by P. F. Kluge
That morning in South Jersey was a special kind of cruise. Eddie had been down since Newark, and I guess Joann wanted my help in cheering him up. Autumn was coming, and we were going to look at the leaves, she said.
Near Manahawkin, we saw that the landscape had changed drastically since our last surveillance. “ADULT LIVING,” the billboards advertised. A whole new community had been cut into the pines, built and paved and peopled. It was one of the first of the New Jersey retirement communities, and we drove through it at ten miles an hour, on streets that were named for birds, like Robin, Heron, Meadowlark. We gazed at the residents, who were raking leaves, and setting traps for moles, and admiring the year’s last flowers, chrysanthemums. Autumn of the year and autumn of life came together for us that day.
“Any morning there’ll be a killing frost,” I said. “We’re due.”
“Who gets frosted,” Eddie asked. “The people or the flowers?”
“I wouldn’t like the winter here,” Joann said. “I wouldn’t want to be old here in the winter.”
“There’s Indian summer to hope for,” I said.
“Hey, what is Indian summer?” Eddie asked. “Years and years, I’ve heard that expression.”
“After the first frost,” I said, “it sometimes turns warm again. You get these mellow days, sunny and brisk. A time for hayrides and—”
“But, oh Christ!” Eddie burst out. “What do they do when winter comes? I mean, what happens all day long? The mail arrives. That’s the big event, I’ll bet. They call each other on the phone. They eat. What else? Sleep? Tell me this, Wordman. You get to be a certain age, what do you figure it feels like just going to bed at night and not knowing for sure you were gonna see the morning?”
“I guess …” I opened my mouth but it was one of those times you start a sentence without knowing how you’ll finish it. Luckily Eddie interrupted me again.
“Hey, let’s go!”
He pulled to the side and was out of the car in no time. He nodded to a pair of old people who were raking leaves, or trying to. That was why he’d stopped. There were lots of leaves, and a gusting wind kept the leaves well ahead of the old-timers’ rakes.
“Come on!” He shouted, yanking a rake out of the old man’s hands, gesturing for me to take the woman’s. They backed off, astonished, while Eddie swept across the lawn. He made a contest out of it: Which of us could build the largest pile? I worked hard, but Eddie went at it like a madman, giggling wildly, raking up huge piles of oak and maple leaves.
“Free Italian-sausage-and-peppers sandwich to the one who picks up the last leaf!” he shouted.
We raced along, stuffing the leaves into plastic bags. The piles dwindled down to handfuls, and before long we were on our knees, chasing the last few stragglers across the lawn.
“You pick the winner, Pop,” he called to the old man. His wife looked shocked, but the old-timer got into the spirit.
“There’s one over there near the mailbox!” he called out. “A maple over by the garden hose! Oooh, a big red one just came down! Get it!”
I’m sure he rigged the contest. Eddie and I were down on our knees, scanning a lawn that was as immaculate as a vacuum cleaner could have made it. We were sweating, and our hands smelled of dirt and leaves. Stems and twigs were in our hair, and our jeans had round wet patches at the knees. We were crouched on the grass when Joann came up behind us, holding a red-and-gold maple she’d been saving for the endgame.
“The lady wins!” the old man shouted. “Hot diggity!”
An hour later, still munching cookies they’d forced on us, we found ourselves near Camden, just across the bridge from Philadelphia. Camden’s not such a good town for leaves. Or trees. Flat, fucked over, mostly black, Camden is to Philadelphia what Newark is to New York: a place you drive through.
“Time we turned around,” Eddie said.
Nobody argued, but there are a lot of old-fashioned traffic circles in that part of Jersey, exits feeding off them like spokes off a wheel. I screwed up the turn, and somehow we found ourselves in downtown Camden, where even the dirty bookstores closed at sundown.
“What a place,” Eddie mused. “Who the hell ever lived here, anybody ever heard of?”
“I know one!” Joann popped up. “A famous person, too.”
“Who?” Eddie asked.
“Guess.”
Eddie didn’t respond. Maybe he was blue. Then again, maybe he was stumped.
“Give up?” she asked.
Eddie shrugged. “Sure.”
“Jersey Joe Walcott,” she said. “I read it somewhere.”
“There’s another famous man came out of Camden,” I said.
“Who’s that?” Joann asked.
“You guess.” But there weren’t any takers. “We’ll drop in at his house.”
I was in luck that day. My memories of a class trip I’d taken ten years before didn’t betray me. And Walt Whitman’s home hadn’t been urban-renewed, although everything around it had. It stood there, an island of wood and stone in a sea of empty lots, smashed brick, shattered glass.
“Oh yeah,” Eddie said as we pulled up in front. “Walt Whitman. Guy who built the bridge.”
“Come on, Eddie,” Joann chided. “The guy they named the bridge after!”
“No shit!” Eddie said.
“Like Pulaski and Goethals,” she said.
“Yeah. And Triboro.”
“Let’s go in,” I said.
“They let you in?” Eddie asked.
“Sure.”
“What for?”
“Just to look around. See where he worked, lived, died. So you get inspired, maybe.”
“Okay,” Eddie agreed. “I could use a little of that.”
I won’t make too much of Eddie’s visit to the place where the senile, half-paralyzed poet spent his last two decades. I’ll leave that to Mannheim and his kind. Yet he won’t be wrong if he argues that something of Walt Whitman stayed with Eddie for the rest of his life.
Like all such shrines, the Whitman house was presided over by one of those dear officious volunteer ladies who are the last-ditch custodians of culture in America. She was surprised to see us, so close to closing time, and a little alarmed. We didn’t look like your average literary pilgrims. But once we paid admission and convinced her we weren’t casing the place, she escorted us from room to room, happy to show us everything: the front parlor, with the poet’s rocking chair and fireplace, the back room, with the bed from which he completed the ninth, or “deathbed,” edition of Leaves of Grass.
Joann loved the place. She was everywhere, poking into corners, peering at pictures, peppering the hostess with questions. What was it? A nesting instinct? An antiquarian streak? A tiny respite from the impasse her affair with Eddie must have reached? I don’t know, but she stayed indoors forever. Eddie, meanwhile, strayed outside, and I followed, into the backyard. I remember there were some fruit trees and a vegetable garden that was about shut down for the season, and a rickety wooden bench you weren’t supposed to sit on. We squatted on the grass and rested our backs against the seat.
“We can go anytime,” I said, afraid that he was bored. “We’ve seen all there is to see. It’s just an old house.”
“Leave her stay a while yet,” Eddie said. “She likes it here. I like it too.”
“I was hoping you would.”
“Maybe someday, they’ll make a museum out of the back room at Vince’s. Hey, wouldn’t that be something? This here bed is where Frank Ridgeway worked on ‘Far-Away Woman,’ and Eddie Wilson sat right over here on a case of empty Schaefer bottles.”
“That would be strange.”
“So’s this. Think about it. If Whitman came back today, he’d find the house the same as ever. He could climb right back into the bed he died in. Or step out into the yard. Same pear trees. Same bench. Same old vegetable patch. Nothin’ ain’t changed. But the minute he stepped out onto the streets of Camden … holee shit!”
I laughed at
that. Eddie had this way of saying “holee shit!” that always broke me up. He had a big grin on his face as he headed back to the car.
I went inside and found Joann. We started browsing through pictures of turn-of-the century Camden and stayed till closing time. When we found Eddie, he was waiting for us outside, sitting on the hood of the car. He was staring across the street, so wrapped up in what he saw over there, he didn’t notice our approach.
I can tell you what he was looking at. I can’t tell you what it meant to him, though, but I can guess. The Whitman house, I’ve said, was surrounded by empty lots strewn with junked cars, ripped mattresses, cans and bottles, all the detritus of urban decay. Here and there, on the horizon, there were a few other surviving houses: a flash of laundry, a scrap of garden, an unbroken window. Out of these houses, at dusk, kids came to play. That’s what Eddie was watching: black kids throwing rocks at birds, foraging over bins of garbage, scraping together a baseball game on a lot where a slide into home plate would mean death from a dozen kinds of tetanus. They played though, till it was too dark to see grounders or line drives, only the fly balls against the sky. Then, when it was too dark even for that, they walked home, kicking, jiving, poking past the poet’s house, trailing clouds of “mothah-fuckahs.”
Eddie pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and offered them around. I didn’t smoke much back then, but I took one anyway, sensing that Eddie didn’t want to leave. Joann lit up too.
“It doesn’t connect, does it?” Eddie said, blowing a cloud of blue smoke into the autumn air. “From there”—he pointed to the Whitman house, then to the war zone where the kids had played—“to there.”
“No.”
“It came apart somewheres,” he said. “They don’t know nothing about each other, him and them. He’s just a name on the bridge to Philly.”
“He’s been dead a long time,” I said.
“I know that, but …” he gestured at the ruins “… what about this?”
He pointed down the street at the black kids. You could still hear them announcing what they would do to each other’s ass, come morning.
“… and them?”
“I got this for you,” I said. It was the only answer I could give. A paperback edition of Leaves of Grass.
He seemed genuinely surprised. And moved. He thumbed through it, though it was too dark to read.
“I like the title, anyway,” he said.
“It’s from the both of us,” I said, a total lie. Joann had been in the backyard, examining the poet’s pear tree, when I purchased the book.
“Thanks, you two,” Eddie said. He grabbed us each by the arm and walked around to the side of the car, and for once the ride home was the way it used to be, relaxed and full of wonder, windows open to the night.
No, Eddie and I never rapped about Walt Whitman. We didn’t recite poems or mark them up or try putting them to music. Fact is, I never saw that paperback again. If you told me Eddie chucked it in the garbage at the next gas station, I couldn’t prove you wrong. To this day, I don’t know if Eddie more than flipped through Leaves of Grass. I know that I made a point of buying a copy for myself, though, and carrying it around. I wanted to read what I hoped Eddie was reading. I wanted to invite him to talk. But all he ever did was kind of wink at me.
“Leaves of Grass?” he’d ask.
“Leaves of Grass,” I’d respond, till it became a joke, a password, a kind of riddle. Sally thought we’d scored some hash. “What the hell goes on here? You guys smokin’ cattails?”
“Leaves of Grass?” I’d ask when Eddie was sitting alone on the edge of a bad mood, or when he’d come out of a motel room after a night with Joann. “Leaves of Grass?”
“Oh yeah, you bet. Leaves of Grass.”
“Leaves of Grass?”
“Bet your ass, Leaves of Grass.”
Now I’d heard it again, twenty years later, from a troubled felon at Rahway State Prison, and I was pretty sure that Eddie’d been trying for something grand and broad—something Whitmanesque—down in Lakehurst. He’d been trying somehow to pull it all together, to cover the landscape, the poet’s empty house and the ghetto’s scavenger kids. Who were Wendell’s “kings”? That I didn’t know, and I didn’t know whether Eddie had even touched what he’d been reaching for. But I bet Joann Carlino did.
Leaves of Grass.
14
Around Lakehurst I got lost. For twenty minutes, I wandered through the pine barrens, till I suddenly came upon a vast, ghostly landmark that told me exactly where I was. Worn and rusting, the Hindenburg’s ten-story-high hangar loomed out of the scrub pine, a dark colossus against a dead gray sky, and I knew I was five minutes from the turnoff to the quonset. I never debated returning to the quonset. I didn’t even bother flashing the turn signal. I just turned.
The sandy road wound through the pines and maples and oak, all of them dwarfed and scrubby. It crossed over a slow dark river whose waters were stained brown by cedar roots and fallen needles, and then emptied out onto a clearing, with just enough room to pull a U-turn. Across the clearing stood the quonset, depressing and uncared-for, as I remembered it. I’d thought the termites would have gotten it by now, or rust, or the fires that swept through the barrens, but there it was, refusing to fall down and die, Doc Robbins’ acoustical wonder.
Why bother getting out of the car? I didn’t have fond memories of the place. There’d been little enough to see back then. What now? Still, I stepped out, slammed the door, and walked toward the quonset. No point in going in, I said. Just—you know—walk around it once and leave. That’s what I did, circling at a distance of, say, twenty feet. The windows, one on each side, were painted black. But the paint was scratched so you could see inside. You couldn’t see much. But you could see—I saw—that there were lights inside. And the lights were on.
I came around the front, stepped onto the rotting wooden porch, reached for the handle, turned the knob.
And stopped.
There was someone in there. I swear it. I heard someone cough—a warning cough, like a snake’s rattle. Don’t mess with me, man, stay outside.
I pushed the door open.
The lights were off now.
I stayed outside, looking in. I couldn’t see much. The back of the room was dark. And the sides, and the space right behind the door. I saw an empty floor and puddles of water, that was all.
I stood there, like a kid on the steps of a haunted house, afraid to enter but lacking a strong enough excuse to run. Someone was in there. It was the surest thing I knew. A derelict, I told myself. A bum. But what bum would take refuge in such a damp and moldy shell on a warm summer afternoon? No reason to take shelter, not here, not now.
I backed away, a step at a time. Why go in? Because I was one-fifth of a group whose leader rented the place for one month twenty years ago? What kind of reason was that? No telling what the quonset had been used for since then, what deals went down there, what might be stashed against the walls, or buried in the floor.
I opened the car, slid behind the driver’s wheel, turned the key. The engine jumped to life.
And the quonset door slammed shut. Loudly, triumphantly, shut.
I sat in the car. There’d been no reason to come to this dead place, and there was no reason to stay. That was then and this was now.
You visit graves, right? But you don’t go digging them up. You drive past the house you used to live in when you revisit the old neighborhood. But you don’t go banging on the door.
I stared at that door slammed shut in front of me, as if whoever were inside knew I wasn’t the type to force my way in.
I decided to surprise him. Surprise myself. Just this once.
I reached over to the glove compartment, pulled out a flashlight, and got out of the car. I snapped the flashlight on when I was still a dozen feet in front of the quonset door. I kept coming.
I knocked on the door three times, and waited. Play fair. Open and aboveboard. Another knock.
No answer.
The knob turned—no lock—and the door pushed open in front of me. I brought up the flashlight and pointed it inside, onto the same patch of floor I’d seen before.
I stepped into the doorway and raised the light.
“Anybody here?”
No answer.
“Is there someone in here?”
Nothing.
I stepped inside. One step is all I got.
“Someone’s here.”
A voice, faint and hoarse, from far back in the quonset. My light didn’t reach that far. A voice, faint and hoarse and terrifyingly familiar.
“NO!” I screamed. “NO!!”
“Get out, Wordman.”
I threw the flashlight into the quonset, where it shattered on the floor. Screaming, I ran for the car. Crying, trembling, I raced through the pines, careened out onto the highway, like a mortally wounded animal running—too late, in vain—from the scene of his own death.
What had I expected? A bum, a drunk? An escaped con from a nearby work farm? Maybe a mental patient—South Jersey was full of institutions. Or maybe—granting the impossible premise that the intruder in the quonset had something to do with the Parkway Cruisers—maybe I’d expected to shine my flashlight on Elliot Mannheim’s predatory face, or Kenny Hopkins’, or even Sally’s. Even Wendell Newton’s. You can escape from a prison, can’t you? But there are some prisons you can’t escape.