by P. F. Kluge
“So when do they start the fights?” I asked.
“Just hold your horses, Uncle Pete,” Chester said. “Relax and enjoy the show.”
“I hate drinking beer straight out of a bottle,” I said. The boys made a fuss and eventually the waitress brought me over a peanut butter jar she’d mostly rinsed out.
The show Chester wanted me to enjoy started with an all-girl band out of Korea that was hard on my eyes and rougher on my ears. “Lolling, lolling, lolling on the liver” was the name of their first song and they worked their way down from there. “Climson and Clover.” At the end they sang happy birthday to one of the customers, a Guamanian guy in a softball uniform. “Happy Birthday to each and evlee one of you,” the lead singer said.
After that there was sort of an amateur night, with men from Anderson Air Force Base doing Willie Nelson songs and a big Palauan offering up a Don Ho medley, “Tiny Bubbles,” “Beyond the Reef,” “Hawaiian Love Song.” The best by far was a little Filipina who put all she had into “The Way We Were.” She amazed me: she took over that song and she owned it. What Streisand sang was a donut. What this girl offered was a cake, with layers, icing, and candles. Every note had meaning, every note was held a little longer than possible, and oh … the looks, the profiles, the tears. That little no-name girl could sing! When she finished I wanted to get up for a standing ovation. Then I noticed that, though I was clapping loud and hard, I was clapping alone. And the boys were looking at me, snickering.
“Trouble is, Uncle Pete …” Chester started, and stopped. Long sentences slowed him down. But he had a good heart. I wouldn’t change him. Even here, when the waitress dropped a can of beer, picked it up, opened it without thinking twice, and everybody got sprayed with foam, he smiled and told her it was okay, just bring us another.
“The trouble,” said Albert, finishing the sentence, “is there’s a million like her. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”
“She was good,” I repeated.
“But it’s ho-hum,” Albert said. “Question of supply and demand. Maybe she’d light up a room in West Virginia. Those redneck mouths would drop, they’d sell their trailer for one slow dance. But here … they’re like cockroaches.”
“You shouldn’t talk that way son.”
“Oh, okay, Uncle Pete. I take it back. But you saw what happened here. Ho-hum. She’s somebody’s housekeeper. She cooks, she irons, washes, watches the kids for a hundred and fifty dollars a month. And she sings on the side. So what else is new?”
“I thought she was good,” I repeated. It still didn’t seem fair.
“Hey!” Chester nudged Albert. “He’s here.”
“Who’s here?” I asked, looking around to see who’d just come in, maybe the owner, who’d tell me what a great business opportunity I could have here, with a little fixing up and the right promotion. But all I saw was the same gang as before, slugging beer, slipping out to the parking lot for drugs.
“Heading to the stage,” Albert said.
Squinting up into a pink spotlight, running fingers through his hair, fussing with a screeching microphone, was the man I came to know as Ward Wiggins. He was a rangy kind of fellow, running to fat and not caring about it. He leaned back to pour a Budweiser down his throat, the way a mechanic might feed a quart of Quaker State into a clunker before taking it out on the highway. You could see the shirt he was wearing pull apart above his belt and his belly button peek out, like a kid poking his head out of a pup tent, wondering is it okay, can I come out and play. He belched then, and I turned to Chester, like it was time to go now, I’d heard enough, when all of a sudden the man began to sing some song—was it called “Love Me”?—that I hadn’t thought about for years, any more than I’d thought about Elvis since he died, since before he died, but that didn’t matter because this was the kind of thing you see in the supermarket newspapers: ELVIS ON GUAM! He did three or four songs, not saying anything in between, not even noticing applause, and when he was finished he walked offstage, right past our table, where he hesitated for just a second, nodding at Chester. “Hello, sir,” Chester responded. Then he was gone, out into the parking lot, and half the customers followed, as though reporters might be asking what he was driving and which way he went. It was over fast.
“That guy scared me,” I admitted. “And I never even cared about Presley.”
Chester and Albert got this look on their faces, the way boys do when they think they’re one step ahead of you, trying to convince you that a swimming pool makes sense, just from a real estate point of view, improving property values, like it’s an investment.
“Uncle Pete,” said Chester. “You know those papers I bring home from school? My introduction to literature course? The one I call farewell to literature? Those nasty comments in red ink? Those zingers?”
“Sure.”
“That’s the guy who writes them.”
“Who?”
“Just got done onstage. Singing Elvis. That’s Professor Wiggins.”
“Well, son, your professor has got himself an interesting sideline.”
“That’s what we’ve been wanting to talk to you about,” said Chester triumphantly. And what he said that night made sense. That night. The next few days I called some people I know. And then I went to call on Professor Ward Wiggins at the University of Guam. I took Chester along to show me the way.
We waited out in the hall an hour to see Professor Wiggins, who was much in demand that day. One or two at a time, people went into his office, emerging ten minutes later, some of the students red-eyed, with crumpled papers in their hands, and sometimes with parents who were flushed and angry, asking directions to the office of the department chair, the dean, the president. It felt like a doctor’s office, on a day that all the tests came back positive. I know all about doctors’ offices, on days like that, walking out with a death sentence and a bill to pay.
“Sir, can we come in?” Everybody was “sir” to Chester. His brother called everybody “dude.” They called him Dude back and it became his name. But nobody called Chester “sir.”
“If you’re next in line,” Wiggins said from the other side of the door. When we came in, we saw him at this desk, facing out the window, looking at a rectangle of brown grass, concrete sidewalk lined with some scraggly plumeria.
“Hi, Chester,” he said. “You too, huh?” He was wearing exactly what he’d worn at the Tiger’s Cage: short-sleeved shirt, tan slacks, running shoes. He glanced at me, then back to Chester. “You bring some help?”
“This is my Uncle Pete,” Chester said. We shook hands. “He’s my guardian, sir. My father, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Glad to hear you say that,” Wiggins said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my own father lately.”
“He coming to visit you on Guam, sir?”
“He’s been dead for twenty years, Chester.”
“Oh. Sorry …” Chester looked at me and shrugged like maybe it was wrong to offer condolences, if someone’s been dead for so long.
“It’s okay. You never get so old you don’t look around for someone to intervene in your life. Someone who’ll say, now Ward, that was a little out of line. Or way out of line. …”
His voice trailed off. He turned away and looked out the window again, to wherever our folks have gone. But when he came back at us he was smiling.
“Okay, Chester. You’re a good kid. I’m inclined to make this painless. But you’ve got to help me out a little. I can’t do it all on my own.”
“Sir?” Chester didn’t know what he was talking about.
“A little pick-me-up, am I right? A make-up quiz, extra credit, nudge the needle out of the red zone? That’s what I’ve been doing all day. In your case, Chester, I don’t mind. I liked you.”
“Thank you,” Chester said, still confused.
“Okay!” Wiggins spun around in his chair. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Remember that one? The first book we read?”
“Yes sir,�
� Chester said. He sounded shaky, that boy of mine. “The first book we read.”
“Excellent. Now just tell me this. What kind of vessel—what kind of craft—do Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi on?”
Poor Chester looked lost. Later, he confessed he hadn’t read the book. Still, he’d kept showing up for Wiggins’ class because he liked hearing him talk, liked the way he walked back and forth, getting excited. The book was kind of incidental. The book was an orange, Chester said. Wiggins was the fellow who squeezed the juice.
“Think about it, Chester,” Wiggins said. “There’s no rush, son.”
He got up and started taking armfuls of books and putting them in empty cardboard boxes. The books weren’t on shelves and they didn’t look like they ever had been. They were in stacks and Guam’s climate hadn’t agreed with them.
“How are we doing, Chester?”
“… kind of craft?”
“That’s right!” Wiggins shouted. “A raft. You got it. The C is silent. And—speaking of C’s—is that okay? I can’t go much higher than that.”
“Sir …” Chester finally had it. “This wasn’t about my grade. That’s not why we came. That wasn’t it at all.”
“I asked Chester to bring me here,” I said. “But this isn’t about him.”
“Then … who?”
“You. I wanted to talk about you.” I let him chew on that while I turned to Chester. “Have you got a way of getting home from here on your own?”
“No problem, sir.” He nodded to Wiggins. “Don’t worry about that grade, sir. Anything you give, it’s all right with me. I’m not so much of a student. But I want you to know I didn’t sell the books back. I’m keeping them with me.”
“Well, then,” Wiggins said. “I guess this is good-bye. I liked having you in class. Keep up with the music.”
“Not really college material, is he?” I said after Chester was gone.
“Never mind that,” Wiggins said. “He never missed class, not once. And he’s the only one who dropped by just to talk, not to get an extension. Or massage a grade.”
“He’s a good boy,” I agreed.
“Well then, mister …”
“Colonel, actually. Colonel Parker.” For a moment his face lit up, as if he’d just thought of something funny.
“Your first name wouldn’t be Tom?”
“Peter,” I said. “I caught your act at the Tiger’s Cage the other night.”
He was surprised by that. He hadn’t noticed me sitting at the table. Now he stared at me awhile, looked me over.
“You disapprove? A professor out in a bar like that, singing Elvis?”
“No.”
“If not, you must be curious. What’s a man like me doing in a place like that?”
“I’m curious, all right. Why you’re throwing books in boxes. Why you said good-bye to Chester like you’d never see him again.”
“Because I probably never will,” Wiggins answered. “I’m out of here. My appointment ends next week.”
“Did you jump or were you pushed?” I asked. I’d gone too far and he recoiled. First I sensed resentment: it was none of my business. Then he smiled and came back with a question of his own.
“Why do I get the feeling you already know the answer to that question, Colonel Parker? You’ve been checking me out, haven’t you? Who are you anyway?”
“Your next employer,” I said. Before I could get any further there was a knock on his door. Wiggins got up, cracked the door open, faced another angry student, a girl, and this one had brought her brother, a weight lifter in military fatigues and sunglasses. So Wiggins gave another pop quiz, something about what color was a whale. When they were gone, he turned back to me.
“If you want to talk, we’d better get out of here,” Wiggins said.
We walked across campus slowly, out to the parking lot, where Henny, my driver, was waiting. When he asked where to, I motioned a circle, a signal he was used to. We headed inland, into the boondocks.
“Henny went ten rounds with Flash Elorde,” I said. “In Flash’s hometown. You follow boxing?” Wiggins shook his head. “They gave Elorde the decision. A hometown decision. In the Philippines, that’s what most decisions are. He’s been working with me ten years. Everything he hears in here, he forgets. I want you to understand that. I do a lot of business in this car.”
“I haven’t heard anything yet,” said Wiggins, “that sounded like business.”
“All right. Try this. Ward no middle name Wiggins, born Lakehurst, New Jersey, June 2, 1949. Isn’t that where that big German blimp crashed, right when it was landing?”
“The Hindenburg. Not a blimp. A dirigible.”
“Public elementary and high schools. Rutgers University. Football scholarship. Fraternity man. B.A., M.A., Ph.D. The apple sure didn’t fall far from the tree. Ph.D. was in 1977. Decline and Fall: The Later Novels of James T. Farrell. What was that about?”
“A ticket to Guam,” he answered. “You can read it.”
“Teaching career starts at Drew University, three years, University of Arizona three years, Long Beach State two years, then there’s a gap in there. …”
“I got married.”
“And quit work?”
“To write. It was complicated. It didn’t work out. Say, Colonel, I’m not enjoying this. I’m not having a nice time.”
“What happened next?”
“I came here. My wife died a couple years ago.”
“Wasn’t she your ex-wife then?”
“Where the hell did you …” He squirmed in his seat, concentrated on looking out the window, where there wasn’t much to see. These islands, once you get away from the beaches, could be Oklahoma. The heat waves come off the road, the wind kicks up spirals of dust out of red clay, dogs slouch around gas stations and mom and pop stores, little clusters of houses cut into tangan-tangan brush. “Yeah,” he said. “If you’re a stickler for chronology. She divorced me and then she died. Not the other way around.”
“Then …”
“It’s not the oldest mistake in the book, but it’s up there. Moving to a new place to save a marriage. Especially a place like this. It’s like taking a sick fish out of a goldfish tank. And putting it in a puddle on the sidewalk.”
He was talking more than he meant to. The car worked that way for me. These rides were like confessionals. Also, it looked like he hadn’t had anybody to talk to for a while. That bit about missing his father rang true. As if those old-timers would’ve been able to straighten us out, if only they’d stuck around.
“So now you’re going to be a nightclub singer?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, waving the thought of it away. “The Elvis thing just happened. After my wife was gone. It’s nice being someone else for a while. But you can’t make a living at it.”
“Yes, you can,” I told him. And, in the time it took to drive back to Agana, thirty minutes or so, he was mine. Our conversation went the way I’d wanted it to. The secret was in the homework, the phone calls, the information I had going in. That’s what primed the pump. Forget about invasion of privacy. People are flattered when they find you’ve been asking around about them, taken the time to snoop, cared enough to listen to the gossip. Spy on them? They love it. Take notes on them, compile a file? They’re tickled to death, thinking they’re important enough to be followed around. They like feeling that way and so, to keep the feeling alive, they talk about themselves. It’s the father thing again, the lost authority. We want to know that someone’s keeping track, keeping score, a pat on the head, a kick in the ass, it’s that simple. And Wiggins would have talked to anyone. He was about the loneliest man I ever met.
III
Albert “Dude” Lane
Wipe ass and walk away! What could you say about a country where they chilled the air and boiled the water, fished with cyanide and watched chickens kill each other for sport? Where they did bad things to bad parts of pigs and called it cooking and, if they ate veg
etables, they washed them off with Clorox first? I kid you not. After three months I still hadn’t taken a solid shit. Later things got better, a lot better, but right after I arrived, this whole country was a bad case of wipe ass and walk away.
At the Ninoy Aquino Memorial Airport, when we arrived, I saw chunks of concrete coming out of the ceiling, holes in the wall with wires trailing out, and the carpet was like something they’d use in a carpet-cleaning commercial, before they break out the magic cleanser. “There will be some delay in offloading the baggage,” the PA announced while we walked to customs and immigration, “on account of some problem.” Yeah, sure. Took time to open all those suitcases.
Flying down from Guam, I’d thought about how we were on the road again, the Lane Brothers, Dude and the Chestnut, how we flew across the world years ago and now we were headed to another strange place. It touched me, seeing the Chestnut staring out the scuffed-up window, trying to decide what was a cloud and what might be an island. My kid brother and me. I felt good about that until I looked across at this pile of suet which made us a party of three, digging into his third package of free peanuts while he read some book by Elvis Presley’s hairdresser. Then I started feeling not so good, having Uncle Buck along for the ride. And I wasn’t clicking my heels about this Philippines adventure either. I was doing it for Chester. It was his idea. I was doing it for Uncle Pete, who made it sound like it was the last thing he was asking of us. The way he looked, some days, he might be right. He had this kidney thing we didn’t talk about because it might upset Chester. Anyway, I was in this for the sake of other people. There wasn’t much in it for me. That was odd, too, because I’m the one who’s supposed to be a me-first guy.
The sidewalk outside the terminal was a feeding frenzy and we were the food, so many meatballs in a tank full of piranhas, of guys surrounding us, yanking at our bags, hotel sir, air-con taxi sir, first time in Philippines sir? The sidewalk was jammed and the road was worse, cars and vans and these stretched-out jeepney things, covered with paintings and tassels and names like LOVE MACHINE, two dozen Filipinos squeezed into them. The music and the shouting and the heat could give you instant migraine and it wasn’t just that, it was the air which wasn’t only hot and wet—we had plenty of that on Guam, God knows—but filthy air, like in a tunnel or a parking garage. Wipe ass and walk away, I mean it. I was wondering what to do when I noticed this wasted-looking American with sunglasses and an aloha shirt and khaki pants.