by Gordon Lish
Like dredge, like carborundum, like drogue, like other words—like torque.
There they are!
That’s them all!
I never saw people get killed so much.
Homespun—you think that this could be what the pajamas could have been made out of?
But in all honesty and sincerity, even when we were both of us turning in different directions and pulling away, him upward and me downward, even then I still feel that I didn’t feel it stuck in my head all that much.
Just imagine it, just imagine it—what if I hadn’t sent Henry back up, just suppose Henry had not gone back up to tell Florence for her to hurry up, your father, your father, blood just dropping out of his head like something out of a pail.
You feel a little chill, you know.
Even on a hot day like this was, you still feel a little chilled feeling when the air first gets to it where your head has been clunked and it is wide open.
They weren’t even special Band-Aids. They were just the kind which anybody can get from them just walking in to any drugstore or any dimestore or any supermarket. You don’t have to go to any big hospital like Mount Sinai Hospital for just for Band-Aids like that!
But which was it, which was it?
Wait for them to come down and bleed to death?
Or go with Kobbe Koffi?
She just went up and she just came down—and then she just sat down on the floor and didn’t do anything except fall down all to pieces just like sticks.
Here is what happened—we lifted the footlocker up together and we got it into the trunk together and then I went to lean back in to get something off the top of the footlocker while he was slamming down the lid of the trunk.
That is what happened.
It was probably just a piece of whatever kind of tape it was which Florence was using to get the inventory to stick up on inside up inside of the footlocker. Whereas in the case of the duffel bag, it was threads. It was just some threads. It was just from reaching back into the backseat to yank off some threads where they were left over from somebody sewing up the seam of the duffel bag.
Mothers out with toddlers, fathers on the way to their offices, kids waiting for day-camp vans—they all just looked at me, they all just looked—a man screaming like a crazy man and running all around in baggy pants.
You know what they probably thought?
They probably thought that the colored man had done it to me—that the driver had—him, Kobbe Koffi.
Actually, didn’t he? Hadn’t he?
AIRDUCTS.
I think you call some of those things I saw airducts. But whether they take the air in or take the air out, I for one do not know, I for one could not say. It was all just seconds really—it was all of it just a question of seconds really.
They really had the littlest-looking knives.
But I think that this was actually because I did not actually know what it was which I was looking at until after the person on the telephone finally told me Peru.
Here’s why you couldn’t count.
The funnels or whatever, the airducts, one or two of them was always, or were always, coming out from back behind them, the killers, the killed, the vents.
FLORENCE CALLED IT OUT and I wrote it down—so many this, so many that.
The inventory.
I am going to tell you something.
When he gets home, when he gets home—judging from summers past, won’t he be big as an ox!
THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE that you should know—namely, that I think you should know that there was not really any way for anyone to get all of the sand back up into the sandbox once they had broken the rule against it and actually gone ahead and dumped it out of it.
IT WAS, IN FACT—there is absolutely but absolutely no question of it—the plain and simple fact is that it was a meat loaf sandwich, that my mother never gave me bologna.
Plus a chocolate drink, not a soda.
He actually said, “Nyahhh.”
As if in greeting, in welcome, in acknowledgment.
I FELT LIKE A SILLY GOON, like a total goon, out there in the middle of everything, my knees buckling, a lady-in-waiting for him at last.
Kobbe Koffi’s.
Not that I knew his name until I finally decided to get myself inside of the fellow’s cab or the fellow’s taxi and let the fellow hurry and save my life.
Here’s one for you!
Where’s Togoland?
I know where Peru is.
Imagine me bleeding more from what happened to me than he did from a whole trench in the top of his head, from a cheek like a peach pit and from a whole trench dug up in the top of his head!
I said, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” But he wouldn’t go do anything and get all of the sand put back in!
MAYBE ONE OF THEM IN HIS MIND WAS GOING like this was—was going ’Airduct,” “Airduck,” “Airluck,” “Chairing.”
You know.
In the language of Peru.
Couldn’t it be a name for you to conjure with even if all of us were in Togoland?
I know why she said that it was binding her!
You think six years old, you think that when someone is just six years old, do you think that when you are still only just at the age of only six years old that you actually but actually do not know everything?
It was soggy, it was squelchy, but there was not what you could call that much of it coming out. It was mostly his buttons which had it on them—and some of the sand in the sandbox which did. But it was nothing in comparison to the way it was the morning of—when it just came spilling out.
Just a scrape, just underneath—they said that the whole thing of it is just a question of the different amounts of local blood which you have in various different places—that plus the fact that I was running all around like a total maniac!
You know what he kept doing?
He kept asking, “Nyere nyis Nyonny Nyize?”
I am no medical expert, of course—but in all honesty and sincerity, I think that you would have to say that by then he was almost dead.
Like a little grain of it pushing up from underneath.
It’s time for me to confess something—namely, that I honestly do not think I could probably go ahead and ever eat a softboiled egg even if you paid me.
That wild Indian of mine, he’s due back what?
Tomorrow?
The imp!
The rascal!
Want to bet me he won’t be twice the size he was?
What I thought I was doing when I reached my hand back in to the backseat for me to get those threads off I for one most emphatically but emphatically don’t know, do not know!
She had long plain bony flat fingers with never any rings on them and with never any nail polish on them and with not even long fingernails, either, but with just the dust from the chalk on them and with just the light that it looked to you like it was coming from down somewhere down inside of them, her fingers, her fingers.
I sat up in the front and looked up.
What they did on the roof, what they did on the roof!—do you have any idea of what they did on that roof?
Why do they do that?
Is everybody a lady-in-waiting?
She said, “See, everybody?”
She turned the storybook around and said to us, “Can everybody see, boys and girls?”
She said to us, “Do you all of you see?”
There was always her finger on what it was!
Blue Coal was not blue.
It was just as black as the way all coal was.
One of them would get up and start stabbing back and then the other one would lie back down and watch.
You know what it must be?
Everybody is probably waiting.
“Phil? Is that you, Phil?”
How I used to suffer before somebody talked me into going ahead and trying mineral oil! And now look at Florence, look at Florence, always tryi
ng to talk me out of it!
I know the day he is coming.
I know the minute exactly.
This thing about Togoland, maybe I said, “Kobbe Koffi, that’s a new one on me, a name like Kobbe Koffi.” Maybe this is what I said to him, and him, maybe he said to me, “Be plenty more like it in Togoland.”
I mean, don’t forget I was dying, you know.
Plus didn’t he have to act like as if it was him who had probably killed me?
Maybe I said, “You ever try Vernax on shoes?”
I think I said, “Kale gives you red blood.”
You know what I think?
I think he said Togoland just to say something.
If there even is a Togoland.
There is a Peru.
I think I said, “What do you think they’ll think to do when they come down and there’s nobody there?”
Or maybe I said, “I want a Christian burial. Tell them to give me a Christian burial.”
I know I said the craziest things.
I believe I said, “All I wanted was to be presentable.”
I said, “Please God he makes the bus.”
I said, “Lilac, hankie, chamois, bodice.”
She used to say, “Gordon, can you say gossamer?”
I said to him, “Go through the light, go through the light—I’m dying, I’m dying—don’t stop for it, don’t!”
Not that I really was, of course.
But the man actually stopped when I tell you, I tell you, he could have run it and gone right through!
I kept on screaming it at him—“No!” I kept on screaming it—“Oh, keep on going, oh please!”
I screamed.
Here is what I screamed.
I screamed, “We are on our way out of here and out of all of this shit, this big boogie dickhead and me!”
It was wonderful.
It was so wonderful, the whole feeling of the way everything made you feel how it was going to lift right up from where it was—and then he did it and did it, went through, ran the light, the taxi shaking like it meant to fucking jump.
Then, then—wasn’t I the happiest then as I have ever been?
I said, “I remember it, I think!”
I said, “If it’s an emergency, I mean!”
I said, “Isn’t it Lackawanna four one eight?”
“Wait!” I said.
I said, “But one eight what?”
About the Author
GORDON LISH is the author of Dear Mr. Capote, What I Know So Far, Mourner at the Door, Extravaganza, My Romance, Zimzum, and Epigraph. This body of work, together with his activities as a teacher and editor, have placed him at the forefront of American letters for more than twenty-five years.
Copyright
First published in 1986 by E. P. Dutton, New York; revised edition published in 1997 by Four Walls, Eight Windows
Copyright © 1986, 1997 by Gordon Lish
Introduction © 2012 by Gordon Lish
All rights reserved
First Dalkey Archive edition, 2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-56478-802-3
Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency
www.dalkeyarchive.com
Cover: design and composition by Mikhail Iliatov
Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America
SELECTED OTHER WORKS BY GORDON LISH
Dear Mr. Capote
What I Know So Far
Mourner at the Door
Extravaganza
My Romance
Zimzum
Epigraph
Self-imitation of Myself
Arcade, or, How to Write a Novel
Krupp’s Lulu
Collected Fictions