I know a fellow needs another store behind his midway, like I say, we could make it in twos, friend. I’ll buy in for both of us, that’s how I’ll piece you off. Like I told you. We can ride it clear when you come on out.
And he said further:
You should have said something.
By reproach I was knotted to him now like the infant to the mama. He sent me with murder in my heart to ask my father: “By what right do you answer my mail?”—not open it, read it, guard me from it, but answer it. He must have sent a money order in my name to the jail in Utah.
In my ignorance, he had saved me. In his ignorance, we were all but Grack judged. Having aspired to my heavy-fleshed father’s simple way (I named it brutality), I found betrayed in him the same equivocation which kept me flowing between the carnival and Pittsburgh, fleeing from my worthless sheets to Phyl, and then away. I revised it clearly once more: He would give me the letter; he won’t. He will simply destroy; he won’t. He will ignore it; he sends money in my name; he returns me to him with a son’s curse on an old man’s head. A few dollars! It was for this mimicking of me that I had to destroy him.
Again Grack showed me the ay. This was the decision as I liked it, thick with blood, heavy in consequence, and irretrievable as the five-dollar bill for Phyllis on the table by our bed.
9. Put out our eyes henceforward
THE truth about my life—I fear all but facts—was this lie which I tell you. We who live waiting for decisions to be made by others have already lost our parents, mother, father, or someone to love. Self-made, crediting only our dismay, we will end unless we learn in bondage to the fat black wart on Grack’s nose or the abstract glitter of his too-much-looking eyes. The carnie is thought to be a rough-and-tumble fellow or a tendoned dancer. We are neither. We are fatherless; we are motherless. Our fond hands touch the padded boodle for love and leap like minnows to the mark’s defeated bawl.
Unless, unless. A will to live in is the great thing a father can bequeath his son.
The house, on that night of which I speak, was humming dark again with the breath of my father and me, and as I crawled from bed, fully dressed in the black corduroy pants which were my carnie garb, I stumbled my shin against a bedpost to give pain to my rage. “Oh!”—this head cocked, jerked, lay flat in its own hiss. The oh was for fury that Dad could have done for me, could have raised me up and destroyed me and slept on; a purple blotch on the bone of my shin gave me a sign of life amid my starvation. I thought of John Wilkes Booth leaping to the stage after shooting Abe, crying out in Latin and plunging away on a broken leg. A sham: while splinters of bone violated his flesh! My father could have freed me, had he been hard enough. All my body ached with Grack’s reproach that I had given only money, neither offering myself to his need nor reminding him by turning away in silence that he had once been master enough to let me climb on his back from the pit in which the carnie dwells. I had struck Grack cruelly at his pride. Dad! I forgave stealing the letter!
In a purchase of conscience, my father had sent money to buy silence from Grack and to ransom the freedom for which I fought; at that postoffice was I destroyed. He miscalculated! Choice was a dilemma for him, and my father could not be strict and serene enough to make an offering of meanness which it happened that I needed. More than that, his deceit struck at me with the sort of miscalculation which has always calculated us apart from each other, from the world of meaningful doing, and from ourselves. What was it to him that I thought him a father?—that poor fat sack tumbled into bed, that gray sick old man with no son for his trucking business.
“I did it for my boy”—the broken bedsprings would pitch him in his dream—“and tried never to hurt nobody.…”
It was so dark in the house that I released the shade to give substance to windows and mirrors, silver and the other metals and their alloy’s in faucet and lamp. At the shelf which ran halfway down the wall of the dining room—a shelf once used for the family plates—I leaned blindly to its one burden, my mother’s picture. Yes, I made out the flash of light, a tinkle of sense in the dark. There remained of her no memory but the smudge-eyed girl caught in the photograph and her moles painted out later.
I had pulled Grack’s knife from someplace where I kept it.
“What? What? That you?” my father called in his sleep, turning, his thighflesh thumping in the mattress, un-waking.
The zip-zip of corduroy leg against leg moved me toward his room. All thought of him had turned to regret and love now that I had no choice left about him; there was but one more turning for me, although the end of the moving was still to be made between us. I could think of him with tenderness as I crept to his door with a cruel knife hot in my hands, held low to jab belly-upwards.
“Wha? What, boy?”
I stopped, choked once more with gratitude, as if it were his tact to make his sleep talk, thus giving me thoughts of risk and mummery to stuff the weak knees of my regret and reversal. (And the dead shall rise; they will speak, the mute, the dumb.) Booth must have choked so, even while latining his deed! I stood stiff behind a door and waited for him to fall again. The dark swarmed within me in this house where I grew up, swarming as does the body in that instant before pleasure, as the mother’s body must swarm when the child’s head comes beating through. This swarming came, and I leaned my head against plaster. Webby and crumbling, the dirt hidden under a beam invaded my hair. This unclean apartment had housed bereaved men for too many years since the photograph on the shelf had been touched or tinted. The dirt slipped in hair and across my wet face, soft now, dusky to the taste when I caught it on my tongue.
Again the heavy cloth on my skin and the taste of rotten lint showed me the way to the blessedness of decision, the forgiveness of others which it allows, the freedom to be responsible to the deepest desire of self-forgiving. “Wha? What?”—but that was my own voice.
But it was time. Hurry was my thought.
Hurry was too fast for a son looking at a father’s door in the middle of the night, come to enact dreams of truth-telling, dreams of evasion, and the great dream of murder which every sulky son knows. The door, varnished dark but swirling with its grain and its rings of growth, stood with the years out of color between us. Behind this wide door he had conceived me; beyond the stained wood he slept alone. My shin ached. The pantleg was sticky where it was bruised; it oozed. It attended poor Dad and his poverty of sense for me. Again the reminder: He had thought to get off easy and cheap against both Grack and his son. Did I drop the knife then? Did I pick it up? “O-oh.” I heard his groan in sleep and his heavy turn behind the door. I dropped the knife; I picked it up; I carried this knife in supposition, but I really carried it. (Did I retrieve it at the door later?) I want to think that at least once we did not get off cheap and easy against each other. However the knife was managed—swallowed, hidden, sleeved, juggled high, escamoted in the carnival of my intentions—I opened the door softly to carry assault with me. It swung without a sound. I had oiled all the hinges in the house.
Cunning and self-deluded by desire, I wore assault like a knife close to me. I came dizzied with hope to peek and peer at my sleeping father, to tiptoe near him and be tender by his bed and to let my eyes widen in the dark and feed on the thick rolls of flesh and look him awake. I came with my own image to search out the resemblance in his features battened on years of eating, years of work,’ the years of his age, and fattened awry by his years of denial and deceit. I was only in the doorway. I came to look murder at my father.
Now! Hurry while the dream endures!
In the room quick now, I sang up the shades and the three o’clock starlight came flooding through. “Ain’t you sleeping yet, boy?” He rolled in his bedclothes, the hairy old legs uncovered and the stench of an old bull’s strength rising off lonely sleep and his weary overmuscled body. Waking, he wheezed hoarsely, and I had the sudden terrible thought: He’s sick! Could die before I reach him!
“Dad, you never said you felt bad—
”
“Son, I wanted to explain to you, I knew from your face how it was—”
“You been seeing doctors?”
“Now you come prowling in my room, I know what you’re thinking. Where you going?”
I whirled from the door, accused, and cried out: “Noplace!” Could it be that he did not see the knife in my hands and the point shielded deep in the flesh of one cupped palm? It was noplace; it was away; it was dropped with my watching at the door.
“You going away? What you looking at me for?”
“Nowhere!”
“Son! Son! Don’t leave me,”—the croak of a sick and lonely old man. “I’m sick, son, take care of me. The doctors say I got to stop everything, and I can’t do that. I worked all my life. Stay. Don’t go now. I could die by myself. All I got now is you and the job.”
I wasn’t going yet.
He sat deep in the wornout springs, leaning against a pillow, unmoving except for the heavy wheeze of his breath in the pale alley-light of stars and a streetlamp through the window. This watchful stillness let me know that he admitted the letter and knew my thought about it. He tried to smile; his mouth opened at me. This was one last tact: no word of the money he had sent Grack in my name.
“I’m sick, son.”
It was as if he had been waiting for me. He had no right to threaten illness and death now, to die owing me my anger, to die like me, incapable of sufficient cruelty and unable to be tender. Even in this decision I failed; I stood only to look murder at him. I measured his cunning at the postoffice, signing my name to a money order, and his shush-shush tread in my presence since, thinking himself clean with me and with Grack and with himself in this dirty house. I only looked my thought at him. His hairy legs were moving; he would climb out of bed; he would try to wrap me in the sick purple flesh of his arms.
He did not touch me. He said: “You’re a fool and no good, you were the death of her—” And he clapped his own hand over his lips. I believe to this day that these words, wrenched against his hand, would have saved his life anyway, even if I had not already failed my intention and begun the far lodging in evasion. His admission of anger, the somber truth of his love for me, let our hatred be spoken between us.
“My fault?” I yelled.
“How could I know what to do? I lived here all alone so long. Get out! You did it!”—and he covered his face. “Don’t leave me, boy.”
“You never should have been that way, Pa.”
“You’re no son to me. You’re no good to yourself.”
“Pa—” I wanted to explain how we nursed failure between us: How the brutal silence for which I had wished him strong—he might have shouldered the blame in his age!—could have saved us both and made Grack grin, cluck with approval, whistle a tune, and forgive us his waiting in the memory of his powerful hope for me when we had last been together. I stood at the bed to say how too much kindness, a money order over my faked name, meant deceit and defeat.
“Shut up, you! Don’t look at your father like that!”
To be patient with him, and to be tender in my decision, this was to do more than look murder at him. And more than fending off his anger which came too late to help me, but not too late to spoil this night’s work. “Pa!”
“You got no right. You had your say.”
“Pa, listen to me—”
“I listened already! I’m deaf from it! Listen, boy, I sent your friend the money and I said from you, but I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t let you go back to him—”
“Don’t!”
“I knew you would leave me—”
“No!”
“I knew you’d go back to him—”
“Don’t say it, Dad!”
“But stay with me now,”—the words so constant in him that this was his cry as the pendulous cheeks swelled in his astonished face and the heavy legs catapulted his body upon me. I thought that I plunged the knife wet and deep into his chest, once and then I could not count, into his eyes I thought, many times for all our illness that no telling can ever heal. Please believe me. My intentions were perfect, were final. The knife, fumbled and fallen at the door, had ripped my shirt as it flew; it had not even taken my own blood. In the reek of bodies and of his wakened flesh, I was beating him back into bed with tiny fist-flurries, spiteful, cool and malignant because this man’s son was like him even to failing with knife, clawing with fingers at his bull chest with its fine, tight-curled hairs and then at the horny silver-bearded skin of his head. I think the old man was crying; the springs groaned beneath him; he made sick stifled noises. Our truth together had always lain unused and fetid between us. He let himself be struck. There was commotion on his bed.
Then, at last, he opened his mouth, and up from his chest came the thick roar of the mastery which is every man’s right, murdered in us by the life we made, his lungs crashing to the tide of his love and his devastation; and the fall of our years together, damned like unto like, carried the flood of his breath and his saliva to my face: “Son! I could kill you with one hand,”—but he would not strike me even now, even for the years dead in him since my birth, and the cry was broken by his tongue clamped between his teeth.
All my larcenies, having despoiled him of an enormous admission, were still no good to me! His over-tenderness no good to us! I put my head an instant against the wet cheek, and then I ran loose.
10. Am never to be stilled?
BACK to Grack, who wanted no one.
I ran, ran, ran with the bloodless thing under my shirt. I ran until I tasted it on my tongue, the blood. It was the last wisdom of the body which kept me moving, turning and running, looking behind and hearing, not feeling, the branches across my face; and running.
I ran with the knife toward Phyllis once more in that moment before dawn. I stood under her window and whistled as I had many years before and waited for her light. A baby bawled; a lamp came on behind pink nursery curtains; I ran again. I was at the switchyards, still running, and then I was clambering in the coupling of a moving freight.
Phyllis had gone away, and so had I, as had my father—not for having lied, not for having cheated, not even for having wished murder—but for failing to lead our lives to be hard with a hardness, willful with a will, and serene for others and self. I was running to a world where no one desires or looks, all the blind ones plucking with our fingers at our eyes. I had not yet been found. Grack taught me how to tease you with a glare which I now possessed equally with him, then to count you into winning scores or foot the skillo soft, with a ho ho ho and a hee hee hee, with it and for it and nothing else until we are to be quit of this life.
I was young. A certain yellowness, a phyllisness, a sonnyboy trust that I had the right to be helpless—these were cured. Undone murder and all, I had learned something about doing my will.
My liver had grown back.
Now I had a road to go.
PART TWO
“It should be every man’s ambition to be well enough acquainted with himself to be his own doctor.”
Take your best hold.
Go peacefully and score on Saturday.
Those that know me, come on in, but no collect telegrams.
11. Now time to eat grass
LIKE a sick dog, I went out to the country to eat grass. And I carried my few bucks of money the way a dog carries his sex—where he’ll spend it in the springtime for a little pleasure or sympathy. The fleeing hindquarters sensation of running away from my dream of death to my father and my reality of no more desire for Phyllis and my wee-wee-covering backlegs scratch into the Pittsburgh of my childhood had made me a dog again. My tail was between my legs and I was running. I was headed down to Georgia where I would pick up the Wide World and Tuscaloosa Too Shows again, Grack again, Pauline again, with it and for it again. There would be no pleasure for me until I stopped.
The very next night, however, my brains came to interfere with the pure aimless pattering of flight. I heard Grack’s voice and saw his ey
es and the wart, all three bearing down in sleep from the shadow of the Ferris wheel where he had told me: “They see the fleas clearer on the skinny dog, Bud. Better be a fat dog.”
Dogginess, skinny and fat, may be all right for some, even for Grack himself, but I had other ideas for myself. Wanting to kill my father and not doing it was a great big idea. Wanting Phyl and turning away from her was an idea about my life. Trying to play touch football again and seeing how the kids took me was a good hunch toward an idea. Getting back to the carnie was getting back to the only home I now knew, there to eat my grass and take care of my liver.
First thing, before I could get new ideas, I had to eat. Spraddle-footed and shivering, I scrambled down from the freight. You haven’t hit bottom if you still know you’re hungry. I ate parochial school lunches that a sad-eyed nun gave me; she might have been Irish or Italian and a girl under her robes, but I would never know and remember only her smudged, sad, married-to-Jesus eyes. I ate handouts from sarcastic kids and angry women: why can’t a healthy boy like this work or go into the Army? I ate what I boosted in small cans from the A & P: caviar, cheese, mincemeat, and similar unhealthful delicacies. Oh, my liver. In the early morning, for example, having slept under the mats of a bowling alley with my head on a pin, I stretched and hummed “John Peel” while I swiped milk from the porches of small-town houses. I was beginning to feel better. “John Peel” is a nice song for a man who has avoided killing his father.
After the first angry night, before John Peel came to keep me company, when I was still a dog and nothing but canine, I stayed away from freights because they mark you with railroad dirt and make it hard to meet nice, respectable people. “Do ye ken John Peel at the break of day?” I hummed to myself this question. I drank my nice milk and put on my nice college-boy face and hung out my thumbs for rides, breathing the mountain air and moving toward the seaboard and Route One.
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