The Smut Book

by Tito Perdue

  Two of them giggled, and two of them blushed. Meantime his taste had rotated over onto the girl in green, a dewy personality about as compliant-looking as any he had ever seen. Focusing upon her alone, he said, “Boy, I thought the girls in ———” (see above) “were pretty! Boy, was I wrong!”

  And that, of course, was when his mother—it never failed—began calling for him. And yet Lee, who had more lief to die at once than be seen obeying anyone, went on speaking: “But I’m coming back when school is out.”

  “Free country.”

  “And I’ll be coming to church, too.”

  “We always come.”

  They nodded at each other, especially the green one.

  From there the family drove back to the big house again, a half-mile journey that was hard upon Leland’s humpbacked grandmother, who didn’t really fit into a modern car. And then, too, she hated to be away from William’s House for very long lest someone come and take away her love letters, her canned fruits, her quilts and doilies, and things in her closet. Her head, such as it was, was small and football-shaped, and yet he was as convinced that she had some experiences stored away in there as that she had no intention of discussing them with anyone. Lee came nearer, catching a whiff of her nineteenth-century perfume. She had been the prettiest girl in the world at one time, and even, some said, one of the prettiest in the county.

  Her possessions were intact, and by the time Lee had changed out of his humiliating costume and into usable clothes, it was time for ice cream and cantaloupe. He watched with fascination as his uncle opened his knife, and after slicing the melon into pieces, picked them up one by one on the tip of his blade. It was only just one o’clock in the afternoon with hours still to go before it were dark again and time for dominoes. Suddenly, feeling that he might be in danger of getting bored, Lee arose and excused himself, and went out to the barn.

  One thin beam of sunlight fell through the roof and set up a spot on the floor, Lee’s favorite place in which to sit. Twenty years had gone by since last the building had been put to practical use, and Lee was conscious, as it were, of having been summoned to life in the aftermath of history, leaving him with very little that still needed to be done. These dead cows and mules, his disappeared grandfathers, they had done the essential work, carrying it out with rude tools that Lee could barely name. His sympathy went out even to the crickets and bees, whole generations of them condemned to lifelong missions of great tediousness. It also went out for his grandmother, still treadling away (insofar as she was able) on her sewing machine. And therefore, although his own life might turn out to be interesting and good, it was too late to atone for all the hard work that had gone on before him—such was his philosophy then and later.

  Twelve

  They drove in silence back to Lee’s hometown. The day was crystalline, a few generalized clouds limping past overhead in skies of purple-brown. Lee’s father, on the other hand, was noticeably less cheerful than of just a couple of hours ago. He did so hate it, abandoning his ancestral house to the vagaries of time and cold weather. Lee kept silent therefore and sat looking straight ahead. The roadside signs were numerous enough, but offered much too little reading matter to keep him occupied. They passed a tin-roof shack, out front a man laboring in his garden on a Sunday. Yes, one could do worse than to ride in bright sun through a series of nonreplicable moments in history and time. And because for him life was but a hoard of old and fading photographs conserved in the album of the mind.

  They passed a man hiking down the highway with one foot lifted forever in midair. Came next his own home-town, a silvery portrait in which some of last week’s Christmas decorations had been left in place. His headache today, Lee’s, was a routine affair, almost negligible indeed, and he was in the grip of an emotional serenity redolent of optimism. They passed Lee’s favorite domestic building, a two-story pile, well-glazed, with blue shutters and a mob of plastic flamingoes in the yard. He caught a quick view of Chichi Roberts whistling homeward from the library with three or four books under his arm and then, next, old man Dooley striding down Seventh Street with a cigar in his mouth and a dog on his leash. He would remember this, Leland would, and in that way distinguish himself as the only person in history to have done so.

  Arriving home, Lee helped to unload the car and then rushed to the upstairs mirror to find whether he still existed or not. He could see himself in two dimensions and then, with his finger, could verify the third. Could anything be more hideous than this? To see one’s self and know that it was looking back? Delaying there, he went through several facial expressions ranging from tragedy to gladness and back. (As long as he lived, he was never to decide whether he lacked something, or whether it was the other way around.) And that, of course, was when his brother yelled out loud and clear: “He’s doing it again!”

  Conditions improved during the remainder of the day, and by late afternoon he could have been found lying in the parlor among the funny pages. He had wanted to keep abreast of the actions of Foozy and Alley Oop, and took care to set off to one side the sheet with Mutt and Jeff, lest his father come looking for it in an irritable state. These personalities added to the town’s population, and he knew at least as much about them as about the man next door. For example, he saw himself as a good deal like Foozy, while his brother appeared to have been modeled on Perry Winkle. Comforted by that, he fell asleep at 4:45 in the afternoon on January 6.

  He awoke to the sound of the radio confiding in his ear. Could anything be more strange than that—radio? For all he knew, the man doing the speaking had died several minutes ago, before his voice had been loaded aboard the wire. Lee still hoped to adjust himself to these inventions and take his place in the modernity coming up all around them. Familiar by now with radios and cars, he had already disposed of his pencils, most of them, and taken up with ball-point pens.

  Thirteen

  Thus Lee, who now returned to his usual ways. The route to school was still the same, though it disturbed him to find that instead of parking his car with the nose pointing eastward, today Old Man Dooley had done it in the opposite direction. Confused by that, the boy grew pensive at first, and then morose. Yes, and someday huge glaciers of ice would cover the town and all the girls he knew would have come and gone and have consummated their fates at last.

  It was the essential nature of things that bothered Lee—of gawky human beings walking upright on the soles of hairless feet while striving to communicate, each to each, with uvulas and mouth parts. Shoes they wore, and while dressed in woolen stuffs, gazed about surreptitiously with jellied eyes that, nauseatingly, were outgrowths of the brain itself. Rodents were lovelier than this.

  “Something wrong with you,” said Leland to himself.

  “I know, I know. But I don’t care.”

  Arriving earlier than usual, he wandered about in the schoolyard, trying to reacquaint himself with the cast of people he had known. It relieved him to see that Naomi, the girl who liked him, was otherwise occupied. Meantime the beautiful Barbara Milkens was standing off by herself, while not very far away Cecil appeared to be locked in conversation with someone’s older sister. Lee went to him and waited.

  “I thought we was rid of you,” the boy said.

  Lee grinned.

  “Lee, meet Sandra. Sandra, this here is Sloan.”

  They shook. Seen at this range, the girl was somewhat prettier than he had reckoned. She had two moles, wee ones, that looked like dots of ink on the aft side of her heart-shaped lips. It dawned on him that Cecil had exchanged his other girl for this one.

  “Hey, I thought you were going with Barbara!”

  “I was. But now we’re going together, her and me.”

  “How come!”

  “It’s personal. Shut up.”

  “Yeah, but . . . !”

  “Thought I told you to shut up.”

  “Okay. But I want to get her side of the story.”

  He turned and walked to where Barbara was waitin
g. She did not appear to be unhappy, in spite of matters.

  “Hi,” he said. “Say, I thought you were going with Cecil. You used to.”

  “Oh, Cecil! He makes me want to vomit! I think he should just get married and settle down!”

  “He’s too young.”

  “He is not too young! Believe me.”

  “Good Lord. Well, who are you going with now?” (He was giving her the sort of concentrated attention that, according to his sources, women crave. She was dressed in a purple sweater that had enough room in it for the figure that would soon be hers.)

  “Nobody. And I’m not going to for a long, long time.”

  “I don’t blame you! How long?”

  She turned and looked him in the face. Below the surface she seemed to be smiling faintly with some of her smaller facial muscles. “Maybe we can go together someday, Lee. If you promise to be nice.”

  “Okay, when?”

  “When you’re fourteen.”

  “Be dead by then.”

  She laughed out loud at him, a good indication he believed.

  The professoress was older than she should have been and had aged during the three days he had been away. On her desk still rested two gifts that either she hadn’t seen or feared to unwrap. Where was Smitty? Lee barely recognized him in his formal shirt. A note came past, a two-page composition in yellow ink. Far away Lee could hear traffic in the road, a dog barking from the hills, an individual tiptoeing down the hall, toilets flushing, and the more distant sound of screams from the Principal’s office. Those who scream deserve it, in Leland’s opinion.

  He had full intended to join the rest of his class in the cafeteria; instead, Cecil came up from behind and seized him by the throat.

  “What, you want to be with us or with them?”

  “Us.”

  “Well all right!”

  They went to the Canteen. Lee, his eyes all times open for the high school girl who had forced a kiss on him back in October, ordered a cheeseburger and Orange Drink, and so did Cecil. The last he wanted, Lee, was for the Navy veteran to come and sit with them and light up a cigarette, all of which of course he did. Again, Lee would have preferred to sit quietly and listen to some of the new music, including especially Billy Eckstine’s “Prisoner of Love,” a song that described almost perfectly his own present predicament. And then, too, seldom had the place been as dark as today it was or contain as many high school girls. In the green room, he caught sight of a blonde girl dancing in a way that made him indignant at first, but less so as time went on. Where was Cecil? The year was 1951 and the scholars were again discussing that knife fight of last month. That was when the veteran turned and looked him in the face, disappointed apparently to be sitting next to an eleven-year-old who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and had no tattoos anywhere.

  “Here,” he said, forcing a cigarette onto the boy. “Smoke it.”

  “Naw.”

  “Goddamn it!”

  “Okay, I will.”

  Sooner or later, it was something that had to be done. He speculated that it might actually be a pleasure of some kind; instead, it proved just about as bad as anything in his experience. Nor did he understand how properly to hold the thing in the received way. Another of his favorite songs, “Stranger on the Shore,” had come on, and he had wanted to remain clear-headed for it. Cecil meantime had gone off into the green room where from time to time Lee was able to identify his silhouette moving about in the dark. All might still have been well had not the high school girl just then spotted him among the tables. Lee tried but failed to get out of her line of vision. And the next he knew, she had arisen from her place and was proceeding toward him.

  “Hi,” Lee said.

  “Been hiding from me!”

  “No, ma’am!”

  “Hiding!”

  “I been out of town.”

  “Yes, hiding,” she said for the third time. “You’re so bad.”

  He allowed her to pry loose the cigarette and then bring it up to her own lips and draw on it. He could also see that three or four other high school people were watching with amusement from the bar.

  “So bad. I guess I’m just going to have to . . .”

  She did it—moving to one side and climbing into his lap. Her weight was greater than his, but not so much greater that he elected to push her away. She was deliberately wearing makeup on her face, including red lipstick. Lee, his kneecaps trembling, looked off into the distance and put on a thoughtful expression. He had lost his cigarette and meantime, where was Cecil? He had no decent way to fend off the kiss that now began to close in upon him, a prolonged business in which he knew for a certainty that he was getting lipstick on him.

  “You’re so bad,” she said, whispering confidentially into his ear. These words affected him, creating a kind of numbness in certain parts. He now began to realize that his very favorite all-time song had just now come on, a gift from providence that not in a thousand years would be repeated.

  Beware, my foolish heart,

  her lips are much too close to mine.

  He had been smoking and drinking, and now he was kissing in full view of fifteen or twenty high school people hooting at him. His fame was increasing, no question about that. It needn’t have come as any great surprise, therefore, when the school’s chief disciplinarian suddenly came into the place and saw what he was doing. All Lee had ever wanted was a few moments of privacy; instead, he found himself once more in the outside world, once more being prodded at speed over to the Principal’s office.

  Reversal of fortune? He was getting used to it. Seating himself in his accustomed place, he strove to make conversation with a frightened-looking seventh-grader who had never visited this place before.

  “Don’t worry,” Leland said. “You get used to it after a while.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Hurt? He’ll make you wish you’d never been born!”

  “Oh, God. It’s just not fair!’

  “That ain’t got nothing to do with it. Anyway, I’m going to die anyway. So what difference does it make?”

  “Oh yeah, I heard about that. Because of your gizzard, you mean?”

  “Right.”

  Just now, the Principal was working on one of the football players, a largish individual showing more weakness than Lee would have expected of him.

  “That makes seven,” Lee said. “Licks.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see whether he gets ten or maybe twenty. Smitty got a hundred last year.”

  “Twenty!”

  “I got twenty-five. About a month ago.”

  “Dang! Maybe that’s what did it to your gizzard.”

  “Probably.” He was close to tears. It appalled him that the stenographer, an older woman with a reticulated face, seemed entirely unconcerned with what was transpiring in the other room. Her job had hardened her to all such considerations—this was Lee’s theory about the matter. Looking directly at her, he was about to say something when the door came open and the football player rushed from the room.

  “Next!”

  Lee stood. He had been given no time to get into the extra sets of underwear stored away in his desk for the purpose, no, nor time to prepare himself mentally or bring his Will into play. Even so, he entered the chamber with a bored expression and seated himself on the leathern couch that looked out over the floor-to-ceiling bookcase with its untidy arrangement.

  “Hi,” he said.

  The man had aged. Slowly, he lifted his head and gazed at Lee as if he had never seen this person before. It was tenebrous in there, and except for the man’s sparkling glasses, Lee would not have been able to pinpoint him in the gloom.

  “Leward, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Reading anything these days?”

  Lee recited the list of the two books he had been given as Christmas presents, literary stuff, one of them, and the other pure fluff. Having finished, he observed t
hat the man once again had put his head down on the desk.

  “Killing Germans when we should have been doing it to Russians.”

  “Sir?”

  “Oh yes, and now we’ve got us a new war going on over there. Could have won it, too, if they hadn’t fired MacArthur.”

  “I read The Swiss Family Robinson.”

  “Yes, and I expect you could recite it by now. Lee, Lee, Lee. Are you ready?”

  He rose, Lee, and took up his position in the center of the room. He feared for his tailbone, but except for that he expected the man to give him only a few unimportant blows before tiring of it. So much, therefore, was the greater of his surprise when the man delivered no blows at all.

  “It just gets worse and worse with you, Leward. Canteen again—is that what it was? Except this time, you got Sophie in your lap and a bunch of cigarettes in your mouth.”

  “You going to whip her, too?” the boy dared to ask.

  “Hm? No, that’s high school stuff. Some of those gentlemen could whip me. Ready to take your punishment?”

  Lee raised his hand to answer, but the man never called on him. Instead, he strode quickly to his cabinet and took out his haruspication hat, he called it.

  “Lee, Lee, Lee. I see a people that cares less about their own babies and wives than about playing poker and drinking gin. You going to be like that when you grow up?”

  “Not the cigarettes.”

  “A world of starving babies?”

  “They won’t do that.”

  “But they will! I’m the one wearing the hat.”

  Far away and over the hill and back, he thought that he could hear music coming from the Canteen, where people were dancing.

  “Anyway, I’ll be dead by then.”

  “Might be glad you are.” And then: “Lee, Lee, Lee; I can foresee the day when women will be like men and outright negroes will sleep in the best hotels. Don’t laugh.”

  Never laughing, Lee abandoned his awkward position, went back to the chair, and seated himself. The day was long and Time was, too, and he had still two full classes before he could go home and cozy up next to the radio and sleep away the remains of the afternoon.