow, dazed by exhaustion.
Dalrymple said, "What does he say about it?"
"He who?"
"You know who . . . Daddy."
"Oh." She was silent for a moment. "Let's not talk about him just now."
"In other words he thinks it serves me right."
"Let's not talk about him just now."
They were quiet and just gazed at each other for a while. He saw in her face the lines of middle-age, the pale skin of a woman who never ventured outside a small constrained world. In the glints of light from her glasses, he saw perplexity and sadness.
"Does Mr. Darnell know?" she asked.
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
"Just what you'd expect. My job'll be waiting for me when I get back."
"He's a good man, Mr. Darnell."
He didn't say anything.
"You know, Clydie, you should listen to Mr. Darnell. He's a man who's made something of himself. And he obviously likes you."
"I'm like family, Mom."
"That's not all and you know it. You're a good worker."
Dalrymple snorted lightly.
"You know, Clydie, we're not all meant to be big people in the world. It doesn't mean you can't have a good life. Some of us weren't meant to go to college and be lawyers and what have you."
"You mean like Walter?" he said sarcastically.
"Your brother worked hard to get where he is."
"I know. And he's smart."
"Being smart isn't everything. If you work hard for Mr. Darnell when you come back you could make a fine career for yourself. A manager of a store . . . or maybe district manager someday. There are people who'd kill for such an opportunity."
"Ah Mom! that's not what I want." His voice was part whine and part cry, full of objection and injury.
"But it may be what you have to take, Clydie," she said firmly, evenly. Then she paused and tried to smile again, and she softened her voice. She touched the blanket, groping for his arm, and when she found it she took it loosely in her grip. "I worry about you, you know. I worry all the time. You're my youngest, you know, my baby . . ."
"Don't, Mother."
"I worry that you're so unsettled and now with this army business . . . you should take what you can get, Clydie."
"What I can get?"
"Don't expect too much, Clydie."
He snorted again and it flustered her.
"Well what do you want?"
"I want to be left alone," he said meanly.
She looked down at him for a long time. He saw no expression in her face, nothing that indicated he had hurt her. Perhaps she expected it, his meanness to her, his sarcasm. Isn't it natural for the off-spring to turn on the parent when the real parenting is finished with? What else could she do for him?
"Are you going to school in the fall?" she asked.
"Yes."
She nodded her head. "That's fine," she said. "But you'll have to keep on at the store you know. Your father won't pay for your child support or your car.
"
"I know."
"He says "
"I know." His voice had lifted a pitch to stop her and she sat again in silence.
"We all have responsibilities, Clydie, we all have a duty of some kind. I've worked at the same job for twenty years, and your father has been with the gas company thirty years. And you know why? Because we had responsibilities. I pray that Mr. Darnell will understand you and overlook your attitude these days."
"I got nothing against Darnell, Mom, or the store, or any of it, and I know I got responsibilities. But can't you see that I might want more, something else? And why are we talking about this now anyway. It means nothing now. I'm going to the war."
"You were spoiled, Clydie, we all spoiled you. You've made mistakes and you have to pay for them now."
"Thanks for reminding me."
"Be strong, Clydie, for once in your life be strong."
They looked at each other, and in each the other saw a kind of condemnation: it is all your fault as the son who should have listened to my wisdom; no it is all your fault as the mother who raised me so unwisely. Quickly they looked away.
"I'll pray for you," she said, looking back. She reached out then and stroked his hair. In her face he saw a mother's sympathy but nothing that he would have necessarily called love.
"Don't bother," he said.
She slapped him. A light but pitiless slap square against his face. It hadn't hurt him at all but he had seen her hand fly out and had felt it against his cheek as if an insect had blundered into him in the darkness. At first he was shocked his mother, a weak and docile woman in most concerns, had never before struck out at him but then he started to smile as one smiles when some great irony has at last revealed itself. He felt the smile wrenching up his face; he couldn't help himself; and in his mind appeared a humorous image of a gnat thinking it could injure an elephant. Her brow was low, her eyes pained, her mouth turned down in an ugly frown of resentment and injury. Her indignation, her constrained fury, made her seem all the weaker to him. He didn't blame her for slapping him; he deserved it; and knowing he deserved it caused the smile on his lips to broaden and deepen, though he knew it would also deepen the wound.
She said nothing. She glared at him. She stood up, still glaring at him in outrageous severity, and left the room. He gazed after her for a long time, long after the door had closed and his heart had calmed to its regular beat.
"I'm sorry, Mama," he said to the darkness.
After a while he turned up the volume on the radio, and once again the distant whispering world entered his room.
6
Morning, at last. Dalrymple sat on the edge of his bed, smoking, coughing, waiting for his parents to leave. Out there he could hear them: the flush of a toilet, the clank of a spoon against a coffee cup, the closing of a door. At the window he watched his father, dressed for work, starched and creased and polished, checking his fly, walk down the driveway and turn at the street. At the corner, where Merton Lane emptied into Prairie Lea Road, a minor thoroughfare, his father would meet his ride, Mr. Ponce, for the drive into town. A few minutes later his mother backed the Chevy out and drove away. So Dalrymple emerged.
The house was pleasant at that time of day, and he enjoyed being there. It always seemed illicit somehow, his being there alone in the morning. He could do anything, go into any room, any closet, take whatever he wanted.
He had slept very little but in his veins pumped a certain kind of excitement, the exalted feeling that comes from passing through exhaustion to something else, a second wind. He poured himself coffee and sipped it while he took his first piss of the morning. In the kitchen again he poured more coffee and then went out to the little patio at the back of the house. This part of the yard was hidden from the eyes of their neighbors by board fences, hedges of wax leaf ligustrum, the back L of the house.
Sitting in one chair, propping his feet on another, he felt more or less at peace and waited for the steamy day to come on. Birds chirped and flitted among the branches of the trees. There had once been a huge oak tree back here, but to the immense disappointment of his parents it had died several years ago, been taken down, and the young elms, the young willow, the young tallow trees his father had planted in its stead were just beginning to clear the roof of the house. A squirrel was eating at the bird feeder, kicking up seed and making a racket, and a blue jay dove at it from time to time, squawking, trying to run it off.
Dalrymple thought of what he had to do that day. It was a Friday, which meant the big truck would come to the store, which meant he would have something specific and menial to do. He would spend his time unloading hampers of bicycle parts and windshield wipers and paint cans, pricing, restocking. Friday was a good day he might sell something too, make some money but he was not inclined to do much. Overnight his mind had linked the store with the government in its crime against him, and he wanted a kind of revenge; it would be the revenge of the lazy and the shiftless, giving as little of himself as he could get away with.
"Let 'em fire me," he said out loud.
He looked forward to seeing Jane that afternoon when she came to work, and he figured he had better go by that evening and see Angie, his ex, to tell her what had happened. Thinking of Angie made his frog of a heart start croaking and brought up the bitterness from his gut he could taste it so he turned his thoughts to Jane, Sweet Jane. Jane was a part-time clerk at the store. She was a few years older than Dalrymple, married to a poor pipe fitter and raising a young son, but still they flirted, joked and had even kissed a few times back in the warehouse. Hey, good-looking, she had said once in greeting and that's how it started. Hey, yourself, he had returned, and they gave each other a look full of that special meaning. For months now the attraction had been deepening, the possibility had been ripening into a certainty until lately it had become apparent that the only remaining questions were When? and Where?
She possessed a large and by all appearances very healthy body and a seething kind of unflaunted sexuality that made Dalrymple burn inside when he got near her. Coupled with this was a shyness, a sweetness, an overripe friendliness about her and a strange vulnerability, almost a sadness. She too had married too young and was stuck now in a resentful union of necessity. Yes. Perhaps today he would make his try . . . what did he have to lose?
Back inside he ate a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table. He read the front page of the Chronicle while he ate and paid particular attention to the war news, though the names and developments meant little to him. Then he watched a few minutes of the morning show on television: more war news, a report on the lottery, draft figures, body counts, Nixon in Washington, a plane crash in Idaho. For the first time in his life he was a part of the daily news, he was vaguely famous.
The phone rang as he was stepping into the bathroom for his shower. He didn't really feel like talking to anyone just then, but on the fifth ring he ran into the kitchen and snatched up the receiver. A deep and gravelly but obviously disguised voice said, "Don't go." It was followed by a teasing chortle of a laugh.
"What? Who is this?"
"Don't do it, you little bastard."
The "little bastard" gave him away: "Oh it's you. How you doing, Uncle Blackie?"
Dalrymple heard another laugh on the line that frazzled out into a high wheeze and then a rumbling cough.
"Not too good today," said Blackie. "This heat's awful and my lungs are giving me fits lately, but we're not talking about me just now. Don't you let those sons of bitches drag you off for cannon fodder, son. I got friends in low places, the lowest of places, and we can get you out of this. I promise."
It was good to hear his voice; contained in its hoarse gruff tones was some vague promise of hope in the world, the sense in Dalrymple's heart that somewhere in his own blood was living the inherited chromosome of something like World Knowledge, a different way of living wherein will power and guts led to the potential of getting by even in the realm of harsh reality. Blackie was different from most of
them but he was kin.
"How'd you find out?" asked Dalrymple.
"Your sweet mother called, and I read the newspapers, you know. So I thought you might need some advice, and I don't mean the kind your father would give you, bless his Republican's heart. You better listen up while I'm still around to give it."
Blackie wheezed and coughed again, and Dalrymple removed the phone from his ear. It was a painful and frightening sound.
"Hang on a minute," came faintly from the receiver.
Uncle Blackie, Uncle Marvin Dalrymple, the Black Bull, his father's eldest brother, fifteen years senior, had gotten his nickname for legitimate reasons. He was the only one of The Bunch of Nine, as they called themselves, who had ever done anything with his life besides work eight-to-five for a living and raise a houseful of children. The stories Dalrymple had heard about Blackie's life made him out to be nothing but a rascal and ne'er-do-well, and there was at least a whiff of truth to them. But there was more to Blackie, much more, and Dalrymple had always kept a clean closet in his heart for his uncle. He considered himself linked to Blackie somehow through a mystical bonding of the luckless soul. He liked Blackie in the way one fuck-up is drawn to another. And it was mutual: Blackie was the only one of Dalrymple's relatives who had ever given him any special attention. Dalrymple's mother said it was because their birth dates were the same and because Clydie was "the spitting image" of the youthful Blackie. Whenever she spoke of Blackie's youth she did so, Dalrymple knew, by way of warning, an object lesson: "See how Blackie turned out, with nothing but the shirt on his back and a big charming smile. Is that how you want to end your days?" All of which did more to pique Dalrymple's interest than frighten him into submission. He wanted in some hidden part of himself to know all about Blackie and then to imitate, though the courage to do so to really do it had not yet materialized in his character.
Blackie's was, to Dalrymple, a wonderful history. In the early years of the Depression Blackie had left school to take a job driving a delivery truck to help the family out and to keep the younger ones at their studies. But he liked to drive too fast, a trait he shared with his young nephew, and one day he sent his truck into a collision with a trolley car on Heights Boulevard. He spent two months in a charity hospital, and when he got out he had a nasty limp and a new attitude. He claimed the company had not properly maintained the delivery trucks and something had gone wrong with the truck that day the steering or something and then of course the company left him to the mercy of the fates after his accident. "The lowlifes," as he called all people with money, wouldn't rehire him and did nothing to help him out with his bills. Whatever the truth was, soon after Blackie got out of the hospital he went radical.
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