Middle C

by Gass, William H

  But does it run all right.

  Them tires turn pretty good given enny encouragement. But I dont give out garentees.

  In the window of the Airstream, looking out at him with one good eye, was Billy Bear. Hello there, Billy Bear, Joseph said with a cordiality he actually felt.

  Its got a quarter gas. If you got a foot for it you kin squeeze a lotta miles outta the ole wreck. Thats a car, tho, wasnt worth much new.

  Are you trying to discourage me? Fifty is about all I can afford.

  I figgur you dont know doob about em, do you? She was smellably close, and Joseph recalled the cologne. Billy Bear wouldnt buy it, tell you that. He knows moren you, kid—my my—you dont know doob. Her splayed hands measured an amount of air no more than a crack’s worth. Though her skin was dark, her palms were very pale. In London, when he saw his first such person he thought they had been painted; then he thought they were diseased; finally, he figured they were smoked like some of the buildings that bombs had charred.

  I’ve never owned a car, that’s true. Actually, I’ve rarely ridden in one.

  If I sells you this Rambler for thirty-five you got to promise never to come back here to complain. You kin come back—welcome enny time—but not to complain. You kin come back sos the car kin die here, shur—but not to complain. Youre strange, you know, kid your age as ignorant as you about—of all the whurl’s ring-a-ding things—about cars. She then engulfed him. Cotton cloth roses were flattened on his face. You led a deeprived life, I guess, she said, her mouth just above his ear. A hug closes the deal.

  Joseph groaned for air on account of the cologne, not on account of the squeeze.

  You got your hug, now I want my thirty-five, then you get keys.

  Much obliged. Joseph counted out thirty-five as the blood receded from his face. The bills had been wadded. They wouldn’t keep still.

  Fortunately the car was facing the road. She pushed his knee to shove his foot down on the clutch, put the key in for him and turned it, forced the shift into low, and shouted go! Joseph drove with a lurch onto the road where he stayed peacefully in that gear his whole wobbly way to Urichstown, where the engine stalled in the fenced lot of a fast food.

  Joseph had been scared, therefore nervous as a fly, the entire drive, but drive it he had, with no background in vehicles beyond bikes, so when he stood before Miss Bruss and Miss Bruss’s desk, he stood as one proud, as one who had returned from a dangerous mission.

  Are you practicing to be a butler?

  No, ma’am. He held out the requested papers. All filled out. Except for a social security number that I don’t have. I doubt I’ll need one for a while.

  Are you complaining about the pay?

  No, ma’am. But I figure there’s not enough to bother the government about.

  We don’t want to bother the government.

  No, ma’am.

  Sit down if you’re done practicing posture. You will have a few things to sign. Then you’ll be mine.

  That’s good, I guess.

  If you don’t turn out deaf dumb and blind.

  Her hair still hung about her head like a cloud around the moon. And she continued to be terse with him, but it was not a dismissive terseness; it felt like well-meaning banter. She was amused. Maybe he should consider a career in gaucherie. Madame Mieux had already suggested that.

  When do you want me to start?

  Library hours are nine to ten. Settle on the eight you want. Have you a place to live?

  No, ma’am. I was about to look. Maybe you have some suggest—

  I have a room for rent if you want to take a look at it. It isn’t far. You wouldn’t need a car.

  I do have a … a sort of car … but—

  You’d have a little fridge and a hot plate. I don’t encourage a lot of cooking. No pets. No girls. No cigarettes.

  I don’t smoke.

  That’s a good sign. I loathe smoker’s smoke, but that’s not why. I don’t want my house burned down.

  The room is in your home?

  “Home” is a nice word. I had an attached garage redone. And redone. Redone by an electrician who was deaf, a carpenter who was dumb, and a painter who was blind. You could park your car in what’s left over of the drive.

  That would be handy.

  I rent it cheap because I like to have somebody near.

  I should say. On account of crime.

  Criminals are too smart to live in Urichstown. We raise them, but they move away.

  Don’t they come back for Christmas?

  It’s nearly lunch. I’ll show you then. You haven’t met Miss Moss.

  No, ma’am.

  Well, now’s the time. She extended her arm, a finger, and a nail. Don’t neglect to sign.

  A car. A job. New town. A room all his own. Oh boy. He signed.

  16

  Joseph Skizzen was running out of room. The floor was bumpy with books and magazines, the ceiling rustled as though leaved, the walls were lined with chronicles and records in anonymous colored covers, and in the past year there had been a huge influx of ecological disaster stuff but no place to store let alone display it. Perhaps, from other parts of the house, he could steal more space for his archives. Miriam had the basement devoted to her grow lamps, potting benches, seed starts, and tool storage, as well as occupying half of the second floor in whose several rooms she slept a little, clipped catalogs, made bulb orders, and kept accounts. They shared the kitchen and its appliances, each eating the little they ate at carefully different times. Joseph’s music books, records, and scores were obsequiously hidden in closets, but he had placed his piano in the middle of the dining room where the table had once stood (it was at the moment imprisoned in the basement and forced to bear bags of fertilizer, potting soil, kelp meal, and various biofungicides, as well as boxes containing the long wait of wintering geraniums). She had plants perched in every window and on every sunny table; there were puddles where pots had leaked or she’d overwatered; and in addition to the ubiquitous presence of his scissors and her little jars of paste for labels, you could find trowels, gloves, and clippers absentmindedly disposed on the seats of chairs, in drawers and cases, or misplaced among a pleasant scatter of dead leaves.

  One’s concern for our species, namely that it may not survive, has been overwhelmed by a terrifying conviction, specifically that it will endure.

  Joseph Skizzen had neither concern nor conviction himself. He was confident that the matter would not be settled in his lifetime, indeed, could not be settled, because even after many millennia, during which the human race—we might imagine—had suffered its own persecutions to a point beyond sustaining, it still might have rebuilt all its war-gutted cities the way Prometheus had magically repaired his liver overnight so that ingeniously improved bombers could exercise their skills with renewed rains of destruction; and no one had any assurance that the building and the bombing would go on or that, ultimately weakened, the ruins would remain during ensuing centuries to smolder or that, good sense at last prevailing, towers would be topped out for the last time, only water and winds to worry their rosy and untroubled future.

  At this moment, a childishly named African tribe was massacring another (he had the freshly scissored clipping in hand); but Professor Skizzen had not read, nor did he ever expect to read, about exercises of goodwill and displays of generosity—of how one mellifluously monickered forest nation, for instance, learning of a drought that was decimating its neighbor, had rallied round with ferns and water bottles to rescue and return the sad tribe’s present desolation to its customary languid life of meadow, coppice, and stream course. Instead, men, women, children were attacked as you might an infestation of rats and slain as if there were a bounty on each bone.

  At this moment (the mail had brought more papers) there were coal-mine fires burning out of control all over the world—China was adot with them, the map looked infested with red mites—noxious fumes and pillars of pollution were besmirching the air in the same way tha
t Pittsburgh (as he’d read) smoked up an entire valley during the big steel days, coating the lungs of the inhabitants with soot, or the way the four-stack steamboats lined the Mississippi River levees belching smoke so black and in quantities so heavy you needed a light to read at noon.

  At this moment, an arsonist was setting fire to several thousand acres of California’s brush and dry grass, as if, this time, the cretin hoped to surpass Wisconsin’s Peshtigo logging fire of October 8, 1871. The railroads, as well as farmers and loggers, had cut away acres upon acres of forest, leaving, like the worst guest, the slash from their harvest in drying piles for sparks from the steam engine’s steel wheels to ignite them. Skizzen clapped his hands with delight when he learned that during Peshtigo’s initial night Chicago’s wooden buildings had also burned. Thousands of people living in the tinderbox structures of upper Michigan and Wisconsin were charred beyond naming. God has rarely been so just.

  Professor Joseph Skizzen’s initial concern was for the survival of the human race, but after a careful examination of the record he was compelled to reverse the direction of his worry, which was now that the race might indeed survive and by that survival sentence to extinction every other living species, cause most of the mineral elements to disappear, many mountains as well, both ice caps to liquidize, and deteem each of the seven seas.

  From the majestic summit of a mountain, a pair of good eyes might see only streams and vales and groves of trees, fair distances and charming towns, losing sight of mining scars, litter, and slummy lanes; but reason, as Goethe wisely noted, will observe only madness and disease when it surveys the world from such a vantage. Similarly a city, seen from above, could be a gay urban scape of red-tiled roofs or a depressing collection of filthy chimneys. However, Skizzen was not so much surprised by human selfishness and greed (one-half of reason’s judgment) as by human stupidity, because the desires that men displayed, either alone, at social clubs, in political parties, or as communities, leagues, and nations, were fundamentally so measly and uninteresting, and the methods employed to achieve them so borrowed, makeshift, and inadequate, that what was eventually obtained was a shambles, leaving their suitors dissatisfied, angry, and searching for more satisfactory targets.

  For a long time, he had regarded himself—if not the sole proprietor of these estimations—to be fairly divided from his fellow man as freethinkers always are, and perhaps quietly but thoroughly detested by them the way someone whose teeth are mired in caramel hates being asked a chewy question. Moreover, preachers of all kinds have always been eager to proclaim the importance to God of every Jack, Jill, and stage-door Johnny whose pitiful belongings they were about to ransack and pilfer. God, they say, sets the value of the poorest insignificant wretch beyond the worth of any natural element (oil), object (house), or entity (bank). The wretch weighs not only as much in God’s scale as a cloud of gnats, or perhaps a field of flowers, but grander than a mountain lake or fruitful valley, more than a symphony of psalms or a philosopher’s system of ideas; because a single human being is of infinite worth; he is filled with soul like a bowl with soup and must not be demoralized or damaged or denied his needs, whatever the cost to lakeside or coastline, forest, ionosphere, rainbow, or geyser; not a hair of the head or of the chinny chin chin should be harmed, since even nail clippings, phlegm, and footprints have magical powers; so glorious is man, so beyond mere price, whatever his cost, so amazing his muscles and other achievements, that he surpasses the worm who makes silk, the beaver who builds dams, and the bird who flies miles and miles on its own over empty seas.

  Was there ever a more laughable hypocrisy? when daily men with women, women with children, children with dolls, dolls with dresses, are attacked as you might an infestation of rats and slain as if there were a bounty on each bone.

  Should humans die or survive, disappear or endure? his indecision rattled like a die in a cup; but at the moment it tended to tilt toward the latter.

  Skizzen pondered man’s real place, based on his actual experience of him, and concluded that the human race was like a gang of small-time goons parading a big-time attitude through a midtime town.

  From the only attic window he hadn’t pasted over with posters advertising bullfights, Skizzen could see the garden, now in its utmost refulgence—borders and beds abloom and buzzing—his mother’s small back bent over a tea rose, one hand holding a small brush and painting the bush’s leaves with canola to admonish aphids, Joseph supposed, to ward off hoppers, intimidate rollers and sawflies. Her footsteps, darker where the dew had been stepped on, marked the morning grass and showed how she’d come from the path to bedside. She wore her wide hat now in shade and shadow. It went on when she went out like every article of clothing the work required: her gloves, her plurally pocketed apron, her white absorbent wiping scarf—each leaf was dried before the oil was offered—her woolly red blouse and her knickers like Japanese gardening pants, padded at the knees with inserts of sponge and lashed about her waist with elastic.

  The garden had come to her rescue, there was no doubt of that. As soon as Skizzen’s salary was able to support them both, he had insisted that his mother quit her rubber-works job and retire into enjoyment. She might read, relax, cook recipes she remembered from the old country, putter about, visit friends; but with an alacrity he hadn’t expected, Miriam had allowed her interest in gardening, which had gradually grown to a full-fledged hobby, to consume and define her. The seasons were like semesters: full of plans and preparations, periods of supervision, training, continuing care, sometimes painful evaluations, and other duties aimed at aiding her plants to realize their true potential—to “strut their stuff,” a phrase Miriam picked up at work, for some reason liked, and now overused. Thus regularity reentered her life, though it was now one of her choosing, in partnership of course with the climate, as fickle and ruthless as she would become herself. She was also fond of quoting the passage from Ecclesiastes about there being a time and a season for everything, until—trite for centuries before it came to her—its banality wore on Joseph’s nerves.

  He felt a little mental unpleasantness like the pang of an errant tooth. A distasteful memory had been recovered from its attic storage: of a time when “strut their stuff” was “strut her stuff” and was said of Debbie, the vain and zealous cheerleader. She should be allowed to strut her stuff if she wants, all the girls do—and she sure has the stuff to strut with, Miriam would add with a kind of pride and a show of salacious satisfaction Joey loathed. He had been so angry when Miriam had spent their precious money on that silly uniform—pleated skirt and letter sweater, one Debbie whirled and the other she joggled—that he had refused to go to the games and watch her make an exhibition of herself, although he had not offered that as a reason but had declared, rather, his indifference to football amounting to dislike. Actually, Joseph had a hatred of sports, based on his inadequacy, that he disguised as apathy.

  In any case, he complained of having to witness her performance every day when she practiced leaping and twisting in the backyard, the skirt rising around her higher thighs as if blown from below so that her hair flew up and down about her shoulders and her neck, Woodbine’s red W undulating as though it were sewn on rapid water. If you don’t like it, don’t look, he was told, as if that were possible.

  Of course, it was their large Victorian house with its wide porches and ample back and side yards that made his mother’s new vocation possible, because she had cultivated the patch of ground their first house sat on about as far as root and branch would take her: lining the short front walk with Joey’s first gift of seeds, then placing beds in customary fashion like a moat around the building before digging up every inch of the front and back except for a few narrow paths paved by thin wobbly boards and marked at metered intervals by geraniums in sunken coffee cans. She was a drillmaster in those days, and her flowers knew they should fall into straight lines and salute as she passed.

  For a time, the size of plants defeated her; they began so daint
ily as bulbs or rhizomes or seeds sunk out of sight in the anonymous earth that she felt they would all have the same adulthood, but they ended flopping on the ground like alyssum or raising their flags like iris and looking silly standing all alone waiting for the marigolds to arrive. Daisies shaded asters and asters denied violas their share of the light. Glads were a major defeat. She stuck them around like sentries, and those that bloomed stood at funereal attention in nearly barren patches of moss roses that hadn’t made it or in thickets of ragged robin that unfortunately had. They were also all orange. After Miriam had scraped them from her palette, Joey told her that, like Easter lilies, glads were largely florist flowers and sent by the living to the dead.

  There was nothing shy or particularly nice about violets, Miriam—and Joey, through her—learned. At first admired, they invaded what little lawn was left, and every other area that offered an opening … well … like immigrants, pushing out established plants and covering the earth with an impermeable carpet of dainty-looking but devilish little flowers whose rootlets, in their eager exercise of total war, throttled worms in their runnels. These darlings, when poisons failed, she had to dig up inch by inch, ripping apart the dirt in a search for bits of root as if she were after patches of seasonal drifters. Over the years she had forgotten about her own alien history, even her present status, and had begun to resent the Mexhex, as she called them, because they worked for potty and were taking positions at her place of work.

  The vine phase lasted a long time. Miriam tacked up wire mesh to the outside of the house where clematis began to climb as soon as the opportunity offered, as well as Blaze and White Dawn among roses, each competing for space among morning glories, honeysuckle, and moon vines. About plants, she cared only that they grew; that they grew in her care was a marvel; they made her feel worthy; a dull house and idle earth were now supporting blue, purple, white, and red bursts in a show called helter-skelter. At the vine-heit of the season (Miriam’s accidental pun), the cottage began to be submerged, and people drove by perhaps to laugh but maybe also to admire the sheer amount of bloom Miriam’s untutored efforts had amassed, nor could you ignore the smart rows of marigolds, zinnias, petunias, and pinks now drawn over the formerly unkempt little property; they made a definite and lasting impression.