The Heat of the Sun (2 page)

To others, the victim was neither Pinkerton II nor the hapless Japanese girl; the one to be pitied was the young Lieutenant Pinkerton, drawn into the seductive lure of the Orient. The Pinkerton
affair, in this view, was a sort of moral Pearl Harbor: Yellow Peril striking again, with Pinkerton II a fitting symbol that East is East, West is West, and never the twain should meet.

Next year, to my astonishment, marks an anniversary: forty years since my story’s end. It is time to begin. I am an old man, and tired; sometimes I wish I could surge
free of the past, like a Saturn V rocket, shedding stages on its way out of the atmosphere. Perhaps, in setting down my story, I will achieve some freedom from it. For years I refused to talk about
the Pinkertons. But history cannot be left to Mr Burl Blakey. This book will appear only after my death. I shall paint no monsters. I shall level no blame. My purpose is simply to tell the story:
not the definitive story (for where is that to be found?), but the story as it appeared to me, from my first meeting with Trouble to the end of my association with his family, many years later.
Perhaps the story is not mine to tell. In the lives of the Pinkertons, I was, I suppose, a bystander, but one well placed on more than one occasion to witness the unfolding of their story.

It is the saddest story I know. The ending is so out of proportion with the beginning. Yet for me that ending is implicit in every step that precedes it: that eternal moment when the atomic
cloud, one summer’s morning, bloomed above the port of Nagasaki, where, many years before, a young man had dallied with a girl known as Butterfly.

ACT ONE

‘You’re sure this is worth it?’

He twisted around. ‘Trust me.’

The hill was low, a gentle incline, but I sweated and my heart beat hard. Grimly, I leaned on my ashplant and said it wasn’t easy; Le Vol replied that nothing worthwhile ever was.

Winter in Vermont, I thought, was going to be cold. The days were drawing in. All the way up from the playing fields, the trees beside the lane had cast down their leaves: topaz and bronze,
ochre and vermilion, saffron and scarlet and burnt orange. They filled me with a strange, exultant despair. They stuck to my shoes, to the end of my ashplant.

I had been surprised when Le Vol asked me to the place he called Nirvana. In my first days at Blaze he had hardly spoken to me, even though he slept in the cubicle next to mine. On the day I
arrived I stepped towards him nervously, holding out my hand; but when I told him my name he only grunted, flopped down on his cot with a squeak of springs, and buried his face in a book that he
produced from a pocket of his jacket like a magician’s cards.

Why he had warmed towards me I was never quite certain. Perhaps he saw that I was unsuited, like him, to the boisterous world of Blaze. On Wednesday afternoons, when there were no classes and
the fields were clamorous with football, hockey, and baseball, Le Vol and I had exemptions: I, for my ashplant; Le Vol, for the sickness that had laid him up the year before and still left him
weak. We were expected to remain in the library, stiff-backed before the elderly lady librarian, but the lady, ever-reliably, always fell asleep.

The cries from the playing fields had faded and the ground had grown level. Le Vol beckoned me around a clump of trees. Quivering in the tawny light lay a graveyard. I was puzzled. Nirvana, I
had imagined, would be a hut or, perhaps, a forest bower.

The graveyard looked abandoned, a remnant of early settlers. Weeds grew riotously. I peered at green, cracked headstones. Born Lincolnshire. Born Sussex. Born Warwickshire. And died in Vermont,
long ago. I pictured flickering ghosts. I had thought of America as new, raw, but, even in America, history tugged implacably beneath the crust of the present day.

I said to Le Vol: ‘Why do you call it Nirvana?’

‘Don’t be silly. This isn’t Nirvana.’ He strode towards a curtain of vines that seethed, thick and prickly, between the trees. Leaning down, he parted the way. ‘A
tunnel, I’m afraid. You’ll have to crawl.’

‘You don’t seem to appreciate I’m a cripple.’

Bent double, I pushed my way after Le Vol through a low, dense darkness. We emerged into a vault, a grey, cobwebbed cell with two heavy-slabbed tombs jammed against opposing walls and a narrow
walkway between them, carpeted with crunching leaves. A rusted lantern hung from the ceiling. Part of the back wall had crumbled, leaving a jagged slot of window that disclosed a view down the
hill, across the many-coloured trees, towards the school buildings.

‘The perfect lookout,’ said Le Vol.

‘For what?’ Gingerly, I eased myself into position on a tomb. ‘This place stinks.’

‘Only mould.’ He pushed back his coily red hair. A long-limbed, untidy fellow, he was inky-fingered, bitten-nailed, and his clothes did not quite fit him.

‘
And
it’s cold,’ I said.

‘But I couldn’t keep Nirvana from you until next summer.’ Le Vol, on the tomb opposite mine, drew forth a pouch of tobacco. My nerves were piano strings, waiting to be struck.
I told myself I must act like other fellows: all I had to do was act like the others.

Several sets of initials, a penis, and a libellous statement about President McKinley had been scratched into the stone. ‘Who else knows about this place?’ I said.

‘No one.’

‘Lately, you mean.’

Firing up his pipe, Le Vol furrowed his brow with a contemplative air, and I asked him how he had found Nirvana.

‘I was running away, actually. From Hunter.’

‘You’re not in trouble with Scranway?’

Eddie Scranway, I had learned soon enough, was the bully of Blaze Academy. Three years our senior, he was a ruthless fellow, feared by all, and had a golden retriever called Hunter. Only
Scranway, whose father headed the school’s Board of Trustees, was allowed to keep a dog.

‘It was last week. He was on the rampage – you know,’ said Le Vol.

I didn’t really: not yet. ‘And you pressed yourself into the foliage?’

‘And found myself in a magic world.’ He passed the pipe to me. His hands, long and veined, hung between parted, updrawn knees. How many others, I wondered, had he brought to Nirvana?
I leaned against the cold wall. Puffing the pipe, I coughed a little, but only at first. Birdsong and intermittent gusts of breeze were all that disturbed the silence.

‘So how long have you had that stick?’ Le Vol asked.

‘I told you, I’m a cripple. I’ve always had it.’ Easier to lie. Why think of Paris? Why think of a green boxy sedan slamming into me on the Champs-Elysées? That I
had once been different was of no account: I was who I was now, and time would not turn back.

Le Vol mused: ‘At least you’ve had some advantages. Just think, going around the world! And there’s me, who’d appreciate it, buried in the provinces.’ He was a
minister’s son from St Paul, Minnesota. ‘Then they send me here. Damn my father! You’ve no family at all?’

‘Just my aunt. She’s all that’s left.’

‘You’re lucky. Family’s a terrible thing.’

‘Only people who
have
families say that.’ My deepest wish was to see my father alive again.

Le Vol was eager to hear about my travels. This embarrassed me: what had I been but my father’s passenger? Through the jagged window, Blaze Hall flared in the failing light. The main block
of the school was a fine red-brick mansion, an English country house spirited across the ocean.

‘Have you thought about this war?’ Le Vol gestured with the pipe, as if, of a sudden, the war were all around us. We could have been in a lookout somewhere, with the front advancing
rapidly. I strained for sounds of shelling, for the stuttering clack of machine-gun fire.

A dog barked in the distance.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘It’s as if everything changed as soon as I left France. I think about it all, Notre Dame and the Boulevard Saint Michel and the Arc de
Triomphe, and don’t understand how there can be a war. Not in France.’

‘Ever heard of Agincourt? Ever heard of Waterloo? Nothing lasts, Sharpless. Things get made. Then they fall apart.’

‘You’ve been reading Mr Adams again,’ I said.

‘Mr Adams, Mr Wells.’ Le Vol patted a pocket and drew forth a book:
The World Set Free
. He leafed through the pages. ‘Don’t rely on anything, that’s the
lesson of our lives. Maybe one day there’ll be a world government, bringing peace to all. More likely, there’ll be bombs that kill everything, raining down from the air. The end of the
world as we know it. Ever wonder what you’ll do when they let you out of here, Sharpless?’

‘When I’m grown up? Why, what will you be?’

‘I’m going to travel. See the world. While it’s still there.’

‘That’s a thing to do, not to be,’ I said.

‘You could come with me – hoboes, how about it? See America, boxcar by boxcar!’ I thought he was mocking me, but I made no protest. ‘Last year in St Paul, when I had
rheumatic fever, I used to lie in a window seat in the afternoons. I was so bored I wanted to die. Horses went by, and trolley cars and automobiles, and I thought: Take me with you. If only
they’d take me wherever they were going. I don’t want to be sick. I don’t want to be weak. And I won’t be. Nor should you. One day you’ll throw away that walking
stick.’

The pipe passed between us, back and forth. Blue-grey smoke swirled around us in the shadowy, chill space, and I wondered if Le Vol could really like me. I had never been friends with another
boy. Cold seeped through my flannels and I thought of the body in the tomb beneath me; of course, it would be nothing now but a cage of bones.

Le Vol let down his drawn-up knees, kicking his heels against mossy stone. He yawned and stretched, knitting together his fingers; his jacket hung open and his bony ribs strained beneath the
tautened whiteness of his shirt. Time thickened and slowed. I looked away: at the rusted, hanging door of the vault; at the leaf-scattered floor; at Le Vol again, his face curiously blank, his lips
a little parted.

I had known this would happen. What moved me was not desire, but inevitability. I stood between the tombs; Le Vol shifted his hips. Lightly, I touched his shoulders, his chest, and felt for a
moment a welling power, as if I could have all the things I wanted, as if all I wished would come to pass. We were about to do what other fellows did. Would we speak of it when it was over? I let
my hand descend, feeling the hardness beneath his grey flannels. I tugged at his fly buttons. Again, closer, came the barking of the dog, and I wondered if Le Vol had heard it too.

There was a sound of running, of raised, excited voices. Le Vol pushed me away.

Somebody screamed.

‘Get him! Get him!’ We knew the voices.

‘Pussy in the well! Pussy in the well!’ Tramplings came from the graveyard: hard, insistent. A scuffle, blows.

‘Damn, he bit me!’ (Who bit? Hunter? No, not Hunter.)

‘Quick, the rope, you idiot!’

How close they were! Hunter was frantic.

The scream again: a terrified wail.

‘No... don’t!’ When I grabbed Le Vol’s shoulder he had not yet moved; now, hunching low, he blundered back through vegetable darkness. Standing, swaying, alone in the
stony cell, I could hear all that happened, picture it too: Le Vol erupting, dishevelled, from the vines; Scranway turning, eyes gleaming, as his henchmen, Quibble and Kane, readied the victim for
the sacrifice.

‘Leave him. What’s he done?’ – This from Le Vol.

‘Why,’ demanded Quibble, ‘are you lurking, Le Vol?’

‘Lurker Le Vol... Lurker Le Vol!’ What a fool was Kane!

Quibble cursed. ‘Keep hold of him. Stop squirming, Billy Billicay!’

Billicay: I knew the name – a skinny fellow with porcupine hair and little round spectacles. I had seen him often, looking lost, and wondered how such a boy could survive at Blaze.

‘Leave him, I said!’ – Le Vol again.

A crunch, a crack. Hunter barked.

Too late, I knew what I must do. Knuckles whitening on my ashplant, I lowered myself to my knees and painfully left Nirvana, digging my way through stalky dark obstructions. Burrs pricked me,
leaves slapped my face; then came a pain that seared my right leg, in all the six places where it had shattered. I sank down, gripping my shin as if to hold it together. From outside came no sounds
of struggle any more, only a whimpering, then laughter.

I had heard about the game called Pussy in the Well. Somewhere in the grounds of Blaze was the real well down which the ‘pussy’ had once been dangled. It had been covered over years
ago, after one too many broken bodies had been hauled up from the bottom. But if no well was available, there were always pussies, and other fellows could improvise.

Through screening undergrowth, this is what I saw: Le Vol, unmoving, prone between two leaning, mossy headstones; Quibble, high in the branches of a yew, rope at the ready, fixing it in place;
Kane, when the rope dropped, looping it under the armpits of the terrified Billy Billicay.

Quibble leaped from the branches. He tugged at the end of the rope. How gleefully they cried out – bullet-headed Quibble, knife-nosed Kane – as little Billy Billicay rose in the
air!

And standing by, watching almost indifferently, Scranway only smiled and held Hunter’s lead. Not for Eddie Scranway the sordid exigencies of bullying, the raised voices, the grappling, the
blows; his role was to direct, to inspire, and, when appropriate, to administer urbanely the
coup de grâce
.

Edward F. Scranway, Jr was the handsomest fellow at Blaze, his uniform always immaculate, his nails neatly manicured, his patent-leather hair never in need of brushing. A man already, he shaved
with casual ostentation every morning in the dorm bathroom, towel tucked around tight torso, muscles rippling in his bent right arm. One thought of Scranway and imagined a gleaming blade travelling
smoothly over an uptilted, moist jaw.

When he let Hunter go, I thought the dog would bound forward, leaping up, snapping at Billy Billicay’s heels. Instead, Scranway, with a raised finger, commanded Hunter to stay, and Hunter
stayed.