If she could go back to those mildly interesting dreams, whose faint nostalgia somehow preceded Debbie’s agony, she might get some relief. This situation was without hope. There was nothing she could do to stop it. It was intolerable. It was like nausea but there was no way to kneel at the cold bowl, no place to shove a finger. Time refused to pass; what good if it did?
How sweet and inevitable was sleep. She woke again at eight, unable to remember how sleep came and erased knowledge. Her arms and legs were warm honey, a delicious fatigue not weakness but a willed dissolution.
She woke again at noon, lying in sweat no more substantial than she was, beaded with it, the sun in the wall hot on the backs of fingers weak as flagella. Thereafter when she slept and woke she didn’t look at the time. She went to the bathroom, that delicious languor everywhere in her, in bladder and sphincter, in heart and spine, and then, hardly waking, she melted into bed again.
Her mother called through the floor register, but seemed to be calling through fog. She thought she might answer, but not now. In a minute. Her mother came into her room and stood there. She saw the woman, almost. Her eyes had melted out of focus, and didn’t want to come back.
“Doris?” her mother said. “Doris?”
She believed she said to her mother that it was all right.
“Doris?”
Please leave me alone for a while. But the voice she used didn’t have any sound because nothing came to the throat. She didn’t want her voice to wake her.
“Doris, what’s the matter?” her mother said. “It’s been two days you been sleeping. Ain’t you hungry?”
“Mmm,” she answered, risking a hum. “Mmm, mmm, mmmmmm,” she hummed reassuringly. Surely her mother would understand that reasonable answer.
“Pa and me are worried about you.”
In sudden irritation she said out loud, “Please don’t wake me up, Ma!”
“You can’t sleep the rest of your life!”
Her mother’s cry focused her. Her mother was ugly with unhappiness, gray dishwater in her eyes, her mouth set with hurt. This was no thing to have caused.
“Oh, Ma,” she said, whereupon her mother made small percussive sounds as meaningful and senseless as fragments of dreams.
Once her mother whipped Debbie home with a dog leash, Debbie’s bawling mouth in memory as big and round as a bushel basket, as loud as a bronze bell. Debbie, who looked so strong, was weak, and feared pain to the point of fainting when it was spoken of. She and her mother both knew this; she didn’t know how much her mother had been told of Debbie’s torment—knowledge that had come to her instantaneously, her perceptions seared with knowing, her sister’s hand, the dislocated fingers flowered out, the deep punctures in the shy, stretched skin of the arches of her feet. Other impalements so thoughtfully deliberate they caused a vertigo of transference into the punisher’s mind. The slime of lust; what you can understand has soiled you. Debbie whipped home, Debbie slapped by her older sister once, twice, three times, the cause forgotten, the impulse still vivid.
On the blade of the dagger were the words Blut und Ehre! When he was finished he went to the lake to cleanse his hands and clothes.
Because Debbie was dead and forever mute, all that had happened in those hours was gone forever, as if it hadn’t ever happened. We don’t live very long with another’s agony. It goes away. If a tree falls in the forest, no one to hear it. For moments at a time it could seem so, and was such a familiar trap, because with a smirk it revealed itself a fraud the more vicious for its sly offer of amelioration.
Her valedictory had so stupidly proclaimed some self-flattering “deep chord.” Here was irony, the opposite of opposites, John Hearne’s humor. Being grossly unattractive she had no right to put on airs. Could she find a flaw in that logic? No. So it was necessary to teach her a lesson. She thought of John Hearne, and of all soiled writhings on the verge of cruelty. She had been used, and she saw them together naked, as if she were cleanly away from her body, up near the ceiling someplace, while the two animals jerked in each other’s meat and mucus. She couldn’t understand who she had been then.
28
That evening Oval got a call. They were coming. Ten thousand bushels in the morning, more on the way. He turned from the phone and revealed this information. Thelma was all excited. “John wih hep you, Daddy!”
Oval said, “We’d better be there at seven, Johnny, so we can get you and Urban officially hired before the avalanche hits.”
It was more like a tsunami, a rise in the ocean that might have been only six inches high but when compressed into an inlet or an estuary showed its force. From that morning on was a time of no time, days and nights indistinguishable. Oval made out “watch bills,” evidently a Navy term, for them all. There were three others on the crew: Tex, an amiable forty-year-old man who told jokes and, like many who had no sense of humor, could be very funny; Jack, a young TJC dropout who was a semipro boxer on the side, and his buddy, Les, who at twenty-two had a comfortable roll of fat just around his middle, above his belt, and who knew Dianne, or Streaky. “You ought to try her,” Les said. “She’s been through the gang at Jimmy’s.”
“She gobbles the gerbil,” Jack said.
“Which is to say she eats the bird,” Les said.
“Aw, she’s a good kid.”
“She’s ginger-peachy, positively.”
“She used to be a brunette, but now she’s a big-league blonde.”
“How you know?”
“I seen her jim-dandy. Ain’t you?”
“Seen it! I ate it!”
And so on, until Urban and Oval came out in swirls of cold and Jack and Les went in. Tex had the easier duty, on that watch, controlling the conveyor belt. John, during his break, was bolting hangers on the new trays. Tex said, “There was a young lady from France, who boarded a train in a trance. Everyone fucked her, except the conductor, and he came off in his pants.”
Oval wouldn’t rest with the others but was continually checking motors, temperatures, the counters that measured the number of packages entering the machine and the numbers that came out the other side. Urban, as if in answer to Tex’s limerick, said, “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Timothy 2:14.”
Tex said, “There was a young monk from Paree, who went into the garden to pee. He said, ‘Dominus vobiscum, why won’t the piss come? I must have the CLAP.’ ”
“Do I have to listen to this crap?” Urban asked.
Things were going smoothly for the moment, the white boxes of Fordhook lima beans moving remorselessly down the converging tables to enter the one conveyor belt. Inside the machine each tray paused, if the timing was right, just long enough to be filled, then the conveyor belt was supposed to pause long enough for a new tray to get into position. Without help this didn’t always happen, and when it didn’t, the slightest lack of attention tore boxes of the new warm beans apart so they slithered out onto the floor and froze. Usually they waded in lima beans, and when the footing got too bad they shoveled them out into GI cans.
Normally three men were inside the machine. One supervised the loading of the trays, another was stationed at the sector 3 trouble spot, and another watched sectors 4 and 5, where he could spot any malfunction in the ejection plunger system, which actually worked pretty well. Communication was by shouting against the fan and wind noises and the icy squeal of metal under stress. When the machine stopped, a bell rang and everyone who wasn’t numb helped make repairs. The bell also called workers from the orange-juicing section down the line, a less feverish operation, to come with hand trucks and help take the flow of boxes from the conveyor belt. Their irritation and disdain were always apparent.
Days passed, or nights; it made no difference. The Indian Pony, repaired, was returned to the parsonage, and he insisted on paying for the new parts—Phil the mechanic hadn’t charged for labor. Bonnie didn’t really take his paying for it very well. His and Oval’s irregular hours, the ti
me they spent at the parsonage in exhausted sleep, seemed to make her morose and quiet. When he did see her, in passing, she had a dark look about her, as if she had been misused and was resentful. Then Thelma got a bad cold with bronchitis and Bonnie had to take care of her as well as all of the church activities, such as the prayer schedules of the Healing Echelons, the Live Christ Daily classes, the Library of Spiritual Help, the visiting lecturers—Prince Grégoire Ushant on “Perpetual Youth,” Dr. Addie Walmberg on “The Lord’s Humor” and Rev. Dr. Pierce G. Pierce, D.D., on “The Dynamic Healing Power of Thought.” She also had to give comfort and counsel to those church members ill in spirit, mind and body. Hadasha Kemal Allgood, lost in his scholarship, wasn’t much help.
Oval’s preoccupation with the machine, John began to understand, was not just an involvement of pride in his invention but a concern for the flow of the beans themselves. He was hurt by stoppages; the bright green cells, rich and perfect, were sacred, and when they were bruised and wasted he was responsible for that loss, the sustenance of the world diminished because of his lack of skill and understanding. He brought damaged boxes home with him and cooked them for himself because no one else wanted any. He expressed no pleasure in them but piled them steaming on a plate with a bit of butter melting down through them and methodically ate them all. Bonnie, who grew more and more grumpy about everything, said he was going to turn green if he kept it up. When he finished he said he had to get back, that Tex sometimes didn’t pay enough attention. It was his and John’s turn to have eight hours of sleep, but he couldn’t sleep. Things were going too well. They’d processed a thousand dozen boxes in a row, with only a hundred boxes damaged. Something had to give way, something he didn’t understand or might not be there to prevent.
He’d touched his wrist to a link of chain and had a raw sore there big as a quarter, which he wouldn’t bother to bandage. He hadn’t shaved and his jaws were gray, pepper and salt.
One night Bonnie called Oval at the Co-op. He was in the machine at sector I. John was just about through with a break and went in to tell him and take over.
Oval came back stooped and distracted. Thelma was worse, he said. Bonnie had a doctor come see her and he said she should go to the hospital. Her lungs were congested. So Bonnie had taken her to Tulaveda Municipal and called from there. Thelma was terrified by hospitals. It was irrational but how rational did you expect the poor dear to be? People didn’t always know how to treat mongoloids, and mongoloids could be as unhappy as anyone on earth. If only they didn’t feel so much pain. If only their threshold of pain was on the level of their intelligence, not their emotions. It wasn’t fair to them; nothing was.
John looked for Thelma’s face in Oval’s, but saw only the blue of the eyes, if that blue could be separated from expression. Even in his doubt, Oval’s face, surrounded by the furry fringe of hood, was open, stalwart and virtuous, like an ideal hero of, say, 1926—a pen-and-ink drawing of “Glenn Goodheart, the Guide,” in an adventure book for boys. His own face, as he’d seen it a few minutes before in the men’s-room mirror, was smoothly youthful but a little lopsided, as if it strained against itself in equivocal ways. There was a resemblance to Oval’s in chin and mouth, but his own seemed less readable. He wondered if Oval had ever snarled and fought.
Oval climbed the iron ladder to sectors 2 and 3, leaving him in charge of the incoming boxes. The trays filled, rose, paused for the conveyor belt as he guided the boxes in across the threshold, sometimes having to pull one or two out to keep them from being crushed. The machine chirped of stressed metal as the open teeth of the sprockets took to the chains. The frigid air moved, a wind without freshness. He clapped his wooden hands against his thighs when he had time, but whatever help that gave to his circulation was never apparent. Just as Jack came in to relieve him he missed a box at the threshold, letting it be sheared in half, so he carried half of the severed box out with him, the warm beans steaming until the heat of Tulaveda extinguished their mist. He took off his gloves and put his numb fingers into the warmth of them. It was true they were perfect, each a separate life, a seed containing within it every characteristic of a wholly new plant. He didn’t even know what the plant looked like, but there had to be, he thought, a pod of some kind. He knew very little about them except the beans were supposed to be good for you if you could get them down. Too bad they had to turn grayish and claylike when cooked, because in this fresh state their green wasn’t unattractive. They were clean, like good air, even though he had waded in millions of them. Tex, imitating the military labeling of their clothes, had once said, “Beans, lima, Fordhook, many, fucking, too.” Yet they didn’t cloy by appearing in multitudes. He put one to his mouth and bit lightly into it. The center was like a nut, a giving, flexible resistance until it softly snapped. It was conceivable that this fruit, or seed, might be prepared in some edible way, not boiled to the pallor of a corpse, with the flavor of wet cement. It was interesting to him that he thought “it, ” not “them,” as if there were no threat of inundation now; not, at least, to his throat.
He put his grimy flight gear in a locker, went to the office and punched his time card. In the parking lot his Indian Pony stood next to Jack’s A-V8, an admirably neat and shining black roadster Jack had told him was “chopped and channeled.” It also had Edelbrock heads and four carburetors, which allowed it to lay out black strips of rubber whenever Jack left a stop sign.
He rode his faithful but tame Indian Pony out onto Pasadena Avenue and over to Los Robles, then up the hazardous rising mile of Boulevard stops to the parsonage. His new sealed-beam headlight was much brighter than his old bulbed one. He wanted a bath, something he’d never really craved in this way before, even in the Army, having always been content enough in his grime and grunge. Maybe it was a symptom of growing older, that you pampered your hide. It was also a cosmetic urge, this time, because a beautiful older woman whose feelings for him were problematical might be there, and who knew what the possibilities were? To make anything really possible was not something he’d work at, or knew how to work at. The possibility was just there. He was tired, yet hard from work, his tendons and muscles firm in ways he would never visibly flaunt but were deliciously prideful.
Bonnie’s car was in the side yard. He parked the Indian Pony and as he came up onto the porch she rose from the darkness of the swinging couch that was suspended there on creaky chains. Her eyes and cheeks glinted in the streetlight. Those were tears. He came up to her, his excuse to see if they were the tears he knew they were, and because she seemed helpless, or at least passive in her unhappiness, he put his arms around her. Hers came around him. “Poor, poor Thelma,” she said.
Could it be that he had forgotten Thelma’s illness? It was true that he had set it aside, as if it were his to categorize. He knew of it, but could place it here or there.
Bonnie’s head was on his shoulder. The cloth strap of her brassiere crossed her back, reminding him of a piece of boy knowledge gained not so long ago, when he was about fifteen: you could get your hand into a bra easily from above, but not from below.
“She’s so sick and unhappy and lonesome there. Would you go see her tomorrow?”
No force in the world could make him go if he didn’t want to, and he didn’t want to.
“All right,” he said.
“You’re so sweet,” she said, and kissed him on the mouth.
But he didn’t want to go, and hadn’t resigned himself to going. Beauty was so strange in its effects, taking away, as if it took away breath, time to equivocate. This was true even of beauty wrong in dimension and circumstance. She was not really possible, not for him, but he still held her.
“You’ll be off work again at seven tomorrow night,” she said. “You can go see her for a while then.”
“Yes,” he said, and thought: You put your hands on a woman and in just a few moments, if you don’t move them over her, you might as well have your hands on upholstery. The hands forget.
“John? Are y
ou going to let me go?” she said with a little laugh.
He let her go and looked at his wristwatch, his military Waltham that he liked to look at, as if time, neatly indicated by the glowing green numerals and sweep second hand, were on his side, a passage toward an undefined but inevitable state of happiness. It was ten-thirty; he’d have to be back to work in eleven and a half hours.
Bonnie said, “I’ll make you something to eat, if you want.”
“I want,” he said, “a bath. My pores are clogged with powdered graphite, ozone and cold sweat.”
“And lima beans?” she said with a grimace.
“I think I’m getting friendly with them—we’ve been through so much together. You know I don’t want to visit Thelma.”
“It can’t hurt you!”
“Then why am I scared?” he said as they went on down the hallway into the kitchen.
“John, she’s just a human being, a child.”
“I’m frightened by imbecility.”
“Thelma’s not an imbecile, she’s a kind and loving person!”
“ ‘The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man only one.’ ”
“I know you’re brave, John.”
“Bonnie, I may not go.”
“She wants to see you. She loves her brother.”
“You told her I was coming.”
“Maybe I did! She was frightened! She needed something to look forward to!” Bonnie’s face went soft and out of focus. “I didn’t mean to manipulate you, if that’s what you’re angry about. I was just thinking of Thelma!”
The Moon Pinnace Page 34