Americana (42 page)

“Sully, I don’t like this story.”

“And the first angel sounded the trumpet. And the winds blew and the third part of those creatures died which had life in the sea, and the third part of the ships was destroyed. And through the silver and gray smoke there appeared a light on the shore at the last limits of the sound. And a figure held the light. And it was a stranger. And Uncle saw him and spoke. Jesus needs me.
Jesus needs me
, he said. And the light was a lantern and the face was like unto light itself. And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it; and they shall desire to die, and death shall fly from them. And Uncle had come to the end of the mystery, which is: that man receives his being as did Christ, in a gentle woman’s womb, beyond the massed and silent armies, beyond eroded stone arranged across the lampless past; which is: that all energy runs down, all life expires, all except the force of all in all, or light lighting light; which is: the figure holding the lantern was a child. And from this knowledge he did turn and scorn and rant against his ship. For where was Christ the tiger in that pentecostal light? And then all mysteries were to find their unendingness, and all echoes to be answered only by their own voices. We were still in the violence of the winds and I begged him to lower sail and he looked at me and bellowed.
Damn your eyes, daughter.
And that was the answer to the final question. Radiant mother giving herself to that blackest of Orangemen. ‘So I lay with my man from the North Country.’ Eugene bloody O’Neill. And that in me then as well. Drums of Ulster. And he cried again.
Damn your eyes, daughter.
A few twigs snapped in my mind, I think. And then the winds stopped blowing and we came about pretty as a picture and began the voyage home. I turned around once but could see no lantern,
nor child, nor bird of the forest. And I knew then that the war is not between North and South, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, crusader and heathen, warhawk and pacifist, God and the devil. The war is between Uncle Malcolm and Uncle Malcolm.”

I woke in the middle of the night. Sullivan was gone. The wind blew a piece of paper across the bed and I got up and lowered the window. Then I smelled cookies baking.

Men like to be told of another man’s defeat, failure, collapse, perdition; it makes them stronger. Women need such news of vanquished souls because it gives them hope of someone large and woeful wanting to be mothered. Sympathy resides in the glands; the breast is magic. Of course this doesn’t even begin to explain what happened after Sullivan finished the bedtime story.

I turned on the light and slowly removed the sheet from her body. Once again I stood above her for a moment and she watched me. I kneeled on the bed and looked down at her. I took her hand and put it to my face and I bit and licked her fingers, which tasted of flavorless soap. I put both our right hands to her right breast. My hand guided hers to her own lips and down along her body and to the inside of my thigh and up to my chest and mouth. She was an artist and I wondered if she thought my body, which she had never truly seen until this night, to be beautiful. I placed her hand between her legs, which were together like lewd art. I lay prone across the bed and bit and licked her fingers, which tasted now of bath and light sweat. I looked into the opening.

I played with the soft flesh and spinning hair. I kissed her fingers, index and middle now bent around the tall hole, and then her middle finger was in my mouth and I sucked at the knuckle and swung my left arm near to her face and found her lips with my index finger and she sucked and licked at it. With my head, my ears, I forced her thighs apart and they gave slowly, grudgingly, with great art and lewdness, and then tongue to root I swam in my being toward defeat so satisying that no pleasure of mere sense could be noted or filed. I was on my knees again, high above her, and I dipped to her breasts and licked and smelled, playing with them, batting the nipples lightly with my finger. I asked her to stand against the wall facing the foot of the bed. She did this. I lay in the middle of the bed, my arms and legs spread wide. She looked at me. All I had to do was raise my head slightly and glance toward my middle. She advanced slowly, as all lewd advances must be made, and kneeled at the end of the bed and took my ankles in her hands and as her hands moved up my legs began to descend, with manifest deliberation, a mime of some creature that has been burrowing for centuries. Her hands were there now and they assembled a brief little pageant of phallus worship and then it was in her mouth and I began to twist and arch. Before very long I made myself ask her to stop and then I was on my knees again and she was on her back and looking up at me. Her head this time was at the foot of the bed and the simple fact of this opposition, this turning on an axis, seemed enormously lewd. I played some more with her breasts. I kissed her on the lips. Abomination. I curled my tongue between her legs again and kissed her once more on the lips in a dream of wheels in white rooms and into her then I went, evolving the basic topography, and entering her I was occupied by her, another turning on an axis, wrong way on the bed, the army occupied by the city. Abomination. I began to think her thoughts or what I imagined to be her thoughts. I became third person in my own mind. (Or her mind.) And in her as deep as I could go, hard and wild as I
could strive, I listened to what she was thinking. Little mothers’ sons. He wants to wake up alone. Michelangelo’s David. Wasp of the Wild West. He is home at last.

I smelled the cookies baking. It lasted only seconds. Then I sank into the bed again and it was like a field on which a certain number of troops have pretended to be dead, trading their odors with the smell of the earth and feeling a deliciousness not known since the games of childhood. I went back to sleep then. When I came out of it, I was not even amazed at the ease with which I could put aside the previous night. It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. I showered and shaved. With my curved scissor I clipped some hair from my nostrils. I looked not bad, things considered, the film-segment done and torn out of me (all blood and eyes), the black wish fulfilled (with all the accompanying panics of such a moment), very little money in my pocket and nowhere in particular to go.

1) New York was not waiting for me with microphones and fleets of ribboned limousines, sweet old Babylonian movie-whore of a city yawning like Mae West.

2) The network had by this time disposed of my corporate remains in some file cabinet marked
pending return of soul from limbo.

3) To stay in Fort Curtis was out of the question; the town was now simply the sum of its unfilmed monotonies.

4) The camper itself seemed off-limits. What could Sullivan and I say to each other? (What had we ever said?)

But in the mirror, these things considered, I looked not bad. Indeed I remained David Bell. I brushed my teeth, dressed, and went to the armchair to pare my fingernails. Perhaps I could go to Montana and fall in love with a waitress in a white diner. Canada might be nice, the western part, for it was one of the very last of the non-guilty regions in the world. I could smoke hashish for a year squatting outside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. A woman came in then, wearing an open robe over a pair of dungarees and a sweater. I had
never seen her before. She changed the sheets, punching the bed repeatedly and then striking the pillow with the edge of her hand in karate fashion. She looked at me briefly in that analytical manner by which all hotel employees compute the biographies of lodgers. I continued to clip my nails, watching silver divots jump through the air. She finished with the bed and threw the used sheets into the hall. Then she reached past the door frame and dragged in a vacuum cleaner. Immediately I pulled in my legs. She activated the machine and began to vacuum, guiding it with one hand while with the other she tried to brush her hair out of her eyes. On her feet she wore heavy white socks and loafers. The robe was beltless and huge, possibly her husband’s. The machine crawled past me, eating my fingernails, and I lifted my feet up onto the chair. She got on her knees and was about to clean under the bed when she turned and looked at me. I could go to Texas.

“There’s some cigarettes under here and a book of matches. You want them or not?”

“No,” I said.

She sucked them in. I had no idea what time it was. My fingernails in the machine. The hair of my belly and balls curled in the sheets in the hallway. She attached a small brush to the pipe and cleaned the blinds.

“That’s a Vaculux, isn’t it? My father used to handle that account. That was years ago. He’s growing a beard now. Just the thought of it makes me uncomfortable.”

“I just do my job,” she said.

She left quietly then, one more irrelevant thing that would not go unremembered. My feet were still up on the chair. Inaction is the beginning of that kind of knowledge which has as its final end the realization that no action is necessary. It works forward to itself and then back again and there is nothing more relaxing and sweet. The chambermaid had left the door open and Sullivan was standing there in her gypsy trenchcoat. We smiled at each other. If I stayed in that chair long enough they would all come to me, chancellors, prefects, commissioners,
dignitaries, wanting to know what I knew that could be of use.

“Come to view the body?” I said.

“May I sit down?”

“Please.”

She sat at the head of the bed, on the pillow, imitating the characteristics of my own posture, knees high and tight, hands folded over them. Above her on the wall—a gap between the printed words—was a lithograph of an Indian paddling a canoe on a mountain lake. I have said much earlier that in describing Sullivan I would try to avoid analogy but at that moment she seemed herself an Indian, an avenging squaw who would descend the hill after battle to tear out the tongues of dead troopers so they would not be able to enjoy the buffalo meat of the spirit world. Daughter of Black Knife she seemed, a workmanlike piece of murder.

“I hope you didn’t miss me this morning, David. I couldn’t sleep so I walked back out to the camper. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“What took place? What occurred or happened? It seems to have slipped my mind.”

“It stopped raining and the fantasies came out to play. Your home movie had put you in a state of anguish. I tried to console you. You wanted to be drenched in sin and so I made it my business to help you along. Old friends have obligations to each other. David, I truly love you and hate you. I love you because you’re a beautiful thing and a good boy. You’re more innocent than a field mouse and I don’t believe you have any evil in you, if that’s possible. And I hate you because you’re sick. Illness to a certain point inspires pity. Beyond that point it becomes hateful. It becomes very much like a personal insult. One wishes to destroy the sickness by destroying the patient. You’re such a lovable cliché, my love, and I do hope you’ve found the center of your sin, although I must say that nothing we did last night struck me as being so terribly odd.”

“Kiss my ass,” I said.

“Do you need any money?”

“Brand tell you to ask me that?”

“He said you were running low. I have some. We’re bound to bump into each other again. You can pay me back then.”

“I can manage, Sully.”

“Where are you going?”

“West, I guess.”

“I hate to think of you all alone out there, David. Honest, I really do love you in my own spidery way. You’ll have no one to talk to. And no one to play games with. And the distances are vast. We’re parked right across the street. Come with us.”

“Where?”

“Back to Maine. Then home.”

“What about Brand? Will he stay in Maine?”

“He hasn’t decided,” she said. “It all depends on his auntie Mildred. If she comes across with some money he may try Mexico. Otherwise he goes back to the garage. His only real hope is to return to combat. I’ve suggested he re-enlist. I’m convinced it’s the only way he’ll survive. You’ve got to confront the demons here and now. Right, leftenant?”

“There aren’t any demons bothering me,” I said. “My problem is immense, as we both know, but it’s strictly an ethnic one. I don’t have any Jewish friends. How do you know so much about Brand?”

“He tells me things.”

“Has he told you about his novel? The Great American Sheaf of Blank Paper.”

“He whispered the sad details.”

“When was this?” I said.

“That very first night in Maine.”

“I don’t seem to remember you two being alone at any point in the evening.”

“He came into the room.”

“The one you and I were sleeping in?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“And he knelt by my bed and whispered things to me. Sad little things. He wanted me to know the truth. I guess he thought it would make for a happier trip. I gave him absolution of course.”

“And then you moved over and let him get into bed with you.”

“That’s correct,” she said.

“And I was right across the room. A deep sleep it was indeed. And you two have been swinging ever since?”

“Here and there.”

“I see.”

“Yes,” she said.

“What I don’t understand are the logistics of the thing. How did you manage it?”

“We grasped at every fleeting opportunity. It was like the springtime of urgent love. While we were on the road it wasn’t at all easy. Things picked up when we got here.”

“What about Pike?”

“Guard duty,” she said.

“And the first time was that night in Maine and I was right across the room.”

“It was really quite funny, David. You were snoring like Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

“I don’t snore. I do not fucking snore.”

What followed had its aspects of burlesque humor, a touch of stylized sadism, bits of old tent shows and the pie in the face. I swung my legs over the arm of the chair and pushed myself up over it and onto the floor. Sullivan got off the bed and we were both standing now. In her soiled torn trenchcoat she seemed to belong in a demonstration thirty years overdue.

“Wait here,” I said. “I want to take leave of the others. Handclasp of manly comrades. We’ll drink to destiny.”