by W. S. Penn
“Your problem is to find a way to avoid ending up with women like your mother.”
“Fat chance,” I said.
“More than a fat chance,” David said, steering the car through a power slide. “Most boys marry their mothers, women like their mothers. If their mothers are like mine, that’s not such a problem. With yours it is.”
“And boys often respond to those women in the same patterns as their fathers,” Sara added. “It is all we know, our parents.”
“Or our grandparents,” I said.
“Are they any different, really?” Sara said.
“Of course they are,” I said with the authoritarian tones of the uncertain.
“I don’t think so,” Sara said. She reached up and began to scratch my head. “Let them go,” she said. “Let them live their lives.”
David’s favorite trips were into Mexico. At first, we went only on weekends to Tijuana, where we’d sit drinking in the Blue Fox, a shabby little bar in which Mexican whores performed salacious acts on a roped-off section of the floor, cheered on by sailors and Marines on leave from San Diego. When the balance of liquor and amphetamines began to tip towards drowsiness, David would shout that the Navy sucked the balls of Marines, and we’d duck beneath the melee of swinging fists out into the Mexican night, find the car, and recross the border.
When we weren’t carrying contraband, David let me drive. If we were transporting tequila or fireworks, he drove. Because of my youthful experiences with American police, I had an unfailing instinct for making customs agents suspicious. They’d ask me simple questions and I’d give them complex answers, and they’d pull us into the inspection station.
“You’re great!” David laughed after we put the seats back in the car and drove away. “Man, I bet you talk to grocery clerks, telling them your problems or going on about nothing. Don’t you know those guys are like dogs? They can smell fear. You gotta learn not to try to talk to them. Never give them more than they ask for. Remember, they’re there to do a job, but they work for you not you for them, and they don’t really want to have a conversation.”
“In other words,” Sara added, “you need to concentrate on not talking to the toaster.”
David was a little like Sanchez. Like most rich kids or successful entrepreneurs, he seemed to see the world as his and living comfortably in it as his right. He played roles easily and well, telling me that roles were not a way of avoiding reality but a way of dealing with it. His roles were, as Sara said, something like my habit of making up stories.
“Games,” she would say, “are not necessarily deceitful. They can be a way of living through a given situation. Is an actor lying when he plays a part? Or is he playing a game that allows the truth to slip out?”
I thought about that. I decided that Sanchez’s roles lacked underpinnings. David had behind him or beneath him or inside him an orthodoxy that defined what he would become, regardless of the roles he might play along the way. (This underpinning was what William the Black had given up, consummating the loss by joining the all-white fraternity. I sometimes wondered if William’s father, like mine, had been the one to give it up. Could William have gone back to Africa any more easily than I could go back to the reservation?) David’s sense of tradition allowed him to face one of the jealous house-servants for the world’s masters—a customs agent—and overcome his suspicions like this:
“Where are you coming from?”
Looking slightly bored, David would say, “Tijuana.”
“Business or pleasure.”
“Pleasure.”
“Are you bringing any goods back with you?”
“No.”
“Any fruits or vegetables?”
“No.”
“Whose car is this?”
“Mine.”
“Looks pretty fast.”
“It is.”
The customs agent would keep his eye on David as he filled out a slip of paper, watching to see if David became nervous or frightened. Finally he would lean out of his kiosk and say, “Okay, go on. Drive carefully.”
David would smile and reply, “I will. Thanks.”
How I envied him!
At the time, many of our so-called peers lamented the “fact” that people could never truly know each other fully, completely, and with real understanding. Dragging their butts into parties, they stood there talking to me and, if I happened to say something foolish like “I see” or “I understand,” they said, “But you don’t understand. Not really. You can’t get inside my head.”
Not that anyone would want to.
It dawned on me that only people, never spotted horses or dolphins, could invent this lament and I began to see that the lament could be reversed and become something to celebrate.
“It’s a miracle that we can know anything at all of what another person is feeling or thinking,” I said to Sara and David. “As long as we aren’t dead, we might not be able to feel exactly what the other person’s feeling, but we can come mighty close. But these people,” I’d tell them after parties, “seem born into an afterlife.”
“Maybe some of them are only asleep,” Sara liked to say. “And you can always hope to wake them up.”
“That’s a pretty big hope,” I said.
“Worth a try,” David tossed in.
How was the problem. “How, how, how,” I often said, feeling odd in the way I sounded like Grandfather would have sounded without my inventing him. I began to fall asleep quickly most nights, dreaming of palm trees and writing, the vivid images of a Rapidograph pen filled with brick red ink poised above a blank book that rested open on my chest. The headaches that could make me writhe with pain until I vomited uncontrollably seemed to lessen and the codeine tablets were less necessary except as a defense against my roommate Woody when he brought Joanne over to our room to sleep with him.
Joanne, a fairly bright but unattractive girl whose voice whined in the dark, cloyed to Woody the way he cloyed to her, out of mutual default. I kept two codeine pills beneath my pillow for the times Woody would sneak in late at night and whisper, “He’s asleep, come on,” and I would roll over as if tossing in my sleep and swallow the pills, hoping to fall into the conch-like calm of the drug before they had finished undressing in the dark.
Sex had always seemed to me a private matter, and yet when I mentioned this to Woody, he gave me one of his patronizing blowfish smiles, accused me of being prudish, and told me not to listen, if it bothered me. I became adept at taking pills without water—a talent I’ve developed over the years to the point of being able to swallow whole handfuls of aspirin. More and more, I tried to stay away from the room, except when Joanne and Woody were having troubles. Then, Joanne would come by and want to talk to me, waiting for Woody, wanting to know where he was and what he might be doing. I knew that Woody was out chasing other women, becoming a typical American male. Joanne was a convenient fuck to him; but with the spirit of free enterprise, Woody was always trying to improve his lot. I felt sorry for her, and I confess I didn’t have the heart to tell her where I thought he was.
Strangely, because of Joanne, I passed German that term. She was good with languages, and having nothing better to do she drilled me for hours until I fell asleep dreaming endless dreams in which I wandered the paths of German sentences trying to find the verbs like Easter eggs. Joanne would doze off in Woody’s bed, waiting all night for him, if need be, forgiving him quickly without even asking for an excusing lie when he failed to come home at all. I stumbled through my German tutorials until the night it dawned on me that Joanne was not to be pitied but admired. Why it hadn’t occurred to me before that she loved Woody, I don’t know. But the night she leaned over my bed in the darkness—I was halfway down the hall to sleep—and kissed me lightly on the forehead, saying, “Thank you,” and then slipped quietly out of the room, I knew what Grandfather had meant by gold untested by fire. It wasn’t that Woody hadn’t tested Joanne. It was that the quality of Joanne’s pure and absolute love for Woody cou
ldn’t be changed by it. And that night, when I finally fell back asleep, dreaming of writing, the Rapidograph fell out of my hand.
“Forget about her,” David said. He looked like he hadn’t shaved for a week. “She’s a born victim. She likes being a martyr. It gives her life meaning, putting herself in situations that can only end with her being hurt. She’d manage to get mugged in Macy’s at Christmas if she could. If you don’t let her go, she’ll drag you down with her.”
“I can’t,” I replied. It seemed to me that if I let Joanne go, which meant not caring about her pain and suffering as ridiculous as it looked to people like David, I would be letting something of myself go with it. Maybe it was because her suffering, though small and apparently insignificant, was the true kind, the kind that came out of love and allowed her to feel pain as well as allowed Woody to get away with murder.
“Good for you,” Sara whispered.
41.
Perhaps I ought to have listened more carefully to David’s theory of victims, but I was too happy to have these friends whom Delia Tompson began to call her “little gyratory troupe.” I began to love them all the same way Joanne loved Woody, without thinking, ignoring the moments no longer than the blink of a mouse in the presence of a cat. Their friendships and the times I spent with them were as addicting as amphetamines.
Amphetamines, I claimed, bought me time, let me waste less time sleeping.
“Like finding a coin purse on a baseball diamond,” Sara said. “It makes you go in circles.”
“Lay off,” I told her. “Besides, I don’t have a coin purse.”
Sara laughed, not without affection, but with the same underlying worry that Pamela, Elanna, and I had had when mother had lectured toasters in front of father’s business guests.
The truth was, the speed made the mouse feel invulnerable, ready to take on the cat and tear its claws out before gnawing out its intestines, and while it increased my energy for sex it reduced my drive with a rush. Combined with that invulnerability, the green and white dexamil spansules that I began carrying like an imaginary knife made me think like normal students did, even to the extent that eating two before an economics exam made the test seem a snap. My essays for English read like one of Woody’s, simple, plain, straightforward, pale in thought—although old Quinin did complain once or twice that they were becoming voluminous. Late into the nights, I wrote in a blank book, stories quick and slight and funny, and I felt beyond the need to revise any of them. Everyone, after all, liked them—everyone except Sara, who could make me burn with a slow indignant rage by suggesting that they had, as she said, possibilities. Slow because I loved her and I was sure she suspected it, felt it, knew it; indignant because my all-too-obvious love neither prevented nor lessened her criticisms and I wondered what gave her the right; rage because she was right, at least in part, always, and I knew it.
“You leave everything out,” she’d say. “Everything that might mean, that is.”
“You just want plot. Naturalism,” I said. “Nothing quick and lively. You want Dreiser and stop signs every other paragraph to tell you what the story means. Buildings leering Stephen Crane style, looming down on the characters fated to have their foreheads dented as the cornices of the buildings inevitably fall. Mere boys leaning over in the middle of a battle between North and South to pick up a shiny pebble, their bodies riddled with seventeen Gray bullets and shattered by the cannonballs of the Blues, and as if that wasn’t enough, a lieutenant prying open the ragged corpse’s hand to find the pebble saying ‘Gee, a mere pebble, a mere boy,’ repeating ‘mere’ nineteen times on one page just to be sure the reader gets the point.”
Her father’s course had done me a world of good. Sara raked her fingers through her hair and waited.
“You finished?” she asked. “You know that’s not what I mean. Your wonder drug hasn’t bought you time, it’s made you lazy. You know that.”
“How do you know what I know?”
“I just do,” she said. She thought for a moment. “The same way you know what your Grandfather would say.” She waited for that to sink in.
“Maybe you could be rich and famous,” she said, giving me a supercilious smile. “You write well enough. Lord knows that the world seems to want writing that says as little as possible. The kind of thing people can read on buses and planes, or during their favorite soap operas. You’re funny …”
“What’s wrong with being funny?”
“Nothing. But ask yourself why people laugh at your stories. Are they laughing because you allow them to avoid the truth? If that’s what you want, then you’re making a jolly good show of it. You have to read more,” she said.
Sara, for whatever reasons, began to complete the education Elanna had begun, lending or giving me books by authors I’d never heard of before—a collection of stories by George P. Elliott was the first. Among the Dangs.
“I want it back,” Sara said. “And take care of it. It’s out of print.”
When I’d finished the collection my rage was subdued. “How’d you like them?” she asked.
“They were okay,” I said. The truth was that they were wonderful. Instead of instilling jealousy, they made me grateful that there were such books to be read. I had cried, secretly embarrassed, over stories like “The N.R.A.C.P.”
“Just okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
Sara smiled knowingly—the same smile she would exhibit with each new book as simultaneously she watched my stories become heavier with intended meaning, stiffer, starker, and far less entertaining. Giving me an Ernest Gaines novel one day, she said, “You’re ready for this. You’ve got to find something to write out of, like him.”
It seemed only natural to turn to Indian myths, reading up on them and then jamming them into my stories like square pegs. When Sara saw these, she not only didn’t smile, she looked sad. “These aren’t the way,” she said. “You’re writing in, not out of.”
“What do you mean?”
“The problem is, even though you think like an Indian, putting too much myth into your stories makes you sound phony.”
“I am Indian,” I growled.
“And I’m a Moravian dwarf,” she laughed. “Oh, Alley. Partly, you are. Maybe that’s what confuses you so much about the world. I don’t know. But partly, you aren’t. Problem is, when you try to pretend you are only an Indian and put Indians into your stories, they come out stick figures because you don’t know them.”
“What about my Grandfather?”
“What about him? You yourself said that every time you try to tell someone about him that he comes out like a wooden Indian in front of a cigar store. Remember when you were thinking of going to Arizona this Christmas and I asked if I could come along, you said no? Don’t you see why you said no?”
I was becoming furious. And hurt.
“You want to keep him to yourself. To keep what you imagine he is to yourself. You’re afraid that if someone like me went with you, I’d find out the truth.”
“What’s the truth, if you’re so smart?”
“I don’t know, do I? I can’t, because you won’t let anyone who cares about you know him, if you can help it. Maybe the truth is that he’s just another old man who does old man things.”
“My Grandfather is not just another old man,” I said, clenching and unclenching my fists.
David knocked and leaned into the room. “Hey,” he said. Feeling the tension pinging around the room, he fell silent.
“Hello David,” Sara said. He nodded, glancing from me to her with raised eyebrows.
“What’s up?” I said, grateful for the interruption.
“I was going to head into L.A. this afternoon. Wondered if anyone wanted to come along.”
“I’ll go,” I said, looking straight at Sara. I went over to the small refrigerator Woody had installed in our room and took out a beer, opened it, and used it to swallow another pill.
“Sara?” David said.
“Aren’t
you taking a few too many of those pills?” Sara said. “You’re going to fry your brain.”
“One is too many,” I said. “Anything else you’d like to correct? I mean are my pants zipped up, do my clothes match?”
“You are such a little boy, sometimes,” Sara said. “I think I’ll stay here. I’ve got some work to get done.” She gathered up her things. “Besides, Alley here will have more fun if I’m not around to make him think about what he’s doing.”
I gave Sara the silent treatment.
Sara only laughed, shook her head, and walked out of the room without even slamming the door.
42.
“What was that all about?” David asked as he merged onto the San Bernadino freeway, having waited that long for me to calm down, for the edge to wear off the rush of amphetamine.
“Nothing,” I said, leaning my head back on the seat, warmed by the sun striking through the tinted glass, as David dropped the Hurst down to fourth and the G.T.O. slid into the fast lane. I could feel the air outside slipping over the car’s high-gloss finish faster and with less resistance than the air on the cars around us as David cut in and out of the fast lane, passing cars lugging along six miles per hour over the legal limit.
“So tell me nothing,” he said. “Ah, shit!” David was looking into his rearview mirror. He downshifted and pulled the G.T.O. into the middle lane between two other cars doing the speed limit. “A cop. Now it’ll take forever to get into the city.”
I looked behind us at the highway patrol car pulling onto the freeway into the slow lane, where he lurked for a minute or two and then leapfrogged two cars and pulled back into the right lane, hiding from the inattentive drivers who were pulling away from us in the left lane. The metal grid bumpers made the black and white Dodge look low and mean as it stalked speeders, and drivers behind him slowed up to his pace. No one passed him, even though he was not doing the speed limit, and David slowed more, unwilling to let him get out of sight in the mirror. Traffic bunched up. Then the Dodge swung off an exit ramp.
“Okay,” I said. “He’s gone.”