All of Us (10 page)

That first week in Santa Barbara wasn’t the worst thing

to happen. The second week he fell on his head

while drinking, just before he had to lecture.

In the lounge, that second week, she took the microphone

from the singer’s hands and crooned her own

torch song. Then danced. And then passed out

on the table. That’s not the worst, either. They

went to jail that second week. He wasn’t driving

so they booked him, dressed him in pajamas

and stuck him in Detox. Told him to get some sleep.

Told him he could see about his wife in the morning.

But how could he sleep when they wouldn’t let him

close the door to his room?

The corridor’s green light entered,

and the sound of a man weeping.

His wife had been called upon to give the alphabet

beside the road, in the middle of the night.

This is strange enough. But the cops had her

stand on one leg, close her eyes,

and try to touch her nose with her index finger.

All of which she failed to do.

She went to jail for resisting arrest.

He bailed her out when he got out of Detox.

They drove home in ruins.

This is not the worst. Their daughter had picked that night

to run away from home. She left a note:

“You’re both crazy. Give me a break, PLEASE.

Don’t come after me.”

That’s still not the worst. They went on

thinking they were the people they said they were.

Answering to those names.

Making love to the people with those names.

Nights without beginning that had no end.

Talking about a past as if it’d really happened.

Telling themselves that this time next year,

this time next year

things were going to be different.

Everything I see will outlive me.

—
ANNA AKHMATOVA

It’s too late now to put a curse on you—wish you

plain, say, as Yeats did his daughter. And when

we met her in Sligo, selling her paintings, it’d worked —

she
was
the plainest, oldest woman in Ireland.

But she was safe.

For the longest time, his reasoning

escaped me. Anyway, it’s too late for you,

as I said. You’re grownup now, and lovely.

You’re a beautiful drunk, daughter.

But you’re a drunk. I can’t say you’re breaking

my heart. I don’t have a heart when it comes

to this booze thing. Sad, yes, Christ alone knows.

Your old man, the one they call Shiloh, is back

in town, and the drink has started to flow again.

You’ve been drunk for three days, you tell me,

when you know goddamn well drinking is like poison

to our family. Didn’t your mother and I set you

example enough? Two people

who loved each other knocking each other around,

knocking back the love we felt, glass by empty glass,

curses and blows and betrayals?

You must be crazy! Wasn’t all that enough for you?

You want to die? Maybe that’s it. Maybe

I think I know you, and I don’t.

I’m not kidding, kiddo. Who are you kidding?

Daughter, you can’t drink.

The last few times I saw you, you were out of it.

A cast on your collarbone, or else

a splint on your finger, dark glasses to hide

your beautiful bruised eyes. A lip

that a man should kiss instead of split.

Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ!

You’ve got to take hold now.

Do you hear me? Wake up! You’ve got to knock it off

and get straight. Clean up your act. I’m asking you.

Okay, telling you. Sure, our family was made

to squander, not collect. But turn this around now.

You simply must—that’s all!

Daughter, you can’t drink.

It will kill you. Like it did your mother, and me.

Like it did.

The entire household suffered.

My wife, myself, the two children, and the dog

whose puppies were born dead.

Our affairs, such as they were, withered.

My wife was dropped by her lover,

the one-armed teacher of music who was

her only contact with the outside world

and the things of the mind.

My own girlfriend said she couldn’t stand it

anymore, and went back to her husband.

The water was shut off.

All that summer the house baked.

The peach trees were blasted.

Our little flower bed lay trampled.

The brakes went out on the car, and the battery

failed. The neighbors quit speaking

to us and closed their doors in our faces.

Checks flew back at us from merchants —

and then mail stopped being delivered

altogether. Only the sheriff got through

from time to time—with one or the other

of our children in the back seat,

pleading to be taken anywhere but here.

And then mice entered the house in droves.

Followed by a bull snake. My wife

found it sunning itself in the living room

next to the dead TV. How she dealt with it

is another matter. Chopped its head off

right there on the floor.

And then chopped it in two when it continued

to writhe. We saw we couldn’t hold out

any longer. We were beaten.

We wanted to get down on our knees

and say forgive us our sins, forgive us

our lives. But it was too late.

Too late. No one around would listen.

We had to watch as the house was pulled down,

the ground plowed up, and then

we were dispersed in four directions.

Last night at my daughter’s, near Blaine,

she did her best to tell me

what went wrong

between her mother and me.

“Energy. You two’s energy was all wrong.”

She looks like her mother

when her mother was young.

Laughs like her.

Moves the drift of hair

from her forehead, like her mother.

Can take a cigarette down

to the filter in three draws,

just like her mother. I thought

this visit would be easy. Wrong.

This is hard, brother. Those years

spilling over into my sleep when I try

to sleep. To wake to find a thousand

cigarettes in the ashtray and every

light in the house burning. I can’t

pretend to understand anything:

today I’ll be carried

three thousand miles away into

the loving arms of another woman, not

her mother. No. She’s caught

in the flywheel of a new love.

I turn off the last light

and close the door.

Moving toward whatever ancient thing

it is that works the chains

and pulls us so relentlessly on.

You simply go out and shut the door

without thinking. And when you look back

at what you’ve done

it’s too late. If this sounds

like the story of a life, okay.

It was raining. The neighbors who had

a key were away. I tried and tried

the lower windows. Stared

inside at the sofa, plants, the table

and chairs, the stereo set-up.

My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me

on the glass-topped table, and my heart

went out to them. I said,
Hello, friends
,

or something like that. After all,

this wasn’t so bad.

Worse things had happened. This

was even a little funny. I found the ladder.

Took that and leaned it against the house.

Then climbed in the rain to the deck,

swung myself over the railing

and tried the door. Which was locked,

of course. But I looked in just the same

at my desk, some papers, and my chair.

This was the window on the other side

of the desk where I’d raise my eyes

and stare out when I sat at that desk.

This is not like downstairs
, I thought.

This is something else.

And it was something to look in like that, unseen,

from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.

I don’t even think I can talk about it.

I brought my face close to the glass

and imagined myself inside,

sitting at the desk. Looking up

from my work now and again.

Thinking about some other place

and some other time.

The people I had loved then.

I stood there for a minute in the rain.

Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.

Even though a wave of grief passed through me.

Even though I felt violently ashamed

of the injury I’d done back then.

I bashed that beautiful window.

And stepped back in.

All I know about medicine I picked up

from my doctor friend in El Paso

who drank and took drugs. We were buddies

until I moved East. I’m saying

I was never sick a day in my life.

But something has appeared

on my shoulder and continues to grow.

A wen, I think, and love the word

but not the thing itself, whatever

it is. Late at night my teeth ache

and the phone rings. I’m ill,

unhappy and alone. Lord!

Give me your unsteady knife,

doc. Give me your hand, friend.

The seasons turning. Memory flaring.

Three of us that fall. Young hoodlums —

shoplifters, stealers of hubcaps.

Bozos. Dick Miller, dead now.

Lyle Rousseau, son of the Ford dealer.

And I, who’d just made a girl pregnant.

Hunting late into that golden afternoon

for grouse. Following deer paths,

pushing through undergrowth, stepping over

blow-downs. Reaching out for something to hold onto.

At the top of Wenas Ridge

we walked out of pine trees and could see

down deep ravines, where the wind roared, to the river.

More alive then, I thought, than I’d ever be.

But my whole life, in switchbacks, ahead of me.

Hawks, deer, coons we looked at and let go.

Killed six grouse and should have stopped.

Didn’t, though we had limits.

Lyle and I climbing fifty feet or so

above Dick Miller. Who screamed—“Yaaaah!”

Then swore and swore. Legs numbing as I saw what.

That fat, dark snake rising up. Beginning to sing.

And how it sang! A timber rattler thick as my wrist.

It’d struck at Miller, but missed. No other way

to say it—he was paralyzed. Could scream, and swear,

not shoot. Then the snake lowered itself from sight

and went in under rocks. We understood

we’d have to get down. In the same way we’d got up.

Blindly crawling through brush, stepping over blow-downs,

pushing into undergrowth. Shadows falling from trees now

onto flat rocks that held the day’s heat. And snakes.

My heart stopped, and then started again.

My hair stood on end. This was the moment

my life had prepared me for. And I wasn’t ready.

We started down anyway. Jesus, please help me

out of this, I prayed. I’ll believe in you again

and honor you always. But Jesus was crowded out

of my head by the vision of that rearing snake.

That singing. Keep believing in me, snake said,

for I will return. I made an obscure, criminal pact

that day. Praying to Jesus in one breath.

To snake in the other. Snake finally more real

to me. The memory of that day

like a blow to the calf now.

I got out, didn’t I? But something happened.

I married the girl I loved, yet poisoned her life.

Lies began to coil in my heart and call it home.

Got used to darkness and its crooked ways.

Since then I’ve always feared rattlesnakes.

Been ambivalent about Jesus.

But someone, something’s responsible for this.

Now, as then.

Every man’s life is a mystery, even as

yours is, and mine. Imagine

a château with a window opening

onto Lake Geneva. There in the window

on warm and sunny days is a man

so engrossed in reading he doesn’t look

up. Or if he does he marks his place

with a finger, raises his eyes, and peers

across the water to Mont Blanc,

and beyond, to Selah, Washington,

where he is with a girl

and getting drunk
for the first time.

The last thing he remembers, before

he passes out, is that she spit on him.

He keeps on drinking

and getting spit on for years.

But some people will tell you

that suffering is good for the character.

You’re free to believe anything.

In any case, he goes

back to reading and will not

feel guilty about his mother

drifting in her boat of sadness,

or consider his children

and their troubles that go on and on.

Nor does he intend to think about

the clear-eyed woman he once loved

and her defeat at the hands of eastern religion.

Her grief has no beginning, and no end.

Let anyone in the château, or Selah,

come forward who might claim kin with the man

who sits all day in the window reading,

like a picture of a man reading.

Let the sun come forward.

Let the man himself come forward.

What in Hell can he be reading?