His mother was fixing him some beans and eggs at the stove, and she turned around with a strange expression on her face, as if she was wondering herself why she had named him Claudel. After a few seconds she said, “It was your father named you. I wanted to call you Claude if you were a boy and Claudine if you turned out to be a girl. But he said no. Not that he didn’t like both names. He said, ‘Let’s call it Claudel, regardless of whether it’s a boy or a girl. No sense having two names ready when we’re only expecting one baby.’”
“I can remember him saying that,” Claudel’s mother said, “just like it was yesterday. ‘No sense having two names ready when we’re only expecting one baby.’ But that’s your father, you know. All over. He likes to be efficient. When he was young and talked more about what he believed, maybe because he wasn’t so sure of himself then and had to hear himself say things out loud before he could really believe they were true, he used to say, ‘Too much is as bad as too little. Worse.’”
Right then and there at the breakfast table, Claudel finally got to understand his father’s philosophy of life. If the old man believed that too much was as bad as, or worse than, too little, and if that belief had led him to give his son a name like Claudel, which he must have known would be an embarrassment to the boy for a long time, then the old man must have a pretty bleak view of life’s offerings. It wasn’t quite as bleak as Chisholm’s Law, say, but it wasn’t exactly optimistic either.
Your philosophy tells you what the world is like, gives you the long view, so to speak. And your principles tell you how to live in that world. And Claudel’s father was telling him that the world was a tough and miserly place, and that the best way to live in that place was to be careful and relentlessly efficient. Don’t waste a thing, don’t take anything for granted. Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because tomorrow might never come, and just in case it does, you better have something done today or else you’re going to get beat tomorrow.
A hard view, Claudel knew. But when he was nineteen it seemed right to him. He loved his father and admired him, even though of course he thought his father was a little cracked on a few subjects, like spitting and throwing stones. But basically he thought his father knew the world a lot better than he himself did. The old man had pulled a hitch in the Navy in World War Two out there in the South Pacific, and after the war he’d worked for a few years down in Boston in the shipyards as a welder. At nineteen the son figured he’d do better listening to the father and taking on the father’s philosophy of life than he would trying to work up one of his own. So he didn’t mind being called Claudel anymore. Now that he knew there was a good reason for it.
2
Then he went off to Vietnam, and over there he learned a lot about the world that made him start to question his father’s viewpoint, because what he saw over there made him start to believe in Luck. His father’s philosophy had no place in it for Luck. But the war was teaching Claudel that there were lucky people, like him and the other guys who didn’t get killed or blown half to bits, and there were unlucky people, like all those Vietnamese farmers, say, whose houses and land and children and whole families were getting wiped out for no reason they could name. Half the time they couldn’t even see the bombers that dropped the bombs on them. It was like God was bombing them, instead of some foreigner looking into a bombardier’s sight at 40,000 feet.
Claudel wasn’t stupid, and he could see that the only difference between these farmers and the farmers back home was that one group was unlucky and the other group was lucky. And since he could see that, so far, he was a member of the lucky group, he started to expect more out of life than his father’s philosophy had said he would get.
He could remember when it first came wholly clear to him that he was one of the lucky ones. His outfit used to sit around at night guarding the 105 howitzers with their M-14 automatic rifles, talking and smoking and looking out at the darkness for signs of life (signs of death for them, so they had to look very carefully). What they were looking for was flashlights. They never knew why, but those guys out there in the black pajamas were carrying flashlights. Every once in a while somebody would see a fleck of light way out there in the jungle, like a firefly, only half a mile away, and he’d start firing his M-14 full steam, and in a second everybody else would be blasting away at the jungle. They weren’t supposed to fire those things except at an enemy they could see, but the guns were fun to shoot, because they were recoiling automatics and the barrel slid back onto a gas cartridge that took the recoil, so they would fire these things and just sit there watching the barrels slamming back and forth practically in their laps while the bullets soared through the night like stars. Then, after the shooting had stopped, all the men would be grinning. There’d be a sudden silence, and Claudel would look around and all his buddies would be grinning at nothing, and he’d realize that he was grinning at nothing too.
One night, though, after the shooting had stopped, he looked around him as usual and saw they were all grinning as usual, and all of a sudden they heard a baby crying. It was stone silent otherwise, so they could hear its bawling clearly even though it was coming from someplace way out there in the jungle. It went on and on, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. It started to make them edgy and nasty-tempered, and a few of the guys cursed the baby’s mother for being out there in the night in the first place. A few other guys cursed the enemy for being out there with guns and booby traps, which were keeping them from going out and finding the baby and bringing it in to safety. And a few others cursed the enemy for setting the whole thing up. They said it was a trick to draw them away from the camp into an ambush in the jungle. That sounded plausible, but they weren’t sure, so they just kept on being bothered by the baby’s crying, which went on and on and seemed to grow louder and louder. Until finally one of the soldiers, a big square-faced guy from Chicago, jumped up and started firing his automatic into the bushes, as if he had seen a flash of light out there someplace. Then the others started firing with him, watching the barrels leap back and forth while the tracer bullets made icy arcs across the sky and dove into the darkness of the jungle a mile and a half away.
After a few minutes they stopped firing and sat down again. This time, when Claudel looked around, no one was grinning. Everyone wore a dark, somber expression on his face, and Claudel knew he looked the same as they did. That’s when he started thinking he was lucky. He was young. It’s how you explain things that are too complicated to explain. You call it Luck. Either you’ve got it or you haven’t got it, but if you’ve got it, use it. That was the first principle of his new philosophy. If you’ve got it, use it.
3
So by the time he got home again, he was raring to go, hot to get started making big money, buy a fast and fancy car, get himself a pretty girl and maybe marry her and buy one of those sixty-five-foot mobile homes to live in. And he did precisely that. He got himself a job as a lineman for the Public Service Company and started pulling in a couple hundred bucks a week with overtime. Then he got himself a loan from the bank and bought one hell of an automobile, a white ’68 GTO convertible that made everybody in town turn around and think a minute. He moved for a while with several different girls from town, one of them the daughter of a doctor, and after about a year he married Ginnie Branche, who ran Ginnie’s Beauty Nook out on Route 28. They had a big wedding, lots of presents, electric blankets, electric corn popper, waffle iron, all the usual things you need, and moved right into a baby-blue sixty-eight-foot-long mobile home out on Skitter Lake. It was a fancy new Longwoods, one of the first mobile homes to come out with a cathedral ceiling and teak-wood paneling in the living room. And after that, every morning when Claudel woke up in the master bedroom with that pretty young woman lying next to him, he’d slowly look across the room at his Danish modern bedroom suite, on to the framed pictures of mountains and streams, to the wall-to-wall green shag carpeting, the fancy fiber glass draperies shimmering in the morning breeze, a
nd out the window to his GTO parked in the driveway, its top down, a huge white bird with its wings folded, and he’d say to himself, “Claudel Bing, you are one lucky son of a bitch!”
Now here’s where you start to get to the point of his story. Because Claudel was wrong. He wasn’t lucky. Not lucky at all. He only thought he was lucky. He thought the world was giving him a ride, and it was beginning to look like a good ride, so he figured all he had to do was just lie back and enjoy the passing scenery. And up to now, he’d been right. But then all of a sudden the scenery changed, and the road got bumpy, and then he knew he wasn’t lucky.
But that didn’t mean his father had been right, that the world was a chiseler and you had to be a miser to live in it. No, because Claudel wasn’t unlucky either. He simply hadn’t learned enough yet to have a view of the world that explained to him what happened to him, what he at first had called being lucky and what later he called being unlucky. Because for a while he did call it that, being unlucky, and if you had known him at that time or had just met him in a bar, you’d have heard him naming his life that way day and night, holding his glass up to let a bit of light from the Budweiser sign float through while he told his sad tale of bad luck to anyone who’d listen.
He’d tell you how the trailer had caught fire and burned to the ground because Ginnie had left the stove on, and how his insurance couldn’t cover the loss so he was still paying off the damned mortgage to the bank. He and Ginnie had come home after a weekend down at York Beach, all sunburned and sandy from the beach and hungover from the good times they’d had the night before with some Canadians they’d run into at the motel bar, and when they pulled into the driveway, all there was next to it, where the trailer had been, was a sixty-eight-foot-long barbecue pit. The two of them just sat there in the car in their bathing suits and broke down and wept.
And after that Claudel would tell you how Ginnie had started running around with Howie Leeke, until everyone in town knew about it, except Claudel himself, of course, until one night he came into the Hawthorne House right after Howie had been there, and everybody started giving him a funny kind of grin, so he asked, “What the hell’s wrong, my fly unzipped or something?”
Freddie Hubbard, a buddy of his from the Public Service Company, said, “No, nothing’s wrong… It’s just that Howie Leeke’s been here and left … and he was telling stories again…”
“What kind of stories?” Claudel asked, thinking maybe one might be funny enough to repeat. He liked a good laugh as well as the next man, especially since his trailer burned down.
“Aw, you know,” Freddie said. “Stories about him … and Ginnie.”
Then all the people in the place sort of wiped their grins off and shifted in their seats and turned away, so Claudel knew what was happening, and what had been happening for a long time, probably ever since the trailer burned and he and Ginnie had moved into town and had taken the apartment over Knight’s Paint Store, which happened to be across the street from Howie’s pipefitting shop.
That’s when Claudel started drinking every night after work at the Hawthorne House, hanging out there right up to closing time, stumbling home drunk and cursing his bad luck. Which of course only seemed to get worse. A man can’t control his fate, but he does make his own luck. By calling it luck. But if he’s a smart man, he won’t call it luck at all. Of course Claudel didn’t know that then. He called it luck, bad luck. So every night of the week he’d sit there on a stool at the bar of the Hawthorne House, punching all the sad songs on the juke box, ordering beers and shots of Canadian Club over and over, until finally Gary the bartender would come over and say, “Hey, Claudel, it’s midnight. I gotta lock up the joint.”
Then he’d slide off the stool and head for the door, stumble down Main Street to Green Street, past the dark windows of the stores and restaurants and the few offices, till he came to Knight’s Paint Store. Up the stairs he’d go, unlock the door, lurch in darkness to the bed, where Ginnie lay sleeping or pretending to sleep. Then, yanking off his clothes, smelling of beer and whiskey and cigarette smoke, he’d pull on her shoulder and paw at her body, even though he’d be too drunk to be much of a man, until finally she would jump out of bed, mad and afraid and disgusted.
In a month Ginnie had left him and had moved in with Howie Leeke, who had left his second wife the previous spring. In six weeks Claudel had got himself fired from the Public Service Company for coming in late so many times, late and hungover. And mad. All the time mad. He had got to be irritating to people. When he wasn’t complaining about his bad luck, he was growling at people who looked, to him, to be having a run of good luck, like Freddie Hubbard, who had been his best friend since grade school. Freddie came into work one morning and told Claudel how he’d been promoted to foreman, and Claudel just sneered at him and said it was probably because they were afraid he’d fall off a pole if they didn’t get him back down on the ground. “Keep lousing things up,” he told his old friend as he walked off, “and they’ll stick you in the front office.”
People would say to him, “Hey, Claudel, how’re you doing?” and he’d grump something like, “Depends on who I’m doing it to,” or some other remark that was designed mainly to stop the conversation dead. It was like falling into a well that didn’t seem to have a bottom. There is an end to a person’s self, though, and you can reach it, but only if you’re stupid enough or smart enough to try hard for a long, long time. And that’s precisely what Claudel did, for over a year, and eventually he hit the bottom of that well.
4
It happened one night at the Hawthorne House. He was living upstairs in a rented room by then, because after he’d got fired from the Public Service Company, he’d started collecting unemployment, and the bank had repossessed most of the furniture Ginnie had left him, the color TV and the bedroom suite and the couch. Besides, he wasn’t able to pay the rent for the place over Knight’s Paint Store anymore, so it seemed a reasonable thing to do. Maybe the only thing he could do. He’d go for days without shaving, letting his clothes get dirty and rumpled, eating Twinkies and potato chips for breakfast and cold canned beans for supper, getting himself drunk on boilermakers usually by three in the afternoon, and then sitting around in the Hawthorne House till closing time. He used to sit in one of the booths, and whenever someone would join him, because of having been a friend from the old days when, as Claudel still thought, his luck had been running good, he’d tell him over again how it all started with the fire and then his troubles with Ginnie and Howie Leeke, and how the Public Service Company had screwed him, probably because of Freddie Hubbard, who hated him, he was sure, and on and on into the night, until finally the friend would yawn and say he had to get home or someplace, and he’d leave, and Claudel wouldn’t see him again for months, because the man would have been able to avoid him.
One night, a Friday, so there were a lot of drinkers in town that night, he was sitting in his usual booth, where he’d been sitting since three that afternoon, and he had nothing to think about, and no one to say it to, so he started listening to the conversation coming from behind him, where three young guys were sitting over beers and talking about state troopers and cars. A three-piece band had been playing for a while, country and western songs that had been popular about ten years ago. They had quit playing a few minutes earlier, had unplugged their instruments, two amplified guitars and a set of drums, and had headed for the bar. The Hawthorne House was laid out in a common way, a small bandstand in front that could accommodate no more than three musicians and their equipment, a dance floor the size of a kitchen, then along the walls a dozen plastic-covered booths and four long Formica-topped tables between them. At the back there was a bar with ten or twelve stools alongside it. On a Friday or Saturday night all the booths were usually taken and half the Formica tables were filled with drinkers, local men and women as well, and when the band played a danceable tune, eight or ten couples walked onto the dance floor and shoved each other around in approximate time to the
music. But when the band took its break, there was a few minutes’ silence, or relative silence, between the band’s ceasing to play and someone’s digging into his pocket for change for the juke box, and in that silence you could overhear conversations in the booths adjacent to yours. The rest of the time you couldn’t hear anything said by anyone other than yourself unless it came from six inches away and was practically shouted into your face.
The music had stopped and the kid behind Claudel had gone on shouting into the faces of the two men sitting with him, men a few years older than he, all three of them wearing mechanic’s uniforms from Steele’s, the local Ford dealer, with their first names on the left breast pocket and Henry Ford’s last on the other. The one talking, or rather shouting, was Deke, and the two he was shouting to were Art and Ron. “Nobody screws over me!” Deke told them. He had long, slack, blond hair that hung in greasy strands thick as twine over his collar, and his forearms wore tattoos, one a heart with a knife plunged into it and the words Born to Love emblazoned above the heart, the other a Confederate flag with the inscription The South Will Rise Again! “Nobody, but nobody, screws over me! I mean it, man, I don’t give a shit how big he is, no goddamn state trooper puts me down!”
The kid’s friends nodded, patiently waiting for the story of how nobody screwed over Deke once, because that’s the way most stories get told when they’re told in person. First the teller sets out his principles, and then he shows you how those principles get enacted in the world, usually by describing some incident or event in his recent past, so that what you end up with is the storyteller’s philosophy of life. If you’d asked him straight out in the beginning to tell you what his philosophy of life was, he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you, any more than Deke could have. Sure he’d have one, at least he’d believe he had one, but unless he happened to be a professional philosopher, the chances are good he wouldn’t be able to tell you what it was in so many words. And if he was a professional philosopher, the chances are just as good you wouldn’t be able to understand what the hell he was talking about anyhow.
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