The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  There was a statistic for him, though he rarely asked questions of fact because, he had often thought, he was not that curious, or was too self-involved to be curious. Maybe it was that the presence of another gave him too much data as it was—a thousand glinting, purring shocks to his senses that could never be put into any sort of order. From her he received all at once the cluster of specifications that meant beauty, glamour, age without her being especially old. Her eyes seemed larger, bluer, whiter than other eyes, unblemished by anything they had ever seen, and she insisted on looking into his while she spoke, which, in his tender condition, made him wish she would pay more attention to her driving.

  Having asked him all sorts of statistical questions she volunteered her own, a monologue that seemed in its clarity and organization rehearsed, or composed especially for an audience whose attention might wander if fact were diluted by any complication other than good news.

  “I was born in Omaha twenty-nine years ago in April and I came to California after high school because of this talent contest put on by the Delbekah Shrine and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. The winner (me!) got to be an apprentice at the Tulaveda Playhouse, which is often visited by Hollywood scouts and has a fine reputation all over the country.” Her history sounded like a brochure. She had enjoyed her apprenticeship; it was great fun. No Hollywood scout had plucked her out for stardom but she’d had bit parts in several movies: The Pearly Gates, with Constance Bennett and Fredric March; Saturday Morning, with Barbara Saxton and Bert Parks; Farewell, My Darling, with Teresa Wright and Sonny Melton. Right now she was mostly modeling, but who knew what could happen, even if she appeared mostly in catalogues and trade journals? But of course a year ago she’d met Oval Forester (no relation, by the way, just a coincidence that they had the same name, one of those mysteries of this life) and through Oval’s teaching she had found Christ Mediator and was doing further study at the Church of the Science of the Way, or CSW, and was living at the parsonage, which was 601-B Los Robles, from the driveway of which she had backed out in front of him without looking and caused all of this pain and trouble. But she always looked before she backed up, and there was no logical reason in the world why he wasn’t killed, or made into a paraplegic or something. It had to be part of the Divine Plan. “This ministry,” she said in the pleased and kindly tones of certainty, “teaches that there is an all-encompassing Power for Good, the Plus-Power, or Godhead, or Divine Intelligence, or Universal Mind (there are many, many names for it, in all religions), and if, through Christ’s mediation, you tune into It, you will prosper abundantly and live a life of love and happiness!”

  They had given him a shot of some kind in the emergency room and later a green-and-black capsule. Now, to his surprise, he felt the change; caution began to slide away. Her gaze, too long upon him and not the road ahead (but who cared?), was as wide and benevolent as her faith. Her perfume was of flowers, a multitude of flowers enhanced by a fascinating and valuable ferment something like a swamp, and he was saddened by his skepticism, his built-in, lifelong, dull, ungenerous skepticism. Maybe there did exist, in this garden of primary colors, this mainland Papeete or Moanalonga, this land of pampered herbiage and engines, sweetness without irony. Without, too, he dazedly considered believing, now that he felt no pain at all, the necessity for consciousness.

  “You’re so tired, John,” she said. “Would you like to put your head in my lap? Would that hurt?”

  “Nothing hurts,” he said, and descended past the giant-spoked steering wheel to her thighs that seemed to hiss creamily like warm surf.

  He awoke in bed, in a dim brown room in which soft varnished gleamings made no urgent claims for identification, being as they were the tops and rungs of furniture. There were memories of being helped by Bonnie and another person, a short man, up wooden steps, across a sunlit porch, down a hallway, of cool soapy moisture on his face and chest. Right now his consciousness was a small creature peering from the pilothouse of his vast, extended body. Controls were at this creature’s command but caution said to be very careful with relays and levers. He moved a finger and then a hand, but the elbow was not pleased that the message had been routed through that area. One by one he found that his connecting places had been overextended by bis rolling and falling, even the gristle of his ribs. Sludge had congealed in his gears and pistons, his universals and suspensions, and he was actually the prisoner, for the first time in his life, of the body he had always taken for granted. He and his Indian Pony, now somewhere nearby, were both immobilized and this hadn’t been his plan. He had intended to ride on past this address, to look at this house, to have options, and now he had none.

  The door opened and in came a person about four feet high and nearly that wide, who opened the blinds upon daylight and turned to him with an immense yellow smile. “Ith Thelma!” it said, and he saw with the instantaneous judgment of the normal that this short being, or person, was feebleminded, a mongoloid trapped into all of its configurations by whatever Divine Force implemented such horrors. “Ith Thelma!” It—she—said again. Her teeth were at first glance all one piece, like the dental ridge of a turtle, but then he saw that whatever she had last eaten, perhaps peanut butter, had smoothed them together.

  “Ith Thelma!” she said. Her mouth was full of the humped tongue she spoke past, her lips moist and thick below her bridgeless nose, her eyes dropsical yet humanly blue under the telltale folds. Her pleasure was so intense as to seem detached from any circumstance.

  “Thay thumthing, John,” she said, which shocked him, because she had chided him, and her amusement was now at his expense. He said in his shame, “Hello, Thelma,” and they understood each other.

  “You hurt?” she asked.

  “A little,” he said.

  She nodded and nodded upon the axis of primitive ears set into the top of her short neck. She smelled of bleach. Her blondish hair had been cut short, perhaps for reasons of hygiene.

  “You hungry?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Not weally?” She pondered this, her lip drooping and shiny. Over her pink, tentlike dress she wore a gray bib dampened in places. She seemed all at once shy, and took from behind her back, where she had been holding it, a piece of white cardboard and put it directly on his face.

  “Thith ith for you!” she said.

  He managed to get his hand, at the expense of pain, to the cardboard and hold it away from his face so he could see it. On it was a drawing in pencil of a motorcycle—his motorcycle. There was the horn with its Indian head, the slope of frame, the spoked wheels and the twin cylinders with their cooling fins. The accuracy was amazing, but even more impressive was a confident delicacy and variety of line. He could even tell how much the front fork had been bent by the crash.

  “Did you draw this?” he asked.

  She nodded, looking down and away, nodding and grinning in a shy fit of pleasure and pride. When she pulled up her bib to wipe her chin the pink dress came up with it, so that he had to see how the amorphous, hairy flesh of her thighs sagged half over her knees.

  “This is very good,” he said. “This is my motorcycle, all right.” She shook and giggled with pleasure, spraying him a little, and he thought only of getting out of here, that he couldn’t take this, that he was too sensitive, that he couldn’t deal with this much longer because, disarmed by sympathy, he would in some monstrous and unthinkable way become her.

  His leg jerked, an involuntary twitch of escape that dealt him purifying pain. When he opened his eyes Bonnie Forester had appeared, tall and shimmery in a white nightgown. “Thelma,” she said mildly, “I thought I heard you giggling in here, you naughty girl! You went and woke John up and it’s only six o’clock in the morning!”

  “Thix o’cock!” Thelma said happily.

  “And she showed you her picture of your motorcycle? Isn’t she clever? A God-given talent!” Bonnie said as if he were the normal sort of person who could cope with enthusiastic mongoloids.

 
; “Yes, she sure is,” he said.

  “Does aspirin upset your tummy? The nurse said to give you aspirin.

  “Not that I know of,” he said, so she tipped aspirin from her warm palm into his mouth and produced a Dixie cup half full of water.

  “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

  “Not urgently.”

  “Go to the baffoom!” Thelma said.

  “That’s right, dear.” Bonnie sat carefully on the bed, in order not to jar him, and in the most abstracted and impersonal way began lightly to massage his shoulders, neck and chest. Her hands were on his skin and over him was the glamorous loom of her, her classic breasts visible to his ill-at-ease X-ray eyes. At her bosom was a decorative, non-functional little tielet of blue ribbon. “Does that feel good?” she asked. “Pretty soon the aspirin ought to start working and then we’ll try to get you up. How do you feel?”

  How did he feel? “Pretty good,” he said. How did he feel? Anxious, immobilized, and yet invested by involuntary and inappropriate lust.

  “How you feel, John?” Thelma asked around her swollen tongue.

  “Okay,” he said, his voice surprisingly calm. Add a demeaning dread of the harmless, the abomination. Meanwhile Bonnie’s gentle hands soothed and scorched him, and next to her power was Thelma, flesh gone wrong, bladders beneath the pink dress big as oddly hung basketballs above the spread nominally of a woman but here blown up into a cosmic smirk at the expense of everything human and female. She must have, along with her obvious good nature, ovaries and tubes and womb and all the rest of a mammal’s business, here skewed and parodied—what the rest of the race passed with averted eyes. They died, mostly, he had heard, in the gruesome joke of their own adolescence.

  But he lay helpless within his temporarily wounded but perfect body with an erection mind and good taste and will disowned, to no avail, when there came a muffled, nudging knock on the doorframe, and a short man in a brown suit stood there burdened with a golf bag full of hooded and tasseled clubs and what, from its weighty pull on his arm, seemed to be a cased bowling ball. The skin of the man’s face was smoothly pink, as if he had pressed his head into a thin diaphragm of flesh-colored rubber, with eye holes, nostril holes and a mouth slot. He seemed shy, but the set of the slit of his mouth indicated determination.

  “Oh, Urban!” Bonnie said. “Don’t tell me you’ve figured it out again!”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” the man said. “I want to give Oval these, and the deeds to my church, and my car keys and green slip.”

  John saw then that there were raised striations under his chin and ears and that he wore a mask of healed tissue. His face had once burned.

  “All right,” Bonnie said. “But when is it going to happen?”

  “Tomorrow morning at five o’clock, Pacific Standard Time.”

  “Are you sure, now? Remember last time.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, his syllables growing rounder through the slot of his mouth. “That was a miscalculation, pure and simple. This time is the Time and the hydrogen and the oxygen will catalyze. The oceans will rise and burn, according to Ecclesiasticus in the Apocrypha, Daniel 12:7 and 12:11 and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I’m certain this time!”

  Bonnie said, “Well, you can put everything in Oval’s office. Put them over by the window, all right?”

  “All right. Thank you, Bonnie.”

  “Hewwo, Ooban!” Thelma said.

  “Hello, Thelma, dear.”

  To John, Bonnie said, “Urban helped me get you to bed yesterday.”

  “Oh. Thank you,” John said.

  “John,” Bonnie said formally, “this is Urban Stumms, pastor of the Church Ovarian Apocalyptic, over on Alta Vista. Urban, this is John Hearne, from New Hampshire.”

  “Howdy!” Urban said, then added, “Well, there’s so much to do…”

  “You go right along, then, Urban. And good luck, now!”

  “Geggod bleggess yeggou,” Urban said. “Heggis weggord beggurned leggike egga leggamp—Ecclesiasticus 48:1.” Urban went on down the hall.

  “What did he say?” John said.

  “Oh, they speak that language—Ovarian,” Bonnie said. “I mean when they quote scripture or mention the name of the Lord.”

  “Oh,” John said.

  “Poor Urban! The last time he predicted the end of the world he lost more than half his congregation, you know. I hate to think what will happen to him if he’s wrong again.”

  “Yeah,” John said. Pondering the Apocalypse evidently had a neutralizing effect, along with the aspirin, so that when Bonnie helped him out of bed, he in his olive-drab GI shorts, he was not unduly embarrassed by himself. She and Urban Stumms had retrieved his duffelbag from the bent motorcycle, which was now leaning against a tangerine tree in the yard, and she carried his musette bag containing razor, toothbrush and such, while helping him toward the bathroom. He could use one crutch as a cane of sorts, but progress was slow. Thelma wanted to help, but her stubbed, thick fingers pulled with unsynchronized force, and her huge thigh pushed the crutch out from under him twice before Bonnie made her stop. He wondered, shame overcoming revulsion, how much he had contributed to that awkwardness. Thelma was genuinely unhappy, and seemed about to cry, so Bonnie had to hug her and take her to her room. He leaned on crutch and wall until Bonnie came back. Thelma, she told him, that poor child of God, was seventeen years old and Oval Forester’s daughter.

  The parsonage was all in browns, full of dim furniture with an old but unused look, like the furniture of churches. The toilet reservoir was an oak box up near the stamped-metal ceiling, with a long chain and a wooden pull, and the lavatory and tub were leggy and coarse-grained—the institutional facilities of 1920, Bonnie told him, when church and parsonage had been built heavily and well by Lutherans. The church itself was of gray stone, and faced the next street, Villa Mesa. It was a small church, with a small congregation, and Oval Forester had to work at another job to support it.

  When he was propped against the lavatory, his musette bag at hand, he assured her that he could carry on by himself, though he was not quite certain he could. The anesthetic power of modesty.

  “All right,” Bonnie said doubtfully. “I’m going to go get dressed, now, but if you need any help, John, you just holler.”

  Whether out of desperation, his desire for independence and solitude, or from youthful resiliency, when he’d finished washing up and had managed to shuffle carefully back to his room, the news from his synapses was cautious but optimistic. He got back into bed by himself, chirping only once from pain that came as a surprise rather than a calculated risk, but then couldn’t reach down for the sheet. While he tested his articulations, unfamiliar small birds outside the open window swooped and sang. After a while Bonnie, carefully dressed and made up, with a frilly apron over an expensive-looking silk suit, came in with breakfast on a tray.

  “Can you sit up? Can you eat by yourself?” Expressive modulations of sympathy rose and subsided in her voice. “Are you mad at me for backing out in front of you? Do you feel angry, John? I wouldn’t blame you!”

  “It was an accident,” he said. It hadn’t occurred to him to be angry. As he chewed his toast he wondered how he had managed to strain even his jaw muscles.

  “But I wrecked your motorcycle, too! Phil’s coming to look at it to see if it can be fixed—Phil’s in the Church and he’s a mechanic. But here you are, you can hardly move, and it’s all my fault! You must have some anger, and I don’t blame you.”

  What a strange way to put it—that you “had” anger when angry. Bonnie looked at him earnestly and he glanced at her for a second and was almost blinded, or at least caused to look away, flinching at her perfection. Every standard of beauty he had been brought up to admire she possessed in such measure his first reaction had been to consider her a sort of freakish ideal, not to be touched. But she insisted upon touching him, and even if she didn’t consider her touch a caress, in his life he had rarely touched another out of mere
affection. She sat on the bed, one hand steadying the tray and the other lightly on his hip, and he remembered with anxious nostalgia the infatuations of childhood, and began to greet as he took them the delicious little steps toward that sweet insanity.

  She was eight years older than he and of other worlds. Her beliefs were perhaps ludicrous but her presence was beyond anything he had ever considered attainable. He thought suddenly of a boat, a Chris-Craft, comparing her to an expensive and beautiful boat. There were those who owned Chris-Crafts of dark mahogany and chrome and powerful rumbling engines, but he had never planned to desire one. They were to be admired, but without yearning. He didn’t want to cope with the desire for something so rich and dramatic, and so never had.

  Maybe it was Dory Perkins, back in New Hampshire, whose name meant a kind of boat, who suggested this comparison. Dory seemed pale and dim, her smaller symmetries now remembered cerebrally, in grays, with only a faint shadow of disloyalty.

  “Finish you owange joosh!” It was Thelma, standing at the door, pretending to look stern. She held a piece of white cardboard across her short forearm, and looked down to it, drooling lightly as she manipulated her pencil. “Ith drawing you, John!”

  “Thelma,” Bonnie said, “I don’t want you bothering John today. He’s got to rest.”

  “Dawing pichure!” Thelma cried, hurt by this injustice. She came closer and drew faster, giving him quick, desperate looks, through tears, and the injustice of her condition, which she probably knew about, gathered in him as a horror of all female unhappiness. She—it, his revulsion said—was seventeen, Dory’s age, and whatever was fearsome in women was in Thelma exaggerated beyond his tolerance. At first he wouldn’t consider admitting his cowardice, but Bonnie watched him, and a shamed nod admitted that he couldn’t stand it.

  “You can show John your picture tonight, when I get back,” Bonnie said, gathering up the tray. With a firm arm around Thelma she moved her toward the door. Thelma was still drawing and trying to see him, the liquid snot of unhappiness like shellac over her mouth. “We love you, Thelma. Jesus loves you. Oval loves you. We all do,” Bonnie said. “And, John? I’ve sent out a call to our Healing Echelons, and today they will aim their prayers at you.”