The Life of Hope (6 page)

Soon I had finished all the whiskey and was so drunk that I thought I was sober. “Time to go fishing,” I announced. It took me many long moments to affix my Hoper to the line. Then I stood up and wobbled up to the water. I actually stood up twice, having fallen on to my butt on the first attempt. “Hey, Moss-back!!” I screamed. “Here come sumpin’ good! Dig your toothies into this, boy!”

I raised the rod and cast. It was a fine cast, and I watched with delight as the Hoper sailed high over the water, flying out far and softly disturbing the stillness of Lookout Lake. I began to reel in, and noticed a certain lack of resistance. Then I saw the end of my line lying a few feet in front of me, the knot unravelled.

“Fuggit,” said I.

I decided to go home and telephone Elspeth. It’s a good thing I’m sober, I told myself, or else she would never talk to me. I
threw my stuff into the moped’s carrying bags and climbed aboard. For a few feet I managed a peculiar serpentine motion, and then the moped and I keeled over sideways on to the gravel road. It’s a good thing I’m blasted, I told myself, or else that would really hurt! I tried again, and soon I was on my way. The sun was setting, and night had covered the earth by the time I reached the homestead.

The big problem here was to keep my speech clear, evenly modulated and well-elocuted. Elspeth had an uncanny knack for picking out even the tiniest drunken irregularities. What I needed was a crisp, earnest conversational style. I spent about half an hour practicing. “Elspeth? How are you? I’m fine. Listen, I’ve been doing some thinking and soul-searching out here …” I was drinking a bottle of beer as I practiced and noticed that this was making the inside of my mouth feel a bit fuzzy. So just before I dialed the telephone, I had a short pull on a bottle of tequila.

The phone rang endlessly, but I knew that she was home. I had a deeply disturbing vision of Elspeth in the sack with some clod, nakedly listening to the phone ring. “Don’t worry about it,” she was saying, massaging this jerk’s chest. “It’s just my goddam husb …”

She picked up the phone, said, “Hello?”

“Elspeth,” I said.

“You’re drunk.”

“All I said was ‘Elspeth’!”

“I can always tell.”

“I’m not drunk. I been fishing. Fishing for Ol’ Mossback, that’s what. Mythical fish of the golden tongue!”

“Listen, I don’t want to talk to you now.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Because you’re drunk.”

“What difference does that make? You don’t want to talk to me when I’m sober!”

“And when is this that you’re sober?”

“I’m sober a lot of the time!”

“I guess I never noticed because I’ve got a class from nine to ten o’clock in the morning.”

“Hardy-har-har.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Don’t.”

“There’s someone here.”

A definite low blow. “Who you got?”

“June.”

For various reasons, this was sickening news. I gave Elspeth my phone number, told her to call me when I was sober. I hung up the telephone.

It was about ten o’clock in the evening. I was pleased that I’d already done all my important stuff for the day, because now I could fart around for a couple of hours.

Harvey Benson was, among other things, a music lover. One corner of the living-dining area was occupied by a strange futuristic turntable, surrounded on either side by stacks of albums. Taking the bottle of tequila along for company, I went and searched through these records. I could find nothing to suit my mood. (A record called “Tunes for Shriveling Hearts and Souls” would sell well, I reflected.) Still, I wanted music, so I finally elected to play the album already on the turntable, whatever it was. I put on the needle and went to gaze at the night through the picture window.

I can report to you now that the piece of music that filled the room was the “Vocalise” by Rachmaninoff. I didn’t know that at the time, having never heard it before. All I knew was that never had music messed around with my innards so violently. I felt like an instrument (an old and out-of-tune one, like a cigar-box banjo) and I was plucked. All the world became beautiful and miserable. Through the window I could see almost nothing but the sky, ink-black, studded with stars. I imagined that I could discern the constellations, that the night was filled with hunters and heavenly creatures. The music seemed to say that there was room in the sky for Elspeth and I, that we could remain forever up there, naked and lonely and tragic in our own small way. I was soon weeping in a very general manner.

I pulled back from the window, having wept, and was caught by my own reflection.

Through the old glass of the window, through my tears, my face looked monstrous. Everything about it was misshapen,
the eyes oddly matched and randomly set, the nose squashed and inches away from where a nose should be, the mouth long, twisted and drooling. I wiped some tears away, but nothing changed about my other face.

It came to me suddenly that my reflection hadn’t bothered to wipe any tears away. I stepped back quickly then, but it remained glued to the other side of the window. I saw that this being was stark naked, which I was not, and fabulously obese. It had bent down in order that our faces should be level, and now that I had broken contact, the creature decided to stand up. It did so, rising to a height of seven or eight feet. And then this monster began to dance, or at least it began to do a lurid and alien burlesque of dancing, touching fingertips to the crown of its head and sashaying back and forth. This man (a term I apply only in the loosest sense, although he was assuredly male, if only by virtue of a tiny pink penis) was absolutely hairless, even to the extent of lacking eyebrows and lashes.

His dance became more energetic, and the fat began to bounce obscenely—he had fat everywhere, even on the tops of his feet. His arms and legs were clearly segmented by rings of lard, his elbows and knees padded with the stuff, places where only a baby should have it. The music ended, and after a few moments of silence (the creature continued to dance throughout this silence, a silence so profound that I guessed the frogs and crickets were likewise struck dumb by the performance) another piece of music issued forth. This one was quick, almost violent. The monster stopped his dance immediately, cocked his head sideways to listen, and then abruptly turned away. He waddled off into the darkness then, his gait splayfooted and plodding. He had to lift his arms high for balance, his hands bouncing merrily in the air. Soon he was gone.

I decided it was time for bed.

The next morning I managed to complete another paragraph of my novel-in-progress. I was very pleased with this paragraph, so pleased that I became profoundly dissatisfied with the previous day’s paragraph and deleted it from my thin manuscript. Then, having done my work for the day, I jumped on the moped and took me into Hope.

As I rode by Updike International a loud horn blew, and the workers drifted out on to the front lawn to eat their brown-bagged lunches. There were hundreds of them, it seemed, and I found myself wondering what Updike International manufactured.

My first stop in town was Edgar’s Bait, Tackle and Taxidermy, where I purchased another Hoper. This one was slightly bigger and cost thirty-five cents less. Edgar was in a very good mood and insisted on telling me some filthy jokes. I laughed heartily at them all, trying to hurt Elspeth in some cosmic way. These jokes all had to do with the way certain parts of the female body smelled, and Ellie would have gone berserk if she’d heard them. After a while, Edgar’s repertoire was exhausted.

I asked, “So anyway, what gives with this ‘Keep your dick in your pants’ business, Eddie?”

Edgar shrugged, lifting his mountainous shoulders up and down quickly. “They say that around here,” he informed me needlessly.

“There must be some story behind it. Like, a guy was taking a whiz by the side of the water and all of a sudden Ol’ Mossback jumped up and bit his pecker off.”

Edgar chuckled a bit, nothing even resembling the guffaws he’d awarded to his own jokes, and then asked, “How’d you lose your first Hoper?”

“Something bit it off,” I lied dramatically. “I was reeling in and then—bang!—just like that, something bit it off clean as a whistle.”

Edgar nodded. “So, you want me to show you how to tie an improved double clinch-knot or what?”

“Yes, please.”

This kept us occupied for half an hour or so. Edgar’s hands were so enormous that I actually had to move around, peeking through the occasional gap between his fingers to see what he was doing. Then I practiced while Edgar retold some of his filthy jokes. In time I became proficient at tying an improved double clinch-knot (actually I didn’t, I became bored with it) so I stopped and wondered aloud what to do next. “Maybe,” I said, “I’ll go get a beer.”

“Go quaff a frosty,” Edgar agreed. “That’s a good thing to do.”

“Wherever should I go?” I mused.

“You got three choices.” Edgar lifted the appropriate number of fingers and counted them off. “One, Duffy’s. Two, Moe’s. Three, The Willing Mind.”

“Which one do you prefer?” I asked.

“You go on over to The Willing Mind,” Edgar responded, more an order than anything else. “That’s a good place to quaff a frosty.”

“Yeah, okay.” I decided to confide in Edgar. “But, I’ll tell you, Ed. There’s this guy there, Jonathon his name is, who kind of gives me the creeps.”

“Whitecrow?” asked Edgar. “He’s a good guy. A little strange, maybe, but a good guy.”

“His name’s Jonathon Whitecrow?”

“Indian?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, his name’s Jonathon Whitecrow.”

I only knew that the name was somehow familiar. Anything I’d learned from
Fishing for Ol’ Mossback
was state-induced, so I had to be drunk again to recall it.

“You want to go quaff a frosty with me?” I asked. Edgar would be wonderful protection against Jonathon Whitecrow and his crazy “Visions.”

Edgar shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t go quaff a frosty with you.” He stabbed his chest with his thumb. “A.A.”

“Oh.” This news saddened me deeply.

“I’m an alcoholic,” he elaborated.

“Yeah, right,” I almost snapped, hoping to silence him. “Hey, Edgar,” I asked, “what’s the difference between an alcoholic and a drunkard?”

Edgar actually thought about this, rubbing his jaw for half a minute before throwing up his arms in wonderment. “I dunno. What is?”

“Us drunkards don’t have to go to all those damn meetings.”

Edgar didn’t seem to realize that this was a joke.

Maybe it wasn’t.

“See you later,” I said to Edgar.

“Bye-bye, Big Guy.”

The day was a scorcher. The Willing Mind lay down the road, shimmering and distorted in the haze. I didn’t want to go there, but my alternatives were swallowing a pickled egg whole and eating (not to mention paying for) a steak. “I’ll just go quaff a frosty,” I announced to the world at large. The taste of Mona’s beer came back, reminding me of bogs in medieval England. “Or a little Scotch,” I decided. “A little Irish whiskey.” This clarity of purpose gave me the wherewithal to begin walking toward the humpbacked tavern. “Pop back a whiskey, that’s all I’m gonna do.” Maybe the Indian wouldn’t even be there, I reasoned, although I knew he would. He’d be standing in exactly the same place, smoking a cigarette, his long fingers touching a half-full shot glass. Jonathon would nod at me as if he’d been waiting.

I was right.

The Bernies and the Kims were there as well, and Mona was behind the bar. They all smiled, but only Li’l Bernie seemed happy to see me.

“Hey, hey!” the stomach shouted. “It’s the Hemingway of Hope! Hey, listen, kiddo, I been thinking. Maybe we should collaborate on this book of mine. I even thought of a title:
Straight From the Gut
. What do you think?”

I was in no mood to talk to tummies, so I ignored him.

Mona was dressed in exactly the same clothes, although they were now wrinkled and close to filthy. “Beer?” she asked, very businesslike.

“No, thanks. Maybe some Jameson.” I nodded in the direction of the bottle of Irish whiskey.

Jonathon was infuriating in his gentleness. “Hello, Paul.”

“Hi.”

Then he was silent. I turned away.

The boy Kim had his hand firmly fastened on to his girlfriend Kim’s breast, caressing it through her T-shirt. Her nipples were boldly erect.

Mona presented me with my shot glass. “Run a tab?”

I nodded and sipped at my drink.

Big Bernie muttered, “Somebody’s cranky.”

“The thing about it is,” I said suddenly, “my wife is a clown.”

“Mine, too,” said Big Bernie.

Of course, if I had a nickel for every time that exchange had taken place I’d be a rich man. “No, I mean she’s a
clown
. A professional clown.”

Jonathon Whitecrow was enlightened. “Aha! That’s why there was a painted face! I should have figured it out myself.”

“That’s pretty inneresting,” said Mona genuinely. “With a circus like?”

“She’s not with a circus now, but she was. Now she teaches clowning and puts on a few shows at fairs and things.” I gestured for another drink. “She’s a very good clown,” I added. “A beautiful clown.”

“It had me worried,” Jonathon mentioned. “I thought I was losing it.”

“Does she live out there, too?” asked Mona. “At the old Quinton place, I mean.”

“No. She lives in Toronto.”

“Oh.”

Big Bernie asked, “Know any good jokes?” I deemed this a pretty jerky thing to say, given my obvious heaviness of heart. But I think, in retrospect, that Big Bernie was trying to be kind. A chilly silence had entered The Willing Mind, trailing along behind me, and Big Bernie only meant to chase it away. At any rate, no one knew any jokes, good or bad.

The curious thing about Elspeth is that, despite being a clown, she’s not a particularly humorous person. She can make people laugh, certainly, can make children hysterical, but in her own heart of hearts she doesn’t seem to find anything at all funny. The state of the world alarms her, and in a certain mood I can see that it should alarm everyone, what with the threat of nuclear war and all that shittiness hanging over our heads.