by John Lawton
‘The summer we went to the moon,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I said the summer we went—’
‘I heard what you said. I meant what is that supposed to mean?’
‘Just what—’
‘What a waste of fuckin’ time that was.’
‘What?’
‘Moon shot, cum shot, it’s all just one big jerkoff! We’ve gone to the moon for nothing. It’s a total waste of money.’
‘Could be. What’s out there?’
‘Not my point. I meant. If I were a poor American—if I were a black woman scraping a living skivvying in Alabama or Mississippi I’d be thinking, “Whitey’s on the moon now. So fuckin’ what?” And I bet that’s exactly what the Blacks are thinking.’
‘Never thought of it that way.’
I wasn’t lying. I had not thought about it that way. Uttered by my punk brother it hadn’t been a notion worth thinking about.
‘Whitey on the moon. I guess it is.’
‘And if I were a little yellow woman with slope eyes who can go all day on a bowl of rice and still tow a tank uphill with my bicycle—I’d say it was the act of a nation that had lost its way.’
If this was irony, it was lost on me. Lost our way? It had been the dream of a nation—Jack Kennedy had committed us to this years ago, and by the time it happened it was smeared in the gore of a foreign war we could neither win nor lose and dusted in the shards of the Great Society. But it was still our dream. I had not dreamt this dream in an age—but before all that, before Russian Sputniks, before Kennedy’s knee-jerk reaction, it had been Billy’s dream and I was hearing Billy far louder than I was hearing Tsu-Lin. Perhaps if I had communicated a little of Billy’s dream to Huey I might not have got the shit kicked out of me outside Sweet Chucky’s bar back home. But what could I say about Billy to Huey—how do you tell a solipsistic brat about a father he never knew he’d never had?
‘My brother Billy used to be fascinated by the possibilities of what might be out there.’
‘Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. When we were in college you used to talk about Billy as though you’d seen him yesterday.’
Had I so written the man out of my daily deliberations? Had there been no room for him in my conversation? Of course Tsu-Lin was right. Memory like an elephant. But once set on a course she was unshakeable—if I asked her again what she thought was out there she’d tell me all over again about waste and poverty, and if I told her I had seen Billy only yesterday . . . well . . . what? That there was nothing more, no further spark in heaven just because brother Billy had said so?
Tsu-Lin drove me down to the road about five in the afternoon, and put me on a bus back to New York. One more homecoming.
When I got into the apartment there was a note taped to the TV screen. Dated today.
‘Gone to Baltimore. Back tomorrow aft. luv R.’
Fine. Mañana.
§
Came the mañana I decided to take reality by the shirtfront and go into the office.
Once I’d opened the door, shoving aside a pile of flyers and bills, I was hit by the smell of stale air. The place had been shut up for a month, in a heat wave. I’d never bothered with air-conditioning. I threw open all the windows. Didn’t make much difference. The stale air of New York in summer—rotting garbage, blocked drains—wafted in. I sat at my desk, flipped the lid off a cup of deli coffee, and wondered where to start.
I sifted bills from flyers, tossed the junk mail, and put off the obvious first task as long as I could. What the place needed was the spring clean it never got last spring. And there was only one place to start.
I went down to the basement. Got a bucket and mop off the janitor, scrubbed up the last of Mel—a brown, crispy melstain on the floor—and poured him down the sink. So long little buddy. And once started, once over the sentimental hump of flushing my best friend into the New York sewers I found it easy to get to work. I dusted, I sorted, I junked, and I rearranged. I hoped the phone might ring. I hoped someone might call with an offer of work. I hoped some forlorn parent might walk in off the street and I could pick up life exactly where I left it. No one did.
It left time for one of the heavy things in life. Move the refrigerator and clean up whatever gunk has congealed behind it. Sort of thing you do once every ten years if at all.
I gripped it in my arms and tugged, trying to break the seal of sticky crud that glued it to the floor. It came free with a jerk that sent me back a step, still clutching a six-foot refrigerator in my arms, and there was a clunk as something landed on the floorboards.
I parked the refrigerator and looked to see what had been wedged between it and the filing cabinet. There, point down, sticking in the floor, was a small, black-handled ice pick. Just like the one I used to have, the one that killed Mel Kissing, the one now gathering dust in the evidence room down at the 5th Precinct.
Would you recognize your own fingerprints? I don’t mean do you know every whorl and swirl, but would you know your own thumb or forefinger by a scar or a mark in the same way you’d know your own teethmarks in the flesh of an apple? So happens I would. That big scar on the forefinger of my right hand, from when I got it trapped in the door of that old Fairblast wood stove of Great-Granpappy Raines when I was about six.
I rooted around in my desk—found my Junior Detective Kit and dusted off the handle of the ice pick. Played Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass. No doubt about it—I’d handled it. It was mine. And if it was mine how did my prints get on the one Nate Truegood had slapped in front of me in June? I regret to say there was a very simple answer.
I locked up. Caught a cab back to Front Street. Still no Rose—thank God. I turned out the kitchen drawers, rattled through cutlery and implements until I found it. A small black-handled ice pick. Identical to the one I’d found an hour earlier, identical to the one that had killed Mel. It had always been one of my chores to hack out the icebox. ‘Bloke stuff,’ Rose would say. We’d had it for years. Only it was new.
I began to feel my heartbeat rise. I felt a new world begin to tear itself apart just as the old one had done the day Nate told me Mel was dead.
Rose was nothing if not methodical. A place for everything and everything in its place. There were two drawers in the top of her bedroom chest—one she called her knickers drawer, the other housed bills and receipts. I had never known her to throw anything away. In a matter of seconds I was clutching two receipts that threatened to self-combust and take me with them. One, dated mid June, was from an Upper East Side clinic that most in-the-know New Yorkers knew was a cover for an illegal abortion practice—$1,000. The other, dated the day after Mel died, was from a hardware store on East 8th, one ice pick—$2.98.
Oh no. Oh Jesus.
What did Mel say when I asked him who his new woman was, the last time I saw him? He said, ‘Nobody you know.’ What does ‘Nobody you know’ mean? It means somebody you do know. In all the years of cat and dog battles I’d seen the two of them have I never thought for a second that they had been or could be lovers. They were too much alike. But they had been. He’d gotten her pregnant sometime before I went to Toronto. Clumsy little prick. And he’d what? Ignored her, refused to acknowledge it was his, just stiffed her for the money? What? What? And what had Rose done? Put on her tight little English pigskin gloves, picked up the household ice pick, gone into my office and iced Mel? Iced Mel and left my prints all over the murder weapon?
Oh no. Oh Jesus. Not Mel.
It didn’t bear thinking about.
I thought about it.
Rose had spent over two weeks in England this summer—putting herself beyond reach, beyond suspicion? When I came back from Vermont did she ask me any questions about Mel, about all I’d been doing? No—she tumbled me into bed to smother any suspicion I might have h
ad with sex. And when she’d heard me and Nate wrap up the case that Sunday morning, she asked me, ‘Is it over?’ And to seal it up she’d taken me back to bed.
How dumb could I get?
I put the receipts back, shoved the drawer back. Stood in the sitting room.
Freeze framed.
Stopped in time and space.
Carbon and mollusc shit once more.
Who was it wrote, ‘My life closed twice before its close’?
And Mel’s voice came into my head once more, mangling Emily Dickinson’s verse with his forgetful something somethings . . . not sure which was heaven and which was hell. I don’t think he even knew the words to ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.
It’s no doubt a cliché, and a big one, that the dying man sees his whole life flash before him. As a kid, when I first heard the phrase, I had this idea of Pathé News or The March of Time, all speeded up but still with the rooster crowing and that portentous voice telling you how important it all was. Like the first time I got a Reader’s Digest letter telling me I’d won a major prize, it takes a while before you realize the insignificance of your own life. I was wrong, it isn’t a movie—I can tell you, the twice dying man sees his life as a second rate slideshow, a series of clattering transparencies jerking round in an endless loop on a shaky carousel, lit by a flickering projector. As your enfeebled brain searches desperately for meaning it discards most of the restofyerlife and just gives you the snapshots.
Mel, that last night in the Village . . . beardless and angry—well, when wasn’t he angry? Cut to Mel on the slab, the day Nate Truegood showed me his corpse, leached of life—who knows if the dead feel anger?
Rose, hair up in a turban, spattered with paint as she had been the first time I set eyes on her. Cut to Rose, hysterical with grief the night I got back from Canada to find out Mel was dead. How does anyone fake something like that?
Althea, backpack on, typewriter in hand, leaving me. Why now? Why think of Althea Harris Burke now? But Althea cut to Rose. Rose peeling off her dress to take me to bed, and Rose cut to the guy up in New England pressing the barrel of his shotgun to my head. I had not thought about him since I saw him blown away by Hammond’s sharpshooter. It was a memory I could readily erase. I had never wanted to see that image, re-live that moment again—but the carousel juddered back and forth. Rose peeled off her dress again and again and the guy’s head exploded right in front of me, over and over again.
For the first time I was curious about him. Up till now I’d merely been grateful that he was dead and not me. And I’d taken it for granted that he had followed Jack Feaver into New York, and killed Mel. But he hadn’t, and I think I’d only been able to wrap the issue in my mind by concluding that he had. He’d followed Mel—of course he had, why else had Mel bothered to mail me his notes?—but he hadn’t killed him. He never got the chance. Rose had killed Mel. Rose had killed Mel.
Cut to Rose. Peeling off her dress. Cut to Rose, hysterical with grief. How does anyone fake something like that? What was it Nate had said? ‘One blow, pierced his skull and buried the blade almost to the hilt in his brain. That took some strength.’ Good God, had she been that angry? Had her whole body turned to rage? And rage to superwoman strength?
Cut to Rose, hair up in a turban, spattered with paint as she had been the first time I set eyes on her. Cut to Rose, hysterical with grief. Cut to Rose. Peeling off her dress. To take me to bed. How does anyone fake something like that?
I heard the door bang open. Rose breezed in, dress billowing around her, hair bouncing, eyes bright, a smile on her lips, a brown paper bag of groceries in each arm. She dropped the bags and kissed me. A wet smackeroo, packed with feeling, her tongue prising my stubborn lips apart.
She must have bought pasta sauce, lots of it. When she pulled off to draw breath I looked down to see burst bags and broken glass and a bloody tide lapping at my feet.
‘Johnnie,’ she said. ‘Johnnie.’
She kissed me again . . . and I knew I was damned.
§
Who would ever know?
Who would ever tell?
§
There are times listening to Americans that you’d think we were roast alive on the grid of Vietnam. That faux-Texan George Herbert Walker Bush, a man whose stake in the state was a vacant plot of building land, summed it up neatly when he put both arms in the air at the end of the Gulf War and told the nation, ‘We have finally lain the ghost of Vietnam.’ Vietnam does not matter. Not in the way Bush thought it ever did. ‘We got our ass kicked’—I’ve never believed that, I’ve never believed America was defeated by the Viet Cong. America was defeated by the processes of Democracy, by a million kids in the streets exercising the right of free speech to say, ‘Hell no we won’t go.’ The Founding Fathers gave us that right when they dreamt up America. No foreign war has been quite as powerful as the First Amendment. Some of America, God knows maybe the larger part of America, has never grasped this. It sees humiliation in every minor incident—a boat hijacked by Cambodia, an embassy seized by fundamentalists—as down to giving way in Vietnam. We have a memorial—a much contested memorial, the least glorious memorial the dead of any nation ever had—to our fifty-seven thousand and some dead. Do we even have a statistic that’s any better than a guess for the Vietnamese dead? And Jimmy Carter said we owe them nothing.
§
Amerika tore itself to rags and ribbons even as we kissed, before I could free myself from that permanent, all-enveloping embrace just to draw breath. Days of Rage. The Crazies set off a bomb in a Marine Midland bank, brought the war home to Manhattan—another on one of the import piers—let’s kill fruit for peace. And the Weathermen put bombs in toilets in the Capitol—let’s blow the pants off women in Congress and put an end to global capitalism. And then, for good measure, they trashed Chicago one more time and blew themselves to heaven or hell on West 11th. And the Motherfuckers? Well you can’t keep track of everyone—maybe they just became one more neon explosion in the neon oven. But by then we were all up against the wall. Tricky Dicky blew away some campus bums at Kent State, and did more to bring the war home than Notley and Feaver could between them, told a thousand lies and got kicked out of office. That was ’74—by then I found it impossible to take any pleasure in his resignation. ‘So we got Tricky’ was overwhelmed by ‘who didn’t we get?’
She kissed me one more time. This time for ever. This time.
Time passes. We live like squirrels in our nest, and Amerika tore itself to rags and ribbons even as we kissed.
Time passes. Rose and I kept Sunday sweet for twenty-four years. We’d turn off the cooker and the radio, unplug the phone, read the Sunday papers, which in New York, you can always get on Saturday, walk in the park, talk, and end a blissfully peaceful day with an early night like a couple of horny teenagers. Once every ten years it would be fulsome in the way I, and maybe Mailer, had imagined it. When New York suffers a heavy snowfall, flakes floating down outside your window the size of old JFK half-dollars, the traffic seems only too willing to give up. I have seen it like this on Thanksgiving and on a few Sundays. To wake to a blanket of white that quiets the city and to see not a tire mark on it. To walk up an Avenue and hear only the crunch of your own feet on virgin snow. Sweet Sunday. It is the most enduring fragment of the sixties. Perhaps the only one of the many I have kept that I still believed in. Sweet Sunday.
Time passes. Rose died last year. She wanted her ashes scattered in Fish Bridge Park, a couple of blocks from the apartment, down by the side of the Brooklyn Bridge where the traffic roars by at rooftop level. It’s the smallest park in the city—a thin strip of reclaimed vacant lot that looks like the last hippie enclave in Manhattan, cherry trees, honeysuckle, wisteria and dusty vegetables growing in the shadow of the bridge, yearning sunflowers and scarlet tulips bending in the breeze off the East River. She planted the tulips herself. The cit
y said no, so I did it anyway. I have lived alone in her apartment ever since. Her apartment. When the will was read it turned out she’d owned the whole damn building since 1962. Never told me. Kept up the fiction of the skinflint landlord for over thirty years.
Mouse? Mouse found no one in West Texas much wanted their family portrait taken by a black man, and after his Village 77 photos went syndicated only psychos wanted their photograph taken by this black man so he sold up and put the money into a gas station franchise. He told me, ‘I look more acceptable in dirty overalls, it confuses whitey less—’sides I make five times what I did.’ The Justice Department sent federal marshals and attorneys to take his statement. He wasn’t charged with anything, but they picked up the life he was trying to make and shook it. He was famous, if not infamous for a while—and he never blamed me. I still hear from him time to time.
Cousin Gabe, no matter how much pizza he forced down, gained no weight. According to Mouse he was as skinny the day they drafted him as he had been the last time I’d seen him. He disappeared in combat, down on the Mekong Delta, in December 1970. The army listed him as M.I.A.—Missing in Action—but Mouse would have no truck with this and told me so.
‘Kid ain’t M.I.A. He’s N.D. double N.’
The army made an acronym out of everything, but this was not one I’d heard. I had to ask.
‘N.D. double N. ’Nother Dead Nigger in ’Nam.’
Notley Chapin joined the Weathermen—perhaps the craziest of the crazies—and he was believed killed in the explosion that tore through their bomb ‘factory’ on West 11th in the spring of 1970. But then someone reported seeing him in Missoula, and then Des Moines, and then Pierre, South Dakota, and it became clear that either Notley was alive or we were in the grip of a potent urban myth in which Notley was reincarnated in all the two-horse towns of America. I waited for a report of him glimpsed talking to Elvis in a midwestern diner on some boulevard of broken dreams. But—he was alive. Turned himself in in 1984, only to find the case against him so tissue thin it was thrown out of court. He too was famous for a few months, wrote his memoirs and then went back to Arizona. Runs a vegetarian restaurant in Tucson. About once in every five years some journalist of limited imagination turns up to write a ‘where-are-they-now’ piece on Notley, chats to him over the tofu special and delights in publishing the fatuous truism that man mellows, thereby missing the equally fatuous truism that man also lies to journalists. I will never eat another meal cooked by Notley Chapin.