by Steve Weiner
‘Because you had complicated relations with me.’
‘I played games with your miserable life,’ he said. ‘Ha.’
‘I tried to be free.’
‘You became imprisoned in your liberty. Only in prison are you free.’
‘Father, you have confused me.’
I got depressed.
‘Le bon Dieu was cruel,’ I said.
‘Don’t blame him. It was your melancholy friends. Negroes and hobos.’
‘I never told you about them.’ He waved a hand.
‘Bah. I created them.’
Breezes whispered through the birches. Death rode the sunset. There wasn’t much time. I leaned forward.
‘But I learned the price of liberty,’ I told him.
‘How expensive is it?’
‘I speak of prison uprisings.’
‘You mean – the Kingston riots – ?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Worse. Bolts driven through heads of wardens!’
‘Oh – God!’
‘Prison guards sent through saw mills!’
My father clutched at the window.
‘Guards clubbed on tree stumps!’ I yelled. ‘Burned in resin!’
‘Where?’
‘Here! In this trailer!’
He arched his back. He was going nowhere. I pushed him down.
‘I’m so glad we’ve had this little talk,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk again, after tea.’
His Missouri cousins Armand and Jim Verhaeren gathered his sweaty pyjamas. They piled his shirts, shoes, tie and prison uniform and made a bonfire.
My father and I played dominoes for quarters and fan droana for dimes. He sank into a perpetual twilight. I sponged the corners of his mouth. I inspected his ears. I plaited his hair for the grave. Trees fascinated him. I saw him licking pencils.
‘Qui a fermé ma porte?’ he asked.
‘Nobody. Nobody slammed your goddamn door.’
Along the river we heard the tom tom beating, slow and steady.
‘Death,’ he whispered. ‘Le grand musicien.’
Zena Courennes came by that night and examined my father. She leered at him with an ironical, rubbery mouth. Old Woman Dyb had died, but Old Man Dyb practised dance steps in the paddock.
‘Jack, Jack, flat on his back. Hang him on the bacon rack.’
Blue bombs exploded. Blue cascades trailed over the Chevrolet. Red bangers sent shocks echoing down the Mississippi River. My father copulated with the pillow. But he couldn’t come. He beat himself with a stick. His hair turned white with desire. Red reflections flashed on his blackening eyes. He used mechanical aids: lubricants, batteries, rubber. In the morning he had facial tics.
‘You look like turkey wattle,’ Zena Courennes laughed.
Doctor Carryfew came to the trailer. My mother served him jelly beans.
‘You have depleted yourself,’ he told my father. ‘The strain of sex has broken you down.’
‘Sex?’
‘You have contributed to the catastrophe.’
‘I?’
The seminal fluid contains large amounts of phosphorus-containing substances which, lost to the body by sexual excess, have to be replaced from the blood. The nervous system also needs that phosphorus. It is thereby robbed. Neurasthenia ensues. Fatigue. Irritability. Depression. Internal explosive pressures.’
‘The whores killed me?’
‘Just so, sir.’
‘And what am I supposed to do now, tie a rubber band around my zizi?’
‘Now?’ Dr Carryfew said. ‘Now? I don’t know what to do now, Mr Verhaeren!’
The priests came. This time my father let them chrism his forehead. My mother lighted incense. Red candles burned all night. Father Jesnin said the last rites.
‘Clocks go wild,’ my father said deliriously.
The death watch began. Black beetles clicked on the red divan. His belly turned black. Wax ran from his ears. His teeth chattered. The tax man arrived. My mother drew up a chair.
‘My, my,’ she said, ‘won’t this be interesting?’
I raised his feet. Blood rushed to his head and he passed out. He woke.
‘I can fight no more,’ he said.
‘Papa – ’
‘I am broken.’
I shook him hard by the shoulders.
‘Goodbye, Jean!’
I slapped his face.
‘Papa!’
I hit him across the nose. Blood spurted from a nostril.
‘It grows dark – ’
‘PAPA!’
I rolled him over and beat him with a broom. He woke an hour later, sore but alive. He looked at my mother.
‘We chewed each other to the last days of our lives,’ he said.
‘Chew, chew, chew,’ she said.
All night the fireworks rose. Green arches rainbowed across the pink sky. I beat out firecrackers in the hay bales. Then it thundered.
‘Thunder,’ he whispered. ‘And it’s Sunday. A man will die. What day is it?’
‘August twenty-fourth. St Bartholomew’s Day.’
‘I win.’
Suddenly his face turned to a mask of horror.
‘In spite of everything we were petit bourgeois!’
Dreamily he rose. The dance of dust motes swirled apart like a beaded curtain. Ignace’s figurines fell in a cloudy light.
‘It is so cold, and I am so naked.’
‘WHO SAID THAT?’ he screamed.
His face turned raspberry. I stepped back.
‘Jean!’
‘Papa!’
The septum of his nose gave way. Flecks of blood spattered his ruined gums.
‘Jean!’
My father spat blood. As he stretched his skin split. Veins exposed and his hip ligaments split.
‘JEAN!!’
‘PAPA!!’
Veils of blood blew over the bed sheets. Clumps of flesh flew into the altar.
‘PAPA!!’
‘No – !’
‘PAPAAAAAAAAAA!!!’
I ducked. Fingers, toenails, gold molars blew against the windows. Jack Verhaeren collapsed into red meat that grinned. His rubbery spine twisted on soiled white fabric.
My father died 24 August 1955. The cause of death was exsanguination. We buried him standing up in the paddock. He was only forty-one years old.
His last words were:
‘Sauve qui peut.’
Sixteen
Liberated at last, I danced down the crossroads. I knifed my father’s uniform in the dust.
‘Antoinette, your pants are wet
I love you yet, Antoinette
I’ll bet you wet everybody you met
My lovely freckled Antoinette.’
I built a coffin and carried it across Missouri. Dirt storms were so bad the air was black.
They arrested me in Jackson, Mississippi, and threw me in the women’s jail where I slept on a leather pallet. The moon was three-quarters full over the water tower and it lit my cell. I smelled peppers and cold dirt. I looked out and saw nothing else, just the silhouette of the city tower. Gradually I calmed down. I dreamed of Antoinette Hartmann, but when I woke I could not retain the memory.
I just had this fragrance …
‘You’ve got a nasty record,’ the sergeant said, bringing me flowers.
‘Do I?’
‘You’ve broken into cars, gotten arrested for burglary, assault and indecent exposure.’
‘Well, it’s rough, on the road.’
‘And you remember nothing?’
‘I am going through hell.’
He wiped my face with a lace handkerchief.
‘You should be in an asylum,’ the sergeant said. ‘How can you not know what you did?’
‘No telling what I did.’
‘Or will do.’
The sergeant faded in and out in a series of black. I grabbed hold but woke later on the leather pallet in the women’s jail.
‘Feel any better?’ the sergeant asked.
> ‘I think so.’
‘Well, you were pretty weird last night. What are you, anyway?’
‘Basque.’
I stayed a long time in that prison. Breezes circled through the dusty streets under a full moon. Fragrances of cactus candy, asphalt and horses came to me in the dark. Far away a freight train blew its whistle. I looked a long time into the darkness. On the third day the sergeant took me from my cell and gave me five dollars. He shoved me out the door.
‘Believe in God,’ he said.
I left Jackson. I became like an unsighted person. There were things, places. But I was not.
American towns were all the same. The same rivers, the redbrick warehouses, garbage. There was always a slaughterhouse, a bridge somewhere, broken walls where Negroes stood. The skies darkened. Everywhere there was broken glass, beer bottles, windows, headlights. Red berries spit poison. Ragweed in a railroad line, heading toward blue mountains, dripped from a rain gone by …
‘My fingers!’
The bones of my metacarpals came through red splitting skin.
I groped forward, collided – now I was really blinded. Moonlight was dark and day was darker. I refused to look backward or touch a horse or goat. There were no knots in my shoestrings. I was a bird ready for flight. I changed my identity.
* * *
I was an Albanian.
My name was John Michaels. When I was twelve my brother Ignace was shot by a Marseilles policeman named Roger Vaucaire. My father was Montenegran, my mother from Shkoder. They were butchered by Turks. I joined the French Foreign Legion, served under Colonel Canale. I had an affair with a prostitute named Antoinette Hartmann. I beat up a man in Gulfport and escaped to Florida.
I went to Carrabelle, Florida. Across Apalachicola Bay on Dog Island I set crab traps where the marshes moved. Under lanterns Negroes pulled fish. Seminoles gunned their boats past the cypresses. I left for Port St Joe and with three men held up a Greyhound bus, took a sixteen-year-old girl to the men’s room and raped her … But that’s one thing they’ll never pin on John Michaels.
I visited the museum of death.
The museum was on Lilac Street in Meridian, Mississippi. It had been a synagogue and was now in ruins. The slats were wood, with fallen white cornices. Engravings filled the foyer: the bleeding of the corpse, flushing the veins, collection of bodily fluids, wax-stopping the orifices. There was a display of formaldehyde and resins, a decomposed head.
Light hung in long shafts through the gauze curtains. I walked alone among the exhibits. A bull skeleton stood by black velvet curtains. White fish hung from black coat hangers. In a bell jar rubber tubes curved into the thighs of an infant mannikin. I pressed a red button. Current ran into the head plate and the baby was clad in copper.
Mementos littered the tables: china dogs, tickets to Lake Charles steamers, marmalade jars, fragments of lace, a cloisonnée cosmetic jar, a Negress carrying a clock, death cards. Upstairs a bog corpse was displayed on a grass mound, kept wet by a dripping lead pipe. It was tarred, like the dogs Indians pulled from the swamps.
There was a shooting gallery in the hall. Tin women in black velvet gowns crossed back and forth in front of my air gun. When I shot three, the house lights went out.
I walked outside past a skinned goat. Tea roses, calendula, violets, statice, jasmine, sphagnum, maroon tendrils, yellow butterflies, all twined upward on the garden walls. There were fountains and an obelisk in an allée of chestnut trees. A Negro, the oldest man I had ever seen, served tea by a Sumerian necropolis.
‘Warm me,’ I begged.
I left the museum of death.
I was a Choctaw.
My name was Gene Vernon. My mother was Seminole. She was killed by a prison guard named Szegy. I sold trailers in Grayton Beach. I married a Catholic girl named Antoinette Hartmann, then robbed gas stations with Kurt Flood. He was clubbed from behind by police in Vincent. Now he’s serving five years to fifteen in Pensacola. But they’ll never find me, Gene Vernon.
I drifted down the coastline toward the Choctawhatchee. I cut horse bellies in Wewahitchka. I went blind. The sun burned off my lips. I drank with my teeth exposed. I was an alcoholic, a plaything of the Choctaw nation …
They called me Handsome Gene Vernon.
Lightning cracked over the water towers …
Pzzzzt.
‘Antoinette!’
Distances became unpredictable. Words lost their meaning. For example, I asked a carpet cleaner the way to Wolf River and he smiled and handed me his cigarette lighter.
‘Keep it,’ he said generously. ‘It’s old.’
I drifted away … I snapped behind trees … the earth buckled … The United States shifted, expanded.
I was a Spaniard.
My name was Jack Castro. My grandfathers were Mayan. My father was killed by a railroad detective named James Banault. I murdered a derelict on the Escambia River, Ignace Vaucaire, and lived with a fat woman from Chile named Antoinette Hartmann. When she died I tattooed a viper in a heart.
In those days there were lots of Cubans in Florida. I lured them to tenements and stole their money. In San Bias three Cubans caught me and tore out my gold teeth. That’s how I got black gums. I fished with refugees on my trawler, the Erland Szegy. We fought the Texans. I killed one with a boulder and ever since took to the road.
I was crazy Jack Castro.
I circled to Camas, Idaho, walked to Malad City, Samaria, Roy and Portneuf, where I stole a porphyry amulet and hung it around my neck. I crossed and recrossed the dark towns, gulleys, buttes, railroad stations like a dog settling down. Leaves in whorls whirled up the branches, owl-shaped leaves, rose and fell as I passed.
A shroud knitted itself overhead in the sky. Below, irises grew between the corn, blue, with crimson pockets. Fields of wheat and rye pollinated themselves out of season. Hollyhocks detached themselves and floated across ponds. Insects began to eat each other. Under blue storm clouds explosive broom darkened the air. Canadian geese flew upside down over the aspen blowing green, silver, green, silver.
I was fruit broken by heavy hands.
‘Antoinette …’
I dug my grave through the world. Erland Szegy met me at a split oak.
‘You look terrible,’ he said.
‘I am frightened.’
Erland took me down to limestone caverns. Prisoners hung by the thumbs. Men dangled upside down with gunny sacks on their heads, crosses jammed in their handcuffed fists. Ojibways, Fox, Sauk and Menominee crossed stagnant black pools, dripping.
Corpses spat teeth. Orchids grew around their heads. They pointed at the causes of their deaths: a knife in the chest, a corroded liver, a bullet hole in the temple.
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘Suicides.’
‘Who?’
‘You and me.’
‘Me? What did I do to myself?’
Black birds swooped down the canyons. A guard beat a boy until the skin burst. A woman gave birth to a hog, screaming. In a tunnel a bull sodomized a child. Trees sprouted fingers where orphans hung by their necks. The rivers of North America, the Missouri, Platte, the Snake, Klamath, dripped through the trembling roof. Screams echoed down the crevices. Erland put on a red-tasselled hat.
‘Oh, Jean – what happiness we could have had!’
It rained upward. Men ate clay crying in the rocks. Erland burst into tears.
‘J’me suis fait avoir,’ he said. ‘I was had.’
‘T’as ben raison,’ I said. ‘You’re right.’
Erland turned into a lame rabbit and jumped into a hole. This was my dream of Erland Szegy, 23 September 1955, on the Purgatoire River, Idaho.
I became invisible.
Idaho stank of sweet, choking red clouds. Ribbon fish stirred in the Purgatoire. A black cicada shot apart on the pine bark. The moonlight twined down spikes of hickory trees and told me what to do. I stumbled out of the pines at Heyburn.
I became visible.
There w
as a black trunk-line shanty, a switchman’s shack, with a red lantern in the window. I knocked on the door. A round Polish face, reddened with drink, appeared.
‘You must be lost,’ he said, with a Polish accent. ‘Come in.’
I followed him in. The shack measured about twenty feet by fifteen feet. Calendars of pornographic women lined one wall. He saw me see them. A plate of cling peaches was on the desk by his clipboard, telephone and timetables.
‘Gets pretty lonely here at night,’ he said.
I sat on a cranberry crate. He drew up his lantern and turned up the flame. He studied my face.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘As if any of us know where we’re going.’
‘You must have a destination.’
‘Do I?’
‘Invent one,’ he said.
‘Okay. Burley.’
‘Well, it’s just down the road.’
‘I know.’
‘You can follow the rails.’
‘I can go anywhere.’
‘I’d drive you,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got glaucoma. I have to be here to answer the telephone. Not that a hell of a lot happens on the trunk-line.’
‘No telling what will happen.’
‘Wine?’
‘Love some.’
The Pole drew back a black curtain and pulled out a jug of red wine. He was embarrassed because there were many empty jugs. He let the curtain fall. He poured wine into two dirty glasses.
‘Where are your parents?’ he asked.
‘My father was a construction worker. He fell to his death. My mother drowned in Georgian Bay.’
‘Now a person like me,’ he said. ‘I’ve lived my whole life being disowned and I still can’t prepare myself for death. I lack contrition.’
‘Let’s cut the crap,’ I suggested. ‘I feel like gambling. Do you have cards?’
‘I do. In fact, I have a pack right here in the desk drawer. Poker?’
‘Five card.’
‘Stud?’
‘Deal.’
We started drinking. He said his name was Rybczinski. He was born in Poznan. His father had been a railroad switchman. He himself hated the railroads. When they moved to Chicago his father got a job with Union Pacific. They moved to Idaho. Rybczinski fell in love with a girl named Dawn Gilchrist. They didn’t have money to marry. Rybczinski went to Bolivia and worked the tin mines. Dawn put his cheques in Twin Falls Federal Savings and Loan. Rybczinski worked one year. Then his contract expired.