The Smut Book

by Tito Perdue

  He feared many things, Leland did, but mostly he feared the conductor, a vulpine man, intelligent to a fault, who had the authority to require people to stand and play their instruments in front of others. Lee, who would have preferred to take a beating from the Principal, tried to make himself as small as possible and just as invisible. It is true that he was surrounded by other clarinetists and oboe players, some of them with horns even squeakier than his own.

  He was slow to assemble his instrument, a costly device comprising three segments of teak adorned with buttons and pads. Once fitted together, these elements formed a black cylinder of about two-thirds his own length. For three years and longer, he had been blowing into this thing, creating a nasal noise that expressed only too well his own social standing at that age. No one loved music more than he, and no one was as poor as he at producing any. Now, lifting the horn into position, it dismayed him to find that his reed had split down the middle and couldn’t be used.

  He had others, frail objects costing each thirty-five cents and more. Working with delicacy, he removed the ruined reed and slipped it into his breast pocket, where it would remain forgotten for the next year and three-quarters, till he found it by accident. All this was a tedious but necessary process, and by the time he had finished with it, the band was playing without him. Useless to try and catch up with them now.

  The band had five trumpets in it, but he could always discern Cecil’s from the others—a high screaming sound that seemed to come from a Roman army marching to the attack. Smitty’s, on the other hand, was darker and deeper, heavier, more morose, elements of profundity in it, hopeless. Their music sorted well with the trombones, golden implements continually readjusting for size and pitch. These boys were larger than Lee and seemed to be in process of merging with their instruments, even sometimes becoming one person. Not so Carl, who was as much too small for his saxophone as Leland for his clarinet. And yet he was sometimes able, Lee, to give off a creamy sound that let him salvage his position in the band. Seen from a distance, he looked like a homunculus sucking on a pipe.

  He could have mentioned the other players, too; instead, he lifted up his horn just in time to play the final measures. He didn’t belong here, truly he didn’t, he whose future, were he to have one, would pertain more to books than to music.

  “Are you with us, Lee?” the conductor asked suddenly, turning his fierce gaze in Leland’s direction.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good, good. Got your little reed all nice and proper now?”

  “Yes, sir. I think so.”

  “Excellent! I’m pleased.” (The band members were grinning.) “And so does this mean that you want to continue to be a member of our little group, hm?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Or would you prefer Latin class? That’s the choice, you understand.”

  “No, sir! Yes, sir, I want to stay here.”

  “Good! Good, good. That’s real good Lee.”

  He was speaking to Lee but his attention and raven-like gaze had shifted over to Charlie T., who had set one of his cymbals off to one side and appeared to be picking at his nose. The majorettes meantime were lounging in the window where a person could esteem their suntanned legs. From somewhere came the sound of a truck laboring up a hill, and further, the noise of an airplane driving overhead. There on the floor, a splotch of sunlight was making its way ever so slowly toward two o’clock. Lee was not unacquainted with these moments, when the world is alert and sentient but time itself has stopped.

  He returned to class to find that Cecil had arrived before him. This would have been the time for a nap, an interlude during which Lee could have refreshed himself with half an hour’s worth of divine unconsciousness or one of his accustomed dreams. But no, the teacher, who appeared finally to have come awake herself, had gone to the front and was drawing problems in arithmetic on the board. He had seen this before, had Lee, having seen the precise same numbers in sixth grade. Must he indeed go through life allowing other people to catch up with what Craig and he and the others from his part of town had accomplished all those years ago?

  He worked quickly through the list, copied it, and then passed the duplicate up to Cecil. In return, hidden as he was by the larger boy, Lee was almost never bothered by the teacher. His face, too, was generally innocent, whether he wanted it like that or not. He wore a long-sleeved shirt because his wrists were thin. He had fifteen cents in his pocket, a clarinet beneath his desk, and a cigar box with hardly anything in it. Such were his materials, apart from a fifty percent interest in a dog and the other usual things to be found in a person’s home. Thinking of it, he managed to lapse off into a hypnogogic state in which he imagined he was actually sleeping in place. That was when a note came past, a voluminous message in Mattie’s yellow ink. Meantime up front, Lois was suffering at the board with a piece of chalk in her hand. Her skirt was old and faded, her knees were stained with grass, and she was no better at maths than if she had been like Charlie T. Ended thus the hour and with it the eighteenth day of seventh grade as carried out in the Alabama of that day.

  He walked home in the gathering gloom. Preston, dodging between the falling leaves, dashed past on his bicycle, followed by his wind-up dog. In the distance Lee discerned two girls, one in violet and the other red, both moving quickly homeward to turn in their reports. Their legs were thin but quick, and they were so obviously pleased to be out of school and in the September weather that Lee was tempted to race forward, scatter their books, and jump on top of them. It was to be the only time in his long life that he would happen to see the two of these in mid-gait at that particular location and time, and in fact he was at all times aware that everything he saw and did was to be done or seen but one time only, and then he’d be dead.

  The gloom was not in the weather—it was only just past 3:30—but rather in the knowledge that he had only a specified time in front of him and then, as mentioned above, he’d be extinct or old or so corrupted by life that autumn days would mean nothing to him. He concentrated therefore on what was in front of him, striving to memorize it down to the least detail.

  He had already memorized the houses along his way, as also the Roman wall that emerged up out of the ground for a few paces before disappearing underground again. He sighted Mrs. Ledbetter’s home with the cat on the porch and the colored shutters, the movie theater and tobacco shop, and the Catholic Church with a sign out front showing a bleeding heart pierced by thorns. He passed slowly in front of Steven’s house, formerly a friend of his. He had remembered the interior of that house and remained confident that he could still find his way through it in the dark. A mile to the east, he saw a crowd of birds circling by rote the town’s faraway steeple.

  He passed under Mr. Megan’s pecan tree, conscious that all the nuts had long ago been harvested by others. (This same man had a plum tree out back, though none dared go there anymore.) Here, Lee halted, memorizing the roses before continuing on. History had been cumulating toward this moment, and he had but moments, parts of moments, before the world and everything would begin to spiral down into the mess to come. He was going to cross the street—he was sure of it—and sure, too, that he had no chance of reaching the other side. Gloom came down over him, and from a distance, he looked surprisingly like a little old man.

  He entered the house at 3:58 and hurried to the parlor. The place was dark and ancient and had the most characteristic smell, somewhat like that of turpentine or camphor. He loved to get down on the rug and press his ear to the radio, a wooden appliance as big as the refrigerator almost. Entered then his mother, a good woman basically, who lately had taken on a physical appearance that looked like Lee’s. She brought wafers and milk and then left him to deal with the radio on his own. A thousand years might go by and never once did Lee question these privileges of his. As to the adventures of Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, he recognized in them a foretelling of his own future career in the world. The broadcast, coming from New York, was perfec
tly audible, and made it possible for him to memorize whole paragraphs of the spoken script. But for certain particulars, they might almost have been talking about him.

  It was the best part of the day. Lying on his back in the darkened room, he waited for Sky King, the on-going story of an aviator and a girl called Penny whose voice and general personality were very like those of some of the girls of Leland’s acquaintance. Outside, the Sun was streaming, breeze blowing, dogs barking, and children calling up and down the street. They were good, programs like these, and he was at all times conscious of the top-most position of his own state when compared alphabetically with the rest. Thinking of it, he began to exult in his unseemly manner. It had required a thousand years to arrive at this, and while he was grateful to the people of the past, some of them, yet was he also perhaps a little bit arrogant for having chosen this time and place instead of theirs.

  He was deep into the program called Inter Sanctum when, suddenly, the afternoon began to lapse into twilight, a transformation so subtle that only those watching very keenly could have noticed. He saw the first firefly working its way bravely through the colloids, a tentative insect indeed, its lantern brief and dim. Using his Will, Lee tried to bolster him somewhat while at the same time giving heed to the radio and a woman trapped in an empty house.

  They feasted that night on spare ribs and sauerkraut, Lee, the woman, his father, and tiny brother. As to the man (called “Young Albert” among the family), he was tired and had been at work all day. Lee waited until his father had served himself, had cut a portion, and had begun to chew upon it with approval. The room itself was dim—they preferred it that way—and no noises could be heard apart from the serious and static-filled sound of news from the radio. The political situation was bad, as Lee divined from the way his father went on listening to it with deepening concern. Someone meantime was trudging down the alley that ran behind the house, whereupon Leland’s father rose suddenly and snapped the curtains shut. The milk was good and plenty of it; no one in this house would starve tonight.

  He loved these moments. The curtains were tied, and in case the telephone sounded, it was to be ignored. His mind, Lee’s, attached itself to his father’s revolver, a blued article that lay half-buried among the pajamas and nightgowns that filled the top drawer. And was there anything in that house that he could not have located to within an inch of its position? No. No, he knew about the business papers, the box in the attic, his mother’s necklace, and a great many other things as well. They had books, they had guns, they had canned fruits and vegetables, and six hundred dollars in the bank.

  All this was owing to the adults, which tended to underwrite his general obedience to them. Both these people were a little bit faded at this hour, and he fully expected his father to repair very soon to the parlor where he would smoke two, sometimes three cigarettes while listening to the radio. Lee made haste to assist with the dishes, which is to say until he saw that it was something his mother could deal with individually.

  The parlor: The news was finished and a crime show had come on. Unwilling to stretch out on the floor in his father’s presence, Lee, wearing an expression as serious as Young Albert’s, sat upright in the upholstered chair. His brother had long ago disappeared from the kitchen—where did he go during these intervals?—but now was back for a second bowl of ice cream. Suddenly shots rang out over the radio, and Lee could clearly hear the sound of someone running down a corridor. His father, too—he had put down his newspaper and was harkening to the program. No one hated crime more than he, and no one yearned more for information leading to the capture and conviction on a regular schedule of bad people. The smoke from his cigarette lifted ever so slowly and filled the lampshade that held it there. He was a melancholy man, and his memory was as deep and as full as Lee’s, if not more so indeed. That was when Leland’s pale brother emerged from the kitchen and, after shaking hands with the old man, ran off to bed.

  It was a privilege, staying awake till nine at night, and one that Lee exploited to the lees. He had done his homework five hours ago, having done it in his head while trekking home from school. The world was disturbed with issues and struggles of all kind, but for him the main thing was to stay for the next program, a dark business having to do with a rocket trip to the Moon.

  He slept that night between fresh sheets. Or tried to sleep, rather, and even at one moment came so close to it that he was momentarily persuaded that he was actually dreaming. His stratagem was to insert himself by imagination into one of those cliff-side apartments used by the Pueblo Indians, complex structures in which a person could move from room to room, sometimes sleeping and sometimes visiting other people; instead, he found himself staring at somersaulting shadows cast on the wall by passing cars. He tried then to imagine himself on board a submarine parked at the bottom of the sea. Or, that he was dwelling with his wife in a stockade in French Canada with snow on the ground and wild Indians all about. Or, that his body parts had been disassembled and put away in a carton, like pencils in a box. Instead, his mind, which had a life of its own, went on running forward, jumping over creeks and other obstacles and pausing only for girls and mathematical problems and tattered hearts embedded in barbed wire.

  At 11:30 he arose, gathered his flashlight and stamp album, and tiptoed over to the roll-top desk, an inheritance from his grandfather that took up a large percentage of the room. That desk had six drawers in it, each filled with objects and other things organized by Lee in his fastidious manner. So persnickety was he indeed that instead of fingers, he was wont to use a sharpened pencil, and sometimes even a set of tweezers to coax things into proper place. He admired straight lines and ninety-degree angles and couldn’t bear to see things out of skew.

  His album was blue, had a coat-of-arms on the cover, and contained 2,437 non-duplicated stamps, approximately speaking. It is true that the world’s nations were by no means equally represented in his collection, not as long as he gave preference to places that were strange and far away and inscribed in some of the odd-looking scripts found in Asia and elsewhere. Chinese! in which every single letter looked like an obscenity, or like an infant’s version of an authentic word. The men, on the other hand (the men on the stamps), looked to be in deadly earnest. He didn’t understand them, Lee didn’t. What did they want? And what was that building in the background, the one with the spires? And that landscape of hills and mountains that, apparently, was designed to appeal to the sort of Chinese people who stood in need of stamps?

  Running forward to the middle of the album, he trained his flashlight on Persia, the most peculiar by far of all the world’s countries. These people had originated the practice of embossing their stamps in silver and gold, an expensive indulgence that, insofar as he knew, had been followed by no other country. But mostly it were the kings that fascinated Lee, generation after generation of some of the most corrupt-looking beings ever seen. And then his favorite stamp of all, a pale-yellow affair showing a sleepy-looking Shah dressed in a preposterous hat. Next to this, his collection of French colonies was of but secondary interest.

  It did calm him, he admitted it, the postage of Mauritania showing a native oarsman pushing upriver in the ink-black night. One could imagine the mosquitoes in an environment like that, the crickets, and the monkeys yelling from tree to tree. Coming closer, he believed that he could discern a crocodile lurking at the river bank. Suddenly he stopped, alerted by the sound of his father milling about in the further rooms.

  He had enjoyed thirty minutes of pretty good sleep, followed by ten or fifteen more of somewhat lower quality when, that moment, Chichi Roberts, a neighboring boy who lived on the corner, burst into his room and began shaking him violently.

  “Lee! Lee!”

  Lee looked at him and then, slowly, got into a sitting position. Once more he was reminded of how strange it was that while his father always kept the curtains closed, yet he never locked the door.

  “Lee!”

  “What!”

/>   “You got any graph paper?”

  The dog also had come awake.

  “Yeah. A little bit.”

  “Can I borrow one?”

  “Gollee, you still haven’t done your homework?”

  “Forgot.”

  “Aw, good Lord. I did mine a long time ago.”

  “And what are all those stamps over there?”

  Lee hurried over and closed the album. He had five sheets of graph paper and wasn’t opposed to sharing one of them.

  “I’ll pay you back,” Roberts claimed.

  “Doubt it.”

  “Hey!”

  “Naw, it’s just my brother. He always sleeps like that.”

  “Well. See you tomorrow, I reckon.”

  Lee nodded and then went to the window and opened it enough to let the boy escape. Ended thus the twenty-third of September, even less education having taken place in Alabama on that day than all the days before.

  Three

  He woke at four o’clock, got into his shoes, and then, seeing what time it was, got back into bed. He believed that he might actually be able to go to sleep again, provided he were able to place himself mentally in the right circumstances—on board a submarine, for example, or a well-built cabin in the French-Canadian wilderness with danger all about. This succeeded at last, and after finishing with Canada, he envisioned himself in the Captain’s quarters of a seventeenth-century sailing vessel standing off the coast of Siam. He knew that he was dreaming, of course. Even so, smacking his lips over it, he retreated under the covers and permitted this and other dreams to carry him through till seven o’clock.