"I know, I know it's disconnected," Charles cries into the wind. “I know!"
"The Peoria operator connected me with Dad."
The idea of the phone company involving their father in this sends up orange coronas that pulse and explode under his closed eyes; then he sees a white screen with a cluster of leaf shadows against it, coal-black fleurs-de-lis that tremble and bend in one direction from the force of the current of the wind in Jerome's voice, as he says, "Grandpa Neumiller died this morning. They think it was a heart attack. Grandma heard him get out of bed and thought he was going off to work. He fell, and when she called he didn't answer."
Charles sits, or sends out the impulses that should result in sitting, and wants to say that this is no joke, but instead, to judge whether it's happening, looks at his hand. It gives off green.
"Dad says Grandma is in real bad shape."
The corner of the bed, a quadrant of Charles's world, falls away with Jerome as he sits in a shaft of sunlight coming through the drawn shade. His face is stained golden. His lips are blue. Green-tinted leaf shadows sway over the gold, and Charles watches the transubstantiation of this, figment of a face once his brother's, as it disappears behind the shifting net of green, becomes a grove of distant trees, a shower of parti-colored leaves, droplets of spray holding the last of the sun on a summer—
"The doctor's given her a sedative," Jerome says, and some of his features reappear.
Jerome?
"But it hasn't helped, I guess. Dad says she's too weak to walk, but keeps getting out of bed and going through the house looking for Grandpa, calling his name."
There's silence, and then a wind sends leaves clattering along the concrete walk outside, and the panes of his window hum in and out of harmony with the force of the wind, which elevates him into a higher region where two characters, somehow familiar, act out a story he once knew but now remembers only details of:
The one seated on the bed, the older of the two, will rise up. He does. The two are brothers. The older one leads an exemplary life, or sd the other thinks, and the other has observed him since he was a child in order to try to learn the right way to act; the older is taciturn, and seldom allows emotion to show on his face, but the other has discovered that if he watches his— Jerome —watches Jerome's eyes, he can sense Jerome's feelings and sometimes anticipate his thoughts. Now, before Jerome rose from the bed, he said something that altered their tie as brothers, and perhaps their lives, and must have been extraordinary and difficult for him to say; there are rainbow-tinted prisms giving off scattered paths of light from his eyes. He brings his sleeve over them, puts his glasses on, and goes to the door.
"They'll be here at five, at my place, to pick us up. The oldest grandsons are going to be pallbearers."
Pallbearers?
Jerome shoves his sleeves into his jacket. "I haven't decided if I'll go to any classes yet." His elbows or wings make ready for flight. "Probably."
"Jill and I were going to a movie this weekend," the other says, searching for the detail to tie him to himself. Dried strawberry runners glittering with gold straw, a Husky-looking dog panting happily behind a fence of wire mesh, its master down on one knee on the other side. Was that right? "What day's today?" "Friday. The funeral is Monday." "Did you say they were coming to pick us up?" "At five. I have to go." Jerome glides over the legs of a body on the living-room floor, and is gone. Leaves of tan and amber, lilac, and bronze shower down on the body, or somebody running, a hand at his shoulder, Charles!
He looks over his shoulder to the other room. There was a body on the floor.
"Ah!" he cried, and recoiled from his voice. It was no dream, I lay broad— He was seized with shivers that came in irregular broken rushes, as he went to his closet, thinking. He doesn't believe it. If he really did, would he walk over here and put on his robe?
He pressed his palms on the dresser top and waited for the first note of grief (which he couldn't explain or know when to expect, and which, in an instant his mind replayed, was related to a butcher knife being whetted on the edge of an earthenware crock, the way it sang, the way the singing made his chest ache) to sound, and the self-absorption formed a film over his eyes and transformed the objects on his dresser—the copper-colored ashtray, the round alarm clock, the gold-framed picture of Jill, the full pack of Lucky Strikes—into talismanic entities suffused with an inner organic yellowishness that shone around their edges, and made them seem to have been arranged by hands other than his to match this moment in time. Jerome?
The way I'm seeing things, he thought, and shook his head, and peeled the line of red cellophane from the cigarettes. He'd been up, after a long argument with Jill, until four in the morning, trying to write a poem for her, and had thrown away everything but "Believe the nude aggressiveness of worms, girl, and settle your hair, gold, over the grove of radiance .. .”
He sat on the edge of the bed and saw his grandfather in a series of snapshots that a twelve-year-old, himself.
had taken and arranged in an album; walking down the rode in front of Vince's house, squinting into a transit, standing beside a pair of acetylene tanks with his hands on his hips, staring down; getting into an old Kaiser he drove then; standing at the bottom of a cracked swimming pool, pointing away; looking up from his reclining chair in the living room as he reached across for a cigarette, his face bleached and startled by the flash—never at rest. And then Charles saw him in the same chair, in natural light, gripping its armrests and staring fixed ahead.
Even when the television was on, he'd sit that way, looking away from it, or you'd come into the room and find him there alone and be surprised at how quiet the house was. There were times when he didn't seem to" notice you, or merely said hello and then went back to his thought, but when he did talk, it was about you and your concerns, and confirmed what you already felt— that he was thinking about others than himself; in particular, you. The rest of the world was going by in a rush and he was waiting for you to come to him, a monument at rest, and nothing you said could take him by surprise; in his silence he'd encountered more possibilities than you could think about, or imagine, or ever came up. It took just a sentence or two from him to help you see light. Imperturbable. An unshakable head of a tribe. The Chieftain, an old friend, J. D. Prell, always called him.
Charles could see the corncribs, machine sheds, silos, and barns built or repaired by his grandfather—with his sons and sons-in-law and, lately, his grandsons, working as his crew—from the area around Pekin and Spring Lake, all the way down to Springfield and Jacksonville, and from the other side of the Illinois River to Sand Prairie Outlook, and beyond; two stone churches in Havana, the community swimming pool, the investor's mansion and the roadside restaurant-bar, the Second National Bank, .the hunting lodge and lookout tower at Chautauqua, service stations along the state highways, motels, the post office in Forest Creek, the Neumiller subdivision in Pettibone, and most of the new houses in Green Valley, Easton, San Jose, Kilbourne, Hartsburg-Emden—
How could they be there and he be gone?
Charles looked up and a white bedroom, empty, dropped around him. There were cigarettes in his lap.
The wind outside, which his thought had dimmed, rose to its real volume and made him shiver again with its strength and the intonations of winter in it. He went to the dresser and lit a cigarette and realized, with the match hitting the ashtray, as if he'd just learned to feel and think, how unnatural it was to have that white thing hanging from his lips. Dark gloom of a cigarette on — He jerked his head to one side. His stream of smoke was spreading out flat against the wall and rolling in a widening circular cloud over a calendar above the dresser.
C. J. C. NEUMILLER & SONS, INC.
GENERAL CONTRACTORS, FOREST CREEK, ILL.
was printed on the lower half of the calendar, above the month of October. Soon it would be his birthday. His grandmother gave him the calendar at Christmas, and said, "This is a reminder to come home and see your Grandpa
and me more often. Or at least write. And those red dates, those are Sundays. Go to church." He'd been to see them only once since then—had he written?—and when he was away from home he never went to church. The room grew shadowy with his guilt.
He crushed out the cigarette and went through the door and stood over the body of Stanley Sucherman, or Speed, as Stanley was called, and demanded to be; his dark spirally hair grew low on his forehead and out from his temples close to his eyebrows, and seemed to be taking advantage of his sleep to invade his pale face. Pale? Speed had a high complexion and his face was usually rose-colored, especially in sleep; an eyelid twitched; he tried to cover a bare shoulder with the quilt. Should Charles wake him? Speed's acquaintances and friends usually sensed that he'd carry their uncertainties and griefs more conscientiously than they, so they unburdened themselves on him and he became so weighted down with worries, none of them his, that he hardly got anything done. He'd registered late and still hadn't found a place to live. Last year he and Charles had done sketches and improvisational comedy in an acting class, and then persuaded the poker-faced owner of a campus coffee house to let them perform in his place.
SPEED & CHARLES
your local home-town campus fags
bits, blackouts, buffoonery, b'zazz
At the Hog's Jowl
Every Thursday night from 8 till you say Auntie, fool.
Charles shoved on Speed's shoulder with his bare foot and was surprised at how Speed, who was as hard to wake as he was, threw off the quilt and backpedaled several steps, making binoculars of the fists he was twisting over his eyes. Speed said, "Hey! It's the long-haired, bare-chested, red-bathrobed Neumiller!"
"Come off it, you—"
"You don't believe me?" Speed said, and offered the binoculars. "Take a look."
"How come you're sleeping on the floor?”
"I love floors!" Speed blinked several times, as he did when he was lying or surprised, and ran the heels of his hands down his wrinkled black denims.
"I thought you were on the couch last night."
"I was, but I love floors. I do! Besides, some good wrist action sent me flying. Whee!"
"If you're going to sleep here, you might as well use the couch."
"Right," Speed said, and picked up the quilt, made by Charles's grandmother, and went to the couch and sat with a plonk.
"What are you doing?"
"I thought I'd catch some more Z's. Unless— Were you expecting Jill?"
"Don't you have any classes?"
"I've missed so many now, I say—" Speed did a flat-handed salute from his chest and his wet lower lip rolled out. "That's what I say."
"I won't be going to any classes, either."
"Good." Speed fell on his back and pulled the quilt up to his throat.
Charles was hurt, or worse, and expected Speed to sense something wrong and interrogate him, as he did in an improvisation, until their minds met and moved along the same lines to a shared revelation; if Charles announced this on his own, it would have the authority of fact, and he wasn't ready to admit or cope with his grandfather's death. He said in a solemn voice, "The way it looks, I won't be going to any classes for a long time."
Speed reached to the coffee table, picked up a roll of Turns by the flag of its torn wrapper, and popped a few in his mouth. "Do you have a cigarette?" he asked.
Charles took the pack from his bathrobe pocket and gave it a toss that Speed caught in one hand.
"Hey, you're really in a great mood when you have to get up before eight," Speed said. "We should do this more often."
The backs of Charles's knees were touching the cushion of the easy chair, so he sat and put his elbow on its wide arm and held his head in his hand, ashamed of involving his grandfather in the sort of pettiness his grandfather walked away from.
"Chuck, I might as well admit it right off. I didn't know what to say or anything, and anyway, I thought you'd like to be alone. I heard Jerome wake you and tell you about your granddad. I figured I'd slip out when you went to the John. I was hoping there wouldn't be another closet scene."
They both laughed. When Jill returned to school this year, she told Charles she wanted to go out more, not just on the fraternity dates she was compelled to go on (she belonged to a socially oriented sorority), but with "other guys," and on the night of her announcement, Speed came into the apartment and found Charles in the bottom of the closet, knocking his head against the wall and slashing around with coat hangers, and crying, "I'm gonna commit suicide! I'm gonna commit suicide!"
"I know how you must feel," Speed said. "My granddad passed on, too, last winter, and I'm still not over it. It's really awful. Really."
Charles was trying to figure out Speed's reasons for pretending to be asleep, and for sustaining the pretext so long.
"If we've got any dough, it's because of him," Speed said. "Our hardware store is really his. He had the worst Yiddish accent you've ever heard, but he called his customers 'Jew bastards! Cockamorons!' I get my sense of humor from him. All he liked to do was fish and pinch pretty tushies. Sound like a coon? I loved him."
Charles's grandfather was standing over him and Charles was on his back. What was that from? He was ill in bed a summer and alone at home during the day. There was a window beside his bed, in his parents' old bedroom, and a bookshelf ran along the ceiling above the window. His father told him his grandfather was bothered by a recurring dream about him; the bookshelf was coming loose and the heavy books falling down on him, and injury was added to his illness. His grandfather visited him every afternoon but never mentioned the dream, and then one day, waking from sleep, Charles discovered a gray mirage high above him on a chair, stretched across the bed, testing the bookshelf. Go back to sleep, his grandfather said. Everything's all right.
"He was half my size but had a nose twice as big," Speed said. "I come into a place from outside, and an hour later I'm smelling grass, ho ho. Hey, what the hell, why don't you just tell me about your granddad?"
It was as if the floor went, and as Charles fell past layers of scenes, faces, tones of voice, a landscape of past love, the descent left him speechless. Then he said, "In our church we only sang during Lent, at Benediction, and you could hear him above everybody else. He sang when he worked, too. Bass. He had a beautiful voice."
Facts. There was nothing in them of who his grandfather was, or what he felt for him. "Once or twice, when he finished a job under contract, he wouldn't take a check for the full amount. His bid was the lowest, but he didn't think he should make such a profit."
"Sounds like a lousy businessman."
“He did all right."
"I mean, you know, ho ho." Speed was blushing and so nervous he could hardly sit. "Do you want to drop this?"
"Yes."
"I was thinking last night when you were up— Hey, what were you doing?"
"Nothing."
"A paper? A poem to Jill?"
"You bastard, you looked in my wastebasket!”
"No, honest. I figured she was due for one after the closet scene. I think you're too good to her."
"Bull."
"Bull, yourself, you old farmer. You should give her hell, you should shake her up, and then squeeze her till her eyes pop. And you want to know something else?'
"What?"
"She ain't worth you."
Charles tried to suppress the laugh but it came out in seizures of pain. Then he said, "Grandpa didn't want to retire a few years ago, but my uncles said he could draw his retirement pay, or whatever, and keep on working as a foreman. So they'd have him sweep up the shop, or sharpen saw blades, or run out to the lumberyard for materials. Lackey jobs. He had to lock up his hand tools because they took them out on jobs and lost them or left them out in the rain. He drove a truck called the Green Hornet, which was a joke of theirs, too. It was an old Dodge panel truck painted with red and green house paint, and once belonged to a guy named Jack Paul."
"Hey, maybe we can use that in a bit.”
"We'll use it!"
"He had a stove inside, and a bed, and drove around the county and slept wherever he happened to be, usually out in the State Forest. The only time you saw him was when he was getting groceries or the mail. He had a big house in town, where a daughter of his lived, and nobody was sure if he lived in the truck because he wanted to, or" if something was the matter with him."
"I'll take a guess."
"He died and his daughter had his belongings auctioned off. Grandpa bought the truck. There were other cars and trucks and station wagons the business owned that he could have used, but the last few years all he'd drive was the Green Hornet. It was named for its speed, which was about thirty-five at tops. Of course, he took the stove and things out. One day I used it to pick up some materials and it broke down on me. I was ready to push it into the ditch and walk to the closest phone, when a car pulled up. It was Grandpa. He said, 'You're having troubles, huh?' And I said, 'Yeah, how'd you know?' He said, 'I sensed it.' "
"Did he know this Jack Paul very well?”
"Fairly well, I guess."
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 44