Americana (26 page)

“It was only a matter of time,” she said.

“I’d better turn on the light.”

It was a low-watt bulb and the light seemed almost brown in that narrow room full of dark jars. She was standing now.

“There is nothing but time. Time is the only thing that happens of itself. We should learn to let it take us along. The Collier woman is a fool.”

I did not move. I felt close to some overwhelming moment. In the dim light her shadow behind her consumed my own. I knew what was happening and I did not care to argue with the doctors of that knowledge. Let it be. Inside her was something splintered and bright, something that might have been left by the spiral passage of my own body. She was before me now, looking up, her hands on my shoulders. The sense of tightness I had felt in my room was beginning to yield to a promise of fantastic release. It was going to happen. Whatever would happen. The cage would open, the mad bird soar, and
I would cry in epic joy and pain at the freeing of a single moment, the beginning of time. Then I heard my father’s bare feet on the stairs. That was all.

* * *

We sat in the Aston-Martin inside the garage. There were still some traces of snow on the windshield.

“My father’s name was Harkavy Clinton Bell. They named me Clinton Harkavy Bell. He made his money late in life. Not that we weren’t comfortable early on. But it was his reputation that came first, before he started earning top dollar. He told me the story dozens of times. He was on a Union Pacific train somewhere between Omaha and Cheyenne. He was sitting next to a man named McHenry who owned a pajama company named McHenry Woolens. McHenry took out a bottle and he and my father got good and soused. He told my father he was on the verge of bankruptcy. So old Harkavy tells him what he needs is a catchy advertising campaign. You’ve got a good American name and you’re not using it to advantage. McHenry. Fort McHenry. Where Francis Scott Key wrote ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ And with that my father takes out a pencil and starts making a layout on the back of a big manila envelope. He draws a battle scene, get it, ships, rockets, a fort, hundreds of troops and a big flag flying on the battlements. Then he writes a single line at the bottom of the layout.
McHenry—the Star-Spangled Pajamas.
Then—this is the crusher—he tells McHenry that what he has to do to nail it down solid is to sew forty-eight stars on every pair of pajamas he manufactures. That did it. It was the greatest merchandising gimmick of the decade. It made McHenry rich and my father famous. That’s how they wrote ads in the old days, kid—sloshed to the eyeballs on the Union Pacific Railroad. He told me that story dozens of times. I think it has a fine innocence to it. I mean the whole idea of getting plastered with a stranger. And the campaign itself. The star-spangled pajamas. It has a lovely innocence to it. You could afford to be innocent in the old days.”

* * *

About a week after the party Tommy Valerio and I went over to a deserted ballfield on the edge of town. The field was surrounded by woods. Only the bare outlines of basepaths and a pitcher’s mound remained, and what should have been the skin part of the infield was covered with weeds. Tommy had a long thin fungo bat and we took turns hitting fly balls to each other. It was a cool day for September, generously blue, football weather really, and I ranged across the outfield making casual basket catches, hunching my shoulder and pounding the glove twice like Willie Mays, and trying to adjust to the sudden change of season; not sorry to see summer go because autumn was all gold and wine in the New Hampshire fields and I would be going into senior year at St. Dymphna’s, where I would amble along the gray lanes in my tweed sport-coat. And yet something was coming to an end, not just summer but something like the idea of what I was, the time I occupied like space, that private time in which one moves and thinks and knows the questions. Time had been warped and I looked back to the week before and could not find myself. It wasn’t until years later, in the period of the affairs, that I began to struggle against this disappearance; to give nothing to Jennifer Fine for fear there would be nothing left for myself. I drifted back to the edge of the trees and caught a long high drive.

“Let’s switch,” Tommy shouted.

“Keep on hitting,” I said. “I want to shag a few more.”

I stayed out there for a long time. Tommy got tired of swinging the bat but I kept telling him to hit a few more, just a few more. I didn’t want to stop. The ball would rise from the bat and then I would hear the light crack of contact and it would go up into the cloudless sky, almost vanishing, black at its apogee, coming down white and bruised, an old ball bruised green from the grass. I began to get serious. I would crouch as Tommy went into his swing, meat-hand on my right knee, glove-hand dangling straight down. Ball in the air, I
would break quickly, watching just the first second of its flight, and then run head-down to the spot where I knew it would land, the spot dictated by the memory of that first second and a knowledge of the wind and Tommy’s power and the sound of ball on bat. Ball caught, I would fire it back as hard and straight as I could, as if a runner had been tagging from third. Tommy would let my throw bounce into the sagging backstop. It went on like this. I was nobody. I was instinct and speed and a memory that extended back for no more than seconds. That was all. I could have gone on all day. But Tommy got exhausted and finally called it quits. I went home, oiled my glove and put it away for the winter.

That night I left my room and headed toward the stairs. I passed Mary’s room and saw my mother in there, small and blue, a question mark curled on the bed. I went downstairs. I sat on the rocker for a while. Then my father called me and I descended the steps into the basement.

Jane sat on a folding chair eating an apple. My father stood by the projector. He nodded to me and I switched off the light and then sat next to Jane. The first commercial lasted twenty seconds. A house stood on a quiet suburban street at night. Inside, a man and a woman were having an argument. A teen-age girl leaned against the TV set listening to them. She was very homely. Then she disappeared, returning seconds later with a small bottle of something. The man and woman looked at the bottle, embraced and began to sing. The next commercial was one minute long. A boy wearing thick glasses was practicing the piano. A hockey stick was propped against the wall behind him. In the distance could be heard the shouts and laughter of children his own age. The boy got to his feet, picked up the hockey stick and raced toward the door. A woman emerged from the next room. She was holding a toothbrush. She ran after the boy, waving the toothbrush and screaming. The boy opened the door and tripped. He fell down the steps and lay on the stone path, motionless. His glasses had been broken. Blood was flowing from a severe
gash at a point directly above the bridge of his nose. He appeared to be unconscious. It was a beautiful night, a cool and clear and almost autumn night. The wind rushed across the grass outside the high basement window. The sky was howling with stars. I thought of old men playing violins and of women in white convertibles driving me to Mexico.

Passing them on the roads as they journeyed toward their own interior limits, one might easily be inspired to twist the thumb of a famous first sentence. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. On foot they traveled, in old and new cars, in motorcycle packs, in trucks and buses and camp trailers, the young and the very young, leaving their medieval cities, tall stone citadels of corruption and plague, not hopeless in their flight, not yet manic in their search, the lost, the found, the nameless, the brilliant, the stoned, the dazed and the simply weary, shouting their honest love of country across the broken white line, faces lost in disbelief and hair, the drummer, the mystic, the fascist, an occasional female eye peering from a rear window, the noise at the back of her head a short song of peace.

We were nearing the end of the first week, determined not to stray even for a moment beyond the borders of our native land, carefully avoiding all those big footprint lakes and the specter of guiltless Canada. Sullivan slept up front, in the part of the camper that extended over the cab. Pike did most of
the cooking. Brand did most of the driving. I yelled and read aloud from road maps.

With us all the way had been Sullivan’s three-antenna marine-band hi-fi portable radio, a never-ending squall of disc jockey babytalk, commercials for death, upstate bluegrass Jesus, and as we drove through the cloverleaf bedlams and past the morbid gray towns I perceived that all was in harmony, the stunned land feeding the convulsive radio, every acre of the night bursting with a kinetic unity, the logic beyond delirium.

When it rained Sullivan put on her old buttonless trench-coat even though we were inside the camper. What a mysterious and sacramental journey, I thought, not knowing most of the time where we were, depending on Pike to get us from place to place. Every time I saw a river I thought it was the Mississippi. Every gas station attendant we talked to was named Earl.

I taped many of our conversations.

“This big blue yawning country,” Brand said early one evening over sandwiches. “I want to piss on all the trees, tumble down hills, chase jackrabbits, climb up rooftops, crucify myself on TV aerials. I want to say hi neighbor to everybody we meet. It’s beautiful. It’s too much. Baby, it’s wild. It’s the strangest, wildest, freakingest country in history. Davy, keep me bland.”

“Tell us about your novel,” Sullivan said.

“Writers never talk about work in progress,” I said. “Isn’t that right, Bobby? It destroys the necessary tension. If they talked about it, they wouldn’t have to write it anymore. Essentially people write to break the tension. Right, Brand? If the creative tension is broken prematurely, the original motivation is lost. I’m surprised to hear you ask a question like that, Sully. You of all people.”

“It’s about a man who turns into a woman,” Brand said. “He’s the former president of the United States. He’s completed his two terms but he’s still very popular and he’s always
speaking at important banquets. At the same time he’s turning into a woman. He’s beginning to grow breasts and his genitals are shrinking. His voice is becoming high and faggy. He wears a garter belt for the secret thrill it gives him. He’s a WASP, the ex-president. But de new president is black. He’s patterned after Sonny Liston. He’s very hip and magical. He turns on every night and he’s making it with all the wives and daughters of the southern senators and even with some of the senators themselves. It’ll be over a thousand pages long. It’s called
Coitus Interruptus.
The theme is whatever you want it to be because appearance is all that matters, man. The whole country’s going to puke blood when they read it.”

“I want to talk about this idea I’ve got for a movie,” I said.

“We’re all ears,” Pike said.

“I’m thinking of making a long messy autobiographical-type film, part of which I’d like to do out here in the Midwest, if that’s where we are—a long unmanageable movie full of fragments of everything that’s part of my life, maybe ultimately taking two or three or more full days to screen and only a minutely small part of which I’d like to do out here. Pick out some sleepy town and shoot some film.”

“How long will that take?” Sullivan said. “You’ll be filming Indians in a couple of weeks.”

“We’ve got time. The part I want to do now will take only two or three days. Either three days or seventeen years. I’ll use available light. I don’t care how primitive it is technically. Besides, I won’t be filming Indians personally. I won’t actually be handling a camera. My job will be to supervise and be supervised. The movie I want to make will be a different kind of thing completely. I’m just starting to get it straightened out in my head. It’s funny how it came to me. I saw a woman trimming a hedge. Almost immediately it became something else. And it’s still changing.”

“I wasn’t finished talking about my novel,” Brand said.

Pike was exploring his ear with a toothpick wrapped in tissue paper. When he was done he went up front to drive.
It was dusk now, bent rust powdering the western sky, neon-blooming motels, the dull sulfuric cast of roadlights, a jalopy abandoned in a field, hood raised like the peak of a baseball cap, a scene from the rural thirties. Sullivan hummed a medley of what appeared to be antiwar tunes. Brand was curled up with his British-made rolling machine and Zig-Zag cigarette paper. We seemed to be passing a resort area now. There were the white toy cottages with pink shutters from Hansel and Gretel and the filling stations of the back streets of small towns with a lone old pump and a dog asleep in grease. I remembered to turn off the tape recorder. Then I turned on the radio. Ali Akbar Khan was performing an evening raga, a sad liquid joy spilling from the strings of his sarod, and I thought of a blind Bengali walking a tightrope over nothing. I began in the dark and would no doubt end the same way. But somewhere between beginning and end there would have to be an attempt to explain the darkness, if only to myself, no matter how strange a form the explanation would take, and regardless of consequence. Maybe it was her hair. Maybe it was the way she moved as she cut the hedge, with the beautifully stylized bearing of a child who knows she is being watched. Sullivan kept on humming. A police helicopter appeared over the trees and went beating past us down the highway. Brand sucked smoke deep into his body.