by Ron Charach
Today Henry doesn’t feel up to scurryin’ like a frightened rat. —Come in, I’m indecent, he tells the entering Claire.
—Hi, hon. How you feeling? Arlene and Rose are on their way—you decide where you want to be.
—I’m not up for company, Claire. I mean, yourself excluded.
—Chest pains back?
—More like a pain in the arse. I’m sick of having to flee what has been my—er, our place since we first arrived in this glorified fall-out shelter.
—Listen, Henry: Arlene and Rose are frantic. Gideon is now proudly signing his name with a small letter “g”—he’s closed down the bar and left his wife, which may mean he’ll be putting the hit on sweet Miz Carla, who he now says he wants to re-form.
—Goddamn fundamentalists. Having high tech on your side is one thing, having God is worse. When I feel up to it, I’ll give gideon a keepsake to remember amos barton by! But a troublin’ image of Elvis, complete with derisive sneer, pops into his head: better not mess with the US male…
—Look, he says, tryin’ to shake both the image and the ear-worm from his head, Arlene’s worries or, God knows, Rose’s or even her baby brother harold’s, aren’t my concern. Why in hell should I have to make myself scarce just so you can hold suffragette meetings?
—Cut the feminazi bashing, Henry. There’s no way Arlene is going to sit in that tiny little room of hers all day, and she can hardly wander through the town now, can she? Carla’s saloon is, as they say, CLOTHES’D. And she’s at risk too. The townies—several of whom are now sporting, excuse me, sportin’ small-first-letter last names—see her as somebody who catered to the eight.
—What about Rose? Shouldn’t her head be the first to fall, now that the Revolt of the Little People is upon us?
—Yeah, but remember “ma rosemary” is one hell of a cook and bottle-washer—drygoods ingredients or no—and john gideon himself wants her to stay on and take care of his household needs. You ought to know the vacuum that develops whenever a man walks away from a good wife?
—Save the allusions, Claire. It won’t get any better for you with the likes of john gideon running things. Henry reaches into a pocket of his robe for another nitro. By the way, any sightings of weird harold lately?
—Why, I thought you knew: he’s in jail. Just about the only prisoner the townies have, too—with cabana escaped, and the rest of them dead.
—Is anyone thinking of coming after me, oh my sweet representative in the adult world?
—No, Halverson convinced the townies you’re no threat, with your health problems and all...
—Yeah, great. Here I sit, a wuss in pyjamas with a wet washcloth for a hat. At least give me time to get back into street clothes before the Women’s Book Club comes for tea.
—It’s not like they don’t know you’re sick, Henry—don’t glare at me like that. I mean, you have the right to be sick—don’t you? Anyway, you decide on what you want to do, but the “ladies,” as you call them, will be here shortly.
There’s a knock at the back door. He decides not to hobble for the exit. He moves his chair at an angle, to face obliquely away from them as they file in. Runs the palm of his hand across two days’ worth of beard growth and for once, instead of feelin’ like a cowpoke off a long stay on the range, he feels the wire-brush cheek of a vagrant.
Rose and Arlene arrive together. They hug as Claire lets them in. Arlene sounds upset, but the women shut up pretty quick when Claire indicates the seated Henry facin’ away from them.
How can she hug that murderous bitch?
—If this is a bad time to visit, we’ll just leave and come later, Rose offers, directing her voice Henry’s way.
—Suit yourself, says Henry. Nobody here but us vegetables.
—May I stay? Rose has the gall to ask.
Claire must know everything. Mother may I? Yes you fuckin’ may, murderess.
—Suit y’self, he says, diggin’ his fingers into his thighs.
—You sure? Arlene presses. —We don’t want to slow down your recovery.
Million dollar word, that one. Touché. Claire’s recovery, Henry’s recovery. Might’ve been worse: rehab.
Henry says nothin’, but Claire indicates by a nod to her visitors that her husband will hold his peace—even if he does have to listen in, the room bein’ small as it is.
—Sheila Gordon can’t get here, too many townies out, reports Rose Seeton.
Sheila Gordon. This little cubbyhole really is turning into Central Command for The Women’s Movement. Or womankind, as john gideon likes to call it. You’d think a cunt like Rose might at least say something like I’m sorry about what happened with amos—or at least something. Ah, but I’d just shoot it down, and she knows it.
—Things look bad, continues Rose. —Our days of being able to communicate are limited. gideon is doing a “men’s movement” trip: drums, higher power, the whole bit. It’s just a matter of time before anyone without a moustache will either be raped or confined to barracks “for their own safety.”
—What can anyone expect from a bastard like that—who took a pass on havin’ kids and never got to be a kid himself? But Rose reddens, realizing what she just said. Arlene finds herself checking in with Claire, who looks away.
—They say he has no pets neither, injects Henry, but they let it slide.
The women are seated in the loveseat/sofa arrangement, around a large pot of tea Claire brewed for them. Henry declines his portion.
—Halverson’s with us, and he has as many as a third of the town’s men with him; Sheila Gordon is doing what she can to organize the town women and the more physically able teenagers. harold has promised to teach us how to run the ventilation equipment and the generators if we can bust him out.
—So that’s the plan, free papa harold, start over from square one? Oh, ladies, really...
—I don’t think so, says Rose, sippin’ her tea. —He’s come down a few pegs, sitting behind bars and being taunted by townies.
—Yes, and I sure was put on ice, right, MA? he blurts out reachin’ discretely for a nitro.
—I’d better leave—there’s no point in upsetting him; I didn’t think he’d stay... She stands to leave and cannot be persuaded to give Henry more time.
The second the door closes behind Rose Seeton; Henry feels like a petulant child, a whinger. After all, hadn’t he had the upper hand for years? She’s only doing what she has to do, seizing an opportunity, and here he is whining to heaven over it instead of being a gracious loser—a real gentleman.
Arlene, his own Arlene, approaches him, as Claire follows Rose out the door to try and coax her back. She puts her smooth hand on Henry’s bony shoulder and gives a little squeeze.
—Of course you hate her. But do you really think she meant for things to end up quite like this?
—I don’t know. You know what they say about the road to hell...
He reaches for her and pulls her by the waist, buryin’ his face in her chest. —What do you know, Arlene? How much did she tell you? He takes in her scent, a mix of stirrin’ and shame.
She strokes his hair and moves her other arm around his back, taken aback by how gaunt he is.
—Henry, Henry, I’m sorry… She worries for him. —Okay, so what do I know? Let me see, she says softly. —That Claire is, in a kind of a way, my biological mother, and that you’re in a kind of a way my biological father, but really, Rose has been both parents to me—and, even though “uncle” harold has never been around much, I can’t let him die in a cage.
Of course. Rose would be only too happy to take revenge on him and let her own brother rot—but has to think of Arlene’s feelings.
The door opens slightly, but closes again; Claire gives them time.
—How can Claire be so able to watch me like this? Has R
ose managed to turn her against me to this extent? Just listen to me whine...
—Claire isn’t against you. She loves you. It’s just that she’s off those nasty drugs, and she’s been getting these hypnosis-type treatments from Doc Halverson, so she’s less clingy—more independent.
—I’ve never seen her like this in all our years of marriage, even before this mess. What kind of treatments is he giving her?
—I’m not sure of their name, if that’s what you mean... she says, still kneadin’ the tense muscles of his neck and shoulders. —But she swears by them and wants us to get them too. She’s also taking some kind of antidepressant, I think.
Of course. Anyone who can hang in there with an arrogant, self-absorbed bastard like me must be a depressive.
He is quietly depressed himself. Passin’ on meals, sittin’ up at night, starin’ into space...
—And you—can you forgive me? he asks, hand over his brow as he waits, wonderin’ how he could even ask, given the liberties he took, the violations.
She leans over him and cradles his head to her, lettin’ him whimper for a while, near tears herself. Kisses him on the cheek and leaves as Claire discreetly enters, gives Arlene a silent wave goodbye and awaits the backlash that, with Henry, nearly always follows a moment of tenderness.
But none comes. Henry ignores her return—to take up the burnin’ question of the moment: how to play out the bad hand he’s been dealt.
Is there a role in the new world order for a cardiac cripple, a reformed reformer, an over-the-hill, mid-life cowboy with arteries like stiff twigs and a pathetic cravin’ for tobacco…tobacco bein’ the only deadly thing galloway had forbidden on his little planet—because he was “allergic,” even to the sound of it bein’ chawed?
Might galloway be goin’ through changes? Maybe he too is comin’ into touch with the kind o’ feelings Henry is now drownin’ in. What are these tears but a crying in my beer, a deadly swig of that worst of all human emotions—regret.
No, “Public Domain” would not be his last poem. He begins work on another.
Venus Betraying
The fine betrayal of you
sauntering into the bathhouse
manned by your gay friends, wearing nothing
but the black-and-white dragon kimono
I bought you.
You lie on your belly
as they lift you and expose you to the halogens
after months of letting me look
only in the dimmest light.
Two clones who are “into other men”
take turns massaging your slight-
ly imperfect parts
—all the more delicious
writhing on the bleached wood,
half of you tensing, then the other,
then the first again,
a bored Don Juan supporting your waist
while his buddy kneads one sweet loaf at a time,
a relaxation so total that you produce,
and laugh a nervous “pardon me...”
“Excuse us,” they answer,
with what fantasies?
That you’re a heavy-set friend?
Who knows what they do with a woman’s curves
though they adore them on the stage.
Are you adored or are you trifled?
Could you not have received
much the same attention from me?
But you were so deeply pickled in wine
whenever we made love, defending
against my interests,
the undeclared intentions...
So now, for you, love,
this last violation
without motive.
After he finishes it, he crumples it. How childish. If only I could remember the better man-and-wife times. When after orgasm, she wore the butterfly rash of satisfaction on her chest, that pungent sweetness escaping the sacred vertical pout. Odd, though, turning Arlene and Rose into gay men. Claire into a fag-hag. And me, a petulant, disembodied narrator? All sad, somehow very sad.
breakout
galloway in his cell. More an oversized tool shed, its walls dented—deformed outward in several spots from where a few rowdy townies that galloway himself salted away tried to break free. But the bolted seams managed to hold, Meccano magic, and the breakouts came to nothin’ but noise and effort—effort an’ noise—the thick padlock through the rings of the door and shed provin’ unbreachable.
galloway slowly wakin’ up, earlier than his townie guard—raisin’ his arms and re-testin’ the limits of his con-finement. Remembers a story Morgan told him about Black Panther leader Huey Newton—how this scrawny, tubercular, bright young man angrily spit blood at the cops when they threw him into a tiny cell. But when it finally came time to release him, he stepped free as a magnificently sculpted figure—havin’ spent most of his wakin’ hours doin’ push-ups since there warn’t any room fer any other kind of exercise. Jest push-ups. Hundreds of thousands of ’em.
All well and good for Huey Newton. He had a cause. I remember how Newton and Bobby Seale and their followers showed up at the California State Capitol carryin’ guns. It made even conservative Republicans so nervous they actually pushed for more gun control in America.
galloway takes out the tiny smuggled note with early next week —Rose on it. Leave it to a woman to sign her name on an incriminatin’ message. As though she wouldn’t also be arrested if they intercepted it. Too much into relationships, women’s age-old problem, the very reason for their lack of political power...unless you call feeding all the world’s babies “power”; I call it “responsibility,” and I am glad to be rid of it.
The electrical power goes on the fritz two or three times a day. It’s only a matter of time before the generators break down and they have to let me out to fix them. Better to get the back-up reactor online. Then there’s the filtered air valves that feed the complex and the plants that live in the greenhouses behind the filter screens. Only I know the codes for the tamper-proof locks that prevent unauthorized equipment tampering. gideon and the boys know that, or they would have dispatched me by now to the great beyond. But they also know that letting me live is an invitation to future trouble, even with barton gone and Morgan out of commission. I wonder if barton ever gave Henry my note. Just a matter of time before they torture me for the code to the bunker.
galloway receives somethin’ else besides the little crumpled note pushed through the crack between the yanked-on door and the shed wall. He’s been getting strange feelin’s—intimations that someone or somethin’ waits just outside these tin walls, tryin’ to communicate. The kind of feelin’ he used to get when cabana was around—after you’d done somethin’ you knew he didn’t like. cabana always had this way of insinuatin’ his thoughts—or more usually, cab not bein’ the most thoughtful o’ critters—his re-ackshuns.
Now it’s late Sunday night an’ galloway has a strong case of the feelin’s. So strong, he has to formulate his stand on bein’ “rescued.” Which ain’t easy to do, since 1) he no longer cares what happens to him, or anybody else and 2) he’s angry as hell at Rose for havin’ taken the law into her own hands and takin’ out his only decent conversation partner, and 3) the thought of havin’ to live with cabana—likely somewhere outside the dome in a high radiation zone or somewheres inside the tunnel system—makes the prospect of dyin’ seem temptin’.
If cabana does show up—like a kind of high-tech pet still loyal to its master—it’d be difficult and maybe even fatal to not go along fer the ride.
At bed-time on Sunday, galloway is let out of the tin shed to have his nighttime stretch and take a leak—even gideon won’t keep a man holed up with his own piss in a five-by-eight with nothin’ but a slat fo’ a window. John Gomez, an unremarkable townie, escorts him to a
little niche in the pipes he calls his office—complete with a picture of his wife and two kids—and tries as usual to make conversation—keepin’ his revolver ’cross his lap for future reference. Course John who’d worked as a fitter and welder could easily handle the likes of galloway with one hand tied behind his back.
—Mr. Galloway—er—Harold, are you willin’ yet to give mister gideon the combination to your bunker—so he can get at the master plans and instructions? Sorry to keep askin’ you, but I was told to keep at it.
“Harold” indeed. Where does this insolent joe-average townie get off...
I know what gideon wants. The lap of luxury pulls on fundamentalists as hard as it does on non-believers.
—Ignore me again, huh? Well...suit yerself. It’s just that if I were you, my back and joints would be pretty stiff from sittin’ in a cage, day after day. I’d want out... Maybe put in for a transfer to the larder, where there’s more room.
—What’s to stop your boss from killing me once he gets what he wants? asks galloway blandly, his tone changin’ because against the metal pipe ahead of him is an equally metallic shadow of a half-clothed form about three-quarters the size cabana used to be. In a second John Gomez catches galloway’s eyes doin’ a dart an’ he swerves around to see what’s behind him, but cabana turns his face too—his body blendin’ with the side of the pipe and no longer detectable.
Gomez turns back to galloway real-quick as if expectin’ to have been jumped by now: —Why, you connivin’? says Gomez, reachin’ for his gun and slowly risin’ from his chair. —Tryin’ to fake me out?
But a python slinks around Gomez’s neck and a second springin’ snake plucks his gun and throws it to harold galloway who simply looks down at it with a disinterest’d look. The coil tightens ’til Gomez’s eyes start to bulge and a gurgle comes from his broken windpipe, as he looks ’round for the picture of his wife and kids, on the verge of becomin’ history. cabana lets him fall to the ground in a swoon, then picks up the thrown gun himself, lookin’ through his reluctant escapee, and holds the gat face-even with the squirmin’ Gomez.