The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Margaret will,” I said. “But I have to get on back to Boston.”

  Naps was incredulous. “You mean you’re gonna go by yourself?” He look back and forth between the two of us.

  Margaret explained to him why we had been unable to agree about the city of Little Rock.

  As if to lend substance to her explanation, I burst out, “Little Rock killed Slater!” Then to Margaret I said, “The same apathy of this town that made your life lonely and colorless for years also drove him to death!”

  “No,” she said, “I can’t go along with that. You didn’t know Jimmy. This town—us—” she gestured at herself and me and Naps—“we can’t be blamed for what he did. Like everything else he’s ever done, he did this all on his own. All on his own.”

  “Do you think,” I asked her challengingly, “that you could allow yourself to stay in this town, after what happened to him? Do you think you’ll ever again be content here, knowing what he did to himself?”

  She did not answer. She hung her head reflectively. When, a moment later, I said “Do you?” once more, she replied, “I don’t know. But I’m going to stay here, and I wish we could consider the argument settled. You’ll come back again, wait and see if you don’t. You’ll come back again and again, and finally you’ll settle down here to stay.”

  “And I’ll wind up, at the age of fifty, drowning myself in Lake Maumelle.” Then I said, “No. No, I don’t think I’ll ever come back.”

  “Yes, you will,” she said.

  “Aw, yeah,” Naps joined her, “I bet he will.”

  “He will,” Tatrice said. “He can’t help himself.”

  Chapter forty-nine

  That afternoon, at my request, Naps took me home. I had had a surfeit of these friends, and I wanted to go on home and spend my few remaining Little Rock hours with my father and grandmother. The common herd values friendships only for their usefulness, and I reflected how I had used Naps: first as a chauffeur, then as a private detective, a valet, and finally I had used his wife. Or hadn’t I? But even to think of it, even to want to…I was a bastard. And was I any less evil and sinful than Slater? The man had been a crackpot, obviously, and wicked and murderous as well. Good riddance, in a sense. But still, some of the things he said in that farewell letter to Dall led me to believe that he and I were, as Margaret had implied, like-minded in a number of ways, both oppressed by the same oppressions, and that therefore I should not send to know for whom the bell tolls, because it tolls for me: in his death I too was diminished. I began to see why Margaret had pitied him, and why she had tried so hard to keep Dall from finding out about Slater’s criminal intentions in the hope that the whole thing would blow over and Slater could find some peace. Was there really a villain in this whole business, and, if so, who? Me, I decided: yes, I am the real villain. The sooner I returned to Boston the sooner I would have a chance to forget it all.

  My father was watching a baseball game on television. My grandmother was writing postcards to friends and relatives. I sat for an hour or so reading my father’s current issues of True Adventures before they took any apparent notice of me, then my father turned in his chair, gave me a cantankerous look, and said, “Enjoying yourself?” Yes, I said; as a matter of fact, yes, I am. “Gonna eat with us tonight?” he said. Yes, I said, I had planned to. “Gonna sleep here tonight?” he said. If I could, I said. Then I told him I was going back to Boston tomorrow and wanted to spend these last few hours with my family. “Well, that’s nice of you,” he said with unconcealed sarcasm. “It’s a wonder to me how you managed to stay as long as you did. I don’t guess you would of, if you hadn’t found some doings to get mixed up in.” I told him that if I hadn’t got mixed up in those particular doings I probably would have stayed longer. He said, “Sorry I wasn’t able to entertain you more.” I told him that for my part I was sorry that the nature of my activities had kept me away from home so often, and I hoped to make up for it, in part, by spending this last day at home. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “Go on out and play with your friends if you want to. I aint worth talkin to.” Daddy, I protested, feeling awful. Let’s talk, I urged him. Let’s you and I talk. “What’s there to talk about?” he said. “Aint nuthin I could say would interest you any.” Tell me about your job, I suggested. “It’s just the same old job,” he said. “It never changes. Same old wires. Same old tools. Day in and day out.” Do you enjoy life? I asked him bluntly. “Same as everybody, I reckon,” he said. What do you like to do? I asked. He answered, “Eat. Sleep. Read. Watch TV. Shoot pool some.” Are you a good pool shot? I led him on. “Better’n some,” he said. Do you prefer snooker or eight-ball? I asked. How do you like caroms? Do you use a light stick or a heavy one? Do you top the cue ball to loosen a frozen ball, or how? And thus I managed to build up about twenty minutes’ worth of conversation between us, but ultimately the talk fizzled out like an eight-ball falling off into the comer pocket. I tried. No one can say I didn’t try. But he was peevish and obstinate; in two weeks I had let him get too far away from me. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  I approached my grandmother and talked with her for a while, but without any more luck than I had had with my father. She shared his resentment. I was too good for my own folks, she said. But she suggested a way I could save face: go back up to the hills of Parthenon with her and visit for a spell. It was a fetching idea, and I gave it serious consideration. I had never disliked the Ozarks as I disliked Little Rock. But I understood at last that I was really impatient to get back to Boston as soon as possible. Was I actually lonesome for Pamela? No, that couldn’t be; I simply wanted to plunge back into my work again and lose myself in the tedium of curatorship. After my unsuccessful job search around Little Rock I was beginning to consider myself quite fortunate in having the job I already had.

  I loafed around the house, trying unsuccessfully to think of other things to talk about with my father or grandmother. As on dull Saturday afternoons of my youth, I wished somebody would call me on the phone. Finally somebody did.

  “Cliff, pal, Hy.”

  “Hi. Who’s this?”

  “Hy.”

  “Hi yourself. Who’s calling?”

  “Hy Norden.”

  “Oh, ’lo, Hy. How’s tricks?”

  “Great. Listen. Wanted to ask you. We’re having the Tenth Reunion Banquet of our Little Rock High School graduating class at the Marion Hotel the twenty-ninth of this month. I’m M.C. And I want you up there on the dais with me, boy. Make a speech or two. Crack a few jokes. Give the home folks a look at a real walking success story.”

  “Thanks, but I won’t be here then. Leaving tomorrow.”

  “Aw, come on, Cliff fellow boy. You can’t let us down. We’re counting on you. Where’s the old school spirit?”

  “Up your ass,” I said.

  “How’s that? Hey, come on, be a pal. I got to get the program printed next week and I want to put your name on it in big letters. We all want you there. Honest to God.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Pressing business in Boston.”

  “Well look, tell me now, level with me: Is there anything I can do for you? Any little favor before you go? Any big favor? Just tell me. Give me a chance to be a pal.”

  I thought about it. But I decided Hy wasn’t the type to offer gratis favors unless he wanted something in return. “What’s the catch?” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Hell, I’m telling you, I want to be a pal, do something for you, any little token—”

  “You could drop dead for me.”

  “Aw, Cliff. Think of old times. Think of the good old days when we used to—”

  “I’ve thought of them,” I said. “Too much. Now suppose you either tell me the purpose of this call or get your sweet mouth off the line. I’m busy.”

  “All right, Cliff, I’ll make it short. I’ve got a deadline to meet myself. I need some information. You could be a big help to me, and I’ll repay you the favor any time, believe me. Now he
re’s the deal. I’ve been told you had an inside wire with James Slater and some girl he was involved with. I was wondering if you could give me some dope on the situation. If you have any idea why he killed himself…”

  “Oh, sure. Got your pencil ready? Good. Quote me if you wish.” I began to dictate: “James Royal Slater, forty-eight, Little Rock’s own Bollington Prize-winning playwright, took his life in Lake Maumelle near his home early Saturday morning. Friends revealed that a type-written note left by the former playwright indicated that he was despondent over the moral and ethical contamination of American life, particularly as evident in and around the city of Little Rock, which he had come to consider a cultural and societal wasteland…”

  “Yeah, but that’s not exactly what I meant. There was some girl he was involved with. Do you know her name?”

  “Christine Keeler.”

  “How do you spell that last name?”

  I spelled it for him.

  “You know her age?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Address?”

  “RFD, Bald Knob, Arkansas.”

  “Thanks. Now, could you tell me what sort of relationship he had with this Keeler gal. I mean, you know, was he getting any?”

  “Oh, heavens no! Much worse than that.”

  “Well, what? I won’t quote you.”

  “It’s entirely unspeakable.”

  “Well, tell me anyway. I won’t speak it.”

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. “She was collecting his belly-button lint to stuff pillows with.”

  “Good Lord, how awful!” he exclaimed, but then he changed his tone. “Wait a minute. Are you sure this is on the level?”

  “Well, of course I never saw her doing it, but that’s what I heard.”

  “Clifford—”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you playing around with me?”

  “Look, Hy, I don’t know anything. You’re wasting your time.”

  “Sergeant Hawkins told me to talk to you, he said he didn’t know anything. If you don’t know anything, I’m sunk. I’ve got to get this story on the air. Please, Cliff. Old times’ sake. Can’t you give me any information on this Keeler gal?”

  “I’m afraid not. Why don’t you speak to John Profumo?”

  “Where do I reach him?”

  “I don’t know his phone number.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “Sixty-nine Codborough Way, London, W.C.1.”

  “London?…Profumo?…Keeler? Oh—Cliff, you old clown! Come on now, quit your fooling. Help me. This is a big thing. Slater was an important person.”

  “Says who? He produced only one play in this town, and you, among others, panned it terribly. Personally, I never even met Slater, so I can’t help you. Sorry. Just say he was a lonely horse rancher who got more than he could take from all the shitty Nordens who rule the earth.”

  Then I hung up.

  Chapter fifty

  Supper was an unsociable ordeal endured in silence. I hazarded a few occasional remarks or conversational questions which were met with either a Stoney silence or the minimum acceptable response. They dropped a few baited or catty observations, to which I could make no reply. So goes the eventual disintegration of the American family. Fed up, I retreated to my room for a while and there I tried to recapture some enthusiasm for the past by collating my mementos again, but this had the opposite of the effect I had anticipated: it offended and nauseated me. Sitting there in that pile of yearbooks, scrapbooks, clippings, souvenirs, letters, and other dross of my teen years, I became actually sick, physically sick, and before I could move or make it to the bathroom I had begun to retch: my entire supper was regurgitated in a helplessly cataclysmic heave which fell upon those tokens and keepsakes and irreparably blotched them. I gathered them up in my arms, the whole heavy pile of them, and took them out into the back yard and stuffed them into the trash burner, and set them afire. I stood back and watched the blaze, and scorching tears burst out of my eyes and streamed down my face. Burn, my bridges. At the perimeter of the flames I descried a large photograph, a portrait of Margaret, and as her young face curled and frizzled in the heat she asked: What are you doing? Burning my bridges, I said. All of them? she asked, and her voice was so plaintively clear that I understood no photograph could be capable of such speech. I turned and she was standing beside me.

  “All of them,” I said. “Just like you burned yours. When you did what you did to the walls of your room and then when you took all of your clothes out of there, you were burning your bridges too.”

  She nodded, and her fingertips came up and lightly touched the water on my face. “I’ve never seen you cry before,” she said.

  “I never have,” I said, and I ran the back of my hand briskly across my face and wiped it almost dry. Then I asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “Doyle,” she said. “He’s worried that you’ll leave town without seeing him again. He wants to talk to you. I told him I would come and get you.”

  “Wants to recant, does he?” I asked, thinking of how he must partly blame himself for Slater’s death.

  “Recant? No, he just wants to see you again before you go.”

  “I’ll come out there tomorrow. Tonight I’m going to stay with my folks.”

  “No you aint neither,” said my grandmother, and I looked up, and she and my father were standing together on the back stoop, looking down at me with compassionate expressions. “You go on out there and talk to that pore boy,” she said. “And I’ll go along with you and see to it that you do.”

  My father’s face was soft in sympathy. “Goddamn idiot,” he said tenderly, “don’t you know there’s a law against burnin trash after dark in this town?”

  “Don’t swear, Wesley,” my grandmother said to him. “I’ll wash your mouth out with soap like I used to.”

  “Burnin trash after dark,” he grumbled.

  I cried harder.

  Margaret took my arm and led me around the house and out to Dall’s car, which she had left at the curb. We got in and waited for my grandmother to go through the house and get her hat and handbag. Margaret asked me why I was crying. I told her I was a broken man. She asked me why I was a broken man. I said because no man is an island, and every man’s death diminisheth me. She was silent and then she said that was not really the reason I was crying. Then Grammaw Stone came out and got into the car with us and we went out to the hospital.

  In the lobby of the hospital I told my grandmother I would wait while she went up to visit with him, but she told me I should go first. After a few moments of quibbling over the matter I agreed to go first while she and Margaret waited in the lobby.

  He greeted me pleasantly as before. His bandages had been removed and new ones put on, but not enough new ones to hide, to conceal his face. I gasped aloud. He was grotesque. Every bone and cartilage in his nose had been shattered, and it didn’t look like a nose at all. Several sutured and unsutured cuts scarred his brow and jowls with various tints of red or pink. Grayish slough in places. Welts, pocks, pustules, and scabs. He was horrid, and he knew it. “Aint I the sorriest mess you ever saw?” he asked me, and I granted that he was. I sat down beside his bed, and tried to avoid looking at him any more than was necessary.

  “You got a picture of yourself I could have sometime?” he asked.

  “What for?”

  “I’m gonna give it to the plastic surgeons and tell em to make me look like you.” But he was grinning and I knew he didn’t mean it.

  “Why me? My face is bland.”

  “Aw, just foolin,” he said. “No, if they give me any say about it, I’m gonna tell em to fix me up to look just exactly like I was before. Take it or leave it.”

  “That’s a highly commendable expression of principle. However, if I were you, I wouldn’t object if they wanted to make a few improvements upon nature.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like giving you a kindly mug to match your kindly heart.”
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  “A cop has to look mean. I been practicin all my life. I caint be Chief of Police if I look like some Sunday School teacher or anybody.”

  “All right. Tell them to restore your fierce glower and your sullen brow, and to leave a couple of wicked scars still visible.”

  “I might just do that,” he said.

  After the first caesura of this meeting, during which I got up to stand at the window and look ponderingly out into the darkness, I said to him without turning that Margaret had told me he wanted to talk to me and I wondered if there was anything particular he wanted to say or ask.

  He said he wanted to know if this was the last time he would see me.

  I told him that it might as well be, because it was painful for me to keep saying good-bye to him.

  He said he still didn’t understand why I had to leave. What did I have against this town? he wanted to know.

  I said the environment of Little Rock had ruined us. All of us, I said, had, in some way or another, been stifled or stunted or stigmatized by the baleful influences of this arid, errant atmosphere.

  “So our environment ruined us, did it?” he said contentiously. “So what kind of environment do you think we should of had?”

  That was a big question. I was exceedingly pained to realize that I could not successfully answer it. I could postulate the ideal qualities of some Utopia, but I could not cite any specific real place which might have made us better than we were.

  Because I was unable to answer his question, he answered it for me: Given the kind of woebegone bastards we was, maybe we’d of been ruined wherever we’d been brought up. As for him, he just wanted to make the best of what he was and where he was.

  The grass always looks greener on th’other side of the fence, he said. But it aint. Stay here.

  No! I squawked. Don’t make me argue about it any more. Let me go! If you say one more word I’ll break down and stay here, but I’ll hate myself for it. There’s no place for me here! I can’t find a job! I just don’t belong!