Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  A pleasant fragrance rather like that of a brushfield being burned. Reinhart had smoked various weeds as a kid exploring local meadows and woodlands: there had been one sort of tall reed which, intact, you could hurl as a spear or, cut into lengths, smoke. Inhaling marijuana, so said many leading authorities, you did far less damage to your system than came from boozing. Other spokesmen were opposed. But Reinhart felt the essential argument was as to ethics rather than health. Did not this effluvium wither the will to succeed as well as asphyxiate the moral values?

  An answer was immediately forthcoming. Eunice leaned over and plucked the joint from one of the beards on the floor, who gave her no opposition, and then found an area where she herself could sprawl and did so. Reinhart joined her there with considerable difficulty. He would rather climb stairs than sit upon a floor. An erect body distributed its weight more effectively than one folded or heaped upon itself like a pillowcase full of wet laundry.

  Her first drag was rather shallow, for all the atmosphere of the place: which is to say he had been prepared to see her ingest what was left of the butt in one great suck, the glow swooping towards her lips.

  Chewing dramatically on the smoke, she handed the little twisted, wretched thing to Reinhart. He had given up cigarettes years before and in the years since puffed only on the occasional cigar presented by business acquaintances. The thought of inhaling had become repugnant to him. To fill the lungs with the fumes of burning vegetable matter, to inflame the delicate linings, to constrict the fine blood vessels, to condense black tar in his interior passages—but marijuana was not tobacco, and might indeed be less harmful. If so, what a joke.

  So he took a moderate draft, inhaled cautiously, felt temporarily dizzy, and returned the butt to Eunice.

  She leaned into him and said: “You can freak out here, do your own thing, with nobody on your back. I wish it was the whole world.”

  Reinhart hoped it was not, his thing being wearing a shirt and tie and a wash-and-wear suit, shaving every morning, and trying to make a go at business. He was neither well dressed nor prosperous, it went without saying, but still could see no future for himself in universal fecklessness. How could you freak out in the absence of will? Yet had not the Moros, inflamed by hashish, run amok, causing the U.S. Army to adopt the 45-caliber automatic pistol, the heavy slug from which would knock a man ass over elbow if it struck so little as the tip of his smallest finger? Some old Army sergeant told him that twenty-five years before, beer-belly rolling over web belt, stained campaign hat. “I was loaded on soured pineapple juice mixed with medical alcohol give me by a nurse I put the blocks to, when out of the jungle run this brown monkey gook and I fired the whole fuckin’ magazine at him and never hit him once but into the earlobe, but it turned the little dicklicker upside down and dropped him like a stone and his crooked sword went flying.” The Philippine Insurrection happened to have occurred circa 1900. Sarge told the story during basic training in 1942–43, at which time he had been no older than thirty-five, younger by a decade than Reinhart was right now.

  Those were the days when older guys had a license to tell outrageous lies to their juniors and were not really believed by the latter but were definitely respected and admired for so doing. It was a kind of convention, half-comic without being absurd. His back to the wall, Reinhart would have relied on Sarge for responsible leadership; one could reasonably expect him to live up to his bullcrap.

  At his next turn Reinhart took another drag, and leaned back to relieve the pressure that the top of his belly was putting on his lungs. Eunice also extended herself and then rolled onto him. Big as she was, her weight did not oppress, as he feared it might when he felt her coming over. She was mass without volume.

  He tried to hand the butt to her, but that proved impossible in the new arrangement. He had gradually begun to inhale, and supposed he was coming under the influence when he sensed no discomfort of lung. Eunice was wriggling gently against him, but in a practical rather than an erotic way, as if they lay in bed together and she adjusted the tangle of sheets.

  Suddenly his tie was inhibiting, and he had the illusion that his head had inflated with smoke and would detach and float away. He took another drag to speed this pleasant process, but his hand, working at cross purposes, rose to open his collar. He decided to open his eyes without determining whether they were closed. He had never before been in a position to play such jokes on his body. Eunice’s hair was in his face.

  What a time to play the fool. He tried to get the butt to his mouth but her head was in the way. He found himself smoking her tongue instead. In the fourth or fifth grade you would hold your tongue and say either: “The teacher has a big red apple” or “I saw the cowboy’s lasso,” and you heard a dirty word. In earlier years the game played at recess was called Catch the Girls: chase a plump little blonde in green tam and mittens on a string, capture and bear-hug her, that was the game, which was fun and sometimes made you want to peepee. Junior Dodge once went to the toilet in his pants, back in the cloakroom. Carlo Reinhart played a bumblebee in the spring pageant, in muslin wings and a yellow-striped knit cap, cardboard stinger in his tail. He squashed a banana in his schoolbag and you could smell it there all year. High-top boots, with a pocket to carry a scout knife, included with some brands. Cut a wedge from his left index finger when sharpening a pencil, a little hunk of flesh which tumbled to the desk, pale, too startled to bleed; he instantly popped it back in the finger and wrapped around his handkerchief, crackling with dried snot. In a few days it had healed up, stayed a welt for years, after decades showed a whitish trace.

  Having traveled up to the present on the dangling digit of destiny, Reinhart identified the surging movement at his groin as Eunice’s spasmodic pelvis. How strange it had been to get the first hard-on while dancing and subsequently duck-walk, thrilling in shame, Could she feel it? Sure, and loved it, so said Roy Moody, class filthmonger. Nobody yet had “hairs,” as they were called to distinguish them from the kind in the scalp. Roy once pulled a lock from a janitor’s brush and stuck them on his crotch with mucilage. Roy once found in his father’s sock-drawer, beneath the balled lisle, a little eight-paged cartoon book showing Toots & Casper having at each other with, respectively, a great bushy orifice and an enormous warclub. Roy claimed some impossible record in meat-beating. Many people were shamelessly candid about their experiences. Wendley, that tall guy from Alabama in Army basic training, always came back from pass with some unlikely story: claimed to have screwed a chicken once. Lies, lies, yet stranger phenomena were on record. Wendley acted everything out but was never disgusting. Even the chaplain’s assistant would laugh. This type of humor could not be explained to anyone who had not been there. The Army was the first and last place Reinhart felt a sense of community.

  He was getting maudlin now and had even lost his cigarette. Searching for it, his hands swept over Eunice’s bare behind. Of course, that made sense: earlier, when she writhed, she had been pulling off her pants, a commonplace event hardly worth noting. He must find that other butt, puff on it, fill his lungs and the lacunae in his memory, flee his humdrum present. But everywhere he searched he felt irrelevant bare flesh. She was a nice girl but obstructive. Either his hands were larger than normal or her naked breasts were smaller than they had looked under fabric. Old Blaine had certainly been right about the liberation afforded by pot. Reinhart didn’t give a fig for career, home, or flag. He had no plans for what he would do when he grew up. All existing categories were exposed as fraudulent, including diet. He loved the feel, from within, of his rippling fat, the soft adipose tissue clothed in thin skin of fishbelly white, marbled with blue blood vessels and dappled with hair. The great kidney pads that hung like hams over his belt behind, the leteral folds in front, the loose meat under his arms, the massive vault of gut.

  He grew quite lascivious towards himself and, forgetting about Eunice, assumed her body was an increment of his own, bigger and better than ever, a veritable Moby among the routine d
icks of the world. But womanlike she made jealous assaults against his self-possession. The difference from every other time this had happened in his life was that he now remained impervious to capture. Oh, he might be denuded, chafed into erection, and inserted well within her, but it was a fantasy over which he could at any time exert control, held off so doing only because her hollow assurance she was being loved amused him. Go right ahead, my dear lady, plunge and withdraw, for all the good it will do you. Little do you suspect I am not involved in your desperation. …

  He was quite comfortable on the hard floor and not at all embarrassed to note that the nearest of his fellows had risen from a recumbent figure to a sitting shadow and could be seen applauding though without sound, unless Reinhart’s vision and hearing were out of synchronization, in which case the handclaps would no doubt come along later.

  “Go, man, go,” said his neighbor thickly, then toppled over again to the supine.

  Reinhart thought: we are being watched, like a hog and a sow rolling in the muck of the pigpen, oink, oink. The longer he went without a puff, the more inebriated he became. He thought he might chance a nap, Eunice being no longer near his face but far, far away, murmuring, breathing, bobbing, ardent though mechanical at some new project. She really seemed to find him useful.

  His spirit playfully left his flesh and from an attitude of levitation reveled in new, penetrating perspectives, studying at once the kelpish hair, blanched skin, and blanket of fat and the underlying organs which they armored: liquor-sponge of liver, oysterish stomach growing a pearl of ulcer, entwined-caterpillar bowels, grapelike gonads. He was one huge mixture of metaphors, but he was alone now. Eunice was now seen in a coupling with another figure beyond his feet.

  That he was nude and recumbent also proved an anachronistic illusion. Surely he had been so earlier, but now he stood in the hallway outside, watching the police mount the narrow staircase.

  “Up here, officers.”

  The saturnine man in the lead, in plainclothes, impatiently signaled for silence. Reinhart stepped aside and the enforcers kicked down the door without trying the nonexistent lock, ran in, and made noises.

  Reinhart sat on the first step, head in hands, no longer hallucinating but still sufficiently narcotized to feel no vicarious hurt from the beating his recent companions were sustaining inside—if one could judge by the sounds.

  In a moment the detective emerged and asked: “A kid of yours in there?”

  “I doubt it,” Reinhart said lightly, then, rising, corrected himself: “I mean, certainly not! I looked. I was relieved he wasn’t when I smelt the marijuana.”

  The officer snorted. “That’s not weed, at least not what I found. It’s dried lettuce leaves, made up to look like joints of grass. Some pusher probably got a few bucks out of them for it, stupid punks. And not the first time. But what do they care? They can pretend they’re high and fuck one another.” He gave Reinhart a look of primitive compassion, “Go home, mister. Your kid is shaming you someplace else tonight, on your money and in your car, shitting on everything you believe in and have worked like a dog for.” He commiseratingly patted Reinhart’s shoulder with his left hand. Reinhart noticed he dangled a short sap in his right, rather cunningly worked in leather braiding.

  “My kid?” Reinhart said with a jerky elbow motion intended to convey indignant pride. “My kid put in two years at the front in Vietnam, came back decorated and shellshocked. He’s earned his right to be a bit confused. Look what this country’s turned into behind his back while he’s been putting his life on the line: orgies and draft dodgers and race riots and punks taking over colleges, buying and selling narcotics in the toilets of discothèques. And what are you guys doing about it? Why the hell do I pay taxes? Why don’t you go down and clean up the Gastrointestinal System?”

  The detective took a step in moral retreat. “You don’t know what we have to put up with, sir. When I entered the Force a cop had a certain respect. Oh, sure, we were supposed to be lower class and stupid and our idea of living was a pregnant wife and a little house in the suburbs and we took orders from the Church, a policeman wasn’t ever anybody’s idea of prestige, you know that, but I’ll tell you this.” His voice broke. “No beautiful, rich, and educated young girl with a new car and a wardrobe I couldn’t buy with a month’s salary ever called you a motherfucker. I’ve been wounded twice in line of duty. If some hood was holed up here with a machine gun and a stack of grenades it would be me who had to go in and get him.” He was practically crying. “Me, the motherfucker, I would go in and get my belly shot out and they’d give me an inspector’s funeral and my wife the insurance plus what the boys collected in the hat. You know what I get paid for wading in chin-high shit for twenty-two years?”

  “Not enough, I’m certain,” said Reinhart, returning the pat. “I didn’t mean any personal criticism, Captain.”

  “Lieutenant. You don’t get promoted fast unless your tongue’s up a politician’s asshole.” But Reinhart’s message seemed to mollify him. He took some air and said: “I’ll look out for your boy in the future. I’ll give him a break if I can. They might call me a sadistic pig, but I am anything but. I could tell you many an occasion when—but you wouldn’t believe me. Trouble is the public’s on the side of the lawbreaker nowadays.” He struck the boss of the newel post with his sap, making a curiously soft yet heavy report causing the rail to tremble around the corner of the next landing. “I’m a veteran too,” he added. “What’s his name?”

  “Sweet,” said Reinhart. “Bob Sweet, Jr.” This was off the top of his head, and out before he remembered Eunice. He must flee before they collected her name.

  “He’s probably got good stuff in him, Mr. Sweet. You can’t last long if you’re a fag in the Green Berets.” Thuds and cries of pain from the room caused a grimacing reaction in the lieutenant. He said: “It’s the girls who break my back, dirty little whores, fouler-mouthed than the boys. We got a dilly in there. A nympho: she called me motherfucker.”

  Fearfully, already descending the stairs, Reinhart asked: “Did you get her name?”

  The lieutenant scowled down, slapping his palm with the blackjack. “Reinhart, it was. Eunice Reinhart. You tell your boy to stay away from her.”

  9

  Reinhart stopped at the bank next morning to pick up at least enough cash to reimburse Bob—considering the way the evening had turned out, he felt obliged to make that gesture—and discovered that Maw had stopped payment on the check for five grand.

  As expected, Eunice was not at her desk in the Cryon office. She was probably in irons in a dungeon full of jeering prostitutes. He was in an ugly position, though the initiative had been all hers.

  He went into the inner office. The desk chair was empty, the washroom door ajar. He had no stomach this morning for announcing himself blatantly. He raised his fist to knock, but had arrived at an angle through which he could see a lighted strip of half a Bob Sweet, standing before a washbowl in T-shirt and trousers. Bob’s head was crystal bald except for the sideburns. At the moment he was installing in his mouth a complete set of dentures. Having seated them with a thumb at either extremity, Sweet squeezed a dot of cream from a tube here and there on the inside of a toupee and placed it upon his crown, pressing it to establish adherence.

  The upper margin of a stiff garment, apparently a kind of corset, rose above the waistband of his pants. He was seen tugging at it before donning a shirt. This was interesting to Reinhart, who was much too obese for any agent of compression to have signally altered the profile of his trunk. Sweet was demonstrably not fat, but he must have a sagging belly—more degrading, in a way, than over-all adiposity. Reinhart was stout everywhere, consistent from elephant-leg neck to big feet-flappers. His scalp was thick—and rather linty, he saw as he unconsciously ruffled it. Hardly a tooth was not stuffed with silver, and three were synthetic and removable on a wire but the shells of the others were real and of his own origination.

  He found himself gliding bac
kwards, away from the bathroom door, as silently as he had arrived. Sweet had not noticed him. A man putting himself together from scratch did not look for distractions.

  The sight was fundamentally more shocking than anything that had happened the night before. Reinhart really found it easier than he might admit to accept any evidence that today’s youth were depraved: a historical phenomenon. He was far from astounded that Maw had stopped payment on his check—that of course was merely personal. Back in the outer office he sat down on a chair and realized that he habitually assumed the worst of others, and had furthermore done so for so many years that the process had by use become agreeable. He was comfortable in a world full of malice and corruption.

  But Bob Sweet was a man of his own generation who had seemed to escape the accumulated penalties of four decades. Oh, there were other examples, fifty-year-old movie stars who married schoolgirls, sexagenarian statesmen with unflagging energy, but Reinhart did not know them except as newspaper and TV myths. Sweet was his age-old acquaintance and newfound friend, and he now proved to be a collection of detachable parts.

  Reinhart’s head was in his hands when Eunice came in. His shoes, II-D, as usual needed a shine. When he reached puberty his dad, instead of a sex-talk, had given him a characteristic rule of life: “Always keep your shoes polished and your clothes brushed and you’ll find that the doors will open for you.” Reinhart had always found it impossible to imagine what Dad had been like as a youth.