by Tito Perdue
“Mine too. Of course, she still comes back at night, sometimes.”
“Good, good. Lord!”
Outside a gander strolled up, trying with weak eyes to see through the screen. It was pleasant here, with the most dappled clouds bumping in the most clear sky. There were so many notable personalities in so many forms—Judy would have swooned.
“How long you been operating out here, as it were?”
“Always.”
“Always!” His mind reeled. Probably the man had meant in the intermittent sense, according to the time theory of Nietzsche.
“Yup. And my daddy before that. You want some brew?”
Not in years had Lee permitted himself any such stuff of the sort, and yet this was so neatly put up, so attractive, like a rare honey; a proper scholar could have read the future in it. He watched it flood the cup and then go swirling for a great while.
“Then I must suppose that you were out here farming all the time that I was in there”—he pointed to town—“attending school.”
“I went to school, country people go to school.”
“Oh, yes, but you don’t take it seriously. I mean, for you it’s simply a measure for getting ready for life, isn’t it so?”
(The man nodded vaguely.)
“See? Actually, it’s the other way around—life is a getting ready for books. Now where are your books, for example?”
“That’s twice you’ve asked that; I’ll be goddamned if it isn’t.”
Lee followed the farmer to the next room, which was bare and huge and, from the smell, was employed at one time for storing hay. Here was a massive portrait of a hard-looking man, with the dead eyes of the nineteenth-century set in a potato face. And below, the books. Lee started to say something insulting about their small numbers, but instead, he went over and got down in front of them. One volume of medical remedies, the rest rubbish; apparently the churl, or churl’s wife, had belonged to a book club at one time. Novels (he knew them!), “relationship” novels dictated over the telephone by thirty-five-year-old, new-style authors while lying in warm bathtubs—he wanted to puke.
“Christ! You could do better than this. No, I mean it!”
“Listen, you come in here, take my cookies . . . ”
“All right, all right. Show me your animals then.” He had expected a visit to the mule; instead, the man’s partiality ran to pigs. Even their home looked something like his own, but smaller, smaller and more odoriferous. At once Lee waded in among them, to the farmer’s surprise. It was their eyes that fascinated him, the exact same dimensions and movement as a man’s, albeit backed up by terribly weak brains. One was lacking a tail, while another’s ear was so perforated, so full of actual holes . . . Lee got down and touched it gingerly, as if it were old manuscript.
“Just look at that!”
“It don’t bother ’em.”
“The devil it don’t! How would you like it?”
“Listen . . . ”
“Holes too!”
The man was gone; Lee looked for him in amazement. Then he took the opportunity to examine the hogs more narrowly, their nature and first cause. What could one say that Plato might settle for? The foot? Because it was dainty and would have sufficed for going to a ball? Suddenly he called out in loud voice, “O ye hogs!” while rousing one or two of the males. He was aware of thirty human eyes on him, and fifteen swinish brains.
He came out, and the sun hit him brightly while he staggered about for a bit trying to get the stink out of his nose. Finally, he padded back to the kitchen for more of the drink. It was like a museum of old times here, with bottles and jars, a display of arrowheads on a board, and a fist-size fragment from another planet that was of a more perfect blue than any seen on earth. Also, a churn stood in the corner, whereon it dawned upon Lee that it was real butter he had been scenting. The butter itself—it would need an hour to find it, and meanwhile the man was striding back across the yard.
“Thought you wanted to see my stock!”
“I do, I do.”
He followed, past the hogs now lying dissolved in pleasure. This time the mule went with them, or rather it went as far as the fence permitted; Lee actually found himself turning, as if to ask a question of the thing. A dog ran up then, and seeing the cane, it suddenly abased itself in the dirt. There were ducks—a whole community of them, each with a rueful little head that turned in unison with every other, all of them under command of the radio tower at edge of town.
They passed through fowls and ungulates, even to a small-size lake with scum on top. Dead waters, brown in cast, and too many huge-eyed insects sipping too insidiously at it. Next came the cornfield; Lee went into it, pushing aside the stalks, as if he knew what to look for.
“Now then! This doesn’t look so very bad. Why, you should come off very well, despite the heat.”
“That right?”
“Yes. Anyway, you don’t need much money, living way out here.”
“I see.”
There was a grove and next a glade, then a well with breastwork of moss and stone. He found himself squinting down into a sanctum of blue-green ink, lovely stuff, with a drunken toad staring up in disbelief. It all came back—his own grandmother shambling off six times a day with her pail. Suddenly, he clutched at his glasses, just in time before they dropped into the well.
The farmer had edged off, gazing down at a gravestone set among yellow flowers.
“That was a good old woman, she sure was. Lord, man, she knew how to make this place do right.”
“Look, my wife had four degrees. From four different universities too.”
“Handle a combine! Better than me.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure she was a fine person and all that. But the kind of woman I’m talking about comes along only once every thousand years or so. Andromache and so forth. Penelope.”
“Kids? Raised six of them!”
“My wife had only to walk down the street and people would smile, dogs come running up.”
“Dogs!”
“And even now she comes when I require it. Can your wife do that? Of course not.”
“My wife did a lot of coming and going, what with one sister in Talledega and the other all the way to Coffee County and back.”
Useless, the man was lost in mediocre memories. And yet Lee did like him, if only for carrying on in neatness and visiting the tomb of his mediocre wife.
They were on the porch, drinking, staring into the aluminum-colored fog that kept belching up out of the lake in great plenty, like souls in gray solution. He was more and more conscious of these phenomena—fogs, abnormal bird calls, diseases of plants—as decadence reached further and further into the countryside itself. It worried him, too, how the moon, formerly his own special star, seemed to be metastasizing on the very surface of it. He drank. And crickets—never in earlier days had they sounded quite so unconvincing.
Now that nothing needed to be done (with the animals in their pens and the mule making his rounds), the farmer himself had taken on the look of an old man. He had the neatest of houses and most laudable animals, yet he was himself so bulbous and liquor-heavy, Lee could feel his gorge rising. To his thinking, the man owed it to be more like a yeoman in the ancient sense, with leather jerkin and wooden shoes; instead it was a veritable potato next to him, with belly and buttocks and little pouting mouth between two baby cheeks. Lee looked at them.
“Well, probably I ought to say good-bye now, get myself on back to town.”
No answer. And no possibility of one as long as the crickets were in their snit. Lee rose, went to the porch’s edge, and pissed into the begging mouth of one of the yellow flowers—he could hear the man yell out in protest.
“Ah well,” (said Lee), “maybe it’s just as well we’re as old as we are. For my part, I wouldn’t really care to witness what’s coming up.”
“Nothing surprises me anymore.”
“Consider yourself a Kievan peasant, then try to see the Mongols riding up in great force
—that’s how it’ll be.”
“We never thought of ourselves as peasants exactly. Shoot, we liked what we were doing.”
“Think of it! Greed, ignorance. All television and no literature—think! And now any one thing is good as any other. Why, I can remember when people used to fall helplessly in love.”
“I remember that.”
“Now these sons-of-bitches love their goddamn jobs, so-called, more than their goddamn wives!”
“I got a boy who’s on his third wife already.”
“Well certainly! If any one thing is good as any other . . . Hell, they could as easily go home with one another’s spouses and never mark the difference!”
“I know it. And that music!”
“And money! Oh, how I long to grant to them the death that Crassus had—a good full meal of molten gold!” (He was losing control, the more he thought about it. Suddenly he stood and ran down into the yard.) “Money! that’s it, money! They had rather have something than be something, you ever notice that? Tell me: had they rather to read in Persian or have a new car:
“You said a new car?”
Lee looked at him. The fog had pushed up so far that it was with difficulty that he could see to lift the cup. Somewhere the dog was calling piteously. Never had he felt more lonely; he wished he were back in his room, asleep beneath a covering of books.
“I’m ready to go to bed now.”
He had hoped for a full-size room with pictures and quilt; instead, he found himself admitted to a mere cupboard, with mere pallet. This was bare. There was flypaper with ten-year-old corpses on it, and in the corner a saucer of poison waited for the mice. He would never, never have been treated this way, not had his wife been still alive. On the contrary, she always saw to it that things were right. Nor could he make a complaint, not with the man already half way down the hall.
He undressed slowly, in his manner. The farmer had been gone only minutes and yet was already snoring, a wheezing sound that made Lee turn to thoughts of dough. Nothing to read. For amusement, he could only pretend that he had been transposed to one or another of the historical epochs of which he had knowledge—Frankish France, for example, when life was perilous and any little bit of warmth and security was worth everything. Luckily, the pallet did have an interesting smell. Then too, he had been left with a lamp, a sooty one that, together with camphor and linseed smells, seemed to whisk him back straightway to the Integrity Age. For him, the things of five hundred years ago were no less real than what was passing in front of his eyes. The screams were just as appalling, even if by now they were approaching the nearer stars. Time, mere Time—he could trace it back to Akkad and before, but earlier than the great inaugural explosion, he could not go. (Save that in each cycle he knew he had met Judy for the first time, the ten millionth time he had done so. And would do so again! That was his ace in the hole.) Suddenly he sat up. The fog was pressing, pressing and nudging at the glass.
He rolled out, went down the hall and to the porch. He had witnessed some disconcerting nights in his time, but nothing on a scale like this. The dog was calling, inviting him down the path, while as for the moon, formerly his own special star, it had so far deteriorated that it was in a different form each time he looked, like a bladder with something in it fighting to break out. He drank. The mule was alert; Lee could read it in his ears. Nevertheless, they passed one another without a word. The barn came up. Old as he was, Lee had known from the start that he would have to climb up into the loft at last to see what he could see. Nor was it lost on him what a place it was for dying, as meet as anything he could have wanted.
He lay for a while, in hay so dusty the he couldn’t breathe rightly. There was a flock of hens below, and they were very nervous to have someone like him in their home. Now was the time to die, just now, face up under the moon and with only a tattered roof between. He could envision children gathering about touchingly, friends of his having come to sing him on his way. His soul really was coming loose; he could feel it, blunt end first. And if he expected the roof to stop him, well instead, he saw that he was looking down from above into the farmyard itself, where the dog was barking at him in great wonder. He did not feel well. Suddenly, he began fumbling for the matches, only to find he hadn’t any.
He came down, past whispering hens, across moonlit yard, thence to the man himself. In sleep he looked more than ever like a potato, a grand one in a napkin, or rather, like the mummy of some lesser official on whom no great care had been taken. Four times Lee nudged before he would open his eyes.
“Can’t sleep.”
“What?”
“I can’t sleep.”
The man sat up. “Well what in almighty hell am I supposed to do? Think about it, man! You come in here . . . ”
“Wine. I need more wine.”
Lee followed him back, this time marking well where he kept the stuff. He did not like to see an elderly person in underwear, especially one of such complexion.
“Aren’t you going to get dressed?”
“Hell no. Hell no, I’m not getting dressed. I’m going back to bed.”
“Well, in that case, I might just as well leave.”
“Leave! I wish to hell you would!”
“I won’t be coming back, just thought you might want to know.”
“Good! No, that’s good!”
He remembered dashing to his room, gathering his things, and then hurrying back to the kitchen for cookies and wine.
“How about the lantern?”
“Take it, take it, take it, take it.” Already the farmer seemed asleep, availing himself no doubt of that personal physics and lack of anxiety that Lee could not really approve of very much.
Ten minutes later, he wished he had never left. There were fens, water-logged, and a palmetto that knew how to slice. Never again would he be able to find his way to the farmer’s house; indeed, as so often the case, he began to doubt there was such a person. Suddenly he trod upon something, an eel or ray in high panic struggling to get out from under foot. Mosquitoes—these he really did loathe. It required the greatest adeptness to capture even one, and meanwhile, another was always sneering in his ear. The Greeks knew them. Suddenly he lashed out wildly with the cane. Also, he couldn’t stay in one place for any length, for sinking.
The moon, previously his own special star, was definitely bloated and with rotten spots in the lower quadrant. Lee groaned, his thoughts turning to his room and the books that had been wasting these eighteen hours. Old was he, tired, and hungry too, and all of this scarcely more than a mile from where he had been born.
He waded into town with his pants rolled, passing one thin wreath of smoke where a house had recently burned. He had one hour, no more, before the sun would be throwing up a new day. He, who had wanted all of life to be like certain divine measures in the music of Debussy and Ravel, saw instead that there was a gas station, an immense pile of disused tires, and warehouses with broken windows. Lee stopped. There was also a small boy with a pail, apparently siphoning fuel from one of the trucks. Lee was able to come upon him quietly and then, of a sudden, thrust the lantern in his face. The boy grinned at first, then he tried to pretend he was indignant. He ended up grinning.
“So! stealing gasoline. Can you tell me where Quintard is?”
The boy grinned. “I couldn’t honestly say.”
Ten
SOMEONE HAD BEEN IN HIS ROOM; she had never been able to do any bit of dusting or straightening without leaving some trace of it in an object slightly misplaced. He called twice. Too late! She had gone.
It was full-blown day now, blatant as could be. And yet, this one seemed so much like those of which he had read, with blue sky . . . he had to wonder. Someday he would go to the window to find the fields full with peasants again, and new-world pilgrims riding by.
He had not eaten, not slept; nevertheless, he went down right away to the “tea room.” Indeed, the place did smell of tea, also of crumpets, deodorant, and lace. This mornin
g he smiled at one of the blue-hair monsters, doing it so courteously she actually left off chewing. Even now it was not too late, with his suit and paste-on smile and the title in front of his name. Suddenly he broke out laughing, an unpleasant sight, and followed it up by a fit in which he spit up a butterfly wing.
He demanded coffee and a whole pie, which he wolfed down in such a way as to send the woman flying from the room. There was a retired military officer with a cane of his own; they looked at each other. The man had heft, no doubt about it, but little of speed, judging by him. Moreover, his stick was too thin. Ten seconds (it was always the same) and the man found himself unable to bear up under Lee’s gaze. Never was Lee more serene, never more at peace, than when he was drilling into the soft material of some ordinary person’s weak, weak mind.
He paid, stepped outside, and hit the street in bright sun. These were not people he saw, but empty sets of clothes that had elected all of a sudden to run away from home. Suddenly, he swung wildly with his stick, striking nothing. True, he might well be going insane, and yet he considered it a weakness to be concerned about such things. Now he saw that he had gone off a full three blocks in the wrong direction.
He hastened, past Alice’s, and then took the shortcut behind Stewart’s house. Formerly, a giant brown dog resided here, friendly to a fault; now, it was a cold-looking animal that had taken over in his place. Lee threatened, even lifting the stick and making faces—useless. The dog had nothing in him, while as for the children . . . they never came outside.
He wanted to vomit; instead, he stepped out onto the golf course and set his face toward the distant mountains. This was considered to be the most choice section of town, but what he saw were expensive homes about which it would be hard to say whether they were in use or not. Himself, he would rather see a man’s brains blown out than one more tree felled. There was still the creek, thankfully. It was with difficulty that he climbed down into the ravine, and then immediately popped out again with the divine Judy. This time she was thirty in age, or forty even, and had no sooner turned loose of his hand than she began veering for the woods where were pine cones in plenty and flowers for picking.