Recapitulation (16 page)

“Bailey was catching, like smallpox,” Mason says into the rattle of cottonwood leaves. “I don’t take much pleasure in his memory. One thing I do remember with pleasure, though—the night you crammed him into the garbage can down at the club.”

He hears his own steps in the quiet street, he is aware of the cars that pass, brightening trees and house fronts and throwing his shadow ahead of him down the sidewalk. The canyon breeze flows steadily against him, a strong breeze for all its mildness. It is dry, but fragrant with what it has blown past since emerging from the canyons: soaked lawns, sprinklers forgotten in flower beds and shrubbery, drives and gutters overflowing. Like a salty cracker eaten with ice cream, that dry wind bearing moist odors blends into a contradictory and tantalizing taste, and he is savoring it even while he juggles and arranges that scene years back, on the same sort of summer night as this, but earlier, barely dusk:

They have been playing late, and are just coming out of the heavy Virginia creeper shadows of the club. And here comes Murphy’s half-witted girl across the parking area. She is really helpless. Any male who speaks to her undoes her; she can’t do anything but roll her eyes and moo. Somebody, Murphy or somebody else, has already got her good and pregnant. She must be five or six months along. Almost every night she comes to the club like this, and Murphy, that little five-by-five who is always singing “O Sole Mio” or “Là ci darem’ la mano” as he rolls the courts in the mornings, is given every evening renewed cause to sing. He will be very proud of that bastard when it is born: “That’s-a my baby!”

But now here comes this unwatched imbecile across the parking area, mooning along in no hurry through the dusk, and Bailey suddenly gets the idea that he’d like to take her on. Never had a feeb, he says. And look, she’s already pregnant, no danger or anything. He begins to kid her. It starts as kidding. Then
Bruce and Joe find out he means it. He wants them to go back and keep Murphy occupied for ten or fifteen minutes while he takes this poor moron under the hedge.

They laugh and refuse. He insists. They continue to refuse. He gets impatient. They try to drag him away, laughing. He will not budge, getting surly. That is when Joe suddenly folds him up and crams him into the garbage can. He comes out fighting, ready to kill Joe. Joe holds him off with one long arm until the girl gets tired of waiting and moons on into the club to see Murphy.

“Bailey was the kind that should suffer a conversion on his deathbed,” Bruce says to Joe’s shadow on the lawn. “He would have made a proper hero for Graham Greene. You and I are too square to get to heaven, but the Baileys are another matter. Only the real sinners give God any reason to exert Himself. No fun shooting tame hares.”

“Speak for yourself,” Joe says.

He has come to a place where Thirteenth East crosses the gully. The land falls away on the lower side into an unbuilt darkness that rattles with moving cottonwood leaves. Simultaneously aware of where he is, and how familiar it is, and hanging back to continue that imaginary conversation on Joe’s back lawn, he feels how the whole disorderly unchronological past hovers just beyond the curtain of the present, attaching itself to any scent, sound, touch, or random word that will let it get back in. As a stronger gust rattles through the tops of the cottonwoods below him, he stops dead still to listen. Memory is instantly tangible, a thrill of adrenalin in the blood, a prickle of gooseflesh on the arms.

In the moving shade he and his mother wait for his father. (Where? Somewhere in the Sun River valley near Great Falls? Somewhere on the Frenchman or the Milk?) The horses, tied to the wheels, rustle for a last oat in the wagon box. On their backs the sweat marks have dried white under the harness. Dust is white in the cracks of the wagon, on the felloes and spokes of the wheels, in the furrowed bark of the trees. The hubs, where axle grease has been extruded, wear knobs of dust like luxuriant mold. The ground is pancaked with the dung of cattle that have dozed in this shade, and over ground, dust, dung, the litter of
fallen twigs, is drifted a snow of cottonwood fluff from burst seedballs. When a sudden wind swarms through the grove, every leaf of every tree spins and rattles, accentuating the stillness that is not stillness at all, but a medley of dry sounds: crackle of grasshoppers, sawing of crickets, distant mourning of doves, and through it, over it, around it, encompassing it, the tap and clatter of cottonwood leaves. He doesn’t know what he and his mother are doing there, he only knows that they wait, patient or imprisoned or entranced, immobilized in afternoon. When he looks up, the sun glints through at him off the varnished faces of thousands of heart-shaped reflectors, and beyond the dancing leaves the sky is a high pure blue crossed by traveling fair-weather clouds that darken and dissolve

become a velvet night sky with a late moon loose in it. The sound of cottonwoods has never ceased. He is aware that behind him, where their bedroll is laid out, the grove is deep black below and afire with cool shimmering light up where the wind stirs the high leaves. But he is not looking at the grove. He looks the other way, across the irrigation ditch, toward the peach orchard and the cliffs. Light like frost touches the high rim, and breaks up the face of the cliff into highlighted edges and promontories separated by depths of soft matte shadow. It falls in ragged patches between the orchard trees, and glitters and passed and is renewed on the water of the ditch. On the other side, Nola stands up, rising out of the dark pool of her clothes, facing him, dusted and hazed with moonlight, glimmering but plainly seen. The night is soft against his skin, but he is shivering, his jaw locked as if by paralyzing cold. She takes a step and dips a foot in the water. A low laugh wells out of her. “Oh, it’s warm!” her husky voice whispers. “Come on.” His shivering is so violent that at first he cannot move. He hears it communicate itself to the gelatinous air, and shake through the air into the tops of the cottonwoods and vibrate there, the very voice of his awe and worship and desire

The vision breaks and tears, dissolving. Below him the trees rattle and are still. Mason feels around in his mind like a blind man reassuring himself about the objects in a familiar room. The
web of associations, the dense entangled feelings, are still, after an absence of two thirds of a lifetime, as intensely there as a rattlesnake under a bush. Not the girl herself; she is no more to him than a rueful shrug. But the associations, the sights and sounds and smells that accompanied her, the vivid sensuousness of that time of his life, the romantic readiness, the emotions as responsive as wind chimes—those he does miss.

Listen to those cottonwoods talking, he says to the two he left behind on the dark lawn. Doesn’t that sound tell you, as much as any single signal in your life, who you are? Doesn’t it smell of sage and rabbit brush and shad scale? Doesn’t it have the feel of wet red ditch-bank sand in it, and the stir of a thunderstorm coming up over one of the little Mormon towns down in the plateaus? Just now, for a half second, it drowned me in associations and sensations. It brought back whole two people I used to love. When cottonwoods have been rattling at you all through your childhood, they mean
home.
I could have spent fifty years listening to the
shamal
thresh the palms in the date gardens of Hofuf, and never felt anything but out of place. But one puff of wind through those trees in the gully is enough to tell me, not that I have come home, but that I never left.

Having let it surge through his head like the wind through the branches, he takes it back. He could never say any such thing to Joe, much less to Joe’s unknown listening wife. And yet there is something he wants to say. He tries again.

“Do you know how privileged you are?” he asks them. “Are you properly grateful to be living in Paradise?”

They protest, naturally. It is their belief that his life has been filled with exotic adventures and that theirs is restricted and provincial. That is one of the reasons he is only imagining himself in that back yard, and is not there in person: he hates the thought of being treated, by Joe, as The Ambassador, a visiting Distinction. That would only exaggerate the changes and the differences and the losses of forty-five years.

But Paradise. Their incredulity makes him insist. He feels that quiet back lawn as a green sanctuary full of a remote peace. “Paradise is an Arab idea,” he says. “Semitic, anyway. It’s a garden, always a garden. They put a wall around it because that’s how their minds work, they’re inward-turning, not outward-turning.
Paradise is safe, not exciting. Like this. Change the mocking-birds in that gully into bulbul birds, and put up a wall, and you’d have it: water, greenness, coolness, peace, and all around you the desert. The Mormons are all mixed up about heaven, their right hand doesn’t know what their left is doing. The Book of Mormon makes heaven into a sort of New Jerusalem, with gold-paved streets and windows of opal and ruby. But the real Mormon heaven was made by hand, and it’s this, it’s an oasis in the desert.”

He cannot tell whether they accept what he says or whether they are only being polite to the ex-ambassador, an old friend. The scene fades, frays, is lost. A car coming along Thirteenth East exposes him where he stands looking down into the moving tops of the gully trees. His shadow rotates, floats outward, stretches, dissolves. For a second or two the car occupies all the silence, the whole inside of his head. Then its noise dwindles and the night and his head are whole again.

He turns back. Most of the houses along the street are dark. It must be eleven or after. A vague frustration grows in him—at the hour, at the fact that the two back there on the lawn cannot understand what he is trying to tell them, at the impossibility of going back there in person at all. How will he get all the questions asked? How will they bridge forty-five years? Can he say to Joe, outright, What
did
happen? Did Bailey and Nola stay together? When I was here for my father’s funeral you said their singing act had broken up, and you thought they had, too. But if she didn’t marry Bailey, whom
did
she marry? Where’s she living? What happened to her?

He would not admit that much interest in her, either to Joe or to himself. But he admits curiosity. That intense obsessed involvement, and then absence, silence. She managed to remain mysterious; he would like to know about her, but he can’t imagine asking. Neither can he imagine trying to explain to Joe why in forty-five years he never wrote a single letter. He was the one with the unstable address; he should have given Joe a chance to keep in touch. Later, much later, he might have read about Mason in the newspapers or got him with his breakfast orange juice on the “Today” show, he might know exactly how time has dealt with Bruce Mason, what he looks like, how he has spent his
life. But by the time that information might have been available, it would have been far too late for Joe to write. Pride would have intervened. I’ll write the bugger when he writes
me.

So now if Mason goes up on that porch and rings the doorbell and startles them out of their bedtime preparations—her hair in curlers, Joe’s teeth in a glass—in what role does he appear? Is he the Diplomat or is he the bootlegger’s boy?

It is impossible, not because he fears Joe but because he fears time, change, himself. After so long a silence, his slightest word, the answer to the simplest question, may strike Joe as being the word of a man who went away and forgot all his old friends and now comes back dropping names, parading himself rich and famous, as it may seem to them, around his home town.

Tomorrow it may be easier. Tonight he is too tired, he is not yet used to the strangeness of the once-familiar. After the funeral tomorrow he will call them, take them to lunch, spend the afternoon reaching back to what, however it may seem from his actions, means the most to him in this place.

He cuts across the parking strip to his car, and in the empty street, a street that stares like an Utrillo, makes a U turn and starts back toward the hotel.

The canyon breeze had died, the trees were still, the street lay out before him, not simply empty, but blurred and ambiguous, a double exposure, and he felt bewildered, in the strict sense, half lost in a half-remembered wilderness, beguiled by familiar-seeming landmarks as he had been when a boy prowling the willow bottoms of the Whitemud, following the destinationless and overgrown paths that cattle had pushed through the brush. He clenched his eyes shut and opened them again to clear his vision, and the street came single again. But it was the street of the past, not that of the present.

It had the familiarity of hallucination. Its trees overhung it with their known, late-at-night stillness, the arc lights blurred in the leaves and cast puddles of inert dusty light on sidewalks and parking strips and the angles of curbs. He had just dropped Joe off after a date, and was turning home. The tiredness of a long day and night had softened his bones. He yawned a jaw-cracking yawn: he had not slept since 1931. Slouched in the seat, scratchy-eyed, doped with drowsiness, he let the car find its own way like an old buggy horse.

Not surprisingly, it took him home, and by ways as familiar as the faces of the dreamed-of dead, past East High School’s gray
barracks, site of all his subsequent flight-pursuit, corridor- and stairway, forgotten-examination nightmares; past the lunch shack, plastered with Camel and Coca-Cola signs, where they used to lunch on hot dogs and root beer, and where older boys, Chet among them, bought forbidden cigarettes and stood on the firing line just off the school grounds and smoked them with the intention of being observed.

Below the lawn, spread along the fossil beach terrace of the lake that thousands of years ago filled the valley, was a long hanging darkness, the playing field where in paleozoic gym-class softball games he had patrolled an invariable, contemptuous right field and batted ninth. Below that, the slope fell away to the crisscrossed lighted streets of the city, the bright bands of State Street and Redwood Road, the curving line of a new freeway, and far out, the darkness of the salt flats and the lake and the desert that reached to California. Up to the right, at the head of Main Street, the floodlighted Capitol stared whitely. Below it was the bloom of the business district with the spiky floodlighted temple at its upper edge.