Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (4 page)

I was just coming out of the shower when the phone rang. A woman with a shrill voice barked at me, Are you the trainer?

I’m a trainer, I said.

I got this horse.

Yes?

He’s nasty. Nobody can ride him. He hurt my husband.

Yes?

Can I bring him to you?

You plan to ride him at my place?

There was silence on her end.

Your horse is acting up at your house, so I should see him at your house. At least at first, don’t you think?

I guess so.

Where are you?

I’m up in Simi Valley.

It was my turn to say nothing.

Hello?

I’m out near Joshua Tree. That’s a long way. Can’t you call someone closer to you?

Buddy Davies gave me your name.

I don’t know Buddy Davies.

Well, he knows you.

It will be expensive for me to come way over there. It’ll cost you four hundred just to get me over there. I said that so she would say no, but she didn’t. Then there’s my time with the horse.

That’s fine.

What does the horse do exactly?

He bucks. Everything will be going along fine and then he’ll freak out, bucking or bolting. He reached around once, tried to bite my husband’s leg. My husband was just sitting in the saddle and he came around like this.

I’ll be there tomorrow morning at eleven, I said. She gave me the address and I hung up.

What what what could be at the bottom of this questionable exercise? Stories that matter and stories that don’t, like a life, served up on the lid of a garbage can with exquisite garnish, parsley and radishes cut to be roses. Whatever is at the bottom (and by
bottom
I don’t mean
lowest point
but
undersurface
or
undercarriage
) of it must have been propagated by an exceptionably significant and fascinating question, mustn’t it have, deeply personal and arresting, engrossing, at the time I wrote it, am writing it, will write it. It is a subtle and delicate last resort against—say—truth? Perhaps
veracity
is a better word.
Reputability.
Truth is so, well, worn and perhaps not worn well. There is either a cluster of grave and terrible questions with which this project is burdened or there is none. You could at least come here with the intention of getting me drunk.

Or you could have a taste waiting for me.

Touché. Or, as the French say, touchy.

It’s a circle, isn’t it? I suppose we must follow it, like ants on a pheromone trail. I suppose it is neither makeshift nor defect. The way we follow turns, in turns. But I’ve taken your conversational turn, haven’t I. Caused a flutter. Funny how easily knots get tied. There you are trotting back and counting lines, he said this and then he said that and then he said and what? Wait a minute. He said this and

You should visit more often.

I was in a particularly surly mood in that evening. I didn’t want to make the drive to Simi Valley the next morning. The mare that I thought was making progress regressed. And I found a rattler under a hay bale and I had to kill it. I always preferred to relocate them, but this one startled me and I reached out with the machete I used to cut the bale strings and whacked off his head before I knew what was happening. I made myself a boring yet somehow edible dinner and read myself into what passed for sleep for me.

The daylilies and zinnias and gerbera daisies are blooming, but the blooms are afreud to be anything but themselves, afreud they are mistaken. The author takes such shit. Probably better to be dead. The easy way out, which, by the way, is the same way in, is to privilege trope over meaning, heels over head, ass over teapot. Remember, you need a map even if you intend to misread. I feel no authorial anxiety and no real writer ever has.

The next morning, Juan came early and was feeding the horses when I got outside. I was glad. I had a bunch of paperwork to attend to before driving to Simi Valley. I watched as he tossed a couple of flakes of hay over the fence to the donkeys. He walked back toward me and said good morning.

I nodded. You’ll have to use the pickup to haul the manure trailer today. The tractor’s broken.

I know, he said. I think I can fix it.

That would be great. I looked at the clear sky. I noticed he was wearing a heavy jacket. Aren’t you hot?

He opened his coat and showed me a flak vest.

What’s that all about?

Protection, he said. They shot your horse, right?

I couldn’t argue with that.

I don’t want the last words I hear to be, I got me one.

I’ll be back this afternoon.

Juan nodded and left to work on the tractor.

I went back into the house and wrote checks to nearly everyone and anyone I could think of. I then put on my hat and started the boring and tedious drive to north of Los Angeles.

Back when we were knee high to knees Point Dume was treeless and wind beaten. It was a good place to throw ashes to the wind. Please remember that.

I followed the woman’s directions, because I follow directions well, and made my way along her dusty track of a driveway. An Appaloosa stood alone in a pasture of scattered patches of tall weeds. The yard was fairly neat but cluttered with ancient farm implements. A baling rake marked the middle of the circular drive. I parked, got out of my car, and walked up the door, knocked.

As soon as the door was opened I didn’t like these people. I felt bad not liking them, but the feeling was there immediately. Before they spoke even, the inside of their house, of their world, struck me as loud.

Loud enough I think at this point to make the point that maybe, though it pains me to say it, a certain Frenchman was correct about the nature of and the mission of the narrative of fiction or perhaps any narrative or, more accurately, the human desire, urge, push, to construct a followable, if not familiar, narrative, a story that has and makes or seems to make sense, a history that can be told and retold, a story that can be understood or thought to be understood, but there is no story after all, is there? is there? Every fool believes that if the coin has come up heads ten times in a row, it will more likely be tails this next time.

And what is this, you say say say, pull the taffy, play play play, the hounds in the attic, the sheep has a fin, and everyone waits to begin again. Blow snot from your left as you plug up your right, kill bugs with your bullets and turn off the light.

And all the details. Of rooms. Of meals. Of walks. Of gardens. Two sofas, facing each other, of worn, camel-colored leather, piping around the cushions the same color. Scratches and a small torn place on the side nearest the hearth. The coffee table, cherry wood, was once a dining table, but the legs were sawn off, very evenly, expertly, but the wooden floor was not true, so the pencils rolled off, two circles from sweating glasses, etched forever. All set on the hardwood floor, covered partially by the worn and generic Oriental rug, stressed and frayed to threads in places. Meatloaf made with brown sugar that you never liked but actually requested on occasion. The meat was too sweet and there was more sweetness added by the red sauce, possibly ketchup on top, but baked in, and yet it was still too dry. Mashed potatoes, the skins still on, lumpy and made with heavy cream. Corn bread, cooked in a pan, so it had to be cut into squares, with jalapeño peppers, baked hard on the edges. Green fried rice, almost crispy, with lots of scrambled egg. On white china, paper thin. And poppy-seed cake with a walnut filling, too sweet. With vanilla ice cream from a round tub. The tablecloth was robin’s-egg blue and too big for the table. The turn around the block past the round fountain in the yard at the corner; the gurgling of it dawned on you only when you were right on it, a big urn with a weak stream in the middle, spilling over the edge onto the ghosts of koi. The dark-purple irises that you were sorry you planted, though you loved to look at them, always needing to be divided, always being given away as gifts in paper bags saved from the market, the rhizomes lying there like bodies in a mass grave. The peonies of many colors, that you loved and everyone told you wouldn’t grow, but they did grow, but in a different place altogether. The morning-glory vine on the back fence, blue against the pink dawn sky. The hyacinth. The star jasmine, heady, crazy heady. Around the edges, purge and garlic planted to keep the gophers away, but you swore the gophers enjoyed the garlic. All the details. Everything in the details. Details, details, details. Of rooms, meals, walks, and gardens. Details telling us who we are, where we are, and why. Telling us everything. Telling us nothing. Because we live inside our heads. So much bullshit? In the middle of the middle of middle America. So much bullshit? In the details.

Deep, well past halfway, into the journey of my so-called life, I found myself in darkness, without you and you and you and you, a whole list of you, and stuck on this crooked trail, the straight one having been lost, and it is difficult to express how in this darkness, rough and stern, every turn presented a new fear, as bitter as death, but what I saw, what I saw there, out of slumber and wide awake in that dark place, was at the termination of some world and the beginning of another, a mountain maybe, a wind pressing against me, issued from some sea I could not see, and so I fled onward, recalling with every step that which none can leave behind, how lucky are the amnesiacs, when a panther addressed my presence and then a lion and then a love long lost, all three heads uplifted, but the last of them, she brought upon me much sadness, the kind that comes with fear, and she wept with me despite her hunger and we were cast back into some light, away from the cats, and while I was rushed back there was a man, whose silence seemed well practiced, and I yelled to him in that barren place to help me and he said that he was a poet and

Dad.

Yes?

Okay, okay.

You will be my Virgil?

If I could only reach the switch. I could either brighten this room or electrocute myself, which comes to about the same thing. I could begin my story here or your story there or you could begin my story, from the beginning or middle or end, depending on how you want it or I need it. These pages that I would have you write, if you wrote, or that you are writing because I wrote, that need to be written but not necessarily read. Pass the barbiturates.

In the year of your lord 1963, August 27, I was in a hotel room with John Lewis and three other members of SNCC and I was livid. I had provided several lines to John’s speech and they were being removed. I remember the lines. The first was,
If the dogs of the South continue unchained, then we will bite back, we will move on those tender parts that bleed so readily, that bleed so profusely.
Okay, I said, understanding that there was a lot of blood in the statement—rather, threat—and so I added the word
nonviolently.
This was not satisfactory. The next line was,
The Kennedy administration does not even talk a good game, failing to support voters’ rights while paying mere lip service to civil rights, as if there is a difference. We say fuck the administration that still walks hand in hand with Jim Crow.
Well, I could see that the word
fuck
was a bit strong and so I suggested
screw
and then 45 screw nonviolently. I was never much of a player in the politics of the day after that evening. The only person I met at the march that remained a close friend was Charlton Heston. I am Nat Turner and I’m sort of pissed off. Just fucking with you, I’m Bill Styron.

I am my son’s father. I will tell my story or stories as I would have him tell my story or stories. And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. I’ve always loved that bridge line. When you put words someplace, like on a bridge, they can roll to either side. It never pays to be proprietary about them. I suppose it could pay, but I am not here to argue that point and what you’ll find is that I will not argue any point, or nearly any point. I’m happy to believe all things. I’ll even believe in god for a while if it will get me laid.

Back to Murphy. I’ll be Murphy and I’m waiting outside the fat twins’ house because I’m afraid to knock. But instead of a handyman, I’ll be a doctor. The other brother is sick, but he’s afraid of hospitals and emergency rooms or he’s too fat to get out of his drug den of a house. And I know that this one is Donald, because I’ve inserted the line from his brother in my previous telling: Oh, you can tell us apart because Donald likes to shoot. If you see Donald, duck. Get it, Donald Duck? So I wait by the car with my bag until the door of the house opens. With my doctor’s bag and what is in there? I will tell you: stethoscope, sphygmomanometer, thermometer, reflex hammer, tongue depressors, peak flow meter, auriscope, speculae, alcohol streets, ophthalmoscope, gloves, prescription pad, tape measure, ECG ruler, obstetric calculator, urine bottles and dip sticks, tourniquet, magnifying glass, and a

map.

And then some other stuff:

Antacid

Analgesic (I like soluble paracetamol.)

Antibiotic (penicillin and not)

Antihistamine

Aspirin (still)

Salbutamol inhaler

A butterfly for kids

A Venflon for adults

Glucose Diazemuls

Bumetanide

Adrenalin

Glucagon

Antiemetic injection

Chlorpromazine

Pethidine

Diamorphine

Morphone

Cyclimorph

Water and saline

Hydrocortisone

Atropine

A pint of whisky

So the door opens and there is this young woman. She is a walking cliché and it pains me to write it. She is beautiful, with dark hair and all the other descriptive details that go along with the cliché. She is pretty enough to be boring. Beautiful enough to lust after and then feel sullied by the thought. She may or may not be flirtatious, and I add this because even if she isn’t I will imagine it and if she is you will doubt it. Nonetheless, when she opens her mouth and speaks, I lose all interest because she is obviously stupid or drug riddled or both.

She speaks slowly, her voice raspy, not a bad voice, but not one you’d choose, Donald’s in here.

I walk through the trashed, but still somehow neat, front room, giant-screen television blocking the fireplace, sofa with a garish western covered-wagon pattern in the middle of the room, layered with a veneer of celebrity and movie magazines, and into a bedroom where I discover that she is correct. Here is Donald, all twiceas-much-as his-brother-weighs Donald, and I realize I have never seen him before and that is why I could never tell Douglas from Donald; I had only ever seen Douglas. So, what’s the problem? I ask.

Having trouble breathing.

Well, let’s take a listen. He is already bare chested. He is lying in bed, covered to the waist by a sheet and a light-blue blanket. I am repulsed by his size, his rolls of meat, his flabby pectorals, and I am ashamed to feel it and yet somehow impressed by my own honesty about my feeling and more, yet I am dismayed by my appreciation of my honesty and decide that I am not honest at all, but vain, and decide I can live with that. I take a listen. You’re alive. We say nothing as I place the cuff of the sphygmomanometer around his arm.

Will it fit?

It fits, I tell him. His pressure is high and I tell him so. I look at his throat and in his ears. I ask him questions. Any chest tightness? Blood in your stool? How are you sleeping? How much do you weigh?

About four fifty, but that’s a guess.

I would imagine.

You should get yourself a blood pressure reader from the drugstore and keep track of your pressure. If it stays high, you’ll need to be on medication. I’m pretty sure you’re going to need medication.

Am I all right?

No. Why would you even ask that?

What’s wrong with him? The woman is standing in the doorway. I notice her flip-flops.

Where’s your gun? I ask him.

I don’t have a gun.

What’s wrong with him?

I look at Donald. You’re fat, I say to him. There’s probably a lot wrong with you and if I were you I’d go get a real physical examination and cut down to maybe ten meals a day.

Hey, from the woman.

You asked.

I want you to be my doctor. I like you because you don’t bullshit around. Hey, I know I’m fat. I work at it.

I do not respond. My eye has caught the table across the room. It is covered with cameras and lenses. I step over to the table and study a late 1950s or early ’60s Leica M3 camera in a plastic bag.

I said I want you to be my doctor.

This is a nice camera.

Take it out of the bag. Look at it.

I take out the rangefinder 35 mm camera and feel the weight of it in my hand. I know that it is the first Leica with a bayonet interchangeable lens mount. There is a 50 mm lens attached and on the table are 90 and 135 mm lenses. The top of the camera is black, not chrome, and it has not been painted. On the table are also earlier Leica cameras and Mamiyas and Hasselblads and Rodenstocks, Schneiders, fieldand monorail-view cameras and lenses, all piled up. This is all so beautiful.

You can take that one. Made in ’sixty-three.

At this point you can well imagine that I have every intention of imagining that I will take this camera. It is beautiful. It is history. In the story I press the shutter and feel almost moved by the tight, quiet click, not even the cracking of a twig, but what it might sound like if a baby could snap his fingers. And here I could go on with my orgiastic discovery of lens after lens, of only the large-format Schneiders, Angulon, Xenotar, Xenar, Symmar, Rubinar, Isconar. But the Leica that I have myself holding, that 1963 beauty, this is what I will have myself take, but why does fat Douglas have this, any of this, on this big table in his scary room?

There’s more in the storeroom. My father was a photographer. He was good friends with Ansel Adams. What do you call them? Contemporaries. They were in f/64 together.

Your father and Ansel Adams. They were friends.

Good old Uncle Ansel. Take the camera. I don’t use any of this stuff. I just have it. Douglas is always saying he’s going to sell it on eBay, but it ain’t happened yet and it won’t. Take it.

And what do you want in return?

Consider it your fee.

This is worth a lot more than my fee.

Don’t worry about that. Come back and take my blood pressure and listen to my internal noises and my heart and shit and you can have another lens, a telephoto even, to go with that baby.

In other words.

You’ll be my doctor.

Donald lies there like the lump of adipose tissue he is. He smiles, nods his big head, his greasy hair, perhaps fearing to move. I do not will not employ modal verbs. Of course this is a lie.

You must be my doctor, Donald said.

Where is Meg Caro?

She came walking back up my drive toward my studio. My wife was at home this time, in the yard separating irises. The rhizomes were in a pile at the border of rocks that surrounded that part of the garden. The sun was brilliant and boring. However, I was not there but at the market buying low-fat coconut milk for a curry I had planned for the evening. It was the afternoon and she stood so that her shadow fell over Sylvia. Sylvia pushed back her wide-brimmed and weathered straw hat and looked up. The young woman wanted to know if I was around and Sylvia told her that she was my wife. She then asked why she wanted me. Meg Caro told her that she had visited a few days ago, that she and I had talked about her possibly being my apprentice or, rather, intern. Sylvia stood and looked back at my empty studio, told her again that I was out, asked just when she had paid this visit. Sylvia wondered why I had not mentioned this young woman.
Intern.
Sylvia repeated the word and found she disliked the taste of it. Meg Caro told her that she had dropped by unannounced and that we had had tea and talked and that she had asked to work with me. Sylvia asked for my response. Oh, he said no and I thought I might try to change his mind And how might you hope to change his mind? Sylvia was angry, though she did not know why, perhaps feeling proprietary, but not likely. She did feel territorial and exhibited it by standing to her full height, some four inches taller than the young woman in front of her. If he said no, she wanted to know, why are you back? I’m back to ask again because there was something I didn’t tell him. And what is that? I need to tell him. Sylvia reminded the woman that she was my wife. He’s going to tell me anyway. I’ll wait and tell him. Now Sylvia was angrier. You may come back and tell him, but you may not wait. When will he be back? Just then I rolled up the driveway. I felt some alarm when I saw Meg Caro standing there and a great deal of alarm when I saw my wife and then her expression. We had a conversation through the windshield of the car, she asking why I had not told her about this young woman and I saying that I had not deemed it terribly important and then she said that I had obviously found it important enough to not mention and she had the last word, until I was out of the car, walking toward them, leaving the groceries in the back of the station wagon. You remember Miss Caro, don’t you? She was here a few days ago. My voice was cold, as if I was angry that she had returned, but in fact I did not know what I felt or what I thought I should have felt. Why have you returned, Miss Caro? I thought I made myself clear. Yes, but I forgot to tell you something when I was here last. And what is that? I’m your daughter. The scenario was not so unheard of, literature being packed with such surprises. Even so, I was shocked beyond belief, yet I could not properly explore or appreciate or process my stunned state because I was entertaining a rather pressing question of protocol—which of the two women was I to address first? I decided (actually,
decided
seems a bit strong or perhaps generous as what I did was simply open my mouth and let something come out) to ask Meg Caro, in front of Sylvia, how old she was. We’ll say that she said twenty-seven this time. So she was considerably older than my relationship with my wife. I then asked just who her mother was. Her name is Carrie Caro. I have never known anyone by that name. I felt some relief, as that sort of name would have been one that stuck in my head. She told you I was your father? You’re certain I’m the right Murphy Lang? There are not many Murphy Langs. Apparently there are at least two. You’re the artist. I have never met your mother. I don’t know why she told you that. As I looked at her I thought I saw a vague resemblance to my mother, which was disturbing in its own right, but I was also certain that it was my imagination toying with me, a notion that I found more profoundly disconcerting. I could not say then just what feature or features were somehow familiar, and hopefully not familial. Since time had decided to do that standing-still thing, I took the opportunity to study Meg Caro’s face. I looked at her upper lip, her lower lip, her right ear, her left ear, the bridge of her nose, her nostrils, the space between her upper lip and her nose, where her nose met her cheeks, her chin, the space just below her lower lip, her forehead, her eyebrows, her superorbital, her orbital, her infraorbital, her parotid, her hyoid region, her upper eyelids, her lower eyelids, the shape of her head, the thickness of her neck, and none of it could I say was familiar and yet somehow, all put together, she did not seem so foreign. It could of course have simply been that I had seen her days before and so she was in fact, simply, familiar. But I had thought of my mother and then I had to wonder why. I imagined a somewhat normal and calm conversation with Sylvia concerning the structure of the young woman’s face. There might be something in the chin, perhaps the mouth. Do you mean the curve of her submaxillary? No, no that. What do you think of her eyes? Not mine. No, they are not. What about the shape of her head in general? Maybe. Something in the neck for sure. Along the carotid fossa or the sternocleidomastoid? Now you’re just reaching. Here is a photograph of my mother. She was about this age when she met you. I took the picture and Sylvia crowded into me for a view. She told me you never knew about me. She even told me it was a two-night stand, as she put it. I’m really sorry, but I don’t recognize her. She’s beautiful. This was from Sylvia, who seemed at once disappointed and relieved, or so I imagined. Perhaps she was angry and only angry. But somehow Sylvia and I managed to separate ourselves from Meg Caro and step inside the house, into the kitchen. How we got in there, I have as yet not figured out. Sylvia looked out the window at the young woman and filled a glass with water from the tap. How could you? One, we don’t know if she is telling the truth or rather if what she is saying is true. I thought it necessary to make a distinction, because Meg Caro needed not be cast as a villain if she did indeed believe her own story. And also, Sylvia, I did have a life before us and you knew that I was not a virgin. I thought you were more of a virgin than this. How could you not know? We don’t know that I didn’t know. I don’t remember the woman in the photograph at all. I certainly would have recalled a name like Cassie Caro. Carrie Caro. Whatever. I would have remembered if I’d had a daughter. Without question, but that’s not the point here, is it? What do I say to her? Do I ask for a DNA test or something? Sylvia looked out the window and finally drank her water. She doesn’t seem like a bad kid. What, now are you getting all parental? I didn’t keep anything from you, Sylvia. If she is my daughter, and I highly doubt that fact, then I have missed out on her entire life. How do you think that kid must feel? Even if I’m not her father, that’s what she’s feeling. Gregor Mendel wrote
Experiments with Plant Hybrids
in 1865, the same year that an actor shot a president, and it wasn’t until thirty-five years later that anyone paid attention and of course Mendel was long dead, but had he been alive he would have been very happy that his work was being recognized and that France had limited the workday of women and children to eleven hours, perhaps, if he cared about such things. Andrei Belozersky isolated deoxyribonucleic acid another thirty-five years later and no one knows his name, only the names Watson and Crick, and also the name Elvis Presley, as he was born in that year and he had DNA, too. Such is science. Such is history. The question remained, who was standing in my yard? Was she a grifter? Was she crazy? Was she a woman who believed her untrue story? Was she in fact my daughter? And that would have made me a father? Well, sort of. What importance should I have been attaching to mere biology? Suppose a sperm of mine had gotten loose to do what sperms want to do? Was I to feel an attachment to every sperm I had ever let go? Suppose this woman’s mother had come by my sperm in a used condom left bedside and in some dorm room that I could not recall? Would I be responsible? More, would I in fact be related to Meg Caro just by a mere biological joining of cells? Blah, blah, blah, I would have thought anything to keep from going back out there. You need to be tested, Sylvia said. I never met her mother. You need to know. You mean you need to know. We need to know. And so I devised this notion, if
devised
is the right word, that Sylvia had conspired with this young woman, who did in fact look more like Sylvia than she did me, especially around the eyes, especially especially around the upper eyelids and especially especially especially around the corners of the eyes, to trick me, to come to me and tell me that story so that I would begin to doubt my memory and so that I would go mad, thus leaving Sylvia in a position to commit me to an asylum, if in fact there are still such places, to a floating prison, if not on the water then floating on some kind of barely legal paper, me in my long-sleeved jacket, too tied up and drugged up and fouled up to appreciate the sheer genius of Sylvia’s plan to dump me into a psycho nightmare and then to trot off to some South American country, perhaps Brazil or maybe Argentina, with her young lover, her young consort, whom she had met at some riding clinic that she was always running off to on the weekends over in Temecula and once in Malibu, where she had to stay over because the drive was so long, she and that young woman who had been passed off to me as possibly my own daughter, entwined on the floral bedcover of a Comfort Inn or a Hilton Suites or a Hampton Inn, their faces buried in each other’s vaginas, laughing into each other’s tufts of pubic hair at how their plan would work to undermine my confidence, sense of self, sanity, and they would be left with it all, the land, the house, the paintings to sell, and book passage on a boat leaving Miami on Christmas Day on its way south or perhaps east, to Portugal or Spain, where they would eat arroz con leche and paella and butifarra and tortilla de patatas and gazpacho and end with tortas de aceite with a very nice Palo Cortada while I would be sitting on a molded plastic chair with my face hovering over a steaming plastic bowl of gruel, thin gruel, but not too thin, Mr. Woodhouse, and when I asked for more I would be struck a hard blow to the head.