The Hair of Harold Roux (27 page)

“Don’t tell anybody if I tell you, okay?”

First, there was a car, a Buick. Short Round spoke conspiratorily, his excited voice lowered a little. This brand-new
Buick had less than three hundred miles on it. It seemed this old man bought it and a week later had a heart attack and died in it, in his garage. He lived alone and they didn’t discover him for a month. By that time he was so rotten they had to spoon him out of the car, and the car stank so much inside nobody could get near it, so there it was, brand-new, and they only wanted $150 for it. Short Round had put up $50, Boom had put up $50, and they needed one more shareholder. Boom’s plan was to strip the whole inside of the car and fumigate everything, even if it took weeks, then put everything back—probably have to buy a new front seat—and they’d be in business.

“Have you seen the car?”

“No, it’s down in Connecticut.”

“Has Boom seen it?”

“Sure!”

Short Round could kiss his $50 goodbye, Allard decided, but at the same time decided not to tell him.

Short Round followed him to the showers. “Man, we can sell that Buick for two thousand bucks! What a deal! We’ll make around six hundred apiece!”

“Why doesn’t Boom buy the car all by himself?” Allard took his shower, Short Round hopping around the periphery of spray but not answering. This question evidently didn’t interest him. Water gushed around Allard’s ears for a while so he couldn’t hear anything else. When he shut it off Short Round was still talking. “Six hundred bucks! And then we got this deal where we can buy war-surplus jeeps for one fifty apiece. Made by Ford, GM, hardly used. Some still in the cosmoline …”

He continued to speak of these great opportunities as Allard dried himself before the mirror over one of the wash basins. There he was, himself outside of himself, muscular and flesh-colored, an image that wasn’t himself. And look at that face. Undistinguished but fashionably Anglo-Saxon, the face was flexible; people were always startled by the strange, violent expressions, or masks, it could instantly warp itself into.
And yet it didn’t smile easily. Behind his mirror image was one of Paul Hickett, who wanted to give the visual impression of a veteran-hero, or maybe now a hero of deals, profits, the man who was In. Paul had once tried to lure him into a strange sort of mutual lie about combat, and he wondered how naive Paul was about new Buicks and surplus jeeps. Maybe this was the same kind of thing, but he thought not. No, this was belief.

Allard shaved his light beard, something he could never do without remembering what Nathan had said—that Nathan himself had a tough beard and tender skin, while Allard had a tender beard and tough skin. A tag of insistent memory he would never lose. Short Round didn’t seem to have beard or skin. His skin looked like parchment, young but ancient, like the skin on a pickled human embryo. Still talking of his deals, Short Round followed him back to his room.

Just a few years ago, Allard thought, four or five fairly short years ago, he himself was a child playing at what he had to know were games. Short Round’s schemes were so plainly games. Boom’s weren’t, but he needed Short Round’s belief in fantasy in order to con him out of real money. The price of the Buick and the price of each jeep were deliberately the same. This was the joke; the con man always laughed because his game was so simple, belief so easily had.

He got his clothes together. For Mary’s father he would wear a white shirt, a tie, and the light flannel suit he’d bought in Boston after his discharge. Such a neat, clean young man he’d seem. A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest. No, damn it, he had honorable intentions. Then why did this charade seem dishonest, and because dishonest, boring, deadly boring? He did not enjoy fooling people. From the con he got no joy at all.

Or maybe not at this particular moment. For instance, he would let Short Round go on believing because it would only hurt him to tell him that he was probably being taken, that the dead-man’s-car story was so old it could probably be found in the Aramaic, referring to a sedan chair or a chariot.

But the old stories were the best, or they wouldn’t have lasted so long. Stories were to be believed. Even when you didn’t believe them you believed them because you knew how you wanted them to come out.

“Hey Paul, you got any beer?” he said.

Short Round was perfectly willing not only to be interrupted but to drop his games immediately. “Yeah, but it’ll squirt all over the place. It’s a squirty case, I don’t know why. Nobody dropped it. Usually you can open Pabst warm okay, but this you got to watch or you’ll get a bath.”

“Go get me a couple,” Allard said, handing him fifty cents. Pleased by the order, Short Round went to get the beer.

Allard would wear his suit, he decided, under army fatigues, so he could peel off the fatigues at Mary’s house and enter formally. The motorcycle would unnerve Mr. Tolliver enough.

Short Round came back with three cans of beer—one for himself—and put them down gingerly on Allard’s desk. “You got a church key?” he said. Allard had a church key. He took one of the cans and opened it at the window so the spray would go mostly outside, then capped the hole with his mouth and drank the pressured warm bitterness. When the pressure eased, he said, “I’ve got to ride the Red Wonderplane to Concord.”

“To see Mary,” Short Round said diffidently.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Somebody mentioned it.”

“Hmm.” His eye was dangerous to Short Round, who looked away. But Short Round liked that danger. The world was full of exceedingly different pleasures.

He rode the old motorcycle toward Concord, the slow, long-stroking engine pulling him over the hills and through the valleys. Even though this trip brought him toward a confrontation he really didn’t want to have, the riding was a pleasure. It still seemed miraculous to him that an engine and not his legs moved him across the land, down the curving highway at forty-five miles an hour. The rural state presented
to him in passing so many pleasant vistas of green fields and the deeper green of pines and spruce, white houses and grayed barns, elms like benevolent high fountains of wood and leaves above stone walls, old maples with trunks like knotted muscles, arms of the earth. He passed through little towns consisting of a general store, a garage with gas pump, a town hall and church no bigger than houses. Into valleys, over small rivers, part of a lake blue and sparsely cabined, a bass fisherman casting from the highway beside his pickup truck. Onward steadily, easily, the engine’s oily heat between his legs, the warm wind a receiving push his body parted firmly and smoothly, mile after mile.

The miles were more precious because of the destination that moved toward him as he moved across the state. Unless he turned around, or went on by, soon that destination would surround him with its particularities and demands.

He rode down the long hill from East Concord, the State House dome a small gold bubble across the river, then over the metal-grate bridge with its gruesome potential toward his flesh. Once into the small, rather dingy city, he turned north in heavier traffic, watching the intent of all drivers lest they be blind or mad. It was ominously, almost unfairly, easy to find the row of sooty duplex houses across the road from and above the mill they served. He drove up the short, steep driveway of Number 16b and parked his motorcycle, the rangy machine leaning raffishly on its kickstand beside the small garage made long ago for a Model T or a Model A. The dark houses crowded around him. It seemed a descent into other people’s lives to intrude into the density of this place. Everything was dusty, brown. Even the grass, where it was allowed to survive within narrow borders, seemed to grow behind an iron gray filter. Stunted shrubs brushed the cement foundations of the houses. Down across the street next to the river the long, dark mill, once powered by water, smoked and steamed tiredly here and there along its length. Looking at the river now he couldn’t imagine how it had ever been lively enough to power anything. A tepid brown, it puddled slowly
about within its scum-enameled banks, barely able to carry off the mill’s brownish foam. Brown. All the houses were painted brown, the wood deep within thick paint, a capitulation to the inevitable tones of the dim factory air. Yet this color, on the modest filigree of porch columns and banisters, seemed also to want to indicate dignity and permanence. A sad meticu-lousness in the choice of dark gray trim here and there, as on the frames of windows and the narrow doors, proved that someone was conscious of design. White lace curtains could be seen through clean glass, light keeping out light, inside a perpetual autumn. How different, as if this were a descent into the past, it all was from Allard’s home in Leah, where crisp white houses were surrounded by grass so green it seemed to glow, even in the dusk, from within each blade.

Mary had been watching for him and came, vivid as a butterfly, from the old house. She wanted to kiss him, but before this intent became too obvious he was taking off the army fatigues he’d worn over his suit. She took them, cradling the soiled GI cloth in her bright arms. She wore a yellow dress so neatly held to her quick body at waist and bodice, so airily swirling at her legs, that she was made preciously delicate by it, as though she were brand-new and he’d never seen her before.

He took his army musette bag, which contained his toilet kit and a clean shirt, and Mary took his fatigues. These could just as well have been left in his saddlebags, but Mary wanted to take them, to hang them up in the closet of the guest room. She wanted to do this. They went up the steps to the front porch and opened the front door, its panes of glass jiggling in their frames. A brass-handled crank bell in the door tinkled once, flatly, though it hadn’t been touched. In the vestibule upon a bureau was a religious statue, or doll, with a pinched, young-old doll’s face. The figure stood a foot high and was dressed in an elaborate doll’s dress edged with pearls and glinting jewels. One hand held a globe surmounted by a cross; the other, too tiny for the rest of the body, was raised, with fingers in the sign of a V. When he stopped to look more
closely at this object, Mary said that it was the Infant of Praig, a special care of her dead mother, and in the bureau were drawers full of beautiful clothes for the doll. Her mother used to change the clothes according to the religious seasons. The clothes the doll wore now were dim with dust.

“The Infant of Praig?” he said, preparing, according to his own lights, to be properly, secularly interested.

“It’s really Prague, like in Czechoslovakia,” Mary said, “only it’s always pronounced ‘Praig.’ I’ve never heard it called anything else.”

But they couldn’t dally; they had to proceed into the small living room, where stood a tall, stooped man of no more than fifty who seemed, though intensely there, smudged about the eyes. He seemed, Allard immediately thought, gone by. About his eyes was the hazed look of an abandoned store window.

“Daddy, this is Allard Benson!” Mary said as though highly pleased and surprised.

Allard took the pale hand in his square one. The hands detached themselves quickly, almost with haste.

“How do you do, sir,” Allard said.

“Yes, and you, Mr. Benson?” The voice was weak, though tense. Again Allard saw in his mind the abandoned display window, old placards or posters inside covered with dust, curled at the edges, their information obsolete by years. Even the sun’s light, if it entered here, would turn dull and sad. Mr. Tolliver’s skin was yellow-brown, his glasses tinted sepia like an old rotogravure. The skin of his face and neck hung as though draped over his head and tacked here and there, at the corners of his eyes and where his ears were attached to his head.

“What are those?” he asked sternly, pointing to Allard’s soiled fatigues.

“The old clothes Allard wore over his suit,” Mary said. “I’ll put them in his closet.”

Mr. Tolliver didn’t nod; evidently he disapproved of his daughter’s carrying this man’s dirty clothes. It must have
seemed too domestic of her, as if she were closer to him, the young and healthy stranger, than Mr. Tolliver had been told.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Benson?” he said.

A silence while Mary was gone with his musette bag and fatigues. Allard sat in an armchair, breath from its cushion rising slowly around him. Information Mary had given him intruded upon him. She had told him that her father was a minor white-collar person in the yarn mill. He had always been in the same niche; he had gone to junior college but had never risen in his job at all, just grown older. He had no tenure, no seniority, and even after all these years they could let him go any time they found it convenient. The mill itself was shaky, sometimes not running at all for a week at a time.

Mary’s brother Robert came in, staring around into the corners of the room as if he were looking for something, said hello and shook hands distractedly. He was tall like his father, taller because at sixteen he hadn’t yet begun to stoop. He was not interested in his sister’s male friends. He was busy; he left for his mad-scientist electronics laboratory in the basement where among other things, Mary had told Allard, he generated great blue shredded clouds of electricity that destroyed all radio communication in the neighborhood.

“Mary tells me you’re majoring in English, Mr. Benson,” Mr. Tolliver said.

“Yes, so far.”

“What would that prepare you to be?”

“I’m not sure—if anything,” Allard said, smiling from habit at the self-deprecating statement he had made so many times. He smiled though he knew Mr. Tolliver would not respond. The man was ill, and probably had no time for any kind of frivolity. But Allard knew also that his statement had not been self-deprecatory at all—just the opposite; in his youthful arrogance he had no need for any dull profession, and he had said this to a sick man worried about his daughter’s future. Mr. Tolliver’s lips were too red, his eyelids too loose around his eyes. It was not really age, it was his illness that like a short circuit had drained away his powers.

“It’s a hard world, Mr. Benson,” Mr. Tolliver said.