Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  Saar started to hyperventilate, and then he burst into tears.

  Mortified, he pretended to sneeze convulsively in order to camouflage this preposterous breakdown. It was the church, he told himself.

  He had always known churches to be dangerous places. He had always intelligently avoided them. Yet here he was, absurdly falling in love with not only a Christian but a priest (and if the truth be known, he would have to say, a mediocre musician, ignorant as a babe of the world of the arts, really not terribly bright, and almost totally devoid of erotic technique); here he sat, in love with such an idiot (not to mention its being homosexual, and a damn waste of time and shame to have to hide it, and still probably—if the country continued to slide back down into the pit of conformity it had briefly pulled its head above in the last decade—probably lose his job); here he sat, in love with this man. Here he sat, badgered by music, importuned by an optical illusion, stained through glass, of haloes goldening the heads of his urchins. Music swells, sinner falls to his knees, he'd seen it in a hundred movies called The Robe. A shoddy gimmick.

  And high above the choir screen, over their heads, the huge gilded crucifix; Christ in careful realism, larger than life, carved and hung there. My God! thought Saar, as he felt his friend Mr. Hyde puff up in his breast. Why not gild the gas chamber then? Why not paste precious stones on an electric chair and hang it up over the altar!

  What a hideous, slimy, lurid symbol for a religion to exalt—a machine of public execution! My God! Gibbon was right, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Marx, who else? Well, whoever, they were all right.

  (Hadn't he heard that Nietzsche had ended up hugging an overworked cart horse, blubbering tears all over its scrawny neck? But, wait, hadn't he gone senile from syphilis by then? Yes!) Yes, they were right. Saar felt the impulse rise to spring up from his seat, up into the air, and haul Christ down from that Cross, hurl Him down to the floor of the church. How dare He hang there as if it were all that simple! His mere six hours of suffering to compensate for the slow, wasting agony of all the ages! His scourging and short walk to death to make up for it all! Millions had died more mercilessly mocked, in greater thirst, in greater fear, in greater pain, unsolaced by faithful tears, not to mention resurrection. How dare He hang up there and claim He paid the cost of one child, panicked for breath, dying in a terror of incomprehension while his parents powerlessly watched. Oh, naturally it appealed to the blind and the halt (halted by misfortunes mental, physical, or otherwise), naturally it was the perfect tool of oppression. It meant nothing and everything, a potboiler of paradox. God born in a manger (every child a movie star), riding to glory on an ass, betrayed with a kiss, savior to whores and drunks and other flashy types, crowned with thorns. Have your king and eat him, too. It was a wonder it wasn't already a TV series. Hyde started laughing while Saar cried.

  The choir faltered. Jonathan stopped them with a wave. "No, no, this is tricky. Now listen again." He ran over to the organ and played a melody with one hand, beating time with the other, singing the words with wide contortions of his mouth. "Laudamus te, benedicimus te, adoramus te. All right? Try it. Ready?"

  A more horrific urge seized Walter Saar. He was entirely sober, yet he held with both hands to the sides of his seat, so strong was the sensation that if he let go, he would be bodily pulled through air, as if by wires attached to the Cross, and sprung against the body of Christ. Compelled to throw his arms around Christ's neck, his legs around Christ's hips, to kiss the worm-eaten wooden lips, to thrust his finger in the sword hole, his tongue in the nail holes, to rub his sex against the body of God here in the sanctity of the church before the world to make a fool of this long-suffering Christ. For what, cackled Mr. Hyde, could Christ do, perfect Love that He was, hung above everyone else, but accept the embrace with open arms? His arms were open to every sinner. They were nailed open.

  "Tu solus Dominus. Tu solus altissimus."

  "Just once more, Jordan, okay?" Jonathan said to the small boy beside Charlie Hayes. Oh, God! Saar choked. Naturally, the only little black boy in the whole damn school, and there he is stage center, voice like an angel, grinning part and parcel of this conspiracy of coincidental significance designed to choke me up! Oh, God, I'm a sentimental jerk! Bring on Dilsey and Tiny Tim and let them sing a duet of "Ave Maria"! Let Little Nell and Little Eva play harps and the deaf Beethoven conduct!

  "Yes, wonderful, now everyone."

  "Jesu Christe. Cum Sancto Spiritu in Gloria dei Patris. Amen."

  "Young man? Excuse me, young man? Can I help you? Are you ill?" Prudence Lattice put her hand on the blue chambray shirt.

  Walter Saar was bent over in the pew, his head to his knees. He lifted his face to see a shimmery blur of a small, birdish, elderly woman.

  "No," he mumbled, hands and face covered with tears. "Thank you.

  I'm not ill."

  "Oh. Good." She smiled. "You're just crying. Good. I thought maybe you'd had an attack or something. Music often makes me cry.

  It just gets so big inside you, you're not big enough for it, and out it comes in tears. Do you know what I mean?" She shook her head, fumbling through her purse. "You young people. None of you ever have any handkerchiefs. Never plan to cry, I suppose. Or catch colds or perspire or have anything go wrong. Oh, I guess I was just the same. Here we go. You take it. Yes. There."

  "Absurd. So sorry. Can't imagine what. Feel a perfect fool."

  "Oh, that's all right. That's what church is for. No, no. You keep that. I have lots at home. People give them to you for presents when they don't know what else to do, and, well, over the years they add up."

  chapter 63

  Ramona Dingley was very ill, but though her voice had lost all volume, it persisted adamantine as she refused to be tormented or distracted by something as morally irresponsible as a hospital at so morally serious a moment in her life as her death.

  "Sammy, hell's bells," growled her physician, "leave her alone. If she doesn't want to go, don't nag her. They can't do anything for her anyhow."

  "There's no hope then?"

  "Didn't say that. I learned my lesson years ago when she got over that heart attack to stop forecasting Ramona's demise. All I'm going to say is that if a woman her age and in her condition chooses to stand out seminaked all night, she's not doing much to help her odds."

  "It's not funny, Otto."

  "Oh, Sammy, listen, I know, I know. Why don't you go take a walk, go get a drink. There's nothing you can do here. Orchid's sitting in there; I'm going to sleep. Either take a sleeping pill or take a stroll. Go on, go on."

  Smalter walked westward among the pine groves and orchard and meadow that lay picture-book perfect between Elizabeth Circle and the silken river Rampage. Through the pines on the far bank, a plum and lavender sky pinked the water. Slowly, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his seersucker vest, puffing on his pipe enough to keep it lit, the pharmacist took his prescribed stroll north along the side of the Rampage and wondered how Ramona felt, what it would be like to be Ramona now. As he passed under a low willow branch, he patted the bark with his hand. Boys, when he was young, had swung out on the branch and dropped from there naked into the river to swim.

  And once or twice, in the coldest winters, when the Rampage was safely frozen, older boys had brought their jalopies onto the ice to race them. Children had skated. Ramona had skated, too, a grown woman, astonishing him with her sudden leaps and turns. Smalter recalled hearing as a child that a young couple, sweethearts, people called them, had fallen through the ice and drowned. For weeks he'd waked with nightmares of their swimming down the black river under ice, pushing up against the dark cold, searching for the jagged hole of light they'd fallen through. His parents had thought he was dreaming of his operations.

  "Hi, Mr. Smalter." It was Luke's voice. In a bend a few hundred feet ahead, Luke and Polly sat quietly by the bank, Polly in a huge tree trunk hollowed into a seat. From a distance they looked like a Winslow Homer painting. Close up, they looked thinner to the p
harmacist; their eyes different.

  Smalter nodded and stood beside them for a while. Then he said, "I told Ramona that you'd dropped by earlier, Polly, but Dr. Scaper thinks it'll be better in general that she not have any visitors while she's feeling so weak." (Miss Dingley had in fact said to Smalter, "Tell her, don't come. Could pontificate. Be pleasant. Deathbed advice.

  Young heiress. Tears and gratitude. Won't indulge myself. She's seen enough dying. Tell her I liked her. Right off the bat. Tell her, don't waste my money. Don't be an idiot. Don't forget, love too, some point along the way.")

  "I hope she's better. Is she?" the girl asked.

  "About the same, I'm afraid. I'll keep you in touch, Polly. Luke.

  See you soon. Don't stay out here too late." Frail and urban among the pines and weeds and brambled thickets of berries, Smalter walked on north, following the river.

  The two young people were quiet until he was out of sight, then they returned to what they'd been talking about before he came. Polly said, "I bet we could tell Mr. Smalter about it, I bet he'd help. He could talk to Dr. Scaper. Listen, if Miss Dingley dies, we still can't let it drop about what we saw, okay? I just wish we had those pictures."

  "Don't worry. I'll get them. It's just a matter of time."

  They were quiet again. Sky and water faded together into night's monochrome.

  Sammy Smalter didn't drink, had no taste or tolerance for alcohol, and so on the rare occasions when he ordered, ordered quixotically by title such concoctions as Brandy Alexanders and Jack the Rippers. Returning from his walk by way of the Prim Minster, he stopped to have a bicentennial special, the Valley Forge, which appeared to be grain alcohol poured over a tall glass of crushed ice with a Betsy Ross flag stuck in it. At Glover's Lane he stopped to visit A.A. Hayes. He found the editor, drink in hand, seated in the dark on his porch steps, a southern custom the expatriate clung to, though none of his neighbors had adopted it. On Hayes's house was a placard modeled facetiously on Ernest Ransom's. It read, BUILT 1948.

  "Sit down, Sammy, I'm all alone. And how am I? Tight as a tick.

  And how do I feel about life? About like Moby Dick. I mean the whale, not the book."

  "Mind company? You were reading."

  "Just a piece of junk." Hayes held up a paperback, Heather Should Have Died Hereafter by Ben Rough. Smalter said nothing. The two men, moonlit, sat on the steps, and Hayes, having pressed a glass on the pharmacist, they shared a bottle.

  Around them Glover's Lane was quiet. The Strummers had closed their house and gone to upstate New York, where Jack's parents lived. They would bury Joy there in her father's family plot.

  Lights were on in the Hedgerow home. Luke Packer sat in the living room with Polly watching the old Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on television. Evelyn Troyes sat in the kitchen watching Cecil Hedgerow sip the soup she had made him. He held the spoon carefully in his bandaged hands. They talked about violin music.

  Limus Barnum's house was dark. On Glover's Lane no one was outside except the editor and his guest.

  Finally, Hayes spoke. "How much more can we take? Can you believe that about the poor Haigs? Awful." He drank again.

  "Yes."

  "You know, Lime was a creep, but I never figured he'd ever do anything. Just a bunch of hot air. I actually used to theorize about him a lot. Boy! So much for my theories. He came into the Day all the time, wanted us to be friends. Just wanted a friend. Poor creepy son of a bitch."

  "He wanted you to become a Nazi."

  "Aw, who took that seriously?" Hayes took Smalter's lighter to light a cigarette. "Poor old Lime. 'Spend time with Lime, and spend less.' You know, really, what was he? Like he said, a guy that worked hard, paid his own way, never had it easy, felt pushed around, put down, not too special, not too successful; devoid of charm, or family, or grace, or much luck, or even the trust, much less affection, of most people around him. All the grudges and frustrations and that piss-ass unarticulated unhappiness of the vast silent majority."

  "If you're writing his obituary, Alvis, don't forget to mention he raped a woman and shot her husband to death. Your poor son of a bitch."

  "Aw, what do you know?" slurred Hayes loudly. "Get off your high horse, Sammy. Who knows what happened out there?" He offended the midget, who set down his drink, which Hayes (entirely unaware of Smalter's response to his tone) immediately refilled.

  Then he patted Smalter on the back and spoke warmly. "I like you, Sammy. Always have."

  Smalter tugged at his bow tie, shook off the affront as alcoholic and not personal, picked up his glass, and took a drink. "What is this?"

  "Scotch."

  "Isn't it a tad on the bitter side?"

  "Tad on the cheap side. Keep drinking, won't matter in a while.

  Sammy," Hayes said solemnly, "I had a dream last night. You'll appreciate it. I dreamed Richard Nixon was King Lear! He was running crazed and half-naked in the rags of that black three-piece suit of his.

  Roaring up and down a deserted beach at San Clemente howling things like 'Take physic, pomp!' But Nixon's not crazy like Lear. He's only crazy like the Pentagon and Exxon."

  "Sane."

  "Right. Have some more."

  "Ah, well, just a bit. How much is enough?"

  "I don't know yet. Ask me twenty years from now. Sammy, that's the point. If Nixon would go crazy, he'd be great! What we need in this country are some tragic heroes. Know what Coleman said? Said there weren't any in America, not even Lincoln when Booth shot him." Hayes staggered to his feet and shook his glass at the stars.

  "No heroes! But it's not because there's no throne to fall off, Sammy, it's because we don't believe in the Fall. America elected to escape Original Sin. No last act. That's why. If the land gives out in Tennessee, why, the grass is always greener on the Great Divide.

  Right? Sammy, my friend, if Adam and Eve had been Americans, they would have left the Garden of Eden in a covered wagon, yelling, 'Yippy-ki-yi-yay! Move 'em out!' They would have settled down west in Babylon and started writing their memoirs and going on shows telling what it had 'done' to them to be pushed out of Paradise. Not After the Fall. After the Shove! That's our philosophy. Yep, and they would have gone into analysis and 'fixed' their heads."

  "Alvis. Excuse me. Could you point me toward your toilet?"

  "Shit. Are you going to throw up?"

  "No. Of course not."

  "'Cause do it out here on the grass. Okay, okay, it's straight back, down the hall on the left. For God's sake, don't do it on the rug.

  She'll kill me."

  When Smalter returned to the porch, the editor was smoking two cigarettes, one in his mouth, one in his hand. He was already talking and, from all Smalter could judge, may never have stopped.

  "Imperfectibility is un-American, so's unhappiness." Hayes burped.

  "We won't admit we're flawed, or handicapped, we won't even be inconvenienced! Old age is un-American. Poor refuse to be poor; minorities insist on the rights of majorities. Cripples protest a lot of steps."

  "I don't much like a lot of steps myself," threw in Smalter, easing himself up into a porch rocker. "I gather you're saying the former president is not tragic because he doesn't sense that he was wrong.

  And this is a national trait."

  "Well, don't make it sound so dumb. Think about it, Oedipus didn't call a press conference and announce, 'Listen, Jocasta and I made a few mistakes, so you're throwing me out. Well, you won't have Oedipus Rex to kick around anymore.' No, he said, 'Look, I was wrong, I was blind but now I see.' See? Tragic heroes accept the imperfectibility of man. Human character, human destiny."

  "It would seem so. How can you drink that stuff like it was water?"

  "Sammy, if you were southern, you'd understand me better, but you Yankees never knew what it was to be defeated. You learn there's no place left to go. The puny little confines of human nature have you all fenced in. No amount of overreaching is going to work. Not over the gate of that sadist, that usurer Go
d Almighty, Jahweh, Lord of Lords and Lord of Flies. You know that? You don't know that. I know that. You don't know that." Hayes's head kept shaking mournfully.

  "I thought cursing the gods was only supposed to make matters worse."

  "Nope, we won't accept our Fall. Won't do it. Nope. You know that?"

  "Yes, love it or leave it. America's a romance, Alvis. That's all.

  Wonders of the newfound land, and man. Rebirth. Like the phoenix rising."

  "Think the South will rise again, Sammy? It will, you know, you wait. Never should have lost," mumbled Hayes. "Damn Gettysburg.

  Damn." The word was a long, drawled sigh. "Ever heard Lee's farewell to his troops? Let me get it. Now there's a hero!"

  Smalter rocked out of his chair and sat Hayes back down. He had often before heard the editor, intoxicated, on the true cause, course, and consequences of the War of the Confederacy. "Look." He pointed. "Police."

  A patrol car had turned into the street and parked next door.

  Hayes quickly hid his bottle behind the shrub bordering the porch steps. "God, Alvis, you are paranoid," whispered Smalter. They watched Joe MacDermott, in uniform, lead two policemen, one with a camera, into the house of Limus Barnum. Lights came on, first floor, then second. Hayes stumbled down his steps and across the lawn, Smalter behind him.

  "Alvis, wait. You think you ought to?"

  "Freedom of the press," the editor said, then belched loudly.

  Barnum's house was full of things. Old and new furnishings, dozens of electrical appliances. A set of encyclopedias and framed prints of the Impressionists in textured cardboard were among the hundred curiously impersonal artifacts, things chosen because they were the things the world told him to choose. Ordinary things.