The Hair of Harold Roux (18 page)

George hums and drums happily upon the wheel with his fingers as they drive along. He doesn’t seem to have a care. Smiling cheerfully, he drops Aaron at his house and drives off to his eight o’clock class of freshmen, those beautiful people.

Aaron stands in his driveway in the warm sun, not wanting to go into his house. He anticipates the feel of the doorknob, the sound of the heavy door pulling out of its weather stripping as it swings open, the sound of his own feet in the
hallway and across the kitchen floor. On the desk in his study will lie his manuscript. In the silent air will hang his various anticipations of Agnes’ behavior when she returns this evening, and his rehearsals of his own cold or warm guilty responses. He shivers, even out here in the sun. There in the garage is his Honda, silver and black, everything upon it functional and clean-lined. It seems such an easy toy, but it contains thousands of design choices, subtleties of torque and friction, electrical circuits of staggering complexity. Alternating current is changed to direct through the mysteries of selenium, that mineral with a selective mind of its own. Gasoline is vaporized and fed in minutely precise amounts into an engine whose reciprocating and revolving parts can whirl and valve more than eight thousand times per minute, over one hundred and thirty-three times each second. And the complications of suspension, balance and control: he despairs of ever understanding. He cannot contemplate such brilliant competence.

He goes into the house. After only one night unoccupied it smells a little close, the air too still, as if the house feels and resents its abandonment. The cat comes in with him at his ankles, all forgiveness, which means it is hungry. He spoons some of its gray, fish-smelling glop into its dish and goes on into his study, where his manuscript lies perversely unchanged, exactly as he left it, not a word added.

Last night he dreamed that with George’s aid and advice he shot George several times in the head and heart. The pale face looms, the weeping bullet holes hardly affecting George’s earnest reasonableness. He unlocks the desk drawer and takes out his black Nambu, unlatches the slide a crack to see if it is loaded, which he knows it is, and puts it back. Those fingerprints on the oily metal are his own. He is an adult; he makes his decisions in private, on his own, with only himself for counsel. He can live, obviously, with paradox, guilt, ambivalence. It may not be the clear golden life of the dedicated or
the faithful, but it has its occasional rewards. It is not rewarding him at the moment, however.

Once he went toward his pleasures with near arrogance, believing not only in his strength but that no matter what debacle of nature or of emotion or even of machinery occurred he would, by agility and luck, survive. He dreamed of being in a high tower as it toppled, and as it came through high trees he coolly stepped off onto a branch and let the tower fall past to its destruction. In another recurring dream he, a corporal, is being taken by speeding staff car with military motorcycle escort down the dark roads of a combat zone. Colonels and generals ride with him, but he is the center of things because he carries a message of high importance. Sirens screaming, they come to an airfield, and out on the field under harsh lights a trim and dangerous silver jet fighter plane is in readiness for him. It is a single-place airplane, and suddenly he realizes that he doesn’t know how to fly it, that the only flying he’s ever done is holding the controls of a Piper Cub for a few minutes in the air. So a little debate goes on in his head, but finally he decides what the hell, he’ll give it a try. The dream ends there, but with some disappointment that it does end there, because he always wants to find out how he did with the jet.

He has had so many close calls in his life, big and small, from mere inconvenience to the threat of death. Whatever fate or magic gets him into these situations usually gets him out. The odds seem to favor him; something seems to be on his side, and he has at times consciously counted on this. Once, broke and hungry in a miserably cold gray Chicago dawn, after a bad run of luck at poker, he was walking back to his room when, across from the university bookstore, he heard a scratchy, ticking sound from a barberry hedge; impaled on a thorn was a crisp ten-dollar bill. Twenty years ago an odd ridge on an otherwise smooth cement highway caused his sliding motorcycle to jump vertical just before he hit the car that had turned in front of him, so that he hit the soft door
panel with his side and crash bar, and wasn’t hurt at all. A septic-tank hole in wet sandy earth collapsed just before he was to be lowered into it to dig. A hunting bullet seared his leg and gave him nothing more than a burn. Congress passed a law, just before he was to go to the battle of Okinawa, saying that he was too young to fight without a full six months of training. While dozing next to Norman Winebaum as they drove to New York, he awoke just in time to see that Norman was going to keep to the right of a car parked facing them on their side of the road. When he and twenty other soldiers were lined up to bail out of a C-47 over suburban Los Angeles, the copilot came running back to find out why the plane was so tail-heavy and told them that the plane was not going to crash—the pilot was losing altitude, circling and wagging his wings as a greeting to his wife below. His reserve enlistment ran out twenty-eight days before the Korean War began. He got the mortgage on this house a week before the rate jumped a whole percentage point. It is almost frightening to go on listing his luck. In Tokyo, one summer evening, two Kanakas had him cornered and were in the process of deciding to throw him out a fourth-floor window of the Nihon Yusen Kaisha building when help arrived in the form of Iwashita and Ohara, members of his squad and also Kanakas, thus as fierce as the first two. The cold sweat of that balmy night can still be felt. He shouldn’t go on; luck is luck, and should never be listed. Do not think of it. His children are intelligent and handsome …

But what has now happened to the Prince of Luck? Has the long-deserved comeuppance begun? Here on his desk lies his work. In the morning light it seems to him dry, starved, flippant, even somewhat nasty. And there is always, in any moment of stasis in his work, the temptation to think about what is currently fashionable, which is a disaster and the death of energy, the death of sincerity. Unless a man has given away his brains to one of a thousand current Salvation Armies, he is alone, judging himself. He wants to congratulate
no one. He doesn’t want to shock anyone, either. He doesn’t want to shock anyone’s Aunt Mabel, or Mrs. Robert H. Ferranos, of 99 Crescent View Terrace, Plumville, Ohio. That is not his purpose. She is human, is she not? Are you not human, Mrs. Ferranos, once an open and delightfully sentient young animal running and jumping over the daisies? He did want her to hear his voice, and he failed.

Mrs. Robert H. Ferranos
99 Crescent View Terrace
Plumville, Ohio

Dear Mrs. Ferranos,

I was hurt by your letter, not so much by its judgment of my book, but because I caused you to write to me in anger. How can I tell you that I respect you, and that no matter where I take you, I don’t want to hurt you? I don’t want to shock you in the way I’ve shocked you. I may call upon you to witness terrible things at times, but I am not upon the side of terror. There are those who would want to shock you, of course, but I don’t think I have their rather infantile needs. Maybe you and I have different, but respectable, ideas about what literature should do. You object, I think, not to the violence in my book but to the occasional (but not random) sex without love, the recognition of the gross mechanics of our needs, the stinks and emissions of the human animal. These would not be part of your literature, which would have as its purpose entertainment and moral instruction—both good things …

B
oom Maloumian ruled his room, an exotic despot sitting in state and dominating his roommates, visitors and anyone within hearing by exuberance and the sheer intensities of his needs, demands, his constant blast of anecdote. To be near him at all caused in Allard a change of style. He resented this influence because in his moral center he despised Boom Maloumian, but after hearing the flow of that huge voice for a while he detected in his own voice some of those rhythms and even assumptions. In Boom Maloumian’s presence this force was stunning. Sitting majestically on his sagging bed, two hundred pounds of shining brown hairy flesh, sweat always gleaming on him, he celebrated his adventures: how he tupped a humpbacked hooker in Toledo, diddled a ripe banana-titted jigaboo in Big D. There was always something odd or freakish about his women, and they always paid for their sins. He told at length how he rolled queers one season in Beantown, the things he or his outfit did to jigs shines spades inks spooks shades coons dinges smokes coals zulus tarpots jazzbos fuzzies darkies shinnies boos nigs boogies. He was an encyclopedia of racial, ethnic and sexual derogations. When his troopship docked in Sydney two men were missing, both fairies. “Official report was, they flew away!”

He looked you in the eyes, beginning one of his tales, daring you, beginning softly like a huge engine idling. Allard had the feeling that if he tried to get away from that fierce,
possessive regard he would not quite make it to the door; almost, with the last fearful optimism of a mouse, but not quite. Boom Maloumian threatened always some last horrifying burst of potential you didn’t ever want to see activated, even against someone else. You were afraid even to witness it. He had the rare quality—at least rare to Allard, who was no stranger to violence—that caused your bones to feel thinner, and when you are conscious of your bones as sticks you are intimidated. This is when the logistical section of your brain calculates that he outweighs you by forty pounds of living tissue, that in the cold regions of his intent he is much less ambivalent toward murder.

Although Boom Maloumian must have had some kind of reconnaissance going, because he was never caught, he seemed to pay no attention whatsoever to any rule or law. He was a constant, almost casual thief, shoplifter, scrounger. His towels and shoes came from the athletic department; one sweatshirt improbably claimed itself to belong to STATE POLICE, TROOP c. You would find your possessions in plain sight in his room. Allard and his roommates would, without comment, take their things back, but others didn’t dare.

He roasted a whole lamb in a pit Short Round dug behind the dormitory, made Short Round eat one of the hot green tomatoes from the five-gallon crock he kept beside his bed to clean the shish from the kebabs. Short Round ran down the hall screaming “Water! Water!” which only made it worse, while Boom Maloumian whooped and bellowed, swaggering down the hall naked, scratching his moss-grown balls. The housemother stayed carefully downstairs in her enclave, and Harold Roux, as floor proctor, was by this time making frantic efforts to find another place to live. Boom Maloumian and Short Round would line up in front of their door as Harold walked past to the showers. “Now,” Boom said in ponderous baby talk, “Evybody who beweeves in faywies cwap dey itto hands!” And they softly clapped Harold down the hall.

Maloumian was often in the company of others who
resembled him, who had the same sort of nickname: Mung Harorba, Flash McLeod, Engine Whalen (who had worked on the Mt. Washington Cog Railway), Snake Morrow, Prop Gil-man (also called Flieger because he had been a pilot). Their noises when together were always raucous and challenging, but Maloumian was the loudest of all.

When he wanted to, or when his inner balances were in equilibrium, Boom Maloumian could be generous with his booze and food, and he could be funny, if in sometimes horrifying ways. In this mood his stories changed, and the central intelligence responsible professed a somewhat rational wonder at the craziness of the world. But he could change back the next moment, the pale cast of civilization fading from the big face, the red mouth, the teeth like pearls, too clean and bluish, as though polished by the hot flush of his breath. When a certain depth of meanness appeared, he seemed to be viciously biting his own cheek and blaming someone else for the pain, his face screwed to port, his small black eyes lost in the thick flesh that was muscled even at the temples.

Allard quickly read these changes, and he resented in himself the tinge of fear that made him so sensitive. He was also ashamed to be amused at Short Round’s willing degradation. He would find Short Round sitting on the floor outside the closed door, reading. “Boom’s jerking off and he wants privacy,” Short Round would say.

It was strange that of the ten or twelve Armenians Allard had known, Maloumian was the only one he hadn’t felt to be somehow more gentle than other men. Armenians: an orphan race with a history of persecution by their neighbors. Arabs, Romans, Turks, Georgians, Mongols, Byzantines, Persians and again the Turks. Starvation and massacre. Once a Turk had taught Allard some Turkish curses, saying, “If you say this to an Armenian, run!”
Eschëk! Pezze venk sen e mesbu! Sen gurt durnful lama sinis
! The last meant “You were born out of your mother’s asshole.” Occasionally Allard wondered if Maloumian did know these words, and felt them at the back of his tongue like dangerous little bombs.

Maloumian’s other roommate, Gordon Robert Westing-house, spent most of his time in a small enclosure deep in the stacks of the library. But even so, he had to come back to the room, and here he had a strange immunity, probably because Boom Maloumian was, at least for the time being, awed by real dottiness. Gordon Robert Westinghouse was one of the few nonveterans in the dormitory and it was easy to see why he’d been 4-F in the war. Quite often he wasn’t really there—or perhaps he was there but you weren’t. He had days when he didn’t look at other people at all. Another of his peculiarities, widely discussed as indicative of a strange upbringing, was that in front of a urinal he didn’t use his fly but slowly and carefully undid everything and urinated with his pants and underwear down at his feet. Sometimes, after days of ambulation inside himself, he would appear in Allard’s room, his grayish ankles showing below pants that were six inches too short for him, his socks having mostly worked down into his sneakers, and talk, usually about his poetry. He gave the impression of feverish dankness; his joints all seemed to articulate at about forty-five degrees off-center. Because he looked so mournful and sick, at first Allard felt sorry for him. This was before Allard discovered the true depths of the man’s unctuous egomania. He listened to no one, ever, and could not be kept from explaining, in utter detail, things generally known.