Angle of Repose (13 page)

Doctor day today. Ed took me to Nevada City in the pickup. Not that I really need any medical care. I know as much about my condition as that overworked, unimaginative general practitioner does. I don’t need him to tell me that aspirin is best for the pain, and that hot baths help, and that bourbon in moderation is good for body and soul. I go every month because I want it on the record that I look after myself. When Rodman feeds his data into the computer I want it to tell him, in its punch-card jargon, that I am medically motivated. It’s no great bother, and it’s the least I can do for Rodman’s peace of mind. The whole trip takes hardly an hour, and it gives me a change of scene. Today, for a bonus, it gave me a queer little encounter with my old school acquaintance Al Sutton.

Ed left me in the doctor’s office and went on to his tire shop. I said I would come down there by myself when I was through. It took me maybe twenty minutes to agree with the doctor that there was no need of further X rays until fall, and then I wheeled into the elevator and went down to the street level and out into the noon crowd.

It is not the Nevada City I knew as a boy. Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. Nevada City is in process of changing from old to new. Up the hill, on the steep side streets, a lot of the old flavor remains in gabled houses and second-story balconies, and even the main street has an occasional old brick building with iron shutters, left over from the 1850s and 1860s. But mostly it is Main Street, Anywhere, a set used over and over in a hundred B movies, a stroboscopic image pulsing to reassure us by subliminal tricks that though we are nowhere, we are at home. All the clues are there, some in Gold Rush type: Chevron. General Electric. Electrolux. The all-seeing eye of the I.O.O.F. Weekend Specials. That Good Gulf. Ruth’s Burgers and Steaks.

The Nevada City that I remember died quietly, along with Grass Valley, when the quartz mines closed down. The Zodiac, the Empire, the North Star, the Idaho-Maryland, the Bullion, the Spring Hill, shut off their pumps (most of which were built to a design invented by my grandfather), and let the water rise and drown all those miles of deep workings.

My father, who was superintendent of the Zodiac to the end, stayed on, and moldered away with the towns. He did not live to see their partial rejuvenation by the urbanoids who in the ’50s and ’60s bought up pineland and filled the hills with picture windows. I myself was away during all the years of decline and renewal, and when I came back I came not to the changed towns but to the almost unchanged house of my grandparents in these secluded twelve acres. I dislike what the towns have become, especially since the freeway, and I go through them deliberately not noticing anything, like a machine set on automatic pilot. People clear a path for me, and though their heads turn to watch the freak bore by, mine wouldn’t turn if it could. Rodman would probably say that in my fixation on history and my dislike for the present I display a bad case of tunnel vision. Actually, I feel a certain anticipation every time I go to town, but the minute I get there I can’t wait to get home. I don’t like the smog and the crowded sidewalks, and I don’t expect to see anyone I know.

Then I ran into Al Sutton, or almost did.

There was this skinny man with a little pot belly and a sagging pants’ seat and glasses pushed up on his forehead, standing in front of the Peerless Laundromat looking away from me across the street. Behind him, blocking the wall side, was a crated Bendix; coming the other way, along the curb, were a woman and child. I stopped, and the skinny man heard me and turned. Unmistakable. Forty years hadn’t been able to modify those nostrils that opened straight outward—we used to say if he lay down in the rain he’d drown. His little narrow-set eyes jumped to mine, apology formed all over him like instant moss, he hustled a nimble, accommodating step backward, out of my way.

“Hello, Al,” I said. “Remember me? Lyman Ward.”

He stared, he snapped his fingers, his brow wrinkled deeply under the pushed-up glasses and the glasses fell down astride the flat bridge of his nose. They were odd glasses that in the sunlight refracted and divided the eyes behind them so that for an instant he looked as multiple-eyed as a horsefly. His mouth opened, and sure enough, there was the old wart on the end of his tongue. It pulled in and hid behind his lower teeth, it crept out again and lay slyly between his lips.

“Thun of a bith!” he said. “Lyman!”

He pumped my hand. I was afraid he was going to pound me on the back, but I should have known Al better. Having been a freak all his life, he has a tenderness for other freaks. Even while he was still shaking my hand and thun of a bithing and saying, Thay, boy, ith nithe to thee you, those odd compound eyes were touching, and taking in, and shyly withdrawing from, the chair, the stiff neck, the crutches in their cradle, the stump under the pinned flap of trouser leg.

“Thomebody told me you were back living on the old plathe,” he said. “I been thinking I might drop out and thay hello, but
you
know. Bithneth. How are you, anyway?”

“I can’t complain,” I said. “How are things with you? You haven’t changed.”

“Oh thit,” Al said, “I’m indethtructible.” As gently as a hand might be offered to a possibly scared or nervous dog, his eyes dropped to my stump. He said sympathetically, “They got you thort of laid up. How that happen?”

“You get careless,” I said. “I was paring a corn one day.”

Haw haw haw. One of the lovable things about Al Sutton was always the ease with which he could be doubled up laughing. He used laughter as a way of placating persecution in advance. Nobody ever held out for long. He could make you feel that there hadn’t been anybody so funny as you since Artemus Ward (no relation). He snorted and strangled and became himself a comic figure. He got you laughing too—with him or at him, it didn’t matter. Same old Al out there on the sidewalk this noon. Lyman Ward, once the town’s rich kid, might have come by in a basket, or on a plank with roller skates under it, and Al would have made all the old ingratiating moves.

“God damn, you kill me. How’d it really happen? Acthident?”

“Bone disease.”

His laughter had already modulated into sympathy. “Tough.” He shook his head, and in the middle of a shake I saw him realize that I couldn’t shake mine, that I was looking up at him under my eyebrows because I couldn’t tilt my head back. He sat down quickly on the Bendix crate to bring himself closer to my level. Few people are that understanding or that considerate.

“Howth the wife? Thee with you?”

“We’re divorced.”

Left for a moment uncertain whether to pursue that delicate subject or let it drop, he let it drop. Through his dizzy glasses he inspected my chair. His nostrils looked as if they had been made with an auger, I could see clear into his head. “Quite a rig you got,” he said. “You get around all over in that?”

“Pretty much. I have to stay in the slow lane on the freeway.”

Haw haw haw again. What a companion. A prince of good fellows.

“You thtill a profethor?”

“I’ve retired. Why don’t you come out some Saturday and have a beer and watch the ballgame on TV?”

“Thay,” Al said, “don’t think I wouldn’t like to. Thaturdayth are tough, though. All the working girlth do their wath.”

“You own the shop?”

“Thit,” Al said. “It ownth me.”

He sat on the crate with his mouth open a little, his tongue protruding slightly. His nostrils were black and hairy. Behind his shifting, glittering glasses he had as many eyes as Argus. We had a real bond: one of us is about as hard to look at as the other.

“What have you got on?” I said. “What kind of glasses are those?”

“Thethe?” He took them off and dangled them by an earpiece, looking down at them as if he had just become aware of their oddity. The wart crept out between his parted lips. For fifty-odd years the poor bastard has had that thing on his tongue, filling his mouth and distorting his speech and building his character. You’d think he’d have had it off years ago. You’d think his parents would have had it off before he was three. “Thethe are my working glatheth,” he said. “Quadruple focalth.”

I looked at them. Four half-moons of magnification were ground into each lens. When I raised them and looked through them, the front of the building swam like hot taffy, and Al became a small crowd. “I thought I had a problem, having to look straight ahead,” I said. “What do you use them for?”

Tentatively, delicately, the wart emerged, touched the upper bow of Al’s smile, withdrew again. Al stood chuckling, scratching his elbow. “I don’t th’pothe a profethor would ever need anything like thethe. But I’m alwayth having to fixth the mathineth. Ever try to thee with your head inthide a Bendixth?”

I get the message. Space being curved, tunnel vision and the rigid neck could leave a man focused on the back of his own head. I don’t know what the effect of quadruple focals on a historian might be—nausea, maybe—but there might be virtue in trying them on.

Whose head
isn’t
inside a Bendix?

Susan Ward came West not to join a new society but to endure it, not to build anything but to enjoy a temporary experience and make it yield whatever instruction it contained. She anticipated her life in New Almaden as she had looked forward to the train journey across the continent–as a rather strenuous outdoor excursion. The day she spent resting with Oliver’s sister Mary Prager in San Francisco she understood to be the last day of the East, not the first of the West. That sort of house, full of Oriental art, and that hidden garden with its pampas grass and palms and exotic flowers, were not for her, not yet. Mary Prager was such a beauty, and Conrad Prager so formidably elegant, that she wished she could introduce them to Augusta as proof of the acceptability of Oliver’s connections. Because her trunks had not yet arrived, she had to wear Mary Prager’s clothes, which made her feel, in the strange garden in the strange chilly air, like someone else–Mrs. Oliver Ward, perhaps, wife of the young mining engineer who as soon as he had established himself in his profession would be able to provide such a house and life as this, preferably near Guilford, Connecticut, or Milton, New York.

Nothing on the trip to New Almaden next day modified her understanding that her lot at first would be hardship. It was intensely hot, the valley roads seen through the train windows boiled with white dust, Lizzie’s usually silent baby cried and would not be comforted. In San Jose a stage with black leather curtains waited; they were the only passengers. But her anticipation of a romantic Bret Harte stage ride lasted only minutes. Dust engulfed them. She had Oliver draw the curtains, but then the heat was so great that they suffered at a slow boil. After three minutes she had Oliver open the curtains again halfway. They were thus insured both heat and dust, and were almost entirely cut off from the view.

By that time Susan cared nothing about the view, she only wanted to get there. Whenever Oliver caught her eye she made a point of smiling bravely; when he said abusive things about the weather she looked at her perspiring hands, and made mute faces of comic endurance. Now and then, as the stage rocked and threw them around among their luggage, she looked up into Lizzie’s stony face and envied her patience.

It seemed a fantastically long twelve miles. Whatever conversation they attempted faded. They sat on, suffering. Susan was aware of brutal sun outside, an intolerable glare above and through their dust. Then after a long time–two hours?–she happened to glance out through the half-open curtains and saw the white trunk and pointed leaves of a sycamore going by. Their wheels were rolling quietly in sand. She thought the air felt cooler. “Trees?” she said. “I thought it would be all barren.”

Oliver, sitting with his hands braced on his knees, looked altogether too vigorous and untired. He had evidently been keeping silent for her sake, not because he himself felt this jolting, dust-choked, endless ride a hardship. “Are you disappointed?” he said.

“If there are trees maybe there’s a stream. Is there?”

“Not up at our place.”

“Where do we get our water?”

“Why, the housewife carries it from the spring,” he said. “It’s only a half mile up the hill. Things are not as uncivilized out here as you think.”

Lizzie’s face, bent over the finally sleeping baby, showed the faintest shadow of a smile. It was not well advised of Oliver to make jokes before her. She was a jewel, tidy, competent, and thoughtful, but she should not be spoiled with familiarity. Susan watched the trees pass, dusty but authentic.

The stage leveled off into what seemed a plain or valley. She leaned to see. Ahead of them, abrupt as the precipices up which little figures toil in Chinese paintings, she saw a wild wooded mountainside that crested at a long ridge spiky with conifers. She pulled the curtains wide. “But my goodness!” she cried. “You called them
hills!”

He laughed at her, as pleased as if he had made them by hand. “You permiscus old consort,” she said, “you deceived me. Don’t tell me
anything.
I’m going to watch and draw my own conclusions.”

The road became a street, and no dust rose around their wheels: she saw that it had been sprinkled. On one side of them was a stream nearly lost among trees and bushes, on the other a row of ugly identical cottages, each with a patch of lawn like a shirtfront and a row of red geraniums like a necktie. At the end of the street, below the wide veranda of a white house, a Mexican was watering flowers with a garden hose. She saw water gleam from the roadside ditch, smelled wet grass. The oaks had been pruned so that they went up high, like maples in a New England village. Their shade lay across road and lawn.

“This must be the Hacienda,” she said.

“Draw your own conclusions.”