The bird tugs his ear. Misery, misery. His best friends are dead. No more excitement, not even aching loneliness, not even guilt. He and the parrot whistle the organ introduction to “A Whiter Shade of Pale”.
Olive is full of strange ideas, odd notions. Weird. Such as exclaiming all the time, Mississippi rain! Wanting broccoli every meal. Such as watching herself in the mirror repeat school school school school. Wanting to name the baby Swee’pea, be it boy or girl.
Holy mother! says Popeye. You gotta be joking.
It goes with our handles, she says.
It sure the hell does! Come on. Swee’pea the Sailor?
No, she says. Swee’pea Oyl.
Oyl? says Popeye.
O Popeye, says Olive.
And did those feet in ancient time, he croons at the bird, and together they whistle the hymn. They sing “Jerusalem” right through to the first cigar.
Popeye stands in the darkening room feeding the baby, his child Swee’pea, a male with a kiss curl. Beautiful, beloved, simple, and good.
When did Olive begin saying O Popeye like that? Once it was an endearment, love talk, now it sounds as if she’s angry, or truly disappointed in him, for everything.
The parrot perches on the edge of Popeye’s dinner plate finishing the mashed potatoes, sneezing. Outside, bats zigzag between the yellow birches. The house creaks a bit, settling. The family car purrs up the street, driver’s side low to the ground, and Popeye whispers, Here she is, here she is!
Till the white Oldsmobile grows small in Popeye’s memory. Though baby Swee’pea is evidence of his basic goodness, he falls from grace oftener than seldom. When Olive says Mississippi rain! he has screaming fits. When the credit cards are not paid on time he blames the government. When the housekeeping goes to rack and ruin and Olive does not dress before noon, he seeks counsel from the bird because the babe is too pure to hear complaint or give advice.
She tries to talk to him about her studies.
But all in his life is too full too round too colourful. He wants the illusion of distance, but not distance itself.
He transfers to night deliveries in the hope that Olive will stay home with the child. She hires a babysitter instead. He misses his evenings with Swee’pea and Jerusalem, but likes the empty streets, likes the way night covers him with a dark stripe, knows it to be earth’s shadow under which he labours; it will be lifted at dawn. He sees himself motoring parts through the city as through a sequence of rooms, as if he’s going cel to cel in a cartoon, frame to frame in a movie. At each place the scenery is different.
One midnight his brakes fail and when he goes off the road he bangs his head. He leaves the van in a hedge and walks home, feeling strangely nervous. It’s odd to be a pedestrian at this hour. He memorizes the make and year of each car that crosses his path.
He’s on a treadmill. In his head he works out his credit ceiling, damns the conservatives and the liberals, then paints the house, buys a motorcycle, visits cities and countries in a widening circle — what colour the house? the bike? what kind of paint? bike? what about Asia? Africa? — then, to calm his pounding heart, he bleeds the brakes, fills the master cylinder, and test drives the truck.
At home all is quiet, occluded, and he’s accurate with his key, enters noiselessly, slipping into the bathroom and closing the door before turning on a light. He undresses and scrubs his hands and face. He’s in the middle of cleaning his teeth when the entrance fills with pink flesh, gun barrel; he’s heard nothing; he swallows toothpaste.
Olive blinks at him. The rifle slowly lowers.
Still she grows fatter.
Nights at work, he loves to think of her walking, of how slow she moves. Inside that three-dimensional body she is the most beautiful person he has known. The way she gazes at him, at their son. The way she can look hurt.
Mornings, he dreams of straight up and down women with black eyes.
When he and Olive make love, he is somewhere else. He can’t understand what their bodies are doing, what the different parts might be for, what the names he’s learned to give the parts might mean. Driving, he is elsewhere. At the factory, orders have to be repeated to him over and over; radio dispatch is angry; he gets lost on streets he should know. He has no more headaches, no more pain at all. The world comes to him in numbered units, events happen in boxes, and human beings have little tinny voices. He is sometimes so exultant that he thinks he will die of ecstasy.
One Sunday, in a golden production full of laughter that takes him completely happy, or close to it, he bounces Swee’Pea high in the air and in the moment before catching the child receives Olive’s finest most secret smile. And it doesn’t matter his pitch is rusty, or that his son crawls away to win her heart — he’s in awe of her, of them both. And he knows, sure as he knows his mind’s a wiped slate from a week of mixed-up nights, that if they were to drive, the three of them, for ice cream cones every Sunday afternoon for ever, that the sun would always shine.
When he’s fired, he stays home and plays with Swee’pea till noon, then they roam the city together and call Olive at dusk to come pick them up. The intersection names he gives her are the funniest shapes in his mouth.
Olive, he says one evening, here’s how it happens. We are going to sell up and leave, move south. We need a new start on things.
Where south?
We will look, he says. We will start looking. We can drive out this weekend, set off early Saturday and drive, just drive. We will find someplace to camp and on Sunday take a boo at the country. Next weekend check out a different highway. Land is cheap in the sticks. We will start looking.
Out of words, he looks across the table through the coffee steam. Olive is just sitting there, big as a circus tent balanced on the chair, gazing way off.
Honey, we gotta do it, he says. Show our boy the world isn’t made of parking lots. Maybe find a dairy town and buy fresh milk. Show him there’s places he can quench his thirst on other than Classic.
He knows she thinks he will have forgotten about it come Saturday, but he’s determined. He ties knots in all his socks, in every shirt sleeve, twists a hair pin round his razor. He will remember, and then they will see what they will see. They address each other with great politeness for the rest of the week. He walks around her carefully, aware she is studying him. And on the morning in question they are indeed all three wide awake, loading the car with camping supplies and slipping under the dash maps of all counties to the south. As Olive turns the wheel and signals to leave the curb, Jerusalem shrieks from the blanketed cage. Popeye leans back to check Swee’pea’s seat fastenings and the belt that holds the cage, and he marvels to himself at the surprising lack of effort it took to get them on the road.
Jerusalem
RUBBER WHISPERS UNDER STEEL SPRINGS. THE country through which they drive so fast boasts no God, Popeye thinks, only a smudge of colour over what keeps a world intact. His thoughts somersault along this land divided into rectangles by long straight grooves and thin perpendicular structures.
Nothing to keep things apart.
Live sun-shaped objects lying inside every right angle.
He rode one in a carousel.
He has always been at home in forest and field, Swee’pea will likely fall in love, Jerusalem will learn new songs, Olive will not seem so large. In time, there will be for his son if not for him the beautiful woodcutter’s daughter . . .
Cows, says Swee’Pea. His first word. Cows.
A hand grasping a can fills Popeye’s head, fingers squeezing till the can bursts. A fanfare. He tosses his child into the air and is cheated. Swee’pea crawls blithely along scaffolding high above the new city. Every time he’s about to step into space, a girder slides into position, the building extends and the child continues. Swee’pea’s progress is dizzying. Moment by moment death by falling is transformed into the building’s thrust as cranes swing steel into place.
The driver escaped the jaws of life, O yes, his own life needed to trace a
rainbow’s far curve. But the time has come for him to declare how much he loves Olive and Swee’pea. Soon he will reach them, although their blood is green and they are not vulnerable to his protection. How can he do what he has learned best to do, how can he save them? He will have to step outside and be God’s hand, lift the car, lift the car.
At last his fingers relax.
And he sees this, that the Ragg brothers’ child was taken to a house in this countryside. That the child’s brief accidental sleeping mother let go.
The baby sings. She sings. Delighting all who meet her, she sings, and her adoptive parents explain she has always sung, since her arrival she has sung. She has not grown, still does not sleep the night through, but wakes them with a song. Frustrated. Hungry. Glad. In such words the parents describe the way their baby sings.
O! Look what you’ve done, says Olive. Look at you.
Between his thighs the pee has soaked into the seat, and his trousers are warm and sodden. His fingers tremble. Droplets glisten on the hard surface of his nails.
You drive, honey, he says. I don’t feel so good.
O Popeye! I am driving!
When the car stops and they get out to clean up, Swee’pea trots down into the ditch. A transport roars past, furious warrior etched into the windshield. Popeye listens to the succeeding quiet, feels it freight the air between his family members. A fine mesh falls. A line grid settles. Limits are drawn, distances measured. Through this gossamer grid he watches light run across the valley, clouds churn on the road. He has peed his pants and it doesn’t matter. In the distance someone is singing a high sweet song. And it’s the brothers’ baby singing. Light is escaping from where land and country imperfectly fit. A brilliant glimmer shocks Popeye into bliss: he is organized, his head empty, his heart in his mouth. From a great distance he sees Olive checking round to ascertain Swee’pea’s safety. She trots down to the ditch to see what has happened, what has changed.
PARALLEL RIVERS
BUZZING IN A
YOU DON’T LIKE MUSIC BECAUSE MUSIC is the art form that invades. Who’d said those words to him? He remembered a warm voice, an explaining voice. Renée. No, the tone was not condescending. His ears were ringing; he tried to force his way into the dream again, to capture the speaker’s identity. The words were caressing, kind; they came from a period of his life long finished. You’re very afraid of being invaded. You must learn to hear music properly, not let it take you over. Listen. I love you. Listen.
Later that morning Gerald woke himself up laughing. Again. He’d managed to rest for a little over three hours though and he felt calmer, less crazy. As usual between jobs he was dreaming of his family, his mother, his uncle, his sister, his wife. All gone. He thanked the laughing dream. Then the years settled in; his mouth tasted foul. Once up, he changed the T-shirt he’d slept in for a clean one. He made a pot of coffee and drank a couple of cups while reading the headlines of yesterday’s paper. He felt like talking to someone, but had no wish to talk to anyone he knew. He wanted a drink, but if he went out to a bar he’d get into a fight. He leaned against the windowsill and fixed on the full bottle of rye beside the cottage cheese container by the sink. He didn’t want a drink. He looked at the ceiling, at the place where a light fixture had once hung. He was thinking of the women he’d lived with, Amanda, Bet, Joan; women he’d for a time thought he loved. He’d left them all except Renée. He stacked them, one atop the other, shackled them together like cartoon symbols in a video game, shot them down. Last of all Renée. He clicked his teeth rapidly, alternating eye teeth, right side, left side. It seemed to be getting dark in the room, as if darkness was spreading from the jagged hole in the ceiling. He turned to the window. Although still quite early afternoon, it was like dusk outside.
Winged insects filled the air. Down below, automobiles turned on headlights. He tracked the progress of an ambulance along the murky block and out of sight. A white deep-sea fish with its bright spinning lantern. The dim walls and windows of the buildings across the way flickered like a fast-motion film of cloud formations as the sun filtered through the thick swarm. Then the light, the shadows, held clear and steady, and he remembered Amanda, her voice, the voice in the dream. The moon-faces down in the street vanished. Everything seemed very quiet. Then he heard slow footsteps above his head, felt a tingle rise up his spine.
They’d been sticky with lemon, drinking tequila, entwined in Amanda’s hammock slung between the fence and a tree in her enclosed yard, and she was lecturing him in that mock-sophisticated way she had. A warm California dawn lit the sky, they’d been up all night, they must’ve been little more than children. The light swaying of the hammock, the closeness, the feeling of complete security, almost of invisibility, just before the hook pulled out of the tree. How strangely musical the jay’s song, that one on the post, had been. So pretty! Amanda said. Jays do sing in that quiet way sometimes, she said. And they fell, drinks spilling, into the long green grass, to sprawl, separate now and gasping into a sky the colour of the jay’s breast.
Gerald licked his lips, tasting salt. A snatch of music drifted from the gliding traffic. He felt vulnerable at the open window. A tapping, pirouetting insect stirred among the origami figures on the ledge. He picked it up, held it gently between thumb and forefinger; the legs waved slowly. An orange paper owl fell toward the heat duct, fluttered head over heels to land on its beak in the dusty corner of the room. He cleared a space on the table in front of the window and set the insect down on its back. He’d never seen one like it before. The legs kicked feebly. Taking a sheet of paper — a field of mustard — he began folding. Maybe he’d phone Renée, invite her out to dinner. The tea-coloured carapace flickered, wings popped out, stretched wide, then closed for good. He worked carefully, scoring each fold with a nail, smoothing the new edge. The woman across the hall, the beautiful silent woman, he’d seen her carrying magazines and books about wildlife, he’d show her the insect. He finished the box, an open-topped rectangle, two inches long, half an inch wide, an inch tall, and used a new sheet — the California sky — to make a lid. His fingers trembled as he transferred the insect from the table to the yellow container. On his way out, he shut off the electric light, the coffee percolator.
In the centre panel of the door across the hall was fastened a notepad and a pencil. The passage smelled of floor wax and disinfectant, familiar, close. He’d not spoken to anyone for three days. He rapped on the door. None of the buzzers in this building worked. He heard someone moving round inside and knocked again, a little louder.
It’s your neighbour! I live across from you! Hello!
He could hear something. He knocked once more, softly. He should not have spoken, he should never trust his voice, so often it came out a strained, jarring, stuttering croak.
Taking the elevator down to street level, he closed his eyes. He hated the messages and slogans scrawled on the walls and even scratched around the numbered buttons. The cables rumbled, the place stank of beer. He felt glad she hadn’t answered. Now he could spend the day doing what he wanted to do, he could be alone and make his own decisions. What could they have said to each other anyway? It was terrible the way people made conversation, told stories, laughed together. They never realized how dangerous it was, how exposed they were. He’d once seen himself laughing with Renée in a restaurant; it had gotten dark outside and he’d studied their reflection in the large window that gave onto the boulevard: she wore the Greek glass beads he’d bought her; his mouth was fixed in a wide grin revealing strings of spit and fragments of food. Thank God that was over. After Renée, his body had felt huge, ugly and, wherever he went, on display. Then he’d started to relax into complicity with those who regarded him as a cool loner, a man who did his job, then disappeared. A cold man. A shy man.
At the fourth floor a muscled black guy wearing only shorts, training shoes, and headphones joined him in the elevator.
Fucking insects, huh?
Tinny rhythms from the headphones,
a long sigh through his nostrils.
Hotter than whore’s piss, man. Gonna go sweat some more. City’s like a furnace. You wearing too many clothes, man. You dig this lousy dry prairie stinking city heat? I really dig it.
Gerald was thinking everything was all right with prostitutes. But maybe the guy said horse piss. At his uncle’s farm in Canada, he’d sat in the dirt in the shade of the house and watched mares running with their colts. Uncle George would play the harmonica as he and his sister watched them run. Uncle George had lifted him high into the saddle for his first and only ride and he’d almost fainted with excitement as his sister looked on, gaping, and he made his spine as straight as he could. But he couldn’t see the animal’s legs or its face, he couldn’t see the horse and had cried to be taken off. He’s peed himself! Uncle George laughed. Look at that! Right down Deacon’s back!
When the elevator door slid open, he stood a moment staring at the deserted beach — a peeling, yellowed mural which covered two entire walls. Nothing like the rocky beaches near his uncle’s farm. Sometime he’d go back there, see if the farm still existed. The lobby echoed with traffic noise: someone had propped open the door with the grimy plastic mat. The jogger danced across the carpet and skipped into the glare. The ocean looked tired. The same pale colour as his sister’s eyes. Gerald peed on the horsie’s back, Gerald peed on the horse! Several bulbs in the ceiling had burned out. He pulled the mat free and stepped through as the door swung closed. Cars streamed past, wailing their horns. It felt as if it were raining and yet the pavement was dry. He walked the few feet to the entrance of the video games arcade, kicking aside the insects rather than stepping on them, peered up to see the sky between the buildings. A kid with a ghetto-blaster said, What you looking at, man? Hey, what you staring at? Somebody gonna jump? Some jumper up there?
Gerald ran his hand through his hair, wiped the palm on his pant-seat. God, his hair was filthy. Should wash it today. He despised having to do pointless things over and over. He should take another job. Miami or L.A., maybe San Francisco. Here there was just paper folding and the video arcade. He was getting good at Mr Do, tipping the apple on top of the monster. He should call the contact in Toronto. He decided not to phone Renée after all. She was bound to tell him to get lost. Maybe he’d give Bernice a ring later, set something up for tonight. Time was getting on, though. Bite to eat, two or three games, call Renée, try the girl across the hall, phone Bernice. Beautiful women were like horses, he’d always thought that. Bite to eat, two or three games, call Renée, try the girl across the hall, call Bernice.
Parallel Rivers Page 7