“Americans,” I expounded, “have rejected all the fathers. All the kings and popes. We’re a land of dadless men.” I’d read Leslie Fiedler that year and was quite taken with his theories. “Like your father, Verl. He walks around your house invisible. Inaudible. People walk right through him. It’s your mother that’s directing the show.”
I lobbed my apple core up in the air, and it rolled down the grass into a little bunch of aspens. Verl put his in the paper sack and put that in the litter bag under the dashboard.
We drove on down into the town to find Leila.
Chapter 3
I Look About Me and Make a Discovery
Floren Park was a tourist town, the ticket booth of the Rocky Mountains and its national park, where people rented knotty-pine bungalows for a week or whole houses for whole summers, safe from riots and robberies, and set out from them for fishing creeks, riding stables, and natural walks. Other residents had retired there in rabble-free alpine A-frames or been born there in Victorian gingerbread three-story houses. And both these sets of “locals” avoided the center of town on inherited principle.
Downtown Floren Park was bright, noisy, and confused; confused because each building in it was disconnected by origin and temperament from its neighbor. Impermanencies clashed like the living rooms filled with imitation furniture of different styles—a colonial armchair, a modern coffee table, a provincial couch. Along the main street, TACOS flashed in neon next to cocoa-carpeted art galleries where handsomely framed mountain landscapes were sold by handsome proprietors for handsome sums. Austrian sportswear was housed beside Navajo jewelry beside a Japanese restaurant where you watched your food dangerously prepared beside a pornographic book store beside Western Outfits beside folk dancing nightly beside children’s toys from Denmark. This summer there was also a Republican campaign headquarters and a Democrats campaign headquarters. For different fees in Floren Park you could have your portrait pasteled, your body massaged, your palm read. You could angle for indifferent trout in a plastic bin, shoot at targets for prizes, play bingo for a painted punch bowl. All the old-fashioned pleasures.
Monday night, June 3rd, both sidewalks of the main street were solid with crowds shoving to move in one direction or the other. I was surprised to see most of the men there wearing red fezzes. Verl pointed up at a huge banner strung over the street, on which the town provided an explanation for this phenomenon. A convention was climaxing.
FLOREN PARK WELCOMES SHRINERS MAY 31–JUNE 5
There was no point in trying to drive the Triumph any further into the main thoroughfare. We were like two polite tourists struggling to maneuver their Hertz through a flea market in Istanbul.
The Shriners had spilled noisily out of buildings, over the sidewalks, and were loudly pushed from behind by their fellow Shriners into the street. We honked the car over to a curb finally, and parked it there. Immediately, a dozen middle-aged faces leaned down into us, black tassles twitching between their eyes. One, running to and beyond fat, breathed on us strongly.
“Get out of that yellow matchbox,” he ordered us, “and I’ll buy you a drink. I don’t care who you are.”
“I tell you, they’re Artie’s boys,” the man next to him said. “I bet you money. This one looks just like him. How much you want to bet?”
The fat one’s sportive companion, who seemed so certain of my paternity, jabbed at my face to show his friend its similarities to Artie’s, and being rather haphazard about it, nearly put out one of my eyes. He was wearing, besides his red fez, a Hawaiian shirt with daffodils on it, a button reading “Nixon’s the One,” yellow Bermudas, and yellow knee socks with white loafers. The overall effect was a little like a sudden attack of jaundice. Meanwhile, his wife (or so I assumed from her matching yellow outfit) kept pulling at the back of his Bermudas and repeating in a stentorian whine an urgent litany of complaints and instructions.
“Come on, Saammm. Let’s go do the polkahhh. You promised me. Lois is waiting for us. Come oinnn. You promishhhed! She’s holding the big table beside the band.”
“Go tell her to put it down!” roared the fat man in my face. Fortunately, I got my head turned away from the fumes. He squeezed his eyes so tightly shut in his amusement at his own remark that he had trouble getting them unstuck. The fat of his cheeks had completely covered them over, and he had to raise his eyebrows up and down several times before his eyes popped open again.
Sam’s yellow-matched mate seemed, however, to miss the fat man’s joke.
“You’re a pig, Bobbie,” she remarked. “The lousy way you treat Lois. God knows why she married you. Come on, Saammm.”
Sam took his probing hand out of my face and said, “ALL RIGHT, Shirley, all right! We’ll all go do the stupid polka. But first! Everybody’s gonna have one more little drink. My treat.”
“Christ! I wish I’d stayed in the motel,” was Shirley’s response to her husband’s suggestion. “I wish I’d stayed in Boise.”
Verl and I shook our heads, also in the negative, which left only Sam and Bobbie enthusiastic about the drinking plan. They lurched off into the crowd of bobbing red thimbles. Shirley, forced to choose between them and us, decided in favor of familiarity and took off too, calling after the jostled yellow meadow walking away from her, “Just you wait, Sam Midpath. Just you waaait!”
The street noise grew into a jangle of drunk and jovial and grouchy voices. I stood up on the car seat to look around. Abruptly, three shots rang out of the jangle, followed by high screeches and a basso, “Goddammit! What the FUCK was that?”—a remark which, having misjudged the noise level, came out after everyone else had quieted down, so that the speaker (Sam’s friend, the fat Bobbie) was laughed at by his immediate neighbors. Perceiving his miscalculation, he turned first the color of his fez, then consumingly nonchalant.
In the middle of the street, four cowboy desperadoes, each in a motley of western styles, were firing revolvers at each other without regard to verisimilitude, ingeniously discharging at least twenty bullets from each six-shooter. As each one was hit, he leapt into the air, gracefully spun about, and flamboyantly died on the pavement. After all four had been pronouncedly dispatched, a bright-badged and rather busty sheriff, followed by a somber young man in a stovepipe hat that rested loosely on his ears and had JUDGE painted on it, marched ceremoniously up, and with some superfluity, clamped handcuffs on two of the slain gunslingers. These and their two former enemies promptly rose like phoenixes from the asphalt and were applauded by the bystanders. The judge then handed each of the cowboys a large poster on a stick, which he took from a box lying near him on the sidewalk. The posters said:
!!! 8:30 TONIGHT !!!
THE BELLE OF BLACK BOTTOM GULCH
FAMILY FUN ** CHILDREN ONLY $.50 **
OLD-FASHIONED MELLERDRAMMER
! #! #! #! # DON’T MISS IT! #! #! #! #
!! RED LAGOON THEATRE !!
NEXT TO THE CREEK
The western troop paraded about the street with their posters and then moved into the crowd, grinning and handing out playbills. A red-haired desperado stopped from time to time to twirl his pistol for the onlookers.
“Red Lagoon. That’s Mattie and Leila’s theater,” I shouted at Verl.
Then I saw her on the other side of the street from us, laughing up at someone tall and bearded, someone who was not her husband, Mattie Stark. She had on a very short blue dress that looked like it had once been a long blue shirt. Leila made her own clothes, and she always made them out of something that used to be something else—being a recycler long before it became fashionable. She also experimented in lifestyles. This time she looked like a hippie: she was wearing a lot of silver jewelry—hooped earrings, dangling bracelets, and loosely designed rings. On the sidewalk beside her was a huge leather pocketbook that came up to her knees and could stand alone. On her feet, the soles of former shoes were tied to her ankles and toes
with blue leather thongs. Leila was blonder than anyone I had ever seen, and her eyes were the same blue as I had always figured lapis lazuli must be.
“LEILA! LEILA!” Verl and I yelled and flagged our arms at her a while, but couldn’t get her attention.
So we locked our stuff in the trunk and headed across the street, going against the flow and making very little progress, for we were swept back by the tide of Shriners onrushing to meet old friends. I kept my eye on the buoy of Verl’s black curly hair, following it until it rose as he stepped up on the other curb and I joined him there.
“Oh!” Leila laughed, “Devin! My God, you’re already here! This is wonderful. Good Lord, you look just the same.”
I hugged her back and forth comfortably, then I thought about what I was doing, got self-conscious, and stopped.
“Boy, I’m glad to see you, Leila.”
“I’m a wreck.” she said, tossing her head back in a spray of sunburst. “Hello, Verl.” She kissed him. “Thanks for bringing him. This is Spur. Spurgeon Debson. Spur, Devin and Verl. Aren’t these Shriners insane? Grown men!” She laughed. I had always loved to see her laugh; she was the only real person I’d met who had teeth like movie stars have.
Spurgeon was large and very well built. He wore soft, pale blue jeans and a sleeveless khaki shirt. His hair was long and dark, with a few streaks of gray glimmering in the black, circled with a leather headband. Around his neck, he had a silver chain with the same kind of random design as Leila’s rings. The most immediate thing about Spur was his eyes, which were deep-set with lined circles under them. They were insistent and almost frantically light white-blue like a whale’s eyes. And his whole face had the pale fervor of a prophet.
We offered him our hands, but he picked up Leila’s remark instead, the one about the Shriners. His voice lifted in a marching singsong, louder and fuller, into an evangelist’s rhythm.
“Somebody should exterminate them. Look! Typical example of the fucking American asshole mentality. Our FATHERS! Morons! Cretins! Living off the labor of better men. Looking down their thick hairy nostrils at the rest of the world. You realize! They are all on the payroll of General Motors, Washington, D.C. Every one of them! Scrape and slobber to the slime of the military industrial complex. Grovel in the blood. Murderers! They butchered the Indians. And the Jews! Now they’re practicing genocide on Blacks and Vietnamese. Read Marcuse! Read Cleaver! Read Sinclair Lewis!”
It was doubtless the most striking introductory remark anyone had ever made to me; people generally limited themselves to, “Nice to meet you,” or other bland formulae. I didn’t learn until sometime later that Spur’s outbursts were repeated nearly verbatim whenever he was addressed on any topic whatever, and that they continued at high volume until he was stopped by your excusing yourself to go to the bathroom or any other emergency you could come up with. By the end of the month, I had involuntarily memorized a portion of this set piece and moved my lips along with him as he screamed.
I noticed that Leila didn’t appear to be paying much attention to what Spur was saying. Verl looked displeased but I was fascinated by such abrupt fervor.
“I’m a poor one-armed son of a bitch,” he continued.
This was upsetting until I saw that he was shaking two quite healthy-looking fists at us and that therefore the phrase had to be a rhetorical rather than a medical one. Actually, it was a quotation, Leila told me later, from Spur’s father, for whom it had not been rhetorical—the father having been retired by that mishap from his position as brakesman for the New York Central, and his son raised in venom on his reaction to being unjustly pensioned-off.
Spur talked on. “I don’t have power. And why? Why don’t I have power? Because I don’t have bread. Money’s their power! Their balls are sacks of silver dollars! Their pricks are rolls of dimes! But I wipe my nose on their money. I wipe my ass on their bonds. They can put me in prison. Leave me there to rot. GAS ME! They do it every day. MURDERERS! SLAUGHTERHOUSE!”
Spur may not have had power, but he certainly had lungs. A crowd was gathering. One Shriner threw a quarter into Leila’s pocketbook. Spur sprang up on the hood of a yellow Lincoln Continental parked next to us.
“BABYKILLERS!” he yelled.
“Hey, you! Get down off my car!” a voice yelled from across the street. It was Sam Midpath, the daffodil field, our old but brief friend. Spurgeon ignored him and began kicking at the windshield of the Lincoln with his cowboy boot.
“How many poor slobs,” he intoned, “how many Dachau prisoners broke their backs building this pile of shit so you and your fat-ass wife”—he had presumably never met Shirley, but visionaries (and such Spur certainly was) have prophetic insight—“so you two can drive around, run over Black kids in the ghettos?” he asked Sam.
“Listen, you freak. You shut up and get down from there before I call the cops,” Sam replied.
At that moment, Shirley came squeezing up through the crowd, apparently all polkaed out.
“Call the pigs, you motherfucker!” Spur challenged him.
“Goddammit! You can’t talk to me like that in front of my wife,” Sam expostulated. As he did so, he grabbed at Spur’s leg, either to stop him from kicking out the windshield or to encourage him to get off the car. Spur booted Sam in the face the way a kicker would a football. It was a seven-foot punt. Sam landed shoulders down, flipped over, and stretched out peacefully, just like the four desperadoes had. Startled into affection by her husband’s suffering, Shirley set off in his ear an impressive imitation of an ambulance siren. We rushed over and helped Sam to his feet.
“Shut up, Shirley!” were his first words.
Spur had disappeared into the crowd, and as the Midpaths didn’t seem to connect him with us, our solicitude was well received. Finally, Sam and Shirley decided against bothering with the police and went off for another drink, if not a dance. Leila thought we should have a drink too. She appeared completely unremorseful about her friend Spur’s behavior.
“Oh, Jesus. I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt that guy. And maybe there’s a truth in the things Spur says. He’s just not very well socialized, the way he says them. Spur’s a little crazy sometimes,”
“A little crazy? Leila, he’s crazy as a loon!” I pointed out.
She looked upset, so I let it drop.
• • •
The Red Lagoon Theatre (formerly a rollerdrome) was next to the Red Lagoon Bar, the manager of which owned both buildings and leased the bigger one to Mittie for his stock company. They were both large, red wooden barn structures backed by pine forest and fronted by a wide dirt parking lot. Beside the theater ran a rapid and broad creek, deep enough in places to be called a river. Leila wanted to build a windmill there and call the theater the Moulin Rouge because once, after seeing the movie, she had fallen in love with Toulouse-Lautrec in, she said, a Jane Avrilish sort of way. For Leila found handicaps irresistible the way some people find long eyelashes or a French accent.
Like the wounded chickens. Years ago, in Earlsford, she used to ask friends of hers who had cars (Verl, for instance) to drive her along behind the truck that brought chickens every morning to the town produce market. A crate of fowls occasionally bounced off the back of the delivery truck and, as the drivers never stopped to retrieve them, Leila would collect the maimed and angry chickens and take them home with her. There, collected into a large pen, she eventually housed at least thirty highway victims, some with splints on their legs, some with bandaged wings, some with beaks bent sideways, or an eye missing. All of them were given names—Socrates, Bessie Smith, Helen Keller—christened with the triumphs of other embattled spirits, though they never answered when called. And now she collected broken people the same way.
When we squirmed through the customers into the Red Lagoon Bar, it seemed even fuller and noisier than the street outside. But few of these people were wearing red fezzes; perhaps it was a lo
cal sanctuary for anti-Shriners. The jukebox shrieked and thumped, the lights were red. We were quickly pressed up against a bar designed to represent a red coral reef. Everybody was talking.
“So I told my old man, ‘Who are you to tell me?’ You know? ‘Do you think you’ve been any kind of a shining example yourself?’”
“Yeah, I’ve seen her around. Why? You think you can make her?”
“Well, Bobby isn’t getting my vote. I don’t trust him. And I didn’t think much of his brother either. What do people like that know about real life? Millions! And ten kids! Millions! It’s disgusting.”
“Who’s that singing?” someone near us asked.
“It’s a guy named Tom Jones, like in the movies,” her escort replied.
“Oh, yeah, I read about him. He’s an Irish Negro.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Well, they said so. I don’t know why they’d make it up.”
It took us some time to squeeze our way over to a booth. Leila seemed to know everyone in the place. People would call to her, grab at her arm, even hug her as we pushed along. She smiled at them. A buzz of panic circled my head. She seemed to know so many people. Where was I in relationship? Maybe some of them were involved with her; maybe she’d slept with them. What did I really know about Leila? After all, her life was here now, here and in Los Angeles, where she lived in the winters. For the past five years, I’d seen her only at Christmas vacations when, on her annual trip to her mother’s for the holiday, she’d drop by to visit Mama.
The Delectable Mountains Page 3