The Hair of Harold Roux (49 page)

They could only wait, hearing the distant busy sounds of wheels and tracks and the thumping breath of the engine. Muted but not made less momentous by distance, first came the tearing of sheet metal, the ferrous squeal of iron on iron, then various crunches logical in their orchestration, a fugue of deep and falsetto bangs and shrieks followed by one last more wooden-sounding crash that was somehow climactically satisfying—the end of a nightmare of momentum. Flames somewhere over there grew quickly until they outlined the narrow tops of the Lombardy poplars. Allard ran toward the crash, choking with apprehension, out of breath before he had even started. If Whalen were in the tender he might well be dead, and immediately he resented having to pull Whalen’s burned, broken and possibly dismembered body from the wreck. Others ran alongside him; he could hear feet pounding across the bridge and on the turf behind. Everybody ran to see the extent of the disaster, and the run seemed to last forever. Down along the tracks that had lately held the train on its course Allard ran and ran, running out of breathless terror and resentment toward what he didn’t want to see or touch.

“… toward what he didn’t want to see or touch.” Aaron Benham, it seems, is also running as fast as he can toward what he doesn’t want to see or touch. Running as time runs,
no matter what you do, toward the bad news. But that is obvious to everyone. His problem is always doubled, however, because there is his life and there is also that thing that is of his life, the thing he is making, whatever it happens to be at the moment, and he never knows what it happens to be.

It is dark outside now. He feels vaguely hungry—it must be ten o’clock and he hasn’t eaten since Helga’s big breakfast, her slim green wrist and hand moving the spatula, her morning smell of sheets and woman’s moisture he caught as he leaned down past her shoulder to smell the frying bacon.

Right now could come a knock at the door of this very house. Right now. A tentative, worried, Helga knock. An emotionally confused, wanting-to-talk knock.

“Helga! Come on in!”

“I just felt so peculiar, Aaron. I’m on my way back from the hearing on the trailer court …”

To go to the hearing on zoning at the junior high auditorium she has dressed up a little bit, and in her knit vest, skirt and panty hose she is sweetly delicate of body yet worried around the eyes—a smoky look of experience that is pathetic and makes her his equal, nearly his contemporary; there is that look of sithared years.

“Come in. I’ll make you a drink.”

“Where’s your family?” she says as she puts her leather handbag on the counter.

“They’re coming back tomorrow. Billy called and informed me that I’d forgotten to have the headlights adjusted and they didn’t want to drive at night.”

She stands leaning her hip against the counter, her arms crossed on her chest, while he makes them both a drink. It is all a little nervous because they are both married and here they are alone in this house. His hand wants to tremble, and so does hers as he hands her her drink, the moisture-cool glass and the ice cubes tinkling together in the amber. Their eyes meet and shyly look away.

Yes, how plausible, but it didn’t happen; Helga did not stop by. He stares from his study window at the leaf-shaken
lights of nearby houses. Our adventures, after a time, are mostly fantasies, and his are worse because of those minor but convincing details that are his curse and his talent. The little silver stretch marks, the musky taste of cigarettes in her mouth. Speaking in low voices to each other, saying funny things, afterwards. He misses all of his strange women, the women of his youth, yet he doesn’t want them to be strange any more. He wants to fill them and to fill their eyes with that look that says I am alive and where I am, there is no time but this, there is no past, I have survived nothing, there is nothing that need happen next.

Allard was the first to reach the wreck. It was the overturned locomotive that burned, the dark orange flames of kerosene baking the oil and paint from its bent metal, spreading themselves along the gravel driveway. The train had nearly made it around the corner by the station, but then followed the lighter caboose when it jumped the tracks and crossed the path. The caboose had entered the Town Hall through the wall of Harold’s room; the passenger cars were jackknifed, one on its side, and he had to jump across a coupling to get near the flaming engine. Whalen was not there, at least at first glance. He ran for the large carbon dioxide fire extinguisher in the lobby of the Town Hall, and with it quickly put out the flames. The engine creaked and hissed, steam, fuel and water leaking from the ruptured tanks and boiler.

Boom Maloumian’s troops tended to take one impressed glance and leave. They had sneakily parked their cars out along the highway, and now they walked soberly, not quite running, toward escape. Whalen, too; Allard saw him across the parking lot, his white face staring for a moment before he disappeared. Knuck’s car was gone; he and Vera must have left quite a bit earlier, and Allard wondered how much, if anything, they had observed before they left. Only later did it occur to him that they must have seen all the cars parked
out on the highway. Or maybe Knuck was too beered up to notice much at all.

Angela and Nathan, Hilary, Mary and Naomi stood looking at the wreckage of the train that now seemed monstrously cataclysmic in its frozen writhings between the Lilliputown Railroad Station and the Town Hall. The engine hissed and creaked, slowly dying as its last pressures ran out.

Boom Maloumian, followed by Short Round and Betty Bebop, walked past without speaking. Betty Bebop, wearing a short jacket over a red satin formal dress, didn’t even look over at the train, or at anyone, but scuffled awkwardly along on high wedgies, her battered face staring ahead. Short Round looked once, quickly, and Boom Maloumian strolled along humming to himself as the three of them faded into a darkness now suddenly split by the headlights of those who were leaving.

Angela and Naomi first noticed that Mary was no longer able to cope with the events of the evening. They exchanged glances and converged upon her. Her teeth chattered; her eyes focused upon nothing. Nathan gave Angela the keys to his car. “We’ll try to find Harold,” he said through closed teeth. “Get her to Brock House and see if you can pry a sedative out of the night nurse.”

“We will,” Angela said. “Don’t worry.” Mary let herself be led to the car.

“Barbaric,” Hilary said. “It’s barbaric.” Since the only remaining transportation would be the motorcycle, he left with the girls.

Allard and Nathan, both wounded and a little dizzy still, searched Lilliputown for Harold. Allard found the sleeping poet, that bird of ill omen, but let him lay. Calling out Harold’s name, they split up and covered the town. At the stone pool Allard was afraid he might find Harold floating the dead man’s float, his white scalp dim in the dark water. But he was not anywhere. Finally they returned to the parking lot to find that Harold’s car was gone.

“I wonder where he went,” Nathan said, really worried.

In the wreckage of his rooms, under a ceiling light that still worked above all the plasterboard and broken studding buckled over the equally buckled caboose, they found signs of some hasty packing. He had taken his clothes from the undamaged closet and his toilet kit from the bathroom. The drawers of his bureau were mostly empty. He had taken none of his beloved books; those that weren’t spilled across the floor were still evenly aligned on their shelves. His notebooks and manuscripts were still there, too; powdered softly with plaster dust, they lay neatly arranged upon his desk.

Allard turned over the top sheet of a deep pile of manuscript pages.

GLITTER AND GOLD
a novel
by
HAROLD ROUX

“Have you read it?” Nathan asked.

“He let me read some of it once.”

“If he took his clothes he probably won’t do anything drastic, huh? What do you think?”

Allard looked down at the solid pile of manuscript pages Harold had amassed with such love and care, that lovely story Harold had told himself to believe. Within those pages, in the kindly warm light of sincerity, Allyson Turnbridge is drawn through danger and terror toward Francis Ravendon, toward the culmination of their true and perfectly mutual love.

Nathan stood beside him, with his thin face, his wide, delicate mouth, his tremor of worry and life. Beneath the pale skin of his forehead was the angular bone that gave it shape. Nathan, unendowed with Allard’s natural gristle, had behaved through it all with impeccable awareness and bravery. His speech to Harold, saying that he would wear a hairpiece too if he were bald at twenty-three, contained dimensions Allard hadn’t been aware of.

Harold, too, grew rounder, deeper in his regard, so that
his degradation was unbearable. He had thrown his fantasy hair like a gage at Maloumian’s feet, and stood there naked in Mary’s presence. Harold hadn’t been destroyed by any of that. But he had been left in charge of the Colonel’s masterpiece and couldn’t face its defilement, so he had run away. For a moment of real crisis, Allard felt all of Harold’s responsibility but could not contain it. He was frightened for Harold’s life. All these lives grew round, as though his vision had been flat and now grew painfully into color and depth. His eyes hurt. He had no way to repair anything that had been done.

“I found this on the church steps,” Nathan said, pulling a crumpled hairy thing from his back pocket. “It’s kind of yucky but I couldn’t just leave it lying there. It’s sort of like part of Harold.” He put it on the desk, its brown human hair glinting, the body of the thing wanting to spring back into the roundness of a human skull.

They turned off all the lights of Lilliputown and shut the door of the Town Hall before they left on the Indian Pony. It was the time of the year for leaving. The next day the dormitories would close and Nathan and Angela would drive to her home in Connecticut for a confrontation Nathan Winston would handle all right, although a few years later he would find that his new name denoted a popular cigarette. Naomi would leave for her home in the Bronx, Mary for her home in Concord, Allard for his home in Leah. No matter what else happened, those departures would occur as inevitably as the changing of a season. When the place you lived in was closed and locked, you had to leave, and nothing could change that.

In the morning Allard woke unrested, his head swollen in places, his ears hot. Before he had gone to sleep he could not stop seeing Harold Roux driving his old car on and on through the might with no destination, his pale head shining, his eyes emitting a viscous liquid that might have been tears or blood. Now he saw that vision into a dreary daylight. The pain in his head seemed both an excuse for and a reminder of what he didn’t want to remember, and as he walked down the
hall to the telephone he let himself limp, though his bruises were not really that bad. They were healing already; he felt his body curing itself, as it always did.

He called Naomi because he had to. He thought it might help, hoping to hear that everything was not as bad as it seemed.

“Hello?” said Naomi’s complicated voice that proved she was all there, right at his ear.

“It’s Allard,” he said hopefully.

“So what are you selling?”

“Please, Naomi. I just wanted to know how you and Mary were.”

“We’re getting ready to leave, like everybody else.”

“So is she all right?”

“She says she’s not coming back to school in the fall.”

Silence, in which he unsuccessfully tried to assess his guilt. “We never found Harold,” he said finally. “He took his clothes and left while we were looking around Lilliputown for him.”

Silence.

“Say something, Naomi.”

“I don’t know why I came to your stupid party in the first place.”

Her enmity hurt him so badly he spoke without thinking. “Well, that’s something you’ll have to figure out for yourself.”

“I won’t bother.”

Now he turned toward anger, a shift to flippancy, an oscillation he hated himself for. “You think you’re knocked up?”

“Possibly. I’ll know in a couple of weeks.”

“What’ll we name it?”

“Allard B. Abortion.”

“You know, you’re kind of funny when you’re not being a Stalinist.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Why do people hate me so much?”

“Allard, it would be no great loss to mankind if you started fizzing and steaming and melting until all there was left of Allard Benson was a soft white thing lying there like a segmented worm.”

“Everybody goes around hitting me all the time, too.”

“You may be interested in knowing that Mary’s brother is picking her up around ten this morning.”

“Listen, Naomi. Maybe I’m just hysterical. I don’t want to talk like this, really. I’m worried about Harold and Mary and you.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m not Mary or Harold.”

“But what if you’re pregnant, really?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“How will you take care of it?”

“Daddy’s money will take care of it. Look, Allard, it’s bye-bye time, when all the little butterflies leave the flowers and flit off on their little male vacations, so don’t let a thing bother you.” She hung up.

It was nine-thirty so he got dressed and went up to the dormitory to say goodbye to Mary. He felt terrible, didn’t know what to say to her to make her reasonably happy except that he … what? He could ask her please to wait and see what the summer might do, and to come back to school in the fall and they’d be together again, and maybe Harold would be back, too. Along the curb in front of the dormitory were girls and their trunks and suitcases. Fathers and brothers loaded the cars while the girls smiled and were teary and said Goodbye, goodbye, have a good summer and we’ll see you in September. But Mary wasn’t there. He asked in the lobby and was told that she had gone. Robert had come a little early and she had gone.

He walked back in the warm spring air, beneath the leaves, feeling free and at the same time depressed, as though he were falling. He couldn’t even find in himself enough energy to feel hatred for Maloumian, Whalen, Short Round or any of that bunch. They seemed not individual men but the same universal force he always recognized and that recognized
him and his kinship with them and eventually smashed him in the mouth. Shape up, Benson—are you one of us, or not? Today Colonel Immingham would return to find that the Vandals had found his paradise.