Hymn
Page 30
Dumbly, with the head-dipping motion of a wounded hippopotamus, Waldo shuffled on his knees toward her. She stepped back once, then twice, then stepped back again.
‘I’ll kill you,’ Waldo blubbered, through grotesquely inflated lips. ‘I swear to God that I’ll kill you!’
He threw aside one of the chairs, then tipped over the table.
‘Whatever you are, I’m going to kill you!’
He tried to pick himself up, stumbled, and fell heavily on top of her. She jarred backwards on the balcony, and where her hand clawed against the planking, she burned black bitter-smelling fingerprints into the wood. ‘Kill you!’ Waldo repeated, and lifted both fists high above his head, ready to smash them down on to her face, the way that he had once seen his father kill a berserk dog.
But Celia clung on to him, arms and thighs, and said wildly, ‘Come on, Waldo! Maybe you and I were always meant to make love together! A special kind of love, yes? Really hot!’
She pressed his blistered face against her bare breasts, and then she ignited him, like a bonfire. He shrieked and twisted and clawed for anything to help him get away. His shoes drummed against the planking of the balcony. ‘Help me! Somebody help me!’ But the flames consumed him as fiercely as if he had been moulded out of paraffin wax.
The pain became so intolerable that he managed to drag himself somehow up on to his knees again, and then on to his feet. He was blazing from head to foot. His shoes crackled and spat as the polish burned.
He stood by the rail with the ocean wind fanning his flames until they roared. The pain, at first excruciating, seemed to burn out and fade, and soon he felt that it was possible to stand here ablaze and not to die. The seagulls were crying. It was dark but the seagulls were crying. He was sure he would hear his grandpa as they walked along the seashore. Don’t worry, young Waldo. Never fear. Now you can fly, too.
He climbed burning on to the wooden rail around the balcony, and balanced for a moment with flames flying out behind him like a monstrous cloak. He opened his mouth to call to his grandpa and fire burst out from between his teeth. He felt as if he were alight both inside and out.
You can fly, Waldo. You can fly.
So, he flew. Over and over in the darkness, forty blazing feet, until he landed with a thunder of flame and a smack of steam into a bubbling hot tub on the balcony below. The tub was occupied by a hairy-chested orthodontist and a redheaded girl who wasn’t his wife, and Waldo’s fiery arrival in his hot tub marked the moment when his marriage, his affair, his practice and his sanity instantaneously and simultaneously vanished.
On the balcony above them, Celia listened to them screaming and gibbering in horror. Then she buttoned her gloves, walked through the restaurant, and let herself out. A Merecedes 380SL was waiting by the kerb, its engine running, its hood dull with bird-droppings and grime. Otto was sitting behind the wheel, his mouth pursed, his cheeks puffed out oddly.
‘Del Mar,’ said Celia. ‘They’re hiding in his lawyer’s beach-house. I’ll direct you.’
Otto nodded, without saying a word.
‘Are you all right?’ Celia asked him.
Otto nodded again, and then opened his mouth. His tongue was crowded with twenty or thirty glistening green-and-black blowflies, all alive, all struggling, but stuck to his tongue with saliva. Otto closed his mouth again, then sucked, then crunched, then swallowed.
Celia said very little on the way to Del Mar, except ‘Right here . . .’ or ‘Slow . . .’ or ‘Watch this intersection . . .’ She was beginning to feel that perhaps her burning had changed her more than she had realized . . . more than Otto had promised her. She knew that she had liked Waldo—loved him, almost. Yet she had felt no remorse when she had burned his face. She had felt no regret when he had plunged blazing off the balcony. In fact, she had felt something disturbing and dangerous—a pleasure in witnessing the agonized death throes of another human being that was almost sexual.
She slipped her hand into her raincoat, and cupped herself between her legs. Moisture and fire. Death and delight. She could hardly wait to find Lloyd again. She could hardly wait to hold him. She trembled at the thought of what they would be doing on the night of the solstice, when the year turned, and the fires burned, and the master race would be reborn.
Otto glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. ‘Was machst du, Celia?’ he asked her.
‘I’m thinking, that’s all.’
‘Did you burn Slonimsky?’
She whispered, ‘Yes.’
Otto wiped stray fly-wings from his lips with the back of his withered hand. ‘So for all Jews,’ he remarked. ‘They escaped once, we won’t fail a second time.’
Lloyd managed to adjust the antenna of the clapped-out Zenith television so that they could watch the late-night news. For most of the bulletin, the Chinese anchorwoman’s face was livid blue, with a thin wavering green moustache, but intelligible sound was all that they needed.
‘Highway Patrol officers were forced to walk five and a half miles across the Anza Borrego State Park this evening when their patrol car was borrowed by two men and a woman whom they had arrested on suspicion of grand theft auto. The barefaced suspects commandeered the Highway Patrol vehicle when the officers temporarily vacated it to interview two hitch-hikers, and used it to return to the Mercedes sedan which they were originally suspected of having stolen . . .’
‘Hitch-hikers!’ exclaimed Tony Express, scornfully. ‘Even the cops can’t tell the truth these days!’
‘What did you expect them to say?’ asked Lloyd. ‘”We stopped to talk to these two Pechanga Indians, one twelve and one seventy, because they overtook us on foot when we were travelling at fifty-five miles an hour in a car”? Give the poor guys a break.’
They had made themselves as comfortable as they could in Dan Tabares’ beach-house. It was one of a row of twenty or thirty shabby oceanfront properties, reached by a derelict back street behind restaurants and stores and automobile body shops. Most of the beach-houses were owned by inland hotels who liked to boast that they had somewhere for guests to enjoy the ocean, or by downtown San Diego businessmen like Dan Tabares who brought noisy gangs of middle-aged men out for a weekend of fishing and Miller-drinking and leering at the local nubility.
The large damp-smelling living-room was furnished with white-painted cane sofas, which were scattered with bamboo-patterned foam cushions, and it was appallingly lit from above, so that they all looked much more tired than they really were. The kitchen was decorated in brown and orange, and boasted a filthy microwave, an electric can-opener encrusted with age-blackened tomato-sauce, and an old Betty Furness-style refrigerator containing two bottles of flat soda-water and something khaki and effervescent that, in another life, had probably been a quarter of a pound of liverwurst.
After they had arrived, Lloyd and Kathleen had driven to the nearest late-night market for bread, bacon, fresh vegetables, peaches, doughnuts, Cheerios, coffee, 7-Up, chocolate bars, Smirnoff vodka, Wild Turkey whisky, and all the other essentials of a civilized existence.
There was nothing in the beach-house that didn’t look as if it hadn’t been rejected from Dan Tabares’ main house, right down to the Goodyear ashtray and the tattered real-estate poster for Rancho Jamul Estates, Your place . . . in the country (actual view). Two of the bedrooms were smallish and mean, with folding beds. The main bedroom had been painted in garish purple, with a tasteless reproduction oil-painting above the bed of a girl in a wide-brimmed hat standing on the seashore with her skirt billowing up, so that her bare bottom was revealed.
Kathleen went out on to the boardwalk in front of the beach-house. From there, half-a-dozen wooden steps led down to the sand. She stood for a while listening to the sound of the surf. Once he had listened to the rest of the news, Lloyd came to join her.
‘Hope those highway patrolmen didn’t get into too much trouble,’ he said.
‘Freshen your drink?’ Lloyd asked her.
She shook her head. ‘I’m going inside in a moment. The ocean always scares me at night-time. It sounds like hungry bears.’
‘Maybe you should get some sleep,’ Lloyd suggested. ‘I’ve straightened the bed for you.’
‘So where were you thinking of sleeping?’
‘I’ll take one of the couches.’
She shook her head. ‘Those couches are disgusting. They stink of beer. I’m sure that you and I can manage to sleep together without doing anything immoral.’
Lloyd smiled, and swallowed whisky. ‘Depends what you mean by immoral.’
‘Just try me.’
They stood outside a while longer, finishing their drinks, and then they went back inside. Tony Express had showered and washed his teeth, and was already in bed, his dark glasses folded neatly on his bedside table. His milkwhite eyes stared at the ceiling, his hands were clasped across his chest.
Lloyd sat on the side of his bed. ‘Do you ever pray before you go to sleep?’ he asked him.
‘Unh-hunh,’ said Tony Express. ‘Praying’s for the birds, man.’
‘You’d be surprised how often it helps, even if you don’t believe in it.’
‘Well, I’m desperate, man, but I’m not that desperate.’
‘Didn’t your grandfather ever read to you?’
‘John Dull Knife? He can’t read, man. But he knows some pretty good stories about the old days, before the paleface honky long-knives stole our land, took all our women and turned our sacred lodges into Safeways.’
Lloyd smiled. ‘And what does he say to you, before he turns out the light?’
‘He always says, “I don’t know why the hell I’m doing this, you can’t see it anyway.”’
Lloyd reached out and took hold of Tony Express’ hand. ‘You’re something special, you know that?’
‘Yeah, man, I know it.’
Switching off the cheap bedside lamp, Lloyd left Tony Express and went to see Franklin, who was lying on his bed fully dressed, looking tense.
‘Everything all right?’ Lloyd wanted to know.
‘I guess so. I feel funny, that’s all. Edgy, I’m not used to being free.’
‘You’ll get used to it quick enough. You sure don’t want to go back to Otto and Helmwige, do you?’
‘I don’t know. I still don’t feel right.’
‘What do you want me to do, chain you to the bed?’
Franklin glanced up at him, and then said hoarsely, ‘No. No more of that. That was when I didn’t have a name, and they made me feel like everything bad that happened in the world was my father’s fault, because my father had been bred by Josef Mengele, and because it was all my father’s fault, it was my fault, too.’
He paused for a moment, and then he said, ‘It’s still hard for me to think that it isn’t.’
‘What made you change your mind about it? What made you decide to run away?’
‘It was something I heard you say to Otto, when you first came to the house. He told you that I wasn’t even a person, and I heard you say, so angrily, “what the hell is he, then, two orders of eggroll to go?”’
Lloyd couldn’t help laughing, but Franklin was quite serious. There were tears in his eyes. ‘That was the first time that anybody had said that I was a person, and was angry with Otto because he tried to say that I wasn’t.’
Lloyd said, ‘All right, eggroll. Time to get some sleep.’
‘You know something?’ said Franklin. ‘I never knew my father, although Helmwige showed me some pictures they took in New Orleans when they came to America after the war. I never knew my mother either. Otto had to choose somebody. I don’t know who, or how.’
‘Your father wasn’t around when you were young?’
Franklin shook his head. ‘Nor my mother. I never even saw a picture of my mother.’
There was nothing that Lloyd could say. He was already aware that Otto was completely cold-blooded, and that he would do anything to anyone in order to achieve the birth of his master race, but somehow the way in which he had arranged for Franklin’s conception and upbringing—not because he had wanted to, but because the Führer had decreed it—was beyond the edge of any kind of human cruelty that Lloyd could think of. It was almost unbearable for him to think of Franklin’s childhood years—nameless, unloved, beaten and sexually abused. The fact that he had somehow managed to survive with his sanity intact was a miracle which was deserving of anybody’s prayers, even Tony Express’s.
Franklin said, ‘You know what I used to pretend? You won’t laugh, will you?’
‘Of course not. Tell me.’
‘I used to pretend that the mom and dad in Flicka were my real parents. Whenever they came on to the TV, I used to turn down the sound and talk to them.’
Lloyd laid his hand on Franklin’s shoulder. ‘A whole lot of kids do the same kind of thing, Franklin. A whole lot of adults, too.’ He was suddenly taken back to his own childhood, lying on his stomach on the worn-out brown rug in front of the black-and-white television watching Duncan Renaldo cantering across the screen. Adios, amigos, see you soon! He closed Franklin’s door and returned to the living-room. Some old late-night movie was playing, and he switched it off. Kathleen was already in the bedroom: the door was ajar and the light was on. There was a smell of Badedas shower-gel, too. He went to the bedroom door and knocked.
‘You want a nightcap?’ he asked her.
‘Sure. You can come on in, if you want to.’
Hesitantly, he edged open the door, and then stepped inside. The bedcovers were folded back, the pillows plumped up. Kathleen was standing in front of the bathroom basin, washing her pantyhose. She was wearing a man’s striped shirt that she had found in Dan Tabares’ closet.
Lloyd said, ‘This reminds me of an old Clark Gable movie. You’re sure you don’t mind if we sleep together?’
She hung up her pantyhose on a wire coathanger and came into the bedroom. ‘That’s very gentlemanly of you. But aren’t you being a little arrogant?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Aren’t you being a little arrogant in assuming that I might even think of doing anything but sleeping?’
Lloyd sat down on the end of the bed and prised off his shoes. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I guess I’m just exhausted.’
He went through to the tiny bathroom and stepped into the pink-tiled shower-stall. He turned on the shower and stood for a long time letting the water gush straight into his face. He hoped to God that he had the strength to carry this thing through, and that he would understand how to deal with Otto and Helmwige when the time came.
Even more than that, he hoped that he would understand how to deal with Celia.
He dried himself and dressed in voluminous white shorts and a T-shirt which said Mothers And Fathers Italian Association. By the time he came back into the bedroom with his mouth tasting of Crest, Kathleen was already in bed, reading an ancient copy of Reader’s Digest. He climbed in beside her. She felt warm; and he was surprised how good it was to lie next to a woman again.
‘Anything good?’ he asked her, nodding toward the magazine.
She shook her head. ‘The usual. How the pilot of a crashed plane crawled nine miles with his leg torn off.’
He rested his head on the pillow and looked at her closely. ‘Are you a tough lady or is that just the impression you’re trying to give me?’
She closed the Digest and dropped it on to the floor. ‘I lived for twelve years with a man I wasn’t sure I loved, and then I lost him. I’ve cried about it, for sure, although I’m not sure why. Maybe I’ve been crying for me, rather t
han him. All those years that could have been better, and weren’t. Maybe it took Mike’s death to wake me up.’
Lloyd said, ‘You’ve got Tom.’
Kathleen nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right, and I wouldn’t give up Tom for anything. But if I’d never met Mike, Tom would never have been born. I would have had some other child, by somebody else.’
‘I don’t know whether you can think like that,’ Lloyd replied.
‘Well, maybe not,’ she said, her finger tracing invisible patterns on the quilt. ‘But everybody’s entitled to some “might-have-beens”, don’t you think so?’
‘I guess.’ Lloyd tugged the light-pull, and the bedroom was swallowed in darkness. Kathleen leaned over him and kissed his cheek and said, ‘Sleep well.’ He was very conscious of the weight and warmth of her breast inside the shirt she was wearing, but he didn’t want to think about getting involved with her. Not now, not with this crisis on his hands. And besides, he wasn’t even sure how much he liked her. She seemed to have a cool, well-suppressed side to her, a willingness to suffer in silence but to resent her suffering afterwards. Lloyd preferred people to say what they meant, right up front. He didn’t have any talent for duplicity.
‘Good night,’ he told her, and turned over.
He lay awake for a long time, listening to Kathleen breathing next to him and the nearby churning of the surf. He kept thinking of that rhyme that Tony Express had repeated,
O Ma Rainey
Li’l and low,
Sing us ‘bout de hard luck
Roun’ our do’;
Sing us ‘bout de lonesome road
We mus’ go.
He slept. He dreamed that Celia was standing watching him, with fire pouring from her eyes and mouth. He dreamed that Celia was sliding closer. He dreamed that she was bending over him. He dreamed that she was kissing his cheek.