The Vandal

by Tom Molloy

  The Vandal

  Tom Molloy

  New York

  For Rita

  1

  I have always been a student of sleeping women. A woman naked and unknowing, drawing breaths and exhaling so that the embracing sheet ripples and folds with her breathing, creates within me the hard kernel of knowledge that what I do is correct.

  The woman I gazed down at, the woman I was about to leave, was pregnant. She was in that early part of pregnancy that is soft and unfocused, like the false winter dawn moving along the eastern sky beyond the bedroom walls surrounding her. It was coincidence that each of the two times I had left this woman, my wife, she has been pregnant.

  I moved through the house silently, peeking in at our four-year-old son, checking locks, the stove, the thermostat. I unfolded the wrappings of my instruments and found that they were just as I had left them; in perfect working order. Without leaving a note, I let myself out.

  As I walked, I recalled the night a few months after our marriage when something awakened me to the still house and the white quarter-moon beyond iced windows.

  Realizing my wife was not asleep beside me, I raised myself on one elbow and could see her in the far corner of the room, wrapped in an afghan. She was seated in a chair.

  When she spoke her silhouette remained still, causing her voice to be very strong in the darkness.

  “You had your DMZ dream again.”

  I didn’t remember the dream and thought it had stopped months earlier.

  “It was only a dream.”

  “You have it every night. That means your soul is trying to speak to you.”

  I got out of the bed and stood by the window, looking out at the fields and the ebony border of the woods. I turned, but from where I stood she was invisible. When she spoke her voice was very gentle.

  “You’re going to leave me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I told her.

  I could see her sharp movement in the chair before her words spilled out.

  “Why is it every time a woman knows something a man doesn’t, it’s silly, but every time a man knows something a woman doesn’t, it’s common sense?”

  Beyond the windows all was still when I spoke.

  “I’m not going to leave you.”

  “You are. I know you love me, and I know you’re going to leave.”

  I hoped for the movement of an animal to break the stillness of the field and its wooded boundary, but no creature ventured forth. Hunter and hunted had business elsewhere tonight. My wife spoke again.

  “You can beat bad dreams if you face them head-on.”

  A breeze from the northeast rattled the windows and caused the chimney flue to issue a metallic yawn. Across the field the tops of pine trees waved at the sky like seagrass in the current of a shallow coastal inlet.

  She said, “Don’t worry about me if you go. As long as I know you’re coming back, I’ll be all right. When it’s time, just go. No explanations, no excuses. That way I’ll know you’re coming back and it will be OK.”

  The wind had passed, and the tops of the pine trees again pointed straight at the moon when she spoke.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Cross your heart?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  She came from the darkness and took my hand in hers. Holding the index finger of my right hand, she traced a cross on the left side of my chest and spoke a single word.

  “Done.”

  As it will on very cold days, the snow crunched audibly beneath my boots and I found a cadence between that sound and the puffs of vapor that marked my breathing. I crossed one field, then another, where with a low grunt I went over a thick stone wall built by a long-dead Yankee.

  Past the wall I turned parallel to the Kennebunk River, watching the water rush past black and menacing against the clear white snowy banks, gathering speed for its imminent demise in the Atlantic.

  Moving on, tripping once on the solid crust of the snow, I could hear an occasional vehicle on Route 1 which runs north-south through the center of Kennebunk. My plan was to reach that road, then hitchhike one hundred miles south to Boston. I hoped I would not run into anyone who knew me, for there were many such people about. I had for some time been a volunteer fireman in Kennebunk. My wife and I had run an arts and crafts shop in town for several years. I have a keen talent for baking and have taught courses in the evening at the local high school.

  A number of women taking the courses have, at certain times, offered themselves and their love. But I have, so far at least, always been loyal to my wife, and for that these women have loved me all the more.

  Near the town I pushed through a deep dirty snow bank that marked the edge of the road, and I quickened my gait on the shallow snow that carpeted the unseen asphalt. Clipped to my jeans at the hip was a walkman; and in the bag along with my instruments were tapes by Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and George Winston. The walkman had a fine feel to it, and as I walked it pressed against my hip with the snug reassurance of a weapon.

  The morning light was spreading over the land in tangible bursts, and it was early dawn when I reached town.

  There, along the empty border of Route 1, at the gas station adjacent to the Kennebunk Inn, I let myself in to the station’s men’s room. My breath was visible in the tiny, unheated room.

  The instruments are wrapped in a length of lavender felt, and each is encased in a small leather pouch, the felt and leather being sewn together.

  All of these tools were made in the 1800’s. The years of care and use have made them almost perfect for the task at hand.

  At the bottom of the small knapsack I carry are: an India oilstone, an India gouge slip, pike oil, and a leather strop, all used to keep the instruments well sharpened. The instruments consist of three small rifflers, a small carver’s mallet, two straight gauges, two curved gauges, one straight chisel, one curved chisel and a screwdriver. The handle of each is made of hickory. All of them are quite small and fit easily in a man’s palm.

  In my shirt pocket is a ballpoint pen carved from walnut by a craftsman who lives with blonde twins on a dirt road in Starks, Maine.

  As I felt inside the bag, I watched myself in the mirror, where steady puffs of vapor told me my breathing, and things overall, were under control. I chose the proper instrument, and my hand moved along the clean white space between the porcelain and the reflecting glass forming the words:

  BEWARE LOVE

  I found the letters to be nicely formed with a slight hint of a swirl beneath the first word.

  I walked briskly across Route 1 to wait amid the still air and the lovely odor of a woodstove that drifted invisibly amid barren maple branches to rest on the town center.

  Like a commuter waiting for his train, I peered down the narrow white thread of the road and waited for a passing car or truck. The scrawled letters on the cold wall had released a deep tension within me, and I felt my whole being relax. Now I was free to travel on to Boston and meet Puma.

  I had met Puma only twice in my life, but it was as if he was always there. I could talk to Puma in my mind. Having written to him about my planned journey and its purpose, I had arranged to meet him this day in Boston.

  I felt my work would be better focused during this trip if I steeped myself in certain discarded traditions. So I had chosen to remain both incommunicado and celibate.

  Yet as I stood, the presence of the sun touched off within me a growing sensual awareness. The thought of sex made me shiver beneath my light, correctly layered clothing.

  The road ahead remained a motionless straight white line that held the sunlight. Nearby, lights still lit against the fading darkness, was a small coffee shop. It was newly opened, and I didn’t know the woman moving
behind the counter. Because of the ice on the plate glass windows, her lower body was a white-uniformed blur, but her shoulders and face were clearly visible. We exchanged a glance. She smiled. I watched the thin empty road.

  The hour at which the shop opened for business had not yet arrived, and the full light of day was nearly at hand.

  I shifted my weight, the vapor of breath seeming thicker now, and the white uniform moved within its ice-coated frame.

  Removing one glove, I tapped on the glass door just above the burnt orange sign that told of the store’s hours. She came to the door smiling but shaking her head no. Pointing at the sign she mouthed the opening hour. I removed my cap and waited. She opened the door and the wonderful fragrance of baking dough and ground coffee surrounded me.

  When she closed the door a tiny bell chimed, joining the metallic sound as her fingers worked the lock shut, and the burnt orange sign tugged at its string, chafing the worn wooden door.

  She said she had seen me around town and decided to let me in because I looked so cold all alone out there. She said the boss would kill her if he knew; she said there was coffee in the back room.

  In her late 20’s, she had hair of a beautiful light auburn texture touched throughout with the color of honey.

  She poured my coffee into a paper cup and stirred the liquid with a metal spoon. I sat on a folding chair as she pulled herself up to sit on a long wooden table opposite me. From a sitting position she added cream and then sugar, spilling some of the white granules on the smooth wood, on the white cloth of her uniform, and the soft curve of her thigh.

  She lifted her gaze from the sugar to me and said, “Oops.”

  The uniform had wide white buttons down the front and she undid three of them as she crossed her legs so that some of the sugar spilled off her thigh and her panties displayed their robin’s egg blue.

  I stared and she said,

  “Do you like sugar? I like it. I like to lick it.”

  To have her in my arms, to taste the white powder and the salty musk of her skin, to press my mouth to the soft promise of her pubic hair, to feel her tongue on mine, to have her in secret rooms like magic visits to youth’s summer night.

  When I shook my head no her puzzlement turned to a pout, then a gentle smile and she said, “OK.”

  We shared a doughnut filled with raspberry, and the paper cups became malleable from the embrace of the hot liquid. Her smile was but an antecedent to the deep embrace of her laughter which came easily when I told her anecdotes about a city boy who moved to the country. I told her I could fall in love with her today except for previous commitments, and her laughter came again.

  As I stood outside again, an olive green van grew larger on the road, slowed, and its right amber blinker came to life. The woman and I exchanged a glance. The warmth of her hand created a clear blue hole in the ice on the window. As she moved behind the counter the hole made her seem disjointed. The driver asked how far I was going. I told him Boston.

  Chill and airy inside, with a set of tools lying like sleeping children beneath a blanket, the van accelerated until a rooster tail of snow chased us along the road. The driver spoke of his home in Nova Scotia, of his father, his uncle, and the woman he loved back there.

  He talked about the whales in the Bay of Fundy and the awesome tides and terrible whirlpools that swept the bay. His words made me more comfortable, and I stretched in the seat, feeling the glass-filtered sun on my face.

  As we spun clockwise around the huge traffic circle in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, then veered south, I told him of a terrible storm on the Nantucket Shoals when I’d gone lobstering four years earlier. An unpredicted storm had caught the fleet unawares because a government weather buoy failed.

  We had spent two days and two nights in the little wheelhouse, hearing frantic cries for help on the static-filled radio, slamming against the walls, the floor, the berserk wheel, and each other, transfixed by the great gray parade of death all around us. As he checked the rear view mirror, the driver asked,

  “What did you talk about?”

  The memory of it made me slightly dizzy.

  “We never spoke.”

  He nodded as though passing a familiar friend, and leaned closer to the steering wheel, staring straight down the empty asphalt.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he said.

  Those were the last words either of us spoke until we bid good-bye before the great concrete mass of South Station in Boston.

  2

  In the city the air was about ten degrees warmer than it had been in Maine. But the temperature again plunged as I descended the stairs to the subway. Below, the walls of the frigid corridors were covered with plywood, and the plywood was smeared with graffiti, the spray-painted icons of America’s underclass.

  Looking at it was like peering into the mind of a schizophrenic; chilling, dizzying, disjointed, and possessing the promise that enough exposure would lead to a closing of all escape routes.

  The train rolled south past inbound trains disgorging their passengers onto the filthy platforms of the oldest subway in the world. The black, white, and brown faces blurred and spun, mixing together as my near-empty car fled each station.

  The stop where I disembarked was called Columbia, and it was above ground. The ancient steel partitions between the tracks seemed to echo the cold and I turned my collar up as I trotted down the stairs. I learned to love walking in the army, and was eager for the miles that led to Puma.

  Of course, Americans are afraid to walk. They think they will be robbed or raped or killed. Most afraid are white Americans, who fear they will be killed by black Americans. It’s the first thing they think of if their cars break down.

  This is one of the basic facts about this country. White Americans are terrified of black Americans. So I walked the near empty sidewalks as cars poured past and I kicked the shallow snow of the city.

  I saw him from a great distance, distinctive even from there in his camel hair coat that clearly defined the powerful lines of his body.

  Puma maintained a persona that transcended many lines of social strata. He was a man who without moving, without so much as blinking, could cross the line from benign intellectual to truculent nocturnal entity.

  Now on the tip of the urban peninsula called Castle Island, he stood with his back to me as he stared past the airport, the harbor islands, and far out to sea.

  Its metallic presence made closer by the chill air, a 747 clawed at the sky over Logan Airport, breached the shoreline and passed overhead, its roar wafting behind like a lingering scent.

  The plane was a dot, the sound gone distant, when Puma turned his gaze toward the curving, wavering, vanishing speck of the airplane. As he had the first time I met him, he offered a poem.

  “The spirit is too weak; mortality weighs

  Heavily on me like unwilling sleep

  And each imagined pinnacle and steep

  Of God-like hardship tells me I must die,

  Like a sick eagle looking towards the sky.”

  The land and the islands lay still, as did the ocean beneath the solid pale blue sky. Puma turned, his ebony skin coming back to reveal his fine wide smile. As we shook hands, he spoke.

  “Poems still make you depressed?”

  “Yeah.”

  His laughter was soft, deep, and answered by a lone gull riding the air, shifting its gaze left and right, seeming to suck in the fecund breeze. Puma continued.

  “Museums still give you migraines?”

  “Yes.”

  His laughter boomed outward so that the little knots of people scattered about in the chill turned to see, as over the water the gull complained, seeming to call for silence. Puma took a small step closer, his eyes looking hard into mine.

  “Think you’re ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your wife?”

  “She understands.”

  “And your son?”

  “He’s my son.”

  Acro
ss the water, jet engines loosed a guttural roar as they were reversed to stop a plane moments after touchdown. Puma spoke above the noise.

  He said we were in an age of decadence; he said before there was light there was order. Of course, the center could not hold, it was never meant to. We, he added were as matter to space and, he intimated by his gaze, that I was to provide the formula.

  “One atom per 1000 litres.” I replied.

  Telling me of fine ways to travel and warm places to sleep, Puma probed my sense of direction.

  Our society was like an army turning a retreat into a rout, Puma continued. In a rout, panicky soldiers feed on one another’s fears, running from imaginary noises and shadows. Americans were in a blind stampede from the cities and before too long they’d be running from the suburbs too, running from people they’d never talked to or seen, let alone listened to.

  Puma said it was like the Battle of Bull Run when the retreating Yankees would raise the cry, “Black Horse Cavalry” and run in blind fear for the rear. But there was no such thing as Black Horse Cavalry in the Confederate Army. We need to stop, think, and hold our ground.

  I told him that I had come to believe that a proper course of action would be an expression of one’s belief within a framework of isolation and celibacy; isolation to give a sharper focus to the message and celibacy to maintain a necessary distance, because much of the silliness released in the ’60’s had eradicated the necessary distance.

  Behind Puma, I could see a grounded jet turning sharply, the pilot working the flaps before trying for the air above. Puma spoke.

  “But what we do matters.”

  The white strobe lights of the plane flashed in the harsh sun.

  “We don’t know what seed is sown.”

  The plane began moving, a silver presence fleeing its twisting brown exhaust. I felt my heart join the pilot’s in its increasing beat. The nose of the plane snapped up, the fuselage lifted gently and carried over the water, over us, and southward over the library of the slain president.

  As it passed from sight, Puma queried, “And who will hold sway in the Fulda Gap? Americans with the social and historical perspective of parakeets? Or Russian Comrades lusting after rock music and blue jeans?”