Mr. Vertigo (6 page)

“You won’t, I promise you. However much you think you’ve suffered so far, it’s nothing compared to what lies ahead.”

“The birds don’t suffer. They just spread their wings and take off. If I got the gift like you say, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be a breeze.”

“Because, my little pumpkin-head, you’re not a bird—you’re a man. In order to lift you off the ground, we have to crack the heavens in two. We have to turn the whole bloody universe inside out.”

Once again, I didn’t understand the tenth part of what the master was saying, but I nodded when he called me a man, feeling in that word a new tone of appreciation, an acknowledgment of the importance I had assumed in his eyes. He put his hand gently on my shoulder and led me out into the May morning. I felt nothing but trust for him at that moment, and though his face was set in a grim, inward-looking expression, it never crossed my mind that he would do anything to break that trust. That’s probably how Isaac felt when Abraham took him up that mountain in Genesis, chapter twenty-two. If a man tells you he’s your father, even if you know he’s not, you let down your guard and get all stupid inside. You don’t imagine that he’s been conspiring against you with God, the Lord of Hosts. A boy’s brain doesn’t work that fast; it’s not subtle enough to fathom such chicanery. All you know is that the big guy has placed his hand on your shoulder and given it a friendly squeeze. He tells you, Come with me, and so you turn yourself in that direction and follow him wherever he’s going.

We walked out past the barn to the tool shed, a rickety little structure with a sagging roof and walls made of weathered, unpainted planks. Master Yehudi opened the door and stood there in silence for a long moment, gazing at the dark tangle of metal objects inside. At last he reached in and pulled out a shovel, a rusty lug of a thing that must have weighed fifteen or twenty pounds. He put the shovel in my hands, and I felt proud to be carrying it for him once we started walking again. We passed along the edge of the near cornfield, and it was a splendid morning, I remember, filled with darting robins and bluebirds, and my skin was tingling with a strange sense of aliveness, the blessing of the sun’s warmth as it poured down upon me. By and by we came to a patch of untilled ground, a bare spot at the juncture
of two fields, and the master turned to me and said, “This is where we’re going to put the hole. Do you want to do the digging, or would you rather leave it to me?”

I gave it my best shot, but my arms weren’t up to it. I was too small to wield a shovel of that heft, and when the master saw me struggling just to pierce the soil, let alone slide the blade in under it, he told me to sit down and rest, he would finish the job himself. For the next two hours I watched him transform that patch of earth into an immense cavity, a hole as broad and deep as a giant’s grave. He worked so fast that it seemed as if the earth was swallowing him up, and after a time he had burrowed down so low that I couldn’t see his head anymore. I could hear his grunts, the locomotive huff and puff that accompanied each turn of the spade, and then a volley of loose dirt would come soaring up over the surface, hang for a second in midair, and then drop to the pile that was growing around the hole. He kepi at it as if there were ten of him, an army of diggers bent on tunneling to Australia, and when he finally stopped and hoisted himself out of the pit, he was so smudged with filth and sweat that he looked like a man made of coal, a haggard vaudevillian about to die with his blackface on. I had never seen anyone pant so hard, had never witnessed a body so deprived of breath, and when he flung himself to the ground and didn’t stir for the next ten minutes, I felt certain that his heart was about to give out on him.

I was too awed to speak. I studied the master’s rib cage for signs of collapse, shuttling between joy and sorrow as his chest heaved up and down, up and down, swelling and shrinking against the long blue horizon. Halfway through my vigil, a cloud wandered in front of the sun and the sky turned ominously dark. I thought it was the angel of death passing overhead, but Master Yehudi’s lungs kept on pumping as the air slowly brightened
again, and a moment later he sat up and smiled, eagerly wiping the dirt from his face.

“Well,” he said, “what do you think of our hole?”

“It’s a grand hole,” I said, “as deep and lovely a hole as there ever was.”

“I’m glad you like it, because you and that hole are going to be on intimate terms for the next twenty-four hours.”

“I don’t mind. It looks like an interesting place to me. As long as it don’t rain, it might be fun to sit in there for a while.”

“No need to worry about the rain, Walt.”

“You a weatherman or something? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but conditions change around here about every fifteen minutes. When it comes to weather, this Kansas place is as fickle as it gets.”

“True enough. The skies in these parts can’t be counted on. But I’m not saying it won’t rain. Just that you don’t have to worry if it does.”

“Sure, give me a cover, or one of them canvas thingamajigs—a tarp. That’s good thinking. You can’t go wrong if you plan for the worst.”

“I’m not putting you down there for fun and frolic. You’ll have a breath-hole, of course, a long tube to keep in your mouth for purposes of respiration, but otherwise it’s going to be fairly dank and uncomfortable. A closed-in, wormy kind of discomfort, if you forgive my saying so. I doubt you’ll forget the experience as long as you live.”

“I know I’m dumb, but if you don’t stop talking in riddles, we’ll be out here all day before I glom onto your drift.”

“I’m going to bury you, son.”

“Say what?”

“I’m going to put you down in that hole, cover you up with dirt, and bury you alive.”

“And you expect me to agree to that?”

“You don’t have any choice. Either you go down there of your own volition or I strangle you with my two bare hands. One way, you get to live a long, prosperous life; the other way, your life ends in thirty seconds.”

So I let him bury me alive—an experience I would not recommend to anyone. Distasteful as the idea sounds, the actual incarceration is far worse, and once you’ve spent some time in the bowels of netherness as I did that day, the world can never look the same to you again. It becomes inexpressibly more beautiful, and yet that beauty is drenched in a light so transient, so unreal, that it never takes on any substance, and even though you can see it and touch it as you always did, a part of you understands that it is no more than a mirage. Feeling the dirt on top of you is one thing, the pressure and coldness of it, the panic of deathlike immobility, but the true terror doesn’t begin until later, until after you’ve been unburied and can stand up and walk again. From then on, everything that happens to you on the surface is connected to those hours you spent underground. A little seed of craziness has been planted in your head, and even though you’ve won the struggle to survive, nearly everything else has been lost. Death lives inside you, eating away at your innocence and your hope, and in the end you’re left with nothing but the dirt, the solidity of the dirt, the everlasting power and triumph of the dirt.

That was how my initiation began. Over the weeks and months that followed, I lived through more of the same, an unremitting avalanche of wrongs. Each test was more terrible than the one before it, and if I managed not to back down, it was only from sheer reptilian stubbornness, a brainless passivity that lurked somewhere in the core of my soul. It had nothing to do with will or determination or courage. I had none of those qualities, and
the farther I was pushed, the less pride I felt in my accomplishments. I was flogged with a bullwhip; I was thrown from a galloping horse; I was lashed to the roof of the barn for two days without food or water; I had my skin smeared with honey and then stood naked in the August heat as a thousand flies and wasps swarmed over me; I sat in a circle of fire for one whole night as my body became scorched with blisters; I was dunked repeatedly for six straight hours in a tubfull of vinegar; I was struck by lightning; I drank cow, piss and ate horseshit; I took a knife and cut off the upper joint of my left pinky; I dangled for three days and three nights in a cocoon of ropes from the rafters in the attic. I did these things because Master Yehudi told me to do them, and if I could not bring myself to love him, neither did I hate him or resent him for the sufferings I endured. He no longer had to threaten me. I followed his commands with blind obedience, never bothering to question what his purpose might have been. He told me to jump, and I jumped. He told me to stop breathing, and I stopped breathing. This was the man who had promised to make me fly, and even though I never believed him, I let him use me as if I did. We had our bargain, after all, the pact we’d made that first night in Saint Louis, and I never forgot it. If he didn’t come through for me by my thirteenth birthday, I was going to lop off his head with an axe. There was nothing personal about that arrangement—it was a simple matter of justice. If the son-of-a-bitch let me down, I was going to kill him, and he knew it as well as I did.

While these ordeals lasted, Aesop and Mother Sioux stuck by me as if I were their flesh and blood, the darling of their hearts. There were lulls between the various stages of my development, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, and more often than not Master Yehudi would vanish, leaving the farm altogether while my wounds mended and I recovered to face the next dumbfounding
assault on my person. I had no idea where he went during those pauses, nor did I ask the others about it, since I always felt relieved when he was gone. Not only was I safe from further trials, but I was freed from the burden of the master’s presence—his brooding silences and tormented looks, the enormity of the space he occupied—and that alone reassured me, gave me a chance to breathe again. The house was a happier place without him, and the three of us lived together in remarkable harmony. Plump Mother Sioux and her two skinny boys. Those were the days when Aesop and I became pals, and miserable as much of that time was for me, it also contains some good memories, perhaps the best memories of all. He was a great one for telling stories, Aesop was, and I liked nothing better than to listen to that sweet voice of his spinning out the wild tales that were crammed in his head. He knew hundreds of them, and whenever I asked him, lying in bed all bruised and sore from my latest pummeling, he would sit there for hours reciting one story after another. Jack the Giant Killer, Sinbad the Sailor, Ulysses the Wanderer, Billy the Kid, Lancelot and King Arthur, Paul Bunyan—I heard them all. The best ones, though, the stories he saved for when I was feeling particularly blue, were about my namesake, Sir Walter Raleigh. I remember how shocked I was when he told me I had a famous name, the name of a real-life adventurer and hero. To prove that he wasn’t making it up, Aesop went to the book shelf and pulled down a thick volume with Sir Walter’s picture in it. I had never seen a more elegant face, and I soon fell into the habit of studying it for ten or fifteen minutes every day. I loved the pointy beard and razor-sharp eyes, the pearl earring fixed in his left lobe. It was the face of a pirate, a genuine swashbuckling knight, and from that day forth I carried Sir Walter inside me as a second self, an invisible brother to
stand with me through thick and thin. Aesop recounted the stories of the cloak and the puddle, the search for El Dorado, the lost colony at Roanoke, the thirteen years in the Tower of London, the brave words he uttered at his beheading. He was the best poet of his day; he was a scholar, a scientist, and a freethinker; he was the number-one lover of women in all of England. “Think of you and me put together,” Aesop said, “and you begin to get an idea of who he was. A man with my brains and your guts, and tall and handsome as well—that’s Sir Walter Raleigh, the most perfect man who ever lived.”

Every night, Mother Sioux would come into my room and tuck me in, sitting on my bed for however long it took me to fall asleep. I came to depend on this ritual, and though I was growing up fast and hard in every other way, I was still just a baby to her. I never let myself cry in front of Master Yehudi or Aesop, but with Mother Sioux I let the ducts give way on countless occasions, blubbering in her arms like some hapless mama’s boy. Once, I remember, I even went so far as to touch on the subject of flying, and what she said was so unexpected, so calm in its assurance, that it pacified the turmoil within me for weeks to come—not because I believed it myself, but because she did, and she was the person I trusted most in the world.

“He’s a wicked man,” I said, referring to the master, “and by the time he’s through with me, I’ll be as hunched and crippled as Aesop.”

“No, sonny, it ain’t so. You’ll be dancing with the clouds in the sky.”

“With a harp in my hands and wings sprouting from my back.”

“In your own skin. In your own flesh and bones.”

“It’s a bluff, Mother Sioux, a disgusting pack of lies. If he aims to teach me what he says, why don’t he get down and do
it? For one whole year, I’ve suffered every indignity known to man. I’ve been buried, I’ve been burned, I’ve been mutilated, and I’m still as bound to the earth as I ever was.”

“Those are the steps. It has to be done that way. But the worst is nearly behind you now.”

“So he’s suckered you into believing it, too.”

“No one suckers Mother Sioux into anything. I’m too old and too fat to swallow what people say. False words are like chicken bones. They catch in my throat and I spit them out.”

“Men can’t fly. It’s as simple as that. Men can’t fly because God don’t want them to.”

“It can be done.”

“In some other world maybe. But not this one.”

“I saw it happen. When I was a little girl. I saw it with my own two eyes. And if it happened before, it can happen again.”

“You dreamed it. You thought you saw it, but it was only in your sleep.”

“My own father, Walt. My own father and my own brother. I saw them moving through the air like spirits. It wasn’t flying the way you imagine it. Not like birds or moths, not with wings or anything like that. But they were up in the air, and they were moving. All slow and strange. As if they was swimming. Pushing their way through the air like swimmers, like spirits walking on the bottom of a lake.”