The concrete floor was underneath Hannah’s feet. The herd came forward in a loose group, her presence—standing up, at least—having implied to them: feed.
She went, staggering a little, to the haybin next to the silo chute (it felt as if she were walking with someone else’s legs) and barehanded she hoisted a bale out of the bin by its wires and hauled it over to the cattle, its weight against her thighs and her back bent away to counterbalance. A pair of tin shears hung on a nail in the workshack. She dropped the bale, walked into the shack, returned with the shears, cut the binding wires and pulled them free of the bale. The hay came apart in slabs. As the cows moved forward each gentle clop of a hoof made her ears sing, and she stepped back to watch them, the long shears dangling at her side from one hooked finger.
“That’s it, come on.”
One looked up, shook its head, and its ears flopped.
“Don’t give me that”—her voice was wearier than they were accustomed to—“I know it’s late.”
Another switched its tail, and also looked at Hannah.
“Eat, you silly fools,” and she hung up the shears.
Their teeth gnashed together like marbles jounced in a bag. She walked, beginning to remember what it was to use her own legs, and sat down (Indian-style—Columban coinage?—Peter would know, Peter who was to blame for all this) in the midst of their ample soft female bellies where she could smell the hay, its rich, vegetable-earth odor and cattle’s breath and their dung from the night, over past the concrete meadow in the corral.
Other vapors limned the inner air. They brought what actually happened back to her in a rush, and prompted a flicker of hysteria, then a calm, which came into her face. Paint. Turpentine. Her head hung down and she noticed her hands clasped in her lap. They were stained with various colors, primarily white, silver, splotches of iron-black, blues, and around her cuticles alizarin crimson, every possible color but green.
—and then she thought, No, Krieger’s not to blame for all this—
Well, he is. And isn’t.
Lupi and the old Indian had disappeared.
The sheets and blanket on Lupi’s pallet were left in a knot, the small square of a pillow on the floor under the gray of Hannah’s flashlight, the very flashlight (metal, ribbed, nice and heavy in the palm) she so long ago held to the farmhouse floor in Nebraska the night after mama Opal had died and she moved into her room, set up the rickety cot beside her bed (she would never sleep in her bed; that would be a kind of sacrilege) and made it up with linens and a comforter from her own. She had thought to keep vigil. She kept the flashlight under the covers with her, and when she found she could not sleep directed its beam along the wainscot and up the wall, papered with mazes of printed petunias, as a kind of game. Under the oval of light the petunias took on fierce faces and she shrank away. She remembered having slept head in her hands in the kitchen the night before. Soon it was all gone into a misshapenness and she awoke in the night with her flashlight in her face, pillow on the floorboards, and mama Opal’s room smothered in cold. She snatched the flashlight away from her chin with a cry, pointed it down beside her.
And here all these years later, white eyelets frayed, grayed, and mended on the pillowcase, not much of a pillow anymore with its goosedown half gone, under the beam of the same old Sears Roebuck torch. Hannah kicked the pillow. She sought it out and kicked it again so that when she drew back the torch’s shaft in her hands and played the beam across the dark smooth space there was a cloud of feathers fluttering all around her.
Next she searched both rooms of the bunker, paced the roof, climbed the tower stairs to the silo. Above the city she smoked one of Henry’s hidden cigarettes. Damp and stale, it made her cough. She flicked it away off the roof. Someone in thirdhand mufti later would snatch it out of the gutter, with an arthritic quiver relight it and continue toward the river.
Black stirrings in the so-called dead space downstairs, those rooms on the massive floor a flight below the ranch itself: unused and each at a different stage of dilapidation. Vacuums with shabby remains of lowered ceilings (acoustical panels dangling from cheap aluminum supports, flat dry tongues panting at their silver lips) the only ornament in a featureless cubicle. One room was filled with broken, partly dismantled sewing machines, vintage units with heavy filigreed legs and wooden cabinets, awaiting a repairman who would never arrive. Fifty or sixty of them. Light, with its cat’s-eye center, matriculated over this junkheap and even across the shattered bulbs strung on wires along the walls. Familiar acquaintances, but no sign of Lupi or the old man. She leaned against the doorjamb and chewed at a fingernail; her mouth was dry and she was thirsty. In the dressing mirror that was propped against a naked, headless mannequin, whose slight breasts and unarticulated genitals suggested that once it had been clothed in dresses with sashes, glass buttons, bows, the look of anxiousness she wore dimly spread and was rebuffed by a frown of surprising scorn.
She thought to talk to Hammond first, but petulant and cross and defiant is all Hammond had been ever since the arrival of the two strangers. And at the playback of the voice on the telephone-answering machine he had made no comment but Hannah knew at once Hammond recognized what he heard; he had said nothing, collected a bucket of ice to sink the poor lame calf’s hind leg into, glanced from under his Stetson brim at Hannah and afterward at Lupi, and left quietly, shutting the door behind just as the message concluded. Hammond observed the unraveling from the supreme distance of his own discontent (or so Hannah took it).
He had been in the bunker by chance when the first call came through back in September, the caller so articulate, his English formal and perfect, pushed through the barrier of his thick Spanish accent, and then the voice on the line she knew well.
Krieger … Krieger? Jaunt to Norfolk, the rear-end collision, panicky call from Norfolk Community, a Franz, Mona, moray eel and a curious beast called a banana wrasse, the story about how Krieger spent sixty-five dollars at the tropical fish store on a certain glorious emperator angel, carefully introduced it into the tank, only to come back a few minutes after it was set loose to find its tail sticking out of the grouper’s mouth, and how he tried to pull the angelfish out but it would not come, and how because it was the same size as the grouper that tail stuck out for the rest of the day as his expensive fish was digested. Then the goddamn moray eel ended up devouring everything in the tank—including the grouper—before retreating behind the plastic castle to float there listless. Krieger? that Krieger? and every irreducible week that intervened, grown like some hideous sponge which could accommodate the entire waters of not just Krieger’s old black-light-illumined tank but the Hudson which, on the right day at the right hour, was reflected through it—only a tiny distorted image wedged between the gables and vines—upside down. Krieger, Krieger? yes, that made sense.
Once Hammond divined if not the exact character of Hannah’s problem some elements of its workings, he subsided into captiousness. He went on with his chores but he went at them more lazily. Pitchforks he wouldn’t touch. He wouldn’t turn a clock key or pull a toilet chain. Hannah saw this and while she was upset by it knew there was nothing to say. If Hammond was not sure something was wrong with Hannah before that, he was certain of it when no comments were made about his insidious behavior. Then Matteo Lupi appeared, solitary and lost, escorting Tiresias, half blind in an ill-fitting suit and deerskin overcoat whose sleeves dangled past his fingers and seams touched the heels of his handmade tire-soled sandals. It was as if she had stepped back into her childhood, those glory afternoons up in the hayloft, making her way down roads in her head with her ancient friend Lucretius, and once there made another step, but this time across the friendly scrim into the evil (what a word, what an empty, useless word, she thought, but nevertheless:) evil world on the other side. What was most surprising was this: the evil world was no more a twilit, dark, maddening place than its counterpart. The evil side of the scrim shown just as bright. The flowers smelled the same, the shit
, the same, everything was unmistakably the same. Except that this was the other side, as opposed to the other side.
She didn’t even need to go down and check—Maddie’d gone ahead. That was okay. It was Maddie’s life, too. She might have told her she was going but must have figured she—Hannah—was asleep.
Okay, have a sip. It all came down to this. That fucking Krieger.
Hammond’s rum had been disgustingly sweet and viscous. This time she really would have to replace the bottle. No three-quarters of an inch this time. The whole darned thing. After the fifth, or the ninth, or twelfth tilt she’d cultivated both indifference to its taste and pleasure in its modifying effect. Krieger withdrew into distance, as did the cattle that right there were industriously bellowing because they had not been fed at the hour of their schedule—so painstakingly devised. Lupi and Hammond receded also. Hannah looked at the painted scenes on the long wall before her and thought, What this wants is a city.
In the janitor’s closet she found cans of leftover paint and brushes. The can of battleship gray would be useful. There were cans of black, reds, other colors, and gesso, too. Most of the brushes had been ruined because they had never been cleaned: sculptural blobs—mucous gunk—of hardened paint attached like puppet heads to the bristles. With turpentine and scissors she soaked and pared the salvageable brushes, tossing the lot onto a dropcloth, dragged the materials to her wall as the herd quieted down to watch. This had been one of the lushest, most inspired meadows in the whole landscape, with a burnt-umber creek trailing S-patterns down through the verdigris grass and the figure there in straw hat, blue-jean overalls, barefooted, rod out over a pool and cork bob near the farther bank where several white rings promised a cutthroat trout, a rainbow, brownie; a grayling lay under the shadow and considered a grasshopper which flinched on the end of the hook. The figure had been the only self-portrait in the enormous composition, although Hannah had never fished, nor worn overalls or straw hat. It was first to disappear under the brash vertical strokes of opaquing gesso. The fumes were delicious. They conjured up her first months in the loft when she primed the walls with a foundation of calcimine and cartooned out the Great Plains panorama. She might have flinched a little when her brush came to the goat in the mural, the mysterious goat with the yellow eyes which Henry had always wondered at but had never had the courage to ask her about. She touched the image that had held Gerald’s ghost there nicely, and painted around it for a while before taking the decision the ghost would be fine, maybe better off, resting beneath another coat of paint, another image. And so with a few strokes it was gone, too.
Buildings, bridges, people in their windows, cars and buses on their spans; an upstream barge hefted mounds of sand or garbage; there were avenues and some leafless trees worked up along their sidewalks which she dotted with passersby; a row of townhouses, a spire, a church, two churches; quays licked at by a river whose blackness came from the middle of the large sheet of glass which she used for mixing her colors, there at the center where all the hues ran together to make a sum of each, a dirty unnamable shade. And just prior to passing out, her cheek pressed to the cool drain-slough that ran from feeding area to a sump which wanted periodic flushing and stank of urine (which the cattle had already begun to lick at for the salt there) since it hadn’t been cleaned, just before she fell asleep, her clothes, face and hands covered with paint, she traced out a small open boat at the edge of the water and put in it the explorer Henry Hudson and his son, set adrift by a crew of mutineers three hundred years before without compass, water, or food, and never seen nor heard from again.
Her temples no longer throbbed. She had to get up off the floor. There were so many things to do.
Her eyes sank momentarily under their thin sheets of flesh and afterwards the flesh drew back and above her were nostrils and broken teeth. The exhalation served as a reference, as did that gentle, insistent nibbling at her head. The cow wanted the shoots of hay that had gotten tangled in Hannah’s hair.
2.
TEARS THAT WELLED in Lupi’s eyes made driving at this high speed—down a road he had never seen before, into the depths of a country he did not know—even more difficult and dangerous than it might otherwise have been. A bead cut down his cheek and formed like a dot of mercury on his chin. The map was so uninstructive. A rise in the road and the car caught flight. But it wouldn’t crash. There would be no shattered glass to shower across the gray fields, no flower of brazed metal, no wheel discovered tangled in a snow fence the next farm over. This exodus would continue until Lupi was able to carry out what he’d promised himself he would do.
“Wake up, Garibaldi,” Krieger in his Corless guise had called out an hour before, with a solemnity only the morning star trapped in the gradient blues of the old leaded glass could make more manifest.
Where am I? he’d wondered, and the ride up to Berkeley house and the wholly unexpected invitation to stay the night, as guests, all returned.
Krieger was staring down at him where he lay in bed.
“The spirit is very strange it has an obligation to create, so said the great Mircea Eliade you with me kiddo?”
By distempering reality with movie Lupi had gotten through the odder developments and twists of the few days before. Yet even movie hadn’t been potent enough to force Krieger’s performance into focus the night before—he had moved with such apparent aplomb through every problem.
“Hey,” he was saying, now walking away from the bed, “is kiddo Italian for kid?”
In the fresh-washed and ironed linen of the bed Lupi tugged his shoulders up about his ears in tandem response (though he might have feigned a snore) to Krieger’s question—and Krieger himself in the pajamas that had been laid out on the other bed in the guest room, the pink room, an oriental theme room with a vellum-covered desk and the silk rug rich in its mango grove and cranes. Lupi wished he felt less ill at ease. Less sunk in dread. But it was there, in him—an overwhelming sense of shame.
“And that obligation takes on different forms I mean this is me talking now but this one is in a class by himself, Berkeley here’s very classy, I don’t mean classy so much as, I don’t know it’s not like you could say this was an upper-class setup, but it’s not middle-class, that’s for sure, it’s not intelligentsia, which is a subsidiary of lower-class, maybe just a notch down below lower-class like a wart on the toe or something, but whatever I still haven’t digested this wardrobe routine etcetera, trust him about as far as I can push this mansion up the hill. The not being available to talk business last night is the worst but what are you going to do, when in Rome, right?”
Lupi sneezed. He was coming down with a cold. How could he ramble so?—Lupi wanted to slap him, though of course he knew that he never would. Besides, he reasoned, he was weak.
“Gesundheit,” as a handkerchief fluttered down. “You okay? I mean you realize you and I are up to our asses in alligators here, so forth, I mean we’re in this together now.”
When Lupi heard dialogue like We’re in this together now, movie framework began to inform the action. Here was a movie about a man who came to realize that the choices he had other than the one where he would give himself over to the real mess he found himself in were reduced to none; his sorry “yes” was an utterance of surrender. He could almost (but not quite) hear the strains of a single violin playing background to the scene. The notes were sweet—couldn’t he use what strength he had to bring them up, yes he could, there they came—watery, high, beautiful, of no recognizable composition, but so lovely that Lupi listened to the soundtrack for a few more moments and missed the segue—
“When up to one’s ass in green gators
It’s good to have waterproof waders,
Salt, pepper and flour,
Which fry for an hour,
And serve with a rasher of taters.”
Krieger roared with laughter, “You ever eaten gator tail, Lupi? Down in the Everglades, sure, absolutely delicious, tastes like a cross between chicken
and what you find between the legs of you know what.”
“No, what?”
The violin trilled, perhaps, fluttered, before it faded away under the track of laughter.
“That’s my boy. What was that one, something like Youth’s a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret, and if we can get through this we won’t regret it, agreed? right.”
“I don’t know.”
Krieger was studying his tongue in the mirror. “Now look, it’s time to check on our friend.”
“Olid,” Lupi muttered, as if in the midst of other confusions he had forgotten his main purpose.
Krieger scowled.
“What’s an Olid?”
“Olid—”
“Memory about as long as an inchworm under a Benihana cleaver they have those over in Roma? burn your food for you right there at the table, juggle a few meat cleavers remind you who’s boss, but as I was saying may I remind you our friend’s to be referred to here for the sake and safety of all involved—”
“It,” Lupi said.
“Correct, good boy. Hey, Lupi, did you ever hear of The Mr. Ed Show over there in Italy?”
“Krieger don’t call me a boy.”
“Ragazzino then, anyway, did you?”
Come Sunday Page 42