The Merry Month of May (40 page)

“Well, what do you know!” he said. “Did you get into that through Zen?”

“Well, no,” I said. “Not originally. But then I did.”

“How did that happen?” he asked eagerly.

I didn’t know how to answer. I decided to tell the simple truth. “Well, I used to believe that men ought not to kill animals with rifles, especially deer. Forest deer, I mean. Whitetails. Like in Pennsylvania and New York State. That you meet at close range. I thought they ought to give the animals more of an even break, and do it in the style of the ancient days. With spears or bows. It was a moral point. I’ve killed four deer you know, with broadhead arrows. I’ve killed running rabbits with the straight-tip target arrows. —Not often,” I added, “but I have.”

“I don’t want to kill anything,” Hill said.

“Neither do I,” I said, “anymore.”

“You don’t?”

“No. You want to know why?”

He nodded.

I did not know if I ought to go that far, really. But it was the truth. The truth of my youth. And he was so obviously going through a bad time. And I wanted to help him. I really so much wanted to help him. “Well, I was gutting out a deer I’d shot. It was the last one I ever shot. Now, deer contain an awful lot of guts. As do we. I might say that deer are about 65 per cent digestive system. Anyway, the day before, I had skinned my right hand badly, saddling a horse. That was out in Wyoming. And there was a big scab on it. I mean, a big thick scab. Well, after dipping my hand into that deer’s belly for so long, I found that the contact with the deer’s blood had completely dissolved my big scab. I happened to look at my hand, and the skinned spot was absolutely pink and clean. That shocked me. I don’t know to this day why it shocked me so badly, but it sure shocked me. I might even say it horrified me. And that was when I went to target archery and then somebody told me about this Zen book and I got a copy of it.”

“Jesus!” Hill said.

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly what I felt.”

“But then why did you give up the target archery after?”

“Well,” I said, “to tell you the truth, it got so it bored me, finally. It just got so that I was bored with it. So I quit. I suppose I got older.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. I was hoping it all would get through to him.

“I don’t believe in killing anything,” he said, finally.

“But you got to eat,” I said.

“Eat plants, vegetables,” he said. “They don’t feel.”

“How do you know?”

That slowed him up a little. He clutched that crazy book. “Well,” he said. “Well. At least they don’t feel as much as sentient animals. They don’t scream.”

“Nobody can be sure of that. How do you know that they don’t scream on a decibel level, or in a different medium, that we simply can’t hear?” I had been through all this for years, when I was younger.

Hill came up out of the chair and started walking around, still clutching that
I CHING
book. “Well,” he said. “Well. I don’t know. I don’t really know. That’s why I’m going away from Paris. I want to think about all these things. I think I’ll go by your shop there and get me some archery gear before I leave.”

“Where are you going to go, Hill?” I said. “And what about money?”

“Cadaqu?s. In Spain. It’s just over the French border, on the sea. I’ve been there.”

I knew he had. He had been there a couple of summers ago, with his father and his mother and McKenna.

“But a guy I know told me there are some great caves there,” Hill said. He sat down. “It’s a nice town, you know. Lots of younger people come there. And these caves, apparently they’re great. They’re outside of town about ten miles, and quite dry. Nobody owns them. Or if they do, they don’t holler about people using them. I’ve got two buddies who’ve been there for quite a while. Sleeping bags. That’s what I’m after. That’s what I’m looking for.”

“Why?”

“Meditate. Same way you have to meditate over your archery, if you want it to be good, perfect. I’ll sit there and meditate. Think a lot. Try to figure it all out.”

“I see,” I said, again.

He did not say anything at that point, and sat clutching his
I CHING
book and staring at it.

“If you figure it all out, will you send me a wire?” I said.

“I sure will!” he said, looking up eagerly.

I found I had nothing to say to this. After a moment I said, “But what about money?”

“Oh I’ve got a little money you know. You know,” he said. “From my maternal grandmother. I’ve even got my own bank account. The folks have never touched that.”

“So you’re going to become an Oriental philosopher?”

“No. No, no. Not at all,” he said. “But there’s a lot of things.”

It seemed to me his entire language had changed, in the week since I had seen him last.

He looked up.

“Why is there so much hate?”

“Well,” I said judiciously, and coughed. “I don’t think there’s as much hate as you seem to think. Actually I guess it’s what one could call, in the parlance, a conflict of interests. But when you’re raised up in a background, like you were, that keeps pounding into you that everybody should be full of love, and then you get out there and see that not everybody is, I guess it comes as a kind of shock.”

“I suppose,” he said. “I suppose.”

I wasn’t sure he’d heard a single word I’d said all during the afternoon. Suddenly he got up and turned half away from me, placed his left hand on the top cover of his
I CHING
book, frowned for half a minute. Then he turned around and opened it again.

“Heavenly bodies exemplify duration,” he read. “They move in their fixed orbits, and because of this their light-giving power endures. The seasons of the year follow a fixed law of change and transformation, hence can produce effects that endure.

“So likewise the dedicated man embodies an enduring meaning in his way of life, and thereby the world is formed. In that which gives things their duration, we can come to understand the nature of all beings in heaven and on earth.

“The Image:

“Thunder and wind: the image of
duration.

“Thus the superior man stands firm, and does not change his direction.

“Thunder rolls, and the wind blows; both are examples of extreme mobility and so are seemingly the very opposite of duration, but the laws governing their appearance and subsidence, their coming and going, endure. In the same way the independence of the superior man is not based on rigidity and immobility of character. He always keeps abreast of the time and changes with it. What endures is the unswerving directive, the inner law of his being, which determines all his actions.” He looked up.

“True enough, I guess,” I said. “But?”

He closed the book.

“That’s what I’ve got to do!” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Just that! My God, can’t you see?” He put the book under his arm and looked around vaguely. “Well, I got to go.”

“Hill,” I said. “Have you been on a lot of pot lately?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Down there under the bridge there’s nothing but pot. It’s great.”

I had no answer to that.

“I met a couple buddies there who have spent lots of time in them Cadaqu?s caves. They know all about it down there the scene.

“The scene, and the cave scene.”

I said nothing at this point, but I had my suspicions.

“Well,” he said. “I better go. I just wanted to come by and say good-bye.”

“What about your folks?” I said.

“Shit on them,” he said. “Mom deserves everything she gets.”

“I understand you were down there at the room at the hotel last Wednesday. The Wednesday of May the 29th.”

“Yes, I was.” He looked up eagerly. “I hung around for a while. Knocked on the door a few times. There wasn’t anybody answering. But I knew they were there. You can sort of tell. You can tell an empty room from one with people in it.” He half-shrugged, in a peculiarly French way. “Then, finally, I went away.”

I had absolutely nothing to say to that. “Look,” I said. “If there’s anything you want, or anything you want done for you from down there, you’ll let me know, won’t you? Hunh?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. His eyes were eager. “And if there’s anything you want me to do for you, you’ll let me know, too, won’t you? You can always reach me General Delivery, Cadaqu?s.”

“What do you want me to tell your folks?” I said.

“I don’t give a shit what you tell them. No, wait a minute. I guess I don’t mean that. Don’t tell them anything.”

“You don’t want them to know where you are?”

“I sure don’t want them coming after me. Tell them nothing.”

“All right,” I said. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

“I’m sure.”

He went to the door, clutching his book.

I was standing by my little bar. “Look!” I called sharply. “I guess you know I think you’re all fucked up and full of shit, don’t you?”

He turned. “Oh, sure,” he said, and grinned. It was the first time he had grinned since coming into the apartment, and it was singularly like Harry’s grin I had seen so often. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Who aint?”

He went out.

The next day was Wednesday. The Wednesday of June the 5th. That was the day that Bobby Kennedy was shot. Of course, in Paris, with the time lag, we did not know about it until later in the morning. In any case, the word was out that the French transportation and mail services would be going back to work sometime during Thursday. Some other industries, steel, automobile plants, weren’t giving in yet. But the trend was clearly toward getting French society back into harness. De Gaulle clearly had won.

23

I
HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT
that if I had been smarter, or more prepared for what Hill was going to throw at me (or not throw at me, rather), I could have helped him more, instead of failing him. I feel I have to take responsibility for that. But that sudden mysticism routine of his threw me. It was so unexpected. And by the time I was able to muddle through it all, and try to come up with some sort of understanding statement that might pull him out of it, he already was gone. Long gone.

And that was the last I was to see of Hill. I have not seen him since. I assume he is still in Cadaqu?s, sitting crosslegged and meditating in some cave, but I do not know. He was still there, and still meditating, when I received his second postcard in late June. I did not answer it, and that was the last word I have had.

I’m sorry he ever met those hippy flower-people types, who apparently from his postcards are living with him, on his money, of course. He told me that much. There apparently is a whole colony of them.

Anyhow, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy pushed the May Revolution completely off the front page of the Paris
Herald.
It did the same with almost every French paper. Of course, the word had been flashed, and everybody across the world had heard about it on the radio before any of the papers could come out with the news. But of course, everybody wanted to read the details.

I remember it was my Portuguese who brought me the news. She came into my bedroom at eight-thirty in the morning and woke me, an absolutely unprecedented thing for her to do. Actually, she was a young woman, much younger than she looked, and unmarried, a virgin apparently, perpetually saving something which
no
one any longer wanted to bargain for. She never came in my bedroom unless I called her. But now she was wringing her hands and tears were streaming down her trusty Portuguese face. She had apparently just heard it on her equally trusty transistor in my kitchen. “Oh, Monsieur,” she kept saying. “Oh, Monsieur!”

I guess everybody felt the same sense of horror and chill. It was as if God had truly abandoned us all, by letting the lightning strike twice. At least, that was what everyone I talked to later in the day seemed to feel. It was certainly what I felt.

I remembered when John Kennedy was assassinated back in ’63. This second time, there was not the totally struck-dumb desolation and total despair, the numbness we all felt when the older brother was shot in ’63. Maybe we were more used to it now, coming so soon after Dr. King. But by the same token, in a way, this hurt worse. I remember that time, when Jack was shot, I wandered around Paris in a daze for two days—going to bars I knew that were frequented by Americans, searching out Americans, and finding them, in all the American-frequented bars, where we all sort of just stood together like wet birds buying each other drinks and nodding our heads and saying almost nothing.

There was not that, this time. But in another way there was an even greater desolation, a greater horror, because of its having happened twice to Kennedys. And of course this time there was hope. Robert Kennedy could be operated on. Everybody hoped, hoped against hope. Of course next day he was dead. I guess nobody really ever believed that he would make it. But there was always this thing of it having struck us twice.

I had met Bobby Kennedy a few times at parties in New York when I was back in the States on business for the Review. But I had never formed any real opinion of him. He certainly appeared to be quite an egotist. And he certainly took great and careful care to maintain and project his public image and role as the Young Defender. Also he had let his hair grow longer. I always had the feeling that, politically, he had seized a cake that he did not have a knife big enough to cut. But then who did have? Nobody.

But then in addition to all of that, which sounded carping to me now, there was something definitely tragic about him. Almost as if he definitely knew what to expect.

Sitting with the newspaper in my apartment, I remembered one night at a lawn party in Martha’s Vineyard where I was visiting, when some of the Kennedy clan had whipped over in their boat from the Cape, and when after all the shouted hellos and laughter and drinks and the barbecue itself, I saw him sitting by himself on the old porch rail, a porch rail which came right out of another time. He had one foot in its expensive loafer up on the rail and was clasping his knee and looking out over the lawn and smiling, all alone, enjoying the moonlight and the party. There were lots of children squealing and playing on the dark lawn, and there was a local band of sorts playing a modified rock. Kennedy simply sat, smiling, enjoying, his blond shock of longer hair hanging down over his forehead.