All the Little Live Things (26 page)

“Oh, I’m just sick about this weather!” she cried. “I wanted to have a really
nice
show, and now nobody can stand out in the sun long enough to look at things.”

I began badly. Turning to the cement mixer, fuming from its maw of ice, I said, “Ah, but this is one I’ve been admiring. No—don’t tell me what it means. Or isn’t it intended to mean anything? Do I have to think in the medium?”

“You come here with me, you scoundrel,” Fran said, and hooked her arm in mine. “There’s one over here I
do
want your opinion of.”

“I ought to get these ladies into the shade.”

“Just on your way past, it won’t take a minute. I want them to see it too.”

As we picked our way over rough concrete and across projecting headers, people in the shade cried Hi and
Welcome, and My God, did you walk? You poor souls. What’s all the cold-weather gear, Joe? Man, you out of your mind? Hello, Ruth. Hello, Marian. Where’s your handsome husband? Still off with those lady seals?

We stopped before the figure in the skirt of tubular iron and I looked her in the teeth. I looked her through the navel. I inspected her rusted viscera. I observed the little flames of the nipples. Though we were under the red umbrella, it was almost as hot as in the open sun. I could see Marian wilting, I myself was oozing sweat, and it made me impatient to be trapped into a lot of dishonest art criticism the minute we arrived. I wanted my hand around a sweating glass, what is more. But with my forked tongue I said, “This is a real departure. This is something
new.”

“What do you think?” Fran said, her braid in her hand. “Tell me honestly, now.”

“It’s different from anything of yours I’ve seen.”

“Yes, I think I ...”

“You didn’t just throw it together, either,” I said. “This was
created.
It will stand a lot of looking.”

“You just look all you want to!”

“It’s ominous, though,” I said. “Is it meant to be a little frightening? Because that’s the way it strikes me.”

“Well, yes, I guess it
is
meant to be a little frightening. It sort of took hold of me as I worked on it....”

I saw Lucio coming, his dark face shining with heat, his shirt mooned. Fran was saying happily, “And if you don’t think that was a perfect
stinker
to weld, with that old torch! I ought to get a new one, Lou keeps telling me. But I sort of like doing it the hard way.”

“Every woman I know is a masochist, apparently,” I said. “But I know a couple who have suffered all they should, for now. Excuse me, Fran, will you? Marian ought to sit down. I’ll study this some more and talk to you later. You should feel very good about it, I think.”

I escaped, carrying with me her soft, radiant smile and her expression—arch would be the name for it—that said
Don’t you forget, now! We’ve got a date, remember!
.

“I damn near called you this morning to come over and earn your supper by helping me dig the hole to roast the beef in,” Lucio said, “but then I remembered you’re an old retired bird and probably couldn’t take it. What were you doing about nine or ten? Lying in the shade?”

“Digging,” I said, remembering the king snake.

“Brother, I wish I’d known that.”

“So do I,” I said.

I got the ladies gin and tonic, I poured a good one for myself, and I led them into the shaded angle looking for chairs. The dictator did credit to his upbringing by rising promptly for Marian, and a man I did not know got up rather less willingly for Ruth. Sue Casement came over just as I was tucking the sweater and stoles under a chair and telling Marian, “Now that the pain is over, try cultivating comfort for contrast.”

“Pain?” Sue said, with concern in her rosy face. “Is something ... ?”

“Joe is being a mother hen,” Marian said.

“Run along and play,” Ruth said. “Sue and I will look after her.” So I talked with Sue a minute and then wandered off, dangerously unattended, into the party.

It was quite a party. In the heat everybody gulped and everybody got quickly tight, and not the least swift of foot among those who ran with the god was Joseph Allston, who had started the day crooked and had been itching to set it straight. The old Dutchman was right, we get too soon oldt and too late schmardt.

I talked with acquaintances, I heard a few stories. Then I discovered that the two dark suits were Russian “students,” men of forty or so, with hard Party faces, whom Fran had met on some committee and captured for the day. She wanted them to see an American neighborhood gathering, and what better time than Independence Day?

I am as willing to wag my tail at foreigners as any other old dog, but these people were hard to wag at. Mostly our talk was about vodka. It turned out that American vodka was less potent than Russian vodka. But also we spoke of languages. I discovered that all Russians spoke English, German, and French at least, but that few Americans knew anything but English and none knew Russian. After a few minutes of this I excused myself and drifted back to the bar for a second inferior American gin and tonic. Looking toward Ruth and Marian, I saw them in a conversational ring with several other women. Marian’s brown legs were stretched out, her head back. She listened peacefully, as if half-asleep.

Four two,
said the police car in right field.
Four two. Accident at Squawk and Squawk-Squawk.
The city manager, who had suspended his conversation to listen, once again turned his ironical attention to the Russians. The developer, leaning his weight on two women who screamed with laughter, was demonstrating how he could drink from the glass held between his teeth.

Hilarity recollected in tranquillity can be depressing. With respect to this particular hilarity I am like Don Marquis’s party guest recalling his last-evening’s conviction that Mrs. Simpkins’s face was a slot machine, and that the macaroons were pennies. It seems to me that on the Fourth I took several Mrs. Simpkinses by the ears and tried to shake chewing gum or stamps out of their double chins. Get old Joe Allston high and he kills you. What a comical old rooster. A prince—and spell it the way we used to spell it in my youth when we applied the term to someone we especially admired. P-r-i-c-k, prince.

Let me get it over. Father, I have sinned. I have put an enemy in my mouth to steal away my brains. I have shamed my gray hairs. I have mocked a friend in such a way that she will never like or trust me again. I have waggled my ass’s ears among the foolish and the drunken.

For instance. The developer, who for quite a while had been feeling no pain, had been feeling other things, including several bottoms. The city manager and I, squatting to examine Fran’s old relic of a blowtorch, observed his wandering hand. The manager looked at me and pulled his deadpan joker’s face down. I was equal to the occasion. Showing him how the torch worked, I dropped some carbide into the tank and added the ice cubes from my glass. When I closed the tank and opened the valve and struck a match, I just happened to be holding the thing close to the developer’s rear end, and the pop of blue flame from the nozzle set his shirttails afire. His friend the manager put him out with a flat-handed slap that moved him six feet.

Later, Lucio and I made an acetylene cannon out of a length of soil pipe, and shortly Lucio, the city manager, the Nobel Prize winner, the All-American, Bill Casement, and a half dozen more of us were happily blowing tin cans and plugs of wood fifty feet down into the gully. I heard Fran explaining to the two Russians that fireworks were traditional on Independence Day, though for safety reasons—and Americans were
much
more careful in that way than world opinion credited them with being, look at the comparative statistics on traffic accidents in Europe and America—they could be fired off only under permit, The city manager’s presence made us sort of legal, though he wasn’t
our
manager.

I didn’t hear the Russians’ reply, but I thought I could paraphrase their response:
Warlike, barbarous, technically advanced, the Americans demonstrate even in their toys and playthings a martial and destructive spirit, though their improvised ordnance seems definitely inferior to the Russian....

Coming up past them after we had exhausted Fran’s supply of carbide, I gave them a cheery greeting in Italian, but they only stared.

The intolerable day was cooling toward evening; the daylight-saving sunshine lay like custard on the oaks and mistletoe, the patio was three-quarters in shade. Carrying my empty glass, or somebody’s empty glass, I made my way back to my women, to whom I had paid no attention for an hour. But someone had kept their glasses full, or else they had nursed their first ones, and their circle was still deep in the sort of talk that women get into-about clothes, children, P.T.A., local politics, conservation, world affairs, art, music, books, that sort of thing—and they looked at me with some amusement and waved me away. So I refilled my glass and turned to see what further entertainment the party offered.

The first thing I saw was Annie Williamson burrowing into the cement mixer, evidently in search of a beer. Even on tiptoe, with her arm in to the shoulder, she could not reach the bottom, and in exasperation she hopped up and put head and shoulders inside. Right then, behind her, I became aware of the city manager with the mixer’s power cord in his hand. Following his wildly pointing finger, I saw an outlet in the wall. He flung me the cord across twenty feet of patio and I plugged it promptly in.

The mixer grated and started to turn, Annie’s tiptoeing feet left the ground, her rump reared up. There were muffled sounds of bears attacking bulls and dinosaurs being gelded, and then Annie’s feet found pavement and her head popped out, red, wet, and roaring.

The city manager liked the deadpan pose, but he was definitely breaking up.

“Laugh!” Annie roared at him. “Honest to John!”

I handed Annie my handkerchief, saying, “That was a kid trick if I ever saw one. It’s a pity people drink when they don’t know how to hold it. Public officials at that. What will our Russian friends think?”

They were standing together with their impassive lumpy faces and their stony Party eyes, and I read their minds.
Among the overprivileged Americans drunkenness may be called the standard. Weak as their liquor is, they do not carry it well. Far from creating the happiness that they say they are in pursuit of, their capitalist system encourages self-indulgence and alcoholic deviation....

The police car squawked. Wet-eyed, shaken with seismic rumblings and convulsions, the city manager lifted his head to listen. He hopped across the headers and leaned in and took a microphone from the dash and talked into it. The squawk box replied unintelligibly. The manager slid inside and slammed the door. The motor caught, the turret light began to revolve. He shouted something, still laughing; gave us a sassy twirl of the siren, skidded his wheels on the slippery oak leaves, and bolted out the drive between the parked cars. There he went, a boy on a man’s errand, accident or fire or gang fight or something. Shoulder to shoulder the Russians watched. Pravda
reports law in America enforced by alcoholics.

Several times during that sweaty afternoon I had caught Fran’s eyes on me, or caught her working in my direction. Evidently the shell game I had played on her hadn’t satisfied. She had peeked under my remarks and found no pea, and she was going to make the old thimblerigger go through his act again. No, that was unfair. She didn’t suspect me of rigging anything, she only felt she had missed the full discussion. Pontifex Maximus, that was who I was, and she hadn’t been able to read my bull.

But I didn’t feel like Pontifex Maximus. I felt like Josephus Arbiter, the Master of the Revels, and so I slipped Fran’s unaggressive but persistent pursuit. I kept clots of people between us, I failed to catch glances, I made strategic retreats to the toilet.

When I finally did find myself confronting the statue, I could feel the alcohol in my balance and my tongue, and I was again in the company of Annie Williamson. The patio had half cleared to watch Lucio and others dig out the pit where a hundred pounds of beef had been roasting in foil packages since noon. Some of the ladies, Ruth and Marian among them, were clearing the bar table and setting out plates and silver. I registered Marian’s activity long enough to be exasperated: Sit down and be
enceinte,
let somebody else do that. But my eye was promptly recaptured by the shadow that the statue’s coy leer threw on the east wall, a thing to scare you to death, and my ear was tuned to Annie’s confidential whisper, which would have rustled palm fronds at forty rods.

“Now you tell me,” she said. “You
tell
me. What is it?”

“Annie, you’ve been a judge in too many dog shows to be baffled by art. Look her over. Check out her points.”

Annie’s face was as brown and shiny as a buckeye, her arms were brown, her legs were brown, her badger-brush of hair bristled, her eyes were beginning to frost over. She gave me a look through blue cataracts, put her can of beer behind her and balanced it on her tailbone, and began to rotate around the figure. She examined its rear end for a good while, hands behind her, head sunk, lower lip jutting. If she had had a cigar she would have looked like a transvestite Winston Churchill in a fright wig. She bent, and her bifocally magnified eye glared at me through the navel. She straightened, shaking her head.

“It beats me. It’s got points, like you say. It’s got class. It could be Best of Show. But what the hell’s the
breed?”

“I thig it’s a gollie,” I said.

Annie opened her eyes wide in contempt. Her bristly scalp snapped down and snapped back. Circling, she peered up under the hammer claws. “Good bite,” she said, and then, excitedly, “Say, the roof of her mouth is purple. That means chow blood.”

“But if she’s chow shouldn’t she have red hair?” I said. “You notice she hasn’t got
any
hair. And look at that brisket. Could she be a Mexican Topless?”