Set This House on Fire (69 page)

Horseshit, he thought drowsily, triple bleeding horseshit. Impotent, now soft and faint, the voice lulled him for a spell and then was lost to hearing, for as he dozed a wild and agonizing fantasia possessed his brain: Poppy spoke to him, surrounded as ever by her children. “Cass,” she said sadly, “I know,” and moved away, and now he was once again with Francesca. In some sun-drenched field strewn with the cup-shapes of anemones, white, purple, and rose, they strolled together and the clear bright day was filled with the sound of her soft chatter.
“Mia madre andava in chiesa ogni mattina, ma adesso mio padre.
…” And she fell quiet, sadly, and now together they were crossing a stream, and she raised the hem of her skirt to expose her soft sweet thighs. Was this indeed something beyond a dream? For on the bank beside her, on a grassy mound where willows cast a constant cool shade, he was naked as, at last, was she, and he held her warm body tightly in his arm.
“Carissima,”
he was whispering and he was pressing long kisses on her mouth—and he felt her hands, too, loving and soft on his chest—and in her hair. Gently he touched the nipples of her heavy young breasts, even more gently that tender warm wet inner place which brought the word
“Amore!”
to her lips like the cry from a madrigal … yet now there was a sound in his ears, a rumbling, as of the confluence of traffic from a hundred drumming streets, and the meadow, the anemones, the willows—his blessed Francesca—all were gone. A smell of putrefaction swarmed through his brain, a sweet-sour outrageous stench of dissolution, of death. On some wet black shore, foul with the blackness of death’s gulf, he was searching for an answer and a key. In words whose meaning he did not know he called out through the gloom, and the echoed sound came back to him as if spoken in an outlandish tongue. Somewhere, he knew, there was light but like a shifting phantom it eluded him; voiceless, he strove to give voice to the cry which now, too late, awakening, he knew. “Rise up, Michele, rise up and walk!” he roared. And for the briefest space of time, between dark and light, he thought he saw the man, healed now, cured, staunch and upright, striding toward him.
O rise up Mi-chele, my brother, rise!

“Sharon’s a Johnny Ray fan, she can’t stand Frankie Laine,” an American voice chirruped somewhere above him. He awoke slowly, with a dull headache, everywhere drenched in sweat. He was racked with lingering sorrow, lingering desire. Pulling himself to a sitting position from the place where he had lain sprawled across the seat, he found himself alone in the car, now motionless, absorbing the full blast of the sun in the familiar parking lot. Two chattering bobbysoxers rosy with acne, in babushkas and blue jeans, both of them licking on popsicles, strolled past discussing culture: “Sharon can’t stand anybody but Johnny.” He was stupefied with drink and the remnants of the all too brief nap; he looked for Mason, saw no one now save a blond soldier with an incredibly square head who strode whistling toward the PX. Sudden panic seized him. Maybe he’s not going to get the P.A.S. he thought. Maybe for some reason he’s going to get all his booze and his groceries and he’s not going to get that P.A.S. after all. The bugger just might be going to hold out on me. Half-stumbling down on the asphalt as he hooked his foot beneath the seat, he lurched from the car and weaved toward the squat, barrack-like PX, muttering to himself, sweating like a Percheron, and belatedly aware (the flushed, tight-lipped look, the suddenly averted
eyes
of some Army wife told him this) that he was dis- playing through his trousers a large erection. He paused and composed himself and then proceeded toward the glass door, where, pushing through along with a crowd of sport-shirted countrymen, he was met by a frigid blast of conditioned air and a gumchewing master sergeant with mean blue eyes and a large scuttleshaped chin. “Where’s your pass, buddy?” he said, gazing up from his deck. “I’m looking for a friend,” Cass said. “You gotta have a pass.” “I don’t have a pass,” Cass began to explain, “my friend has a pass and I usually—” “Look, soljer,” said the sergeant, laying aside a copy of
Action Comics
and gazing at him without sympathy, “I don’t make the rules. Uncle Sambo makes the rules. To get into this Post Exchange you’ve
gotta have a pass.
Signed by the CO. and endorsed by the adjutant. How long you been here? What outfit you in? Guard Company? H. & S.?” Cass felt sounds like sobs welling up in his chest, a red mist of fury began to glaze his eyes. “And another thing, buddy, let me give you a tip,” the sergeant went on, “if I was you when I got into civilian clothes I’d be a little bit more careful about my appearance. Especially when you’re taking a load on. You look like something the cat dragged in, soljer. I’d just go somewhere and sleep it off if I was you.” For a long moment, incredulous and confused, stirring with insult, outrage, Cass stood looking at the sergeant, mouth agape; through the icebox air, muted, sweet, floated a syrupy confection of recorded dance music, saxophones, clarinets, and whining strings; from some other source, competing with the goo, a crooner softly blubbered, adding a mawkish dissonance. He smelled a drug-store smell, as of ice cream, milk, and spilled Coca-Cola. One more word out of him, he was thinking slowly, dimly, deliberately, and I’ll flatten his bleeding nose. And he was not precisely sure, but in his daze and stupor he did seem to be making a clenched fist and a lurching gesture in the sergeant’s direction when he felt a touch on his arm and then saw Mason, intervening. “That’s all right, Sergeant,” he was saying, “let him in on my pass, if you will. He’s—uh—my
man,
and I’ll need him to help carry some things out.” He turned to Cass, his voice ill-tempered: “You’re a big help, Buster Brown. I tried to wake you up for fifteen minutes. Let him through, will you, Sergeant?” “Yes, sir. Right you are, sir.” And so, trailing Mason, he pushed into the place—his
man,
now. It was close to the last bleeding straw… .

He felt himself slowly going. The booze he might have tolerated. Or he might have sustained himself even in the depths of pure exhaustion. But booze in company with his exhaustion (how many hours of sleep had he averaged daily in the past weeks —four? three?—he did not know, aware only of a weariness so profound that it threatened thought, sanity, threatened sleep itself, which in turn was so racked and haunted by his nightmarish six-times-daily ritual hike that even in his dreams his feet kept steadily plodding over rocks and boulders, his mind counting landmark cypresses, his fingers pumping life and sustenance into Michele’s ever-outstretched arm)—whiskey and exhaustion were too much, and together they conspired to unseat his senses. “Mah BAH-lews will be yo’ BAH-lews,” the voice was crooning, in a vindictive whimper, “some day, baby”—and as Cass trailed after Mason toward the food market he felt overpowered, in spite of himself, by a kind of numb, despairing hilarity. In front of him a red-faced rawboned Army matron in slacks loomed up. “Harry!” she crowed. “They don’t
have
any Reddi-wip!” And Cass, squeezing past her, mumbled, “Merciful God, think of that.” The remark unnoticed, he passed on in Mason’s train, staggering slightly athwart pyramidal towers of canned soup, dog food, and toilet paper, and blundered for a moment into a queue—between two hulking figures, one of them, he dimly discerned, a major in crisp khaki, who scowled and said: “Just a minute there, you. Go to the end of the line.” He giggled, hearing his own lethargic dreamlike voice: “Don’t you believe what they say, Major, peacetime Army ain’t all a bunch of bums, why take you, now, you look like a fine upstanding clean-cut …” but at this moment felt Mason’s clutch on his arm, heard Mason’s smooth apologies—
Just a joker, Major, don’t pay any attention
—and now Mason’s voice in his ear, the peremptory command:
Straighten up, you idiot. I’ll let you make a clown of yourself tonight, any time you want. But not here. Do you want me to get that drug or not?
“Sho’, Mason,” he was saying. “Sho’, Sho’, buddy. Anything you say, anything at all.” Shortly after this, briefly separated from Mason in the jostling throng, he found himself half-sprawled across the camera counter amid stacked-up orange boxes of Kodachrome film, amid lenses and light meters and leather camera cases, solemnly sighting through a Brownie. “But what I mean is,” he was cajoling the corporal-clerk, “what I really mean is, is it made for all eternity?” He had begun to wobble dangerously. “I mean can I take and snap a little shot of Myrtle and all the kids, and maybe Mom and Dad too, and Buddy, he’s my brother, and Smitty, he’s my best pal and—” But now he went no further, for almost simultaneously with the clerk’s shouted “Bates, c’mere and help me get this drunk out of here!” he felt Mason’s presence again, heard the apologies, all followed by a moment of blankness so perfect that it was as if someone had stolen up upon him and, quite painlessly and suddenly, bludgeoned him with a sledge hammer. Shortly after (two minutes, five minutes, time had escaped him) he came astonishingly, brilliantly alive, discovering that in some fashion he had acquired a child’s rocket gun and that now, with this noisemaker at rightshoulder-arms, he was weaving precariously among the counters, singing at the top of his voice. “‘Gawd … bless …
A-murrica!’”
he bellowed. “‘Land … ’at I … love!’” Sidestepping some khaki arm outstretched to intercept him, he executed a deft marching manual—
wan, hup, reep, jaw
—and lurched blindly into a pyramid of Quaker Oats boxes, which flew apart with the impact and came down around his feet in a myriad of separate, puffy explosions. “‘Stand beside her!’ “ he heard himself roar, tramping on. “‘And guide her …’ Gangway!” Stark truth seized him even as he marched—he was courting total disaster—and desperate, prayerful words
(Slotkin, old father, old rabbi, what shall I do? Teach me now in my need.)
formed a brief and passionate litany on his lips; but wildly beyond control, he marched steadily through the place, scattering dogs, captains, colonels, children, shoppers, bellowing imperial commands. “Gangway! Out of the way, you Army trash! Make way for a real live foursquare Amurrican!”
Zock!
he went with the rocket gun, taking aim at a cowering Army wife.
Zock!
“That one’s to pay back the Founding Fathers!”
Zock!
A portly colonel, quivering, blazing with outrage, came into his line of fire.
Zock!
“That one’s to pay for the right honorable lady ambassador!”
Zock!
“That one there’s to pay for foreign aid! Globaloney!”
Zock!
It was, he knew numbly, the end of the trail. A shudder ran up his back, and the familiar sour taste, presaging the onslaught of oblivion, rushed up beneath his tongue even as he took sight upon a bespectacled major and his wife, aiming to get two ducks with one blast. “Here’s one to comfort the shade of Thomas Jefferson!” he howled. And the rocket gun, expiring, uttered one last feeble and uncertain
Zock!
as he felt strong arms seize him at last, and as the day reeled and heaved and collapsed into darkness… .

“You’re lucky you didn’t end up in the guardhouse, dollbaby,” he recalled Mason saying some hours later, as they drove back by way of Sorrento. It was a ride full of lights and darks, strange shifting shadows, and a half-sleep composed of abstruse and per- plexing dreams. Totally worn out, he spoke not a word to Mason, even to respond to such singular remarks (though he was careful to store them up in his memory, for future reference and action) as: “You can thank heaven that I got you off the hook, I think you can see how utterly dependent upon me you’ve become.” Even when, somewhere above Positano, he regained strength and sobriety enough to open his eyes drowsily and look at Mason, hearing him say this: “In the complete wreck you’ve become, dollbaby, I don’t think you can fail to understand why I might be determined to get into her pants. Of what earthly use is a
lush
to her? After all, someone’s got to give her a good workout—” He kept silent, biding his time. He would have his day. He closed his eyes again and slept all the way to Amalfi, where he was to meet Poppy at the
festa.

Yet curiously, inexplicably—not to say unforgivably—Mason at last did hold out on him: he did not have the drug in his possession after all. As Cass got out of the car in Amalfi and made a motion to pluck the bottle out of a carton in the back seat, Mason slammed the door abruptly and gazed at him coldly from his place behind the wheel, gunning the motor in savage, sharp bursts. “Hands off, Buster Brown,” he said curtly, with venom in his voice. “I’m going to keep that stuff until you
come to your senses.
Look me up tonight.” And he stared at Cass with an expression filled with such inchoate, mingled emotions that Cass thought that Mason, too, was about to take leave of his wits. “Look me up tonight,” he repeated in a queer choked voice, “maybe we’ll be able to strike some sort of bargain.” “But for Christ sake, Mason, you said—” Cass began. But suddenly the Cadillac slid away into the dusky afternoon, and vanished up the road toward Sambuco. What sort of bargain had he in mind? Cass never found out, but as he stood there that afternoon on the piazza in Amalfi, swaying slightly, stunned by what Mason had done and by the abruptness of his departure, he was aware that this last look of Mason’s, composed in part of such hatred, was made up in at least equal part of something else not quite love but its loathsome resemblance.

I guess now I’ll really have to rob the son of a bitch, he thought, as he went into a
drogheria
and bought a bottle of wine. Then after all of this is over I’ll sober up. I’ll sober up and give him a fat lip.

He was really quite ill. When he met Poppy and the children at the seaside
festa,
she peered at him closely, observed that he looked “gruesome,” and insisted that they go up to Sambuco at once. Through the carnival dust he looked at her: her brow was beaded with sweat, and she was quite agitated, and as he listened to her she seemed extraordinarily pretty; what she was saying he barely heard but he knew that every word she spoke was expressing nothing but concern for him. And with sorrow he realized that for a longer time than was morally or humanly reasonable she might as well never have existed.