October

by Al Sarrantonio

  And so to this day, another in three weeks of good days, under an autumn sky of clear, deep sapphire, among living trees that seemed to breathe beneath his touch, pulling apples like tight-skinned uteri bearing the juice of life within, with Ben Meyer passing him, slapping him on the back, smiling on him like a father, and Ben's wife bringing lunches up to them from the house at the bottom of the hill, climbing slowly through the still frame of the movie that was this beautiful day, bearing a basket covered in blue-checked cloth, with sandwiches and a red-topped gray thermos with hot coffee inside, with pie and fruit and scraps for Rusty. As they ate, they watched Rusty and Ben's terrier, Rags, play, run around the apple trees, kick through dry leaves, with tall, wide cotton-ball clouds bearing majestically overhead from Vancouver to New York and beyond. New Polk was spread below them like a toy town, tall white church steeple, houses colored from a child's crayon box, blue and red and yellow, trees blotched yellow and brown and red; at the edge of the town the university, like a town itself, a spread of green grass, perfect buildings, brown clocktower, white face, ebony arms; little cars moving through New Polk like toys; the day, the tart air, the clouds, the food, the work, the playing dogs, all of it making James drowsy, making him want to lay his long body down after Ben's wife gathered the remains of the lunch together and the day had grown long. Ben didn't seem set on going back to work. James put his back against a tree and put a long grass in his mouth, and Ben smoked, looked for a while at the sky and then at the retreating form of his wife taking the lunch and the dogs back to the house down the hill. He continued to watch as she tended her garden, moving her hoe lovingly through the rowed soil, a tiny figure in the midst of all that color, like a peasant in a Brueghel painting.

  "This is a fine time of year," Ben said. He pulled in smoke from his pipe, let it drift from his mouth.

  "I can see why you love it."

  "If I could freeze a day like this, a moment like this, I could live in it forever."

  James moved the grass from one corner of his mouth to the other.

  Ben said, "Thank you for staying."

  James looked at him. "I should be thanking you."

  Ben shook his head. "It's not the work I'm talking about. I would have hired a couple of boys from town like I always do. The work gets done. I'm such a curmudgeon, they don't know if I'm alive or not in New Polk. It's more the companionship, and for Martha's sake. She's been kind of lonely, feeling it more, the last year or two."

  James knew Ben would continue. He stretched one long leg out, leaned his head back against the tree.

  "We had a boy," Ben said. "He died, a long time ago. We couldn't have another. There's been this hole in Martha's life, and now the hole seems to be getting bigger."

  "What was his name?"

  "Barry. He was seventeen, good at sports, liked to play ball. He was tall, like you. I was traveling a lot, then. When they got through to me, I was in Indiana. There was a fire, a whole bunch of kids at a Halloween party. We lost a whole class out of the high school, except for three. They said my boy died saving them."

  Ben smoked his pipe, looked at the sky.

  "I'm told you're supposed to let it go after a while. I don't know about that. I can't see his face so clear anymore. When I look at pictures of him, so sharp and focused, he looks like a stranger, somebody I knew when I was a boy. But in your heart, you never really forget. They take a piece of that with them. The hole never closes up again."

  Ben smoked his pipe; James was silent.

  "Sorry to go on like this," Ben said. "I just wanted you to know that you've filled up that hole for Martha a little. I can tell. She's happier lately, doing things for you and that dog of yours. The thing I wanted to ask you is, if you'd like to stay on a while longer . . ."

  Ben had turned to regard the sky again; but James knew that Ben was waiting for him to speak.

  "I've thought about it," James said. "It's been good for me, here. It's not only the relaxation, or the work. I ran away from a lot of things in California. Some of them I needed to run away from. There are people here in New York, my father down in the City, whom I need to see. After that, I don't know what I'm going to do."

  "Like I told you . . ." Ben said.

  James stretched, felt drowsiness coming over him. "It's funny," he said. "I don't even know why I came back to New York. I almost turned back halfway here. But something kept me going. It's like something made me keep going."

  "Well . . ."

  James looked up to see Ben standing over him, smiling. A tiredness, the sum of three weeks of bad sleep, the cool beauty of the day, the work behind him, the luxurious weakness of his muscles, the aftermath of the autumn lunch in his belly—all conspired to close his eyes.

  "You sleep, son," Ben said. "Too nice a day to go back to work. Think about what I said."

  James nodded; through closing eyes, he vaguely saw the trail of Ben's smoke as he walked away, descended the hill. The day became a blanket around him; the hard back of the tree was the hard ground he had grown used to, the sounds of the trees were lullabies. He closed his eyes . . .

  The heat. He was in Iowa, summer, and everything he had heard was true. The land was flat as a griddle around him, the fields bleached yellow, corn ticking like dry sticks. He had not seen water, a running stream, the gurgling wetness of a creek, the blue, flat mirror of a puddle, for two days. Dry highway was what he had seen—an endless stretch of flat, gray-black road, edged in dust, from the cabs of a succession of trucks. And now, toward the end of the day, the trucks had stopped, the highway stretched empty ahead of him, and he was thirsty.

  What the hell am I doing?

  The last couple of days, he had begun to wonder. Since he had hit the heat of the Midwest, had come face-to-face with real summer, the idea that he had made his point, had been foolish enough, had begun to take root. And after another day of parched hitchhiking, through a vast, flat hell of corn-filled nothingness, he had all but decided he had had enough.

  Marcie would be worried about him by now, and Samuels would be frantic. Three weeks. He supposed it had taken Marcie this long to come around; but Samuels, he would wager, had begun to go crazy after two days. After all, James had disappeared before, marching petulantly off a miniseries set once because he didn't like his trailer. But that had been three years ago, and James's prima-donna days were supposedly behind him. There had been fights since, but he had never walked off another job. Or disappeared as one was about to begin.

  That's what would have Samuels going, the fact that James was due in Burbank in ten days for a movie shoot. Six weeks beyond that, he had a recurring character part in a midseason television replacement. And a running shoe ad to shoot in late September. And then—

  James figured Marcie had been able to hold Samuels off from calling the FBI until now. After all, James and Marcie's normal fights had been big enough for at least a week's cooling-off period They had never gone at it quite so viciously as this before. And even at the end, after a night straight out of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, raging through the Vancouver trailer, by the end of which he had brought up Marcie's long-dead coke dependency and she had pulled two or three of his old lovers out of the scrapbook, they both knew that the point of exhaustion had been passed, that they had fought as hard as they could and would eventually patch it up. In a way it had been exhilarating, knowing that this was as bad as it could get. He almost threatened her with a knife. But he knew that if he did, she would only laugh and he would end up laughing, too, and that would be the end of it. He needed to go a little further than that to make a point.

  So, the next day, after the wrap of the shoot on the Lincoln movie, he had simply walked out and kept walking.

  At first it was a joke, his wearing the Lincoln costume and all. And then it became serious, after Marcie passed him in her Corvette on the way out of town and shouted, "Watch out for John Wilkes Booth, shithead!" before roaring off.

  So he kept walking. And after a day of it, it had
seemed like a good idea to just keep going. Because some thoughts had begun to grow in his head, and it occurred to him that this was as good a time as any to attend to them.

  So he had begun the Great Walk, and seen the country, and almost no one recognized him, even with his Lincoln getup, and for a while it was just fine.

  Then he got to Iowa.

  Maybe it was something about the approaching Mississippi River. In his mind, over the weeks of his travel, it had become a sort of dividing line between seriousness and frivolity. Twice he had caught himself in telephone booths, quarter dropped into slot, area code and six of Marcie's seven digits dialed His momentum had flagged. He was getting tired.

  He didn't really want to go back East.

  That, he knew, was the real issue. If he crossed the Mississippi, he had made a pact with his heart that he would go all the way, complete the Great Walk, and settle things once and for all in New York. Marcie he wasn't worried about; he had begun to miss her terribly, but he knew she would come to understand what he had done and why. She would understand that it had nothing to do with her, really, and that it was something he would have had to do anyway. His agent he could handle; the lost work would go to someone else in the stable. It might hurt him for six months, but they would start asking him to do this part, that part, again. The tabloid lies might even help fuel the fire of his popularity.

  So, the issue: Did he want to go on? If he crossed the Mississippi, he would have to face his past. There was no other reason to continue.

  Suddenly, standing on this heat-baked ribbon of highway in Iowa, with the smell of the big river almost to his nostrils; with the dry, brittle, motionless, chest-high fields of corn around him, he knew that he didn't want to go on, that it wasn't time to face his past yet.

  He would return to California.

  He would hitch a ride to Cedar Rapids, call Marcie from the airport, get the first connecting flight to Los Angeles, and be back in L.A. by tomorrow.

  The Great Walk, for now, was over.

  A constriction lifted from his heart. The sun was lowering, but he felt it rising within him, bringing peace to the region of his heart. When he thumbed a ride and got into a glossy, huge Peterbilt that stopped for him, he leaned back and immediately slept, until the driver pushed him gently awake on the shoulder.

  "Buddy, time for you to get out."

  James blinked awake into the sun at the horizon. It was nearly twilight.

  "We in Cedar Rapids?"

  "I can get you there tomorrow, if you want. I been hauling six nights straight, got to get off the pills 'fore I run her off the road."

  "Where are we?" For the first time James looked at the driver's face: a burned-out mess, the reddest eyes he had ever seen. Cap pushed back, beard stubble, a heavy-set man with a kind but tired face.

  The driver blinked awake. "Wish I could sleep you here, but there's only room for one. I noticed some lights ahead. Sorry, I've really got to crash. Meet me in the morning."

  As James climbed down, the driver was already slumping over, pulling a blanket over himself as he lay across the front seats.

  James stretched. The sun had dropped below the horizon. The night was summer warm, dotted with pinhole stars, a humid breeze. The ever-present corn had begun to rustle, grumbling in the dark. He heard a low, mechanical rumble. A glow of light sat like a beetle in the darkness ahead.

  A mile's walk and he reached it. A carnival, its last night here, according to the roadside banner, ennui already setting in. Red and white signs, lots of exclamation points, a few desultory customers padding the beaten dirt paths among faded-paint rides. Orange metal fencing around them. Turning teacups, gray, with a blue stripe around the top, a Ferris wheel whose apex dipped up into the night, a merry-go-round with a few squealing children, hot-looking parents waiting, bored for it to end. The calliope missed a few bars of Schubert's "Marche Militaire," an intermittent hollow chunk where a tinkly note should be.

  James bought a cola, syrupy warm, at a dull-red kiosk, thought on a whim of trying to win a Kewpie doll for Marcie. The bottles he had to knock over were dented, battleship colored; the balls rubbed with dirt, old, soft around the seams. All but one bottle fell from its base. On his second try he cleared them all, was handed a small doll, orange, spiky hair, wide-awake eyes, frightening grin. It had flat pieces of red felt for hands and feet. One side seam was torn, showing cheap padding, walnut-shell pieces.

  He was suddenly depressed. He was about to put the doll in a nearby metal oil-drum trash container, saw an empty-handed little girl staring at him, and handed it to her.

  "Look, Daddy!" she cried, running to her father a few paces away. The father stood mopping his hairline with a tired handkerchief "Look what I won! What about my cotton candy?"

  The father looked down at her, nodded tired thanks to James, drew the little girl away toward a nearby booth where an aluminum pan churned pink, threadlike sugar around long, fragile white paper cones.

  At eleven, the small crowd dispersed. James followed them to a square, dusty parking lot cornered with long poles topped by red pennants. Strings of red and white Christmas lights sagged between the poles. Some of the bulbs were out; one white one blinked annoyingly, on and off.

  James stopped a man who was just helping his wife into their station wagon. A little boy was curled on the back seat, thumb in mouth, clutching a stuffed tiger. The tiger had the same frightening smile as the Kewpie doll.

  "Can you tell me where the nearest town is?" James asked.

  The man turned languidly to him. He flicked a mosquito away from his ear, scratched at his sweaty neck around the back. He wore a checked, short-sleeved sport shirt, was thin, with thinning hair. "Jeez, there ain't a town near here. Nearest one forty miles away. This is farming country, if you haven't noticed." He smiled tiredly.

  "Is there anywhere I could find lodging for the night?"

  The man looked him up and down, stifled a yawn. "Sorry, no, mister." He closed the door to his wife's side, walked around, got into his car. Without another word he pulled the station wagon out, drove off.

  All the cars drove off.

  The string lights in the parking lot blinked once, in unison with the one defective bulb, then went out. James heard the pennant at the top of one of the corner poles flap lazily. The calliope stopped. Far off over the fields, corn murmured.

  Most of the booths and kiosks had been abandoned. There was a small show tent, green-and-white-striped, faded. James entered. Inside was a minuscule stage, two steps up, pine planking, knotholes fallen out from dryness. Facing it was a half circle of thirty or forty folding chairs.

  A man in clown makeup and ballooning red-and-white suit sat on one of the chairs in the last row, hunched over a makeup box. His head was completely white save for a crowning, monk-like fringe of bright red hair. James was reminded of the Kewpie doll.

  "What—?" The clown swiveled with surprise toward James, as if he had been caught at something. James was relieved to see that his mouth, which had been cleaned of makeup, did not have the Kewpie-doll grin he had seen so often that evening.

  "Sorry," James apologized.

  "Sure." The clown rustled in his makeup box before turning back to James. There was a small rectangular mirror set in the open, hinged cover of the box.

  "You lost?" the clown said, his tone cool.

  "Guess I am. I've been hitchhiking. My ride dropped me here for the night."

  The clown studied him. "That getup, I thought you were part of the show"

  James smiled. "It's a long story."

  "So tell it to me," the clown said. Abruptly he rose, walked to the stage, reached behind it. He pulled out a large blue metal cooler. Grunting with effort, he dragged it around to the front of the stage. He opened it, fished into water, produced two beer cans before slamming the cooler shut.

  "Alfresco," he said, tossing one of the beer cans underhand to James.

  "Thanks." The beer was cold; when it went down, it tasted even cold
er. James remembered how warm in comparison his cola had been.

  The clown sat on the cooler, feet spread apart, arms on his knees, dangling the beer from one hand. He studied the ground before he looked up. "I'm Billy Peters. You're . . . ?"

  "James Weston."

  "They call you Jimmy?"

  "No."

  "Fine." A tentative smile. "So how do you like our little outfit, James?"

  "Well—"

  "Tell me the truth. Sucks, doesn't it? You know what it's like trying to make a buck in carnivals today? Especially an old carnival?"

  Before James could answer, the clown said, "Can't be done." He straightened, put the beer to his mouth, drank, lowered the can. "This is the third outfit I've been with in three years." Again he drank from the beer can. "Just can't be done."

  "I was wondering why there were so few people here tonight. With not much happening around here, and this being the last night, you'd think—"

  The clown waved his hand "They would have been here. Would have packed the place. There's nothing to do here but screw dogs or sit on corn. They had a multiple murder here couple days ago, that's why they weren't here."

  The clown waved his hand again. "Happens all the time. You know how these farm families are. Dad tells Sonny he can't whack off anymore in the outhouse, or can't go out with Betty Sue 'cause Dad wants to bop her himself so late one night, Sonny gets the Winchester Dad gave him for his twelfth birthday out of the garage, spends an hour up in his room cleaning, oiling, and loading it, then walks calmly into Morn and Dad's room, blows their heads off, does the same to Sis and Junior, then sucks the barrel like an El Producto an meets 'em all in heaven." The clown looked down at his beer. "Happens every week. Farmer roulette."

  James sipped from his own beer. The clown emptied his, stood to open the cooler lid and fish for another beer. He resumed his place.

  "So," Billy Peters said after sampling the new beer, "what's your story?"

  James told him an edited version. He admitted that he was hitchhiking across the country on a whim. "But now," he said, "I think it's time to head back to L.A."