The Favorite Game (3 page)

T
he Japs and Germans were beautiful enemies. They had buck teeth or cruel monocles and commanded in crude English with much saliva. They started the war because of their nature.

Red Cross ships must be bombed, all parachutists machine-gunned. Their uniforms were stiff and decorated with skulls. They kept right on eating and laughed at appeals for mercy.

They did nothing warlike without a close-up of perverted glee.

Best of all, they tortured. To get secrets, to make soap, to set examples to towns of heroes. But mostly they tortured for fun, because of their nature.

Comic books, movies, radio programmes centred their entertainment around the fact of torture. Nothing fascinates a child like a tale of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Calvary to Dachau.

European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.

T
hey had Lisa, they had the garage, they needed string, red string for the sake of blood.

They couldn’t enter the deep garage without red string.

Breavman remembered a coil.

The kitchen drawer is a step removed from the garbage can, which is a step removed from the outside garbage can, which is a step removed from the armadillo-hulked automatic garbage trucks, which are a step removed from the mysterious stinking garbage heaps by the edge of the St. Lawrence.

“A nice glass of chocolate milk?”

He wished his mother had some respect for importance.

Oh, it is a most perfect kitchen drawer, even when you are in a desperate hurry.

Besides the tangled string box there are candle-butts from years of Sabbath evenings kept in thrifty anticipation of hurricanes, brass keys to locks which have been changed (it is difficult to throw out anything so precise and crafted as a metal key), straight pens with ink-caked nibs which could be cleaned if anyone took the trouble (his mother instructed the maid), toothpicks they never used (especially for picking teeth), the broken pair of scissors (the new pair was kept in another drawer: ten years later it was still referred to as “the new pair”), exhausted rubber rings from home preserving bottles (pickled tomatoes, green, evil, tight-skinned), knobs, nuts, all the homey debris which avarice protects.

He fingered blindly in the string box because the drawer can never be opened all the way.

“A little cooky, a nice piece of honey cake, there’s a whole box of macaroons?”

Ah! bright red.

The welts dance all over Lisa’s imaginary body.

“Strawberries,” his mother called like a good-bye.

There is a way children enter garages, barns, attics, the same way they enter great halls and family chapels. Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached.
They have the dark reverent air of immense kitchen drawers. They are friendly museums.

It was dark inside, smelled of oil and last year’s leaves which splintered as they moved. Bits of metal, the edges of shovels and cans glimmered damply.

“You’re the American,” said Krantz.

“No, I’m not,” said Lisa.

“You’re the American,” said Breavman. “Two against one.”

The ack-ack of Breavman and Krantz was very heavy. Lisa came on a daring manoeuvre across the darkness, arms outstretched.

“Eheheheheheheh,” stuttered her machine guns.

She’s hit.

She went into a spectacular nose dive, bailed out at the last moment. Swaying from one foot to another she floated down the sky, looking below, knowing her number was up.

She’s a perfect dancer, Breavman thought.

Lisa watched the Krauts coming.

“
Achtung. Heil Hitler!
You are a prisoner of the Third Reich.”

“I swallowed the plans.”

“Vee haf methods.”

She is led to lie face down on the cot.

“Just on the bum.”

Geez, they’re white, they’re solid white.

Her buttocks were whipped painlessly with red string.

“Turn over,” Breavman commanded.

“The rule was: only on the bum,” Lisa protested.

“That was last time,” argued Krantz the legalist.

She had to take off her top, too, and the cot disappeared from under her and she floated in the autumnal gloom of the garage, two feet above the stone floor.

Oh my, my, my.

Breavman didn’t take his turn whipping. There were white flowers growing out of all her pores.

“What’s the matter with him? I’m getting dressed.”

“The Third Reich will not tolerate insubordination,” said Krantz.

“Should we hold her?” said Breavman.

“She’ll make a lot of noise,” said Krantz.

Now outside of the game, she made them turn while she put on her dress. The sunlight she let in while leaving turned the garage into a garage. They sat in silence, the red whip lost.

“Let’s go, Breavman.”

“She’s perfect, isn’t she, Krantz?”

“What’s so perfect about her?

“You saw her. She’s perfect.”

“So long, Breavman.”

Breavman followed him out of the yard.

“She’s perfect, Krantz, didn’t you see?”

Krantz plugged his ears with his forefingers. They passed Bertha’s Tree. Krantz began to run.

“She was really perfect, you have to admit it, Krantz.”

Krantz was faster.

O
ne of Breavman’s early sins was to sneak a look at the gun. His father kept it in a night-table between his and his wife’s bed.

It was a huge .38 in a thick leather case. Name, rank and regiment engraved on the barrel. Lethal, angular, precise, it smouldered in the dark drawer with dangerous potential. The metal was always cold.

The sound of the machinery when Breavman pulled the hammer back was the marvellous sound of all murderous scientific achievement. Click! like the smacking of cogwheel lips.

The little blunt bullets took the scratch of a thumbnail.

If there were Germans coming down the street …

When his father married he swore to kill any man who ever made advances towards his wife. His mother told the story as a joke. Breavman believed the words. He had a vision of a corpse-heap of all the men who had ever smiled at her.

His father had an expensive heart doctor named Farley. He was around so much that they might have called him Uncle if they had been that sort of family. While his father was gasping under the oxygen-tent in the Royal Victoria, Doctor Farley kissed his mother in the hallway of their house. It was a gentle kiss to console an unhappy woman, between two people who had known each other through many crises.

Breavman wondered whether or not he’d better get the gun and finish him off.

Then who’d repair his father?

Not long ago Breavman watched his mother read the
Star
. She put down the paper and a Chekhovian smile of lost orchards softened her face. She had just read Farley’s obituary notice.

“Such a handsome man.” She seemed to be thinking of sad Joan Crawford movies. “He wanted me to marry him.”

“Before or after my father died?

“Don’t be so foolish.”

His father was a tidy man, upturned his wife’s sewing basket when he thought it was getting messy, raged when his family’s slippers were not carefully lined under respective beds.

He was a fat man who laughed easily with everybody but his brothers.

He was so fat and his brothers were tall and thin and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, why should the fat one die, didn’t he have enough being fat and breathless, why not one of the handsome ones?

The gun proved he was once a warrior.

His brother’s pictures were in the papers in connection with the war effort. He gave his son his first book,
The Romance of the King’s Army
, a thick volume praising British regiments.

K-K-K-Katy, he sang when he could.

What he really loved was machinery. He would go miles to see a machine which cut a pipe this way instead of that. His family thought him a fool. He lent money to his friends and employees without question. He was given poetry books for his bar mitzvah. Breavman has the leather books now and startles at each uncut page.

“And read these, too, Lawrence.”

He looked at his father in the crisp, white bed, always neat, still smelling of Vitalis. There was something sour inside the softening body, some enemy, some limpness of the heart.

He tore the books as his father weakened. He didn’t know why he hated the careful diagrams and coloured plates. We do. It was to scorn the world of detail, information, precision, all the false knowledge which cannot intrude on decay.

Breavman roamed his house waiting for a shot to ring out. That would teach them, the great successes, the eloquent speakers, the synagogue builders, all the grand brothers that walked ahead into public glory. He waited for the blast of a .38 which would clean the
house and bring a terrible change. The gun was right beside the bed. He waited for his father to execute his heart.

“Get me the medals out of the top drawer.”

Breavman brought them to the bed. The reds and golds of the ribbons ran into each other as in a watercolour. With some effort his father pinned them on Breavman’s sweater.

Breavman stood at attention ready to receive the farewell address.

“Don’t you like them? You’re always looking at them.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Stop stretching yourself like a damn fool. They’re yours.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Well, go out and play with them. Tell your mother I don’t want to see anyone and that includes my famous brothers.”

Breavman went downstairs and unlocked the closet which held his father’s fishing equipment. He spent hours in wonder, putting the great salmon rods together, winding and unwinding the copper wire, handling the dangerous flies and hooks.

How could his father have wielded these beautiful, heavy weapons, that swollen body on the crisp, white bed?

Where was the body in rubber boots that waded up rivers?

M
any years later, telling all this, Breavman interrupted himself:

“Shell, how many men know of those little scars in your earlobes? How many besides me, the original archaeologist of earlobes?”

“Not as many as you think.”

“I don’t mean the two or three or fifty that kissed them with their everyday lips. But in your fantasies, how many did something impossible with their mouths?”

“Lawrence, please, we’re lying here together. You’re trying to spoil the night somehow.”

“I’d say battalions.”

She did not reply and her silence removed her body from him a little distance.

“Tell me some more about Bertha, Krantz and Lisa.”

“Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else.”

“Then let’s be quiet together.”

“I saw Lisa before that time in the garage. We must have been five or six.”