The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Hi!” I said when he at last looked up. That was the nice thing about his name, it spared words in greeting. There had always been those who, trying to circumvent the redundancy, had said, “Hello, Hy!” which was needlessly formal, or “Hi, Norden!” which had a coarsely imperative sound.

  The process of recognition proceeds through four stages on the human face: first, an utterly blank stare; then, second, a sudden twitch of interest, often accompanied by a slight tilting of the head to one side and a lifting of the eyebrows; third, a look of intense concentration, during which the eyes are withdrawn and the lip often bit, while the person is trying to place the subject; and, fourth and finally, an ebullient expression of success and pleasure accompanying the loud utterance of the subject’s name. Hy Norden, it saddens me to relate, went through only the first three stages; he did not achieve the last. “Charles?” he said feebly.

  I smiled, waiting.

  “Clarence?” he said. “No…Clyde? Clinton? Clifton?”

  “Close,” I said, smiling, waiting.

  He was snapping his fingers in rapid succession, and mumbling to himself, “…rock, boulder, pebble, cobble…stone—” Then, “Stone!” he said, and, unsnapping his fingers and pointing one at me, “Clifton Stone. How are you?”

  “Clifford,” I said. “Just fine. How’re you?” And, resting my hand tentatively on the back of a vacant chair, tried telepathy: And now why don’t you ask me to sit down?

  “Never can remember names,” he said and, gesturing to his companion, added, “You know my wife Marcia?”

  I saw her clearly for the first time, but I would not have recognized her otherwise, so great was the change. Marcia Paden, of course! who had been head cheerleader, president of Beta Club and the Gold Jackets, most likely among females to succeed, queen bee of the Pulaski Heights clique; how appropriate that she was matched up at last with Norden. But her tastes, and consequently her appearance, had improved: where once she had been simply a conservatively plaid-clad girl of unkempt mode, of studied neglect, now she was thoroughly kempt: her stunning raiment must have been ordered specially for her by Kempner’s: a two-part shirt dress of heavy white linen, the shirt of near-tunic length, slashed deep at the neck; her red hair, plumped Marien badly from beneath a black Panama straw hat of sewer-lid size, was carefully Clairoled; her lips Cotyed, her scent Cordayed. Stunning. My own wife Pamela had often been capable of making herself look like that when I took her out, and for a moment I wished I had her with me; it would put me on a level with Hy. Pamela was certainly prettier, I had to reflect.

  “Paden, wasn’t it?” I said to her, giving Hy notice that somebody at least could remember names.

  “That’s right,” she said, doling out a parsimonious smile.

  “Glad to see you,” I said and returned my gaze to Hy. Ask me to pull up a chair, you bounder.

  “Where you live now, Cliff?” he asked, unconcerned, really.

  “Boston,” I said.

  “Married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “No.”

  I am in a goddamned employment office, I thought, and now he is going to ask, Religious affiliation?

  Instead he said, “What are you doing?”

  I did not immediately perceive the meaning of his question. My first reply, which I deigned not utter, was, “I am standing here in the Deadline Club in Little Rock wondering how long I will have to keep standing here before you ask me to sit down.” Maybe I should have been nonchalant about it and pulled out the chair and plumped down uninvited, but I had my principles. He was asking me, I realized, what my occupation was. “I’m a VAP collector,” I said.

  “Pardon?” Perhaps he thought it was a euphemism for garbage collector or bill collector.

  “Research for a foundation,” I said, preserving the mystery.

  “Oh.”

  “I see you’re on television now,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  Come on, Hy, you old jackleg politician, it’s me, Clifford, one of the boys, give me a seat, I’ll buy my own goddamn drink. The conversation, such as it was, began to run out of gas. He sat there entirely at ease, one arm draped casually over the back of his wife’s chair, his eyes blank and tired and vague, while I stood uncomfortably at attention, the knuckles of my hand which gripped the back of the chair growing white from the pressure of the squeeze. It was my most humiliating moment in years; not even Pamela’s degrading devices could have put me so far out of countenance. My crest fell with a sickening thud.

  “Well,” I said, but stopped, my voice too dry for speech. A long moment passed.

  You wouldn’t ask me to sit down?

  Sorry. But you see, Clifford, it’s like this: I’m the cock of the roost around this place, see? And you? Who are you, fellow, but a back issue, a dud, an also-ran? So pack it off, boy, I got no use for you.

  I removed my hand from the back of the chair. I would have enjoyed swinging it into his face. “Nice day,” I said and glanced around the room, whose air-conditioned darkness suggested night.

  “Yes it is,” he said and inspected his fingernails.

  “Well, see you around, Hy,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Glad to’ve seen you, Marcia,” I said.

  She smiled.

  I departed.

  Crud.

  Chapter ten

  There is nothing here for me, I decided, scuffing aimlessly and glumly along Main Street. I am a stranger in my own home town, I am a stranger to whatever it might have in the way of redeeming value. There is not anything here. Nor anybody. That answers my question—What, or who, am I really looking for?

  Absent-mindedly I window-shopped for a while, then I wandered into the Rib on West Second and had a couple of schooners of Michelob. While I was drinking my beer, I debated with myself whether or not to go see Dall Hawkins at the police station. I had done this before: I had debated with myself. Always I had decided not to. I had nothing against Dall—he was a fine, good-hearted, quick-minded fellow, albeit occasionally ill-humored and bullysome. But my friendship with him had always been more corporal than capital—we had practically nothing in common except our appreciation for rough physical combat, a wish for creative expression by means of a slam-bang application of our bodies, a passion for innocent violence acquired from our Ozarks rough-and-tumble ancestry, through which Dall became a football player and I a boxer: lanky though he was, he had been one of the best fullbacks in the history of the Little Rock High School Tigers; runty though I was, I had been one of their best boxers. It is only my distaste for stereotypes which keeps me from thinking of Dall and myself as a perfect Mutt-and-Jeff combination.

  In my memory of him are images of an occasional afternoon’s sport when, peeved or bitter over some grievance brought about by the injustices of some teacher or fellow student, we would stand together restlessly on the south steps of the school building after the final bell and complain loudly to each other of our gripes, and then use each other as an escape valve for our rancor. “We gotta police up on somebody,” he declared typically on one such occasion, therein unconsciously foretokening his future career. “We gotta beat sap outta some bastards.” His anger, cooped up and unfocused, softened my own; I cheered up and told him to do likewise. “Naw,” he said, “I gotta lay into somebody.” “All right,” I said. I would deliver his tension. Plunking a teaser against his chops, I squared off and said, “Come on, mix it up, you big prick!” He laughed and waded in on me, flicked a light left against my shoulder, then swung his steam-hammer right toward my head. I blocked it and delivered a thudding wallop to the pit of his stomach. He grunted and swung that royal right again. It nicked my ear and I gave it back to him, a nailer right on the button, which spun him off balance. He staggered back a few steps, but I didn’t pursue him. Dall was almost a foot taller than I, and about fifty pounds heavier, therefore I couldn’t afford to get him really angry at me. So I waited, and when he came
back at me I peppered an assortment of one-two jabs into his pan, then caught one of his potluck shots on my chest, which knocked me down. He let loose several body slugs while I was getting up, but I ripped his guard open and hooked him on the nose with a cracking right. He countered with a straight stab which I rode out of harm’s way, then I hung a heavy clout on his ear. He tagged me with a left cross. I unpacked a solid whump to his stomach again. We danced around for a while and I could see he was cooling off a little. We pitched a few feints at each other, then I connected with a stinger to his chin, and saw his mighty roundhouse coming for me. I slipped under it and we exchanged a couple of left wipes. His mouth was bleeding and my nose was. “Okay, buster,” I warned him, “here comes your corker,” and I clipped him with an easy right to open his guard and then threw my blockbuster at him. He got it full in the mush and went down, but it didn’t lay him out. “Goddammit,” he said, sitting there on the grass and wiggling his jaw in his hand, “I think you busted one of my teeth.” But always afterward we would feel just fine, and forget our grudges against the world. And I never met a better sparring partner.

  Give the guy a chance, I persuaded myself, so I left the tavern and ambled on over to the City Hall, which housed the police headquarters. Walking through the hot sunshine with a belly full of beer is not wise; I became woozy. Yet I arrived at the City Hall and went on inside to have a reunion with this old physical friend whom I had not seen for eight years. But the police station was gone. I mean, it wasn’t in the rooms where it used to be. I wandered around the corridors of the City Hall’s first floor, looking for somebody to tell me what had happened to the police station, feeling a strange suspicion that perhaps the police force had been abolished entirely in an economy move and thus the town was as lawless as during the steamboat days. I couldn’t find anybody. In my wooziness and dejection and continual suspicion that there would not really be anything that I could talk to Dall about, I gave it up, left City Hall, staggered through town again to the public library, its waffled modern façade gone up like a masonry carapace around the homely old Carnegie edifice which, along with the YMCA a few blocks west, had been my favorite refuge in a youth of applied cultivation of my mind and body. The rest of the afternoon I spent in the library, shut away from the hostile town.

  In the Periodicals Boom my glance fell on the current issue of Connoisseur, and I eagerly picked it up and found my name on the contents page, and there was my short illustrated paper on “Identifying Saw Marks and Plane Marks on Drawer-bottoms of Connecticut Chests of ca. 1750.” I sat down and read it through; although I had worked it over so extensively that I knew it by heart, there was a special satisfaction at reading it in print, and I became so suffused with pride and a sense of accomplishment that I abandoned all thought of Little Rock and, reflecting philosophically that every man has a purpose in life and that perhaps my purpose was to explore the harmless properties of American antiquities, the moribund yet picturesque fossils of the VAP, I managed to convince myself that I had come to Arkansas only to research certain relevant aspects of the VAP, and that I had no time for any old friends anyway.

  I found two splendid volumes on the archaic indigenous arts and crafts of the Southland, one of them emphasizing Arkansas and Louisiana productions of the mid-nineteenth century, and, using a still-valid library card that I had carried around in my wallet for ten years, I checked them out and took them home with me and began an earnest, concentrated study of them, interrupted only by supper, during which Daddy asked me what I was doing and I told him I was working. I told him I had flittered away too much time already, and now I had to get back to work. After all, I wasn’t entirely on vacation. Finishing Sybil’s beef stew in fifteen minutes, I excused myself and returned to my room and resumed my swift, alert perusal of the books. A fascinating subject, really. The native art of the Southern homesteaders was unpolished and makeshift in comparison with the more ornate culture of New England, but it had a raw force, a directness, a kind of masculine expedience which perhaps typified the lost American spirit more fittingly than that of any other time or area. I began to transcribe long passages from these books to my Ring-Master. But eventually I had to give it up. The hidden laughter of all those unfaithful old friends, who valued friendships only for their usefulness, was still ringing in my ears. I could not escape where I was.

  Why, why have I come home?

  Chapter eleven

  “The trouble with you, boy, is, you gotta unwind,” my hortative old dad instructed me, jabbing at me a free finger of a hand which held a can of Busch. We shared the morose purple sofa of the living room; Sybil had the armchair, but she wasn’t listening to us. The television set was on, a limpid silvery rectangle in the gloom of the far side of the room. After abandoning my abortive attempts at scholarship, I had joined them there, and my father, questioning me about my adventures of the day, had decided to play again his old role of fatherly adviser and admonisher. “Yeah, you got to get down off that cloud, get the starch out of your collar. This aint Boston.”

  “I know it isn’t Boston,” I retorted, rather loudly.

  “Shhhh!” complained Sybil, a punctured tire leaking slowly.

  She was watching the Andy Griffith Show.

  “Turn it up!” her grizzly lover roared at her, and then he turned back to me. “And another thing. You have been around them high-tone Boston folks too much, you forgot how to behave yourself when you’re back here amidst us plain old unwashed clucks. No wonder nobody would talk to you.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I protested. “All I said was that they—”

  “Yeah, but another thing—”

  “You guys pipe down, okay?” Sybil beseeched.

  “Still and all, you—”

  “But, Daddy—”

  “If you guys are gonna make all that noise, why don’t you go—”

  “Aaa,” he nasally bleated, “damn pigheaded women.”

  “Let’s go sit on the porch, Daddy.”

  “Let her go out to the damn kitchen if she don’t like it in here.”

  “I’m watchin this damn show, that’s why!”

  “Let’s take off our shirts, Daddy, and go sit in the breeze on the porch and drink our beer, all right?”

  “I like it in here. It’s comfortable. Hellfire, caint a man sit in his own goddamn livin room if he has a mind to?” He paused and waited to see if either of us would challenge his rights, and then he continued. “Now another thing. The trouble with you, son, is you’ve got just a mite too highfalutin and toplofty for your own good. You use to didn’t be that way. You use to—”

  “Oh, Jesus sake,” Sybil moaned, rose, and turned up the set’s volume.

  “—use to could go up and be chummy with just about any old feller who came along. The trouble with readin all them books is, you get so’s you can’t look at people, you’re so used to lookin at words. And another thing—”

  Without a word I shrugged my shoulders in a gesture of helplessness, got up, and returned to my room.

  A glass-fronted Victorian bookcase held the remnants of my adolescent book collection, and I browsed indolently through it, trying to find something to read. But the collection, mostly old paperbacks and textbooks, was stale and immature and there was nothing in it I had not read before or cared to read again. Wedged behind a row of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books was a sheaf of photographs of nude women, lolling and stretching and squatting in all manner of ample-assed pose, which I had often used to feed the fires of wish-fulfillment in the dreams of my pimple period, but now, flipping through them again, I was entirely blasé and unstimulated. Constantly restless, I rummaged through more of the papery debris of my irretrievable prime: a yellowed page from the Sports section of a 1953 Gazette with a photograph of me, stunning in silk Everlast trunks (purple, as I recall), getting my hand held high by the referee at the conclusion of the Featherweight bout in the Golden Gloves at Memphis; a letter from the Admissions Office of the University, notifying me that
I had won a four-year scholarship; two ticket stubs to the Arkansas-Mississippi football game of 1954 (I could still see Preston Carpenter catching that fabulous pass—but who was the girl I had taken with me? Not Margaret Austin); a ribbon-bound stack of all issues of Ring magazine between 1948 and 1953; a tenth-grade theme written for a city-wide essay contest, “Why Little Rock Needs Natural Gas” (won honorable mention, no money); an envelope containing a lock of Margaret Austin’s black hair and an eight-by-ten photograph of her at the age of seventeen, pretty but doleful-looking; a typescript of my speech in the American Legion oratorical contest of 1951, “What’s Wrong with the U.S. Constitution” (a presumptuous subject, missed honorable mention by a half-dozen votes); the cover of a travel brochure for Hot Springs which serves as the false front for a thin, poorly drawn, black-and-white comic book showing an imitation Dagwood and an imitation Blondie engaging in every conceivable form of natural and unnatural sex activity—a classic example of a venerable kind of hard-core pornography known simply as “fuck book”; and a few other less mentionable items of juvenile erotica, including a prophylactic (rubber in the argot) which when blown up to the size of a football displayed a Grecian line drawing of Priapus forcing his attentions upon a recumbent maiden under the legend “Courtesy of Nick’s Cigar Store, Coldest Beer in Town.” This last item, I reflected, belonged rightfully in the Cabot Foundation’s collections, VAPish as it was.