Odd Jobs (5 page)

On the mustering-field—the parking lot of the newly enlarged regional high school—the personality I had created for use in the world outside Hayesville began to disintegrate. With downcast head I sensed from all sides a certain irradiation, as if the television sets out of which I had so urbanely expressed myself had reversed their currents and now were burning my reality away. In the tangle of assembled marching units and minor dignitaries I became obsessed with avoiding contact, and slithered back and forth in my inappropriate seersucker suit like a pariah or like a gossip reporter from some universally loathed but, because this is America, tolerated journal. The lead car of the parade, I observed, contained the burgess—an irrepressible bully, my contemporary, once nicknamed, because of his multiple warrior wounds, Scabs, and still, after forty years, called that. Also in this car rode the four borough aldermen, all wearing uniformly black suits as if to emphasize their remarkably distributed disparity in size, like a set of toys. The smallest was a virtual dwarf, a tailor called Runt Miller, and the tallest Gus Horst, a
six-foot-eight-inch giant famous, in my high-school years, not only for his basketball prowess but for his skill at the discus, which flew from his long hairless arm as from a sling. The limousine behind theirs was to hold four beribboned veterans, one each from the two world wars and the two Asian involvements. Then some fire engines festooned with tricolor bunting, and a marching band led by stocky-legged young twirlers in white plastic boots and silver sequinned miniskirts, and the truckload of Indians, some more fire engines, and a limousine holding a probate judge, and the flower-banked float holding Miss Junior and Mr. Gay Pennsylvania, both gorgeous in chiffon, and another marching band. Our open limo, a ’68 Caddy with corrosion-speckled chrome, came toward the end.

The streets were lined with faces, unfamiliar most of them, hatched since “my time,” yet all of them in another sense profoundly familiar, with that Hayesville look, a doughy solidity, a way of sitting, “just so,” on the curbs and porches and aluminum folding chairs brought out to the sidewalk, and with that Hayesville accent in their singsong voices, those voices with always something sardonic and something kindly about them, that small-town mix of street slyness and barnyard slyness, with love in the slyness, and menace in the love. Block after block was lined with these faces; they called my name, they pointed and laughed at my banner. I was trapped and had no idea how to act. My fellow limousine passenger, the Congressman, kept gladly waving, gathering votes; he called out people’s names; he bounced back to these sidewalk crowds their own belief that by being born in a place and staying there year after year they had performed a great and cherishable feat.

When I tried to imitate the Congressman’s waving, my hands felt like lead. My face seemed imposed from afar, a mask stiff with fear. I had traversed every inch of these streets, as a child, in all weathers, dragging a sled in winter, bouncing a basketball in summer, sashaying in a noisy group of semi-delinquent, cigarette-puffing buddies, or clinging awkwardly to the fragrant body of a solid local girl; but never had I moved as slowly as in this infernal siren-plagued inane caravan. I would have screamed, as one screams in a stalled elevator, but for the illusion that I was in a narrow glass display box and a scream would use up all my air.

An old classmate, now a beefy master plumber in a denim leisure suit, capered to the side of the limousine and offered me a beer. A middle-aged woman in purple slacks held aloft a sign upon which my face, torn from the cover of a sensational magazine, had been pasted and captioned
in Magic Marker with the words
NOT THIS BUT JESUS
. The parade was heading down Filbert Street now; at its corner with Elm lived a woman who had been kind to me, who had let me sit in her kitchen while her daughter entertained more amusing boys in the parlor—a disconsolate paranoid widow who had always been fighting with her neighbors but who had served me Ovaltine on her porcelain kitchen table and let me shell peanuts into her wastebasket while she told me the plots of the cellophane-wrapped novels she read all day in her dark and manless house. (She rented those novels from the Hayesville Drugstore’s lending library; how gaudy and dynamic and precious books seemed then, well worth a nickel a day!) At her corner the crowd was thick but she, who had seemed old then and would be ancient now, was not present among her neighbors—still fighting with them, I supposed. I looked toward her big front window and, indeed, a watching shadow lurked within, not close to the glass, where she might have attracted hostility, but deep in the aquarium gloom of that living room in whose brown, nappy, welcoming furniture I had once sunk so gratefully, as respite from the exhausting furniture of my own home. I waved, and the shadow in that dim parlor waved back. “Now you’re cooking,” the Congressman told me. “Give ’em the high five.”

Hayesville tots in strollers clutched balloons and flags. Some tots looked like candy apples, big heads on sticks, their faces smeared with sugar. Older boys raced in and out of the crawling parade, taunting it as they would tease a half-crushed snake. I saw a young father lift an infant to his shoulders, and I remembered my own father’s shoulders under me, and my panicked grip on his high unsteady head, on that brown straight hair of his, hair so fine that in the coffin, while the minister was doing the eulogy, some strands of it had riffled in an imperceptible draft. That infant being lifted now would never forget his glimpse of this parade. History’s grind was beginning in his poor soft brain.

The parade rounded a corner where a Buddha of a man sat surrounded by devotees. An aluminum chair was folded into his fat like spit into chewing gum. It was Lefty Reisenbach, the only major leaguer Hayesville has ever produced. I had seen him play shortstop for the playground team, slim as a knife, and as flashing. Then, on rudimentary Fifties television, as a blur of gray sparks, cocking his bat, squinting toward third base for the sign. Now he was back home and bloated on fifteen years’ worth of local beer. Old ballplayers are like ruined temples: their gifts
have blown through them and left not a trace, just a hollow inscrutable pomp.

The secretary of my high-school class broke from the crowd and ran along beside us. She had been lithe and wasp-waisted, a cheerleader and a wing on our undefeated girls’ hockey team. Her weight had doubled since then, but she still moved athletically, matching the limousine’s pace with easy strides. Her chest, her bouffant hairdo, the upper parts of her arms all bounced. “Bobby!” she called. “Are you married?”

The sirens, and a marching band from the coal regions hitting hard on “The Marine Hymn,” made it difficult to hear. “We’re divorced!” I shouted.

“I
know
that,” she called impatiently, beginning to be winded. “It was in
People
! Have you married
again
?”

“No,” I called back, as the limousine jerkily accelerated. “I’m living with a woman! Everybody’s doing it!”

“Not around here … they’re not,” she responded faintly, curling up and falling away like an autumnal leaf. There was something amiss, some secret, as always in Hayesville, I was not privy to. The day, which had mustered itself under one of those white hazed skies that represent sunshine in these humid parts, was clouding; large ragged scraps of cloud, with plum-colored centers, had gathered above the dark green crowns of the Norway maples that line the borough’s straight streets. The horse-chestnut trees—the guardians of my childhood with their candles of bloom, splayed fingerlike leaves, and glossy, inedible, collectible nuts—had been mostly cut down.

The parade ended way over on Buttonwood Avenue, where the sycamores form an allée and the trolley tracks used to head out of town. The parade did not disperse but had become a vast collapsed mob. Jostling tubas and glockenspiels uttered random notes and leggy twirlers in their white boots and braid-encrusted jackets giggled in anticipation of what came next. What did come next? The four aldermen had gathered, making a single black sloping mass, Gus Horst foremost and leaning dolefully forward. Behind them rose a temporary structure of raw new pine—a platform for speeches, I guessed at a glance. With a shudder of its gummy carburetor, our limousine at last stopped. When I opened the door and tried to step from it into freedom, Scabs’s steel-hard, bullying hands seized my arms. Several of Hayesville’s sleepy-eyed young policemen moved in to back him up.

A certain reverential hush overtook the crowd as it parted for us. Drawing nearer, near enough to smell the resinous fresh lumber, I saw the structure to be a gallows. Of course. It was for me. It was what I deserved. Terror thickened in my throat and then vanished. By ever leaving Hayesville, I had as good as died anyway.

1976

FIRST WIVES AND TROLLEY CARS

W
ILLIAM
F
ARNHAM
, though as tough and flip as most denizens of this eighty-two-percent-depleted century, was sentimental about first wives and trolley cars. A trolley line had been threaded down the center of the main street of Wenrich’s Corner, his home town, leading one way to the minor-league metropolis of Alton and in the other direction to a town so small and rural that its mere name, Smokeville, was enough to make the boy Farnham and his flip pals laugh. Yet it was the ride toward Smokeville that lingered sentimentally in his memory.

For several years he delivered free movie-circulars for the Wenrich’s Corner Movie Theatre, walking up and down the rectilinear maple-shaded streets on Saturday mornings, darting up cement walks and tossing the leaflets onto porches as if playing Halloween pranks in broad daylight. The leaflets announced the week’s coming attractions and were distributed not just throughout Wenrich’s Corner but in the neighboring towns as well. Some Saturdays, Farnham was assigned Smokeville and given the two dimes’ trolley fare there and back by the tall bald man, the town’s only Jew, who owned the movie theatre. The shows changed three times a week, with B-movie double features on Mondays and Tuesdays, free dishes to the ladies on Thursday nights, and free Hershey bars to children after the Saturday matinée. All Hollywood’s produce poured through that little theatre, with its slanted cement floors and its comforting smells of steam heat and bubble gum. There were some minimal wall decorations in what Farnham thought of as Egyptian style but he now knew to have been Art Deco, reduced at this remote provincial level to a few angular stripes of beige and silver paint.

Farnham was eleven, twelve. He believed in the movies, and in the Sunday-night radio shows broadcast from Hollywood, where Jack Benny would drop by at Ronald Colman’s house to borrow a cup of sugar, just like neighbors in Wenrich’s Corner. The boy Farnham’s simple joy in the Jack Benny program was only slightly troubled by certain paradoxes. If Benny and Mary Livingstone were married, as the newspapers all said, why didn’t they live together and why was her last name different? And why, when Dennis Day sang his song, was it always to show Jack and Rochester what it
would
sound like when he did it
really
on the Sunday-night show, which they all admitted existed but which never, on the air, arrived, except in the form of rehearsal? These were mysteries, like what girls were thinking and why all heroes in comic books wore capes.

The movies as well as trolley cars and comic books cost a dime, if you were twelve or under. When admission went up by a penny tax for the war effort, this tiny increase drove Farnham, whose weekly allowance was thirty-five cents, to deliver circulars in exchange for a week’s free pass. Otherwise he wouldn’t have a nickel for the Sunday-school collection. He often went to the movies three times a week, walking, unaccompanied by a parent, in these far-off days before television and R ratings, when Hollywood’s fantasies were as safe as the family living room.

On the way to Smokeville, the tracks rounded the eponymous but no longer central corner—the town had grown east, toward Alton. Wenrich’s Inn had stood here until Prohibition. Throughout Farnham’s boyhood, the building, stuccoed sandstone with a long second-story porch rimmed in peeling jigsaw carpentry, had been dismally boarded up; after the war, it opened as a camera store at one entrance and a bakery at the other, with two dentists and a chiropractor upstairs. On his last sentimental visit to the town, Farnham, an art historian who had found tenure in southern California, saw that the inn had been re-established as an eating place, with exposed beams and fancy prices. The streetcars had negotiated this corner with much plaintive friction of metal on metal and sometimes a shower of sparks that indicated the trolley had lost its electrical connection overhead. The motorman, generally a rude and overweight Pennsylvania Dutchman, would shove off from his high metal stool, let himself out of the clattery folding doors, step on a step that flopped magically into place, and run to the rear of the stalled car, where with a single angry thump he would set things right. The motor resumed its throb, that incessant mechanical pulsing as of a heart trapped beneath the long, dirt-blackened floorboards.