by W. S. Penn
Mother had packed me a lunch of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, an apple left over from the drought of ’56, and celery sticks—all of which I donated to the spirits of the road, hoping that those spirits, once they got a taste of one of mother’s fabulous lunches, would turn the bus around. At least send it skidding into a ditch.
I did not want to go to camp.
Neither did Bernie Schneider want to be packed like a shrimp onto a bus and motored off to have healthy fun. Bernie wasn’t into healthy fun.
“After all,” Bernie told me, “Jews aren’t into having healthy fun. We,” he said proudly, “are into suffering and survival. Prunes, not vitamins.”
I have to admit I was grateful for Bernie’s sense of humor. Years later, after I had forgotten what Bernie looked like even as I stared at the pictures of him as a boy in denims with cuffs rolled halfway to his knees standing beside a sway-backed mare inside the camp’s corral, I would remember his joke about the end of the world. It went: There are three religious leaders selected to announce over T.V. that a great flood will end the world in twenty-four hours. One at a time, they face the camera. The priest advises all good Catholics to confess their sins and say their penances. The Protestant minister speaks of hellfire and the day of judgment about to descend on mankind. The Rabbi, coming on the T.V. last, says, “Jews! You have twenty-four hours to learn to live underwater.”
So it was, as the yellow bus sped towards the relocation camp on Lake Arrowhead, Bernie began to teach me how to live underwater. In the twelve hours between the first lesson and our first mustering out by the fit young man who was our cabin counselor, I only learned to hold my breath for long periods of time. Still, that was enough for the time I was to be in camp, and after I taught Bernie how to sneak through the woods downwind from the prey, it was sufficient to allow us to watch our cabin counselor with one of the girls who worked in the kitchens.
To describe her is virtually impossible. Bernie and I only imagined talking to her, and most of that talking was merely of words on the way to something else, like pebbles on the path to the temple. She wore nylon shorts that covered three-quarters of her ass and a cotton T-shirt that somehow managed always to look wet. For two boys, those were enough for us to wish we knew her.
Our counselor didn’t have to wish.
We watched from the brush in the woods one night as Rolf spread a sleeping bag on the ground and then slowly tied each of her arms to small trees. Even in the darkness, we could see the look in his eyes as he slipped those shorts down her legs that seemed, from our angle of vision, endless.
“Legs all the way up to her ass,” Bernie whispered.
“Ssshh!” I said, trying not to choke on the air that burned my lungs. I’d been holding my breath.
Rolf slowly tied her ankles to stakes in the ground before he knelt and rolled her T-shirt up to reveal breasts that were iridescent in the moonlight. She lifted her head to watch him expose his very being, and her eyes! The look in her eyes was like some wild animal’s.
Bernie tossed and turned in his bunk the whole night. Girls’ names rolled off his lips like distant thunder. Even the next morning, he seemed to be shivering as he brushed his teeth. I had to row him out to the raft on the lake and dip him in the cold water every twenty minutes to keep his skin temperature even with the ice-cold of his guts.
I began to worry about Bernie’s ability to survive, to live beneath the water of his dreams, but he insisted on going along to watch. He ate little, playing with his food like a sated cat; he ran miles in his restless sleep in pursuit of an illusion that he would pursue for the rest of his life. The only sign of health was that he settled on one name for this illusion, Tammy, and now the same thunderstorm broke over him night after night as though it were being blown back and forth over the landscape of his heart by alternating winds.
Before Bernie was shipped home, I tried in desperation to teach him how to make people dissolve. Night after night, we watched Rolf and Tammy pumping away at each other, trying to stare past them, past the desire we felt in ourselves. This at great risk to myself because I knew that if I succeeded in making the people dissolve, I might never get rid of the voices. Bernie failed. He failed because every time he reached the point of dissolution, Tammy bit her lip or ground her teeth loudly, or threw her head back and cried out, “Oh god! Rolf!” and Bernie clamped his eyes shut, breaking the magic of the spell.
We tried peeing in Rolf’s Listerine. Tammy only cried out louder.
We put rubber cement in his hair cream. Tammy bit her lip so hard that night that a drop of blood congealed on her lip, glistening before it turned black.
Owls flew and foxes ran through the mid-night. Bernie’s will seemed to fly off with them, speeding through space and time in pursuit of a dream he would never possess. Instead of dissolving the image of Rolf and Tammy, I stared past them at a vision of Bernie, ghostly and wasted, his gray worsted suit like prisoner’s garb, trapped by the things he thought his Tammy wanted.
The sight of Bernie as alien frightened me so much that I broke and ran, spending the night on the high rocks overlooking the black and depthless lake. I sat there, staring inwards, dissolving myself, my logic, my will, until I was able to see beyond the perimeters of the lake and my age.
“Dreams,” Grandfather said, maintaining a reserve because of my pain, “can get you.”
Bernie became a haunt, hanging about the kitchens while the other children rode horses or swam. When he lifted his bow and aimed the arrow at the target fifty feet away, I could tell that he was aiming at something far away like love. In the evenings around the campfire, Bernie’s singing was the low moan of a wounded animal. Years afterwards, I would hear the horn of a ship lost in the fog, and I would think of Bernie singing as he steered his life towards his vision of Tammy. Unlike a ship, even if Bernie found his port, he would never be able to unload his cargo.
After Bernie’s mother had driven all the way out to Lake Arrowhead to collect him like a bundle of Third Class mail held at the post office, I looked around at my happy co-campers. To the unsuspecting eye, we all looked the same. I, however, saw them as future stockbrokers who would collect antique cars for fun. Boys who would attend the same colleges their fathers attended, receive identical marks, and after graduation marry their mothers, enduring the same lives. Girls who were learning to shop for boys and that soft toilet paper which is so important to women. Mixed in, because everything is mixed, were the sons and daughters of meter readers and liquor salesmen, a Jew (in absentia), an Indian, and some of the detritus that remains American.
One morning, by the row of outdoor pipes and faucets slung above metal troughs, I noticed a skinny runt of a lad putting toothpaste instead of Brylcream into his hair. Against his cocoa-colored skin, the foaming white looked either ridiculous or stylish, depending on your definition. His name was Buchanan Roy Leland.
“Buchanan?” I asked him, toweling his head dry after washing the toothpaste out of it.
“Named for my daddy’s fav’rite president,” he replied. “Ouch! You’re hurting.”
“Sorry. Buchanan? What did he do?”
“Nothing.” Roy grinned. “That’s why he was daddy’s fav’rite.”
Well, Buchanan Roy had been born in Oklahoma and he did everything. Anything. Like the lion with the thorn in his paw, he became my loyal comrade for the two days before I fled from camp. Roy stole two extra canteens from the kitchen. He procured a map and compass, and with the solemnity of a virgin on his wedding night, he gave me his Bowie knife, which Rolf had taken from him the first day and which he had recovered within minutes of the taking. And he did it all within forty-eight hours of Bernie’s departure.
I treasured that knife the same way I’d treasured Bernie’s friendship before he grew crazy with his visions of Tammy. After I dismounted from the mare I’d ridden out from camp and slapped her on her way back to the stables, I began to forget Roy as I focused on the horizon, stopping to check the compass e
very half hour until I reached the highway to Palm Springs. Roy no longer mattered once I was free, although as a parting reward I had shown him where to hide at night to observe the spectacle of Tammy’s performances. I didn’t worry that Roy would suffer Bernie’s fate: Roy wasn’t Jewish. Roy definitely lacked Bernie’s imagination. For Roy, sex would always be poking the nearest girl. For Bernie, it would be the embellishments, the, so to speak, temporary lies or pretenses of corsets, cords, the soft cries and whimpers and moans. Bernie might masturbate; Roy would jack off.
As I stuck my thumb out, pointing east, I decided there were two kinds of friends at least. One who is trying to live beneath water, whom you are forced to leave behind if they drown. The other won’t go near the water, and you simply leave him behind like a Burma Shave placard you pass on the road to who knows where.
7.
It will always seem strange that I remember Grandfather’s large pores second only to his high forehead and white hair. Even now, when I close my eyes and speak with him, reaching out and touching him over the long distance of unreality, I remember his pores, especially on his nose.
I don’t need the imaginary telephone anymore. Grandfather has been dead in white people’s terms for over a decade, so the telephone receiver would be nothing more than a cheap trick to illustrate the way the horizons of death have shortened for me. All I do is concentrate, close my eyes, and listen to his voice coming out of the Absence of Angels. That concentration erases time and I can talk to him the way he was before he pedaled his way into the Absence of Angels, before he even owned the killer three-wheel bicycle.
Chosposi lay along the hills beside a small mesa that rose among gorges and dunes to a small flat plain, staring at the sky like the eye of a bird and lost among the other grander mesas in the desert. Behind the dwindling village rose the mesa wall. Before it was a long narrow canyon, leading out to the highway and eventually to the trading post which sat alongside the mission. The mission looked like a facsimile of the Alamo.
A Nez Perce, Grandfather had migrated and settled in Chosposi for reasons of his own. He had married Laura P., he told me, with the hope that the progeny of two half-breeds could inherit the right halves and be full-blooded again. His hope wasn’t some snotty feeling of the superiority of blood. If anything, it was the desire to keep his children and their children from being susceptible to sunburn.
We sat side by side, gazing at the peach colors cast by the sun rising beyond the horizons of the known world. I kept quiet. Each time I turned to speak, all I could imagine saying was, “What large pores you have, Grandfather.”
Behind us in the house I could hear Laura P. beginning her day. I knew her routine. She would stand before the Kachinas on her mantel convincing herself of the differences between people and animals. Then she would slip on an apron and softly complain her way to her potter’s wheel or into the kitchen where she’d heat the vat of oil and begin frying donuts and the thinly rolled corn delicacies called Piki, which Grandfather would later take to Johnny Three Feet’s Trading Post for sale.
Disturbed by the low tremors of Laura P.’s carping, a Patchnose snake slithered onto the rocks turned white by years of conflict with the sun, and coiled itself into the mood Grandfather generated. We—Grandfather, the snake, and I—could have spent the whole day like that, suffering ourselves to live in a silent time where nothing changed but the height of the sun and the heat of those rocks. But as I watched the snake with the respect I’d learned to give snakes, dangerous or otherwise, the rocks shimmered and then dissolved. The sun reached higher, turning yellow, and I envisioned father and mother, wondering what had become of me.
By now they should be aware of my disappearance from camp, and they would be worried. I felt inconsideration mixed with not a little fear: When father got hold of me, I would pay the bus fare for sure. Whatever halves of the blood father had received certainly did not include the pacific instincts of Grandfather. But then age does all sorts of things to a man. How was I to know that Grandfather, too, had been capable of violence when he was father’s age just as I am, although less capable than father because Grandfather taught me to control my dreams, to wield my dreams like a grand eraser.
“If you remember too much,” Grandfather said, “you expect more. Dreaming right, you can erase the memories that wear you down like dripping water.”
In the midst of my worries (I was only beginning to understand what Laura P. liked to say, that it was a miracle I was still in two pieces), I decided to phone my sisters and have them tell our parents where I was. Using my imaginary telephone, I’d try Pamela’s closet. If that didn’t work, I’d wait until late afternoon and try to reach Elanna as she sat in the graveyard talking with mother’s mother. At the very worst, I’d have to give in to realism and go down to the trading post and use the pay phone.
By the time Laura P. disturbed the sunning snake again, giving Grandfather and me the carefully packed goods to carry to the trading post, I couldn’t stand the silence any longer. I had to say something.
“What large pores you have, Grandfather,” I blurted.
Grandfather laughed.
It was miles to the trading post, but we didn’t have a choice except to walk. After his children were finished bearing their own children, Grandfather had decided that the Plymouth deserved a rest and he had put it up on blocks in the garage behind the trading post, storing a case of oil and filters in the rear seat in case of emergencies. As the two of us hiked along beside the ribbon of highway, undisturbed except for the occasional Buick or Oldsmobile with louvered rear windows roaring past, I needed to speak. I began telling him about Bernie and Buchanan Roy.
“Jews are not white people,” he said, when I’d finished. “Many of them are Real People like us. Though,” he added, “some behave like snakes. There are useful snakes. Gopher snakes. This boy who gave you the Bowie knife. Be careful not to step on them.”
I wanted to tell him about the other things that had happened on the way to Chosposi. Not to tell him was a kind of lying. As we trudged along the gravel edge of the highway the Saguaro Cactuses raised their arms to the blanching sun. Cactus owls peeped out and cried “rue” before beating a hasty retreat from me and the revelations of the sun. In the distance, the air shimmered with moisture and the asphalt turned deep black before it disappeared. How could I tell Grandfather about the days I’d left out, recounting my trip? Aren’t Grandfathers asexual? It was even more difficult to imagine Grandfather copulating with Laura P. than it was to imagine father coupled with mother. All of a sudden, I skidded to a halt.
“What else is the matter?” Grandfather asked, looking at me with a slow inquisitiveness that bordered on indifference.
“Father has never had a …,” I said. I caught myself. I’d been about to say “a blow job.” It was a terrifying revelation and it almost made me weep.
“Come along,” Grandfather said.
Forcing my face to go blank, I caught up to him.
“Want to tell about it?”
I shook my head, no, mistrusting my voice. Grandfather was father’s father, the same father who’d said that sex is not everything, even though he was lying when he’d said that. It was sex, the lack of it, that sometimes made my father crazy and taught me to diminish my presence around the house. Besides, where would I begin?
The car had skidded to the shoulder of the highway. A man had climbed out. The driver threw out a backpack as the man stood gesticulating, leaning into the convertible, bending like a rod that was not used to bending. Angry. Not wanting to find myself in the path of an angry man, I was about to high-tail it away from the road when the car skidded to a halt just past me and the door flew open. The man began to run towards the car.
“Hurry up,” she said. “Get in.”
I slipped the bandoliers of my canteens over my head and dropped the canteens into the rear seat. She put the car into gear and sped off. Without looking at the dash, she ran the tachometer up to 6500 and dropped th
e shift lever down to second, up to third, down to fourth, and then settled the convertible into a comfortable 3000 rpm’s, cruising along at 75 without fluctuating more than one or two miles per hour in speed. I was impressed. I’d never seen a woman drive like that. Till then, I’d ridden only with mother, who hunched forward over the steering wheel, creeping down the highway or braking through city traffic, periodically sucking air in through her clenched teeth with a quickness that always frightened me.
“Where you headed?” she asked.
“Grandfather’s.”
She laughed. “No sweat. Right on my way.” I explained where Grandfather lived. “I can take you there tomorrow,” she said. “If you want to spend the night in Flagstaff.”
“Sure,” I said.
She reached behind the driver’s seat and pulled out a bottle of Beefeater’s. “Want some of this?” she asked. Holding the bottle up, squinting at it, she said, “Brad was sucking on this like it was his momma’s titty.”
Any boy would have lied about his age, faced with a woman who talked like that, not to mention the way she was dressed in a halter top and short shorts that were not made but grown like new skin. She didn’t care about my age any more than she cared that I was a virgin, as she let her head fall back over the edge of the bed that night and whispered a litany of men’s names.
Gerri was a drug runner. “I don’t deal,” she said. “I just move the goods around from one place to another. Like Bekins. Besides, everyone’s got a right to lay back and get away for a while, don’t they?”
Even though I suspected that buying that answer was like buying a used Ford with a flammable gas tank, that didn’t bother me too much.