Tough Guys Don't Dance (8 page)

I went by the marijuana field and its stubble had been beaten to the ground by rain. Some shame at the haste with which I had cut the stems this September left me now as uneasy as one feels on encountering an ill-used friend, and so I came to a stop as if to pay my respects, and indeed my little plot had the air of a cemetery ground. Yet I could hardly pause, a panic was too much on me, and therefore I hurried farther down the trail
past the clearing and in and out of thicket and stunted pine, and there, another few steps along, was the most curious tree of all. A dwarf pine poked up from the crest of a small sandy ridge that had pushed through the loam of these woods, a fearfully twisted little force of a tree, its roots clinging to the uncertain rise, its limbs all contorted together on one side and trammeled down before the wind like a man kneeling, only, at the last, to thrust up his arms to the sky in prayer. That was my tree, and at the foot of it, under the roots, was a small cave not large enough to hold a bear cub, and my door to this burrow was a rock with its moss many times raised and patted back into place. Now I saw it was much disturbed, the edges as raw as a dirty bandage pushed up on end by the swelling of the wound. I removed the stone and felt into the hole in front of the footlocker, my fingers scraping and searching into this soft loam like field mice at the edge of food, and I felt something—it could be flesh or hair or some moist sponge—I didn't know what, but my hands, fiercer than myself, cleared the debris to pull forward a plastic garbage bag through which I poked and saw enough at once to give one frightful moan, pure as the vertigo of a long fall itself. I was looking at the back of a head. The color of its hair, despite all the stains of earth, was blonde. Then I tried to see the face, but when to my horror the head rolled in the bag without resistance—severed!—I knew I could not go on to search the features, no, I pushed back the bag
and then the rock with hardly an attempt to replace the moss, and flew from those woods to my car, driving down the humpbacked road with speed to compensate for the caution with which I came in. And it was only after I was back in my house and deep in a chair trying to calm my shivering with bourbon neat that the realization came over me in all the burning woe of one wall of flame falling upon another that I did not even know whether it was the head of Patty Lareine or Jessica Pond lying in that grave. Of course, I also did not know whether I should be afraid of myself, or of another, and that, so soon as night was on me and I tried to sleep, became a terror to pass beyond all notions of measure.

T
he voices came to me at dawn. I listened to Hell-Town in the hour between waking and sleep.

“Oh, Tim,” the voices said, “you've burned your candle by both ends: the balls and the brain, prick and tongue, your bunghole and your mouth. Is any tallow left in your wick? As if the wicked could tell.”

They said, “Oh, Tim, don't lick the thighs of whores. You come too fast tasting the old sperm whale. Give to us the dying salts. Give us back the scum of all who lost. Goodbye, sweet friend, I curse your house. I curse your house.”

Let me speak of the little I could comprehend. Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. Waking from nightmares and sleeping in terror, I climbed at
last onto one conclusion. Assuming I was no part of this deed—and how could I be certain of that?—I still had to ask: Who was? It must be someone who knew my marijuana patch. That spoke directly of my wife—unless it was her hair I touched in the burrow. So I had my conclusion: I must go back to the woods and look again. As fixed in my memory, however, as the flash of light that is followed by the thunder of pain when your shoulder is pulled out of its socket, was the remembered glimpse of that dirtied blonde hair. I knew I could not go back. I was a jelly. I preferred to molder in the last suppurations of cowardice.

Is it evident why I do not care to describe my night? Nor why each logical step cost so much? Now I understood how the laboratory rat develops psychosis in a maze. There are shocks at too many of the turnings. What if Jessica was there? Would I know then that I had done it?

On the other hand—and I could have driven a hundred miles in the time it took me to go back to this alternative—if Pond and Pangborn had returned to Boston, or were by now even back in Santa Barbara, or back wherever their fling would chuck them—then it had to be Patty's head. That brought on a wholly unmanageable sorrow. Sorrow, and a surge of nasty vindication—which was only choked off by the onset of a new fear. Who could have killed Patty but Mr. Black? If that was true, how safe was I?

Do you feel a hint uncool around strange black dudes? Try such a thought in the night when you have come to the conclusion that the dude may be looking for you. Every wave that slapped on the shore, every gull that stirred, was an invader: I could hear windows raised and doors forced.

It was degrading. I had never seen myself as a hero. My father—with the best will in the world—had taken care of that. But I had usually been able to picture myself as not wholly unmacho. I could stand up for my friends; I could close a wound and keep the festering to myself. I tried to hold my own. Yet now, each time my mind was clear enough to bring forth a new thought, panic soiled me. I was like a puppy in a strange house. I began to fear my friends.

It had to be someone who knew where I kept my marijuana. That much was demanded by logic. In the false dawn, therefore, I realized that as I met my friends on the street in the day or two to come, I would distrust the look in every eye. I was like a man plummeting down a slippery slope who finds a little horn of ice to grasp, but so soon as he embraces it, the projection breaks loose. I saw that if I could not decide the first question, which was: Put it!—Was I the killer?—then I could not stop the slide, and madness would wait at the rim.

As dawn came up, however, and I had to listen to the solicitations of Hell-Town—why did these voices always call most loudly between waking
and sleep, as if waking and sleep were a century apart?—I became aware at last of the chirks and cronks of the gulls, their gabble loud enough to chase the larvae of the night. But saying “larvae” now offered the minuscule pleasure that one word from Latin had come back in the midst of all this. You
larvae
, you ghosts! They taught Latin well at Exeter.

I clung to this thought. In prison, when one was at odds with another convict, and fear became as heavy as the leaden breath of eternity itself, then the smallest pleasure to reach your heart in such a state was, I learned, as valuable as a rope cast down into the abyss. Concentrate on the pleasure, whatever it was, and you could lash yourself to the edge. So, in this hour, I tried to embrace matters that were far away, and thought of Exeter and Latin, and by such means proceeded—not so much to calm myself as—to insulate the dread, and thereby manage to keep thinking about the little furnished room in a boardinghouse west of Tenth Avenue on Forty-fifth Street where my father now lived at the age of seventy. By the aid of such concentration I could see again the piece of paper he had tacked above his mirror and read again the words he had printed carefully on the paper. They said
INTER FAECES ET URINAM NASCIMUR
and beneath this, my father, with a flourish, had inscribed the name of the author:
St. Odon of Cluny
. My father's nickname (which I like to present in this context) still
remained Big Mac in defiance of all McDonald hamburgers.

“Well, what do you want with that?” I said to Big Mac the first time I saw the note on the mirror.

“It's a reminder,” my father replied.

“You never told me you knew Latin.”

“Parochial school,” he said. “They tried to teach us. Some of the droppings stuck.”

“And how did you get this?”

“From a priest I know. Father Steve. He's usually in trouble with the Cardinal,” remarked Big Mac in an agreeable tone, as if that were the first virtue to ask of a priest.

Well, I knew enough Latin to translate. “
Inter faeces et urinam nascimur
”—“Between shit and piss are we born.” Even culture came to Big Mac at the edge of a longshoreman's hook.

But now the phone was ringing on the table by my bed, and I was ready to expect that it was my father. We had not called each other in a good while, yet I was sure it would be his voice. I had the faculty to be thinking of a friend even as he or she was picking up the phone to give me a call; this happened often enough not to surprise me any longer. On this morning, however, I took it as a sign.

“Hello, Tim?”

“Well, Dougy,” I said. “Let us speak of the devil.”

“Yeah,” he said. That told me how hung-over he was. His “yeah” could offer you the devastated
landscapes of the brain after sixty years of drinking. (This is, of course, on the assumption he did a little boozing when he was ten.)

“Tim,” he said, “I'm in Hyannis.”

“What are you doing on the Cape? I thought you hate to travel.”

“I been here three days. Frankie Freeload retired up here. Did I tell you?”

“No,” I said. “How is he?”

“He passed away. I been at his wake.”

For my father, the death of an old friend would prove as awesome as a cliff by the side of your house crumbling into the sea.

“Well,” I said, “why don't you come over to Provincetown?”

“I've been thinking of that.”

“Do you have a car?”

“I can rent one,” he said.

“No, I'll drive down and pick you up.”

There was a long pause, but I could not tell if he were thinking of himself or of me. Then he said, “Let's wait a day or so. There's some loose ends here with the widow.”

“All right,” I said, “you come when you're ready.” I thought I had offered no sign of my miserable condition, but Big Mac asked, “Are you all right?”

“My wife isn't here. She took off. That's okay.”

There was a long pause. He said, “Yeah. I'll see you.” And he hung up.

He had, however, given me some of the means to rise from my bed and go about the day.

Speak of hangovers, I was like a man on the edge of an epileptic attack. If I watched each move and never stubbed my toe or took a misstep, if I did not turn my head too suddenly, nor make any motion not prepared in advance, then I might be able to carry myself through the hours without a seizure. Here, it was not the convulsions of my body but the caterwaulings of the witches that I kept away by the singularity of my thoughts, which is to say I only allowed myself to think of particular matters and no others.

Since my immediate problems were as untouchable as a raw wound—even my tattoo began to throb if my mind cast a glance in its direction—so in compensation I discovered that to reminisce about my father was, on this morning, a palliative. I did not have to think pleasant thoughts, I could even dwell on old pains, but they were virtually agreeable to contemplate so long as they adhered to the past, old regrets serving as counterbalance to keep me from slipping back to where I was now.

For instance, I thought again of Meeks Wardley Hilby III. There had been a month in my life down in Tampa when I literally awakened each morning with the problem set before me: How were Patty and I to murder him successfully? Still that recollection caused no pain now. Indeed, it aided my concentration for two good reasons which served me like panniers carried on either side for balance. One was that I most certainly did not kill Wardley, even came to
discover that there was no very determined assassin in me—not the worst thought to have on this morning! The other was that I was not thinking at this point of Mr. Hilby as I knew him in Tampa with Patty, but on the contrary, was remembering our curious bond at Exeter, and that had much to do with my father, indeed it brought back the best day I suppose I ever spent with Big Mac.

Meeks Wardley Hilby III, it may as well be repeated, was the only inmate I knew in prison who had also been in my class at Exeter. What always impressed me most about such a connection was the fact that we were also both kicked out of school on the same morning a month before graduation. Prior to that, I hardly knew him. Hilby had been a wimp and I had been a fair jock. He had gone to Exeter for four years like his father Meeks before him, and I put in one fall and spring as a Post Graduate on athletic scholarship after senior year at high school in Long Island. (My mother wanted me to go on to Harvard.) I had been trying to bring my promise as a Wide Receiver to an Exeter team that could not pass. (Have you ever seen Eastern prep schools play football?) We walked together out of the Headmaster's Office the day we got the boot, and Meeks Wardley Hilby III was crying. The scuffed satin on the lapels of his dinner jacket and the heliotrope bow tie were like a costume to wear to one's execution. I was sad. Even now, recalling the moment, I can feel the sadness in my limbs.
I had been caught smoking marijuana (which was no small matter twenty years ago). The Headmaster was truly shocked—and Hilby's case was worse. It was hard to believe, considering how slack he looked, but he had attempted to rape a town girl he took out on a petting date. I didn't hear about it then. Nobody concerned wished to speak (and the girl's parents were soon bought off) but Hilby gave me the story eleven years later. In prison, there was all the time to tell one's tale.

So, on this morning in Provincetown, when I wished to keep myself apart from all that was on me, it was, as I say, almost agreeable to return to the dolorous day I left Exeter. I remember it was a beautiful afternoon in May twenty years ago when I said goodbye to the school forever. I packed my gear into two duffel bags, dumped them and myself on a bus, and my father (whom I had already phoned—I could not bear to call my mother) took the shuttle to meet me in Boston. We got drunk. I would love him for that night alone. My father (as you may have gathered from our conversation on the phone) was not often a man to do any more talking than the exigencies of communication would require, but he could soothe you by his silence. He was six-foot-three and at that time, in his fiftieth year, he weighed two-eighty. Forty of it he could have done without. It stood in front of him like the round rubber fender on an amusement-park car that bumps other cars,
and he breathed heavily. With his prematurely white hair, boiled red face and blue eyes, he looked like the biggest, shrewdest and most corrupt old detective in town, but in fact he hated cops. His older brother, whom he never liked, lived and died on the police force.