Bullet Park (12 page)

“It was windy, as I say, and there was more thunder and it looked like rain and the light on the course was failing so you really couldn’t see the faces of the men who played through. They were high school kids, I guess, slum kids, hoods, whatever, wearing tight pants and trick shirts and hair grease. They had spooky voices, they seemed to pitch them in a way that made them sound spooky, and when one of them was addressing the ball another gave him a big goose and he backed right into it, making groaning noises. It isn’t that I dislike boys like that really, it’s just that they mystify me, they frighten me because I don’t know where they come from and I don’t know where they’re going and if you don’t know anything about people it’s like a terrible kind of
darkness. I’m not afraid of the dark but there are some kinds of human ignorance that frighten me. When I feel this I’ve noticed that if I can look into the face of the stranger and get some clue to the kind of person he is I feel better but, as I say, it was getting dark and you couldn’t see the faces of any of these strangers as they played through. So they played through and we went on talking about his diploma and the rules of the game. I said that whatever he wanted to do he had to train himself for it, he had to prepare himself. I said that even if he wanted to be a poet he had to prepare himself to be a poet. So then I said to him what I’ve never said before. I said: ‘I love you, Tony.’

“So then he said, ‘The only reason you love me, the only reason you think you love me is because you can give me things.’ Then I said this wasn’t true, that the only reason I was a generous father was because my own father hadn’t given me very much. I said that because my own father had been so tight was why I wanted to be generous. So then he said: ‘Generous, generous, generous, generous.’ He said he knew I was very generous. He said that he heard about how generous I was practically every day in the year. So then he said, ‘Maybe I don’t want to get married. I wouldn’t be the first man in the world who didn’t want to get married, would I? Maybe I’m queer. Maybe I want to live with some nice, clean faggot. Maybe I want to be promiscuous and screw hundreds and hundreds of women. There are other ways of doing it besides being joined in holy matrimony and filling
up the cradle. If having babies is so great why did you only have one? Why just one?’ I told him then that his mother had nearly died when he was born. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know that.’ So then he said that I had got to understand that he might not want to come home at dusk to a pretty woman and play softball with a bunch of straight-limbed sons. He said he might want to be a thief or a saint or a drunkard or a garbage man or a gas pumper or a traffic cop or a hermit. Then I lost my patience, my woolly blanket, and said that he had to get off his ass and do something useful and he said: ‘What? Like pushing mouthwash.’ Then I lifted up my putter and I would have split his skull in two but he ducked and threw down his club and ran off the links into the dark.

“So there I was on this ruined miniature golf course having practically murdered my son but what I wanted to do then was to chase after him and take another crack at him with the putter. I was very angry. I couldn’t understand how my only son, whom I love more than anything in the world, could make me want to kill him. So then I picked up his putter and walked back to the car. When I got home I told Nellie that I’d had a fight with Tony but she sympathized with him, of course, because I’d already had a fight with her. Then I had a drink and looked at television—there wasn’t anything else to do. I sat there in front of the set until about midnight when he came in. He didn’t speak to me and I didn’t speak to him. He went upstairs to bed and I went up a little later.

“He’s been in bed ever since.”

W
hen Tony had been in bed twenty-two days Nellie received a letter from a cleaning woman named Mary Ashton who had once worked for her. Mary had been intelligent and industrious but she had been a thief. She had first stolen two small diamond rings that had belonged to Nellie’s mother. Nellie never wore the rings and she did not accuse the maid of the theft. Good cleaning women were hard to find, Mary was poor and deserving, and Nellie thought of the diamonds as a bonus. A month or so later a pair of gold cufflinks vanished and Nellie fired the maid. She did not mention the cufflinks. The letter she received was neatly typed (had she stolen the typewriter?) on good stationery (stolen?). The letter read: “Dear Mrs. Nailles: I know that your son is sick and I am very sorry to hear this. He is one of the nicest boys I have ever known. In the village there is a guru or faith-healer who calls himself Swami Rutuola. He cured
my sister of arthritis last year. He works part time for Percham, the carpenter, but he’s usually at home in the afternoons. He doesn’t have any telephone but he lives upstairs over Peyton’s funeral parlor on Hill Street.”

This combination of theft and magic disturbed Nellie. She and Nailles gave a cocktail party that afternoon and she didn’t have a chance to show him the letter. The party was excellent. It is difficult to praise a cocktail party but as a hostess Nellie deserved praise. There was no fatuity in the pride she took in her house. The pleasant rooms seemed to be partly illuminated by her graces. The sixteen or seventeen guests were people whose company she unreservedly enjoyed. The food and liquor were splendid and nothing banal, boring or asinine was said. Charlie Wentworth, sitting close to Martha Tuckerman on the sofa, shared with Martha a flash of immortal longing. Looking into one another’s eyes it suddenly seemed to them both that a life together would be paradise. They would laugh at one another’s jokes, warm one another’s bones, travel to Japan. Martha left the sofa then and joined her husband at the bar. This was the closest anyone came to adulterous passion. The only difficulty was that Nailles had a circular driveway and without Tony—who was, of course, in bed—to direct traffic, the parking was haphazard. Nailles spent the last half hour of the party either moving cars or asking people to move them. Everyone had gone by eight. They had some scrambled eggs and sausage in the kitchen and Nellie showed Nailles the letter.

“Oh, my God,” he said, “she was the one who stole, wasn’t she? Maybe it’s a ring of thieves. Maybe the Swami’s an accomplice. Magic is the only thing we haven’t tried but I’m not up to it.”

Nailles’s struggle to get into the city on the train had become so acute that he finally had gone to Dr. Mullin, who prescribed a massive tranquilizer. He took this each morning with his coffee, telling Nellie that it was a vitamin pill. The tranquilizer gave him the illusion that he floated upon a cloud like Zeus in some allegorical painting. Standing on the platform waiting for the 7:46 he seemed surrounded by his cloud. When the train came in he picked up his cloud and settled himself in a window seat. If the day was dark, the landscape wintry, the little towns they passed shabby and depressing, none of this reached to where he lay in his rosy nimbus. He seemed to float down the tracks into Grand Central, beaming a vast and slightly absentminded smile at poverty, sickness, wealth, the beauty of strange women, the rain and the snow.

On the morning after the party Nellie was waked by the sound of gunfire.

There had been riots in the slums and she wondered for a moment if the militants had decided to march out of the ghetto and take the white houses of Chestnut Lane by force. Nailles was not in bed and she went to the window. What she saw was Nailles in his underpants on their broad lawn, firing his shotgun at an immense snapping turtle. The sun had not risen but the sky was light
and in this pure and subtle light the undressed man and the prehistoric turtle seemed engaged in some primordial and comical battle. Nailles raised his gun and fired at the turtle. The turtle recoiled, collapsed and then slowly raised itself up like a sea tortoise and began to lumber towards her husband. She had never seen, outside a zoo, so big a reptile, but it was Nailles, not the reptile, who seemed out of place in the early light. It was the turtle’s lawn, the turtle’s sky, the turtle’s creation, and Nailles seemed to have wandered mistakenly onto the scene. He fired again and missed. He fired again and she saw the turtle’s huge head swung to one side by the charge of buckshot. He fired again, put his gun on the grass and picked the turtle up by its jagged tail.

“Oh darling, are you sure it’s dead,” she called down from the window.

“Yes,” he said. He seemed surprised to see her at the window. “It’s dead. Its neck is broken.”

“Where do you suppose it came from?”

“The bog, I guess. It must be a hundred years old. I got up to go to the bathroom and I saw it crossing the lawn. At first I thought I was dreaming. The shell must be three feet long. It could hurt a child or kill a dog. I’ll bury it later.”

In the bedroom Nailles, his right ear ringing from the gun and his right hand shaking a little, knocked a tranquilizer, his last, into his hand but his hand was trembling so that the tranquilizer fell to the floor and rolled under a piece of furniture. Nailles waited until Nellie
had left the room. He bent a metal coathanger into the shape of a hook and lying on the floor he tried to recapture the pill. The piece of furniture—a dressing table-was flush to the floor and darkness concealed his pill. He hooked two pennies and a button. He then took the lamps off the top of the dressing table and moved it away from the wall. It was a heavy piece of furniture with loaded drawers and was a struggle to move, and when he got it away from the wall there was no pill but there was a crack in the flooring into which it must have fallen. He ran his coathanger along the crack but his only catch was dirt.

The thought of taking the train without a pill gave him all the symptoms of panic. His breathing was quick and his lips swollen. The place pain took in his memory was curious—he thought he had no memory for pain—but now the agony, confusion and humiliation of getting off at Greenacres and again at Lascalles, of getting off at Clear Haven and again at Turandot—returned to him with nearly the intensity of fact. He could not do it. Courage had nothing to do with his suffering. If he forced himself to go to the station he knew he would be unable to board the 7:46. Cold baths, self-discipline, prayer, all seemed like the moral paraphernalia of his first year in the Boy Scouts. He had to get into the city to fend for Nellie and his son. If he could not get into the city they would be defenseless and he imagined them as besieged by enemies—cold, hunger and fear—refugees from a burned city. He took a cold shower on the chance
that this might help, but water had no calming effect on his image of the 7:46 as a portable abyss. He didn’t know what hours the doctor kept but he knew that he had to get a new prescription before he did anything else.

The doctor’s office was in a development of two-story apartments called garden apartments although there were no gardens to be seen. He rang and a man in pajamas opened the door.

“I must have the wrong address,” Nailles said.

“You looking for the doctor?”

“Yes. It’s terribly important. It’s an emergency. It’s a matter of life and death.”

“You got the right place but he’s not in practice any more,” the stranger said. “The county medical society closed him down three weeks ago. He’s doing laboratory work in the city.”

“What happened?”

“Pills. He was giving out all sorts of illegal pills. But I’m right in the middle of my breakfast …”

“I’m sorry,” Nailles said. He could drive into the city, or could he? He could take a bus. He could take a taxi. A man spoke to him from a car parked beside his. “You looking for the doctor?”

“God yes,” Nailles said, “God yes.”

“What was he giving you?”

“I don’t know the name of it. It was for the train.”

“What color?”

“Gray and yellow. It was a capsule, half gray and half yellow.”

“I know what it was. You want some?”

“God yes, God yes.”

“I’ll meet you in the Catholic cemetery, out on Laurel Avenue. You know the one I mean. There’s a statue of a soldier.”

Nailles got to the cemetery before the stranger. It was an old-fashioned place with many statues, but the monument to the soldier stood a head taller than the host of stone angels and was easy to find. Gravediggers worked in the distance. Nailles had guessed that graves were dug by engines, but these men worked with a shovel and pickax. He passed an array of motley angels—some of them life-sized, some of them dwarfs. Some of them stood on the tombs they blessed with half-furled wings, some of them clung with furled wings to the cross. The soldier wore the uniform of 1918—a soup-plate helmet, puttees, baggy pants, and he held in his right hand, butt to the ground, a Springfield, bolt-action, 1912. He had been carved from a white stone that had not discolored at all but it had eroded, obscuring his features and his insignia so that he looked like a ghost. The stranger joined Nailles, holding a few tulips that he must have stolen somewhere. He put these into a container in front of the ghostly infantryman and said: “Twenty-five dollars.” “I’ve been getting a big prescription for ten,” Nailles said. “Look,” the stranger said, “I can get ten years in jail for this and a ten-thousand-dollar fine.” Nailles gave him the money in exchange for five pills. “You’ll need some more on Monday,” the man said. “Meet me at the railroad-station
toilet at half past seven.” Nailles put a pill into his mouth but he needed water. Rainwater had collected in one of the commemorative urns or ewers and he scooped enough up with his hand to get the pill down. Driving to the train he waited for the pill to take hold, for his cloud to gather, and by the time he got to the parking lot it had begun its wonderful work. He was moderate, calm, a little bored and absentminded. He forgot to put a quarter in the parking meter but when he had completed his painless journey into the city he telephoned Nellie and asked her to try the guru.

A
fter lunch Nellie poured herself a whiskey. I should go to a shrink, she thought, until she remembered the doctor circling his invisible dentist’s chair. She hated him, not for his real-estate business, but because she had always felt vaguely that in any crisis psychiatry could be counted on to work a cure, and he had taken this solace out the door with him. She remembered that the cleaning woman—the thief—had false teeth. Her favorite disinfectant had been a chemical, advertised to smell of mountain pine woods, but this imitation of the sweet mountain air was so crude, flagrant and repulsive that it amounted to an irony. Snowcapped toilet seats. Eliot had asked her to see the guru and so she went.