by John Gardner
It was not until Craine was in the plane for Chicago—from there they’d fly down to Carbondale—that the truth burst over him and he began to weep. He was going to live. The plane groaned and shuddered, then quieted, taking off. Never in his life had Craine experienced such emptiness, such revulsion and despair. Meakins, in the seat beside him, turned to look at him, wide-eyed, then reared forward in acute distress, reaching to touch Craine’s arm with both plump, young-womanish hands. “Jerry!” he cried softly. Never before had Meakins called him “Jerry.” Meakins wet his lips, baffled and embarrassed, blushing, then brought out, “Does something hurt?” Now he too had tears in his eyes, as if he’d guessed what the trouble was.
Craine shook his head. He couldn’t speak a word for fear of bursting into whooping sobs, part sorrow, part childish rage. He covered his face, pouring the tears into his hands.
“What’s the matter?” Meakins said. “Can I get you something?”
There was no way, of course, that Craine could say what was the matter. Time was the matter; the fact that people lived and died for nothing, and horribly at that. Meakins’ daughters, once pretty, now grotesquely fat. Craine’s parents, dead when he was too young to remember; the poor old-maid aunt who’d raised him, Aunt Harriet, her silly existence vanished from the face of the earth like a puff of her Evening in Paris face powder. His friends, all those people who, incredibly, had come to visit him—faster than the airplane was rumbling toward Chicago, they were flying to their graves, all for nothing, all part of the vast, unspeakable foolishness. Women he’d loved, should perhaps have married—he no longer knew even where any of them lived—all, all were shooting like greased lightning toward the grave, or were perhaps there already.
He pulled off his thick-lensed glasses to wipe his eyes, but the tears came pouring more profusely than ever, and a whimpering, uncontrollable, began to push up from his throat. All his defenses had abandoned him at once, even that comic, ironic detachment that had until now gotten him past the worst life could dump. He saw himself as the people now craning their necks must be seeing him, a hawk-nosed old derelict with deep-sunken, red, weeping eyes; an old limp suit grown three sizes too large; long, crooked fingers, stained fingernails. He could conjure up neither amusement or disgust, only sorrow at the waste, one more poor unlovable orphan wailing its heart out to no one in particular, for no good reason.
“Listen, let me get us a drink,” Meakins said. He reached up and pushed the stewardess button. “It’s emotional exhaustion, that’s all,” he said. “It’s a natural reaction.” He loosened his tie. “You’ve been holding it all in, that’s all. It’s natural.”
Now the stewardess was coming. When she reached their row she pushed the button that turned the little light off, then leaned over to look at Craine, then, in haste, at Meakins. She was blinking rapidly, probably wearing new contacts.
“My friend here would like a martini,” Meakins said, “—double; straight up, two olives. I’ll take the same.”
“Brothers and sisters, let us drown our woes in gin,” Craine said, and tried to laugh. At once he was sobbing again. There was a movie he’d seen once, German propaganda—he’d seen it in connection with a case up in Chicago. Thousands of childlike men and women in rows—braids, trim crew cuts—doing click, spin, click calisthenics. … something about “Christ the Athlete” …movie lighting that made the field where they exercised seem the pastures of heaven, terrible new Eden, mind of God with prefrontal lobotomy …
The stewardess looked at him, stopped blinking for an instant, then nodded to Meakins and backed away, turning and stretching out one arm, trailing it like a dancer, as she went.
The mood had eventually passed, of course. That was one thing you could say, things eventually passed. Perhaps it had been a significant period of his life, all things considered. For all his stubbornness, not even Craine could claim he was the same man he’d been before his brush with death. His beliefs had been secure, his patterns and emotions as solid as frozen ruts in a country lane. He’d known who he was, where he stood, what mattered in the world—almost nothing: good Scotch, healthy defecations (they were mutually exclusive, of course), a minimum of inconvenience, especially the inconvenience of dealing with people who had opinions, knew slogans, found significance in things. None of that had changed except—what? The way his heart leaped, blind to good sense, when he read the words What Does God Require of Me? It was as if the high fortress walls he’d built with the best of materials, the finest of plans, had for no earthly reason begun to open up seams so wide they let in rain and daylight, both radioactive. Sometimes, for no reason—but more and more frequently, these past three, four days—flashes of the closed-off past came back to him: an image of his aunt in her classroom, talking with her head tilted. She wore a blue dress—high collared—and small, light blue earrings. In his mind he heard the music that went with her: classical. She always played classical. In the long maple music bench she sat on when she played—it was glossy and smelled of lemon, he remembered—she had faded yellow books of Chopin, Schubert, Bach, Czerny, and one red book that said The John Thompson Method. He must have stared at it often as a child of six or seven, maybe older. He could see it plain as day. Craine squeezed his eyes shut tight, then opened them.
All languages, the Vedic priests believed.…
When he looked over from his book, he saw, as he’d known he would, a mouse under the bed, crouching motionless, as if aware that Craine was watching him. Craine thought of the cat at the restaurant and looked down at his book. Outside, he was aware without looking, it was now completely dark. His hands were trembling. A police siren wailed in the distance and passed perhaps a block or two away, speeding toward the edge of town, still greater darkness. He remembered the Scotch on the carpet beside his foot and reached down for it, but with the tips of his fingers on the rim he for some reason hesitated, listening again. His neighbor was playing music on the record-player, something classical: orchestral; German. He raised the glass and drank, then, setting down the glass again, drawing the book up to his eyes where he could read it, felt for his matches. With a part of his mind he was aware of a second mouse moving in stops and starts toward the first.
The reason he knew it was a young woman following him, he realized all at once, was that he’d seen her. Her face was soft and obscurely Oriental, possibly Semitic, like the faces on the walls of Egyptian tombs. In the momentary vision she was beautiful: dark hair, dark frightened eyes, large and slanted—curiously shaped, in any case, like the eyes on old statues from Cyprus. It was only for an instant that their eyes had met; he could not now remember where or even when: a day or two ago, perhaps. Quickly, he’d looked away, but not before he’d glimpsed something disquieting, even shocking, in the look she gave him: some ravenous appeal or legitimate demand, some claim she had on him, mystic and outrageous, nothing common nature could explain. There were words, in fact: Mr. Craine, you’re supposed to save my life—and look at you! Her lips had not moved. His heart had floundered, but then instantly his senses had come back to him and he’d known it was nothing, his drunken imagination playing tricks again. She was young, maybe twenty. They’d never met in their lives. Pretty girl, he’d thought, pursing his lips and frowning, turning his head slowly and casually to look again. She was gone. (Craine’s eyes moved left and right, left and right. His lips puckered tightly, sucking at the pipe. Smoke clouds billowed above him.) His hands trembled badly. He drank again. If his neighbor was listening to music, it occurred to him—now Craine was squinting, looking up over the book, crafty—then he couldn’t be writing poetry; too distracting. On the other hand, of course, if he was grading papers, or if some young woman was rolling around on the rug with him …
There was something important he’d been thinking about, or had meant to think about. He cast back, groping, but he’d lost it.
It was increasingly hard to keep his mind on the book. He’d slept, off and on, when he’d first come home, but he was d
rowsy again; no doubt the whiskey. Also the print grew increasingly blurry. Why he forced himself to read he could hardly have said, but he did, or rather tried to—drunkard’s discipline, yes—lipreading, insisting that his mind pay attention. His mind slipped around him, closing his eyes without his noticing, offering him a different, more surprising book. He read with increasing interest, increasing astonishment, until the whiskey glass slipped in his hand, waking him. He righted the glass, then on second thought set it on the floor beside his shoe, unaware that, of course, he was tricking himself again, making it easier to fall asleep. He pressed his rear end back farther in the chair, put his burnt-out pipe in his shirt pocket, and bent forward over the book, lipreading again, following the print with one finger. He read with fierce attention, but again he fooled himself, for though his eyes moved dutifully, focusing on the print, he was running over images in his mind.
Linguistic proliferation, the Vedic priests believed …
Craine had paused, a block from his office, Hannah Johnson standing ample and sweaty at his side. He’d turned around abruptly, but there was no one, or, rather, only those people he might have expected to see— shoppers, high-school students, people leaving work. He kept his panic hidden, eyes darting left and right, finding nothing. Almost without his knowing it, his eyes continued searching, waiting to pounce on some movement in a doorway, some shadow where there ought not to be one. Yellow leaves and old newspapers blew across the street, caught in the gutters, lifted over, and hurried on, like businessmen running with their heads bent. The air had the heavy tornado-weather smell that would be normal back in August, a month ago. He glanced at the sky—wide blue, slashed by jet streams and smudged, down lower, by yellow-white clouds from the smokestack at the edge of the university campus. They were running on crushed and oxygen-blasted sulfur coal; an experiment. “Whole country buried chin-deep in shit,” he muttered, less to Hannah than to the whole sinful nation. His bleary eyes aimed at the smoking horizon, out beyond the last of the city’s low buildings, southward. In the sky, high above the smoke, two hawks hung floating like kites. Craine’s head shook slightly, as if with palsy. He stood with his elbows clamped tightly to the sides of his chest, the left one supporting the Sanskrit book, his right fist, just above his overcoat pocket, closed around the top of the sack that held his whiskey. Through the smoke, he could make out traces of the gouged yellow hills, once thick with oaks and pines and, on the lower slopes, orchards. To the north, once corn land—beyond the range of his vision—lay five-mile-long strip mines, cobalt-blue, blood-red, and rust-colored pools where nothing was astir but invisible insects and the tongues of lizards.
Hannah Johnson bent forward and touched his forearm. “Don’t think about it, Craine,” she said sadly. “You’ll give yourself a heart attack.” To a passing stranger it would have seemed that she was giving him a quarter. Hannah was well kept, matronly, dressed too warmly for the autumn day. She wore a light, purple coat.
She turned her head, following the direction of his angry stare, and pursed her lips unhappily. “I remember when up there was the prettiest scenery in the world,” she said. The corner of her mouth tucked in—a trace of a long-suffering smile. She had the voice of a singer. She stood with her weight on her left leg, her right leg thrown jauntily forward. Her shoes were red. She said, “There was an old Baptist church out on Boskydell Road where my family used to go every Sunday in George Elroy’s pickup, all us children in the back.” She laughed and lightly slapped the air with her hand, remembering. “George Elroy would always sweep it out and put applecrates in for us to sit on, and down the road we’d go in our Sunday good dresses, all hooting and hollerin and wavin at the people … oh yes! The church was in the hollow—pretty white church just up among the trees from the railroad tracks where the granary set, before the fire. You wasn’t here when they still had the granary.” She glanced at him, her expression grieved, checking. “No, you was still in Chicago then, that’s right. It was a regular little village, Boskydell. Big old granary and apple barn, filling station, houses …That ole fire pretty much took all of it. The church is still there, though; mostly white folks now. That’s the way it is, y’know.” She tipped him a little smile and a shy look, as if slapping her knee. “You just get the neighborhood cleaned up nice and doggone it, in comes the white folks!” Craine grimaced back, not real anger, just whiskey, as Hannah no doubt knew. “Don’t think about it, Craine,” she said again, suddenly heavyhearted, and patted his forearm. “Everything gonna be all right. We got the Lord’s own promise.”
“We’ll see,” Craine muttered, looking angrily to the left. Hannah’s talk of God was no better for his temper than whiskey. The whole world’s dying of leukemia, he could have told her. We got twelve thousand tons of TNT for every living person on earth, if you call that living, and more every day, by the trainload, as fast as we can make it. But he said nothing, merely crunched his teeth together. His childish rage was more disgusting to Craine than all the rest.
He shook his arm free, not quite roughly, muttered his farewell and, turning with hardly a nod, walked on. She stood where he’d left her, queenly, surrounded by autumn gold, shaking her silvered head, looking after him. In his mind he watched her, though he walked in the opposite direction. She lived northeast, the Negro section, in a small, crowded house with tin-patched linoleum floors, purple carpeting, red and purple flowers in the windows—geraniums and purple statice. Craine lived downtown. She couldn’t help him, heaven knew. No one, as she must know, could help him. Not that Craine wanted or needed help (Craine set his jaw, sliding his eyes from left to right), staggering through his days, his drunkenness almost unnoticeable except to the canniest eye, he told himself—though perhaps he’d gone a little far there, today; crossed the line there with McClaren and the talking cat.
Craine hurried on toward his hotel room. If someone were to tell him the fates had set him down to be shot dead tomorrow (so Craine mused with the part of his mind not reading), he’d never bat an eye. He had no relatives, no friends, no possessions he cared about; he had no future, no past—a creature moving comfortably outside Time, as he’d tried to explain to McClaren.
His mind toyed briefly (his eyes moving over the page, left to right and downward, steadily) with the thought of Hannah Johnson’s sharp memories. He’d seen it many times, how she dipped into her past as if the whole thing were running like a movie in her head, Greer Garson and Alan Ladd—her husband T.J., just home from the war, grinning like a fool in his uniform; the birth of her children, their baptism days; the big house they lived in on Sycamore, up among the whites, before T.J. got in trouble. She spent half her time harking back or casting forward. A curious way to live, it seemed to Craine. He glanced over his shoulder; someone slipped into a doorway. Craine remembered, abruptly, something from his navy years—he’d served on a submarine in World War II. A few frozen images: his commanding officer with wrinkles around his eyes and his hand on his chin; a sunrise on the Pacific like a cheap picture postcard. And he remembered, less dimly, though dimly enough, some three, maybe four of the books he’d read then; it was there that he’d picked up his reading habit. The 42nd Parallel; a biography of Lincoln; a book on the formation of the universe—the slow collapse of dust clouds into solid, hot masses: creation as the closing of a fist. Try as he might, he could bring back nothing of the cabin, not even the bunk he read on or the color of the blankets. He could remember warm light, soft and yellow, as in a house, but he couldn’t remember the source. Casting back farther, back into his childhood, he could call back, except for an image of Aunt Harriet at the piano—nothing whatsoever. Now he was imagining—or rather dreaming, nodding over the book—that he was in dispute with someone about memory. He sat at a huge iron desk, trembling and defensive. “Why should I?” he snapped, cantankerous, full of business. He was both himself and the other man, it seemed. “Nothing?” he asked mildly—or the observer asked; the identification was not so clear now. “Nothing at all,” Craine a
nswered with a touch of defiance, whimpering in his dream. The observer, bearded and bespectacled, was on guard; he knew himself at the edge of some old unpleasantness. “Nothing!” Craine said firmly, angrily, in the darkness.
He waved his hands, explaining, and even as he did so he remembered traces of what it was that he could not remember. He was fishing from the bank on his uncle’s farm with his trim-bearded father, who was somehow a woman, his father aloof, his cuffs cocked high above his citified socks, his pose as patient and serene as the sunlight in the snakegrass around them. All this Craine saw, though staring down in intense fascination and half-mystical alarm at the slow-moving, clay-yellow water, thick gumbo, from which the deadmen would rise. He knew what was down there, or some of it: snapping turtles, gars, enormous slick frogs, and at the bottom, where the wood and flesh of the deadmen turned slowly to earth— bewhiskered catfish. When the line went taut Craine’s heart leaped, terrified, seeing already what would happen in an instant—the fish wildly fluttering above the water, like his heart, spinning in the light like a large silver coin, then thumping to the grass, where it would flop and suck for breath, already dying, laboring against air. His father’s neat hands were like a doctor’s, touching it. His glasses blinked light. Little Craine stared, wide-eyed, and held his breath. So it went again and again, each time less frightening. After a while one got used to these things, death and life touching, like his father’s pale fingers on the fish. The threat drew back a ways, retreated into the shadows of the nettles, then farther, into the trees. He sat in warm sunlight, the world grew increasingly rational; his father cleaned his glasses. Though Craine’s heart beat rapidly, perhaps he had already begun to forget. Soon nothing would remain, of this or of anything else from his childhood, except at night. At night, years later (so he told the icy observer, hurriedly whispering), he would dream of murderous black catfish, slow-moving as zeppelins, prowling among the stars.