Krieger would from time to time, with capricious irregularity, write Hannah. A letter would come and she would put it aside for a day or two, even as long as a week, before opening it to read. Some were tangential and chatty, others she found unexpectedly sweet—“So we finish with this hemp-and-slat bridge, wobbly-looking piece of work, but it spans this forty-fifty-foot gorge, Hannah, handsome slithering creek down at the base of the thing and a falls so far down you can’t hear it roaring, or spitting, &c, and so I’m yelling at these ignorant little bastards who I catch stuffing carnival explosives, a cherrybomb I expect, down some poor frog’s throat and chucking the poor beast out over the gorge’s edge just to watch it blow in this muffled burst. Just the insanity of it. But they insist that I be the first person to walk across this bridge. Celebratorily, you know. And I think of all the lashing I helped with on it and the boys at my sides sitting there for days along the banks slapping mosquitoes and flies, all of us trading advice and lashing timber, only the Peace Corps cat here whose handiwork I don’t trust, &c, and so well yes, I go them one better grab my favorite kid in the village here, bright brown-eyed punk, and up he goes on my shoulder and we set out together to make the far bank, and midway across there’s a mighty strong surging swing to the thing, the water so far below and the wind playing with the loose vegetable strutting, I wish you could see this bridge Hannah, but in the end there we were at the other side and all the villagers were screaming, walking back and forth across for the rest of the day, marveling at their accomplishment. I missed my calling, I should’ve been a funambulist, join the circus, ride a unicycle up on the highwire. As fine a day as I’ve ever seen. So it goes.”
After his internship with Sardavaal, which continued for many months longer than Jonathan had thought it might, the return to his own work was difficult. Primitive cultures (“fundamental” was Sardavaal’s term) in the upper-mountain regions were more interesting to Jonathan than the introduction of literacy or higher-tech agricultural methods to cooperative farms. Astronomical determinatives in the lashing of cedar branches to construct a bridge … six monkeys on a morning branch to judge the gender of a pregnancy … the salted fingertip in the shaman’s hand to draw off a cataract … prophetical readings that might be made from the puke of a firstborn son … the persistent reference throughout the most alienated communities to the superiors or gods-of-the-silver-heads (who Jonathan suggested must be conquistadors, though Sardavaal demurred), beings who had flown between stars from the farthest worlds in the night sky to devour the men and women of the ground-world, and how some of these gods still lingered among animals of the forest, ancient beings, wizards, cow-headed girls, brutes, ranting apocalyptics—through Sardavaal Jonathan had glimpsed, in the veils of translation and peyote, another layer of mind. He’d begun to think of his own as the bastard culture, one where the very act of walking across the land was an act of surveying, reducing the clods of dirt to measurements of abstract value—purchasable, and thereby powerful only if owned. Here the land and earth was still motherly. He thought these things. They felt clichéd, sentimental—but in his gut he sensed he was on to something.
One morning Sardavaal left. Jonathan was disappointed but not surprised. This was how he behaved. It was known throughout the anthropological community. It was why tutelage under Sardavaal was good and bad. You learned, but he disappeared as he saw fit. Jonathan was handed a pouch with money in it, a map, the briefest note thanking him for his work, acknowledging how useful it had been, wishing him good fortune, expressing impatience against the day when they would meet again.
He reestablished affiliation with the university—having taken a leave of absence—and communicated in letters to colleagues his continued intention of pulling all his notes together into a book, but privately he had come to wonder what real purpose there would be in it, other than securing for himself a temporary niche in the publish-or-perish world he embraced from the farthest possible remove. One thing he did know was that no monograph, article, or dissertation was going to better the fortunes of Manuel de Jesus Díaz (who could be seen waving, battered straw hat tipped back on his dark head, in a cloud of dust left in the wake of the truck), or of any of those skinny, giggling children caught up in the whirl of terrified hens and cocks.
The truck, affectionately if wryly nicknamed El conejo, had neither horn nor brakes, but since the exceptionally agile hog that ducked its crap-caked snout away from the front fender and careered wheezing down a red embankment was the only traffic Jonathan would encounter until he reached the outskirts of the capital, these were not necessary. He parked El conejo in the lot at Toncontín airport, removing the distributor cap from under the hood. This was a precaution against the truck’s being hot-wired and stolen. It was an old move, one he’d learned from others in the fieldwork years before. Still, the odds were at best even that El conejo’d be there on his return. He should have asked Manuel’s brother, who knew how to drive, to ride into the capital with him and take the truck back to Lejamani; but it was too late now—although the flight was delayed five hours—because there was no telephone in the village and so he had no way of discussing El conejo’s fate with Pablo Díaz. Bored, he watched half a dozen air force troops roll dice across the cracked tarmac in the shade of a transport helicopter. Over the mirage and heat of the runway Radio 15 de Septiembre propagandized and played Menudo—biggest band since the Bey-atlas, he mimed Díaz. Defiant and a little reckless, Jonathan rummaged through his knapsack to find his portable receiver, which he tuned to Radio Progreso, a Jesuit station, for while he disliked the Jesuits as much as he did the anti-Sandinistas, he figured the two ought to at least share the air space that was only rarely filled with the roar, windows snapping at their frames, of a flight taking off, or maybe landing.
Grand Central was more stale than ever, rank, gamy, teeming with people, people whom he couldn’t help but see as gringo, even knowing he was one. Awkward—didn’t feel great. And what lay ahead was a bummer unless he could reinvent it even as it took place, as an anthropological exercise in some manner. It was, he knew. And so he would have to think of it as such. It was the truth, wasn’t it—the reversed Descartes bit, I am therefore I think, had not escaped him, nor the internal discoursing’s defensiveness. Nor even its silliness or show of exhaustion. Tight belt, man. Little day-after-Thanksgiving spirit, eh?
The train hugged the riverbank. He knew each stop by heart from having made trips to Manhattan as a youth; they ticked by as the train passed their outskirts. The Jersey shore was concentrated into a long skyline sunk under a film of filth the shade of sepia seen in old photographs, the ones in which all the men and women and children are long since dead, the flowers turned to dust and the vase that held them there broken and discarded, or hidden on a back shelf of some antique shop. Yonkers, Glenwood, Greystone, Hastings, Dobbs Ferry—old man Dobbs and points along the river his ferry served: these were things Jonathan once knew but the details were lost as he watched the shoreside houses, bushes, what he used to call shields, shields of granite, burst by the window. Ardsley. Irvington (what was it about the headless horseman that never got through to him as a child the same way it had his sisters? Even Maddie, who was never afraid of anything, had been known to wake up shouting, having seen him, a white halo in the woods, a hem and a haw of wind rasping at a sill).
His ears rang; involuntarily he gave an unsteady toss of the head, as the train pulled out of Croton.
With this new development, which frightened Alma but which Jonathan was sure she didn’t understand, the family would be dispersed and all its history gradually forgotten—he guessed he had to face that. Non compos mentis—as if a mind could ever reach that state of composition until it was dead, done with, composed, like a garden in November, like gardens he could see out the window.
He sensed this might be the last time he would spend in the house, before they would be forced to sell. Alma had already taken it upon herself to evict the boarders their father had allowed in. The
re would be the matter of dispersing hundreds of heirlooms, antiques, rugs, books and papers, the controversial collection of “longevity memorabilia” (which had cost the family more money than anything else Jonathan could put a finger on)—of setting loose the poor little caged animals, ferreting out the forgeries and shams from any legitimate artifacts he had accumulated (by sheerest good luck, Jonathan thought). Alma hinted that these debts were enormous, and that their father had assumed them with singularity of purpose. Whatever chattels could be auctioned to help offset them would be. There would be the matter of convincing Alma the time had come to have him put in a nursing home—he knew she would resist. The whole trip was nothing but a tremendous pain in the ass he told himself and then recalled how they used to call Rhinebeck Swinebeck and at least that brought his spirits up, made him less grouchy there in the train, alone, feeling somewhat ridiculous about his continued adolescence.
A young man, about Jonathan’s height and build, picked him up at the station, just north of Kingston.
“Jonathan?” Dill guessed as he looked up into the face contracted into a disoriented yawn; he recognized him by the similarities shared with Alma: that clear, flat brow, the eyes receptive, opalescent, the face narrow, the skin taut. Together they collected his bags—old duffel and nylon pack—and climbed a set of chiming metal stairs from the platform to the lot where the car was parked.
“Long trip, you must be tired.”
His shirt sleeve flapped in the open window as he looked out on the strange surroundings, the Victorian houses, the gas stations—thinking, Are they stealing El conejo now?
“I’m sorry about your father—” Dill began, and broke off.
He was a strange sort of a person. Jonathan looked at his hands. Impossible to imagine those upon his sister. “How’s Alma?” Jonathan went on, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Say, what time is it,” and feigned considerable concentration over resetting the hands of his watch. “I always forget whether it’s two hours forward or back.”
“She’s all right, she wanted me to tell you that she wasn’t able to tell him about your coming home until, well to tell you the truth she’s at the house telling him now.”
Jonathan lifted his fingers to his eyes; there was a sign that drew up and was passed whose message painted in crude, red, block letters spelled out COUNTRY LIFE CONVENEANCES SUPPLYS INJOYMENTS—and as these letters pressed away into the gauzy world conveyed behind, deep in his wavering sight, just what he wished to gather up of memory replaced those words half-hidden in their stand of shabby, gnarled, twisting vines and his father was there, there, hands laid across his chest as he asked why, Alma why this now, honey why’d you go do this to me?
He unpacked up in his old room on the second floor, dressed, came down for dinner. Alma had made a special occasion of his homecoming, the table set with the heavy silver, the tantalus liquor cabinet unlocked—to which Jonathan went immediately, lifting one of its decanters to the rim of a glass.
Owen had not come down to greet him. Alma said he was asleep. Her voice telescoped up from the grassy parapet as she rehearsed for Dill (whom Jonathan could see sitting near her quietly, noncommittal, a little sour plucking at his lower lip with his fingers and staring out over the rampart into the field) her plans for the first days of the “reunion.” As he peered down at her, her sweatshirt violet and with Japanese calligraphy printed on its front, her hair was alive with motion, fingers probing the air before her. He drank the balance of scotch and set the water glass on the sill. Jonathan, always bad boy, always the schmo, but he thought he would have to rise to this if for no other reason than it did seem to be near the end of something—most likely the last tenure of any Berkeley at Berkeley house. Big fucking deal, he thought.
He focused his attentions elsewhere. They took him from the parapet to the maple tree out another window where a mockingbird, flashing its pewter-banded tail, rendered calls of warblers. He was reminded of a Gatling gun … where had he ever seen a Gatling gun? Family trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
He took the booklet he’d brought for the trip and a mechanical pencil out of a side pocket of one of the packs.
Note that. Something to blanket the scotch, or whiskey—same thing.
In the book he wrote, Remember the mockingbirds here so many of them Id forgotten completely. Their songs endlessly varied or has some ornithologist somewhere figured out some number of finite variations? Their flicking tails Id forgotten as when they perched themselves on the eave or at the end of a limb they look like nasty little Gatling guns but then as a note Im just in here in old room and all the rest the bird is beside the point and have to face dad and Alma acting like Alma acting like Alma is this all my fault no it is not my goddamn fault and Owen is going to act like Owen acting like who cares. Gatling guns they used back in Civil War our Civil War of course that is? while outside, the mockingbird would continue to sing all night.
He could’ve sworn it spoke a phrase to him in Spanish, but there was no way for him to interpret what the bird wished to say. He scratched, further, in his notebook, what he had thought before the bird drew his attention away—big fucking deal.
Owen is about to feed the troops. The cages along one wall of the room he occupies hum and squeak, by fits and starts, with activity inside. Excited little feet paddle, pink feet, and they give, it is true, quite a joyous and comfortable feeling to the office.
He is thinking that it is a shame his daughter Alma’s seen fit to bring her brother home, to ask him to come home, because she’s frightened (young Jonathan, escapist into the past with his balderdash about moral restitution—who’s more alienated from his profession now? father or son?—and all his bunk about civilization as toxin, and the rest of it). Frightened about my mind, well she doesn’t know the half of things. She and her Dill, her fellow. What I want is future here, not present, not past. Is it so much to ask? Bad time of year. No leaves, no snow, nothing.
A road leads up to the house, loops in back, leads back.
3.
OUT THE WINDOW a few high threads of cirrus were frivolous details in a sky otherwise as chalky green as celadon. Dawn, and already warmer than usual for the time of year. Jonathan was up before sunrise, having slept heavily after the rich food. Recollecting the events of the evening he wished he were back in Honduras. He’d finally excused himself from the table, saying that if he didn’t go to bed he would fall asleep in his chair. And as he climbed the stairs he’d felt guilty, since Alma had gone to the trouble of making dishes she knew he liked: paella with lobster, mussels, baby clams, monkfish, shrimp, three times the measure of chorizo the recipe called for—chorizo in honor of the Tropic of Cancer, or something along those lines. The feast was presented with great enthusiasm. Their father had come to the table late, dressed formally and moving stiffly in shiny old glen plaid with a woolen tie thickly knotted at the neck. He moved brittly but with grace.
“Alma neglected to mention you were coming,” he’d said, as he sat in his chair at the head of the table.
“Well it’d been a while, Owen, and so, on a whim, why not come up and check on the family,” Jonathan answered. Using his father’s given name was a risk. A further visit to the tantalus had helped loosen him up.
“A nice gesture but not necessary.”
“Thank you, too.” (What did that mean?)
“How go your efforts at saving the world?”
Already drifting into their usual exchange. In order to compensate for his feelings of defensiveness he leaned into his response a little hard. “Alma told you I’d been down into Nicaragua helping with the harvest?”
“Don’t bait me,” his father broke in, which left the table silent, but Jonathan proceeded—
“The CIA’s brewing up another mess and just like I told you we’re going to fuck up just the same way we’ve continually fucked up since, since before there even was a CIA.”
“I’m sure the Marxists appreciate your assistance.”
“They�
�re a democratically elected Socialist-oriented government which replaced an American-backed neo-Nazi dictatorship.”
“I see.”
“One of the most callous, brutal, bloody, venal dictatorships in history.” As Jonathan lifted his spoon to his mouth he hesitated, then ate, swallowing harder than he knew he ought, feeling awkward eating food after making such a pronouncement. It hurt his argument somehow, to talk about injustices while feeding his face. “And yours?” he said.
“My what.”
“Your efforts to save—”
“Alma? what’s this in my dish?”
She had been listening from the kitchen, and answered a bit too quickly, “Paella.”
“Looks awful, smells fishy doesn’t it?” asking Dill.
“I understand you’re involved in something, some sort of project,” Jonathan interrupted.
Owen smirked, scratching his temple gently. “I’m not at liberty really, contractual commitment to discretion and besides this isn’t dinner conversation is it, you came all the way from Nicaragua—”
“Honduras.”
“—to talk shop? Let’s have some wine, teaspoonful can’t hurt the blood, Dill?—what is this concoction again? meant the wine for you, accelerates my blood sugar—this soup reeks.”
“It’s a fish stew, Mr. Berkeley, so I guess—”
“I don’t want fish soup, it’s deleterious flesh.”
“Fish is good for you,” Jonathan asserted, thinking, baited, and took it hook, line, sinker.
“What do you know, you don’t know anything about it, fish is deleterious to the alimentary canal, sodium chloride, like drinking the worthless product of micturition.”
Come Sunday Page 31