The Absence of Angels

by W. S. Penn

  Allison and I invented our own ball-less brand of Fast Break. One week, she’d be dragging me into bedrooms, alleys, parks by day or night, where she would get me panting like a dog about to expire from heat exhaustion. The next, she’d be pushing me away, saying “I’m not a whore” with all the trained moral force of her sex. At first, I protested that I didn’t think of her as a whore.

  Eventually, I replied, “You’re telling me! With a whore, you get what you’ve paid for.”

  We would break up. She would wait a few days, and then call and I would succumb to the whine of her tear-filled voice. Again the tussle and tumble of young love would begin. Again the proclamations.

  “All you want is my body,” Allison would say accusingly, her sharp teeth clenched. I’d be stumped. It was, after all, true, I did want her body. Though small, it was tight, and she flounted the tightness almost as well as her mother did, whether in jeans or in some silky blouse that became see-through at twenty watts. For a long time, I avoided telling her that all any man would want would be her body, that her mind was like generic imitation Parmesan cheese, pale and flavorless. My patience endured as my determination grew and my understanding shrank.

  I came to be able only to say, “Fine,” without remorse, when she’d tell me that we’d better stop seeing each other. When I walked away from her, she didn’t recede beyond the horizons of my concentration, she simply vanished. Only when I saw her again could I recall what she looked like.

  “You want my body” became a refrain for Allison and a challenge for me.

  19.

  About the time my uncle switched from singing “Let’s Do the Twist” to “Moon River,” Pamela emerged from the dark confines of her warm and protective closet to attend the local community college. She had evidently believed me on those trips to uncle’s house when I’d told her repeatedly that “It would be all right,” and the dreams she rode into the world were delicate, subtly marked by oranges, yellows, blacks. A spot of purple in the iris of each eye for contrast. She was beautiful, her flat face a cool facade capable of exploding into an intense and experimental sexuality.

  In the secret hours of moonlit mornings, worn and tired from friendly bouts with the bottle or the local police, I would sneak past the metallic blue illumination of her boyfriend’s car and into the house, strands of Johnny Mathis’s lyrics of innocent, permanent love covering the sound of my footsteps as I tripped past father slumbering on the living room sofa. It was the nights of Johnny Mathis’s silence that predicted what I knew four months later aboard my uncle’s yacht: that Pamela would marry the boy who brashly hung his legs over the bow of the boat as uncle slewed across wavelets, spraying him, trying to shake him off like a cowboy off of a bull.

  Elanna, on the other hand, unfooled by Johnny Mathis’s or my promises, had taken her own view of the world astoundingly different from Pamela. Sometimes, those late and gin-drunk nights, I would pause at the insomniac door to her room and listen to the resistant strains of Baez or Peter, Paul, and Mary. Not so long after Pamela had begun fluttering off daily to the community college, Elanna took herself off to the university, where she joined the Free Speech Movement while learning how to fill out forms of enrollment properly. Then, as I leaned my forehead against the stony cold of her bedroom door, all that would seep out from inside was a mustiness, filling the hallway with the smell of disuse as though mother had vacuumed the house without a filter bag in the machine.

  In my own room, I tuned the stereo to the local country and western station, and tried to think. My scalp itched and I was forced to cross my fingers to confuse my nervous system and scratch my own head, pretending that Elanna was there to comfort me.

  Grandfather couldn’t compete with Country and Western and all I could gather in were words like “sparkplug” and “filter.” I got up and closed the drapes on my window, switched off the stereo, and lay back down, closing my eyes as tightly as I could, hoping with the dark silence to create a vacuum which would draw grandfather’s words out of the darkness and into my ears.

  At that moment, wearing a tie-dyed shirt of Elanna’s, mother burst into my room, darted to the window, and threw open the drapes.

  “Light!” mother exclaimed. “There must be more light. How is college?” she asked when the drapes were open.

  “I’m not in college, mother.”

  She turned and looked at me, her gray eyes becoming greener as though the smoke in her mind had cleared temporarily. “You’re not in college,” she said.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Pamela and Elanna are.”

  “Excuses,” mother said. “Well, it’s your life. If you want to ruin it, go ahead.”

  “I haven’t finished high school,” I said.

  Mother wagged her finger like the arm on a metronome. “Tcchh, tcchh,” she said. Her eyes wiggled like jello and became grayer as the metronome slowed. “And why do you hate me?” she said.

  “I don’t hate you, mother.”

  “Why did you say you did?”

  “I never did …,” I said. The frustrating thing about mother was that notions, like feelings, came and went from her mind like parolees reporting irregularly. While they were in her mind, they stayed until the stockpile was depleted, and we had no idea how large that stockpile might be. If, at one moment, she thought you ought to be in college, then you ought to be, regardless of your age and experience. Her trips to the electroshock therapist didn’t really interrupt these notions but only dispersed them, making their focus general instead of specific. For example, if mother decided I hated her just before she went off to a brain cell barbecue, she would return believing that we all hated her, not just me. It was like an intermittent Korsakoff’s syndrome, mother forgetting the lines that connected the points of her life. She was beginning to seem more than merely dotty.

  “I heard you!” mother said. “You said, ‘I hate you sometimes.’”

  I could only look at her. She looked like a little girl who has been denied something promised. I was helpless.

  “Well, young man, I’ll tell you one thing. You’re not worth a Christmas goose and I’m going to let your father deal with you.”

  Helpless. And weary. “I did not say I hated you.”

  “See if I put you in my will,” mother said. “I won’t leave you a wooden nickel.”

  What could I say?

  “You’ll be sorry,” she said, “when I die. You’ll see, you’ll be sorry.” She slammed out of the room.

  “Fudge!” I said, beginning to laugh, but inside, not out, shaking with laughter at the absurdity of the conversation on the inside, with tears beginning to stream down the valley of my increasingly pronounced jowls.

  20.

  I couldn’t help but laugh when mother said that about her will. The money in her family had been acquired by women, maintained and propagated by women, and yet, when her Christian Scientist mother died believing in Error and not in heart disease, it had come into the clutches of mother’s father, a harsh man whose great love was the pursuit of cosmetic women. He had lost most of the money in successive alimony suits, and by the time mother’s four-slice toaster electrocuted itself trying to swim Lake Tahoe on the way out of California, he was unwilling to contribute any of what was left to her medical expenses. His unwillingness was manifested by his refusal to make any mention of her illness, and the one time I drove mother the five hundred miles to visit him, holding my breath as we passed through the smog of Los Angeles, he spent the entire afternoon ignoring not only her but me. To him, I was the cause and effect of whatever seemed to be upsetting her. To me, he was a nastily illogical man who was capable of saying, “Only good Indian’s a dead Indian.” And did say it, mind you. I didn’t want his money. It was his monster, his darkness, that that money represented, and my only escape was to disregard it.

  I knew that I was supposed to say something to the effect that I didn’t want mother to die, that I didn’t expect her to die (yet), that she wasn’t to talk that way, and th
at, in the end, I despised the quarters her mother had used to make her weak voice clink with the hint of substance. I hated the money, not mother, not mother’s mother. As for her father, well … who would miss him? Come to think of it, who would actually miss mother? Would Pamela? She was becoming more and more ethereal and there were times I wondered if she would miss me. Elanna? Before Elanna had moved to Berkeley to sit around with men in Bob Dylan stubble and women with Joni Mitchell hair discussing politics and spiritual essences (both of which my friends would later reduce to Karma), she’d told me, “Mother has not had the best of lives.”

  “I know,” I’d said. “Her toasters …”

  “Listen, you mindless little shit. This isn’t a laughing matter,” Elanna had said. “Mother’s life has been one of disappointment. Cooking and cleaning and giving everything up for you and me and Pamela, having to pretend she liked those men who follow father home from an office which changes its address as often as you change clothes.”

  “I’ll wear dirty clothes,” I said.

  “You know,” Elanna said, her face beet red with anger, “you were supposed to have been a girl. You were going to be named Charne. But you came out a boy, a gargantuan baby weighing upwards of ten pounds. Another of mother’s trials and disappointments.”

  I began to scratch my head furiously.

  “Of course,” she said, softening, “I was supposed to be a boy. Thank God it was you, not me, who was a boy. Can you imagine you as a girl, as big as you are?”

  “What does it matter?” I asked, relieved that Elanna was no longer angry with me.

  “It does,” she replied. “I know it does. I just don’t know how yet.” But when mother entered the sanctuary of Elanna’s bedroom and cleaned it out, throwing away every memento Elanna had of boyfriends and the small joys of adolescence, keeping only the copies of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and The Tropic of Cancer to underline in indelible red at her leisure, it was Elanna’s turn to hate mother and my turn to say, “Well, at least she’s greatly simplified the job of reading Lawrence and Miller.”

  If no one missed mother, then no one would remember her. That seemed a fate worse than death, like never having lived at all. Sorrow overcame my sense of humor and I went out to find mother, convinced that I could reason with her and explain that I didn’t hate her, that all I felt was a growing absence and that I couldn’t hate someone who wasn’t there.

  Mother was nowhere to be found.

  I found father in the garage, bent over the washing machine, his arms sunk into the tub up to the shoulders, making him look not a little ridiculous. I watched. Father cursed as best father could.

  “Oh balls,” he swore, as something inside the machine snapped.

  I said nothing. Father was good at taking things apart—mechanically inclined, you might say—except that I couldn’t remember a time when father had ever successfully gotten what he’d taken apart back together again. Machines, to father, were like Humpty Dumpty to all the King’s men, a trait I didn’t inherit but which father assiduously taught me by making me so nervous when I changed the oil on the car that I’d forget to replace the drain plug, only noticing the oversight when the fresh oil began running down the driveway past my shoes. When father was not around, though I had a bitter resentment for machines and their ability to turn on me, I was somewhat more skilled in dealing with them. And deal with them I did, disdaining the quarters vending machines asked for, tinkering with their works until everyone for blocks around could have a Coke compliments of the Coca Cola Distributors. How many times I would be arrested for theft, I didn’t know, then; about as often, I suspect, as father was arrested by machines themselves.

  I sat on the stoop of the door leading from the house to the garage smiling, watching father attack the washing machine with the fervor of a boy taking apart his grandfather’s power saw, looking for the sawdust. I revelled in his cursing.

  “Oh fudge!” father swore. I heard something clank inside the machine’s carcass, and then fall to the cement floor of the garage, unreachable, unless one moved the machine. “Oh balls!” father muttered.

  Father’s arms emerged from the guts of the machine and his hands locked onto its corners as he wrestled with the washer like Antaeus with Hercules. Suddenly I saw him, years before my conception was even conceived, a boy struggling to discover the mysteries not of the universe but of the everyday. A shirtless boy, his body round but hard, crushing the horse’s oats in his hands, trying to find the nourishment. I saw his frustration and his punishment; I saw his mother weeping because they couldn’t afford to send him to college; most of all, I saw him standing before the minister, innocently believing that mother’s “I do” was a beginning and not an end. I could have hugged father at that moment.

  “Maybe you could get off your duff and give me a hand,” father said, winded, beaten by the machine’s specific gravity, his premonitory sense undamaged by the battle.

  “What are you doing?” I said, rising, dusting off the seat of my jeans. “Trying to find where they keep the suds?”

  I had meant it as a joke. Father had little patience for jokes at the moment. Letting go of the Kenmore, his left hand struck me across the eye, sending me tumbling back across the floor of the garage like a pink pelican. As I lay there, he crossed and stood above me, and I saw his body beginning to stoop, shrinking into the shape he had had as a child. Towering though he was from where I lay on the garage floor, I realized that he was no longer as tall as I was. That bodies are not Sanforized against time and emotion.

  “You know,” he said, leaning over me the way one would lean over a crib, “you’re just like your mother.” He stomped out of the garage.

  Not much later, when I stood before the bench in Santa Cruz, arrested for assaulting a cigarette machine, my minor case undiverted by a McCarthyite judge from the social security set, I would recall how I had carefully removed every nut, every bolt, every belt from that Kenmore washing machine and then turned it on, running water into the tub and listening to its delicious and inevitable death as it came apart. I would be cited for contempt as I lapsed into silence before the judge, realizing that it was then, when I killed the washer, that the wonder years had begun to end, replaced by the dim digestion of the worried years.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  21.

  During those years, my reputation as a criminal was stamped by rumor like a grape into wine. My teachers began to look at me funny and on dark days they ignored me, not calling on me to answer questions, for fear my criminal nature would erupt. Only Marion McNamara, the quintessential Latin teacher in love with Julius Caesar, could stare into my darkness and see that whatever it was I had been arrested for did not make me either dangerous or romantic.

  Walter and Allen, Stephen and Paul liked to hang around with me on the school’s grounds. None of them wanted to take me home where the naturally suspicious eyes of their Anglo-Saxon parents would see the stains on my reputation. I was grateful, then, for William the Black, whose color seemed to make him impervious to the stain which could rub off by associating with me. The girls fluttered when I sat near them in class or outside, during lunch. Living up to my image or, rather, creating it and maintaining it, I disdained the Beatles and memorized the Stones while less openly I listened to Country and Western, to silky guitars sliding around booze, trucks, loneliness, replying, when Elanna mocked my taste, that Country music had “No lies in it.” With the solitude of a Country singer, I drifted, at times teaming up with William in a duet of meanness, backed up by the five known hoods in the school. I wore a peace button with tiny engines on the wings of the symbol transforming it into a B-52 and with “Drop it” stenciled below that. Up close, I was the Midnight Rambler; at a distance, I was a liberal like most of my schoolmates.

  Two Point Alley became Four Buck Alley as I began procuring liquor for anyone willing to pay me four dollars above cost. On Friday evenings William and I would borrow his father’s Triumph Tiger, zip over to East Paly and meet L
inc the Wino, and return by nine to the school parking lot, where we distributed the ordered liquor.

  “The name Hummingbird protects me,” I said to Allison.

  She tried to sound dark and foreboding. “Next you’ll be into drugs,” she said. “You will ruin your life, Albert.”

  Fuck you, I thought, saying, “It’s my life.”

  The first time I approached Linc, he was hanging out with a small group of men, young and old, on the corner, sharing a bottle of Ripple. “Hey,” he said, as the rest of them looked dark and forbidding, “you lost?” I was a little frightened, but I told him no, I wanted to do some business. The look on his face made me add that I wasn’t a cop.

  “A cop? You hear that?” he said to the group. “He ain’t a cop.” They all laughed. “Shit, you’re barely old enough to be a white boy. So what you doing round here?” He held his hand up to stop me from answering. “I’ll tell you. You want some a this.” He raised the bottle of Ripple.

  I nodded, gaining courage. “My name’s Hummingbird. Alley Hummingbird. I’m Indian.”

  He stepped closer to me and looked at my face. He made and remade a decision several times. “Nah,” he said. Then, “Okay. So what? You expect that do you any good? Hummingbird. Hummingbird?” He paused, thinking. “Alley?” I nodded. It was up to him, now. There was no use giving him too many words to think about.

  “Okay. So you’re Indian. Name like that, you ain’t Jewish. Still, you listen. I go in there,” he gestured at the liquor store in the middle of the block, “buy you some of this and get caught, it’s again’ the law.”

  “Against the law, whether you get caught or not,” I said.

  “You ain’t listenin’. What I’m telling you is you got to make it worth my while, and it make no difference what your name is, Alleybird.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while,” I said.

  “Nah,” he said, starting to leave me there, alone. “It ain’t worth less’n two bucks a bottle. I got expenses, boy. Overhead.” He held up the Ripple.