Sweet Sunday

by John Lawton

  ‘Grab breakfast and meet me outside in twenty minutes.’

  She stuck a straw hat on my head, handed me a little backpack and led me up the side of the canyon and out onto the mountainside. For about two hours we hiked upward in silence. I stopped countless times to let my lungs recover. When I started again I’d find her sitting on a rock around the next bend. The last time she was sprawled on the path in the blast of full southern sun, staring into the distance. I flopped down next to her.

  ‘What are we looking at?’

  ‘Mexico.’

  ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘Hasn’t moved lately.’

  She took the pack off me, unrolled a waxpaper parcel and laid out ham sandwiches for two—just when I’d been expecting hippie food.

  ‘Eat up. It’s good. We raise our own hogs too.’

  I looked at Mexico till I got bored. Took about ten seconds. Then I ate.

  Ethel said, ‘What is it between you and Notley?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Things the two of you did in Chicago?’

  ‘Were you in Chicago?’

  ‘No, but Notley told me you were. That was quite a stunt you pulled. Is that what this is about, some stunt of Notley’s?’

  ‘It isn’t about Chicago. He’s been places I never have.’

  ‘Vietnam?’

  ‘I wasn’t talking geography.’

  She didn’t press the point.

  ‘You know. The guy has qualities. A lot of him is pure asshole, but he has qualities. But he doesn’t appreciate what we have here. He’s out pulling another stunt now—he no longer tells me what. Are you two planning something?’

  ‘No—we’re not.’

  ‘Because . . . these stunts don’t work, do they?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘OK—then give me this—they don’t work anymore.’

  ‘That’s probably true.’

  ‘It feels like we’re just nibbling at the edges.’

  That I could not deny. I’d stopped nibbling a while back. Until very recently it had been one of Mel’s roles to remind me of this.

  ‘It’s like we’re Commanches whirling around the wagon train. When what she should really be doing is taking the fort.’

  I said, ‘Is that a metaphor?’

  It was her turn to say nothing. To see if Mexico had moved lately.

  Then, ‘We could make it work here. So long as the man leaves us alone, we could make it work here. If Notley continues to pull stunts they’ll come for us. I think that’s one of the reasons I have to leave.’

  ‘What’s the other?’

  ‘You can get too comfortable. You can get . . . too easy.’

  §

  Notley said, ‘You stayed?’

  I said, ‘Seemed like the place to be. At the time.’

  ‘So . . . now you know, are you going to publish?’

  ‘Can things like this ever stay secret?’

  ‘Who would tell?’

  ‘How can I not tell? It’s murder. You’d tell. You’ve already told me.’

  ‘Yes—I’d tell. I was always going to tell, sooner or later. I was just waiting for the whole puzzle, rather than just a few pieces. And I’ve been thinking about the piece you brought me, what you said about the difference between military law and civil law. And I think they’ve got Feaver every which way. He’s on a leash and they can jerk it anytime they want. To discharge him, honorably or not, puts him, as you say, beyond their reach. As long as he remains a soldier they’re still controlling the issue, they’re still controlling the fallout, they still hold the pieces. They have CYA.’

  ‘CIA?’

  ‘No. CYA. Cover Your Ass.’

  ‘Then why let you go? Why let anyone go?’

  ‘Who gives a fuck about a bunch of grunts and a black sergeant? I imagine they’ll sit on him for another year or so, then pension him off. If it blows after that it’s ancient history and, again, who cares?’

  ‘Why doesn’t Feaver just quit?’

  ‘I don’t know. But like I said the man is driven. I can only conclude there’s still something he wants out of them—out of the system.’

  I thought about it—to no purpose. To second guess him was pointless. I’d never met the man.

  ‘You say he’s in Vermont? Where in Vermont?’

  ‘Roughly where New York and Vermont meet Massachusetts. Near Manchester. Place called Squab Hill, between Granville and Manchester. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I think I have to talk to Colonel Feaver.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake—why?’

  §

  The Buick died on me, conveniently, on an access road approaching Tucson airport. I stuck the tapes in my bag, abandoned the car and walked into the terminal. I got myself on a flight to Houston with a connection to Kennedy. Time to go back to New York. The endless homecoming. Part of me wondered why I had not said New York when Ethel had asked what I might grace with the name of home. I seemed to be always arriving at New York. A place to which I constantly came. Less the long goodbye than the long hello.

  §

  1963. I got off the bus from Washington that summer’s day and went in search of Mel’s apartment. Everything I owned—or everything I had not disowned—was in a backpack, so I walked. A meandering route from the Port Authority to the East Village. I’d never set foot in New York City in my life. It was a little like walking into a movie. That lighter than air, eye-bedazzled feeling. I sat in Madison Square and stared up 5th Avenue. I dawdled on Lexington and watched the Chrysler gleam like diamonds in the sky.

  I found myself outside Mel’s building around mid-afternoon. A note was pinned to the door. ‘Turner. Gone to work. God knows how long I’ll be.’ And on the back was a scribbled map of how to find the office of the Village Voice. I found it. I found Mel, bent over an old typewriter, typing furiously with one finger of each hand, oblivious to his surroundings, oblivious to me.

  ‘So you made it,’ was all he said.

  He’d changed his image. I’d lived so long with the old one I had long since thought it permanent. Mel had always been Beat—the ‘nik’ is ­derogatory—and his idea of Beat cool had been black. Black jeans. Black roll-neck sweater. Black, heavy-rimmed glasses. A neat black, mephistophelean, goatee beard. He could have played tambourine for Peter, Paul and Mary or polished the horn for Dizzy Gillespie. Now he seemed to have discovered color. He looked a little like the outside of an Italian restaurant, a dash of green, a dash of red. A ring in one ear, a multi-colored scarf at his neck. A T-shirt he’d done up with knotted string and then dyed. Round-lensed, brass-rimmed little spectacles. He was, had I but known another derogatory term, the prototype ‘hippie’. The beard was growing. It was a couple of years before his face vanished altogether—down to eyes and nostrils—but I could see the way it was going. Pretty soon hair would take over—hair was here to stay.

  ‘Take this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the address where you’ll be staying.’

  I looked at it.

  ‘Don’t take a cab, they’ll hear your accent and mark you for a rube. You’ll end up crossing the Tri-Borough bridge both ways. Take the subway to City Hall and walk from there. Down the side of the Brooklyn Bridge, cross Pearl, cross Water and you’re there. Can’t miss it.’

  ‘You mean you’re not coming?’

  ‘I got work to do. What’s your problem?’

  ‘I mean. I never even met the woman.’

  ‘You two will get along just fine. Rose is OK. A little off the wall maybe, but OK.’

  He went back to two-fingered typing, hammering down fit to break the machine. I left. It was not the reunion I’d been expecting. But, then, what had I been expecting? He was right about Rose
though. A little off the wall. But we got along fine.

  I walked down Frankfort Street, under the roads leading to the bridge, wondering if the roar of traffic would stop at night and let me sleep, crossed the side streets, glimpsed the towers of Wall Street in the near distance and found myself in a part of town that looked bombed out. My first reaction was to re-read Mel’s note, on the assumption he or I had got something wrong. I turned into Front Street. All the buildings were boarded up. They looked as old as the Republic, neglected, uninhabited, deserted. A smell of fish hung in the air. A guy in a bloody apron pushed a cartload of lobster along the cobbles. I looked for the right house. A five-story warehouse. Only the first floor had glass in its windows, and I took that to be my destination. I walked up the stairs and tapped gently on the door. A few seconds later it was yanked back and a turbaned woman stuck her head out.

  ‘Yes?’ An upper-class English accent.

  ‘Turner Raines. Mel sent me. You must be Rose.’

  The door was pulled wide. There stood a six-foot woman stark naked but for the turban, spattered from head to foot in half a dozen different shades of paint. She looked like an animated Jackson Pollock.

  ‘Elizabeth Diment,’ she said. ‘Called Rose because of some unimaginative bastard’s joke about an English rose. Not funny, but I live with it. After all, I’m not even blonde!’

  I could see that. She led me into the apartment she was half-­decorating —one wall started before the last was finished, colors tried out in streaks all over the place, what furniture there was tucked away under sheets. But—it was big. Looked across the way to the ruins of another warehouse opposite, but it was light and spacious.

  Elizabeth/Rose showed no inclination to get dressed and no consciousness that she was undressed. I supposed it made some sort of sense. Paint the apartment and don’t ruin your clothes. Skin is waterproof and almost anything washes off it.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I? Why don’t you take a look at your room. End of the hallway, on your left.’

  The apartment was spacious. My room wasn’t. It had nothing in it but a mattress. I lay down on it. An inch less and my head and feet would have touched opposing walls. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going back, I wasn’t looking back. If anything it suited my mood. I wasn’t about to be re-born, but a room the size of a womb could do no harm. I went back to Rose and her paint and her very English cup of tea, and said, ‘Fine.’ She named a low rent, less than I’d paid for my share of the Washington apartment, and we shook on it. We drank tea. Me in my Levi’s and Tony Lama’s, Rose in her nothings. She told me all about herself—I figured that was one of the functions of tea—how she’d come to America in search of a great-grandmother in Virginia who’d supplied General Hooker with the commodity to which he has, ever since, lent his name—scratched bits of paint off her boobs, munched on chocolate chip cookies and in the end leapt up, pulled off her turban—red hair falling in giant ringlets halfway down her back—and disappeared into the shower.

  We spent the evening in some of her favorite bars. Several of her favorite bars. We ended up in Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place drinking margaritas. Just before she got totally drunk, she stuck five dollars in my hand and said, ‘Make sure we get home OK.’

  I rolled her into a cab, I rolled her out and I put her to bed.

  ‘You know, Texsh, I think we’re going to get along jush fine,’ she said.

  And so began a pattern of our lives that took up one and often three nights of our weeks for the next few years. She would appear the next morning, made-up, levelheaded and we’d go into work together. She was given to steams of rage, and I could hear her anger roar out across the entire floor of the office—‘Can none of you dozy fuckers learn to spell?’ ‘Good God, man, you’d forget the date of your own Revolution if I hadn’t tattooed it onto your arse!’ One unfortunate freelancer got so exasperated with her he uttered the near-fatal line, ‘I wouldn’t normally even think of punching a woman . . .’ and before he could finish the sentence she had coldcocked him with a left jab and was dancing around him doing the Cassius Clay shuffle, yelling, ‘Get up, you spineless little toad of a man!’ If this sort of thing happened late enough in the day it would inevitably end in what she called ‘a bit of a crawl’ and we’d hit the bars again. I didn’t mind. I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t mind. She seemed to know what she was doing.

  It was an odd relationship, but I quickly forgot to view it that way. We had suspended gender. Sex did not rear its greedy little head. Her indifference to flesh and gender could astound people. I’d get dragged to clothes shops with her, yeaing or naying the stuff she swanned out of the changing room wearing, more often than not dragged into the changing room with her. After one expensive afternoon hitting the lingerie shops of 5th Avenue, she tried on six different bras over dinner. We had guests. Mel did not know where to look—or to be precise he knew exactly where to look—and whichever girlfriend he had in tow never spoke to me or Rose again. I got used to it. It was like living with a six-year-old, permanently kicking off her clothes and running across the beach. It meant no more than that.

  We finished the apartment between us. Gradually over the next five or six years the landlord—‘that old skinflint, darling’, never did get to meet the man—did up the rest of the building and we found ourselves with neighbors. Rather than go down further the neighborhood started to come up a tad. Down the street they started a Seaport Museum and parts of Fulton Street got, as Rose put it, ‘a bit bloody posh’, but the ‘poshness’ never reached our end of the street. We lived in an enclave of general neglect, modest improvement, modest rent and stinking fish. One day a scrawny tomcat appeared through the window with a chunk of cod in its jaws. It stayed. Rose, me and ‘Neddy Seagoon’—don’t ask why—an unholy and not wholly unhappy trinity.

  Over the next three or four years we—Rose and me, two non-native New Yorkers (the cat after all was a native)—saw our city change around us, felt its center of gravity shift from around 52nd Street (all that jazz) to around the East Village, to Alphabet City—a movement generated by thousands, tens of thousands, of other non-native New Yorkers pouring in from Ohio, Iowa, Indiana (pick a nowhere place and take a guess). It was kids, kids disowning their family physically as we had metaphorically. New York filled with new huddled masses yearning to be free. They huddled around Tompkins Square, they slept a dozen to a room exactly as the last wave of immigrants had done, and I’d put their average age at sixteen or seventeen. By 1967 they were making the East Coast version of the summer of love. I remember walking across the square with Rose one August night, dope hanging on the air, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band booming out of a dozen different windows, feeling outnumbered, almost old and not much minding that we were, and Rose said, quoting quite unintentionally from the Beatles’ previous album, ‘Where do they all come from?’

  §

  1969. I got into the apartment. Neddy sat by his empty bowl and howled until I fed him. Rose was back—clothes scattered across her bed, the wardrobe door slid back, a waft of scent still hanging in the air, an open suitcase with two bottles of duty-free British gin—she just wasn’t around. This was nothing unusual. Most of her relationships amounted to short-lived sexual frenzies, often no more than one night stands. I learnt early on that if she wasn’t home for a night or two it didn’t mean I’d find her at the bottom of the East River.

  I slept late. Ate a lazy breakfast at lunchtime and weighed up the merits of my last conversation with Notley. He had a point. Why ask? I had a point, and I rather thought I would stick to it. I had to ask. The near-dormant part of my character crept to the surface. I had to ask, I had to give the guy a hearing. I’d heard Mouse’s tale. I’d heard Notley’s, and the two were not the same. Supposing the third was not the same as the second? Then another voice in the head said, ‘But you saw the photographs—they are the constant in this, the photographs, as sure
ly as E=MC2.’ And another voice said, ‘Ask.’ After all what were the chances he would shoot me? In cold blood? In Vermont?

  When I set off for Hoboken late afternoon, Rose still hadn’t shown up. I picked up my conspicuous yellow VW in the stacker and yet again drove north—it seemed like driving this route had become as imprinted on my flesh as a lifeline. I cheated fate. Just for the hell of it. Swung back across the George Washington bridge and up the east bank of the Hudson—Yonkers, Poughkeepsie and places north. Why not? I had criss-crossed America, turned it into a cat’s cradle of tire tracks. What mattered one more bridge, one more stretch of highway?

  Why did I leave it so late? Never did figure out why. Did I think of darkness as some kind of cover? Whatever—dusk was creeping down by the time I passed Hudson Falls. All the same I followed Notley’s instructions and I found the place easily. Through Granville, across the state line a mile or so into Vermont, a mile or so down the road to Manchester, off at a graded road marked Squab Hill and follow the track. All it lacked was a sign saying ‘mass-murderer this way’. Where the gravel turned to dirt there was a mailbox balanced on a skewed pole with ‘Feaver’ stenciled on the side. I parked the car by the side of a wood and set off on foot. It was past dusk and moonlit. There were fields of stubble all around me, chaff and grain scattered across the track. The aftermath of harvest. As I rounded the edge of the woods, a hill rose out of the stubble like a knob—a sharp hill, straight up, straight down, exaggerated like the illustration to a fairy tale. Atop this hill was a house . . . And in this house there lived a giant.

  How to describe what I saw by the light of that silvery moon? Put simply, as simply as it hit me, Squab Hill was the log cabin, backwoods, Natty Bumppo version of my father’s house. Where Sam had built in glass and steel and alloys this monstrosity on stilts was hewn from pine, the bark still on the logs. It crept up the hillside to tower over the fields at treetop height. It was the same principle at work, I felt, the boldness, the ugliness of fuck-you arrogance.

  The first floor seemed to be garages, the retractable door of one was wide open and a greenish light—they’ve landed, they’ve landed, take me to your leader was my first thought—glared out across the yard. There were no lights on the second or third stories. I left the shelter of the trees, crept up to the house, trying for shadows, knowing that if I wanted a look inside I’d have to risk stepping into the light. Why? For fuck’s sake why? Why was I behaving like . . . like what? A guerrilla? A boy scout? Or just a hammy gumshoe? I could have just walked up to the door and rung the bell.