The Heat of the Sun (3 page)

Quibble and Kane stepped back respectfully as their master advanced upon the strung-up victim. Billy Billicay – shoulders hunched, jacket rucked up around the rope – was too afraid
to do more than snivel. His spectacles flashed; his feet, unkicking, hung at the height of Scranway’s chest as Scranway took in hand first one little shoe, then the other, unknotting the
laces with the air of a fond father tending a beloved child. After plucking off the shoes and peeling off the socks, he handed the items to Kane, who received them gravely, like a manservant.

The final touch was accomplished with adroitness still more admirable. Reaching up, Scranway fondled at the fastenings of Billy Billicay’s trousers, tugged them down, underwear and all,
and tossed them inside out to Quibble, who slung them over his shoulder. The trousers – that was an essential part of Pussy in the Well: should Billy Billicay find his way down from the tree,
there must be no easy end to his humiliation.

The little party stood surveying their handiwork. A delighted Kane chanted, ‘Pussy in the well! Pussy in the well!’ and Quibble cawed, but Scranway hushed them – as if, at this
pinnacle of accomplishment, there could be no place for vulgarity. Dread filled me as I gazed upon Billy Billicay’s hairless, pale thighs. A child: just a child.

With a curt laugh, Scranway tapped the little boy’s hip, setting him swaying like a pendulum; then, as if he were bored, he turned on his heels and strode off through the crunching
leaves.

Hunter padded obediently behind; Quibble too. Kane leaped up on a mossy slab and danced. As he shuffled, his head swayed from side to side and his nose seemed more than usually like the point of
a knife, cleaving the air with thoughtless strokes. Kane was a scarecrow of a fellow, quite without the lumpy bulk of Quibble.

Only after Kane followed the others did I pull myself from the graveyard jungle. I had torn my jacket; there was a scratch on my cheek; I felt the wetness of flowing blood. Floundering, I made
my way to Le Vol. Almost sobbing, I shook him and told him he was a fool.

His eyes opened. ‘Damn Quibble. His fist’s like a rock.’

We did our best to save Billy Billicay. There was no need to cut him down from the tree. His arms, pushed upwards by the tautened rope, slipped from harness of their own
accord, and down he dropped. I reached him first. His spectacles were smashed. I took off my jacket and tied it like an apron around his naked thighs. Le Vol lifted him in his arms and carried him.
Billy Billicay was light, but the journey was long. ‘It’s all right, Billy,’ and ‘Not long, Billy,’ and ‘We’ll protect you, Billy,’ we said, but
Billy Billicay was silent all the way.

By the time we got back it was dark, and the others were in the dining hall. Furtively, Le Vol and I took Billy Billicay up to the dorm and put him to bed. With the unspoken, steady conviction
of schoolboys, we would say nothing of what Scranway had done: it was our secret, as if we were ashamed.

We could not have saved Billy Billicay. I smoothed his chill forehead. In stripy pyjamas, he lay back on his pillow. Without his spectacles, his eyes were haunted, hollow, as if already he had
left life behind. No one knew much about Billy Billicay. He was a person of no importance, one of those destined to pass through the world like a phantom, leaving no mark.

The day after, Billy Billicay rose as if nothing had happened, sat in the dining hall in his usual silence, and slipped crabwise down the corridors, eyes averted. The day after that, he cut
classes in the afternoon. No one knew where he had gone; it was some time, indeed, before the alarm was raised. Later, we heard that they had found him in the graveyard.

The rope, secured by Quibble, still hung from the tree.

McManus II, the dorm room where I slept at Blaze, was a long, high-ceilinged chamber, partitioned in parallel lines. The partitions, evidently, had been put in place to afford
us some protection against violence and immorality; in truth, they fostered both. The construction was of the flimsiest. No doors were provided, only curtains; cubicles were open at the top, and
fellows could easily scale the dividing walls. In many places, partitions had been punched through; spyholes had been gouged and stuck up with chewing gum. Each cubicle contained an army-style cot,
usually rickety, with a cabinet beside it that could not be locked. In the daytime, the place was merely drab, cheerless; at night, when moonlight slanted through the windows and spilled over the
tops of the partitions, it became a place of fear. Many times I lay awake, listening to the creakings of the wind, the hootings of an owl, and, closer at hand, the whisperings and suppressed
laughter, the furtive rockings, the gasps and sometimes thumpings and shouts that ended abruptly with a dazzle of light and a master’s angry cries.

One afternoon, soon after Billy Billicay’s death, I asked to be excused from class, saying I was unwell. It was not a lie: a febrile nervousness had afflicted me since that day at Nirvana.
I went up to the dorm. The light was a filmy grey. How strange they seemed, these lines of cubicles!

Mine was number twelve. I pulled back the curtain on its rattling pole. I sat on the cot and it squeaked, sagged. Pictures – a horse, an actress, an automobile – had been pasted to
the partitions by fellows in the past; pasted up, torn away, and pasted over again, leaving a palimpsest of ragged colours and shapes. I thought of the evening ahead: hobbies hour, dinner, study
hall, prayers. I thought of the day to come, with its unwanted lessons: Literature, History, Latin. I thought of Billy Billicay, of what a fool he had been. How little imagination, to think that
his life could never change! – as if all he had been or ever could be was Pussy in the Well, dangling from the tree, while the elegant, rough inquisitor ripped his trousers down.

I thought about my father. He told me once that in the life of every man there was one great good fortune and one misfortune of equal force. What these were in his case he never went on to tell
me, but my good fortune, if I had one, was to be his son. Addison Sharpless was a man of no particular gifts – he was difficult to love, moody, dissolute, but it is to him that I owe my
peripatetic life and that outsider’s angle that (I like to think) has made me a writer. He was a Southerner. Born in Georgia after the Civil War, he was the heir of a ruined family, remnants
of an
ancien régime
clinging to the tatters of old ways. As a boy, roaming their shabby plantation, he dreamed of a life unburdened by the past, and, after quarrelling with my
grandfather, lighted out for wilder regions of plains, mountains, deserts: Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah. Successively he became a saddle-maker’s assistant, a dry-goods merchant, a traveller in
patent medicines. In San Francisco he found himself in charge of the customs house, and it was there, in 1900, at the age of thirty-four, that he married the harbourmaster’s daughter. I was
born a year later.

My father took up a consular posting and we sailed to Nagasaki. The posting was the first of many. Whether he was determined to proceed ever westwards, perpetually in flight from his origins, I
cannot say, but by the time I was eight years old I found myself in Paris. There was much I could barely remember: not Japan, where I had lived in the obliviousness of infancy; not Indochine, where
Mama had died, sinking beneath a feverish burden while I lay in my little bed, unknowing, and the tin roofs drummed with monsoonal rains. There was Ceylon: what was Ceylon? Green, interminable
terraced hills watched from the window of a climbing train. Turkey: what was Turkey? A man in a fez, a bubbling pipe, the weird high wailings of Mohammedan calls to prayer.

Only France flamed out with the vividness of life. Fondly, I recalled my father on honey-coloured boulevards, a portly figure in a frock coat, with moustache neatly waxed and the cane that he
liked to carry, spinning it sometimes in a white-gloved hand. He referred to this gentlemanly affectation as his ‘ashplant’: a knobbly sapling of iron-tough wood, lacquered darkly
black. How settled he seemed, how magnificently middle-aged! He kept a mistress in the Latin Quarter, a buxom, high-coloured girl from Dieppe with a delightful kindly laugh.

In Paris, I barely thought of myself as American. America was a dream: America was photographs, sepia images in a crackly-backed book. What had they to do with me, this tumbledown house in a
place called Georgia, this beautiful unremembered Mama, this Addison Sharpless from another life, strangely slender, in a straw boater by a boardwalk rail? Slipped between leaves was a postcard of
San Francisco; visible in the picture, indicated by an arrow, was the low, long apartment house, glaring white as a monastery, where Woodley Addison Sharpless made his entrance into the world. His
American life had been brief. Days later, we left the white apartment house for the ship that waited to bear us away, across the blue Pacific and out into the world.

My misfortune, which for many years would outweigh my sense of good fortune, happened in Paris, one afternoon on the Pont Saint Michel. My father was taking me to tea with his mistress when
suddenly he collapsed. His ashplant clattered into the gutter; his trilby rolled across the cobblestones and he clutched his heart, convulsing. A woman screamed, and I cried out and kicked as
strangers, milling forward, shouldered me aside, bearing me away from my dying father. Two days later, on the Champs-Elysées, I ran into traffic and almost died. How could I know where I was
going? Tears blinded me.

I had tried before, and failed, to write about this in my journal. I tried again now and had barely begun my entry when noises in the dormitory interrupted me. I was alarmed. If I were sick, I
should have gone to the infirmary; to be in dorms in daytime was forbidden. First came a footstep. Then a shuffle. Next, a creak, followed to my amazement by raucous music, horns squealing with
brassy impertinence. I peered down the aisle. Billy Billicay’s cubicle lay at the far end: number thirty. It had been empty since he died. The sounds, I felt certain, were from there.

Riding over the music came a brazen, mocking voice – whether male or female, it was hard to tell – that first chanted some nonsensical recitative about sweethearts, love, and love
lost, before bellowing out how you’d miss me, honey, miss my huggin’, miss my kissin’, some of these days when I was far away.

At Billy Billicay’s cubicle, the curtain was open, and inside, busying himself with unpacking, was a new fellow. The first thing I remarked was his thick, unusually blond hair. He wore it
a little long but not at all raggedly; it shone out even in the dusky gloom. Fellows at Blaze, Scranway aside, were shabby; this fellow was neat. His uniform, as he moved, seemed barely to crumple,
as if made of a special fabric denied to the rest of us. A ring flashed on a finger. Bending down, averted from me, he retrieved a rolled-up sock from the floor.

Only after he stood again did the fellow see me watching him. He smiled. His mouth was wide, full-lipped, the teeth white and regular. Playfully he tapped me on the arm with the sock and said,
‘I just
adore
Sophie, don’t you?’

He had to raise his voice above the music.

‘Sophie Tucker.’ He indicated the phonograph; frilly-horned, it perched perilously on the cabinet beside the cot.

The fellow’s eyes were extraordinary: deep, penetrating, an invitation into a darkness at once alarming and warm. Often, in times to come, I would wonder how to describe those eyes, so
peculiar, so immoderate, beneath the blond sweep of hair. They were not blue, not black: they were violet.

On the cot, over the scratchy military blankets, the fellow had laid a silken quilt; on the partitions, he had tacked up colourful prints.

‘A Braque,’ I said, surprised. In those days, Americans knew nothing of modern art.

The fellow tossed the sock up high and plucked it from the air. ‘Funny, isn’t it? What do you think it’s meant to be?’

‘Houses on a hillside.’ I had seen the picture in Paris.

‘Do you know, I believe you’re right.’ Leaning forward, the fellow inspected the flat, block-like shapes. Gracefully, the pale nape of his neck stretched from his collar, and I
feared for him, as if a neck so slender might easily be snapped. Should I tell him not to display these fineries? This was Blaze: all, I was certain, would be soiled and broken soon. Yet there was
something about the fellow that belied his fey appearance: a tensile strength.

He held out a hand to me. ‘They call me Trouble. Don’t ask me why. I’m Pinkerton – Ben Pinkerton.’

Trouble, or Pinkerton, was shorter than I, a good head shorter, but perfectly proportioned, a little man. Whether he was younger than I or older, it was hard to tell. His hand, as I shook it,
was dry and sleek, a delicate glove; there was a shock of cold from the ring. I wondered if he knew he would be sleeping in a dead boy’s bed. Others, I supposed, would tell him soon
enough.

The next time I saw Trouble was at dinner. He had found himself at a table far from mine, with fellows I did not know. I was worried for him. I struggled to listen while Le
Vol told me something funny that had happened that afternoon in Literature with Mr Gregg. Often I glanced towards that distant table. How would others take to Trouble?

There was one clue, and it puzzled me: laughter, sudden and sharp, loud enough to ride across the clamour all around – and then the applause of eager hands. Trouble tilted back his chair.
He grinned and someone slapped him between the shoulder blades.

Le Vol said irritably, ‘Who’s the new guy?’

Across the table from us a fellow called Elmsley, tight-collared with an acned neck, leaned forward and informed us in a low voice, as if it were a secret, that he had seen Trouble arrive that
afternoon. ‘In a big automobile – black, with windows all dark at the back. But you know who he
is
, don’t you?’

I had disliked Elmsley from the first. The pustules on his neck were yellow half globes, buried in circles of reddened flesh; his teeth were brownish and sharp, like a rodent’s fangs, and
there was something rodenty, too, in his tapering nose, which wrinkled as he said: ‘Pinkerton. The senator’s son.’