False Entry (19 page)

I explained that the petition had been signed and returned the day before. He shook his head. “Not here then,” he said. “In there.” He pointed to the wall that joined the office to the courthouse. “Gone into the file. For the court.” Off his feet, he seemed to regain a certain sobriety, almost more intense than the real, as if his balance, reaching for the norm, had slipped past it. His eyes, large on me, were not for me. “’Twas a bad job, eh?”

I spoke across him, an overreacher too. At the moment our logic was not unlike. “How do we get it back?”

“Pa has the key. And he’s gone to Montgomery.”

“When will he return?” My courage sank, not of itself, but of my sad knowledge that it was my first and that I did not yet know how to maintain it for long.

His answer was at once monstrous and infinitely believable. For answer he pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk and slowly fingered, counting, the bottles there—tall white ones with a French label. “Three,” he said. “Left me three. Three days.”

Confused as I was by what I could not quite interpret, I could still follow him. The shifting, the thin-skinned are myself—I move as they move. With those who are all one dense fabric I cannot engage. “Doesn’t he leave the key too?” I said. “Somewhere … somewhere you could find it?”

His eyes, sly now, were on me for me. He entered now and drew me after him, into that opposite atmosphere of the drinker, in which all that is revealed is to be avoided also. Tact was all around us now in a cat’s-cradle of invisible string. He put his finger to his lips. We were trapeze artists, he indicated—hanging by our toes. There was a universe, there in a corner, to be sidestepped, to say nothing of all those conniving by many paths to meet us—among them a son who bore so humbly the name of his father, and a father with such a special consideration for his son.

Walking on the balls of his feet with a delicate lurching, he went toward a cupboard and opened it. Umbrellas and jackets hung there, and a monkey-black cape too small to be his own. From the folds of this he removed, using his left hand, a flat key. It was not for the door. This opened noiselessly into the courtroom, no doubt to allow the elder Fourchette to doff or assume whichever half of him suited the calendar. His son went through it silently in his ring-nosed gait, slipping across the bare, oiled floor to a row of filing cabinets lined up against the far wall, most of them old wooden ones like those in the office, a few of them, at the end, new and gray. He used the key to open a drawer in one of these.

“What name’s it under?” He had put on a pair of glasses with dark-tinted lenses that, with his pleated shirt front, gave him the look of a man who chose to be at once dandified and blind.

“It’s under Higby,” I said. My courage returned with the sound, although the room was eerie under the single lamp over the entrance outside. “Had you better have a light?”

He muttered that he had forgot his flash, and pointed to a switch behind me. Six polished white domes sprang to light above us, far up against the high ceiling, attached to the brackets of a fixture that splayed far above us like a daddy longlegs. I cannot now remember whether I thought of the resemblance that night, or later. This was the first time I had been inside the courthouse. It is like the school building when school is out, I thought, recognizing that same hush of institutional guilt suspended. But the school had a different smell, the cheerful stink of bad children busy being weighed. Here, later on, they came to be found wanting.

But I cannot fragmentize what I knew later, saw then. I know that he had trouble finding the paper and that I stood there a long time.

This then is the courtroom as it was then and later, as it no doubt always is. It is a large room with an audience of chairs that sit in an immanent threat of waiting—when empty, for people; when crowded, to be cleared. Its spectrum is brown—tobacco, urine, disinfectant and the battered wood that holds them, porous flesh of the state, waiting to be replaced by stone. Here official cleanliness covers human dirtiness; some argue it other ways round. The final admixture is the judgment.

I heard him grunt when he found the paper. He stood over it, his head weary on his chest, moving to its counter-breath side to side. He took off the glasses and screwed up his eyes. I crept nearer behind him, near enough to catch his essence, blended with the faint, criminal flavor of the room. There would have been time to snatch the petition, seize it and tear it, be gone. Note that I did not.

“Turn off the light, would you?” he muttered. “Would you kindly?” I went to obey him, walking across the big room between the chairs. I heard the swift padding behind me. When I turned, he had vanished. He had had time to close the door to the hall and the office door. I could hear a thin clinking. When I entered, he was sitting at the typewriter, just closing the drawer. He lowered his eyes, covering his mouth with the back of his hand.

I was angered enough then at his tricks, his slowness, to stoop over him without speaking and take the petition from the muddled pile in front of him, delaying only to check that it was the right one. But when he stammered out what was I doing, where was I going, I stopped to answer him. Note that I did.

For his answer, he held out the key. By hint and suggestion, never saying an explicit word, but lapping me in the strengthless flow of his “tell-you-whats,” his “sorries,” he made me see what he skirted: that if the petition were missing without explanation, his father would come to know how often clients made him do the work over, how he concealed it by stealing the key. Once again I listened. And this time I spoke. Old Fourchette, I thought, so clever at leaving bottles, would be as subtle on keys.

“I’ll bet he does know,” I said. “How can you think he doesn’t?”

His son said nothing; only the red of his cheek merged deeper, as if I had committed a solecism we must both ignore. He opened the cabinet without a further word and replaced the key in the cape. He is like that fabled giant made of water, I thought, with his politeness, into whose form one’s fist plunges meeting nothing, against whose bulk one cannot move. His right hand began to tremble. I gave the petition back into the other.

Later on, excusing myself, I told myself that one must never parley with the weak, for while you do so, they give you their weakness to hold. That is a fine bit of wisdom. But the hall of apothegms is made of mirrors; it is unlikely that we can pursue there even one image to its end. While they give you their weakness, you take time out for yours. And even this may not be the close.

At the moment, I promised myself that I would come back to see old Fourchette on Monday. I could still see that act, a tiny flare of action yet to occur, in the distance, only a few days away. I did not want to go home, thinking of it. The clock said eight. I would leave him to Ticely. I turned to go.

But he meant to thank me in his way. “Join me in a little refreshment,” he said. “Always keep some on hand.” He reached, not into the drawer as I had expected, but behind his father’s chair, into a space behind two of the leather volumes, from which he drew a whisky bottle and two glasses. I had my growth, looked older than I was, and it is probable that he did not remember, had it mattered to him in that region where boys were men at my age, that I was eighteen. He must long since have reached the stage where he carried little over from minute to minute except the burden he carried always. And in that too, the drinker is compelling to those who, as he forces them to see, merely frivol on the norm. His bleared eye, fixed on the important, shamed me; I could not keep my own from that hand, so tremulous, that seemed to be held in flame.

He served me from the whisky bottle, then, turning his back to me, shielding what he was doing, he downed a quick shot from one of the bottles in the drawer, served himself another and turned around again, holding his glass, paler than mine, ostentatiously in front of him, like a child who takes two nickels from a drawer and comes forward saying, “Look! I took this,” holding out one. I marveled that such a behemoth of a man could seem like a child, that such a huge child should persist at times in reminding one of a man. At these stealthy moments he was a naked man. And at others (as when I had challenged him about his father) he seemed suddenly to reveal that he knew this, and humbly inclining a forehead that had its patch of Mosaic wrinkles, to exact of me only the covenant that it not be admitted between us that he knew. Sitting opposite him in the small, hard chair reserved for clients, with his typewriter between us, a heavy old desk model shaped like a pew, I had a curious thought. I thought of the Romans, who read their augurs in the guts of fowl, and I wondered whether, if they had used men instead for this purpose, they would not have chosen to read their mysteries, their augurs, in the entrails of such a man as he.

Meanwhile he sat there, comforted, in the bit of social peace garnered from being able to do what he must within the public frame. I took my whisky with the testing sips of the novice. It had a wet-ashes flavor much stronger than the treasured Scotch that once or twice a year took the place of beer at home, but it did not make me drunk. I had eaten the sandwiches and chocolate, and although I was not yet aware of it, I had the steady head of the man whose plight is to loosen control, not to keep it. But I was mortally tired and stressed, and it was the hour of the day that for me often brings apperception.

For a fleeting minute I thought of Johnny—of our lost tryst together at the café. Even as a grown man, sharing a drink with another in some “local,” the thin, surviving shadow of that sometimes dips by, in spite of all else that his memory meant to me later. What does not happen we keep forever green.

Fourchette had forgotten me, except perhaps that if anyone entered, my glass excused his glass. These ruminative, interim pauses that fall between men at such times, when the cup is held suspended, the knuckles absently rub the chin, the rain suddenly begins outside the room and is listened to and no one speaks although all hear, or someone says “the rain” and all nod and are silent—these are the most powerful moments in life, when its fathomless current is distinctly heard. The chair says, “Lo, I am the chair—in a museum a hundred years hence if I last”; the grate says, “I shall be gone, but now I am here”; the rain says, “I shall be the same then, though not for you, but tonight I am for you,” and the silent room is filled with their thunder. On my deathbed I shall be thinking of such a moment if I am able, yearning for that old order where the drama is stilled and all that rich,” anonymous current prevails.

“Where did you get the shell from?” I said.

He raised his head, bemused. “Lots of them, down home. Came in on the ships, I reckon. Don’t rightly know from where. Used to have us one for a night-light. In the vestibule.” He suddenly snapped on the desk light and held the shell over it, flushing the rosy epithelium that lay concealed. It glowed in the room’s darkness like a great ear. “Hear the Gulf in it,” he said, and set it down.

For a while we sat silent. His hand remained on the shell, his fingers closing on it, their muscles almost still. I thought of home, of how it would have been if I were entering there now with the petition torn in two, my mother and uncle sitting at our table, the two severed halves placed triumphantly before them, in the bitter charade I had planned. And now I could see that imagined action as a child’s tantrum that changed nothing, that merely retreated from what it did not want, that had no argument of its own, that struck no blow. It was the tantrum of the dressmaker’s son, reared among the minor contretemps of that trade—the awkward slash of scissors, the fabric that incontinently tore. It was a revolt scaled meekly to the world of my mother, to the reverberations of a dropped pot, a smashed plate, to all those petty mishaps with which women obscured the face of the serious, that they mustered so loudly against the real. It was this I should be fighting—not my uncle. He and I, in our male dreams, were allied. It was my mother I should be bitter against, who was using my uncle’s dream to limit me, who, whether she knew it or not, was the natural, the female guardian of all the philistine. My heart contracted for a moment in piety; she had left that needle inside it. But it was she I should be withstanding, for refusing to reverence the other half of me, for fearing all the sore, imaginative life that was mine. If a blow was to be struck, it must be at her. And it must come from there.

“Meant to thank you,” said Junior Fourchette. “Thank you kindly. Had it in mind.” I heard his humbleness. It made me shiver in fear of my own.

“Can you change the name for me now?” I said. Shamelessly I used what I knew of him. “The name you got wrong?”

His hand stole toward his pocket. “Now?”

“If I wait,” I said, “I might not keep my nerve.”

He nodded slowly, intimately, as if we exchanged a professional secret. His eyes, steadied with sympathy, were almost sober. And in me, from some inner fount, the sense of how to manipulate my brothers rose like wine. To do it, you joined a little of your truth with theirs.

I thrust the petition under his glance, and pointed. “They want to give me that name—my stepfather’s. But I’ll have one of my own. I’ll have any, before I have that one.”

He bent to read. Alcohol coarsens only the coarse. To others, like him, it gives a fumbling clairvoyance. They receive what one has to say on the fine edge of their own trouble. One can speak to them as one might to some poor, spoiled priest who is the more safe because he will not remember, all the more catholic because he has been defrocked. He shook his head, reading where I pointed. “George Higby, Junior.” A corner of his mouth pulled down. His hand came from his pocket. “No, not that one,” he said. “No.”

I helped him put the paper into the machine, but I could go no further. The machine, an ancient one, bristled with clumsy spools and spacers, and at that time I had not yet learned to type. The paper he used was thin as tracing sheets and lined, perhaps to guide him, in the same bluish purple as the lead in indelible pencils—a kind of paper I have never since seen. Any erasure tore it. “No, I’ll do it over and then insert,” he said. “We can keep the last page.” This was the page with my mother’s signature.