Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  For breakfast we ate oranges or apples we bought by the bag at the warehouse grocery, generic yogurt, and day-old bread from the industrial bakery down the street. After breakfast, Dru sat cross-legged on the floor moving colored shapes around a model stage made of black construction paper or filling out the seemingly endless forms that the grant committee required of Stovepipe Theater, while I lay on the couch with my feet over the back, reading cycling magazines. At some point Dru would hoist her satchel to her shoulder, toss her scarf around her neck,

  and leave me alone until later, when Crowder and Sing and Majors came by, as they could be counted on doing more and more often.

  The day of the show grew closer.

  In Roy’s old pea-green Volvo wagon, we made the rounds of the junk shops and dumpsters, and on trash days the curbsides of the richer neighborhoods, plundering clothes, furniture, and household machines—anything that might be useful in the future.

  “Value shifts,” Crowder said. “That which you may toss away today, might save a life tomorrow.”

  “Or kill someone,” Sing said.

  “As the situation dictates,” said Crowder.

  We drove to car graveyards scattered along the railroad tracks and to the industrial parks west of town where we’d be met at vinyl-sided prefab outbuildings by bored men with clipboards who’d wave us past to machine shops in aluminum storage sheds where some other bored man they had met somewhere or had found in the classifieds stood beside some piece of useless machinery, a broken down portable generator or a wrench the size of a softball bat with a crack in the flange. We would offer money that usually was refused. Usually they were happy to get rid of the object in question.

  I liked these foraging missions for how they reminded me of some of the afternoons in the Reeds’ truck, driving around the mainland with Grey behind the wheel, Callie on the hump, and me at the window with my right hand resting on the side-view mirror. Majors was in Vail with his family and I had the feeling that my seat in the Volvo might have been temporary, but I also had the feeling that when he did come back I’d be welcome to sit in back.

  On the way back to town a clump of wet snow fell from a branch and exploded on the windshield. It would soon be time to go back to school.

  21

  SPY VS. SPY

  Dooley came back tan and somehow even more slovenly in his appearance. His shirt was misbuttoned and his eyeballs looked sunburned. “I acquired a taste for paella and Balearic waiters,” he said, and I laughed because I thought I was supposed to. Seeing him after a month, I knew my feelings for him had changed. I didn’t revere him the way I had, and that made it easier to like him. I’d gotten to know my job and didn’t have to ask any more if there were things he needed me to do. It got to be like back in the shop, the two of us in the same room without talking for hours at a time.

  I didn’t go back to Rosewalter until days after school started. Dru was happier than I would’ve hoped to see me go, and I wasn’t back in my room for ten minutes before I wanted to leave. Ship had come back from Baraboo with no visible scars from four weeks of parental disapproval and with a new electric razor that he pointlessly propelled around his chin three times a day.

  “Some girl’s been calling for you,” he said. He’d fieldstripped the razor and was cleaning the circular blades with a round brush.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t say. She asked for you. I said you weren’t here. ‘When’s he going to be back?’ ‘I don’t know.’ Since then she just hangs up.”

  “How do you know it’s the same girl?”

  “I recognize her static.” He held the blade on his finger and blew across the top. It grossed me out to think about microscopic fuzz from the Shipper’s face flying all over the room.

  “Quit it,” I said.

  “So you’re going with that girl.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What was her name, Sue?”

  “Dru.”

  I crashed on my bed and realized I’d actually missed it. It was the first thing assigned to me when I arrived.

  “That where you’ve been at night?”

  “Yup,” I said, picking a book and pretending to read. “What did you say the girl sounded like?”

  “Just some girl.”

  “Happy, sad, mad?”

  Expertly, he replaced the blades on their spindles, snapped the lid shut, zipped the razor into its fake leather case, and set it on his dresser, adjusting it a couple of times with his fingers so that the case lay parallel with the edge of the dresser top. “Sad,” he said. “She sounded like a girl who was sad.”

  Just when I resigned myself to a life of Ship yattering in my ear, he went down to the lounge. I sat in the dark with my eyes open, appreciating silence on a noisy floor.

  The next night I got delayed at the factory, helping Roy and Majors (back from the Rockies with his arm in a sling) paint some chairs. I stayed over and the next day woke up too late to make Edwards’s class and skipped the rest of the day’s classes to make up some extra hours of work. I helped with the sets at the theater and read books while the others rehearsed. It was fun. Fun enough to cut class. I had a job I liked. I figured I’d catch up on school later.

  Then the CIA came to town.

  It was Crowder who saw the notice in the paper. Recruiters were on campus looking for patriotic self-starters to join their outfit. I was sitting in the last row of seats, reading Mill on the Floss, where Tom and Maggie are about to get creamed by the wreckage on the river, when Crowder blew by, bounding down the aisle taking up feet of ragged carpet with each stride, yelling, “Did you see this? Did anybody see this?”

  They passed a paper around. I heard Harold say, “This is interesting,” and Dru said, “No, Roy, no way.”

  Bea said, “Remember.”

  Roy said, “This is different. We wouldn’t be selling anything. Would we, Sing?”

  “We wouldn’t have to.”

  Then Roy called up to me, “Hey Tom, you in?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  Dru stood with her hands on her hips. “I’m swear I’m going to kill all of you,” she said.

  Two days later, we loaded a barber chair that Roy had lying around the factory and had been looking to use for a long time into the Volvo and Majors, Roy, Harold, and me piled in front and we lurched off toward campus. There was already a line of students carrying signs and walking around in circles with signs that said, TORTURE THIS and CIA + $ = DEATH and like that outside of the Commerce building where the interviews were going to be. On a knoll nearby was another crowd, guys from one of the fraternities with their own signs that said things like, GO HOME QUERES. Plus there was a TV truck there. When we set up the barber chair, a crowd gathered immediately. Harold made for himself and me these baby blue smocks, with a zipper down the front and the name Harry stitched on his and Buzz on mine. Roy and Majors ducked behind the building, while Sing and I put up our sign that said, WELCOME SPIES—HAIRCUTS FREE FOR CIA RECRUITS. And Harold shouted, “Who’sa gonna go firsta?” in a bad Italian accent. Then Majors, who’d ducked into the building to put on a suit, walked up carrying a briefcase. With a flourish, Sing brushed the chair with a whisk broom and wrapped a sheet around Mike’s neck, and I stepped up with a damp towel that steamed in the cold air and wound it around his face and Mike screamed like it was burning hot. As everyone laughed, Sing said, “So-a sorry,” and shoved him back in his seat. Then I whipped up a muck of suds with a shaving brush in a cup and slathered them all over Majors’s face, swiping across his lips with my finger to make a mouth hole.

  I was supposed to shave him, which was a little scary, since we were using a real straight razor and with all the excitement my hands were shaking and while we had him in the chair Roy came creeping out from behind a tree, dressed in a spy outfit he made himself, like the cartoon in Mad magazine, with a black mask and black broad-brimmed hat and cape. He crept up on his tiptoes, which was hilarious to see because he weig
hed more than three hundred pounds and still he was really good at sneaking up on people. He pulled out this overstuffed envelope that said “Secret Plans” on it in red block print and slipped it into the pocket of Mike’s jacket, while Harold gave Majors a truly awful haircut with a pair of electric clippers.

  Then Sing whipped off the sheet, twirled it like a bullfighter’s cape. “Offa you go. You join the spies, make-a us proud,” he said. And Mike got out of the chair, straightened his tie, ran his hand across his nicked cheeks and through his patchy hair, and walked through the door with the secret plans poking out of his pocket.

  “Who’sa next?” Sing said, and one of the students who was walking the picket line handed his sign to the woman next to him and sat in the chair. He had very long hair, tied in the back with a rubber band, and when he pulled the rubber band out it fell on his shoulders. Sing looked nervous. “I don’ta know if you spy material,” he said.

  But the man said, “Cut it all off. I’m ready to join the war machine.”

  Harold looked at me. I don’t think we’d thought through the idea of somebody actually wanting us to clip his hair. “He says, ‘Take it off, Harry,’” I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “we take it-a off.” Harold plunged in with the clippers. Everyone was looking on—it had to be a couple hundred at this point—and hooting and cheering as this guy’s hair fell to the ground in fat, brown clumps. Once again, Roy snuck up behind the chair, this time with a miniature tape recorder that he held up for everyone to see, while he put his finger to his lips. He made a big show of turning on the record button before sliding the machine into the pocket of the man in the chair who was into the bit enough to pretend he didn’t notice. When we finished, his head was as bald as Grey’s. He stood, felt all over his scalp with his hand, and raised a fist in the air.

  “Your mama,” Harold says, “she no recognize you.”

  The protesters were getting impatient about being upstaged and begin shouting louder and more often into their megaphone, “Nunca mas,” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the CIA has got to go.” The police, seven or eight cops and a van, arrived but seemed willing to stand around the perimeter as long as the protest remained peaceful, which the picketers seemed content to do. Then one of the guys from the huddle of fraternity boys, this squat kid with a baseball cap turned backward on his head, pushed his way through the ring of onlookers, flopped in the chair so hard it almost toppled over backward, and said, “Do me,” while his friends pumped their fists and barked like dogs. “And a shave,” he said.

  Harold didn’t want him in our chair. He pulled off the guy’s baseball cap, revealing a haircut that was already military short. “It-a looks like-a they already gotta you,” but the guy grabbed Harold’s smock in his fist, “Do it, faggot,” he said.

  If Harold was startled by the man’s rage, he didn’t take long to get over it. “You tell our secret to the neighborhood. That’sa no good. Buzz, you shave-a him good, eh?”

  I brushed the lather on his square jaw, being careful to get as much as I could in his ears and nose. Then as I put the straight razor to his cheek, he said, “You cut me and I’ll kill you,” but as he moved his head to talk the edge of the razor skipped across his skin. As I drew back the blade the lather was tinted pink with blood.

  “What did I say?” the guy shouted and grabbed me by the collar. As he did my first thought was that I had a deadly weapon in my hand, and as I was trying to decide whether to drop it or wave it in his face Roy jumped him from behind, knocking the chair over and tangling the two of them in his cape. At which point his fraternity brothers broke ranks and charged, reaching the pile at about the same time as the protesters who tried to head them off. I remember reaching for Roy’s belt buckle, while trying to keep an eye on Harold and then the sound of cardboard whistling through the air and then black.

  It was the second time Sing and Crowder made the cover of the Daily Cardinal, though this time all you could see of the two of them was Roy’s huge ass, as the kid pulled his cape over his head, and Harold in character, with his hands to his face in mock horror, while I stood in the center of the frame—standing still amid the blur of fists and feet—in the second before the sign hit me.

  The newspaper was on the corner of Dooley’s desk. There was no doubt he had seen it, but I wasn’t going to bring it up if he didn’t. “Does it hurt?” he asked me of the black eye.

  “Only when I touch it.”

  He smiled and picked up the paper. “You have chosen the path of the notorious,” he said.

  “It was just a gag.”

  “I should send a copy to Professor Edwards. I’m sure she’d like to know what you look like. She tells me she hasn’t seen much of you.”

  “It’s a big class.”

  “I told her to look.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I was worried that you’d get lost. Not without reason, as it turns out.” He put down the paper, laced his fingers together, and tilted his head back like he did whenever he was about to make a speech. “Historically the university—and you must remember and understand that when I speak about the university I am speaking of the institution, not of this university—has been viewed by the laboring classes as something between a country club and a sanitarium. The degree to which that was true at any point in history is irrelevant because what we’re talking about here is perception. And nothing of what Harold Sing or Roy Crowder or Miss Gordon are inclined to undertake would go far toward changing that perception. It’s their prerogative to do as they wish, as it is yours.” He picked up the paper and turned the pages slowly. “However, you may have to suffer consequences that they will not.”

  “Like what?” I asked. If I’d known it was the last time I’d talk to him, I might’ve remembered his advice and not asked the obvious question.

  “Ah,” Dooley sighed, “but that is the nature of consequences—you can rarely predict what they’re going to be.”

  22

  ALLOW ME A FEW WORDS

  [ A stage, dark

  Tom, Bea, Harriette and Majors occupy the front row of seats in the otherwise empty theater with noisemakers and horns, layers of prop clothes hastily thrown on: velvet period costumes of many periods, wigs, boas, a fox stole with the head still on, crowns, tiaras, and a Robin Hood hat with oversized feather protruding from the band. Harriette, as always, in mourning.

  In the background in colored lights, phrases punctuated by ellipses seem to float in air “… dazzling …” and “… pure entertainment …” and “… a must-see …”

  The lights come up on stage, revealing a wooden scaffold, a speaker’s platform, with a railing draped with flag bunting, red with white stars upon intersecting blue stripes, the stars and bars of the Confederacy, and in the center a portrait in an oval gilt frame, a bearded gaunt figure that first looks like Lincoln but the lights reveal to be Jefferson Davis. Standing on the platform with his arms on the rails is Roy Crowder, dressed in a Lincoln costume two sizes too small, the buttons of the waistcoat near popping, the stovepipe hat perched on his head like a beanie. The audience cheers, whistles, blows their horns and spins their noisemakers, a din barely audible over the sound of canned applause piped in over speakers. ] Friends of the Union, mothers, and loyal Zouaves, it gives the Tahoe Holiday Inn the greatest pleasure to introduce, direct from engagements in Richmond, New Orleans, and St. Joseph MO, the greatest thespian of this or any age, Mr. John Wilkes Booth.

  [ ENTER HAROLD SING, WEARING A BLACK OVERCOAT WITH A FUR COLLAR, A NARROW-BRIMMED BLACK HAT, AND KNEE-LENGTH LEATHER BOOTS. IN ONE HAND HE HOLDS A LONG, BLACK CANDLESTICK MICROPHONE. HE GUIDES THE CORD BEHIND HIM WITH THE OTHER. RECORDED MUSIC PLAYS, HE SINGS THE CHORUS TO “IS THAT ALL THERE IS?” ]

  SING: Thank you ladies and gentlemen, grand to be here at the Mary Chestnut Dinner Theatre in the Round. Of course, the way I feel it’s great to be anywhere [ rimshot, scattered canned laughter ].

  I’m telling you the Union army chased me half way acr
oss Virginia, I said “Who do I look like? Harriet Tubman?” [ rimshot, no laughter ]

  Wow, tough crowd. Last time I worked a room this tough the band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” [ delayed rimshot ].

  [ ENTER DRUCILLA GORDON, FROM THE HOUSE, HER FACE FLUSHED WITH COLD AND ANGER ].

  Honestly, I didn’t want to shoot the president. I sent him a letter that said, “President Lincoln, free the South and I’ll call the whole thing off.” Unfortunately, I sent it to his Gettysburg address. [ Silence ] I said, I sent it to his Gettysburg address.

  DRU: Lights. [ HOUSE LIGHTS COME UP ] What’s going on? Why didn’t you wait for me?

  ROY: We wanted you to see the opening without the psychological cue of a rising curtain.

  DRU: Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. We lost our grant.

  HARRIETTE: What?

  DRU: They pulled our grant.

  BEA: How come?

  DRU: Why do you think?

  HAROLD: [ walks to the front of the stage ] You’re not blaming this on us.

  DRU: I don’t have to, Harold.

  ROY: In so many words?

  DRU: It didn’t have to be in so many words.

  TOM: [ FROM THE HOUSE ] So what? Were you doing it for the money?

  BEA and MAJORS: Yeah.

  SING: Tom’s right [ he crosses to the chair on the stage lit by the spotlight and sits with his legs crossed, turning the tip of his cane on the stage with his thumb and forefinger ]. Vanity, greed, and envy are the roots of plot. We have indulged in these vices, and we have been made to pay because of it. The play sucks. Roy knew it. I knew it. You all knew it, only you were too polite to tell me, except for Bea. If only I’d listened.

  HARRIETTE: So what do we do?

  SING: Nothing for now. When the time comes, we’ll know what we have to do.

  DRU: [ to Majors ] How’d you do the words?