Americana

by Don DeLillo

  “Go ahead.”

  “I was waiting for you to guess. Harris Hodge? The first replacement Weede hired after the mass rape and execution? He showed up yesterday.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “He’s a very neat guy, David. A terrific sense of humor. And he’s really cute-looking. Hallie thinks he looks like Paul Newman, only younger.”

  “How much younger? I want to know his exact age.”

  “I haven’t been able to find out yet.”

  “If you got off your ass once in a while.”

  “Don’t get angry.”

  “What else?” I said.

  “Trotsky struck again.”

  “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Great, great. Whose name was signed to the memo? Wait, I want to guess.”

  “Like forget it,” she said.

  “I figure we were about due for a Giambattista Vico.”

  “Forget it, sweetie.”

  “I was thinking about Beckett last night. Was it Beckett?”

  “You’ll never guess so I may as well tell you. It’s a three-name person. Otto Durer Obenwahr.”

  “Trotsky really pulled one out of the hat this time.”

  “I’ll say. Everybody’s trying to figure out who Otto Durer Obenwahr is. Ed Watchold sent his secretary to the library this morning. The place is in a minor uproar.”

  “What does it say? What’s the quote?”

  “I saved it for you. Ready? Fools! Fools! To square the circle is child’s play. It is the reverse which leads to the beatific vision.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Listen, find out everything you can about this bastard Harris Hodge. But especially how old he is.”

  “Okay.”

  “Does Weede like him?”

  “They’re having lunch tomorrow.”

  “Find out if Weede likes him. I’ll call you again somewhere between here and the Navahos.”

  “Okay. Have a good time.”

  “So long, Bink.”

  “David, I almost forgot.”

  “Yes?”

  “Ted Warburton had to be rushed to the hospital.”

  “When was this?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. He collapsed at his desk.”

  “Goodbye,” I said.

  All five of us sat in the camper all afternoon. Pike drank Old Crow from a paper cup and made occasional growling sounds. Ahead were the Rockies, dripping sweat, paws scraping the earth, set to pounce, his keeper the lion. Brand was lost behind his glasses, traveling back, I thought, to some timeless room at the center of his being, bungled memories of four walls and the gray medicine man. Kyrie bit the knuckle of his right thumb. Somebody parking a car hit our rear bumper lightly and we nodded. I was wearing my Comanche moccasins, a pair of green wide-wale cords with a garrison belt, and a black sport shirt.

  “Sully, who’s Otto Durer Obenwahr?”

  “Expert on liquid oxygen and high altitude drogue chutes.”

  “Seriously, ever hear of him?”

  She seemed to be trying to tear circles out of the newspaper she was reading. She tore circles and handed them to Kyrie. He was sitting on the floor. He handed the circles up to Brand.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I said.

  “Bring back some Mars Bars,” Brand said.

  “You owe me change of twenty,” I said. “I left a twenty on the table.”

  “Don’t look at me, Davy. I didn’t pay the check.”

  “I didn’t pay it,” Kyrie said. “Don’t look at me.”

  “Somebody owes me change of twenty.”

  “I left when you left,” Pike said.

  “Somebody owes me change. I’ve been paying for everything around here.”

  “Bring back some jujubes,” Kyrie said.

  I walked down a street that had the sadness of all roads leading out of town, a blues-song street, oil spilled by huge trucks, a traffic light swinging high over an empty intersection. I crossed to a building with a neon beer-sign out front. I found the telephone, called the McDowd Communication Arts Complex and asked for Carol Deming. I was using a wall phone at the back of the room. Three auto mechanics were at the bar. I noticed a pinball machine, a bowling machine, a jukebox and a shuffleboard with three steel discs sitting in rosin. Then I heard Carol’s voice.

  “North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”

  “Hi, I didn’t know if I’d find you there. It’s David Bell—from the park.”

  “I’m sorry, you’ve reached the answering service for NATO Brussels. They’re all out. Would you care to leave a message?”

  “I’m in a bar on Howley Road.”

  “Buster’s,” she said. “It used to be a firehouse.”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “I can take Austin’s.”

  “He won’t mind?”

  “Of course he’ll mind.”

  I sat at the bar and had a scotch. The ashtray in front of me was full of pared fingernails. I was on the third drink when she arrived. The way she walked made her skirt sway lightly across her legs and I felt lucky and full of improvisation, a nice loose music in my head, and I knew the auto mechanics were watching her but not with sludge and crankcase lust; rather with a small joy, I thought, a tiny leap of flesh, the light lucky feeling of seeing a pretty girl with bare legs walking across a room behind a smile that says she likes being a woman being watched. I tried not to look so pleased. She glanced at my drink and asked for the same.

  “I wasn’t sure you were living at McCompex too. I thought it might be just him. You didn’t say anything about it yesterday. Was it yesterday we met?”

  “There isn’t much to say, David. It’s just something to do while I wait for my husband to divorce me. I had some money saved and I’ve always wanted to study acting. So I came on down.”

  “From where?”

  “Detroit,” she said.

  “That your hometown?”

  “I was an army brat. I’ve lived in nine states.”

  “What did you do in Detroit?”

  “We used to have a drink every Friday evening at the Zebra Lounge. That’s what we did.”

  “You mean people from the office.”

  “You know how it is on Friday. Everybody wants to unwind with a drink or two. They used to have canapés for the regular crowd. We were the regular crowd.”

  We talked and drank for a while. I was feeling good and loose, on the verge of inspired dialogue, drink number four, a pale flame rising. Carol took a pack of Gauloises out of her handbag. I lit one for her and a sweet evil smell lay flat on the hanging smoke.

  “Did the regular crowd at the Zebra include one extrovert who was always joking with the waiter and who liked to order exotic drinks?”

  “Fred Blasingame,” she said.

  “What were some of the drinks he ordered? This is important.”

  “I remember once he ordered an Americano. I remember another time he ordered a Black Russian.”

  “I think we’re really getting somewhere. When you take a bath, Carol, do you like to lift one leg out of the water and wash it sort of slowly and sensually?”

  “You’re going too far.”

  “Carol, how do you feel about the war?”

  “I can’t seem to get involved, maybe because the whole thing is so halfhearted.”

  “People are dying.”

  “I know. Isn’t it terrible?”

  “Can you identify Otto Durer Obenwahr?” I said.

  “Didn’t he play lead guitar with Grand Funk Railroad?”

  “Let me ask you this if I may. What is the most pressing need in America today?”

  “Patriotism,” she said. “Our sons must return to their mother. She is waiting with open legs. Killing the pig-eyed and the slope-headed must once again become a matter of national priority.”


  “Did the Zebra have piped-in music? Please answer at once.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did the regular crowd ever have friendly arguments about the name of a certain tune?”

  “That used to happen all the time. Carl Stoner, who was in premiums, was always having arguments with Martha Leggett. Martha Leggett was the funniest little girl you ever saw. She was less than five feet tall and Freddy B. used to let her take puffs on his cigar. We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That’s the way we chose to live. I’m prepared to defend it.”

  “Did the rumors about Carl Stoner and Fred Blasingame’s wife have any basis in fact?”

  “Come on now. There weren’t any rumors like that. And anyway you haven’t even asked me about the summerhouse.”

  I ordered two more scotches. I didn’t know where we were headed and I was in no hurry to find out. It was obvious that the feints and jugglery of the moment did not confuse her one bit. Her answers were almost too easy in coming. Her voice changed, even the structure of her sentences, and as we went along I realized she was no mere student of theatercraft. She seemed perfectly relaxed, almost bored, content to let me find a pace and theme, breaking inflection from sentence to sentence and yet never relinquishing the bedrock irony, the closed fist of the Midwest. Her eyes emitted quick blue light. She was far from being the worst thing you could expect to find in an old firehouse in Iowa or Missouri or Illinois.

  “Have you ever been to New York?” I said.

  “We used to go over to the pier on Gansevoort Street and watch the sun go down. We used to eat soul food on Tenth Avenue.”

  “After several or more drinks, did any of the men in the regular crowd at the Zebra ever slip their hands under the table and try to caress either of your thighs?”

  “I guess that sort of thing is unavoidable if you’re going to have a few drinks in mixed company. But there was never any trouble about it. I mean all I did was sort of shift in my chair a little and they would get the idea and that would be the end of it.”

  “Did tiny Martha Leggett shift in her chair?”

  “I have no way of knowing.”

  “I applaud your loyalty.”

  “She was a plucky little skylarking girl. She and Fred Blasingame were like a comedy team. George and Gracie. That’s what we used to call them. My father’s name was George.”

  “That brings us to the summerhouse,” I said.

  “Tall grass and lemonade. Those lazy afternoons at auntie Nell’s. I was such a silly thing at fifteen. This is difficult.”

  “Please try.”

  “He came from the base to visit me, taller than the grass, so bright and shining in the sun. He was in uniform. Nell made lemonade. We sat out front beneath the big elm, just the three of us and John Morning. Daddy had brought me a book of poems, sonnets written by a southern lady whose lover was killed at Vicksburg. Nell went inside to start dinner. John Morning sang a spiritual and then went off to the stables. Daddy read the sonnets to me and I cried and called myself a silly thing and he laughed softly in that gentle way of his. We drank the lemonade and watched the sun go down over the big elm.”

  “Where was the Jamison boy?” I said.

  “The Jamison boy had drowned in Loon Lake just three weeks before. Daddy knew about it, of course, but was gentle enough and wise enough to make no mention of the tragedy. After dinner we walked through the tall grass beneath the moon. We listened to the crickets and daddy held my hand. Then we went back to the house. Nell made some lemonade and John Morning told us the yearling was coming along just fine. Daddy went out to the stables to look at the yearling. I went to my room and he came up later and spoke softly in the darkness of war and death, touching me softly in soft places. He made no mention of the tragedy of the Jamison boy and he said nothing about the summerhouse.”

  “At what hour were you awakened by the strange sound?”

  “It was almost dawn when I was awakened by a strange sound. I got out of bed and put on my riding pants and the green sweater with the button missing. I still have that sweater. It was the sweater I was wearing the last time I saw the Jamison boy, two nights before he drowned. We were on the back porch drinking lemonade. John Morning was singing a spiritual. The Jamison boy asked me whether I’d be spending the whole summer this time or just a few weeks as in the past. I said it was up to mother. He said he was tired of all the mystery about mother. He wanted to know the truth.”

  “So you told him about the summerhouse.”

  “Yes, I told him,” she said. “He was the only one who knew the horrible secret. And two nights later he drowned. I still have that sweater locked away somewhere in a trunk. Do you have any idea how difficult this is?”

  “Carol, when did you first realize that his death was not an accident?”

  “When I was awakened by the strange sound. I knew what the sound was and I realized the Jamison boy had been shot to death prior to being drowned. I put on my red satin dress with the plunging neckline, the dress I wore to mother’s second funeral. Needless to say, the sound was coming from the summerhouse. I walked through the tall grass, which was wet with dew. The sun was coming up over the big elm. I opened the door of the summerhouse.”

  “What did you see?”

  “It was daddy. He was naked except for his uniform.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Really I can’t go on.”

  “What was he doing, Carol?”

  “He was firing bullets into John Morning’s drowned body.”

  “What did you see in John Morning’s hand?”

  “The locket. Mother’s silver locket.”

  “Did any of the men in the regular crowd habitually break his swizzle stick with a loud plastic snap?”

  “Bob Kirkpatrick.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “What can you tell us about him?”

  “He looked like a redwood tree.”

  “Can you identify the governor of California?”

  “There is no such place.”

  “Excellent. If a redwood tree falls in a deserted forest, does it make a sound? Or is sound dependent on a sentient being?”

  “It makes a sound.”

  “What kind of sound?” I said.

  “One hand clapping.”

  “You’re going too far, Carol. But I’ll try to stay with you. You mentioned your husband earlier in the evening. Was your husband part of the regular crowd?”

  “My husband is part of no crowd, regular, irregular or otherwise. He’s black. Blackest black.”

  “You’re telling me he’s a Negro.”

  “What used to be called an American Negro.”

  I was getting drunk. The bartender put two more drinks in front of us. I lit another cigarette for her and she turned away when she exhaled and then swung her head slowly back and looked at me with a grieving smile. The three mechanics were at the pinball machine. Four young men drank beer at the other end of the bar.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “I wanted to escape from the regular crowd. It reached the point where I was seeing ghosts. I was asleep in a loft one night. I was tired and drunk and I fell asleep. I dreamed about the town where I grew up. When I opened my eyes I thought I saw my mother’s ghost in the room. But it was just an apparition I dragged up out of the dream. What I saw was the woman who owned the loft. Whose studio it was. She had come in and was standing in the doorway when I opened my eyes. What, if anything, do you make of all this?”

  “David, I’m out on my feet. I’m really tired. It’s been a long day. If you don’t mind I think I’ll be getting on back.”

  “I want you in my film,” I said.

  They were having dinner when I got back to the camper. Afterward, for Kyrie’s benefit, Brand tensed and untensed his forearm in rhythm so that the tattooed dogs seemed to be moving. I kept waiting for someone to complain about our stay here. Kyrie went to sleep under the table. I took Sullivan’s radio to bed with me. I t
urned it on, low volume, and listened in the dark. Every time Pike snored I punched the side of the camper and he would stop for a while. Unable to sleep, I listened to the radio half the night, changing stations, countries, hemispheres, switching to shortwave and ships at sea, the whole nightworld scratching out there, entangled languages, voices in storms of passion and static, commercials, prayers, newscasts, poems, soccer riots, threats of death and war and revolution, laughter from the mountains and appeals to reason from the broad plains, demonstration in La Paz, landslide in Zurich, assassination in Dakar, fire in Melbourne, confusion in Toyko, tragedy in Athens. Then I heard a familiar voice.

  “At the sound of the gong it will be exactly three o’clock in the morning. Three o’killing clock. This is Beastly here and we’ve still got two hours to go. But these next crucial minutes will tell all. Time to pluck the lint from your omphalos. Time to gnaw at the legs of chairs. I know you’re out there in mamaland, tens of thousands of you, humped up on the floor whimpering, licking the cold steel of the barrel of your shotgun. The agon begins. Time to scream into the pillow. Time to brainpaper the walls. But if we make the next ten minutes we make the night. Three in the morning and werewolves slink in the parlor. American Mean Time. You came home from work to find your wife in bed with your sister. Curiously refreshing. You stayed to watch. Sure, I know what it’s like out there. One big succulent eyeball bouncing on your tongue. Eye of goat. Black gleaming eye of master fucker of all the baby sheep you counted in your wetty bed. I know what it’s like. I, Beastly, have foresuffered almost all. Forced by my priestly capillaries to go all the way to Dublin to attain suitable erection and staying power. Mollycuddling my bloomless bride. Mother of twin anxieties. Indeed I know your secrets. For the past three days you’ve been followed all over town by a gigantic bald Malayan wearing a mackintosh. You’ve placed an ad in the L. A. Free Press. Studs, butches and house-broken pets interested in self-stimulation. Adding no freaks please in small type. Using a box number corresponding to the day, month and year of your first holy communion. You are drowning in porn and prury. You are unmasked and emasculated. We interrupt this program for a news bulletin. The president rose at noon, breakfasted with cabinet members, lashed out at his critics, shook hands with a Negro, had a steambath, and lunched with Nguyen Cao Dung, the former head of an undisclosed country ostensibly run by the CIA as a nonprofit organization. This is Warren Beasley at the White House in Washington saying this is Warren Beasley at the White House in Washington. We return you now to our studios. I feel silence out there tonight. Nothing stirs but a faint gray figure limping through the bus terminals and train stations. Lonely onanist in his chilly calculations. Where is the charitable ear for my intemperate prattle? I keep my caricatures to keep me company. Lord Greystoke, the British adventurer, plans to sail a Chinese junk singlehandedly between Malta and Crete in order to prove that the Mediterranean was once a lake in Sinkiang Province. I know you’re out there somewhere, all you prankish gunmen, pacing your scurvy rooms, making lists of likely targets with your Scriptomatic ballpoints, thinking incredibly in your wistfulness of the grandeur of state funerals. Photos on the wall of grouped adolphs. That hot thunder in your head, every drum since Goliath. This is Simon called Peter speaking on behalf of the Bumblebee tuna packers of America and wishing all of you a safe and sane ascent into heaven. You’re in good hands with God the Father. The kid I wouldn’t be so sure. A real maven. But tough in the clutch. Three after three, les misérables. The enemy grows bold. Just enough time for some random news items. Europe has apparently vanished. Its whereabouts are completely unknown. However, seamen aboard a Liberian tanker off Greenland have reportedly sighted oil slicks and all sorts of Louis Quatorze debris. Time to dig at the issues behind the news. Time to sit at the gurgling Wurlitzer beneath the streets and like that unloved phantom of the lower depths to let a single tear flow down your brutish but sensitive face. But first a word from our alternate testicle. Women, here’s a remarkable new way to give junior and sis the kind of nutrition they need for those growing-up years. Kill your husband and feed him to the kids. You’d love that, wouldn’t you? All that melting butterflesh. All the animosities in your soul washed away by his flavor-rich enzymes. What subtle gravies you could conjure with those executive haunches. Enough and more again for all the saucepans of Bloomingdale’s. Sweet waves of acidic backwash. Alfresco would be nice. Save the uglies for junior. To make him brave. Garnish with parsley. But I go too far, even for this audience of one-celled organisms. It is my own fake flesh I mean to cook. Delirium. There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is the station break. The clock crows. It’s all numbers. Numbers and Deuteronomy. I’m losing my edge but stay with me. It’s your only hope. Four minutes to death. No time to waste so you’d better listen fast. The bird is beginning to grimace inside the cuckoo clock. Quick—pray. Bow down to the god of your choice and pray for the end of yourself. Pray for new eyes and ears. Pray for shapes to change. Pray for fresh juice to take with you into your imminent climacteric. Pray for short and hunless winters. Pray for the Upper East Side, all those white tile buildings full of lonely girls quoting phony Persians to boys in love with jockstraps. Pray for adriaticated Venice. Pray for desirelessness and the dice-play of cunning. Pray for the insides of things, men and batteries, that they be shaved to coolest precision. Pray for the walls of things, that they secure the things they secure against the anti-wall. Pray for the scrotum sacs of industrialists. Pray for poets who summer at Nantucket. Pray for 1958 two-toned Oldsmobiles. Pray for Umbriago, the mayor of New York and of Chicago. Pray seriously for the Austrialians because if they ever get the bomb it’ll be a muddy rugger for us all. Pray for the bald eagle and his meddling beak. Pray that we stop replaying our lives into the sucking tapeworm. Pray that we not disappear O Lord into thy vastly impractical nightmind (from whence we came) without first preparing for the abrupt change of pace. Pray for expressiveness, that we cast away these welder’s masks we wear to hide our grief and joy. Vulva! Vulva! Vulva! Seep inward and test what’s left against the night. Be persistent as Java man was not. Water your mousterian cranium. Return to the primeval fertile crescent. Dar es Salaam! Abu Simbel! Chou-Kou-Tien! But the truth, I fear, is that I fear the dark days of the Arabian nights. I’ve got the Stephen Dedalus Blues and it’s a long way to Leopoldville. Black panic in the filter of my kingsize Kent. We have awakened from the nightmare of history. Put your logical fork to the mushroom omelette. An unpleasant interruption in the assuring continuity. No precedents for the legal apparatus to pick at. No scrolls for men to jot their histories on, their art, their powerings of flag-draped armies. No sequels for the moviegoers in the think tanks. Riddled genes of Japan, we watch the dripping of your questions into the earth. Exeunt all and remember. King Kong died for your sins. Time for a final prayer as the cuckoo door swings open. The Queen James version. Strategic Air Command, which art in heaven, swallowed be thy planes. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Omaha, Nebraska. Give us this day our daily dread and forgive us our strontium as we forgive those who strontium against us. And lead us not into annihilation but deliver us from rubble, for thine is the power and the power and the power, forever and never, oh man.”