The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  3

  “YOU DON’T look Jewish, Mur,” Shelton said.

  “Neither do you.”

  “I know, but my name and all…”

  Murray looked at Shelton, who didn’t think he looked Jewish. What, exactly, was it in that dark hair? How it grew where it grew? And that pale skin whose hollows were just a little too hollow, the flesh in its angles just a shade too acute (or obtuse?), the skin again, saying heavy beard, but tender, transfixed me; and more things, of course: the pimple below his eye, where the skin still oiled adolescently—wasn’t that a Jewish pimple, the dark red of it Job’s anguish, the pus in it Jewish, straight from the cornucopia of suffering? And more things: an expression a thousand years old and at the same time callow, sallow, vulnerable. He was a Jew at ten yards, at a hundred yards, and he didn’t think he looked like one.

  “You little kike,” he said, knowing that the love in his voice was precisely, accurately received, stereo-hi-fi. What a preamplifier in this nervous little animal! Shelton turned, his pimple blushing, to his book. Once, when they were freshmen, shortly after they had met and become, immediately, good friends, they had gone to the library to look at the Orozco murals. “Lookit Christ!” Shelton said, and they looked up at the violent creature painted in an agony that seemed nothing meaningful, but vindictive, cruel, as if the injured Christ were as blindly vicious as his tormentors. “Wow!” Shelton said, “this Orozco…” and as he had taken to doing, he hung his hand on Murray’s shoulder and then hung on it. Murray, without thinking, turned and said, “Don’t lean on me, will you?”

  They were cool, then. Friends, but cool—and that coolness had never quite gone away, as if Shelton had said to himself, “OK, ½ goy, 50 per cent goy, .5 goy: we can live with strangers. That’s not new.”

  But now Murray wondered, and asked himself, “If he doesn’t know he looks Jewish, is that good for him, or bad for him?”

  “I’m just part of a percentage—a quota. You know, just so many Jews in this Ivy League,” Shelton said bitterly.

  “You must be smart, then,” Murray said.

  “Sure, what with all those eager little Jewboys pushing up.”

  “Then what about me, Statistic? I’m not even here. What quota did I come in on?”

  “Your old man’s quota, butch boy. One hundred per cent Amurrican,” Shelton said.

  “They saw the dirty fact on my application, Ikey. Dear old Mom’s a sheeny from Jew York.”

  Shelton looked at him and burst into whimsical, bitter laughter. “You’re a kike-o-phrenic, you are, with all your Anglo-Saxon muscles. What does it feel like? Which is the poison, the Jew or the goy? How the hell can they even breed? I think they’re different species. You’re a tiglon, a mule, a freak—probably sterile. Don’t your guts go two ways sometimes?”

  “My Hebe friend, let me tell you. I am the true American, and I refuse to go neurotic: everybody else is cake, best friend (one of my very). My father is a hunter, and knows which way is north north northeast, and he-and-his settled and fought bloody for this country. My mother is from the city of the world, that first and most cosmopolitan city, named Ghetto, where the walls echo to civilized violins, and howls. So up yours, Dr. Selkoff, you wig shrinker, I wear no rug.”

  “Nor no tefillin, nor no New Testament…”

  “No, both. I’ve got a supplicating arm and a sanctimonious hip pocket, both.

  “Oh, the Moskevitch Ramble is cool, that’s all,

  So come, let’s have a matzoh ball!”

  Murray sang as he jigged lightly from chair to bureau to desk to floor.

  But was there just a little, just a leetle bit of want and wonder about certification that was absolutely pure? My father’s antecedents, man, are old and almost noble. Viz. Nicholas Grimald. 1519?-1562?, scholar, preacher, author. In Tottel’s miscellany of Songs and Sonnets. Treachery toward Protestant cause during the reign of Queen Mary. Viz. that! And though my mom, well…match the old man for stud, bud. I’m no bastard, no accident, either. I saw it on the birth certificate. Hard to tell about you, love chile.

  He sat down at his desk and began a letter to his father:

  DEAR O.M.,

  Expect me soon if O.C. (Old Car) makes the mountain. Maybe we won’t be able to talk (I always write easier, anyway) and maybe I won’t send this letter (I don’t send easily). But I wonder myself why I want to go look at the country. I know, we’ve been to Illinois, California, etc.. But I want to go with no credentials but my face and the price of a hamburger, and see what they do where they live

  Here he stopped and thought of a line of poetry that had been going through his head: “The music of windy distance.” His poem, of course. The line made him think of the eerie crackle and singing on a long-distance telephone circuit, or the just heard radio stations across the plains and mountains late at night: the music of weather and faint human cries and electricity that was the real hum of the lonely country. Always reaching out a little too far, and at the mercy, really, of God knew what: My country, he thought. And then, with a grin self-conscious in the presence of his sense of humor, he thought, My girl, my honey, because he would be looking for her, too—for the one in a dream he’d had about the end of the world. Maybe he’d have to hurry. He crumpled up the unfinished letter and tossed it in the wastebasket.

  “Let’s go over to the house,” he said to Shelton, who could not look up because he was making a neat arc on graph paper with his compass.

  “Eff the fraternity,” Shelton said, and made his arc.

  “What an attitude! Boy, this ain’t like the old days.”

  “I don’t like to be a walking tolerance, at which they can point with martyred pride and secret disgust, so eff the frat.”

  “You’re a bleeder, patient Selkoff. My diagnosis is that you have Hebe-o-phelia, an old cut that refuses to coagulate.”

  “And you have goy-tre, which is a thick neck, the upper part of which you call a head.”

  They were both silent, in some awe at their own wit, trying to think of more. More didn’t come, so Murray jigged again, this time jumping from floor straight to the top of Shelton’s bureau:

  “Oh, the Moskevitch Ramble is cool, that’s all,

  So come, let’s have a matzoh ball!”

  “Watch out for my picture!”

  “Slippin’ an’ slidin’ up an’ down the mantelpiece,

  Spittin’ through my yeller teeth….”

  “Save it for the crowds, halfback!”

  “Your picture?” Murray reached down and picked up the gilt-framed picture of a girl, a sweetly humble, drooping little girl who looked about fifteen, very soft; not pretty, but tender. “Ah, Leilani, sweet Leilani,” he crooned, holding the picture in his arms. “I kiss thy pure and limpid brow, thou child of passion! Leilani, Leilani Schwartzl”

  “You know what her name is!” Shelton’s pimple waxed very red this time—a danger signal. His voice had risen and grown just a little querulous.

  “Shel, now. Hoo, boy. And you know how charming I think she is, too. So whoa, there, and don’t become Semitic warrior, what?” Shelton subsided a little, and Murray said, “If I can’t bait you, Jew, who is the Jew I can bait, nu?”

  “Well, I know I’m sensitive.”

  “Sensitive! You? Well, I won’t go on….”

  “I just get tired of it, Mur.” This time serious, having gratefully given up, because Murray was his friend, who could be trusted (almost).

  Murray looked down from the height of the bureau as Shelton went back to his analytical geometry. The narrow bone along Shelton’s shoulder seemed so pale, so fragile, and the pulse in his skinny neck so tentative, as if it had no real rhythm and might suddenly, for no real reason, do the cha-cha-cha, or stop.

  “You’re OK, kid,” he said, and Shelton’s hands stopped fiddling with his protractor for a second. He was still, tense, very moved, Murray knew. Stereo-hi-fi, all right: preamp, amp, tuner, changer, tweeter, woofer, high decibel range. But so fragile.


  He leaped from the top of the bureau to the door, and the room shook. “Hey!” someone yelled down the hall.

  “See you later,” he said as he opened the door.

  “Grüss Gott,” Shelton said without looking up.

  Murray went down the stairs two or three at a time, not really running, just pleased with the swiftness of his feet, their nice sense of control in the air. It felt as though he were floating down, just touching a step here and there for fun, not for support. He could even go down backward this way, and turn around and around as he descended. “Hi! ” “Hi!” people said to him as he went by. “Hi!” he answered. He liked to jump hedges, the fenders and even the hoods of cars, to run up a tree as high as his head and then fall back with a twist and land on his feet. Sometimes he felt that if he had to he could run to Kansas, jumping fences all the way. No one could catch him on a football field; no one tackler, at least. They all seemed to be in slow motion, like the puffing steam engines he had seen when he was a little boy, and all he had to do was to step off the track for a moment and they’d go right on by, their eyes glazed with exertion and staring as inflexibly toward where he wasn’t—where he used to be—as the eye of a locomotive. Whenever he started around end, he’d give a little jump and click his heels, just for joy, for neatness, for the love of his confidence and lively knees; and the run itself, no matter how long, he would foresee and then remember as a fine series of loops and side steps and curves, like flight. Even in his dreams he ran and jumped. He could glide—take a little run and jump and keep going all the way down the sidewalk a foot or two above the cement, then gently come to earth, still moving lightly on. Sometimes he would jump too high in these dreams, deliberately, and find himself in the air above the trees, with too long a way to fall. Still in control, though worried, though sometimes even painfully scared, he’d know that when he hit, it would hurt.

  By the time he reached the common he had danced some of the demanding energy out of his legs, and he walked past the subdued street lights, out, away from things into the middle of the wide common, where he stood with the stars turning over him. Cars drifted around the edges, and the few neon signs of the business street at one corner were muted, rather Ivy League themselves. But that street led to America, to the center of things, to Murray Grimald without titles: not a student (that limbo), not a football, basketball, skiing, weekend-houseparty star. He never wore his varsity sweater, for instance, unless he was required to, and never inside out with the stitches so modestly showing. To hell with it all, and with it the expressions of admiration, guarded regard, jealousy—all the necessary bric-a-brac he had to carry with him at school. He wished there were nothing, nothing but possibilities, things to do, and each a different thing to do. Nothing seemed impossible to him, and because nothing seemed impossible he felt the responsibility to learn, to achieve. In this enormous, inchoate list still dreamed the fantasies of childhood. They sneaked in on the back of his energy and youth. He wanted to write a book, to make a movie and a play, to paint a mural bigger than Orozco’s, and twice as shocking, to sail a sloop around the Caribbean, wearing nothing but shorts and sneakers—no socks—and a rigging knife at his belt and a Tommy gun stowed in the paintlocker, to play the guitar like Segovia, to play Hamlet, to meet and love and marry the most lovely and intelligent girl in the world, to win the Deutscher Preis against Mercedes-Benz in a Grimald Special, to build a house, to raise a son. He was willing to learn, and he wanted to start right now.

  He lay on his back in the grass, looked up at Orion’s belt, and began to compose a letter to his father:

  DEAR O.M.,

  Have you ever been sitting around, not knowing what to do, and all of a sudden you realize just what’s bothering you—you don’t want a drink, you don’t want to go skiing or drive a sports car—as a matter of fact you suddenly have a clear, honest streak—and what you want is for someone to tell you how goddam good you are? Well, so have I, sometimes, but not any more. Not right now. I’m sick of being a B.M.O.C., O.M., sick of it. In the army, at least, I’ll be a plain soldier, with just my face sticking out of olive drab. That’s all right, but what can you do in the army? It’ll be over after a while.

  I want to do, O.M., not be. You see what I mean? I may be wrong, but I think I’m a man now. Like you in some ways, not like you in others. I hope I’m like you in some ways, O.M., and I only wish you knew I hoped so, because I’ll never write this letter, O.M.

  With respect, admiration, perplexity,

  Your son,

  MURRAY

  P.S. What is wrong between you and mother? Answer in 25 words or less.

  M.

  4

  “AND I killed a porcupine,” Richard said to Shim, who had cleaned one of the grouse for him.

  “I’ll git you your shell,” Shim said.

  “Never mind the shell.”

  “Said I would. By God I will.” Shim went to the hall locker where he kept all his guns and ammunition, brought back a shell and placed it on end in front of Richard. They sat at the kitchen table, Shim with a beer and Richard with his long drink of bourbon. Zach had accepted another one of the purple ones, and sat in his chair with the little glass held upon his knee. Opal, standing on a little platform so that she could reach the sinkboard, flashed her smooth little calves at them as she prepared supper. They would have partridge pie, among other things, and she skillfully stripped the meat from the bones.

  “If they ain’t enough bird meat we might have a little wild veal,” Shim said, his face carefully blank.

  “You’ve got some?” Richard said. Zach grinned.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. You find a bullet in it, it’s wild.” Shim chuckled, and then with his thin hands squeezed his beer can and easily bent it over upon itself before he tossed it into a basket next to the sink. He went to the refrigerator and got out another.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Opal said.

  “Good eatin’, though. I notice you like it some.” Shim turned to Zach. “I was practically raised up on venison, warn’t I, Pa?” Zach grinned, showing his too perfect, bluish teeth. “One time Zach got two deer and a elk—one season.” Zach nodded, looked as if he wanted to speak, and then composed his face for silence. “Didn’t we have meat!” Shim said.

  “Elk?” Richard said.

  “Every so often we git a herd on the mountain; then the state is supposed to keep the herd down to size. Easy to kill, you find the herd. Ain’t like deer. Zach, he didn’t have no permit, though.” Zach smiled and nodded.

  “It’s not worth it,” Opal said in her clear, practical little voice. “Look what would happen if you were caught.”

  “If they caught Shim Buzzell,” Shim said proudly, “they’d really bear down. That young Spooner now, he’s hot after me! Oh!” Shim said, laughing, “you ought to see him come nosing around. Bet he’s out there below the open slope right now. I know where he hides his car, too. Don’t he think he’s some cutter in the woods?”

  “Ever since what you did to him,” Opal said.

  “Oh, dear!” Shim said, and whacked his hand on the table. “You got to hear it! Ain’t I a mean son of a bitch? You tell him, Opal.”

  Opal didn’t care for such goings on, and she disposed of the story as quickly as she could. She turned around on her little platform as if she were going to recite in class, like a little girl, and said: “Shim found the game warden’s car where he had hidden it. He was on a stake-out for Shim, and Shim did something to the tires—smeared bacon grease on them—and in the next week the porcupines ate all four of his tires.”

  “He never could prove where it was done!” Shim shouted. “Oh, dear me! That Spooner!” He leaned back in his chair and purred, his laughter low and mellifluous, and continuous, his white teeth showing between lips that were slightly redder than the smooth orange bristles that covered his face like stiff fur.

  This time some amusement did appear on Opal’s dark face. “He had to walk home twice, once from Switches Corners to
Leah in the middle of the night.”

  “Seven miles!” Shim said, for a moment halting his moaning laugh. “Oh, dear. The poor little Boy Scout in his fancy uniform!”

  Zach himself had been rocking back and forth from the waist, heaving and smiling, his cloudy little bag wagging like a goat’s beard. While they were honest in most ways, the Buzzells, like many hill families, felt that game laws were amusing, and to be played with. Dangerous play: the standard penalty for jacking deer was a $500 fine and the loss of every article connected with the act—usually cars, guns, flashlights, even tractors and trucks. But the dangers were accepted and never railed against. The law was there, and one disrespected it at fair peril. Many of the game wardens, coming from the same hill-farm families, had been poachers themselves and they knew most of the tricks.

  Now Shim seemed very open and talkative, and Richard felt that because he had shot the two birds and the porcupine he was in good favor.

  He could still see the porcupine after the shot had wiped him out of the crotch. His fat body bounced like a bladder full of oil when it hit the springy leaves. The face was gone, bone mashed. He pushed the plump flesh, quills askew, into a hollow and kicked some leaves over it. The woods would take care of it. The image was there, of this destructive act, but it was not all unpleasant. The violent act was a certain one, at least, and its symmetry—the form of the giving of death—called, in a satisfying way, to an impulse ’way back, and deep. He would not romanticize himself by pretending, by pumping up in his modern conscience any great symbolic, moral drama. He did not feel any different, and he trusted how he felt. He was alive, and a man could keep his secrets without letting them fester. If, next time, a porcupine crossed, with a porcupine’s fat and sullen crawl, the place where his own body rotted—so be it. And of course it would be so, some day. Meanwhile, the bourbon tasted good, and his mortal bones proclaimed their well-being by being justly weary.