Americana (7 page)

Her signature,
Jane Davidson
, was at the bottom. At my father’s house in Old Holly, where they spent most of their visit, they never got out of their tennis sneakers and khaki shorts. This was a new Jane to me, this long-striding American man-woman. When we all lived together in Old Holly, I had never thought of either of my sisters—Mary was the other—as being anything less than feminine. Now here was Jane as co-captain of a roller derby team. They ate nothing but hamburgers, frankfurters and potato chips. Big Bob always seemed to be on the floor wrestling with the kids and their dog while Jane ran up and down the stairs like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, two steps at a time and a shitty diaper in her hand. My father, whose fantasy life (I suspected) was a curious blend of the dusty vast splendor of longhorn aristocracy and the faultless breeding of English dukedom, viewed this panorama with glacial disdain, one suede elbow resting on the mantelpiece, his stately manor stance, and a putrid cheroot in his mouth—Charles Bickford in a boundary war with some effete sheep rancher. But he managed to remain calm and an hour after they had left he confessed to a distant loneliness. He was a complicated man, often coarse in speech and manner, unintentionally comic at times, yet possessed of genuine insight—a good man, I think, beneath the snarl and brawl. Evidence of his fantasy life, manifested mainly by the clothing he wore and the books in his library, did not seem apparent to anyone but myself, and it may well be that I sought to dilute the force
of his reality, the powerful effect on me of the very fact of his presence, by mixing some giddy daydreams into the jug. My father had served in the Pacific during World War II. He came back with some shrapnel in his chest and a lot of medals. He kept the medals hidden and never talked about the shrapnel but I knew that both were there. We had a long talk about sex and death and I drove back to the city even faster than usual.

I remembered who I wanted to call. It was Pike. I told him I had something important to discuss and we decided to meet at Zack’s Bad News, a small bar in the East Village where he spent a lot of his time. I shaved, sprayed on some deodorant, ferreted some food particles out of my teeth with dental floss, then sandblasted with the electric toothbrush and gargled with mouthwash. I put on a pair of green chinos with slash pockets, my mandarin opium-shirt and Tobruk desert boots. Then I slipped into the stained leather Montana grizzly-hunting stud-coat I had just bought at Abercrombie’s. I decided to walk down to Zack’s. It was cold and the wind came around corners carrying the smell of snow and a faint intimation of evergreen from the Christmas tree stands. On Third Avenue the buses went by in packs, lit up like operating rooms, each window containing several moribund heads. A few yards in front of me was a man with a transistor radio. He held it to his ear and crossed the street with no regard for traffic. I walked behind him for five blocks and he didn’t lower the radio once. I moved alongside him. He was listening to a weather report and talking to himself, or talking back to the radio. He was much younger than I had expected, a boy of about fifteen, very round and blotchy in appearance, secret eyes peering out of the baby fat, and he had the slightly retarded look of incipient genius—that crowlike scratchy cunning of the city’s ragpickers and bottle-savers, those evolutionary masters of survival. The boy looked at me.

“Snow bulletin,” he said.

I never liked to get too close to such people. I crossed Third
Avenue quickly. I had gone less than a block when I heard him shouting to me. He was standing on the other side of the avenue near a lightpost, hands cupped to his mouth and the radio tucked into his armpit, calling to me, his bulky figure vanishing and reappearing, a slide presentation, as the cars and buses passed between us.

“It’s on the way,” he shouted. “They just announced it. It’s heading this way. We should get it any minute. Three inches by midnight. All motorists are warned to keep off emergency routes. The mayor says don’t drive unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’ll be here any minute. Three to four inches. Snow! Snow! Snow!”

Zack’s was an unusual place. Only on rare occasions were any of the local anomalies present—Zoroastrians, Zen cowboys, soothsayers and the like, or lost children looking for Ames, Iowa—and they never seemed to stay very long. It didn’t draw any of the area’s ethnic or subculture groups and it certainly wasn’t vibrating with laughter and political talk, that graduate school atmosphere of elbowing jocularity. Zack’s was one of the quietest places in New York. Most of the regular customers appeared to be crazy. They just sat and drank, mumbling to themselves. Every so often one of them would sing a totally incoherent song, a private hash of lullaby and talking blues, the kind of song heard nowhere else except on a subway at three in the morning. The place scared me a little.

Pike was sitting at his unofficially reserved table with a young girl I had never seen before. Pike was close to sixty. His full name was Jack Wilson Pike and he called everybody Jack. He had fine blue eyes, a disappearing chest and the leisurely belly customary in a man his age. I had met him through Sullivan, who once said that he was as American as a slice of apple pie with a fly defecating on it. She also said he had saved her life once, though she didn’t state the circumstances. The girl wore an old chapped leather windbreaker which I recognized as Pike’s, his aviator raiment.

“How do you like my waif?” he said.

The girl hit him on the shoulder.

“He says I’m his waif. He’s an Air Force colonel and I’m the waif he like rescued from a burning building. The one his own planes bombed. We haven’t come to the part of why he was hanging around in the streets while his own planes were dropping bombs.”

“I was a spy,” Pike said. “I was an advance man. I parachuted in at dawn so I could set up the bombing coordinates. They dropped me in with nothing but a shortwave set and a bowie knife. No guns, they told me. A single shot and the whole countryside would be alive with troops. If you have to kill, they told me, use the knife. It’s quick and it’s quiet.”

She gave him a backhand to the ribs. Pike asked me what I wanted to drink. He seemed drunk himself, or well on the way, and in an hour or so his head would tumble to his chest, and his entire upper body, with the sad and ponderous majesty of a dynamited mountainside, would pitch toward the table. He returned from the bar with two drinks.

“I have news,” I said.

“The lady told me.”

“What do you think?”

“Drop me off at Miami Beach.”

“Due west, Pike. Into the great white maw.”

“The great white maw and her sister Katy. A man can get killed out there at this time of year. Ask Gash here. She hails from Wyoming, the equality suffrage state. Tell him about the elk herds, booboo. How it gets too cold for even an elk to tolerate. That’s where I draw the line, at fur-bearing animals. When it’s too cold for them, count me out.”

“I’d like to live in a big wet greenhouse,” the girl said.

“Blizzards,” Pike said.

“They want blizzards,” I said. “The network wants blizzards. We want to show how much progress the Navahos have been making and if we can get a blizzard at the same time the show’ll be that much more interesting. Airlifts by helicopter. Makeshift hospitals.”

“You’ll garner the industry’s choicest awards. But count me out.”

“Look, that part of it is beside the point. We’ll just drive out there, that’s all, just for the hell of it. We won’t be going for a few months so the weather’s bound to be a lot better than it is now, even out there. I think we can pick up a camp trailer in Maine. And we’ll just go. You can map out the route. It won’t cost us much. Food and gas. And I’ll spring for the gas.”

“Ask Jack if he’s ever driven cross-country before. Ask him if he knows how boring it can be in the deepest contiguous sense of that word. I’ve done it a number of times, windshield wipers beating in my brain.”

“Look, my last two years in college I took my T-Bird out and back. It was terrific. I stopped only to sleep and eat. This time we’ll go slower. We’ll stay off the superhighways. We’ll discover all the lost roads of America. I’m bringing my movie camera. We’ll get it all on film. Your spiritual father, Pike. You’ve always talked about meeting a cougar. Well, he’s out there, crouched on some big brown rock, swishing his tail.”

The girl wasn’t drinking. I couldn’t figure out the connection between them. She was about one-third his age and seemed very attached to him but in a way I could not quite define. Her blankness intrigued me. She looked almost alluring in Pike’s windbreaker, small and dumb and tentative. I felt a need to know more about her, to fill out that incomplete image. Only completed could it begin to tell me whether I had a further need to demand from it some small recognition of my galvanic potentials as a man. I remembered the attractive couple in the restaurant during lunch that same afternoon, legs touching beneath the table. Pike was beginning to fade.

“Why are you driving when you can fly?” she said. “Don’t you love to fly? I love it. It’s the sexiest thing there is.”

“This is a religious journey,” I said. “Planes aren’t religious yet. Cars are religious. Maybe planes will be next.”

“Planes are sexy.”

“That’s right, the way cars used to be. But cars are religious now and this is a religious trip.”

Something stirred.

“He’s out there, you say, swishing his tail. I’ve always wanted to confront a cougar face to face without bars between us. Something might happen. We might feel some kind of flow between us. It’s hard for a layman like yourself to understand that. But getting up face to face with a gorgeous steaming beast like that. It’s a mystical thing, Jack. A mystical thing. The cougar. The mountain lion. The catamount. The puma. I first saw him in a zoo when I was no more than ten. Even then I felt a bond between us. I’d like to confront him face to face. No iron bars. Something might happen.”

“We’ll go up into the Rockies,” I said.

“I’d like to confront him before I die.”

“We’ll go up into the Rockies. That’s where he is, crouched in the shadows, maybe waiting for an epiphany of his own. You get a battlefield commission. Sully said so. And you can map out our route.”

“I have to do peeps,” the girl said.

“The head’s back there.”

We were silent until she returned; she punched him on the back when she sat down. Then Pike said to me:

“What runs faster, a greyhound or a cheetah?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea.”

“Think about it. There’s no hurry. Take your time. Greyhound or cheetah?”

“I’ll have to guess,” I said.

“If that’s the best you can do.”

“I say a greyhound runs faster.”

He hit the table and gazed off into the wings, a look of ineffable disgust on his face.

“Tell him, cootie.”

“A cheetah,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Cheetah goes seventy miles per,” Pike said.

“How do you know how fast a greyhound goes?”

“No living thing, man or beast, can top seventy. Cheetah’s the only one. Cheetah goes like the wind.”

“Have they ever been matched in a race?”

“Greyhound’s never been clocked above thirty-six. Why, a gazelle could trounce a greyhound. I can name any number of animals prepared to demolish the famous greyhound. Gazelle. Pronghorn antelope. Jackrabbit. Any number. Damn but you’re stupid.”

Pike was fascinated by animals. He liked to promote theoretical races, fights and tests of strength. His facts were often shaky but his convictions were deep and abiding. Nobody who tried to dispute the result of one of his epochal races or snarling culture-circled battles ever got very far. Pike would present a series of what he referred to as verifiable facts and documentations. His face would tense with rage and pain as he tried to demonstrate the obvious truth to his opponent. I don’t know what theme he had found in the animal world that moved him to such emotion, maybe just innocence, the child’s, the old man’s enchantment with an undefiled life and the purest of deaths. Pike was a living schizogram, as were Sullivan, and Bobby Brand, whom I have yet to introduce, and my father and departed mother, and perhaps myself. He was almost gone now. His voice was thick and seemed to overlap itself, words sticking to his tongue. He lit one cigarette while another still burned in the ashtray. Soon I would learn what I could about his teen queen, the abstract cartoon he had rescued from footsteps and rain.

“Why is it you keep your hands under the table all the time?” I said. “You bring them up only to give Pike one of those tender clouts. Then down they go again. What’s under the table that’s so interesting?”

“Dorothy Lamour and the squid people.”

Pike snorted and softly collapsed. I went to the bar and ordered another drink for myself. Zack put down his newspaper and removed the thick spectacles he wore. He poured
the drink, then lifted the wet five, sponged down the bar, gave me change and went to sit in a folding chair beneath an overexposed photo of a bridegroom and best man outside the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Scotch.”

“It’s real neat to watch. The ice shines and there’s like things going off. Little explosions all over.”

“Why do you want to live in a greenhouse?”

“I want to live in a big wet greenhouse with hair growing in it. There’d be like doll’s hair and doggy hair growing in all the pots. That would be neat. And anybody who wanted to be there could be there. John and Paul and Mick and the Doors and the Airplane and Bobby and Buffy. We’d all smoke and there’d be lots of audio-visual hardware. Then we would all eat hot fudge sundaes. That would be the neatest thing in the whole world.”

“How did you meet Pike?”

“I was at Elephantiasis with a boy from NYU. The vibrations were bad. I was stoned on hash and I weighed about a zillion pounds. It was like being in the back of the blue bus. Then dada came over and bought this boy about a dozen drinks and he went to the toilet and never came out. Then dada took me to his room and we ate a whole Sara Lee chocolate cake and drank a big thing of milk. It was wild.”