The Hair of Harold Roux (42 page)

When the call is over, when their voices have expired, Aaron walks away from the telephone table, down the hall to the front door, opens it and stares out into the world. He remembers an incident in which he had the choice of action or inaction, but it was less complicated then, perhaps like an earlier version of Hamlet. Being central in his life, he can at least in private do without the wry muck of false modesty. The hole he is in is the most important hole on the front. No one but he can even attempt to define his view of the world. Man of violence, death-dealer, inclined to protect the weak, ashamed of all dogma, believer in man’s bestiality and in democracy, as afraid as anyone of death, not afraid of violence —a waking dream he has entered many times, often with joy —but afraid of the joy of violence.

A warm evening in May, lively with the odors of Tokyo that were then human, coming from the processes of life as it survived in the rubble. Hibachi smoke, fish, onions,
sboyu
, beer, piss, the warm odors of the ages. He had left the Nihon Yusen Kaisha building, gone up the short broad avenue past the Maru-no-uchi, through the busy, bombed-out shell of Tokyo Eki and was crossing a long wooden footbridge over
the yards of railroad tracks below. People moved quickly, small, gentle-seeming defeated wraiths going home from work in the dusk,
geta
and shoes clattering softly on the wooden planks, mixtures of Western and Japanese clothes, muted tired people walking with the delicate economy of the partly hungry.

Ahead of him a big American soldier had something small trapped against the railing. Aaron approached this frantic center of energy, the Japanese who came toward him glancing fearfully at it, then setting their eyes ahead as they passed. The big shoulders of the soldier hunched forward in a rage Aaron saw was necessary to his task, created by desire but blown up by real sanctimony. Though his voice was strangled by his rage, the soldier seemed to be accusing a middle-aged Japanese man—an office worker, probably, in round spectacles, neat shabby Western coat and tie over the baggy cotton knickers of surplus Japanese army pants—of possessing American cigarettes. Possession was the soldier’s legal term.
Possession
. An observer, Aaron stopped behind the soldier and watched him steal the man’s wrist watch, discard his empty lunch box, rip his coat pocket in his search, all the time cursing out his one legalism, wanting to kill. The thin Japanese, in his terrible danger, of course said nothing. The people passed in their muted hurry, having to survive. Across the tracks, past a stone-lined canal, were the cracked buildings still standing, dim lights in windows, then the streets, stalls, the mounds of the city in the dusk.

Aaron looked up at the breadth of the soldier’s thick neck from behind, feeling more than naked. Amputated. He felt made of air, a ghost. He had no weapons. It was not his business; it was always his business. He yearned for a gun, a knife, a two-by-four, anything to give him leverage beyond his thin bones. A bar of soap in a sock, which one soldier he knew carried in his back pocket, would have made a sap. But he had nothing, and after a while he walked on by. For a long time he daydreamed of his ideal duty, in a sick rage within himself. He might have reached down from behind and
grabbed the soldier by the cuffs of his pants and heaved him up and over the railing, where he would have fallen twenty feet or more to the tracks below. Because of Aaron’s weakness, death or terrible injury were the only choices he had. It was what the soldier would have done to him if he’d said a word. By then he knew murder’s symptoms.

He could later tell his friends about it and gain some of the fraudulent relief of confession. Little Willy, a corporal, showed him the folding stiletto he carried—a mean-looking knife made in the Philippines. But even with such a weapon, acting on such a level, where would he have cut or stabbed the soldier? The blade, though five inches long and thick enough, didn’t seem adequate for a mere threat. He might have hamstrung the soldier, or cut his Achilles tendons, but he didn’t think he would be able to carry away the responsibility for the blood, the blue-white tendons drawing up along their ruptured sheaths into the leg muscles. In the absence of real power blood seemed the only alternative.

Though he could walk away, and had to walk away, he could not walk away with impunity. He could never be a mordantly amused or merely interested observer of the beast.

He acquired the Nambu later, but never carried it.

Dusk is falling in his yard, the apple trees fading into their night shapes in which one doesn’t think of them as having mass, they are so quiet in the dark.

His wife and children will be returning soon, the headlights of the Chevrolet beaming down the gravel there, bringing the apple tree brightly out of its shadows for a moment before the lights are swallowed by the garage. And then from the garage, after the slamming slabs of the car doors, will come those closest to him, the ones bound to him so deeply he cannot function without them. This he knows because he tried it once and it was like trying to live without his heart or lungs. They are the forces that keep him alive, shocking him into his duty with the irritant voltage of pacemakers.

Embedded in him. Sometimes he doesn’t like any of them. He feels misunderstood, taken for granted, attacked. He would rather be an Eskimo leaning over a seal’s breathing hole waiting, waiting in the sub-zero wind for the meat and fat with which to feed a hungry and grateful family. All he wants is for them to smile and be happy when he feeds them. He can’t remember everything! Don’t they understand how much he tries to remember, has to remember?

He finds himself shaking with indignation and guilt. His eyeballs grate in their sockets, his brain dims, there is a short in the electronics of his spine caused by his bruised knee and wrist and the dying day’s hangover. This wreck who peers bleakly across the falling darkness can’t be him.

It was such a short time ago when he and Agnes moved into this house with the two young children, when the house’s warmth was a wonder to them all as the snow swirled at the windows and the wind was beaten back up the chimney by the fire. He and Agnes saw through much younger eyes then, as though childhood were more translatable among them all than this later time.

But now it seems too late. He can speak to his children, who are growing up into their ironies, their humor that speaks to his, but he can seldom speak in that relaxed way with his wife. Of course they always had little to say outside of the tensions of their relationships—once good tensions, exciting ones. Still exciting, but now often wearisome, turned into accusation. When they are making love it is still the way it used to be. He would like to have a woman again with whom he can relax, admit things, be valued for the nonvalue that consists of merely being a man.

He thinks that he will never leave Agnes, but he can’t predict what he will do. He isn’t much different from any man, his years have slowly but surely taught him, and he sees so many of his friends and acquaintances breaking up, desperately looking for a remembered calm.

Agnes is the sort of woman who remembers everybody’s children’s names, and the full names and occupations of coupies
met once at parties. She has the talent to make him feel guilty that he does not. She has the talent to make him feel guilty most of the time, and it has always seemed to him a strange talent for a wife to cultivate. His colleagues think of him as a prodigy of industry. He is never sick and never misses classes or conferences or meetings. He is always available to his students and his colleagues. Though he thinks of himself as a fairly lazy writer, the statistics seem to disprove this. And so it is mainly through his work that he retains a sense of his worth, except for the negative indication of Agnes’ possessiveness. He is wanted; he is demanded. It is demanded of him that he be prompt, courteous, efficient, etc. And if he is a writer, of course he writes; doesn’t a doctor doctor, a plumber plumb? God, he hears the echoes of his self-belittling screams of rage.

Aw, shut up and get to work, says his other voice. You need a woman to tell you you’re great all the time?

Yes! Yes!

Well, then why don’t you and, say, Helga run away together? Take the old Vollendam to Havre and the train to Paris; there’s still a fine little hotel with tall windows near the Luxembourg Gardens.

The two children, tender in their cotton flannel pajamas, snuggled on either side of him; across the room in the black interior of the fireplace dark orange flames silently flowed upward from the hardwood logs. He was the father, the large one who kept the cold away. In the deep chair Agnes was not reading her book but listening. It was a winter story Janie and Billy knew as deeply as experience, a story as frightening as they knew things really were. But they were allowed the hope, the slightest hope, that virtue and love would in the end surmount the most deadly tribulations.

And so he told them the story, how, that night, when everyone was asleep, Janie put on her warmest clothes and went to search for Oka under the frozen moon. She went to
the barn first, the crampons her father had made squeaking on the blue ice. Maybe Brin, out of his warm, phlegmatic vastness, might have something to tell her. Or the clever goats, who seemed to know so much though they never seemed to care, their indifference as distant as the moon—what they must have seen through the black slots in their yellow eyes.

She stood in the breathing barn, slits of moonlight and the briny smell of hay and manure around her, saying, “Brin? Brin?”

He moved a gigantic part of him—brisket or flank, she couldn’t see that well at first—and rumbled deep inside one of his stomach chambers:
I am only a beast and do not understand much. Oka was warm and could help to hear the noises. She could smell wolf and bear when they were hungry, but now she is gone and I am only an ox, strong but with few opinions
.

“But where did she go, Brin? Where did she go?”

She will follow the moon because how else could she see
?

“But the moon goes over Mount Gloam!”

Why do you ask anything of an ox
?

Behind her the goats, amused, tilted their heads at each other and stamped their feet.

Janie didn’t know if she’d heard anything at all other than the movements of penned animals and the creaking of frozen timbers, but she had to go toward where the moon would set, toward where it was forbidden to go. Mount Gloam was dark, sacred to the Old People, Tim Hemlock had told them many times, and only the Old People, if there were any of them left, could go there. It was said that the gods of the Old People could never die, and without their people they had grown mean and vicious.

But Oka knew nothing of this. If only she could catch up with Oka before she got to the forbidden place, she could lead Oka home to the warm barn. With her crampons she could cross the ice better than Oka on her slippery hooves.

She took Oka’s rope bridle from its peg and tied it over her shoulder. As she left the barn, carefully closing and latching
the door upon its warmth, the frozen windless air came into her nose, into her chest. She knew she shouldn’t go alone into the forest, across the crackless ice that was smooth as the ice on a pond yet frozen into hills and waves, but she must find Oka. Her crampons squeaked, complaining of the hardness, as she entered the frozen, silent trees.

“She didn’t take the Timothy seeds,” Janie Benham said. “She didn’t take the Dandy Timothy seeds so she could drop them one by one and be able to find her way back.”

“I didn’t think she’d need them,” Aaron said, “because Billy could see which way she went by the crampon marks in the ice. So could she.”

“Oh.”

“Suppose it gets warm and melts,” Billy said.

“But you know it didn’t
melt
,” Janie said. “Anyway, I liked the Timothy seeds.”

“All right,” Aaron said. “Before she left the barn she reached into the gunnysack and filled her pocket with Timothy seeds.”

“The chickadees would eat them all up,” Billy said.

“Do you want to hear the story or not?” Janie said. She turned to Aaron. “He’s already heard about how smart Billy was to understand the hand language and make the medicine.”

“He wants to hear about Janie, too,” Aaron said. “Anyway, the birds had all gone, remember? Even the chickadees.”

“So, smarty,” Janie said.

“Maybe you both know the story too well,” Aaron said.

“No! No!” they said at once. That wasn’t the question; of course one knew a story, and the knowing of the story didn’t hurt the story. They were answering his tiredness, the suspicion that he would just as soon not tell the story now. “No, Dad! Come on!”

“And don’t change it,” Janie added.

“Everything changes unless it’s written down,” Aaron said. “And even then it changes.”

“No, you can’t change it!” Janie was upset. She suspected
betrayal; tears were moistening her eyes. She didn’t like paradoxical statements of any kind and refused to see any sense in them at all, just the cynical attitude behind them, which meant betrayal; was life so complicated one had to say what one didn’t mean in order to mean what one meant? Janie’s clear eyes, their wide pale look with all feelings there shining from inside would give the lie to all paradox if they could. On Billy’s longer face paradox got its recognition less grudgingly, and for him the story would no doubt soon change, though its words might not.

“All right,” Aaron said. The children grew quiet, vibrant, tensely silent while he told them how Janie searched through the frozen forest and came, at dawn, to the terrifying waterfall and cliffs they had both seen in the old lady’s eye. Oka’s and a deer’s tracks led along a narrow trail in the sheer cliff, a trail no more than a foot wide in the cragged rock along the side of the cliff, and it led directly toward the thunder of the falling water.

At this point Janie Benham held his arm in both her hands, her blond head pushed against him, half-hidden, fearful, trembling, proud. This was the little girl’s bravest moment. To go on because of love and duty, the terrible energy of the water on one side, the narrow path beneath her feet, the icy cliff at her small shoulder, ahead old stories of vicious gods and monsters. Had they taken Oka and killed her? Would she find Oka hung on a hook, her warm body turned into cold meat? Or was Oka now a battered wet cow-corpse tumbling over rocks in the chasm below?