Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  The aunts of the god and young Maia, they wandered off into the park. I heared the congressman took them all in, the little blonde girl included. That he has soothed her parents with the promise to take care of the little maenad. That his sisters stand testimony to his history of providing.

  Only the reverend and his wife remained, and some old woman fear-struck or simply old, I could not be sure, but she wasn’t or couldn’t move. The wind began to rise, overturning stage props and wrenching free the rafters of the theatre. Then I swear, and this I told the police, that the old woman began to change, to transmogrify in the crazy moon, the shadow of the trees passing over her like it was molding her into a new shape. And there she was, the python Apache wrote about. She turned and coiled, slithering down the tiers toward the orchestra, where my entourage and I stood fascinated, because the legends is true when it come to the hypnosis of serpents.

  It was the boss coming on stage that deflected her attention. Mr. Thorne come downstage with Mr. Castille, and the python wrapped around him and unhinged her jaw, and I was just too horrified to think I had been gonna step up about a hundred dollars more to show on opening night, suddenly that seemed like backseat driving when you put it up against what was taking down Mr. Thorne, because the snake curled around him and began to crush, and the Brischords was out of there and Mr. Castille, who at least had more cojones than MelMel or Chrome in that he struck once the serpent, he bruised her head with his heel before he, too, high-tailed it into the night and denial.

  Then the python unhinged her jaw, and the unspeakable began.

  63 Exodos: Antistrophe: Polymnia

  The sarcophagus as refuge, as consoling stillness.

  We take a different marching order to trick beholders with our processional. Already the girls exchange lutes, scrolls, podia. We cover our tracks, and the generations to come will know us by new names.

  Across from us the krater settles into stillness as well. The god and his Ariadne, the maenads and the glittering pappasilenos, the contending boys on the opposite side—all of them would look familiar right now, if you have been following the story and know the principal actors. But right now, it is after hours: nobody here but the scarcely animate statuary, the god of fluorescent light, the wayward security guard.

  And the peopled krater, of course, breathing with the memory of wine.

  The countenance of the god is young, then older, then back to young. As always in portrayal—young, feminine and beautiful, then bearded and wiry like the satyric goats he musters. This time he darkens, his skin softening and his eyes folding in a serene and indifferent loveliness, and then the painted profile takes on skin more pale, stippled shadow at the jaw, the shorter, swept-back hair recognizable from the pulpit of Antioch, from pulpits all across America, for that matter. The woman opposite him plays the twinned reeds of the aulos, but she is young and old as well—an Ariadne bridal at last, or a mother drawn out into the Dionysiac forest on a current of wine and madness. And the old man changes the least, grey-haired paunchiness with occasional sideburns and a costume glitter to his robe.

  And that old man carries a krater as well, upon it another old silenos carrying a krater, receding into the depths of the mysteries. He just told you he was fading. I look upon him—upon them all—and thank my mother Memory, who has given me the final word.

  The krater is brimful with imagined wine. You can drink from it, of course. No blame. The gods say so, as do the hexagrams. But if you wet your head, my dears, you lose everything.

  The time is coming for sleep again. The banners outside the museum are dated, and the crate readied that will take us across your huge and dormant country to another venue. I would say we shall wake again and you will see us, but night is perpetual sleep, as the poet says. So I will not know until it happens. Until then I will come to the banks of the dark underground river and wait there, and the krater will settle into sleep as well, the gods translated and fallow in impossible light.

  64 Exodos: Strophe: T. Tommy Briscoe

  We got ourselves saved again later on, at Antioch that October. Because them things need renewal as well, and we heared they was coffee and sandwiches.

  They was no hippie bus this time to get us there, but Miss Maia give us bus fare. That time of day on a Sunday there is no express out that way, but we traveled on transfers, and I have learned that there is no place far from you when you do.

  We knew, when we got to the complex, that we were not the kind of sinners that the Reverend Koenig wanted to save. Our sins were warm ones, borne of too much wine and naughty loving, and these days they welcomed the cooler sinners there, the frauds and inside traders. They had ways of explaining how these were not sins, not really, but ours remained most grievous, most cardinal.

  They claimed nothing had changed. But Koenig had changed. Had become more like them, had rejoined the fold. I had not thought he would give in, for I had heared things about him. But that night he stepped down from the pulpit and stalked the stage, like an actor or like a big wild cat. He was enthusiastic, and I suppose the god had picked him out of the multitude, had found him useful for the time.

  Because it all changes, children. I have no idea how many times I have been saved: I remember wearing a leisure suit once, when I opened my heart to Jesus. I remember a field far earlier, high grass and women singing. I believe there was once when they did not call it saving and when they spoke in a tongue I no longer recall. Each time the god descends he expects tribute, he expects blood and ashes. And maybe the Reverend Koenig was figuring that out, or maybe just riding the snake until the loneliness made sense and he could rest in it.

  I do know that Miss Maia has receded, like the Rausch sisters, into obscurity and money, and that the Congressman’s women have taken her in, are guiding her, making her respectable and putting the tags on things. She may even marry, but I think it is too soon to tell, what with her work and the election weeks away.

  She is the one who visits Miss Starr when the schedule permits. The whole revelation, the blood and the police and the anagnorisis, all took place in the hospital wings. They keep her lulled there pending slow therapy, settled on an anti-psychotic cocktail that makes a man downright envious. Miss Starr is thinner now, almost gaunt, and if she stands by the windows of the ward the light shines through her, and you can see the bars and the glass and the muted promise of sun beyond it.

  I am fading as well now. I noticed it when we first broke into fall weather, back a couple of weeks ago, when I awakened on the park bench again, covered with cold dew. They was a dream I was rising from, somewhere in a warm night so clear and star-struck that it was hardly night. I did not recognize the constellations, or perhaps we had yet to name them and give them meaning. But in the dream I was rushing through undergrowth, not away from anything or toward anything, not really, but with the joy of running, children. It felt like that moment when I copy the King, and mimic his movement, the pivot of leg and knee, the roll of the scarf behind his neck, the martial karate dance that he done in Vegas.

  It was that moment when you are not yourself but flowing, on a current you remember only when you enter it, bound toward that deep and common destination, and for that moment you are so in tune with it all, joy and tears, that when the dream fades and you find yourself on the bench covered with October dew and the sunlight bare and bald above the rows of shrubbery and trees, there’s a great sadness that takes you, and you cry to dream that vital peace once more.