The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  Electric fans push air like setters’ tongues over me.

  Daddy’s voice at the other end of the showroom says, “That fucker Hoover’s done us in.”

  He’s talking to the skinny man, as I expected.

  The skinny man’s voice has baritone depth, and a will to be rapid, but its depth of near bass makes it sluggish with an urging-on breath in it.

  He says, “That fuck, Hoover.”

  The fat salesman says in a weird tone, piously but murderous: “It ain’t right, letting people starve; death’s too good for some of them bastards.”

  Daddy said, with a sigh, “That’s right. But I’ll tell you gentlemen something, you spend your life fightin’ the bastards, you got no life left at all.”

  The skinny man asks pointedly, “Is that a fact? I guess that’s fact: you want to win, you got to be meaner than they are.”

  Daddy said, “Everyone wants a hero to be mean for them—”

  The skinny salesman said, “Heh-heh, well, yeah, Mean Jesus with a Sword for president; go get things done for me, J.C.”

  Daddy said, “Well, we’re all clowns and cocksuckers in the end, I’m telling you men the truth.”

  “I’ll say amen to that,” the fat one said.

  Daddy said, “I’ll tell you what, lookit there—” Dad turns his head. On the other side of the big plate glass window, a blowsy big-boned woman is swaying past in the heat—sashaying. The salesmen follow his lead. Dad said, “That’s ripe. Listen, you like movies? Make your life like the movies and devil take the hindmost. Live nice, that’s my motto, I’m a good-hearted man.”

  One of the salesmen says, “How about that? You want I should go give the tot a hand?”

  “Naw, naw, let him have his day; it ain’t no fun to be a child: let him be a man, a little man.”

  The skinny salesman has an odd look. He leans against a car trunk.

  Daddy says to him, “You’re a devil of a fella. I’m right, wouldn’t you say I was right?”

  “Why, sure—hell, a man buys Buicks is right.”

  Daddy and the other man speak with what seems both love and hate in their voices.

  “No, no,” Daddy insists, “in your heart, you know I’m right, you know kids are O.K. and this other stuff is filth. Filth.”

  “If you say so—hell, you’re the boss; you want me to shoot anyone for you, I’m your man—” His large eyes refer to Daddy’s cash by being jocular and impious.

  Daddy admires the feral facial style, the dexterity of the other man’s face. Then he says (his breath is fast), “If I say so, hell, that’s what you say, listen: you like good times, you like sweet people—what’s wrong with being simple? Don’t tell me you don’t like what’s clear and simple.”

  The skinny salesman says: “What I am saying—sir—is that a man’s got to—”

  “To have balls, I know that—”

  “Sure, a man’s got to have balls, a man’s got balls—unless he don’t—What I’m saying here, what I’m announcing, is, a man’s got things he’s got to do, you know what I’m sayin, I cain’t give you no Buick, you got to pay for it: your kid there, he takes out his little wee-wee and does number one on one of the Buicks, I got to step over and stop the little twinkler. It ain’t like he’s bad, you know—it ain’t like you trust me none, I didn’t see you put the money none in my pocket, I don’t recall I heard you say to me, ‘Here, I’m buying a car, pick one out for me’—Hell, man, I’m being as friendly as your average ten-cent whore—”

  “I won’t give you an argument on that.”

  Dad’s friendly mood is like an ass the salesman has to kiss.

  Powered by the radiance in my pocket, I drift in an alley of Buicks. With every step I take, the bills bite at me, like a chicken pecking through my shirt at my skin.

  I touch the large headlight on a black sedan. I see my sore, thin self in the vertical pond world of the mirror, in that spread of scene, cars, potted palms, men, and bandaged child.

  My pleasure is thick and like wool and like grass, too, at night. My heart is a small wooden hammer that beats on my ribs: this rattles me. I stoop to look under the cars. I hear the sounds of the men talking clattering along the floor. The salesmen and I believe Daddy will decide which car if any we buy. My conceit about the money in my pocket has the slow wings of river gulls—large white birds reflecting the blue of the sky.

  I stand up and look at the mural again. Past coupe, roadster, sedan with special tonneau, maroon and black coach, in the flattened ungeometry of the mirror, a cigared man smiles. The scene, impalpable, drowning, holds movements. Everything has coronas of shine. Two of the salesmen peer toward the bandaged child over hoods and around grilles. The child stands on tiptoe and myriad white-bandaged things stir in mirror, fenders, grilles, and bumpers, speechless phantoms in the hallucinatory room.

  Dad says to the salesmen, “I’m nothing but a smart-aleck whore myself.… But I got a good heart and I know how to have a good time and that’s worth more than you might think—it’s worth a lot more. I’ll tell you my honest-to-God theory: I don’t think salesmanship can pull us out of the Depression but you men are doing real well. But people got to stop being mean. Still, you never can tell: this is a whore’s civilization.”

  The skinny salesman has a mysterious look of satisfaction that curves into a threatening ecstasy of conviction, maybe of being able to manage Daddy. I open the door of a blue Buick. The car light goes on. I pause, and behind me I hear foosteps. It’s the skinny salesman—he’s abandoned Daddy, and he is coming swiftly toward me. I start to climb into the car. “Hey there, now, little man, lemme give you a hand.” He comes close and lifts me. I have one knee on the car seat and I am panting a little.

  His hands, his touch, his odor are thoroughly foreign. This is translated into a violence of heartbeat. My thin ribs, my thin sheeting of skin and small muscle slide and squirm inside the salesman’s grip, in a kind of outrage. He can see me come to harm and not die himself with sympathy or sadness: he’s not a woman where I’m concerned. I sigh—a babyish showing-off; he is ogling me. I hated and held in contempt all men but S.L. whether I really did or not: that’s what loyalty is. I’m a good son, I’m his sweetheart provided I hated the people I liked. The child smiles past the skinny salesman’s thin shoulder at S.L.—I love S.L. best. He often asks me if I do. Putting S.L. first was the chief duty I had while I lived with the Silenowiczes.

  The salesman wants my admiration, my inferiority, S.L.’s: this is a foreign sort of love.

  Then, aware that I have the money, I look at him, I stare at him with my disbelief in the worth of everything that is not S.L. I stare without compromise.

  He said in a weird accent, “Yes, that’s a gorgeous child—” Yayuhs, they-it’s uh guh-gar-jus chi-i-le.

  The orphan emotions. The bandages.

  He showed me the windshield-wiper knob and the ashtray. He pulled it partway out and flicked it with his thumbnail to make a rapid drumming sound. I stared with unremitting attention. I was walling emotions off with floating walls of refusal that were like the sides of a ship. The man near me, his giant hands, his voice, his purposes, I am entangled in bad things.

  The other salesmen and Daddy gather near me and ask: “That the one you want?”

  “He’s got a real deadpan there, don’t he, he’s just not nice, he’s not himself, would it hurt you to smile? Maybe it would, maybe his chin is too sore—”

  I am excused from any outward confession of feeling—my deadened face has its electricities behind it.

  I hold my arms out to S.L., blond, solidly set, juicy. He doesn’t love as I do. His emotions are very full—very frequent; they stop and start, they frequently go dead. And his terrors are not like mine; like a lot of male terrors, they are the grounds of bluff, masquerade and wit, nonsense, pretense.

  S.L. is lonely and without meaning without me; and meaning is consolation. His sense and knowledge of the world is dark, is unconsoled and meaningless. He is afraid i
n ways that the child is not afraid. His cowardice, as absolute as passionate love, reaches a hand toward me, flutters and is pale in that air. I knew this as a child—how large the feelings are in my father. It’s an effort to live every day. I take his hand and feel in him the horror, the rage, the sense of the world’s filth. The child’s casualness, his fearlessness torment this poseur and handsome man who tried to re-create the child’s terror as a terror of the child’s not loving S.L. enough.

  He is a genius at creating a mean nerviness in people, a sensitive and far-fetched devotion and storminess toward him. For a while.

  This man has in his head, a thousand times, a dozen times a day, recollections of the war he served in. I adore him—literally, but I can’t trust him to defend our religion, which is Him. He likes to escape from me. He forgets all our arrangements. He deals in odd emotional currencies that include my “sense of humor,” my willingness to “forgive” him.

  Our power makes me want to be bad.

  The child spits on the grille of the coupe.

  “That’s not nice,” S.L. says. He’s a little bored now with this stuff, this shopping.

  Intently, sensually, the child rubs the spit off with his hand.

  S.L. mutters, “Pretty world, pretty world.”

  He imagines pornographic scenes. He told me once, Men want everyone else’s prick cut off—it’s a special favor if they make an exception of you. He sees shoals of whorish women swimming, their buttocks break the surface of the water. His breathing quickens. He shifts his posture. He bestirs himself. “Get to work, Wileykins, pick a car for Momma.”

  The child regards him from down the aisle of cars. S.L. stares vaguely—benevolently—childward, but not really at me: the smiles hive in the shadows at the corners of his lips.

  He has a half-erection.

  The child’s sweet youth and fragility cheer S.L. who says, “You have to do it by yourself, I’m not going to interfere one bit, not one little bittle bit.”

  S.L. feels sane, justified at the moment, effectual: his daily gamble is goodness is known to me.

  The child leans forward, then to the right, to the left—his retinue of reflected selves kowtows and sways everywhere. The white bandages are everywhere-—small albino birds. S.L. watches obliquely the return of pleasure to the cautious child. He sees these things with his lecher’s clever and experienced and deadened eyes—he sees things I see dimly through my sense of him.

  “How’s the big shot doing?” My father looks handsome and furtive, my other self.

  The ways the child knows him are unjust.

  Do You Remember the Time I Gave You Fifteen Hundred Dollars to Buy a Car? For Your Mother? There Was No Cheating. I Meant It. I Did It. The Money Was Real. It Was Cash. It Was an Interesting Thing to Do—That I Did—Do You Remember?

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes? Have you picked a car?”

  “Which car do you want me to pick, Daddy?”

  “Macher, it’s your day, whatever you pick is fine, you got the moolah, just pay for it like an officer and a gentleman.”

  “Daddy?”

  “I’m here. You decided yet? You have your hand over your pocket? You think the money will fly away? Well, you know something, maybe you’re right, you’re a hell of a fella, I can learn from you.”

  I thought Daddy was wrong to have aroused so much enmity as he had in the salesmen when he was so weak (so good-natured). I couldn’t help him here. His pleasure now is of the Who cares? Who gives a fuck? variety. And I was much happier than that. Our cantankerous—and blissful—little comedy, Dad’s and mine, is Dad and me us versus everybody.

  “The blue one, Daddy, I want the blue one.”

  “Speak up, Skipper: what you want, you shall have: that I promise you. ”

  I shouted, “I WANT THE BLUE ONE!”

  “O.K.” To the salesmen, he said, “Write it up, the little feller’s bought his mother a car.”

  A story is a brighter substance when it isn’t finished, when it is still partly hints and guesses, a family matter like a child’s face. Because I loved my father, his lies and will and money, I went over and put my head against his legs; I said to his haunch: “I want the car now, Daddy, let’s take the car now and go home now in it.”

  He said that was a good idea; and I climbed into the interior cavity of The Great Machine Selected by Me and Now Owned by My Dad while a mechanic fussed over it. I had to hand the money to the skinny salesman: his moneyless beauty was no longer electric for me but had become vague.

  The car had a lot of smell in it, plush and rubber floor mat and varnish on the wood steering wheel.

  A mechanic, bony and with expressionless eyes and with dark swabs of grease on his coveralls—he looked incompetent—said, “We just put it on the floor this morning; ain’t no one yet test drove it; but it looks okeydokey.”

  The engine noise is like a lot of metal legs, nickel and tin, clinking and clanking and melting and hissing. Or like little guns banging on and on. Or a really big, rushingly ablaze bonfire of leaves, maybe. Daddy is revving it up and letting it quiet down: he’s a better driver even than Ken.

  “Let’s go, Daddy.”

  “I’m waiting for you to say, Home, James: that’s what a gentleman says to a chauffeur, to the man who drives the car for him. You own it, I drive it, I have to wait for you to say, Home, James—ho-oh-m Jaymes. It’s your car—until we give it, you give it to your mother.”

  I whispered, “Houhmmm Jaymes …”

  “Louder!”

  I shouted it.

  A part of the wall is pulled open by six men, three to a side, and we drive down a ramp—a moveable and clattering wooden ramp that three more men put in place—we bounce onto the cobblestones of the street into the host of yellows, the burst of whites and heat of the day.

  On the new car’s plumpish slidings, the subtle broilings and bubblings of its motor, with wayward bits of shine erratically pulled back and forth and whipped around and made to vanish from the dashboard, and then others, flitting, wobbling, dancing, to appear on it, in the hot light, we drove past parked cars and a car parts store and the hollow shadow of a repair garage with its wide doors open on the men within and a Venetian blinds depot, with our progress (the car’s portrait) in plate glass windows floating several feet above the sidewalk in eerie beauty and madness.

  Thumpingly over the cobblestones that shone like the cheeks of little angels and along trolley tracks that glittered with light in starry parallels, along a commercial route, we drove into a quieter area, not far away, and past three towering and silent warehouses, we came, in a quiet and empty part of town, to where the road up to where we lived was cut into the side of whitish rock and scrub growth and lined with a low wall of concrete—an ascent with problems and privileges that made Dad clench his jaw and grit his teeth and also smile and nod (because we were going to the good part of town). Almost as quickly as a trained fighter with a sword, Daddy shifts down with victorious, fast skill, and the car boils upward on its surprised torque and in all its grand weight against what might seem a phalanx of the air or a guardian row of elephants that push their light-struck brows against our advance. The loud and echoing sound of the car motor and the wind-tumult and the whiteness of the cliff glittering like a headache or a mood of madness—the shifting heights and drops are a kind of childish madness itself. The hood, the radiator cap seem to haul us at the slant some seesaws have, we are dragged up, the world is blown backwards like a cape.

  Daddy’s face is almost at a forty-five degree angle to the dashboard, a sign that he is intent: this has something to do with his eyesight, something to do with the mystery of having a face.

  His open and fleshily vulnerable features, his blond beard stubble, shine with sweat and light. He means to have a deadpan look but his face is theatrically naked, blurred, oscillant: I have taken and keep most of these things, these qualities of his face. S.L. has a look of soft, other-minded insolence—and irony—when he drives: it lo
oks funny on the kid. It looks funny on me now.

  S.L. was a genius at some things: You think people would understand, a car is not a horse, you think people would understand what’s going on, it’s like you’re wearing seven league boots, it’s not like with horses, you haven’t got no time to think, I drove horse wagons, when I was a kid I knew about horses, I had good hands, but you got to have a special kind of mind for a car, you got to let the world go and you got to admit that when science comes in, then what you thought was common sense goes out the window because it ain’t common sense no more; I ain’t talking like a professor because I want to make a point here and I can’t do that when I use my dress up language. Listen to me: once you got a machine of any kind what you thought before was common sense is crazy now. I can give you a good example: with a horse, it’s all rhythm, you get your butt into it, you get your pulse into it; but a car ain’t no animal, it ain’t got no rhythm, it’s got steadiness or unsteadiness, pardon my country English, I’m talking like a mechanic, one of the ones who knows what he’s doing, a car ain’t got any of that kind of rhythm, it ain’t like a horse, it’s like a clock: it’s like a clock but when the hands go ’round, you’re in a different place, you’re passing a different tree: now this is crazy, and you got to be crazy to do it, you got to understand you’re crazy to get into the car in the first place. Would you climb into a clock to spend an hour or two? You got to understand the clock ain’t got nothing to do with you sitting there, except you’re the reason, but the car seat don’t matter, the axles matter, the flywheel matters, what’s going on in the cylinders matters. Wheels don’t sit on the ground like feet do, and horses don’t have gears. Horses get set and pull, a lot of times they balk, like a woman, but in a car, it’s all clock stuff, you can’t change the speed on this kind of clock, it’s rolling along, and you change the way it rolls, and it keeps ticking just as fast, and it’s got to fly straight up: well, not straight up, it depends on the hill, it depends on what you got in the backseat, how fat your mother-in-law is, that settles a lot of questions about how it rolls or how it climbs; you got to realize that when it’s standing still, it’s in a hole, and it’s got to get up and get out of the hole: standing still for any kind of clock is a hole, but every single minute it’s on, it’s got to tick. People think cars and watches is pure convenience, they’re crazy, they got their feet on the ground all right, but they’re not in that car if they think that they just can get in and go, they think they can just wind and wind a watch, they’re butchers, they got no feel, that’s how come they get killed; these wonderful machines is wasted on them; you have to do it by feel and knowledge, you have to be smart, I drive by the seat of my pants and I tick off the miles, it takes brain, it takes brain power, real brain power, you have to know how to hold your horses, ha-ha, you have to fit yourself to what’s there, I know whereof I speak.