On the Monday, Mel decided we should make a trip to see her Uncle Colley. Supposedly, we were giving the Honda a test run before we braved the long drive home, but there was more to it than that.
We stayed overnight in a motel off the I-40 just across the Arkansas state line and drove up into the mountains the next morning. We had missed the full blaze of the fall colours, but the muted reds and yellows of the trees had a smouldering beauty of their own. As soon as we left the interstate, we seemed to have gone off at a tangent from the modern world. We passed tumbledown shacks with screen doors closed on their dim interiors and smoke creeping from their chimneys. The further we went, the more primitive they looked. Don’t expect neon lights and running water at Colley’s, I’d been warned, it ain’t the Best Western. Still, I had no idea that people lived like this in Ronald Reagan’s America. It might have been some remote corner of the Transkei. The deer-hunting season had started and the woods were full of hunters. Flickers of gunmetal through the trees, a glimpse of a crouched figure in a bright jerkin stalking through a clearing, the occasional shot thumping down off the heights convinced me that we were driving back into another century.
Colley lived alone. He was – I hesitate to use the term – the black sheep of the family and they were embarrassed by him and proud of him at the same time. He was no close kin of the Liebmans: one of Hedda’s aunts had married some cousin or half-brother of his. The fact that he was not a blood relation, and did not have to be accounted for in their genes, made it possible to claim him for the family history as a living link to what was rough-hewn and untamed in the American spirit.
I was under strict instructions not to use the word ‘hillbilly’ in Arkansas. But that was only part of Colley’s ambiguous charm. The other part – the main part – was his hair. He had too much of it. I don’t mean he had more hair on his head than the average man: his entire body (so I’d been told) was covered with it. The condition was so severe that as a young man he’d joined a freak show and been displayed at state fairs as the wolfman – dogman – apeman – depending on the preferences of the day.
Mel had told me Colley’s story long ago. Everyone who found out we were going to see him had given it another twist. I wasn’t sure what to believe. When his name came up, people swapped glances or suppressed a laugh. Sometimes the whole thing felt like the kind of prank you play on foreigners to show how gullible they are. For all I knew, I was being initiated into the family through a test of my humour or forbearance.
The road had dwindled to a track and I was starting to wonder how much more we could expect of the car when we finally reached Colley’s ramshackle cabin. As we drew up on the bare patch of ground that passed for a front yard, he rose from a rocking chair and came to the edge of the porch.
At first glance he seemed disappointingly ordinary, not even bearded, a big man in washed-out dungarees and a checked shirt. His face had something raw about it, like a vegetable that has been blanched and hastily peeled, and his long, pale hands hung down at his sides, tapering towards the earth like taproots. A joke at my expense, I thought. Or has his condition – I didn’t know what to call it – abated over the years? But when he greeted me, and my fingertips pressed against the soft, greasy back of his hand, it occurred to me that the skin had been shaved.
He gave Mel a hug. Then he pulled his hat over his brow and helped me fetch the bags from the car. He wanted to carry them into the cabin, but she insisted we’d sleep in the RV as usual. After a tussle of wills, we all went round to the back where an old motorhome stood on blocks. It was damp and mushroomy inside. The bare mattress looked like a block of old cheddar.
Colley wanted to show us off. He led me out front, pointed to one of the rockers and took the other. There was coffee left over from breakfast on the stove, and Mel poured us each a cup and brought out a chair. We spent the rest of the morning on the porch, where the hunters passing in their pickups could note that he had company.
Everyone stopped to talk. They wanted to know about the deer, about who had got lucky yesterday and where, but mainly they were curious about the visitors. Once their memories had been jogged, a few of them recognised Mel, who’d been coming here since she was a little girl.
Colley’s neck of the woods was not on the tourist route and he was particularly proud of me. ‘This boy here’s from Africky,’ he said more than once. ‘He’s from plumb across the pond.’ It wasn’t long before I disappointed him.
A man called Mason and his son, who farmed together on the other side of the valley, came along in a pickup and Colley decided I should join their hunting party. He insisted; he even went to fetch a rifle. I would have gone too – being shown off like a curiosity was making me irritable – but while he was inside Mel leant over and said in my ear, ‘Don’t leave me alone with him.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s just not a good idea.’
‘What should I say? I don’t want to offend him.’
‘Make some excuse. Say you’ve got an eye problem or something.’
Colley came back with the rifle in the crook of his arm.
‘I know nothing about rifles,’ I said. ‘I’ve never fired one before.’
This was a lie. I’d been in the army and learnt to use everything from a popgun to a Browning, and I’d gone hunting too, although I hadn’t pulled the trigger myself.
The Masons looked aghast. Never used a gun? And he says he comes from Africky.
‘The boys’ll show you how,’ Uncle Colley said.
‘I don’t believe in hunting, actually. I mean, I don’t mind if other people do it, but I’d rather not join in.’
He exchanged a knowing glance with his neighbour. For a moment, I was annoyed with Mel for making me play the city-boy, but my thoughts quickly turned to her reasons. Was she scared of him? And, if so, why had we come?
The Masons went off along the track. We sat in the rockers. There was nothing else to do.
In the course of the morning, I had a good look at Colley. Not that there was much to be seen: he kept the shirt buttoned to his throat and wore boots under the dungarees. His hair was cropped into a blunt block on top of his head. It was strange, I thought, that a man who apparently had too much hair should look like he was wearing a wig.
Around noon, he sent me into the yard behind the cabin to stack firewood. Grateful for the distraction, I put my back into it, working the tension and tedium out of my muscles. When I came back, Mel was balanced on his knee, with his long fingers clasping her hips and the heel of his boot drumming. Playing horsey, you could say. She rolled her eyes at me as she squirmed off his lap. Over her shoulder, he was smirking as if I was the biggest fool he’d ever met.
It was lunchtime. We followed him along a path through the trees to a lot where a dozen pickups were parked, one model after another like a row of old journals, and we climbed into the newest one and drove back down the road we had come on. He doesn’t need to work, Mike had told me, he owns shares in an oilfield in Oklahoma and he’s got more money than he knows what to do with.
At a rest stop on the interstate, we had chicken baskets and fries and big glasses of iced tea. Halfway through the meal, I noticed the five o’clock shadow on the backs of his hands.
We returned to the cabin. Still there was nothing to do and we sat on the porch again. As the afternoon wore on, the hunters started coming down out of the hills with the deer they’d shot. Mason and his son had a doe draped over the hood. ‘This one’s yours,’ Mason said to me. ‘She’s got your name on her.’ The kill looked underweight to me – there were rules about the size of the animals you could take – but, as a man who knew nothing about hunting, I thought I should hold my tongue.
Uncle Colley had the boy carry it around to the smokehouse. There was some spring left in the lithe body, and when he slung it across his shoulders it twisted in his grip as if it were trying to get away.
Alone that night, clinging together on the crumbling sponge like survivors of so
me natural disaster, Mel and I whispered and giggled for an hour.
‘What an old goat,’ I said, ‘he can’t keep his paws off you. You should have warned me.’
‘He’s harmless.’
‘Really? You seem quite scared of him.’
‘I know how to deal with him. I just don’t want to make it harder than it should be.’
‘Isn’t it weird, though, the way he keeps touching you? I mean, you could make him stop.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You have to imagine that he’s been alone all his life. I’m sure he’s never had a normal relationship. He’s starved for affection. Doesn’t it make you sad?’
I woke the next morning to the sound of running water. For a drowsy moment I thought I was in my own bed and Mel was taking a shower. Just as I realised where I was, the splashing stopped and I heard a low moan, and then silence. Pulling the blanket around my shoulders against the early-morning chill, I knelt on the mattress and looked through the blinds.
In the clearing behind the cabin, Colley was sitting in a metal tub with his head between his knees, enveloped in a fuzzy cocoon of steam. Mel was bent over him, lathering his back with a block of soap. Her skin was pale in the morning light and soft as tissue paper, so clear and thin I could see the angles of her hipbones and shoulder blades. I cannot say I doubted for an instant that the creature in the tub was Colley. What else could it be? And yet two certainties condensed in my mind at the same time like images superimposed on one another: it was Uncle Colley and something else, an animal covered in thick brown fur that had followed the smell of fresh blood out of the woods and let itself be domesticated.
Mel put the soap down on an upturned bucket and reached for a long-handled brush. The shaggy hound moaned in anticipation. With the ease of a circus girl who did this every morning, she scrubbed at his back, working the foam into his fur, shoving it all one way and then raking it the other. He submitted to this painful pleasure, drawing his head down between his shoulders against the thrust of the bristles and then stretching out his neck again as the brush went down his spine.
He looked to me like the dog-headed men in a medieval bestiary or one of those monsters out of Africa with eyes in its chest or the head of a lion. Except that it was the other way round: the head of a man on the body of a beast. I have always been more susceptible to myth than psychology. Perhaps that’s why this vision did not repulse me.
She poked him with the handle of the brush and he stood up. In an instant, the book learning was sluiced away and he was simply a man, a big man with too much hair on his body, two naked hands and a naked prick, and a big round head with a patch of fur on its crown.
There was a hose attached to the rainwater tank and Mel opened the tap and held her thumb over the end. He yelled and capered in the jet, feeble though it was, splashing suds over the sides of the tub, and the water ran off him, driving channels through the hair down his thighs, while the cloak of steam blew away in tatters. As a young man I was prone to jealousy, yet I felt nothing but a shiver of recognition.
I lay down and pulled the stinking blanket over my head. If I went outside, I knew, everything would change, the story would have a different ending, but I had no idea whether it would be better or worse. What would I say?
In the event, I did not have to make a decision because the door opened and shut. I pretended to be sleeping. Mel slipped in beside me. When I turned over and clasped her shivering, soap-scented body, the small of her back felt strange to my touch, cold and damp and covered with goosebumps.
Later that morning, as we were preparing to leave, Colley brought a ladder into the cabin and sent me up it to fetch a cardboard box from the musty cave in the rafters. There was something he wanted to give me as a going-away present. It was a red flannel shirt. God knows how long it had been up there. The thing was filthy; it smelt of bacon grease and sweat, but he insisted that I try it on. Ants, or some other insect I could not imagine, had been nesting in one of the sleeves and when I pushed my arm through it a lump of hard red earth fell out of the cuff.
He wouldn’t let me take it off. He told me it fitted perfectly, although the cuffs hung down past my fingertips, and he winked at Mel so theatrically that I couldn’t fail to notice.
I was still wearing the hunting shirt when we drove away. As soon as we rounded the first bend in the road, I stopped the car, pulled the thing over my head and flung it into the undergrowth.
The day after we got back from Arkansas, the aunts and uncles and family friends came to celebrate Shabbos at the Liebmans. In the afternoon, I helped Mike put the leaf in the dining-room table and bring the extra chairs up from the basement.
Mike’s brother Morris was the last to arrive. He was a psychologist, although he looked like a businessman in his dove-grey suit and burnished wingtips. His bow tie, a rash of pink polka dots on creamy silk, was a whimsical flourish with an ambiguous message. ‘Relax,’ it said, ‘I don’t take myself as seriously as you do.’ But I heard, ‘Beware! Don’t think I’m harmless because I’m wearing this silly tie.’
He hunted me down in the living room, where the men were chatting while the women put the finishing touches to the dinner, and pulled a chair up so that we could talk.
‘I’ve never actually met someone from Darkest Africa,’ he said, ‘let alone a representative of the master race.’ And then he laid a puffy hand over my own to show that he was joking. When I spoke, he tilted his head to one side, profoundly attentive.
He started out by telling me that he despised apartheid. He imagined that no one could live in South Africa without going mad. It would make you sick, he expected. He imagined and expected many things. ‘I imagine it makes you feel awful,’ he said. ‘I expect it keeps you awake at night.’ Within a minute I felt like fleeing, but the arm of his chair was pressed into the padded side of the sofa like a bony elbow in my ribs. Only joking, he said, and gave me another jab. I was relieved when we were called to the table, disappointed to find him directly opposite, appraising me over the rim of his wine glass as if he could see through me.
‘Our visitor from Africa should say the blessing,’ he said when we were all gathered around the table.
I declined. He insisted, until I had to say: ‘I’m not Jewish.’ The yarmulke I had pinned to the back of my head suddenly felt like a ridiculous disguise.
‘Forgive me,’ Uncle Morris said, ‘I just assumed.’
Mike said the broche, and as soon as we were seated the awkwardness was submerged in talk and laughter. Mel gave my leg a reassuring squeeze under the table.
It was a country meal with Yiddish trimmings. There was no chicken soup, although one of the aunts had brought chopped liver, which was served with crackers rather than kichel. The main course was quail. Hedda warned us: ‘Watch your teeth.’
We spoke about Uncle Colley, of course. Morris imagined how surprised I must have been to find a man living in such a primitive state. The way he said ‘primitive’ was insinuating, as if he was quoting a word I had used myself, one which passed a judgement that rebounded on me. He had a way of looking at me that suggested he knew me better than anyone else at the table. ‘Living up there in the woods,’ he said, ‘you need a strong stomach to keep the man’s company.’
The picture of Colley and Mel came into my mind, and along with it a shameful sense of betrayal. Unsure what I had seen passing between them, half-convinced I had dreamt it all, I had not said a word, and neither had she.
There was no sign of birdshot in my quail, although everyone else was fishing bits of black lead from their mouths. Halfway through the meal though, I began to feel strange. My skin crawled. I should have said something at once, but I didn’t want to cause a fuss.
The conversation turned to medicine. Perhaps it started with the question of whether anything might have been done for Colley, or perhaps one of the old people was simply discussing their aches and pains. Uncle Morris bemoaned the w
asteful excesses of modern healers, the cascades of pills and potions, the bloody surgeries. Doctors were always reaching for the scalpel. He mentioned Chris Barnard, who had put the heart of a black man – or was it a baboon? – in an ailing white body, in the body – pulling a face at me – of a Jew. Everyone laughed. He did a toothy impression of Barnard that seemed to me a parody of my own accent. He began to speak about eczema. When Mel and I discussed it afterwards, after I’d recovered, she insisted this part of the conversation came later, when Morris was trying to make a diagnosis, saving my life, I was disorientated, but in my memory it comes before, he is suggesting the diseases of the skin to which I might fall prey, predicting them if you like, urticaria, prurigo, suppurating boils. They were all possible, indeed likely, they were to be imagined and expected. While he was busy with the list, I opened a gap between two buttons of my shirt and saw that my belly was covered with red spots. My skin was burning. I put my hand under my shirt and scratched and peered again through the gap. It looked like chickenpox. The rash was already rising on my neck. I should have said something, but I carried on eating and listening to the talk around me, following a line here and a phrase there, catching hold of none of it, letting the meanings sink beneath their accents. Then Hedda’s sister was bringing in the strawberry fool and Hedda was waving at me from across the table as if we were on opposite sides of a river in spate. The welts had appeared on my cheeks apparently and my neck was puffing out like a bullfrog’s.
Morris took charge. He gave instructions for an ambulance to be called. Then he scratched through the medicine cabinet and crushed a couple of tablets into a glass of water and got the mixture down my throat before it closed up entirely. They put me on the sofa while they waited for help to come. I was gasping for breath. Mel held my hand and cried. Her mother’s drawn face came and went over her shoulder, echoing out of a distant future in which an old man on his deathbed, surrounded by a little circle of family and friends, turned out to be me.
101 Detectives Page 2