The Hair of Harold Roux (7 page)

The troops were using their knives on the fish, some filleting, some gutting, throwing the guts to the gulls who had mysteriously multiplied into dozens. The gulls cried, soared, deftly caught food from the air, landed gracefully on the water to examine parts too large to swallow—but not the trooper who at this point slid in vomit from the poop and fell eight feet into the sea. As he drifted slowly alongside, most of the troopers observed him as if he were another kind of strange, natural phenomenon, and only one or two thought it anything out of the ordinary. At the stern Aaron gaffed him by his waist band, and he and Mark hauled him out. None of the troops helped pull him over the rail, but as he lay passed out among the fish, fish parts, blood and beer, one of his fellows, to great hoarse shrieks of appreciative laughter, unzipped his fly and stuffed a small, violated cod into his crotch.

Aaron looked away, at the sunlight on the undulant blue sea, the white gulls planing against the sky. He looked down again to see a balled, tangled handline drift by out of reach.

The leader of the troops, perhaps showing some disappointment, said, “They’re good boys. They’re good boys. No fights. No fights.”

Again Aaron looked away, examining his own emotions with what seemed to be infinite care. What was he doing here? He felt that he shouldn’t have to be here, and with this came an accusation of self-indulgence. There was, though, the danger that in truth he couldn’t stand it much longer. Never in his life had he enjoyed the abomination, or been a pure observer. There was the danger that he might enter as an actor here. The Detroit ginger brandy had been a mistake. He didn’t want to turn away from the blue elements, back toward mankind as collective slob, back toward these goblin exaggerations of himself. Finally he did turn back, because he had to, but the sight of the blood and gore, these humans having fun disemboweling fish, gave him traitorous thoughts: he could see them all dead; he was on the side of the fish. Yes, he was
on the side of the fish, not just now but in a deeper and more despairing way.
Animal bipes implume
, the two-legged animal without feathers. He was sick of being one of them.

When he turned back he found that they had discovered a new game. Gulls are not stupid, but three of them had been caught before the others realized that some of the fish guts contained hooks. Great shouts of encouragement rewarded those troopers who had their living kites on strings, the gulls crying, napping, suddenly awkward in the air.

As Aaron proceeded toward the first kite-flier he heard Captain Billy’s shout of astonishment and disapproval. The first kite-flier was a young man who responded to Aaron’s presence by his side with a pleased grin, as though he expected only approbation. His face was smeared over with vagueness, however, and as he jerked the string to show his control and possession of the gull his bleared eyes didn’t quite focus. He couldn’t understand why Aaron wanted to take the string himself. At first he pushed Aaron’s hand away with some good nature, meaning to say in his gestures and laughing, garbled words that Aaron should go get his own bird. Finally becoming irritated, he blinked and scowled as though someone were shaking him awake in the middle of the night.

“Wha’ you doing!” he said, his expression caught at dead low tide as it struggled through the change from pleasure to danger. In it was disappointment, almost a pout at this loss of pleasure, and then with effort it began to signal sternness and anger. The young man cocked his right arm, upon which a stenciled anchor shone bluely through thick reddish hair.

Later Aaron would wonder why this action lifted from him the weight of despair: he needed that aggressive response, and in his own sudden change of metabolism he lost years, ascending as he did toward a purer definition of himself. Never having known much moderation once it came to rage, he did have time to fear his own dangerousness before he knocked the young man down on the bloody deck. Strange how time seemed to slow; rage had always heightened perception in him until he could observe himself and the world as
if in slow motion. He had time to choose a blow he hadn’t thought of for years—one he’d seen an MP use on a black soldier, in which the forearm is at the last moment of the arc drawn quickly back toward the chest and the law of conservation of momentum increases the elbow’s velocity so that it hits with stunning force.

The young man lay on the filthy deck gasping and hugging his chest. A shout, half moan, arose from those troopers still conscious enough to have witnessed it. Their collective disapproval began to form itself into aggression and the determination to exact revenge. Aaron could read this very clearly in the changes of flexed arms, sucked-in bellies, the stance of feet and legs. In response, his voice listed in their own language their canon of unforgivable definitions—those meaninglessly shameful epithets that are so powerful.

Captain Billy and Mark, he noticed, had put themselves between him and the troopers, so he pulled on the line that led upward to the crying gull. One of the other gulls flapped away dragging its whole line, wooden reel and all. Trying to be gentle, but of course not able to communicate his intent to the gull, he pulled it down from the sky. As it came nearer its great wings beat in an arc as wide as his spread arms, and it stared at him and fought desperately, its tail spreading and angling for control. The wind of its wings blew into his eyes. He saw that it had swallowed the hook and there was nothing he could do but unsheathe his knife and cut the line as close to the beak as possible. Perhaps it would live. He cut the line and the gull rose powerfully in a swift spiral and was gone, as were all the other gulls from this nemesis of a boat.

It was very quiet now; Captain Billy was talking to them. Aaron wondered as to how he was not present in his own body, which he seemed to observe as a system of weapons. His knife resheathed itself, his prisms scanned, his bipod adjusted upon itself its marvelous complications of balance. He was at that point of readiness, of purity of intent, in which the body and mind are most nearly one.

But of course the Joe’s Spa Troops never did rally, their cause being rather doubtful even to them. Their grumbling, in fact, degenerated still further into something like a collective whine. Aaron, out of sudden and devastating embarrassment, retired to the bow. Soon Mark came to help him haul in the anchor, and the
Frodo B
., as bloody as if it had fought boarders, cutlass and pistol across its decks, turned with the blue swells and churned toward home.

After the subdued troopers had been helped onto their bus and the bus departed, the crew hosed the gore off decks and railings and retrieved those handlines that weren’t snarled beyond all reason. They filled two GI cans with bottles, cans and other trash that the troopers hadn’t had the energy to throw to the innocent sea. The dead fish were, according to their kind and condition, relegated to lobster bait or saved for food. After two hours or more, when the
Frodo B
. rode clean again at its moorings, Captain Billy brought out a six-pack the troopers had abandoned and they sat in the slanting afternoon sun, each with a warm beer.

Mark began to laugh. Between his high, mirthful wheezings, he glanced at Aaron, and finally held up his beer. “Here’s to nonviolence,” he said. “Oh,
my! See see shoo sboor

“I’m sorry,” Aaron said to Captain Billy. He was terribly ashamed and depressed—emotions he had tried to hold at bay while he almost frantically helped clean and scour the
Frodo B
.“It was none of my business. I acted like an idiot.”

Captain Billy just smiled, seeming to encompass within his youth not only the proper answer but a patience and tolerance that made Aaron’s violence seem even more undignified and juvenile. This made him conscious of his age; he could have been the father of these men. He thought of the blow that had decked the trooper with such efficiency, and how in his time it would have been admired. Now, in their eyes, it must seem merely stupid, which it was—the usual betrayal his generation managed whenever it had the inclination.

“I’m an asshole,” he muttered. “You ought to put us animals in the brig.”

Mark put his arm around the old professor’s shoulders and shook him. “Shit, Dad,” Mark said. “You’re not used to it, that’s all.”

“Patronize me at your own risk,” Aaron said.

Mark laughed and laughed.

A
aron finds that he has been suffering; it is as if he has just awakened from anesthesia, aware all at once of vast traumatic manipulations of his body that must have happened while he was asleep. “God!” he cries out, hearing himself with the critical ear of an actor, hearing the cry as a simulation of despair. If one is to die, why not now? That question has never been properly answered.

He goes to his study, where all his books and toys sit looking almost as they did this morning when they interested him, yet now devoid of life, dimmed out. On the other side of the room from his desk are his fly rods, his pack frames, his light ax, squash rackets leaning in the corner. Maybe they will never interest him again, but will hang there and sit there dusty and dim forever.

There on the shelf above his desk are his books—his own, the ones he has written. They have been too often seen, too often examined and remembered for the ancient passion he
once felt for each of them. Now they are faded other worlds, dim, yellowing.

He would like to leave this place. He would also like to leave this time, but of course that is impossible, and without a movement backward in time he cannot recover energy and cannot cut those connections of use and love and custom that hold him here. No, he must, from this ancient base, work.

Part of that work is memory, but memory is not always trustworthy, because here he is remembering one spring night, walking alone through the crowds of tattered people in Tokyo Station. He smells again the faintly acrid air of the great city. The spring wind is warm. All across the city in its rubble thousands of hibachi fires are burning, rice and delicately pungent foods are cooking. In his memory of Tokyo he is always hungry, nineteen, conscious of his resiliency and strength. He thinks all Japanese are tough, spare and beautiful. An old woman with sturdy legs carries on her back a gigantic bundle of fagots that must weigh a hundred pounds, her trim feet grayish in her
geta
, the taut cloth band of her tumpline shining across her forehead. The fagots themselves seem shaped by art, drawn in their delicate black twists by a fine brush. But he does not want memory to take him off into nostalgic moments of the past like this. Tokyo has nothing to do with the work at hand. Nothing. Nor has Paris, London or Rome, towns he knew in his early twenties when they seemed so ancient and he so modern. A small university town in New England is closer to his real present, his work now, than all those dreaming old cities. He must go back to that little town, feeling bad about it, not wanting to go there, having huge doubts that he has the will or the energy to make that journey back in time.

On a clean page in his notebook he writes in block letters:

THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX

Staring at the words he feels something like despair. He’s got to disengage himself from people so he can get to work. He’s
got to stop killing himself in various ways, large and small. Smoking and drinking, just for a start. Sure.
The Hair of Harold Roux
: he must begin quite simply, muster those facts that he knows, and build, arrange, populate that barren plain with trees and names. Allard Benson, Mary Tolliver, Harold Roux, Naomi Goldman, Boom Maloumian … There is a world there, partly of the past, that must sustain itself. All right.

Our rather thinly disguised hero is one Allard Benson, and the story (a simple story of seduction, rape, madness and murder—the usual human preoccupations) seems to begin when he has reached the age of twenty-one. A veteran, though no war hero, his combat has consisted of earnest attempts to maim his fellow soldiers rather than the enemy. He doesn’t really approve of violence, and rather believes that he is always having to defend himself; his theory is that he is not so large that he overawes potential aggressors, nor so small that they might overlook him. There is some truth in most theories. There is also the theory that he wants to kill the world for girls like Mary Tolliver, and a certain raw look upon the faces of large, aggressive men suggests to him the causes of her unhappiness. Let us say that he believes that one human being should not cause pain in another, and that whenever he himself sins against this catchall bit of orthodoxy he is clearly aware of it; whatever it is that he has done is printed coldly and permanently upon his soul. This is Allard Benson’s voice, of course, masking certain things in an unfortunate flippancy.

And then there is Harold Roux. Poor Harold. What visions did he have of college? The war was over at last, and no longer would this pale, thin, sensitive young man have to experience the crudity, the vulgarity, the sheer horror of barracks life. He must have thought longingly of ivy-covered walls in the bright autumn light, of formal elegance and wit, the life of the mind, of dignified professors in tweeds, of long, serious discussions of great issues in places like “Commons.” Also of the talented and beautiful girl who would be his companion. Allard always wondered if Harold got any further with this last dream than holding hands, perhaps, or a
chaste kiss. Because on the day after his discharge from Fort Dix, New Jersey, Harold went to New York and made a strange decision, a magical decision which, like all choices in magic, contained its own dark laughter and the necessity of the third and last wish, the one that always erases the damage done by the first two. Harold made this Midas choice; he later paid and paid again the price that magic exacts from mortals.

While in the army Harold had gone bald. It was nothing pathological, just an inevitable shedding of his top hair—first a tonsure, then the lenghthening of the forehead, then the shiny top of the skull bare from brow to where the cowlick once grew and beyond, the whole process complete at the age of twenty-three. And in Manhattan he happened to pass the doors of an establishment whose necromancers claimed the undetectable restoration of Harold’s loss. He hesitated, he smiled, he began to walk on, he hesitated again. He looked through the display windows at pictures of men of forty (before) suddenly transformed (after) into dashing young men of thirty surrounded by luscious, though rather witless-looking girls. As far as Harold was concerned, they could keep that type of girl, but still …