On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Chickenshit,” Carl replied softly. “Chickenshit Jewish cocksucker.” But he took his foot off the brake.

  Neither said any more till the truck pulled up in front of the Weinreb house on Chickasaw Avenue.

  Before getting out of the cab Daniel said, “Don’t pull away till I’ve got my bike out of the back. Right?”

  Carl nodded, avoiding Daniel’s eyes.

  “Well, then, good-night, and thanks for the lift.” Once more he held out his hand.

  Carl took the offered hand and grasped it firmly. “So long, murderer.”

  His eyes locked with Daniel’s and it became a contest. There was something implacable in Carl’s face, a force of belief beyond anything that Daniel could ever have mustered.

  He looked away.

  And yet it wasn’t true. Daniel was not a murderer, though he knew there were people who thought he was, or who said they thought it. In a way Daniel rather liked the idea, and would make little jokes to encourage it, offering his services (in jest) as a hit man. There has always been a kind of glamor in the mark of Cain.

  The murder had taken place shortly after Daniel’s release from prison. The father and older brother of his friend Bob Lundgren had been forced off the road on their way back from a co-op meeting, made to lie flat in a ditch, and shot. Both bodies had been mutilated. The stolen car was found the same day in a parking lot in Council Bluffs. The assumption was that the two murders were the work of terrorists. There had been a rash of similar killings all through that winter and spring, and indeed for many years. Farmers, especially undergod farmers, had many enemies. This was the main reason, behind the proliferation of fortress-villages like Worry, for despite their sponsors’ claims they were not provably more efficient. Only safer.

  The murders had taken place in April, three weeks before Bob Lundgren was scheduled to be paroled from Spirit Lake. Considering the repeated threats he’d made against both victims, it had been fortunate for Bob that the murders had preceded his release. As it was, people assumed that he’d hired someone to do the work for him — some fellow prisoner who’d been let out ahead of him.

  The reason that Daniel in particular had come under suspicion was that the following summer he’d gone to work for Bob, supervising large work-crews of convicts from Spirit Lake. It was a fantastic summer — fraught with tension, filled with pleasure, and highly profitable. He’d lived in the main farmhouse with Bob and what was left of his family. His mother stayed upstairs, locked in her bedroom, except for sporadic forays into the other rooms, late at night, when she would break up the furniture and call down the wrath of God. Bob finally had her sent off to a rest-home in Dubuque (the same one Mrs. Norberg had gone to). That left his brother’s widow and her twelve-year-old daughter to take care of household matters, which they did with a kind of zombie-like zeal.

  Every weekend Bob and Daniel would drive up to Elmore or one of the other border towns and get thoroughly sloshed. Daniel got laid for the first time in his life, and for many times besides. As an ex-convict (and possibly a killer) he was generally left to himself by men who would otherwise have gladly kicked shit out of him.

  He enjoyed himself (and earned a lot of money), but at the same time he didn’t believe in what was happening. A part of him was always backing off from these events and thinking that all these people were insane — Bob, the Lundgren women, the farmers and whores boozing in Elmore. No one in his right mind would want to live a life like this.

  Even so, when Bob asked him to come back the next summer, he’d gone back. The money was irresistable, as was the chance for three months to be a grown-up instead of a high school student, than which no form of life is more downtrodden, disenfranchised, and depressed.

  Bob was married now, to a girl he’d met in Elmore, and his brother’s widow and her daughter had moved out. Now instead of boozing only on the weekends they were boozing every night. The house had never quite recovered from the elder Mrs. Lundgren’s jihad, and Julie, Bob’s twenty-two-year-old bride did not exert herself in its rehabilitation beyond the point of getting almost all of one bedroom wallpapered. She spent most of the daylight hours in a daze of boredom in front of the tv.

  Once, sitting on the back porch on a rainy August night and reminiscing about the good old days at Spirit Lake, Daniel said, “I wonder what ever happened to old Gus.”

  “Who?” Bob asked. The tone of his voice had altered strangely. Daniel looked up to see an expression on his friend’s face that hadn’t been there since those times in prison when the subject of his family would get into his bloodstream and bring out the Mr. Hyde in him. There it was again, that same occluded gleam of malice.

  “Gus,” Daniel said carefully. “Don’t you remember him? The guy who sang that song the night that Barbara Steiner let go.”

  “I know who you mean. What made you think of him just now.”

  “What makes a person think of anything. I was daydreaming, thinking about music, I guess — and that started me thinking about him.”

  Bob seemed to consider the adequacy of this explanation. The look on his face slowly faded to mild irritation. “What about him?”

  “Nothing. I was just wondering what ever became of him. Wondering if I’d ever see him again.”

  “I didn’t think he was a particular friend of yours.”

  “He wasn’t. But the way he sang made a big impression on me.”

  “Yeah, he was an all-right singer.” Bob uncapped another Grain Belt and took a long gurgling swallow.

  They both fell silent and listened to the rain.

  Daniel understood from this exchange that it was Gus who must have murdered Bob’s father and brother. He was amazed how little difference the knowledge seemed to make in the way he felt about either Bob or Gus. His only concern was to defuse Bob’s suspicions.

  “I’d like to be able to sing like that,” he said. “You know?”

  “Yeah, you’ve told me on the average of I would estimate once a day. So what I’d like to know, Dan, is why don’t you ever sing? All you have to do is open your mouth and yell.”

  “I will. When I’m ready.”

  “Dan, you’re a nice guy, but you’re as bad as I am for putting things off to tomorrow. You’re worse — you’re as bad as Julie.”

  Daniel grinned, uncapped another Grain Belt, and held it up in a salute. “Here’s to tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Bob agreed, “and may it take its own sweet time in coming.”

  The subject of Gus had never rearisen.

  When Daniel had left Worry it was six-thirty, but already it had seemed the dead of night. By the time he was home, after the slow drive through the snowstorm, he had expected no more than left-overs heated up. But in fact his mother had waited dinner. The table was set and everyone was watching a panel discussion about the new fertilizers in the living room. They had not waited, the twins in particular, with much good grace, and before Daniel was out of his windbreaker and had given his hands a symbolic splash in the wash basin (saving the water for the toilet tank), they were all of them sitting down and his mother was spooning out servings of tuna fish casserole. Aurelia passed the plate of sliced bread with a look of malevolence. Cecelia giggled.

  “You didn’t have to wait dinner for me, you know. I said I’d be home late.”

  “Fifteen after seven is not an unthinkable hour for dinner,” Milly said, more for the sake of the twins than for him. “In New York City, for instance, people often don’t have anything to eat before nine, even ten o’clock.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Cecelia sarcastically.

  “Did you have a nice time?” his father asked. It was rare nowadays that his father asked even so much as that, for Daniel had become protective of his privacy.

  Daniel tapped a finger to his mouth, full of the tuna and noodles. The casserole had cooked too long, and the noodles were dry and hard to swallow. “Terrific,” he finally brought out. “You wouldn’t believe their piano. It’s as big as a pingpong tab
le practically.”

  “That’s all you did, all afternoon?” Cecelia asked. “Played a piano?”

  “And a harpsichord. And an electric organ. There was even a cello, but I couldn’t really do anything with that. Except touch it.”

  “Didn’t you even look at the horses?” Aurelia asked. She turned to Milly plaintively. “The horses out there are so famous.”

  “Perhaps Daniel isn’t interested in horses,” Milly suggested.

  “I didn’t see the horses, but I did see Grandison Whiting.”

  “Did you,” said Milly.

  Daniel took a meditative sip of milky tea.

  “Well?” said Cecelia.

  “Was he nice to you?” Aurelia asked, coming right to the point.

  “I wouldn’t say nice exactly. He was friendly. He has a big bushy red beard, and a ring on his finger with a diamond on it as big as a strawberry.” He measured the approximate size of the strawberry between finger and thumb. “A small strawberry,” he conceded.

  “I knew he had a beard,” said Cecelia. “I saw that on tv.”

  “What did you say to him?” Aurelia asked.

  “Oh, we talked about a lot of things. Mostly politics, I guess you’d say.”

  Milly set down her fork judgementally. “Oh, Daniel — don’t you have a grain of sense?”

  “It was an interesting conversation,” he said defensively. “I think he enjoyed it. Anyhow he did most of the talking, and Boa got her licks in, as usual. I was what you’re always saying I should be — an intelligent listener.”

  “I’d like to know what’s wrong with talking about politics,” his father demanded. It was Mr. Weinreb’s stated conviction that Daniel’s friendship with the daughter of the richest man in Iowa was not to be regarded as an exceptional occurrence and did not require special handling.

  “Nothing,” said Milly, “nothing at all.” She didn’t agree with her husband about this but wasn’t prepared, yet, to make an issue of it. “Cecelia, you eat the peas too.”

  “Peas have vitamins,” said Aurelia smugly. She was already on her second helping.

  “How’d you get home?” his father asked.

  “There was a pick-up coming in to town. They stopped it at the gate. If that hadn’t come along, they were going to send me back in a limousine.”

  “Are you going back next Saturday?” Aurelia asked.

  “Probably.”

  “You shouldn’t overdo it, Daniel,” Milly said.

  “She’s my girlfriend, Mom. She can come here. I can go there. It’s that simple. Right?”

  “Nothing’s that simple.”

  “Why don’t you ask her to dinner with us?” Aurelia suggested.

  “Don’t be silly, Aurelia,” Milly scolded. “You’re all acting like Daniel’s never been out of the house before. And by the way, Daniel, there was a phone call for you.”

  “I answered,” said Cecelia. “It was a girl.” She turned Daniel’s own ploy against him and waited to be asked.

  “So? Who?”

  “She wouldn’t say what her name was. But it sounded like Old Wiremouth to me.”

  “Don’t make fun of people with braces,” said her father sharply. “Someday you’ll probably have them too.”

  “And eat your peas,” Milly added.

  “They’re burnt.”

  “They’re not burnt. Eat them.”

  “They’ll make me throw up.”

  “I don’t care. Eat them.”

  “What did she want, the girl who called?”

  Cecelia stared balefully at a teaspoon-size mound of peas sticky with white sauce. “She wanted to know where you were. I said you were out, but I didn’t know where. Now I wish I’d told her.”

  Daniel reached over with his spoon and scooped up all but three of the peas. Before Milly could say a word he’d eaten them.

  Cecelia gave him a grateful smile.

  Down in his own room he had to decide whether his futzing around with the instruments at Worry counted as practice and whether, therefore, he was at liberty to omit his hour of Hanon’s Virtuoso Pianist. He decided it didn’t count and he wasn’t at liberty.

  With the first fifteen exercises behind him, which was as much as he could get through in an hour, the next decision was easier. He wouldn’t do his homework for chemistry, and he wouldn’t read the Willa Cather novel for Eng. Lit. He would read the paperback that Boa had given him. It was really more of a pamphlet then a paperback, printed on pulp so recycled it was a wonder that it had got through the presses intact.

  The white letters of the title shone through a ground of ink, so:

  How to Behave

  in Order to

  Develop

  the Personality

  You Want

  No author’s name appeared on the cover or the title page. The publisher was The Develop-Mental Corporation of Portland, Oregon.

  Boa had got the book from her brother Serjeant, who had got it in turn from a college roommate. The book had convinced Serjeant to drop out of college and take (briefly) boxing lessons. It had convinced Boa to have her hair cut short (it had since grown out again) and to get up every morning at six to study Italian (which to her own and everyone’s amazement she was still doing). Daniel thought that he was already doing approximately his utmost by way of advancing slowly and steadily toward his major life goals, but he wasn’t so sure that his personality couldn’t bear improvement. In any case Boa had been insistent that he should read it.

  Daniel was a naturally fast reader. He’d finished the book by ten o’clock. Generally he didn’t think that much of it. It was self-help at a pretty simple-minded level, with lots of mottoes you were supposed to whisper to yourself in order to get motivated. But he understood why Boa had wanted him to read it. It was for the sake of the Second Law of Develop-Mental Mechanics, which appeared first on page 12 (where it was heavily underscored by a ballpoint pen), and was then repeated many times throughout.

  The Second Law of Develop-Mental Mechanics is as follows: “If you want something you’ve got to take it. If you want it badly enough you will.”

  8

  The Second Law of Develop-Mental Mechanics notwithstanding, it was some time before this tacit promise was to be fulfilled. Boa herself was not at once persuaded that her virginity should be numbered among the somethings that get taken by those who want them badly enough. Then, by the time she’d been brought round, early in April, Daniel found himself unaccustomedly beset by technical difficulties. But a way was found, and they became, just as Boa had imagined they would, and just as Daniel had imagined too, lovers.

  In June Daniel was faced with an awkward choice; which is to say, a real one. All through the school year he had been confidently expecting to fail Mrs. Norberg’s Social Studies class, but when the grades were posted he came off with an almost mirraculous B (the same grade Boa got). All at once it became possible to take up Bob Lundgren’s standing offer to work again that summer at his farm. Eighteen weeks at $230 a week meant more than four thousand dollars. Even taking into account the expense of weekend carousals in Elmore and a further outlay for some sort of motorbike in order to keep on visiting Worry, the job would still have meant a bigger chunk of money that he could hope to put aside by any other means. The fact remained, however, that he didn’t really need so much money. In his overweening pride he had only applied to one college, Boston Conservatory. He hadn’t expected to get in (except in the idiot way he half-expected all his wishes to come true), and he hadn’t. His tapes were returned with a letter saying very bluntly that his playing in no way measured up to the Conservatory’s minimum requirements.

  Boa, meanwhile, had been accepted at all but one of the eight schools she’d applied to. Accordingly, their plan for next year was for Daniel to find a room and a job of some sort near the college of Boa’s choice. Harvard seemed the likeliest, since maybe Daniel would get into the Conservatory on his next try, and meanwhile he’d be able to start taking voice lessons,
Boston being so musical.

  As to the summer just ahead, Daniel had been expecting to stay in Amesville to repair his inevitable F in Social Studies, the bright side of which was that he’d have been able to see Boa just about any day he liked. Also, Boa’s favorite aunt from London was going to pay a long visit to Worry, and this aunt, Miss Harriet Marspan, was a musical amateur in the old sense of doing and caring for nothing else — and for its own sake, never thinking where it might lead nor what profit it might yield. Boa thought she performed with unusual capacity and immense good taste. The three of them would form the Marspan Iowa Consort, to which end Boa had already sewn together a sort of banner of welcome and hung it across the whole width of the music room.

  However if Daniel went off to work for Bob Lundgren, the Marspan Iowa Consort would amount to no more than an old pink sheet with assorted scraps of cotton stitched to it. Yet if he stayed, what would he be accomplishing? For all her excellences Miss Harriet Marspan didn’t sound like a natural ally. Even her devotion to music made him uneasy when he thought about it, for how was Daniel to measure up to standards of accomplishment formed in one of the music capitals of the world? She would flay him, like another Marsyas.

  But then again, some time or other he’d have to take the plunge; he’d have to leave the audience and join the chorus on the stage. However: and yet: but then again — the questions and qualifications multiplied endlessly. And yet it ought to have been a simple choice. But then again.

  On the night before he had to give a final yes or no to Bob Lundgren, Milly came down to his room with a pot of coffee and two cups. With a minimum of beating around the bush (without even pouring the coffee) she asked what he was going to do.

  “I wish I knew,” he said.

  “You’ll have to make up your mind soon.”

  “I know. And that’s about all I know.”