!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  “Did you ever look at the sky at Bread Loaf?” I asked.

  “What ever made you think of that place?” Allis said.

  “The stars, girl, the stars.”

  “Yeah, look. It’s pretty, but I’m not dressed for a long stay out here. Let’s go in.”

  It was getting cold and a mist was rising from the cooling ground. I put my arm around her hip; she put hers around mine. “You take your pill?”

  “I don’t need it, honey.”

  “Do me a favor. Take it, take them.”

  Glenn drove up that first weekend. He seemed not to disturb the air, as he moved, quite as much as he used to; he had in some way perceived his vulnerability, I thought. He should have been still galloping on clouds, with his first book already under contract; and I thought his nostrils would be quivering with the still-distant smell of success. (Never mind what I’d told him. Who when young believes? Had I believed Langston Hughes? But Hughes had taken his tambourine to glory to the tune of Ellington’s Do Nothin Till You Hear from Me—perhaps a more stylish way to meet the Big Pool Player than sending a note saying, I Am Bored.)

  Glenn and Allis had had, it was natural to assume, some conversations about me, so there he was, trying not to be worried, while Mack, with that frenzied cool of a kid dying for company, dogged at his heels, wanting to have a catch, go for a swim, destroy snakes, put up a tent, cook hot dogs. Allis carried him off with her to shop, and Glenn and I were left at lakeside holding beer and fishing poles.

  “This,” he said, “is a great idea.”

  “You don’t have to rush back, do you?”

  “Naw. I can stay a while. How you doin’?”

  “Okay.”

  “Slowin’ down with the work? Taking next year off school?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I had been concentrating on my line. I never understood why it was that Mack could bait with pieces of bread and come up with some biggies, and I couldn’t get shit with caviar. I said, “Surprised you didn’t bring someone with you. You’re taking all this too seriously.”

  He laughed.

  “You bring more of the book for me to read?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Maybe you can help me with something.”

  “Me?”

  “Hey, you sound like you never said that I ought to change this or move that around—”

  “I know, I know. But this time you asked. I’m flattered.”

  “I figure you’ve written more books than I have.”

  We sat in silence, listening to the wind playing in the trees. I felt a great sense of comfort with him sitting beside me. Then he said, “I don’t think I want to write another book. Just now, it’s tough finishing this one.”

  I started to ask why, but he rushed words at me: “Jed’s dead.”

  Jed had not played the past two seasons because of an injury. He’d returned to Cleveland.

  “The Lakers didn’t want him back and no one else wanted him. He was just a piece of meat. Couldn’t find work—who wants a dinosaur cluttering up your place, you know. Not even as a playground director. Never saved anything. Tried to draw up and shrink in the ground so people wouldn’t know it was him looking so beat—”

  “No commercials, no color commentary for the games—”

  “You kiddin’, Dad? The white boys got all them gigs, damn near all of them. Jed was ashamed that he’d made it and then lost it.”

  “Never married, did he?”

  Glenn snorted. “Having too good a time. I mean he wasn’t making Wilt’s money; still, it wasn’t bad for a guy who couldn’t count to one hundred and whose vocabulary you could almost put on a cigarette wrapper. A piece of meat, black meat; that’s all he was. I tried to talk to him and he’d always say, ‘Man, you right. I ought to go back to school and finish up, be somethin’ more than a basketball player.’ He always said that and then smiled and I knew he was shuckin’, was too kind to ask what all my education had got for me. Shit, I didn’t have a Rolls-Royce or a circular bed with mirrors on the ceiling or a swimming pool or instant recognition.”

  He sank into silence.

  I said, “It was that ankle, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it was, and it might have been all right but they made him play on it a whole season before he had to quit. I mean, he wasn’t Wilt or Jerry West.” He sighed. “Last week he suited up in his Lakers’ outfit, took one of the game balls they’d given him when he was Rookie of the Year, and he dribbled right out on the highway and tried to stuff the ball down the top of a trailer rig doing seventy-five.” He shrugged. “And that was it.”

  I looked out at our lines running down into the water and then seeming to go off at angles.

  “I feel like I put the whammy on him, Dad, and I don’t know how to—maybe I don’t want to—finish the book. It won’t help anything or anybody.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Something had sunk in after all, but I didn’t feel good about it. “Finish. For yourself. That’s most important. It’s all a meat market, son. The thing is to try to stay off the hook.”

  Glenn had a habit of starting to speak, stopping, and then speaking again. It was as though thoughts came at him like lightning and some he had to dodge. “I wonder if it’s not too late for good books.”

  He looked at me; I had not responded right away. “Can it ever be?”

  “Maybe it always was, Dad. We just keep hoping.”

  “If you didn’t write, what would you do, teach?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?” I shouldn’t have said that. Some old-fashioned cultural holdover had slipped out: one must do something.

  “I think I wanna travel. Hire out on a ship, like Grandpa, like Langston Hughes, look at things, do that until I’m ready to write or settle down with something else. Sound okay?”

  He didn’t have to ask, yet I was pleased that he had, and he knew it. I envied his lack of encumbrances. I trusted the range of his vision because it seemed that something had sunk in after all. “That was an asking,” I said. “You didn’t have to.”

  “Well … the money for the education … things like that. Some folks get testy. They want you right out there in the marketplace.”

  “You don’t owe me—us—anything.”

  “Yes I do,” he said quickly. He became busy with his line. “I worry about you,” he said after a while. “Can’t help it.”

  “I’m okay, and I’m really gonna slow down.”

  “Go traveling. Allis wants that for you.”

  “I know. Maybe later. I’ve got a few things to finish up.”

  “Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve had a few things to finish up.” He snatched open the lid of the cooler and took out two more beers. “What you’ve always needed was just a well-armed battalion instead.”

  I flashed on a father going and coming, coming and going, while his children waited to play with him, and I felt suddenly and abjectly apologetic. “Look—I’m really sorry—”

  “Hey! It’s all right! It took a little time, but I know where you’re coming from. I’ve learned the lesson and that’s why I wanna hit the road—the way you did.”

  “But where am I coming from?”

  He laughed one of those nasty street laughs, like someone who’s looked over your shoulder long enough to know your hand.

  “Tear down the sand castle,” he said. “Put it back under the water.”

  He was right. I said, “Mack has the same complaint.” The abrupt bitterness that framed my words surprised me. “I’m always finishing up a few things.”

  “Oh,” Glenn said, “he’ll learn the way I did that there are a couple of things more important than playing with a Frisbee. Don’t worry.”

  “I count on you to help with Mack, you know, if anything happens to me.”

  Yes, I had been thinking such things. Putting items in order, I guess it’s called, and pondering once again how a society, in inverse importance, could make an individual more valuable dead than alive. Insurance. Seeing that the lo
ved ones were provided for, etc.

  Glenn looked at me and then stared glumly out at the water. “You didn’t have to say that; that was a given, and that’s why it’s better for me to travel now instead of later.”

  The last part was so familiar. I said, “Thanks. But talking about life and death, continuity, yes, and travel, I want to tell you something important.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “No. You’ve got yourself another brother in Spain.”

  “Say what?”

  Now I laughed.

  Glenn took a very deep swallow of his beer, peering out at me over the can. “How old?”

  “Around eighteen now.” Glenn’s face was without expression; it waited for detail to be carved into it. “I never saw him,” I said, “only a picture some time ago.” I felt compelled to say hurriedly “I looked for him—them.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Alejo Cato Donoso.”

  Glenn said, “He ought to be a poet with a name like that.” He moved his line. “Cato. The relationship couldn’t have been all bad. Did you love the woman?”

  “Allis asked me that and I said no. But I was lonely, so I guess I did love her. Then. And, as a matter of fact, he is a poet. His mother told me that in a note several years ago, and now my Spanish publisher tells me about his work.”

  Glenn smiled a great, beaming smile and said, “You leave your mark, Dad. Maybe a writing genius like me.”

  “Maybe. I have this hankering to see him. It bothers me, I mean, it really bugs me, but it was one of those things born out of night, and went into daytime and then went, period.”

  “It happens,” he said. “Somehow, you never think it happens to your father—although, I gotta tell you, I always had an open mind.”

  “I want you to look him up. Talk to him. See how much of us is in him.”

  Our lines lay languidly, not even drifting now. I said, “I worried about him. Before I even knew it was a him. She—her name is Monica—already had a kid when I met her. In a way, it was like being back with you and Catherine. She was part African, part Spanish. When I found out about the other kid, she was gone. I’ll give you the dough.”

  “Maybe I can hire out on a ship that stops in Spain.”

  “Yeah. Give it to you, anyway. Do you remember, were you pissed when I left?”

  “Not pissed, but I remember a hole in my life, when I didn’t see you.”

  “Well. I’m sorry.”

  He reached over and hugged me. We both stared at the water. The bass seemed to be having a very good time not ten feet from where our lines were. Glenn looked at his watch. “It’s time for your pill.”

  Naturally, there were times that summer when the work seemed to want to wait. Some days when I was alone, Allis and Mack having gone back to the city for something or other, I would sit poised before the machine, my notes neatly stacked, yesterday’s manuscript marked and ready for rewrite, and then would glance out the window. That was my undoing. For mile upon mile the valley opened itself to the sky, which pressed down into it. I would go outside and sit and stare at the serenity of the coupling, and I marveled at the foliage silhouetted against the heavens: some of it looked like the profiles of people I knew.

  But it was the wind, I think, the wind that most hypnotized me. The wind said things; it said things in whispers, gusts and occasional roars. The wind had to know all. It had whipped around this Earth from the beginning, enveloping it as it moved through space. The wind had seen and heard everything: long-extinct beings communicating with !clicks, the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes exploding up out of the plain while other ranges, now nameless, slid beneath the sea; it must have recorded the awesome sounds of lands breaking away to begin their inch-per-year journeys apart from each other; in reply what would the wind say about the sudden Cretaceous extinction of the great reptiles: They ate their own eggs? They drowned in a flood? God had been playing pool and when he destroyed the planet between Mars and Jupiter it spread deadly iridium over the Earth? Would this wind echo Akhnaton in his prayers perceiving the sun as Center, and was it now whispering as it slipped through trees and grasses, curled miniature tsunamis out on the lake, that all was now being brought to us by the people who stole everything from the Southern Tribes in whose sun-drenched lands gods were born? By the people who stole sextant and compass and grandly presented us with five hundred years of Holy Crusades and channeled the Renaissance northward, evolving Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, et al., and who brought you the first multinational companies and over-ocean trade in souls and bodies, who implanted ovenry in the tale of Hansel and Gretel and made Jack-the-Real-Culprit the hero—he who had stolen from the giant sleeping peacefully atop the beanstalk? Say what, wind, Typhon, Huracán, Zephyr, Tronada? This is being presented by the people who brought you the spinning jenny and the cotton gin, the steam engine, the Gatling, Spencer, Colt, the .75, .88 and the .105? And why not have developed the ICBMs and MIRVs after Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

  This wind had witnessed the passing of every one, including my mother’s in her sun-bright bedroom, with her husband (they’d never divorced, only separated) riding one ocean and her son another, and it, in coats of sleet, had driven my torpedoed father to the bottom near Murmansk—strange place for a black man to die—and this same wind (had it never tired of seeing, hearing, doing?) knew the dark Moravian forests in which Allis’ people had huddled, watching Catholics kill Protestants and Protestants kill Catholics, and knew that both together had killed Jews—this wind that had absorbed the billions of first-born sounds, always a cry of anguish and fear that the end of the passage was about to commence.

  Chastened, I would then re-enter the house and settle down to tell my story, which seemed barely a pause between all the words, the infinite number of words, the wind could tell if only it were possible.

  When I had finished my work for the day, in that vast forest silence stitched only by wind sounds, I reread Paul’s books. “Why those?” Allis had asked when I packed them. I’d shrugged, truly not knowing why, except that if I wandered around in them, I might chance upon something that might explain us both.

  And I did.

  With the exception of The Burnt Offering, he had written absolutely dead things, without potency or life. His books were drills, exercises, promenades of the seeming manners and morals of the times, totally incapable of springing up armed men, as I believed books ought to do. If his works did preserve the essences of his will, his intellect, then I had no reason to envy him. We had simply moved through a second life, had once again reached puberty, when the glands, this time artificially stimulated (fame, fortune), produced a change that was not physiological. He had arrived at his religious certainty, after a false start. My certainty, racial, had been imposed. I rejected that imposition; Paul had no need or no wish to reject his. Toward the end of summer, when the dew became heavier in the mornings and white spider webs dotted the ground, when one came on shedded snakeskins and the late afternoons bit harder with chill, when I had finished all his books, I returned to my first conclusion about the leaking away of our friendship.

  Simply, I was a reminder, proof, that the somewhat lofty values he held (within reason) could work only if he restrained or ignored me. Obviously, the two were interchangeable; they gained the same end. Given the situation, illusion could only persist, insist, if one caused the reality to be absent.

  I was Paul’s reality, finally, and who ever wants much to do with that?

  And he, goddamn it, was mine.

  Absurd, this bicamerality that turned each on the other while time robbed us both—as individuals, as groups—of unheard-of probabilities. I wondered if Paul had ever thought this way. I wondered, in fact, precisely what he was wondering these days.

  One day when Allis and Mack had gone to the city and I was moving through my routine, the phone rang. When it rang here, it always startled; it was like a lance slashing through time itself; the ring was an anachronism composed of wires,
bells, electricity, unimaginable distances, faceless operators and technicians. One wanted it to ring, to carry good news, greetings, information, but one was always startled to hear the ring insisting itself just under the sound of lazy winds gliding across the mountaintop.

  “Hello,” I said, hoping Allis had not had an accident or that the apartment had not been burglarized.

  A fine female voice said, “Mr. Cato Douglass?”

  “Yes, who’s this?”

  The phone startled, yes, but it was like the mail, holding magical qualities for the writer; a thumb up, a thumb down, a rocket ride into the cosmos or a descent so swift and so deep that Dante’s Inferno resembled a swim in three feet of water.

  “Hold for Mr. Kass, please.”

  Kass? Kass? Oh! Bob Kass. The Bob Kass. He had been the subject of numerous laudatory articles about his leadership in the new Hollywood. He brought in new writers, new directors, took chances. I tried to grab hold of myself in midbound. Is there a writer whose heart doesn’t bound just a bit at least when Hollywood is on the other end of the line? Listen: even Kosinski gave in. Take the money and don’t go to see the film. What law says you have to see a lousy film made from your very good book?

  “Cate? Cate, hi. Bob Kass. How’re you, Cate, all right?”

  “Okay. I’m okay.”

  “Listen. Paul was out here last week. He’s your greatest fan ever, man, no shit, and he was saying that we ought to make films out of your books. And he’s right, Cate, you know. We got all your books. I make sure the story editor gets every fuckin’ thing you write, but I gotta level with you, baby. You’re in the top class of American writers. You write your ass off, no shit. But, hey, we aren’t doin’ anything black; nobody is—”

  “Hey, Bob, you guys out there never did anything really black, so what else’s new? Is that why you called?”