The Heat of the Sun

by Rain, David

  ‘Just my aunt. She’s all that’s left.’

  ‘You’re lucky. Family’s a terrible thing.’

  ‘Only people who have families say that.’ My deepest wish was to see my father alive again.

  Le Vol was eager to hear about my travels. This embarrassed me: what had I been but my father’s passenger? Through the jagged window, Blaze Hall flared in the failing light. The main block of the school was a fine red-brick mansion, an English country house spirited across the ocean.

  ‘Have you thought about this war?’ Le Vol gestured with the pipe, as if, of a sudden, the war were all around us. We could have been in a lookout somewhere, with the front advancing rapidly. I strained for sounds of shelling, for the stuttering clack of machine-gun fire.

  A dog barked in the distance.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘It’s as if everything changed as soon as I left France. I think about it all, Notre Dame and the Boulevard Saint Michel and the Arc de Triomphe, and don’t understand how there can be a war. Not in France.’

  ‘Ever heard of Agincourt? Ever heard of Waterloo? Nothing lasts, Sharpless. Things get made. Then they fall apart.’

  ‘You’ve been reading Mr Adams again,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Adams, Mr Wells.’ Le Vol patted a pocket and drew forth a book: The World Set Free. He leafed through the pages. ‘Don’t rely on anything, that’s the lesson of our lives. Maybe one day there’ll be a world government, bringing peace to all. More likely, there’ll be bombs that kill everything, raining down from the air. The end of the world as we know it. Ever wonder what you’ll do when they let you out of here, Sharpless?’

  ‘When I’m grown up? Why, what will you be?’

  ‘I’m going to travel. See the world. While it’s still there.’

  ‘That’s a thing to do, not to be,’ I said.

  ‘You could come with me – hoboes, how about it? See America, boxcar by boxcar!’ I thought he was mocking me, but I made no protest. ‘Last year in St Paul, when I had rheumatic fever, I used to lie in a window seat in the afternoons. I was so bored I wanted to die. Horses went by, and trolley cars and automobiles, and I thought: Take me with you. If only they’d take me wherever they were going. I don’t want to be sick. I don’t want to be weak. And I won’t be. Nor should you. One day you’ll throw away that walking stick.’

  The pipe passed between us, back and forth. Blue-grey smoke swirled around us in the shadowy, chill space, and I wondered if Le Vol could really like me. I had never been friends with another boy. Cold seeped through my flannels and I thought of the body in the tomb beneath me; of course, it would be nothing now but a cage of bones.

  Le Vol let down his drawn-up knees, kicking his heels against mossy stone. He yawned and stretched, knitting together his fingers; his jacket hung open and his bony ribs strained beneath the tautened whiteness of his shirt. Time thickened and slowed. I looked away: at the rusted, hanging door of the vault; at the leaf-scattered floor; at Le Vol again, his face curiously blank, his lips a little parted.

  I had known this would happen. What moved me was not desire, but inevitability. I stood between the tombs; Le Vol shifted his hips. Lightly, I touched his shoulders, his chest, and felt for a moment a welling power, as if I could have all the things I wanted, as if all I wished would come to pass. We were about to do what other fellows did. Would we speak of it when it was over? I let my hand descend, feeling the hardness beneath his grey flannels. I tugged at his fly buttons. Again, closer, came the barking of the dog, and I wondered if Le Vol had heard it too.

  There was a sound of running, of raised, excited voices. Le Vol pushed me away.

  Somebody screamed.

  ‘Get him! Get him!’ We knew the voices.

  ‘Pussy in the well! Pussy in the well!’ Tramplings came from the graveyard: hard, insistent. A scuffle, blows.

  ‘Damn, he bit me!’ (Who bit? Hunter? No, not Hunter.)

  ‘Quick, the rope, you idiot!’

  How close they were! Hunter was frantic.

  The scream again: a terrified wail.

  ‘No... don’t!’ When I grabbed Le Vol’s shoulder he had not yet moved; now, hunching low, he blundered back through vegetable darkness. Standing, swaying, alone in the stony cell, I could hear all that happened, picture it too: Le Vol erupting, dishevelled, from the vines; Scranway turning, eyes gleaming, as his henchmen, Quibble and Kane, readied the victim for the sacrifice.

  ‘Leave him. What’s he done?’ – This from Le Vol.

  ‘Why,’ demanded Quibble, ‘are you lurking, Le Vol?’

  ‘Lurker Le Vol... Lurker Le Vol!’ What a fool was Kane!

  Quibble cursed. ‘Keep hold of him. Stop squirming, Billy Billicay!’

  Billicay: I knew the name – a skinny fellow with porcupine hair and little round spectacles. I had seen him often, looking lost, and wondered how such a boy could survive at Blaze.

  ‘Leave him, I said!’ – Le Vol again.

  A crunch, a crack. Hunter barked.

  Too late, I knew what I must do. Knuckles whitening on my ashplant, I lowered myself to my knees and painfully left Nirvana, digging my way through stalky dark obstructions. Burrs pricked me, leaves slapped my face; then came a pain that seared my right leg, in all the six places where it had shattered. I sank down, gripping my shin as if to hold it together. From outside came no sounds of struggle any more, only a whimpering, then laughter.

  I had heard about the game called Pussy in the Well. Somewhere in the grounds of Blaze was the real well down which the ‘pussy’ had once been dangled. It had been covered over years ago, after one too many broken bodies had been hauled up from the bottom. But if no well was available, there were always pussies, and other fellows could improvise.

  Through screening undergrowth, this is what I saw: Le Vol, unmoving, prone between two leaning, mossy headstones; Quibble, high in the branches of a yew, rope at the ready, fixing it in place; Kane, when the rope dropped, looping it under the armpits of the terrified Billy Billicay.

  Quibble leaped from the branches. He tugged at the end of the rope. How gleefully they cried out – bullet-headed Quibble, knife-nosed Kane – as little Billy Billicay rose in the air!

  And standing by, watching almost indifferently, Scranway only smiled and held Hunter’s lead. Not for Eddie Scranway the sordid exigencies of bullying, the raised voices, the grappling, the blows; his role was to direct, to inspire, and, when appropriate, to administer urbanely the coup de grâce.

  Edward F. Scranway, Jr was the handsomest fellow at Blaze, his uniform always immaculate, his nails neatly manicured, his patent-leather hair never in need of brushing. A man already, he shaved with casual ostentation every morning in the dorm bathroom, towel tucked around tight torso, muscles rippling in his bent right arm. One thought of Scranway and imagined a gleaming blade travelling smoothly over an uptilted, moist jaw.

  When he let Hunter go, I thought the dog would bound forward, leaping up, snapping at Billy Billicay’s heels. Instead, Scranway, with a raised finger, commanded Hunter to stay, and Hunter stayed.

  Quibble and Kane stepped back respectfully as their master advanced upon the strung-up victim. Billy Billicay – shoulders hunched, jacket rucked up around the rope – was too afraid to do more than snivel. His spectacles flashed; his feet, unkicking, hung at the height of Scranway’s chest as Scranway took in hand first one little shoe, then the other, unknotting the laces with the air of a fond father tending a beloved child. After plucking off the shoes and peeling off the socks, he handed the items to Kane, who received them gravely, like a manservant.

  The final touch was accomplished with adroitness still more admirable. Reaching up, Scranway fondled at the fastenings of Billy Billicay’s trousers, tugged them down, underwear and all, and tossed them inside out to Quibble, who slung them over his shoulder. The trousers – that was an essential part of Pussy in the Well: should Billy Billicay find his way down from the tree, there must be no easy end to his humiliation.

/>   The little party stood surveying their handiwork. A delighted Kane chanted, ‘Pussy in the well! Pussy in the well!’ and Quibble cawed, but Scranway hushed them – as if, at this pinnacle of accomplishment, there could be no place for vulgarity. Dread filled me as I gazed upon Billy Billicay’s hairless, pale thighs. A child: just a child.

  With a curt laugh, Scranway tapped the little boy’s hip, setting him swaying like a pendulum; then, as if he were bored, he turned on his heels and strode off through the crunching leaves.

  Hunter padded obediently behind; Quibble too. Kane leaped up on a mossy slab and danced. As he shuffled, his head swayed from side to side and his nose seemed more than usually like the point of a knife, cleaving the air with thoughtless strokes. Kane was a scarecrow of a fellow, quite without the lumpy bulk of Quibble.

  Only after Kane followed the others did I pull myself from the graveyard jungle. I had torn my jacket; there was a scratch on my cheek; I felt the wetness of flowing blood. Floundering, I made my way to Le Vol. Almost sobbing, I shook him and told him he was a fool.

  His eyes opened. ‘Damn Quibble. His fist’s like a rock.’

  We did our best to save Billy Billicay. There was no need to cut him down from the tree. His arms, pushed upwards by the tautened rope, slipped from harness of their own accord, and down he dropped. I reached him first. His spectacles were smashed. I took off my jacket and tied it like an apron around his naked thighs. Le Vol lifted him in his arms and carried him. Billy Billicay was light, but the journey was long. ‘It’s all right, Billy,’ and ‘Not long, Billy,’ and ‘We’ll protect you, Billy,’ we said, but Billy Billicay was silent all the way.

  By the time we got back it was dark, and the others were in the dining hall. Furtively, Le Vol and I took Billy Billicay up to the dorm and put him to bed. With the unspoken, steady conviction of schoolboys, we would say nothing of what Scranway had done: it was our secret, as if we were ashamed.

  We could not have saved Billy Billicay. I smoothed his chill forehead. In stripy pyjamas, he lay back on his pillow. Without his spectacles, his eyes were haunted, hollow, as if already he had left life behind. No one knew much about Billy Billicay. He was a person of no importance, one of those destined to pass through the world like a phantom, leaving no mark.

  The day after, Billy Billicay rose as if nothing had happened, sat in the dining hall in his usual silence, and slipped crabwise down the corridors, eyes averted. The day after that, he cut classes in the afternoon. No one knew where he had gone; it was some time, indeed, before the alarm was raised. Later, we heard that they had found him in the graveyard.

  The rope, secured by Quibble, still hung from the tree.

  McManus II, the dorm room where I slept at Blaze, was a long, high-ceilinged chamber, partitioned in parallel lines. The partitions, evidently, had been put in place to afford us some protection against violence and immorality; in truth, they fostered both. The construction was of the flimsiest. No doors were provided, only curtains; cubicles were open at the top, and fellows could easily scale the dividing walls. In many places, partitions had been punched through; spyholes had been gouged and stuck up with chewing gum. Each cubicle contained an army-style cot, usually rickety, with a cabinet beside it that could not be locked. In the daytime, the place was merely drab, cheerless; at night, when moonlight slanted through the windows and spilled over the tops of the partitions, it became a place of fear. Many times I lay awake, listening to the creakings of the wind, the hootings of an owl, and, closer at hand, the whisperings and suppressed laughter, the furtive rockings, the gasps and sometimes thumpings and shouts that ended abruptly with a dazzle of light and a master’s angry cries.

  One afternoon, soon after Billy Billicay’s death, I asked to be excused from class, saying I was unwell. It was not a lie: a febrile nervousness had afflicted me since that day at Nirvana. I went up to the dorm. The light was a filmy grey. How strange they seemed, these lines of cubicles!

  Mine was number twelve. I pulled back the curtain on its rattling pole. I sat on the cot and it squeaked, sagged. Pictures – a horse, an actress, an automobile – had been pasted to the partitions by fellows in the past; pasted up, torn away, and pasted over again, leaving a palimpsest of ragged colours and shapes. I thought of the evening ahead: hobbies hour, dinner, study hall, prayers. I thought of the day to come, with its unwanted lessons: Literature, History, Latin. I thought of Billy Billicay, of what a fool he had been. How little imagination, to think that his life could never change! – as if all he had been or ever could be was Pussy in the Well, dangling from the tree, while the elegant, rough inquisitor ripped his trousers down.

  I thought about my father. He told me once that in the life of every man there was one great good fortune and one misfortune of equal force. What these were in his case he never went on to tell me, but my good fortune, if I had one, was to be his son. Addison Sharpless was a man of no particular gifts – he was difficult to love, moody, dissolute, but it is to him that I owe my peripatetic life and that outsider’s angle that (I like to think) has made me a writer. He was a Southerner. Born in Georgia after the Civil War, he was the heir of a ruined family, remnants of an ancien régime clinging to the tatters of old ways. As a boy, roaming their shabby plantation, he dreamed of a life unburdened by the past, and, after quarrelling with my grandfather, lighted out for wilder regions of plains, mountains, deserts: Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah. Successively he became a saddle-maker’s assistant, a dry-goods merchant, a traveller in patent medicines. In San Francisco he found himself in charge of the customs house, and it was there, in 1900, at the age of thirty-four, that he married the harbourmaster’s daughter. I was born a year later.

  My father took up a consular posting and we sailed to Nagasaki. The posting was the first of many. Whether he was determined to proceed ever westwards, perpetually in flight from his origins, I cannot say, but by the time I was eight years old I found myself in Paris. There was much I could barely remember: not Japan, where I had lived in the obliviousness of infancy; not Indochine, where Mama had died, sinking beneath a feverish burden while I lay in my little bed, unknowing, and the tin roofs drummed with monsoonal rains. There was Ceylon: what was Ceylon? Green, interminable terraced hills watched from the window of a climbing train. Turkey: what was Turkey? A man in a fez, a bubbling pipe, the weird high wailings of Mohammedan calls to prayer.

  Only France flamed out with the vividness of life. Fondly, I recalled my father on honey-coloured boulevards, a portly figure in a frock coat, with moustache neatly waxed and the cane that he liked to carry, spinning it sometimes in a white-gloved hand. He referred to this gentlemanly affectation as his ‘ashplant’: a knobbly sapling of iron-tough wood, lacquered darkly black. How settled he seemed, how magnificently middle-aged! He kept a mistress in the Latin Quarter, a buxom, high-coloured girl from Dieppe with a delightful kindly laugh.

  In Paris, I barely thought of myself as American. America was a dream: America was photographs, sepia images in a crackly-backed book. What had they to do with me, this tumbledown house in a place called Georgia, this beautiful unremembered Mama, this Addison Sharpless from another life, strangely slender, in a straw boater by a boardwalk rail? Slipped between leaves was a postcard of San Francisco; visible in the picture, indicated by an arrow, was the low, long apartment house, glaring white as a monastery, where Woodley Addison Sharpless made his entrance into the world. His American life had been brief. Days later, we left the white apartment house for the ship that waited to bear us away, across the blue Pacific and out into the world.

  My misfortune, which for many years would outweigh my sense of good fortune, happened in Paris, one afternoon on the Pont Saint Michel. My father was taking me to tea with his mistress when suddenly he collapsed. His ashplant clattered into the gutter; his trilby rolled across the cobblestones and he clutched his heart, convulsing. A woman screamed, and I cried out and kicked as strangers, milling forward, shouldered me aside, bearing me away from my dying fa
ther. Two days later, on the Champs-Elysées, I ran into traffic and almost died. How could I know where I was going? Tears blinded me.

  I had tried before, and failed, to write about this in my journal. I tried again now and had barely begun my entry when noises in the dormitory interrupted me. I was alarmed. If I were sick, I should have gone to the infirmary; to be in dorms in daytime was forbidden. First came a footstep. Then a shuffle. Next, a creak, followed to my amazement by raucous music, horns squealing with brassy impertinence. I peered down the aisle. Billy Billicay’s cubicle lay at the far end: number thirty. It had been empty since he died. The sounds, I felt certain, were from there.

  Riding over the music came a brazen, mocking voice – whether male or female, it was hard to tell – that first chanted some nonsensical recitative about sweethearts, love, and love lost, before bellowing out how you’d miss me, honey, miss my huggin’, miss my kissin’, some of these days when I was far away.

  At Billy Billicay’s cubicle, the curtain was open, and inside, busying himself with unpacking, was a new fellow. The first thing I remarked was his thick, unusually blond hair. He wore it a little long but not at all raggedly; it shone out even in the dusky gloom. Fellows at Blaze, Scranway aside, were shabby; this fellow was neat. His uniform, as he moved, seemed barely to crumple, as if made of a special fabric denied to the rest of us. A ring flashed on a finger. Bending down, averted from me, he retrieved a rolled-up sock from the floor.

  Only after he stood again did the fellow see me watching him. He smiled. His mouth was wide, full-lipped, the teeth white and regular. Playfully he tapped me on the arm with the sock and said, ‘I just adore Sophie, don’t you?’

  He had to raise his voice above the music.

  ‘Sophie Tucker.’ He indicated the phonograph; frilly-horned, it perched perilously on the cabinet beside the cot.