Airships (13 page)

It was a long and sparkling match. Humble won.

Humble took the check and the sterling platter, hurled the platter outside the fence and into the trees, then slumped off.

The image of tennis was ruined for years in Vicksburg.

Dr. Word and the Edwards met French on the court. Levaster saw Word lift an old crabby arm to French's shoulder, saw French wince. Mr. Edward said he had to hurry to his job. He wore a comical uniform and cap. His job was checking vegetable produce at the bridge house of the river so that boll weevils would not enter Mississippi from Louisiana. Levaster looked into the eyes of Mrs. Edward. Yes, he decided, she still loves Word; her eyes touch him like fingers, and perhaps he still cuts it, and perhaps they rendezvous out in the Civil War cemetery so he won't have far to fall when he explodes with fornication, the old infantryman of lust.

“Mother,” said French, “let's all meet at the bridge house.”

Levaster saw the desperate light in French's eye.

“Don't you, don't you!” said Levaster afterward, driving the Lincoln.

“I've got to. It'll clear the trash. I can't live in the world if Word's still in it.”

“He's nothing but bones,” said Levaster. “He's done for.”

“She still loves him,” said French.

They all gathered at the bridge house, and French told his
father that his wife had been cheating on him for twenty years, and brought up his hands, and began crying, and pointed to Word. Mr. Edward looked at Word, then back to his son. He was terribly concerned. He asked Word to leave the little hut for a second, apologizing to Word. He asked Olive to come stand by him, and put his arm over his wife's shoulders.

“Son,” he whispered, “Jimmy Word, friend to us and steady as a brick to us, is a homosexual. Look out there, what you've done to him. He's running.”

Then they were all strung out on the walkway of the bridge, Levaster marveling at how swift old Word was, for Word was out there nearing the middle of the bridge, Mrs. Edward next, fifty yards behind, French passing his mother, gaining on Word. Levaster was running too. He, too, passed Olive, who had given out and was leaning on the rail. Levaster saw Word mount the rail and balance on it like a gymnast. He put on a burst of speed and caught up with French, who had stopped running and was walking toward Word cautiously, his hand on the rail.

“Just close your eyes, son, I'll be gone,” Word said, looking negligible as a spirit in his smart tennis jacket and beret. He trembled on the rail. Below Word was the sheen of the river, the evening sun lying over it down there, low reds flashing on the brown water.

That's a hundred feet down there, Levaster thought. When he looked up, French had gotten up on the rail and was balancing himself, moving step by step toward Word.

“Don't,” said Levaster and Word together.

French, the natural, was walking on the rail with the ease of an avenue hustler. He had found his purchase: this sport was nothing.

“Son! No closer!” bawled Word.

“I'm not your son. I'm bringing you back, old bastard.”

They met. French seemed to be trying to pick up Word in an infant position, arm under legs. Word's beret fell off
and floated, puffed out, into the deep hole over the river. French had him, had him wrestled into the shape of a fetus. Then Word gave a kick and Olive screamed, and the two men fell backward into the red air and down. Levaster watched them coil together in the drop.

There was a great deal of time until they hit. At the end, Edward flung the old suicide off and hit the river in a nice straight-legged jump. Word hit the water flat as a board. Levaster thought he heard the sound of Word's back breaking.

The river was shallow here, with strong devious currents. Nothing came up. By the time the patrol got out, there was no hope. Then Levaster, standing in a boat, spotted French, sitting under a willow a half mile downriver from the bridge. French had drowned and broken one leg, but had crawled out of the river by instinct. His brain was already choked.

French Edward stared at the rescue boat as if it were a turtle with vermin gesturing toward him, Levaster and Olive making their cries of discovery.

Carina, Levaster's teen-ager, woke him up. She handed him a cold beer and a Dexedrine. At first Levaster did not understand. Then he knew that the sun had come up again, seeing the grainy abominable light on the alley through the window. This was New York. Who was this child? Why was he naked on the sheets?

Ah, Carina.

“Will you marry me, Carina?” Levaster said.

“Before I saw your friend, I might have,” she said.

French Edward came into the room, fully dressed, hair wet from a shower.

“Where do I run, Baby?” he said.

Levaster told him to run around the block fifty times.

“He does everything you tell him?” said Carina.

“Of course he does. Fry me some eggs, you dumb twat.”

As the eggs and bacon were sizzling, Levaster came into
the kitchen in his Taiwan bathrobe, the huge black sombrero on his head. He had oiled and loaded the .410 shotgun/pistol.

“Put two more eggs on for French. He's really hungry after he runs.”

Carina broke two more eggs.

“He's so magnificent,” she said. “How much of his brain does he really have left?”

“Enough,” Levaster said.

Levaster drove them to New Hampshire, to Bretton Woods. He saw Laver and Ashe approach French Edward in the lobby of the inn. They wanted to shake hands with French, but he did not recognize them. French stood there with hands down, looking ahead into the wall.

The next day Levaster took French out on the court for his first match. He put the Japanese Huta into his hand. It was a funny manganese and fiberglass racket with a split throat. The Huta firm had paid French ten thousand to use it on the circuit just before he drowned in the river. French had never hit with it before.

French was looking dull. Levaster struck him a hard blow against the heart. French started and gave a sudden happy regard to the court.

“I'm here,” said French.

“You're damned right. Don't let us down.”

Edward played better than he had in years. He was going against an Indian twenty years his junior. The boy had a serve and a wicked deceptive blast off his backhand. The crowd loved the Indian. The boy was polite and beautiful. But then French Edward had him at match point on his serve.

Edward threw the ball up.

“Hit it,
hit
. My life, hit it,” whispered Levaster.

Unable to swim, he had maneuvered to fall off an old-timers' party yacht in the Hudson River. His departure was not remarked by the revelers. They motored on toward the Atlantic and he bobbed around in the wash. He couldn't swim. But he did. He learned how. Before he knew it, he was making time and nearing the dock where a small Italian liner sat dead still, white, three stories high. Nobody was around when he pulled up on a stray rope on the wharf and walked erect to the street, where cars were flashing. Day after tomorrow was his seventieth birthday. What a past, he said. I've
survived
. Further, I'm horny and vindictive. Does the fire never stop?

Out of his wet billfold he withdrew the sodden money and his government card, yellow, with his name on it: Quarles Green. His parents wanted to compensate for the last name with a fancy front one, poor dogs of Alabama, 1900. Hell of a year for dumb fornication, though, said Quarles aloud. Like all years.

He had never had a satisfactory carnal experience in his life.

What about the letters I wrote? he said as he walked to the concrete and traffic. Can I bear the humiliation of surviving after them, especially the one to Jill Jones? Won't she see it as the last feather on the ton of boredom, my appearing, hello, I'm not dead, let's do it again? Walk around in the nude doing house duties, cleaning, sweeping, cooking, me trailing in the wheelchair behind, taking her fathom like
crazy. I've seen better bodies, but hers is earnest and scandalous enough. Pretending to be a crip so my lust would not disgust her from the room. Developed a real crush on her. At forty a week per Wednesday, I ought to be allowed it. Apologized for the crude sniffing episode unfortunately when I rolled in behind her as she was using the vacuum cleaner. Inadvertence of the wheel here, dear. She never heard the snorts for her vacuum.

I burn to see her, but she lives in Yonkers. Dye my hair, appear at her window with a cello.

He paid the cab with his wet money.

“What'd you do, fall in the river?” said the guy.

But Quarles didn't answer. Quarles was busy whispering:

My Beloved Daughter,

Thanks to you for being one of the few who never blamed me for your petty, cheerless and malign personality. But perhaps you were too busy being awful to ever think of the cause. I hear you take self-defense classes now. Don't you understand nobody could take anything from you without leaving you richer? If I thought rape would change you, I'd hire a randy cad myself. I leave a few dollars to your husband. Bother him about them and suffer the curse of this old pair of eyes spying blind at the minnows in the Hudson.

Your Dad,
Crabfood

At the Y he found his suitcase and left for La Guardia on bicycle. Once out into the real mainway traffic, he heard the outraged automobiles blowing at him. Let no policeman interfere, he pleaded. This is New York's last chance at me. He passed the toll at the bridge without even looking their way. There was a shout. Kill me, kill me, he shouted, answering. Then up into the wind of the Triborough Bridge. Shit, I've overpedaled; where's La Guardia, anyway? he cursed himself. Then he remembered and turned around midbridge. He made it back and passed the tollkeepers, shouting imprecations.

His bike came in near thirty miles an hour over the last
hump of the bridge, and there wasn't much traffic now. He extinguished the lights.

Why didn't I ever drink or smoke? he asked. I killed two men who did when I was intercepting hooch. I never had any bad habits. My body keeps on. I think I'm getting stronger. I've gotten a third wind. He turned back toward La Guardia.

This is such small tooling. I rode the first mass-produced motorcycle in America. Because of my lust habit, I can't afford even a city Honda. Hundred sixty a month to trail Jill around in my phony wheelchair. Rental of the wheelchair fifty per. If I get back to Memphis I can afford something, if I've got to live.

My car was full of prime confiscated booze. It was summer in the Ozarks. I got her drunk and possessed her on the pine needles. She went hysterical and wouldn't put her clothes back on without promise of marriage. After I married her, she seldom took them off again. Some nights she slept in overalls and a belted cold-weather coat. I stared at ceilings all over America and practiced self-abuse, thinking there was a government camera in the wall and hurling myself under the sacred bed of my snoring matrimony, afraid of God. Then that morning I crawled out over the towel of her latest shampoo, full of flint-colored hair. I gazed in my palms with terror, thinking the hair of the old stories was true.

Later in the day she cooked three hot meals, wildly neutral as to taste. She told me she thought a blessed event was coming to us. How? When? I wondered. I was dismayed by the holiness of my marriage. I got a glimpse of her ankle and climbed up on the roof, weeping. When I came down I didn't care anymore. I wore the purple smoking jacket I'd bought for our honeymoon and stored away when she said it was snaky. When she said something, I said (I had limescented oil in my hair):

“So you don't even have natural needs?” pouring myself a near beer. “All you care about is moving chairs and pictures,
from room to room. Between me and a bucket of paint to freshen up the front porch, you'd choose the paint and we both know it. Me and God hate you.”

She fell in a spasm. She cried out how she could be a full wife.

“Let's go all the way,” says I.

“Anything to please you and the Lord,” says she.

Soon afterward I had to blast a stiller who locked himself in a hooch shack, but he was underground and we didn't know it when we set it afire. I heard the voice calling me. He knew me. It was just outside Mobile in my home grounds and they knew I was with the Volstead people. Calling me, Quarles? Quarles? I ran up to the door and there was Weeber Batson's oldest son standing at the window with his clothes on fire and a double-barrel eight-gauge in his hands right on me, cocking it.

I had to blast him. I hit him right in the hair.

The guys kept calling him just a stiller, but I knew better and I was sick at heart. Oh, she really got interested in me when I was sick. That's when she comes alive, going around with cold towels and that cold mud porridge she got off the recipe of her aunt who was even a colder warp than her, or more honest: the aunt never married. When I got well, we were in Arizona holding down the corn beer production on the Apache reservation. It suited me. I didn't want to be near Mobile again. And on the reservation there was a drunk Indian I shot, about seventy years old. He claimed he'd been under old Geronimo, who died in aught-twelve or so. Nobody had a gun when the old guy run up all corned to the eyes, five of us agents sitting around a fire lying about strange vegetation and nooky we'd been among. For fifteen minutes we heard him yell he was going to kill us with this bow and arrow he had on him. We tried to kid it off him, but he kept stamping around and aiming it. I wasn't scared, but the senior was, and he told me to get the heater out of the car. It was a Tommy gun. When I got back, the old Indian was stamping on their feet and spitting on them, making sounds
like
otta, otta
! over and over. He took their hats off them and threw them in the fire.

When he saw me come up with the gun, he smiled like a coon. For an old guy he had surprising white teeth even though all the rest of him was filthy. Then he took the arrow back and shot me square in the solar plexus with it, the crazy idiot. This filthy arrow was in me, it felt like right in my heart, and I looked over and all the agents were so juiced on corn beer they still thought it was a fun house when I needed help. So I shot about a quarter of the Tommy into him and he backed up ten yards and fell flat. I didn't want to die alone. It sobered them up, quick, before I fainted. Luckily I had a big chest when I was young and the point was hanging in there a half inch from the fatals, said the doctor. The old Indian never bothered my sleep much. I think he wanted it bad.