Sign Languages (9 page)

“Better than anything, I'd say.”

A woman's and a man's. Then laughter. And I see myself gasping for air like when the wind howled down the stovepipe and smoked us out into the open.

Angels, Mothermae?

The sounds of them crystal clear and floating on the heat waves. Bright and distinct right at my feet. Passing through my head like a breeze.

But I'm not a believer, and so I scrambled past the tangle of greenbriers just in time to see them drift around the bend. In a long low wooden boat. A canoe. Their voices still coming back over the sandbars and the flat rock they almost scrape. The first and only time I've ever seen anyone for any reason on Bridgett.

White angels if angels, Mothermae. Angels with parasols and fishing tackle.

I turned around to glean the mess of rubbish, teasing out the tight bundle until I screamed, yelled, heard my voice for the first time in days, weeks. Louder than I've ever heard it before.

I beat it up the bank, heard it coming up after me. “Oh,” it kept saying. “Oh, oh, oh,” like great gusts of wind.

Below me the fingernails painted red, chipped, the hand crooked, pill bugs all over it, up against the grate, bundled in the tight dry weeds.

I held the sign; we swayed together. The sun right overhead for a long time. I thought of Bruno Hauptman, saw the picture of the baby they found. Stuffed up in a culvert like a parcel of things you ought to want to look at.

Now I laugh. Then I laughed too, later. “You're getting old, you goddamn sure are,” I'd said. I begin to sort through this month's deposit. But there's been little rain to bring stuff down. There's nothing here, but I'm not disappointed. It happens a lot during the dead of summer. Once there was a whole book, its pages barely faded.
The Waitress Murders
. I still read it once in a while. Catalogs. Huge pieces of cloth that come in handy. I think maybe the bicycle basket came from here.

Now the heavy plaster hand is on the windowsill. I put a candle in its palm. It was probably from one of those store dummies. I love to remember that gray-headed man scrambling up the bank yelling. And after I'd had the laugh, I wondered if my voice had carried down the creek's channel to the people in the canoe. Had they said, “Shhh… listen… what's that? Listen!”

“My God, it's a person.”

There's a chance all that didn't happen the same day, the day I discovered the grate. But I think it's so.

Gifts from God, Mothermae? Sometimes there are vague and distant noises. The rumble of thunder, the hiss of snakes from out of the mouth of the pipe. But it's not Baby Jesus turning his head this way, is it? Most likely it's a trick of the wind, or the pipe travels under a road, opens near some houses or a factory.

Coming out of the cold into the spring is the best time. I'm already thinking about planting some peppers. When I want to talk I'll go into town to the priests. I'll ask them about Mary, say I've read those brochures and they're interesting. Get the two of them really going. Or I'll take the shovel and walk down and dig up the asphalt patch. I've done that before. And when they show up in their yellow dump truck, I'll come the long way out of the woods without anything in my hair or beard. Sit and drink Pepsis with the black boys stripped to the waist and shining. They think I'm a hobo. They ask me questions about my travels that make the white foreman laugh and shake his head. I answer them as best I can.

FRIENDS OF BECCARI

August 3rd
Still on the banks of the Trinity

David Fisher
The Hotel Charybdis
Taormina, Sicily

My dearest Dave,

I'm sorry I haven't answered your last two letters, but much has happened the last six weeks. How are you and Marta? Here all seems well enough (only I'm suffering from the last month of summer heat). B. is relieved she's finished here with no summer session and, at Harper State next semester, only two courses. The children are fine. As usual, J. is still full of music and song; L. suffers from the imminent departure. She spends all day outside at play.

I wonder how the book on D. M. Thomas is coming? Only last night I decided to open the Old Bushmill's single malt, sit on the deck (next to the table crowded with ailing and dead bonsai—you were right, as usual, I don't spend the necessary time with the little bastards. And now, with the move in a couple of weeks, maybe it's best they all shed their leaves), and think of you. By the time you do get back—via Bolzano, Lake Como, etc.—we'll be settled in and the new place, new semester, new town (smaller but cheaper, I hope) will surround us.

Anyway, I sat on the deck and drank, missed our conversations, and realized I couldn't sit, drink, remain silent about what's happened though I don't know what to make of it all yet; though I think, in many ways, it answers a hundred questions we've asked each other over the last four years since you drove in from Phillips College and hated all the right things with a fine sense of humor.

I tried my best to drop it last month; I hoped it'd be smothered by the impending cross-country move. But somehow that only tantalizes it, provokes it. And your absence has me hulking through the department, unable to talk, everything quickly becoming even more foreign than it was the first time I saw it all. I know you'll understand.

Of course what our lovely writers do is fascinating, you know. Absolutely so. But it's not completely right because it does nothing to explain what I saw in Tegucigalpa. When we taught Poe, Dostoyevsky, Calvino, many, many others, we emphasized their distortions, bulging seams, oddities of time and place, repeated movements, sudden illnesses as exciting ways into the same old reality, some new way of exploring the same old human situations. They all just teased reality through a bit of illusion. Maybe the protagonist was insane and his madness gave him new insight or a frighteningly clear perspective.

Though the character is a murderer like Mathias in
The Voyeur
, he remains a man, and the world he distorts into repeating patterns found on beaches, tablecloths, suitcase linings is still an island the reader takes as real with sand, salt breezes, sea gulls. All these invented perspectives ways of seeing the same old things with vitality. Didn't we tantalize our students with the insights and outlooks of deranged men, ill men who reinterpreted the ordinary, the static, while we talked on and on in comfortable classrooms with hissing radiators and flaking paint?

It's method we admired, isn't it? New ways of seeing old dilemmas. But the world was always the world around them—a world of bridges over rivers, whores with tuberculosis—not something free-floating and amorphous with mysterious, unlimited possibilities. We certainly took comfort in that. In that, and in knowing, beyond anything else, that men sulking in dark cellars, writhing in nightmares, writing fantastic books were always men. Men as we understood them—even in madness, even as murderers.

We cagily with great ease of mind, told our classes there were only a dozen themes available, all the rest is brilliant variation. We were smug, weren't we? But none of this explains my brother and Odoardo Beccari.

I'm sure you remember how often I've spoken of my brother. I know, when I wrote you last, I mentioned how he'd taken off on an old-style world tour in the spring. His was the biggest success of the Clarke family. Where I never “quite got through with school,” as mother quips, his was a meteoric rise. After high school and the Navy (anything, he said, to escape the late ‘50s) he finished college at UT, then went into the state legislature while in law school, etc., etc. Now, at fifty, he's a hell of a criminal defense lawyer in Patroon. Remember we once talked about the Hopkins case—the papers termed him “The Beast”—and how my brother turned down the offer to defend? But those are the sorts of cases he's taken since losing his bid for state prosecutor general back in ‘74.

For years he had a tremendous impact on me. He was the first person in our family to go to college, almost assuring I would, making my own children's education a certainty. He'd get me to memorize and recite Kipling poems when I was six or seven and he was home on furlough. We love one another in the typical Clarke fashion—nothing demonstrable at all. Tight-lipped, hands in pockets, expectations present but unspoken.

But over the last few years there's been a change with him. It's so noticeable even my mother has commented on it, though she's put it down to absence of familial responsibilities, etc. Approaching fifty is dreadful, I'm sure (and you know better than me, right?). With him it's made for a certain restlessness and listlessness simultaneously. It's almost (and here's where I'm sure we discussed him as an example) proved our point that one drifts into conservatism because it's less complicated (offers a clear right and wrong view, good and bad), seems the natural outcome of age and its subsequent tendency to withdraw and avoid contact with what's ugly, complicated, and sorry in the world.

Anyway, without children, he's poured himself into the law, and in it, I think, he's passed from some idealistic desire to help the unfortunate to a dwelling on the unsavory character of his clients, their melodramatic and awful plights; most of all, on their refusal to accept the consequences of their actions. His politics have gone from McGovern to Reagan and beyond (he holds some absolutely horrific views on personal freedoms vs. the state's power, etc.). I know we talked all about this when we discussed some of our colleagues, whom we dubbed “The General Staff.” And we noticed that almost axiomatically as compassion lessened, stature and bucks grew. So did feelings of disappointment, isolation. Now the naive and youthful worldview was something to be embarrassed about like a vestigial tail, an open fly. They were grownups now and only children saw things without wise cynicism.

Sorry I'm drifting, though I wanted you to recall what I've said about my brother and what we together have said about the way the world's turning lately. Now, quite unexpectedly, I'm afraid I may have an answer for such stuff.

Here's the important point of all this; the simple but mind-boggling thing which outdistances all our lovely writers who altered the man and the world in ways we could understand and accept, indeed applaud and admire. What the Friends of Beccari can do is something utterly fantastic and profoundly disturbing.

Allan wired me from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, about six weeks ago. He sent me airfare with a cable asking me to join him for a week or ten days and saying we'd fly back together. B. was a bit upset at the whole idea of, as she said, “the boys getting to play,” but she didn't really mind. She and Allan have never gotten along very well for all sorts of reasons, and besides, her father was ill with his prostate again. So, she chided me but was finally eager about the trip. She and the girls decided they'd spend the time at her parents', easing her mother's duties.

He'd left four months earlier, closed down the office, let the secretaries go, and simply slipped away without an itinerary. Mother was dismayed at the immaturity of it all. I was delighted because I realized he needed immediate relief from his job. And, I suppose, I hoped he'd mellow his cynicism somehow and return some sort of optimistic liberal as he'd once been when I was in high school (In the state legislature, he'd authored bills broadening the state's pitiful social services). Anyway, he'd once been my hero and I wanted the best for him. A trip that'd provide him with whatever he needed. Though I guess I foolishly believed he only needed time alone in some exotic place to shake a fifty-year-old man's summing up of things. I honestly don't know what I really expected to find in Tegucigalpa, his last stop before coming home. I never once thought about those Kipling poems he'd made me memorize, or his romantic view of the military (even, honest-to-God, after four years in the Pacific with the Navy!). All of which had been given to me too, a legacy from him. But I'd stopped with it years ago through Sassoon, etc. Though I readily admit it can still fascinate. Why else do I so enjoy
The Raj Quartet
, all those ancient Bengal Lancer movies? Now it all wells up and frightens me because of the possibilities.

Anyway, he wired that he'd arrived and I flew from Houston to Tegucigalpa. I'm not a good traveler, as you well know, so all the way I was disoriented, fearful of foreign languages, saw myself as homeless, unable to eat or drink in comfort. Stepping out of the plane, I encountered the unruly crush of hundreds of people. Though it was cooler and less humid than in Houston, the tropical sun seemed sharper, closer.

I had the address of his hotel, but out in front of the terminal, standing before one of a hundred battered Toyotas, was a shabbily dressed wiry fellow who rushed up to me with a sealed envelope. Torn open, it revealed a note from my brother, though hastily written (I guessed then) because it was his handwriting but not clearly so. In it he told me to stay with the bearer, who'd bring us together.

Four hours earlier I was in traffic on the way to Houston Intercontinental, but now it was all different—just off-key and foreign enough to exclude me without fascinating.

I have few impressions of Tegucigalpa. It seemed full of cars and the staggering vegetation of tropical places (though Florida's my only true reference). All the time I was rereading, refolding the note. I had no expectations really. But I had thought we'd meet in his hotel, have dinner, etc. And though this was hardly upsetting, it was unexpected enough to worry me.

We left the city, at least its center, and wound up a hillside and turned abruptly into an almost hidden driveway—a brass plaque and opened, heavy iron gates blurred past. Here was a wide pearly gravel drive traveling even higher up the hillside until it ended in a small parking lot full of expensive vintage cars. As I paid the driver, who remained in the car and passed my light bag out the window with some difficulty, I heard the sounds of powerfully stroked tennis balls and splashes into water, though neither court nor pool was visible through the thick but well-manicured trees and shrubs.