Lee

by Tito Perdue

  “Hey! You hit me right in the throat!”

  “Yes, and I’m going after the nose next.”

  And he did so, a well-targeted strike that made the sort of noise Lee was addicted to. Now the man had two wounds, both bleeding; moreover, his cane was bent. He never saw Lee’s foot (shaped like a trowel), surprisingly swift as it was. The man called once (to Lee it sounded like an owl), then went down. Lee’s heart sang—until the man tackled and brought him down as well. He had a terrible vision of money running out of his pocket and bills lying in view. It was a choice of gathering them up again or pounding on the man.

  He would have preferred to be in bed; instead, the man bore down again upon him with his cane, shortened as it now was. The sun had come up three minutes ago in great splendor, but Lee could not enjoy it. He parried. He was himself bleeding from the head and seemed to have snapped his finger again. His friend was clearly having the worst of it, and yet (Lee admitted it), he never once called for help. He even experienced a certain grudging sympathy for all such boys as had grown up in the same town and never gone away. Suddenly, seeing an opening, he came down mightily on that same nose as was already in such a state.

  “Had enough?”

  “No, no.” (But it was the cook that said it.)

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. Sun’s up.”

  “How about that nose?”

  “Leave it alone.

  “Are you sorry now about all the things you’ve done?”

  “Yes, yes. I don’t want to hear no more about it.”

  “And Debra?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. You have to understand: it was her idea.” They glared, and then, suddenly, the other turned on his heel and strode away. Lee shook his cane at him, one last insult before sprinting back to the cafe where already the new day’s breakfast clientele was making a great noise. It was about what he had expected: the drunk had taken his books, and when he came back, the cook had taken his bills.

  Eighteen

  FOUR TIMES HE WENT TO THE WINDOW, his exasperation growing. He had swollen places on his crown, the beginning of horns. His glasses were broken. He wanted it dark, wanted silence, wanted the working people to drop their tools and go back into their cells again. Nothing so infuriated him as this continual ripping up and laying down of pavement and road, as if that way happiness might be found. He liked woods.

  By four the slum was dark; by six, the world. Waiting by the window, he could mark the very moment it changed from day to night. Two minutes ago it was all pragmatical people scurrying home with worried faces; now suddenly, he saw youths emptying out into the street in bright colors. He saw a large woman in a tight skirt; behind her, a mere adolescent trailed along with a face sick from lust and too much neon. Across the way was an open window—it looked like a picture tacked up in space—revealing a woman ironing and a depressed-looking man sitting on the bed. This was twentieth-century stuff, another five thousand years before civilization could have its start, and yet, even where he was going, he knew he’d miss it someday. Either he would mix into the sun or, according to another of his theories, pay for his errors with a long-term stint as a one-celled thing.

  He rolled, groaned, dressed, urinated, and hummed. There were at least four persons next door—he could hear them coming awake one by one and then hastening to get into their colorful clothes. Saturday! He wanted to puke. It was then he noticed that the radio tower was flashing in a crisis, having changed from red to purple.

  He waited by the door and then, suddenly, burst out in great leap so as to foil anyone who might be lying in wait. He saw all manner of black people waiting to go outside, yet who were reluctant to do so. Lee went half a block, then he stopped to watch the daytime police withdrawing slowly in a group, step by step, finally snapping the gate shut behind them. He then saw something that chilled him to the soul—a huge man with his head shaved down the middle in the Lombard style described by Gibbon. The other direction held a crowd of youths, a grinning species that made Lee’s gorge rise to look at them. Under the circumstances, he hardly knew what to do. Nor was he willing to go upstairs again, not with “music” above and “music” below and “music” in the hall.

  Instead, he lit a cigarette. The storefront had a niche—Lee was ten feet deep in it before he espied a second party there, a girl it looked, who had huddled up at the back, watching him steadily in fear. Twenty years ago and he might have offered aid, but not now, not when he actually took satisfaction in things going from bad to worse. Just then a man strode past, one of the last of the good ones hastening home before too late. Lee immediately came hobbling out after him with noise and goggling eye; he did so love to see these types run, especially the pudgy ones leaving trails of cologne.

  He came back, laughing, and again squeezed into the cave. The girl had come forward, drugged apparently. “Still here? Out, out, out!”

  No answer. She seemed not to hear.

  “What is it—cold?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well. Socrates used to do some of his best thinking in the cold. Now if he could stay out all night in the snow, then you . . . ”

  “Want to fuck?”

  “What! What! I’m old, can’t you see that?”

  “Want to look at it?”

  “No I don’t want to look at it! Jove!”

  “Got five dollars?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Lend it to me, okay?”

  “Certainly not.” He went closer. This one had dead eyes, and her mouth hung open; there were other symptoms too that related to the quantity of television and advertisements in her head. “Television! Alright, out, out, out!”

  He had to hiss and raise the stick up high. Finally she did break past and through the opening and—he could scarce believe it—straight into the arms of the Lombard across the road!

  He wasted half an hour, sometimes coming out from the niche and exploring for a block or two. The moon was large, and kept him too stirred-up for his bleak room, where nothing would be happening just now. A taxi came. Lee waited until the client had paid his fare before leaping on board himself. He would have preferred an older driver, one who had done all and seen all and knew to obey without showing too much surprise.

  “I should like to run out into the country for a spell—can you do that?”

  “Country.”

  “Yes. Why must you repeat it? And try to find me a scene like . . . I don’t know . . . sixteenth century perhaps!”

  The car did not budge; moreover, the man was watching in the mirror. Lee expected it. Finally, he took out the money and showed it in one hand and the cane in the other.

  It looked more to him like Akkad, with its clay villages and squat little tombs of the “beehive” style, all of it exactly as when the original inhabitants had run off and left it. The moon too, also made of clay, was so much without shape it looked as if someone had been kneading with it. What he wanted now was music, music and Judy, music, Judy, and a ship that would steer itself. Further, he had determined that if the driver once more glanced in the mirror, it would be so much the worse for his head, which was already rather nonsymmetrical. Finally, three miles out, he took out the matches.

  She materialized immediately. Tonight she was sparkling, grinning, and dressed out in a blue suit that was itself very like the night. He knew so little about the place whence she came.

  “Judy, Judy.”

  “I’m here.”

  It was this woman’s voice (deep for one so short) that caused the man to veer suddenly and almost go off into the woods.

  “Just keep your goddamn eyes on the goddamn road!”

  A windmill came up, with what looked to him to be a hanged man dangling from the paddles. He had seen this before in books—the sixteenth century and certain bloody wars of the Dutch. He saw a starved mule, and next, a house on fire and some tens of crazed soldiers dancing joyously with heads on pikes.

  “You see?” (It was Judy.) “I
t’s always been bad. Had you rather be back in those days?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “No.”

  “What is it—Thirty Years’ War?”

  “No, this one didn’t even get written about.”

  That instant a barn went up in an explosion of bright beautiful flame.

  “It’s Greece you want, isn’t it?”

  “Judy! Is it possible?” He stared, running over suddenly with amazement, fear, alarm. “It can’t be done.”

  “Oh?”

  “No! Let’s not, Judy.”

  “You might not like it.”

  “I know, I know.”

  She was laughing, still teasing after all these years; she had a method for being eighteen and fifty at the same time. Suddenly:

  “I told you to keep your goddamn eyes on that road!” He lifted the cane; Judy pressed it down again.

  They had come into high country now, the Zagros chain, as it seemed to him. Here the huts were miserable and, apart from goats, he could see no livestock anywhere. He had seen better than this in Alabama. Indeed, he questioned whether all things had not already long ago happened in one fell moment of wildest doing. Or rather, that there was no Time, no millions, no history, but only one giant monster with infinite fingers and eyes without count.

  “No such thing as ‘Time,’ right?”

  She looked at him in surprise; nothing made him more proud than to come up with these discoveries of his ever and again, based upon his wisdom and reading.

  “Very well, I think I’d like to see Greece now. But not ‘straight on,’ as it were—too risky—might blind me. No, could I just see Lycia instead? Till you count to ten?”

  “Lycia!” She laughed merrily. “There ’tis! I’m counting.”

  It was fine. Not that Grecian Greece of the Greeks, to be sure, but the epoch was right. The people—rather small-seeming, to his eyes.

  “What are they thinking?”

  “You always ask that.” She laughed, then that same moment his time ran out. Amazingly, they were back in Alabama, viewing an undistinguished landscape with litter and a people whom he knew from personal experience to be below the norm. He saw a man in a tiny cabin with a huge television. The very shape of his ears and head revealed everything one needed to know about his spiritual state.

  “Look at that one.”

  In fact, she had gone. He fumbled desperately for the matches, dropped them, then came up to find the driver’s vile face searching in the mirror.

  “Goddamn it! I told you . . . ”

  “Alright, mister, that’s all for you.”

  Indeed, they slowed, then actually stopped; Lee found himself looking down into a valley that was not at all like that of Xanthus. Hurriedly he showed his money.

  “That won’t do you no good.”

  “This will.” He showed the cane.

  “Nope.”

  Now Lee saw the man had a pistol—and was showing it.

  It was disappointing in the real air, with real stones under foot—a much smaller experience than dreaming about it aboard a cab. Then he was warm; now, cold. Probably it was a mistake to have left the highway, all of it from his unwillingness to meet up with another traveler possibly, or police, and then having to explain himself.

  He liked to steer by the moon, now once more his own special star. Tonight the thing was but three-fourths full and yet already greater than the Peloponnese; he could see a long flight of yellow crows weaving homeward to it in drunkenness. Below lay a village, vacant these hundred years and yet still giving off smoke. The woods were dense with animals, a naive population that had been pushed back into the dark corners, never knowing why. As for himself, he would prefer to see a thousand men disemboweled than one more lizard with a missing tail. Based upon what he knew about the anti-world, it were better to be disemboweled one’s self than to have murdered even one.

  By the time he hit town, he was loaded down with flowers, no two of them the same. He stopped. He had seen the sun in splendor, he had never seen it like this—rose-colored wafer with idiots dancing on the rim. Someday, he knew it, the beauty of things would break him where he stood.

  According to his theory, he could go on developing for as long as he disbelieved everything the modern age promoted. Mostly, he disbelieved that this “bloodsun” was not the deity that he could right well see that, in fact, it was. His instinct was to get him down on both knees in praise; instead, he turned into a driveway, a garden, a good place to pee and have a cigarette.

  He had slept! Sleeping in the city! He knew it from the first instant the man’s shoe nudged him in the ribs. At once Lee leapt up, but then he had to grab hold of the individual to keep from falling.

  “What’s going on here!”

  “Ha! Nothing. Or very little anyway.” He laughed. “All’s well as seems well!” Again he laughed, slapping the man in friendly-wise.

  “Are you ill?”

  “Ha! No, no. No, I was just . . . ”

  They looked at each other. It was simply a man, no better or worse than others of the kind. Lee saw at least three places—hip, thigh, and pot—where he was available to attack.

  “Do you need a doctor?”

  “Doctor! No, no—you know how squeamish they are. So!” Suddenly he turned and strode off. The man’s wife had retreated into her home where he could very definitely see her in consternation behind glass. Ahead, two miles further, was his own hotel, six royal pennants fluttering gaily in the breeze.

  Nineteen

  DAYS PASSED. SO SILENT WAS IT, time so slow . . . Heretofore he had needed books on one side and music on the other; now it was the sun alone, hours upon hours of it while he stared, wide-eyed, in a four-floor hotel. Some numbers of insects had penetrated the room; he spied them here and there, looking back with that unblinking eagerness he so much hated to see. Never leaving the bed, he was thinking more deeply than most people would have believed possible. Other times, he would lie on one side for long periods, praying no one would burst in upon him in his condition. He might move one hand slightly, he was very far from being able to grasp the cane. These were not moments so much as entire days going by, the wallpaper deteriorating even as he watched. He could feel his time approaching, the great noontide.

  In Alabama some winter days are like spring. Then would Lee bound up and stick his head out, as if he imagined it were childhood and his own most memorable dog were somersaulting for him to come out again and play. Instead, finding it winter, Lee drew back in. He had doubts he would see many more summers, summers that is as summers are commonly understood. Or, that he ever again would run with his dog in earthly shape. Nothing could be more tantalizing than this persisting hunger, old as he was, for music, dogs, Judy, and milk-white pages. He wanted to live, wanted to die, wanted a final reckoning with all who had wronged him.

  One day he got up and shaved and then went back to bed again. Finally, a Thursday, he threw himself out into the hall and thence to the lobby, where a new-age woman in foot-long earbobs was sitting in haughty array. For five seconds Lee stood, counting. Her neck was so thin, her nature such, she could have no slightest suspicion as to how near she was to a very grim death. His hand twitched once, then relaxed from the cane.

  He went out. It was one of those listless afternoons, as when a great man has recently died. For himself, he was beginning to question whether he was still visible or not—no one paid notice to him—and whether there might not be yet older people who had turned completely invisible. Suddenly it came to him that he had not tasted of food in days.

  He ran, past one restaurant that was full and then on to another that was so dark and evil-smelling that no one attended anymore. Lee saw the chef, a haunted man with arms dipped in gore. According to Lee’s expectation, the waitress must needs be a widow and grandmother, slow-moving, tired, washed-out and with bad feet, wanting nothing, poor and hardly able to remember any longer the farmstead where she had grown up—he saw her in the corner. This was most de
finitely his class of restaurant, here where he had space and dimness and no requirement to be within seeing distance of rotten youths. He searched the place, finally settling for a stagnant booth at the rear from which he could study the street, but the street could not study him.

  First, a woman, old and forlorn—he had seen her so many times: fifty years ago in Toledo, in Chicago had he seen her, Iowa, Ohio and France. By now he could even put himself in her head and look out through her eyes, and what he saw were children and grandchildren scattered to the winds. Another strange thing: Formerly, he had detested the old and admired what was young; now, it was the other way around, and in a country that adored movement and noise.

  The waitress brought his fare, more paste-colored slum slop made of dextrin and hoof mucilage. She was mournful, this one—he divined that her children had not scattered merely, but expired. And had she not one time been pretty perhaps, and had he not himself once chased her screaming into a closet and kissed her while she fought? He was almost certain that he had not.

  This day his stomach wanted nothing in it, not even a swig of milk. Nevertheless, Lee tossed the stuff in and sucked on it. To his mind, eating was obscene at the best of times, but so long indulged-in that no one any longer recognized it for what it was. Suddenly, half-asleep as he was, he spotted a couple that snapped him out of his stupor and sent him chasing out onto the street. Something in their faces—these were the first unspoilt people he had seen in fourteen years. Holding hands too! His mind flew back to the 1950’s when he had personally known any number of such types, unbesmirched ones, and in a country with a structure to it.

  He put on speed. Indeed, this was a girl (high forehead, bouncing hair) worth fighting for, dying for if one couldn’t have her, and yes, the world had once been full of such people. However, she was taking far too much pleasure in her swain and the sun on her forehead to listen to any warnings of his; instead, he let himself fall in behind.