Truants (5 page)
**********
Margaret Atenborough Cooper was our chauffeur in the morning. The instructors took turns driving the delinquents to their summer jobs. Mrs. Three-Name Cooper, as Steele called her, was our art teacher. Except for her insistence that we use all three of her names when addressing her, and her valiant and silly attempt to redeem Steele, she was tolerable. In the studio, which was also the wrestling room during the afternoon, she would wander from easel to easel, talking nonstop, mainly saying to me: “Keep it in perspective, Collin Elder. Keep it in perspective.” It was a pleasant, though useless thing for her to say to me about art
or
life.
Steele got to her. I think she loved him and hated him. He did not keep things in perspective. At all. He’d done four life studies from memory (we had no models), in which he had featured the genitalia at ten times actual size. He was saving the viewer time, he said. She tore them up and made him draw paper bags for three months. They were abstract paper bags, and she shouted at him in desperate artistic accents: “Abstract, Raymond Steele! The bag is abstract! It does not participate in reality!” And Steele would look up into her benevolent and frustrated face, focus his rancorous eyes and hiss, “And neither do you, Meg, old gal!”
I think these exchanges wore on Margaret Atenborough Cooper. Had she not been surrounded by so many art supplies, she might have wept. She wanted the best for us, I suppose. She wanted Steele to be saved. She wanted him to sketch just one landscape and leave out the dune buggy and the two nude picnickers. She wanted
appreciation
, in the largest sense of that word, to seep into our lives. She should have known that for us it would take more than art.
She dropped Steele, Rawlins, and me off by the employee’s gate at the fair in the flat colorless heat-light of noon in Phoenix, Arizona. Steele walked away already intent on some new mischief; Rawlins mumbled “See you later”; and I went up to the driver’s window and shook her hand. “Thanks for everything, Margaret Atenborough Cooper,” I said.
She was a bit distracted, watching Steele’s back. “Oh, yes,” she said, starting the car. “Of course.”
I ran after Rawlins, then, and caught him before he reached the grandstand where they were erecting the special stage for that evening’s performance of Horatio and his Trained Somethings.
“Take care of yourself, big fella,” I said to him, making him shake my hand. I wanted to add: “I’ll send you a postcard from California.”
He looked at me slightly confused.
“You watch out. I’ll see you around.” It was the most genteel goodbye I would receive.
It was Wednesday, so Steele and I would shovel the soggy tons until three and then make the dump run in the fair’s mammoth dump truck, carrying assorted debris—broken chairs, stairs, fence, signs—out to the County Dump. On the return, we would go by a lumber plant and load up with sawdust for the horsebarns. It was the best day of the week, though Steele would get stoned and drive catatonically, saving any words or enthusiasm for our stop at Taco-World on the way back.
Knowing this was my last day at work, I shoveled with keen vigor, keeping well ahead of Steele, and I paused once to deliver a short, but meaningful, farewell address to Hippo, the monstrous white Charolais bull. He made little expression; he was hardly able to move at all because of the size of the body into which he had been bred. He didn’t look regal or virile. He looked as though he were patiently waiting for his back to break from the strain. I never saw him lift a foot the four weeks of our acquaintance.
Steele was being rancorous with the ninety cattle on his side of the barn. When he couldn’t fork the soggy mats from beneath their feet easily, he’d stroke them ungently with the prod, and I could hear him swearing with rhythmic regularity. He screamed the titles of every genital I knew, plus three others, and he coupled a lot of phrases with “sad bastard!”
Director Captain Fowler came by twice in his azure golf cart showing off “his” fair to the dignitaries. His broad tan face was smiling as he waved this way and that in his domain, and he paused to nod benignly my way. When he drove up the other aisle, Steele was ready and snapped to attention and saluted, because he knew it got under the Captain’s skin. Old Steele, getting his minor kicks as he could, lost in the charade of each little day.
At noon, the chain-saw massacre of noise would vibrate the rafters, meaning that mean Ring Holz had started his motorcycle-trapeze exhaust machine. Steele came out beside me in the dry shade of the barn and we watched Holz on the platform. Holz studied the motorcycle with the attention other men give the racing forms, as he revved the motor and waited for the first bolt to fly away. As the announcer came on to do static for a while, we saw the girl—Holz’s daughter—walk by us from the trailer she and her father lived in during the fair.
“Good luck, honey!” Steele said.
She turned her head without pausing and fired, “Fuck you!” Her suit, silver, looked like it was made of old fish scales.
Steele laughed and called back, “What time do you get off?”
“Lay off. She’s got it bad enough,” I yelled to Steele through the motorcycle explosions. Then the machine died. While Ring Holz, that death-defying skyrider, was clambering over the machine trying to find which Band-Aid had come loose, his daughter stood below the platform and lit a cigarette.
“Come on,” Steele said. “I’ve always wanted to meet a daredevil.”
I didn’t want to come on. In fact I was ready to go back to the barn and face that. But, I followed ten paces behind him through the gathering throng, and that’s what was assembling, a throng, a mob interested in seeing accidents. I was still carrying my shovel.
The crowds that assemble at fairs are the worst sort. They converge only wherever some derelict is offering chances on a vegetable-masher-radio-pottery-kiln-combination kitchen appliance, or where the two-headed calf stares from his side of a glass jar, or where some hooligan is going to defy death, which really means to risk burning a pant leg on a hot exhaust manifold.
“Hi,” Steele said. “You a daredevil?”
She dropped her cigarette on his shoe. He and I watched it fall.
I was looking at her face pretty hard. It was all red and gray with make-up, but other than that she looked younger than both of us. Up close I could see her costume was really dirty. There was grit and grease across her rump and one distracting dark smear across her heart breast. The lipstick she wore made her mouth a round velvet apple, but I could see it was just a mouth, like mine.
“Why don’t you assholes go back in the barn,” she said.
Steele was doing his smile. “Naw, I don’t think so. We assholes come to see you defy death on the trapeze.”
She looked up at Ring the Holz, stretched now across the seat of the motorcycle the way a body is carried on a horse. He was turning something with his fingers.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Easy. Just a minute.” Steele patted my arm. “What time do you get off?”
The girl was walking in little circles looking into the sky.
“What’s your name?” He went on, pushing. “At least tell us your name.”
“I’m going back,” I told Steele. The girl looked at me so I felt I should say something. “Hold on,” I said. “When you’re up there, hold on.” And I carried my shovel back through the thickening mob.
By the time I reached the barn I heard the cycle clear its rheumy throat, and belch wetly into ignition. I watched the girl mount her trapeze, and Holz, forcing a smile through sweat, wave at the people all gathered to see him fall on his foreign nogging.
BLADALADALADALADALADRRRuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuubbbberribberrbalall!
The machine walked its wire upward, and the girl held on. The exhaust was so thick that the Horticultural Square was darkened like Calvary, and before Holz reached the top and stood on his head, members of the audience moved off one and two at a time, retching.
While the noise was still blaring, Steele joined me in the barn.
“She wouldn’t tell me, the bitch.”
I looked at him.
“Her name. I called her ‘Ringaling.’” He laughed and moved to the door to peek into the smog. “But damn, I’d like some of that. I’d like to get that daredevil to defy a little death with me up in the loft!”
**************
At two in the afternoon, Steele threw his shovel in the corner and went off to flirt with Connie for half an hour—as was his custom. (He said he’d have her in the loft before Thursday.) Then he left her booth to pick up the garbage truck. So I had an hour in the barn alone, to breathe and think, to stroll and push the shovel, to watch the fair-goers ogle Hippo.
I won’t go into my “American Citizens Amaze Me” address here, but let it be implied. I mean this is the land of the free and the opportunity does exist to be diverse, which I guess is a good way to describe me, but in their diversity, these pedestrians exhibited a certain homogeneous grunginess, wearing their undershirts inside out and adorned with two different brands of motor oil, wearing no underwear and a deerskin vest allowing generous portions of their breasts to protrude into what used to be called
public view
.
The trend at the Arizona State Fair was for townspeople to wear printed T-shirts and caps, the kind of caps with a patch above the bill. So that by the time these people passed, I could read more than I wanted to know about them: their occupations, sexual and political preferences, their favorite brands of corn seed and automobile parts, their general obsessions. Open books.
Strings of girls fled through the barn, their stiff cutoff Levis not fitting at the waist where girls curve inward. The gap between flesh and denim always the same distance: the width of my hand.
The little kids experimentally stepped in the new cow turds, while their parents tried to look interested in cattle. One family of eleven wandered through staring at the rear-ends of all the cows in bewilderment, trying to figure out why these beasts were here at the fair.
At one point an entire busload of oldtimers, senior citizens, hobbled through. They struck me as being ninety times as curious as the cattle. I studied them, trying, as is my habit, to establish some natural link between them and myself. What happens? Do I get that old? It didn’t go. I couldn’t imagine any elderly cattle, limping around the pasture, wrapped in wrinkles, blind and drooling. It seemed, and this is the truth: unnatural. I absolutely couldn’t imagine being that old, and I have a versatile imagination, though I did share the proclivity to walk in meandering lines with many of them. Several thrust stainless-steel walkers before them, devices used for balance. It took the group thirty-five minutes by my watch to walk through.
Later, Captain Fowler drove by, his cart full of three bureaucrats in five-piece suits. I didn’t even wave.
I met Steele at the back driveway of the fairgrounds at three, and climbed way up into the rumbling dumpmobile garbage truck. He had already rolled a joint and the cab was fumified. I declined a hit and settled as he held his breath, as you should, I guess, when turning into the traffic.
“Got a bear,” he wheezed, containing smoke.
“What?”
He blew the smoke in a cough all over the windshield and blinked in the rush. “Got a bear on board. Died in the Zoo garden.”
“A bear! A real bear?”
“Dead. A dead bear. Seems they downed him to travel, then upped him for the show: overdose. A cub.” He sucked another bodyfull of smoke.
I looked out the window at the forty million pizza parlors and dry cleaning shacks that free enterprise defines as landscape. I would’ve slumped in my seat, but Steele wouldn’t have got it. We had a dead bear cub in the dump truck, headed for the Deer Valley Sanitary Landfill. The pizza joints became drive-in groceries, and they became bar and grills, and they became gravel then cactus, and in the distance the monsoon clouds of early September waited near Flagstaff.
There was a huge sign at the Deer Valley Sanitary Landfill announcing a thousand details about how much fun the park that they were going to build on all this garbage was going to be. The sign’s most arresting feature was the governor’s signature; he’d had to sign it with fourteen spray cans.
The director of the dump, whom we called “Coach” because he wore a whistle around his neck, came over and told us where to park. He indicated the space with the same menace others use to notify you that they are going to kidnap your daughter. He acted like a recent graduate of the Home, and was actually assessing our load for redeemable goodies. Steele backed in over all the matted trash and edged the truck up to an abyss full of debris: couches, lumber, Christmas trees, auto parts, entire automobiles. When I jumped down to see if the truck was clear to dump, I noted that the flatbed pickup next to us was in flames. Evidently, the driver had left it running while he pulled off sheets of rusted corrugated tin, and the exhaust pipe had ignited some packing material and subsequently the body of the truck.
The driver ran around screaming and beating the flames with a large palm leaf he’d found. The coach of the dump came running, blowing his whistle for the fire to stop. Then the driver snapped to, discarded his frond, and boarded the truck. He drove it around for a while, the bed of his truck a bright load of growing flames.
Finally the man collided with a pyramid of the coach’s salvaged washers and dryers, and we all saw the windshield go smoky as the cab filled. The coach was there, though, blowing and huffing. He pulled the driver from the truck and we heard the FFFaaaaahhhhhhhhhuuuummm as the flames licked the wet under-engine and climbed the grille. Since there wasn’t any explosion, all the dump-goers returned to hurling trash into the abyss, and the driver of a D-
1 2
Cat moved in on cue and shoveled the flaming flatbed into smoking shreds over the edge, as if it were an ordinary item burning for disposal.
Then Steele threw the switch for our truck, and we heard the hydraulic screaming which indicated the truck was dumping. The back arched and heaved, and Steele goosed the clutch twice and we were free and clear. I walked around the quaking earth, and went around behind.
