by Paul Hawkins
*
While Blaise was busy with Maria, Jude had taken to hanging out with his older sister Tess (though she would leave him soon enough for a bass player). Jude had initially taken to hanging around that dry flat farm to be with Janet but Janet would have nothing to do with him because she had a brain in her head and knew Jude was dreamy and unsure of himself, and so Jude took to hanging around with Tess, who was older and worldlier anyway and who knew how to pull at a bottle and had already had misadventures of her own and could be a sympathetic ear to his having been kicked out of college for being a “rebel” (so he told her) and then readmitted on probation. They took to swimming together at Jude's family's pool in cul-de-sac Ritzville, and although she had started out sort of disliking Jude because she thought he was uppity, she took a fancy to his muscles, which themselves had taken a fancy to the frequent exercise of swimming, and so more often than not they ended up in the pool and subsequently in the pool house without a speck of parental supervision because his mom was off searching for apparitions or else campaigning for mosquito nets for Africa and his dad was organizing corporate fun runs to eliminate diseases.
Janet knew about Jude and her sister and only let on revulsion, but I could sense inside her something else, some jealousy of Tess’s being able to successfully escape their familial malaise. She wasn’t jealous of Jude - or at least she didn’t think so - but she felt jealous of Tess’s ability to flip the bird at the world, and she hated herself for it. It made her scrub the counters in the drugstore at her second job even harder. She hated being jealous of irresponsibility. She longed to escape. She was too good for this place.
Blaise's trouble all began when he slept with Kitty Buffington.
From Blaise's Journal
All my trouble started when that Buffington lady seduced me.
From Rosalind's Journal
Blaise's woes all started with a phone call from Chantilly (the modeling agent who had first discovered him waiting tables). She informed Blaise that Mrs. Buffington (Caroline) had informed her that Mr. Buffington had abruptly left on an extended excursion to Europe with a cadre of his buyers and that left Mrs. Buffington alone and in need of an escort to some sort of Guilty Cowboy/Sad Indian Art Cultural Soirée put on by members of the city council and most of the chamber trying to prove that Oklahoma City was a town "on the grow" and worthy of corporate relocations and investments.
She wanted Blaise to escort her just this once, she said, because she was so tired, so tired, of mincing men and her relatives and phonies. And so Blaise reluctantly agreed, though he had to explain it to a disgruntled Maria, who did not like the thought of him in a tuxedo on another woman's arm, and she told him he had to break off this “social obligation” if it got the least bit creepy. He assured her that old lady Buffington was a dried out old prune of almost 30 and it would be only this once and he would figure out how to pawn the duty off on someone else next time, even if it mean throwing up on her tonight.
But it had been easier to disregard Caroline Buffington in theory than it had been when they both had too much champagne in them and he found her crawling all over him in the back of a limo, and the next thing he knew all his stifled libido had welled up in him and his head buzzed in the cloud of her perfume and then he did what he promised himself he would not do. They untangled themselves and he scooted away to tuck in his shirt tail, and she fixed her lipstick and dropped him off at his car with a smile.
Over the weeks she insisted on seeing him again and again and he refused, for a while, but she kept finding ways to be alone with him in a breakroom in a warehouse in an office in a trailer and he gave in to how easy it was to get some and still have an angel to come back to – Maria – his angel, and he would kiss her double-strong when he was back with her, but she chalked that up to punch-drunk love. She’d just open his book in front of him and make him study. It worked for a while, until Blaise began being late to meet her and lax in his schoolwork. He flunked a test, and when she got onto him he waved her off and changed the subject to going out to dinner, but she refused, and left him alone that night for the first night in a long time.
From Blaise's Journal
I slept with old lady Buffington after escorting her to some art show and she had been coming onto me all night like a cat in heat what with her husband away at some cabana and her life a cold façade anyway and me just drunk enough not to care, especially once she let me feel her up.
Anyway, the real problem is that I went back again and again for seconds, and I got spoiled and lazy, and I knew I did not deserve Maria, and - well - she sensed as much about everything and I was stupid enough to think I was getting away something.
A person makes stupid mistakes when they’re young. For weeks I went on thinking I had the best of both worlds and was becoming a man, that I was succeeding in lots of ways with no one the wiser, but that was the beginning of the end and I just didn’t know it.
Still, now and then some good things happened. Maria still didn’t want to believe what she already sensed and often doubled-down on affection to deny it, and we went out to some of the fanciest restaurants in town and she even kidded about where I might take her to propose to her, and at the same time old lady Buffington was moving me from modeling into the offices at Buffington’s, and she let me pretend like I had some say in what fashions went into their lineup for fall, and I think it’s around then that everyone at the store got pretty wise to what was up, and Mr. Buffington finally got himself a P.I. And that was the beginning of the end soon enough.
Also, in the midst of all that, some old man I mowed lawns for in that old neighborhood near the Quonset hut (this out of charity once and then routinely) died and left me a jewel of a classic car, a 1949 Pierce-Arrow, garage-kept and pristine. He had been a lonely old guy widowed 40 years. I mowed his lawn and afterward I would sit on the porch while he gave me a beer and I let him talk my ear off. But when he died it turned out he hadn’t had anybody else in the world and so he left that old car to me, and that car was sweet. I already had a car and didn’t know what to do with another one, but my uncle Dave, who dealt in all things automotive and shady and who owned the car graveyard here in the sticks, offered me the abandoned acres of Boheme in exchange for the vehicle because, as he said, "Look Blaise, I got me a Texas oil man lined up who'll pay top dollar for that car, and you already have that Thunderbird I pieced together for you from spare parts, but those acres, they'll always be there and if the city ever really ever builds out here again those acres will be worth something. I'll give them to you instead of your dad because God knows he'd show no interest in them but you have your future ahead of you. And hell, who knows? There's those ghost town foundations out there and maybe one of those fruit loop artists buried a can of silver dollars or a priceless sculpture or something."
"Fair enough. It's a trade."
"And I got an old silver Airstream trailer from a guy who owed me money - if you take the acres you can have that too. Hell Blaise, you need to get out of the old man's house."
"The deal was good enough already."
"Yeah, but there's one more thing - you got to take this pig."
He lifted a pink piglet from a cardboard box and held it at me.
"What?"
"I took it in trade for car parts. I don't know what came over me. Her name is Bess Truman."
"Good grief - a pig?"
"Look, I'll fix you a pen and she won’t eat much."
"Yeah right."
"Okay, she'll probably grow huge. But it'd be a big favor to me."
"You have an illegal exotic zoo on your back acres, don't you?"
Dave shrugged. "Look, the world of restoring classic cars brings in some big money and some shady characters who like barter as a way to keep transactions off the books. Let's just say I have a creature or two that never graced the landscape of Oklahoma by way of nature. That pig was supposed to be breakfast for one of them, but I ain’t got the heart."
"That zoo's
going to land you in the pen someday."
He looked at me. "No Blaise, the illegal gambling will. Being out here in the sticks puts a fellow in the mind to think he can get away with anything. It'll get in your mind. Resist it."
So I looked at him and took the pig. And although I really didn't have room in my life for a pig I took her to get the acres of Boheme. And the afternoon found me and that pig fast friends soon enough, she trotting alongside me just like a dog, and we went metal-detecting out in Boheme that night. Not that I found anything. But I had a hunch that something I needed was there, somewhere, and so I often wandered out there in the nights when Maria was working her second job (or said she was) or off with her study groups (she said she was studying), and I would stroll amidst the old slabs of the ghost town not suspecting that soon enough my father would be dead and my girlfriend would leave me and that Tess would run off with a bass player (again), and Janet would light out in disgust at our father and I would be left alone, out in the high dry sticks, and in being left alone and seemingly without the grace of God, I would be lost, and then tempted, and then trapped by my temptations into doing horrible things.
On one of the many nights when Maria was away, I could look in the mirror and see why. All girls have an intuition. Even when I am happy something clouds inside of me. After the initial euphoria of being in love, something creeps back in. I could feel it at the back of my head like a shadow or a gun.
Maria, who with a woman’s sense had already started to see past that the first great blush of romance, could see no second act in me (this on the level of the unconscious, because in her mind she was still in love). It was not even about the affair. She did not know about the affair yet. It was about a deeper thing inside, the existence of brokenness at my center that was alien to the instincts to survive and thrive.
Nonetheless when she left it blindsided me. I would rather have had her leave angry than sorry, but she was sorry. I could see myself all to clearly because of her pity. When Maria left me I was shattered, and I sank into despondency just about the same time the oil bubble burst and the economy imploded, and the succession of miseries left me too lethargic to even button myself into flannel for the Tippins ads.
From Blaise’s Journal
Maria had left me. No one knows how hollow, forever, it can make a man if the one woman who pierced and would ever pierce his heart leaves him. Who knows what a pierced heart means? Knights used to die from one glance never returned, right? And what are you left to do when that one complementary thing meant for your life leave you alone? Wander? Die inside? Lose yourself forever in routine? Go to a monastery and take a vow of silence like those knights did in the stories? There was something noble in those stories. I think any of those choices would have been better.
From Rosalind’s Journal
Tess and Janet and Blaise were all too successful at their stratagems of distraction to notice the increasing withdrawal of their father who, with the extra equipment he got from Don, was able to sift the signals to a greater extent than ever before, but still without hearing any messages that he wanted to hear, any shred of hope, and instead only filled himself with news of the misdeeds men, in this country and that, atrocity upon atrocity, and violence upon violence, with no inkling of the ministering angels that had guided him and watched over him as a young sailor in the Pacific in World War II, that had seen him through harm when he was too young to realize the terror he was in, and had guided him back home, and let him find his one true love but then had taken her from him without dignity, without warning, without a single signal of reassurance thereafter, leaving only his self and the void, and a hiss from every corner of the world in every language from every preacher who wanted his own life of sin and prosperity licensed by the Crucified Lord and Amway that it was all somehow his fault because God had left him.
At last he turned to what some old scientists had attempted, in the desperate waning days of the war, what he had gleaned from a hunk of badly damaged technology and some scant burnt pages rescued from one small cave in his island-hopping days in the Pacific.
He built a machine to talk to the angels, but it was only visited by the prideful lonely ones who cannot even talk to one another but can talk to men. Maybe it was him talking to himself, pulling himself down into his own despair, but who put those thoughts in his head? Whatever it was, it hissed at him with time-worn wisdom:
"Everybody dies. Kill yourself and join her."
And Blaise in his despair, years later, turned to his old man’s notes and books, but not before first exacting his punishment on all of the human voices that had distracted his father from his hope. That is to say, he jammed all the signals of the human princes of the air, and it was, in its own way, as famous as the New York blackout of a generation earlier. The soap advertisers alone lost a billion dollars. That led to his first ten-year sentence in prison.
Did You Find Out Where He Gets His Money? - Part 2
The lean hollow man, Laredo, who had hounded the owner of the bait store, now hissed into a pay phone in late afternoon. The voice on the other end interrogated him.
"Did you find out where he gets his money?"
"I didn’t even meet him. But I talked to the guy at the bait shop. He said I could meet him there tomorrow."
"Well find out where he gets his money. His dad never had any, and he sure doesn't get it mispainting folks' house numbers or mowing old folks' lawns for charity or shooing possums and raccoons from people attics or knocking down hornets’ nests, and he sure doesn't get it from that gawd-awful junk art he welds on late into the night then trots up front to lower everyone else’s property values. He might get it from Boheme. That land's worth something now."
"Look, I’ll find out okay?" Laredo said.
"I think he owes you something. Look, if he's expecting you to meet him tomorrow, you do something else - you break into that house or trailer of his instead, while he's at that bait shop waiting for you, and find his secrets."
"Break in? I'm not so sure."
"Now listen, you suck it up and do what you have to do. You love me, don’t you?”
He hesitated so she asked again.
“Yes, of course.”
“I'm sorry I'm pressing you so much. I just know that you deserve the best. We deserve the best."
He heard her hang up, so he hung up. He had a day to kill before he met Jude and Blaise at the bait shop. He wondered if he hated and had hated Blaise as much as his mother told him.
He headed back to Lucky Day Motors to see if he couldn't make a few more sales.
The Present: From Jude's Journal
Blaise has let me read his rewrite of Rosalind’s rewrite of his journal. I want to interject something here that bears repeating: Blaise was often hidden from his own motives and the consequences of his deeds by an Agent of Unknowing. He waded in and out of misadventures and circumstances the way other people try on clothes at a thrift store. I think in many ways he was a blind agent of forces because he was often unknown to himself.