The Centaur (24 page)

“Try it.”

“I don’t know why the hell I’m bedevilling you like this.” Like a schoolchild Caldwell stands to attention, makes fists of concentration at his sides, squints to remember, and announces, “ ‘Song of the Passaic.’ By John Alleyne MacNab.” He clears his throat.

He thinks, slumps, and smiles. “That’s all the further we go. I thought I’d remember more.”

“Very few men would have remembered as much. It’s not a very happy poem, is it?”

“It is for me, isn’t that funny? I guess you have to have been brought up beside the river.”

“Mm. I suppose that
is
the way things are. Thank you,
George, for reciting it.” And now she does turn back into her room. The gold arrow on her blouse seems for an instant to press against her larynx, threatening to smother her. She brushes vaguely at her brow, swallows, and the sensation passes.

Caldwell heads for the stairs groggy with woes. Peter. His education is a riddle to which however it’s posed the answer is money of which there is not enough. Also his skin and his health. By correcting the exams now Caldwell can give the kid another ten minutes sleep in the morning tomorrow. He hates to pull the kid out of bed. It will be eleven before they get home tonight after the basketball game and this combined with that weird night in the flea-bag last night will ripen him up for another cold. A cold a month like clockwork, they say the skin doesn’t have anything to do with it but Caldwell doubts this. Everything interconnects. With Cassie, he had never noticed until they were married, just one spot on her belly, but with the kid it was a plague: arms, legs, chest, even on his face more than he realized, bits of crust in the ears like dried soap and the poor kid didn’t know it. Ignorance is bliss. In the Depression when he used to push the kid along on his Kiddy Kar with the forked stick, he had been frightened, he had come to the world’s cliff-edge, and his son’s small face turning around to look back, the freckles solid under his eyes, made the world seem solid. Now his son’s face, dappled, feminine in the lips and eyelashes, narrow like a hatchet, anxious and sneering, gnaws at Caldwell’s heart like a piece of unfinished business.

If he had had any character he would have put on baggy pants and taken her onto the vaudeville stage. But then vaudeville folded just like the telephone company. All things fold. Who would have thought the Buick would give out like that just when they needed it to take them home? Things never
fail to fail. On his deathbed his father’s religion: “eternally forgotten?”

Nos. 18001 to 18145: these are the basketball tickets missing. Through his closets and his drawers and his papers and the only thing he had found the blue slip of Zimmerman’s report, slip of sky, making his stomach bind like a finger in a slammed door. Biff. Bang. Well, he hadn’t buried his talent in the ground; he had lifted the bushel from his light and showed everybody what a burnt-out candle looks like.

A thought he had run his mind through in the last minute had pleased him. But what? He picks his way back through the brown pebbles of his brain to locate this jewel. There. Bliss. Ignorance is bliss.

Amen.

The steel mullions of the window of the landing halfway down the stairs, with their little black drifts of dirt by now as solid as steel itself, strike him strangely. As if the wall, in becoming a window, speaks in a loud voice a word of a foreign language. Since, five days ago, Caldwell grasped the possibility that he might die, took it into himself as you might swallow a butterfly, a curiously variable gravity has entered the fabric of things, that now makes all surfaces leadenly thick with heedless permanence and the next instant makes them dance with inconsequence, giddy as scarves. Nevertheless, among disintegrating surfaces he tries to hold his steadfast course.

Hummel. Call Cassie. Go to the dentist. Be here for the game by 6:15. Get in the car and take Peter home.

This is his program.

He bucks the door of reinforced glass and walks down the empty corridor. See Hummel, call Cassie. At noon Hummel still hadn’t found a second-hand driveshaft to replace the one that snapped in the little odd-shaped lot between the cough-drop plant and the railroad tracks; he was searching by telephone through the junk yards and auto body shops of Alton and West Alton. He had estimated the bill would come to between $20–25, he would tell Cassie and she would somehow make this amount of money matter less, it was just a drop in the bucket as far as she was concerned, just one more drop more or less to pour into that thankless land of hers, eighty acres on his shoulders, land, dead cold land, his blood sunk like rain into that thankless land. And Pop Kramer can stick a whole slice of bread into his mouth at one swoop. Call Cassie. She would be worried; he foresees their worries intertwining over the phone like two spliced cables. Was Peter all right? Has Pop Kramer fallen down the stairs yet? What did the X-rays show? He doesn’t know. He has thought off and on all day of calling Doc Appleton but something in him resists giving the old braggart the satisfaction. Ignorance is bliss. Anyway he has to go to the dentist. Thinking of it makes him suck the tender tooth. By searching through his body he can uncover any color and shape of pain he wants: the saccharine needle of the toothache, the dull comfortable pinch of his truss, the restless poison shredding in his bowels, the remote irritation of a turned toenail gnawing the toe squeezed beside it in the shoe, the little throb above his nose from having used his eyes too hard in the last hour, and the associated but different ache along the top of his skull, like the soreness left by his old leather football helmet after a battering scrimmage down in the Lake Stadium. Cassie, Peter, Pop Kramer, Judy Lengel, Deifendorf: he has them all on his mind. See Hummel,
call Cassie, go to the dentist, be here by 6:15. He foresees himself skinned of chores, purified. One thing he loved in his life: in splicing cables, the sight of the copper strands, naked and raw and gleaming and fanning when suddenly stripped of the dirty old rubber. The cable’s conductive heart. It used to frighten him to bury something so alive down in the ground. The shadow of the wing tightens so that his intestines wince: a spider lives there.
Brrough
. In the shuffle of his thoughts his own death keeps coming to the top. His face burns. His legs go watery, his heart and head become enormous with fear. Death that white width for
him?
His face is drenched with warmth; a blindness seizes his body; he silently begs a face to appear in the air. The long varnished hall, lit by spaced globes of sealed-in light, shimmers in tints of honey, amber, tallow. So familiar, so familiar it is surprising that his footsteps in fifteen years have not worn a path down these boards, yet it seems freshly strange, as strange as on the day when, a young husband and new father still with that soft New Jersey twang and blur in his voice, he had come in the heat of an Olinger summer afternoon for his first interview with Zimmerman. He had liked him. Caldwell had instantly liked Zimmerman, whose heavy uneasy allusive ways reminded him of a cryptic school friend, a seminary roommate, of his father’s who used to come visiting now and then on a Sunday and who always remembered to bring a little bag of licorice for “young Caldwell.” Licorice for George, and a hair ribbon for Alma. Always. So that in time the little stencilled casket Alma kept on her bureau overflowed with hair ribbons. He had liked Zimmerman and had felt liked in turn. They had shared a joke about Pop Kramer. He cannot remember the joke but smiles to remember that one was made, fifteen years ago. Caldwell walks with strengthening strides. Like an
unpredictable eddy in the weather, a small breeze arises and cools his cheeks with the thought that a dying man would not have it in him to walk so upright.

Cattycorner across from the trophy case with its hundred highlights, Zimmerman’s door is shut. As Caldwell strides by, it pops open and Mrs. Herzog steps out at a slant under his nose. She is as startled as he; her eyes widen behind her cockeyed butterscotch hornrims and her peacock-feathered hat sits crooked as if with shock. She is, from Caldwell’s height of age, a young woman; her oldest child has just reached the seventh grade. Already, ripples of protective agitation are spreading upwards from this child through the faculty. She got herself elected to the school board to guarantee personally her children’s education. From his professional heart, Caldwell despises these meddling mothers; they haven’t a clue as to what education is: a jungle, an unholy mess. Arrogantly her mouth in its blurred purplish lipstick refuses to frame a smile of confessed surprise, instead remaining ajar in frank amazement, like a stuck letter slot.

Caldwell breaks the silence. An urchin’s impudence, revived from deep in his childhood by the forgotten sensation of nearly having his nose socked, dimples his face as he tells her, Mrs. Herzog of the school board, “Boy, the way you came out of that door reminded me of a cuckoo clock!”

Her air of interrupted dignity, ridiculous in one not yet out of her thirties and leaning her weight on a doorknob, freezes the harder at this greeting. With glassied eyes he resumes his walk to the end of the hall. Not until he has bucked open the wire-reinforced double doors and started down the steps under the yellow wall where since yesterday the word
FUCK
has been scrubbed away, does the fist sink into his stomach. His goose, cooked. What in hell had the pushy bitch been
doing in there? He had felt Zimmerman’s presence behind her in his office, a dark cloud; he could feel Zimmerman’s atmosphere through a keyhole. She had shoved open the door like a woman making a point at her back and not dreaming her front was exposed. Caldwell in his present state cannot afford another enemy. Tickets 18001 to 18145, Zimmerman’s report saying in black and blue that he hit the kid in class, and now this: bumping into Mim Herzog with her lipstick smeared. A bubble expands in his throat and, stepping into the open, he takes in fresh air with a gasp as sharp as a sob. Blurred crimped clouds have been lowered tangent to the town’s slate roofs. The roofs seem greasily lustrous with sullen inner knowledge. The atmosphere feels pregnant with a hastening fate. Lifting his head and sniffing, Caldwell experiences a vivid urge to walk on faster, to canter right past Hummel’s, to romp neighing through the front door and out the back door of any house in Olinger that stood in his way, to gallop up the brushy brown winter-burned flank of Shale Hill and on, on, over hills that grow smoother and bluer with distance, on and on on a southeast course cutting diagonally across highways and rivers frozen solid as highways until at last he drops, his head in death extended toward Baltimore.

The herd has deserted Minor’s. Only three persons inhabit the luncheonette: Minor himself, Johnny Dedman, and that atrocious ego Peter Caldwell, the science teacher’s son. All but the shiftless and homeless are at their own tables at this hour. Five-forty. Next door, the post office has closed. Mrs. Passify, moving tenderly on worn legs, lowers the grates on the windows and eases shut the drawers colorful with stamps and inserts the counted money into the mock-Corinthian safe. Behind
her, the back room seems a battlefield hospital where gray mail sacks lie unconscious, steeped in an anesthesia of shadows, prone, misshapen, and disembowelled. She sighs and goes to the window. To a passerby on the pavement her great round face would seem the face of a grotesquely swollen child straining to peek out of a tiny port-hole, the goldleaf O at the zenith of the arc of letters spelling
POST OFFICE
.

Beside her, Minor methodically twists his coarse white cloth into the steaming throat of each Coca-Cola glass before he sets it down on the towel he has spread beside his sink. Each glass continues to give off a few wisps of mist as the cool air licks it. Through his window, which is beginning to fog, the pike is ripe with cars hurrying home—a laden branch whose fruit glows. The luncheonette behind him is all but empty, like a stage. It has been supporting a debate. Within, Minor is a cauldron of rage; his hairy nostrils seem seething vents.

“Minor,” Peter calls from his booth, “you’re old-fashioned. There’s nothing wrong with Communism. In twenty years we’ll have it in this country and you’ll be happy as a clam.”

Minor turns from the window, dome flashing, brain raging. “If old FDR had lived we’d have it,” he says, and laughs angrily, so that his nostrils spread under the burst of pressure “But he went and killed himself, or else he died of syphilis. God’s judgement: mark my words.”