THE EXISTENTIAL ACT
OH VIOLA. You went my bail in the De-troit jail.
She had an old pipe organ salvaged from one of the abandoned churches in the neighborhood, and it was practically the only furniture in the huge living room. She lived alone in one of the large corner apartments at the top of The Pasadena. The floor was painted gray and was bare and there were only a couple of wicker chairs and a low table. He had just made a pass at her.
"You would be surprised at all the men who have tried that," she said, smiling without mirth. "Half the ones living in this building, too. Even the doctor who delivered me wanted to seduce me."
He looked into her dark eyes for a flickering moment trying to detect some strange, deep laughter. It might have been there in the aloof French-Canadian beauty. He wasn't surprised.
"Viola, I only..."
"Sit down."
A woman nearing middle age who had never married, she was a nurse at the hospital where Howie's mother had just been operated on for a perforated ulcer. He had never heard Viola play her organ. Now she sat down at the console and turned on the screw compressor.
The perpetual candlelight reflected in curtainless windows. It was terrible organ music, he thought. César Franck. Abruptly he got up out of the noisy wicker chair and walked over to the window. A beautiful old white passenger steamer with the words GEORGIAN BAY LINE was coming slowly in from Lake St. Clair and it was raining, water in perpendicular columns striking the still surface of the Detroit River and forming rings. He quietly left the apartment.
He pulled up the collar of his diaphanous Mackintosh and shouldered his way into it. At one point during Tim's New Year's Eve party he seduced Felix into going on an adventure. They went out the kitchen window together and climbed the fire escape to the roof. Horsing around, Felix doing ballet steps you'd think he was going to fly off The Pasadena. But it was freezing cold. They tried the door to the elevator house, discovered it was open and went inside. It was warm, there must have been a radiator, and they stood there for a few minutes. All of a sudden there was traffic on the elevator. Solenoids kicked noisily and relays gave off loud blue sparks, and the carbon brushes on the commutator of the big electric motor made blue flames which illuminated the interior of the elevator house, and Felix flung his arms around him. Felix was not making a pass. He was blubbering with fright. Somebody was living in there.
One day he got back from looking for a job and when he went to put his key in the door he discovered that the apartment had been broken into. The cats were gone! Oh, calamity. Lying on the bridge table was a piece of paper ripped from the writing pad: YOU ARE UNDER ARREST, followed by scrawled lettering he had difficulty making sense of. What he could imagine, however, was the way the cop grasped the pencil and laboriously inscribed his scruffy message. It was the jaywalking ticket.
What was worse the cats were gone. They were nowhere in the lobby so he guessed that they were up the stairs of The Pasadena. Sure enough, he found Boris on the fourth floor landing. Panting from the dash up the flights he carried the trembling animal down to the apartment. But the police intruders had forced the door, and so there was no way of keeping it closed except by leaning a chair under the knob. He was putting food in the cats' bowls when Howie came home.
"This is typical," he said. "They break into gays' apartments all the time." He closed the sliding door to the kitchen, took the last couple of singles out of his billfold. "Go get us some hamburgers. I'll see if I can find Ralph."
He went to the White Castle and bought hamburgers and French fries. When he got back Howie was repairing the door and Ralph was in the kitchen with Boris eating and purring.
"He was on the stairs, all right. I found him standing at the door to the roof."
"I hope you took the elevator up. Now what about the police?"
"You'll have to turn yourself in." The older man shrugged. "It's one of those irritating trivialities."
"But I couldn't meet in court on account of the date!"
He had to go the the Paradise Valley station to turn himself in. Howie knew the way and the two of them set out in the winter evening, crossed over East Jefferson and followed Dequindre. How cold it was in February. The streets in the vast Negro slum were uncleared and treacherous, no foothold for dog nor man between infrequent patches of cinders thrown on the slick walks. It was far, and the endless dilapidated houses were like negatives on a strip of film, the yellow light from windows blackness. The only time they encountered anybody was near the police station. The desk sergeant was burly and peevish.
"Why didn't you pay the fine?"
"Because I was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean on that date."
"So you're a fugitive from the law. Aren't you kid?"
"No, sergeant. You see, the officer who wrote the ticket forgot it was New Year's Eve so he wrote the court date for the same year."
"You're really a wise guy, aren't you? I know you think that's funny but I don't. Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to put you in jail and you can go to court tomorrow morning."
"But.."
"You would have saved yourself trouble by paying the fine. The bail is five dollars."
"But I don't have five dollars. You got five dollars, Howie?"
"I don't have four bits."
"So you can make yourself at home, kid."
They took his shoes and his belt and put the contents of his pockets in a Manila envelope. The only thing he was allowed to keep was his pack of Pall Malls and book of matches.
"Hey, whitey! You got a cigarette you can spare?"
It was the only other prisoner, an intelligent-looking young black guy in the cell opposite. He tossed him the pack through the bars of the cells.
"Keep them. You got matches?"
"Hey, thanks! Sure I've got matches."
He fired off the rest of his own matches in order to scrawl a poem on the yellow-painted brick wall. As the evening wore on the pokey started filling up with drunk and disorderly blacks, and by midnight they were doubling them up in the cells. It was past two in the morning before Howie and Felix arrived with his bail.
"It's from Viola," Howie explained. "She got off duty at the hospital at twelve. Nobody else had any money."
As they were leaving the police station one of the cops whistled at Felix.
"Hey kid, what do you do for a living? Go around saying the sky is falling?"
But the judge thought it was funny, about the court date, both the judge and the whole enormous, motley, laughing roomful of suspected traffic offenders. So he got off with paying the fine, which he was able to do with the refunded bail.
He liked to think about that because it gave him a feeling of being in a position to act in the existential sense, that by simply ignoring the ridiculous jaywalking ticket he had validated his existence. The laughter was on his side; it was the system that was in an observation cell. He stopped, stood there on the sidewalk on Woodward Avenue and shouted in the rain until he was out of breath.
"I, EXORCIST, FROM CURDLED MIST TO INCANDESCENT NIGHT, TWIST THE SONG OF FEAR INTO THEIR EYES. MAGOROTH AND SCANDRIL FROM THE SUNKEN HARBOR'S DUST, THE UP-AND-CLUBBING FISKORANT OUT OF THE FARTING BUSES OF DOWNTOWN, ALOFT AND SQUALLING WITH THE WIND OF STARVING CHIMERAS I HISS THEE EQUALLY TO THY CARRION-SLIMED NOSTRILS...
The joint was really jumping. He looked around him at the others. It was time to heave out and trice up. But Roxanne wouldn't give him back his $25, she just had to buy the TV set. Felix rambunctiously sashayed in and floated, yards and yards of blue chiffon, into the easy chair, lighted a cigarette and turned to him exhaling profusely.
"How is Howie's Mumsy doing?"
"She was in surgery day before yesterday. He told me on the phone, all they left of her stomach isn't any bigger than a teacup."
"Oh, how darling, a teacup with a little finger."
Felix shrilled, inhaled abruptly and reached for a handful of M & Ms. At which Buns Barker, who was aggressively snuggling up to Aaron on the sofa, ostentatiously cleared his throat and retracted his lips so they vanished around the neck of his beer bottle. Buns was a doctor too. Meanwhile, Vermillion emerged out of the john, shrieking at the top of her lungs:
"A little finger and a thumb, you mean."
Her arm was extended in what might have been an ancient Mediterranean insult. She had wrapped, in a flash, a towel around the limp wrist so that it had the startling effect of a medical illustration. A clubhand with painted nails. Just then the already ajar front door banged open and in crashed Mary Ella and Jonquil in undershirts and suspenders with Verdi's La Traviata blaring from the other end of the hall and the place was absolute bedlam.
"My dear it's too, too, absolutely..." she primped her hair in back "...all, and I mean all of the conventions of the sex."
"Sweet Vermillion," said Jonquil, "one of your shortcomings is that you are always treating people according to how you think they want to be treated."
"At least I'm not one-way like you."
"You little gash manqué, just because I never let you get a whiff!"
Meanwhile Buns was undaunted. "You'd be much better off, Biddie, if your eyebrows were black."
He licked the tip of his little finger, hooked the other index finger under the Willow Child's chin and moistened his blond eyebrows for him. It was hypnotic. Here, Buns, he heard Roxanne's voice say and something landed on the coffee table. It was an eyebrow pencil. The sepia sissy's shirt, from a distance, looked reasonably clean. It was a short-sleeved white Oxford shirt with button-down collar with a button in the back. Buns was a pathologist, worked at the Wayne County Morgue, no less. The pocket of the shirt, whose collar was by no means white, contained a battery of Scripto pencils with leads, one of them undoubtedly bugraphic, of various colors and they had left marks on the Oxford cloth as Dr. Barker, after having jotted something down, clipped them back in the pocket of his shirt. The Willow Child excused himself and got up out of the sofa and went to the bathroom. Somebody was using the bathroom. He stood for a minute smiling, perhaps to Felix, and then walked out and down the hall to Mary Ella's and Jonquil's apartment and went to the bathroom...
...the rosary with the upside down crucifix, which wasn't any less upside down for being seen in the mirror. In addition the Willow Child was wearing a black turtleneck jersey, black chino pants with a buckle in the back, and with his Mackintosh on and those black eyebrows he looked ready for action. Which was what Dr. Barker wanted. He flushed the toilet.
Poor Roxanne. He had seen Roxanne in the shower, could hardly keep his eyes off the peroxided pubic patch, and her back was covered by severe acne and boils. She was allergic to herself, she rationalized. When he got back to Roxanne's living room Roxanne was religiously, like a votary, placing on top of the TV set the antique brass cobra candlestick she had told him, to make him jealous, that she had got from Howie. The black candle flickered and the cobra's ruby eyes sparkled. He glanced at what was happening on the pooped picture tube.
"When'll I get the twenty-five dollars you borrowed?"
"When Howie gets back," Roxanne sniffed. "You can get it from him."
He sat down in the sofa again. Bishop Sheen had just drawn an angel on the blackboard.
"...or do you think you're still holding out for Mother Goddamn?" Buns hissed.
To be truthful, after he found out Rachel was living in the basement apartment he had considered taking over one of the others in the building, a four story walk-up whose landlord was also The Pasadena's.
Bishop Sheen's ecclesiastical vestments swished audibly.
"Pretty slinky, to say the least," averred Mary Ella. "Did you hear that, Vermillion? She crossed her legs."
"So what?" Fitzmuir had said, with becomingly manly self-assurance "Why should an individual's actions have to be approved by other individuals?"
"That's it," he had said. "It's a social habit. We act, can only act as individuals, then look over our shoulders expecting group reaction and are lost when none comes."
"So the answer is, Don't look back."
He looked up. A gigantic shadow, cast by the light out in the hall, seemed to come inside the apartment and filled the living room. Lo and behold, it was the two mammoth dykes, Buddy and Terry.
"Hi, girls," said the dominant of the two, Buddy. "Sensible pursuits, I see." She bent down hugely, bacon at right angles to the ham, and squinted at the television screen. "That's who I thought. Lily Pons."
There was unmistakably something of the police matron about them. They had a girl with them, dressed like a little truck driver. While they were laughing he got a look at her. She was no more than seventeen or eighteen years old.
Buddy and Terry were already on their way to the kitchen for beer and snacks. Without thinking he stood up to give the girl his seat. She hesitated, then looked him full in the face.
"Is it still raining?" he said.
The others were as frozen, hanging on the prelate's intellectual sugarplums. She shook her head.
"Come on," he said.
Bolted to the end wall of the hall was a ladder leading to the roof. He jerked his head for her to follow, walked over and climbed it and shoved the hatch cover aside. In a moment he was standing on the roof. The girl's head and shoulders appeared and he gave her a hand the rest of the way. When she was standing beside him he covered the hatch again and straightened up. They could hear sounds of the neighborhood, kids, a screen door.
"What's your name?" he said.
"They call me Marty. Martha Jenks. What's yours?"
"Aaron Ainsworth."
The tarpaper glistened with puddles of rainwater. He knew where the fire escape was, he had been up here before. It was a warm, humid, Great Lakes spring night.
"Aaron Ainsworth and Martha Jenks," he whispered.
She was smiling in amazement. Tenderly, he put his arms around her. She leaned her body into his. They could hear the John Lodge Expressway. He took her visored cap off her head and cautiously kissed her cowboy mouth.
Oh Lord, I kissed her again...
The heavy drops spattered down and it started in raining steadily.
When they got over on the other side of the expressway they found themselves on Putnam. It was possible to see the building on Merrick from The Newton Annex and vice versa. He stopped and looked at the rain bouncing on the hood and top of Greg's gray Olds that he had got cheap through the U.A.W. It had been standing there on the university parking lot for a month and the tires were nearly on the rims.
"That's Greg's car," he said, turning and walking on.
"Who's Greg?"
"A friend." He looked at her. "He's a union organizer."
The traffic on Woodward Avenue bright and sizzing, the few taxis full-up. They snagged an empty at Grand Circus Park, sat silent and holding hands on the back seat. In a couple of minutes the car angled down Cadillac Square and took the shortcut through Farmer Street. When they were on East Jefferson Aaron started shivering.
It was still raining when they got to The Pasadena. He paid the driver and they got out and his teeth were chattering. He sent Martha a hearty smile and led her up the front steps, but he almost couldn't find his key and once inside the apartment he began shaking like a leaf.
They were both of them soaked to the skin. She helped him take his shoes and clothes off as the cats sat watching them in the light from the wall lamp that he had left burning. It was as if something were shaking him to the marrow, like a spirit which had taken abode in him was in unwilling departure, and much later he would remember the sight of the nude girl turning from the cold radiator and coming at him with the silver cross between her breasts and her arms open.
"Oh my God," he gasped.
She took him in her arms, and he would remember her smile and the warm sensation and the softness of her arms and her breasts pressing into him, and the odor of her wet hair as he stood there trembling his lips blue.
"Come," she said.
She lay down on the bed and drew him down to her and held him so that he was on top of her and pulled the covers up over them and hugged and rocked him in her thighs.
"Goodness gracious...well shiver my timbers!"
Ah, and he was laughing now and it was the warm, sweet thing and the odor of her and she kissed him with her tongue and he was playing with her, oh Martha Jenks, and his hand found the soft warm place with the wetness, yes, the bath of life, and he leapt alive like a man unleashed.
"What does your father do?"
"He's a truck driver."
"The real thing, eh?"
"Yes, but I personally can't stand to be around him, he's so domineering."
"Who does he drive for?"
"He used to drive for Spector and before that for P.I.E., Pacific Intermountain Express. Now he drives for Delta Shipping out of Port Huron. We live in Alpena."
"What does your mother do?"
"My mother stays at home with my brother. She used to work in a bar, you know the galaxy of honkey-tonks out Telegraph Road. That's where my father met her. I like looking at the sky. I'm always reading the sky, you could call it. It says things to me. I like the stars over Lake Huron and I know the constellations of both the summer and the winter night skies. Funny, my father taught them to me. We used to walk out on the ice at night. He's a great ice fisherman. In summer we'd row out on the lake in the starlight. I wonder if you know what that is. On a calm night it's like rowing a boat out in the Milky Way..."
"God..."
"And when there's a full moon and you go snowshoeing at night, you can tell the time with a moondial of the tree trunks. Think of what the Indians had. There's an island in Lake Superior, pure metallic copper. When the French found it they called it Isle Royale. But the Indians had been getting metal out of it for centuries. It's said that the Indians were able to temper copper, but nobody's ever seen it. At least not so that it can be verified. Not now, anyway. It's just a rumor, you know? Of something that existed or that happened a long time ago. I mean like a hundred and forty-five years ago there was an earthquake in Missouri changed the course of the Mississippi River."
"In Missouri?"
"Yes, near a place called New Cairo . . . Aaron?"
"Yes."
"Last year when I came to Detroit and started running around with Buddy and Terry, me and another girl got caught stealing a car, here in Detroit. Actually it was in Highland Park. But because I was so young, I was seventeen, I was allowed to cop a plea. So I pleaded guilty to stealing the hood of the car. It meant the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor. So I got three years' probation. I still have to see my probation officer once a week."
"Did Buddy and Terry put you up to it?"
"I wouldn't want to say that. They're really kind and sensitive."
"It's the system, getting you to serve. It's just like in the Navy. It's so easy to do something and get brig time, and then you're in a different social category for the rest of your life."
"So you might as well stay in."
"Yes, it's like the whole thing runs on humiliation. Like when you hear glorious Bach organ music you don't think about the convicts who were chained to the bellows of the church organ. The fat cats will do everything they can to break you and remove any vestige of human dignity. You know they'll do that, to get you to do their dirty work. And at the same time channeling your resentment onto people who are pretty much in the same situation as yourself. Like on the carrier, there isn't a more unpopular group of people than the Marines. I had a division buddy on the Shiloh, Rainey, he was from Kansas, a sweet guy with bedroom eyes who was popular with women. One time he was late getting back to the ship. Two days AOL and he got the brig and the Marine guards broke his arm in his cell. I used to go on liberty with Rainey, and he'd always start talking about how he was going to kill that Marine when he got out. The jungle bunny had his cleaning station in a 40mm gun tub, and Rainey would come up and look down into those Marines' gun tub and say 'There's the son of a bitch who broke my arm in the brig.'"
"Wow, I wonder what that Marine thought."
"Yeah. I knew a Marine at Oak Knoll, he had a nervous affliction, he had never done anything right in his life. Did Buddy and Terry put you up to it? It wouldn't surprise me if they were hoping you and the other girl would have to do time in stir."
"Oh, I don't think they are that complicated."
"I was a third-class petty officer on the Shiloh, and one night a week when we were at sea I would have a watch. I would go all over the ship and check all the gun mounts and firecontrol directors and then go below decks and check the magazines, which were full of live ammunition, once every hour for four hours. At the end of each tour of the ship I'd use the phone in the optical shop and phone the OOD, and I'd say "Ordnance security watch reporting all secure, sir." Actually it was interesting and I enjoyed it. I would go through the darkened passageways with my watch belt and my flashlight, through night-lighted sleeping compartments where men were snoring, bunk curtains swaying with the movement of the ship, look down a hatch into the chiefs' mess and see a couple of the chief petty officers sitting drinking coffee and shooting the shit. And above decks, checking the gunnery installations in the brightness of the tropical night sky. It was stupendous. At one place on my tour there was a piece of angle iron, part of a strut supporting the catwalk along the flight deck on the starboard side. And at least once during the watch I would grab hold of it and swing out high over the water as the ship plowed through the night and do a few chin-ups. And then way forward in the bow of the ship, below and forward of the chain lockers, there was a trunk with a vertical ladder going down three levels, and I'd go down there and check that the padlocks on three magazines hadn't been tampered with. But the trunk itself, a narrow, triangular shaft just inside the voids in the cutwater of the ship; you do it quick and holding your breath because the air is nothing but old paint fumes, no oxygen. If you take a breath you'll pass out and suffocate."
"God what if you hit a rock!"
"Yeah, in the trackless Pacific, what if the monster piles up on an uncharted rock? But down in the bottom of that trunk, standing there for a few seconds holding your breath, the dim lightbulb pulsating in the atmosphere of another planet, and it's wiggling and you get the feeling for an instant, the thought flashes through you that you're sailing over the edge of the world, that it's all disappearing and passing over into another consciousness."
"It's wiggling?"
"Yes, the cutwater is bucking and swaying, of this nine-nundred-ninety foot steel construction being thrust at twenty-five knots through the dream soup. And you can actually hear the seawater being divided and rushing past beyond the twelve-inch armor plate."
"God..."
"There were so many magazines I had to check that after three hours it would all seem a blur, running down and up ladders making sure everything was all right, that there was nothing unusual. And I don't think I ever missed a single one. But on the carrier there's this trunk leading down from the mess deck, diagonal double ladders and sort of roomy, elbow room you might say. You know, the brig prisoners are made to do everything double-time. You're standing in the chow line on the hangar deck and along come the brig prisoners double-time, a couple three Marine guards riding herd on them, like on a command they all drop and do thirty push-ups double-time. Once I saw a guy try to escape, right there on the mess deck. The brig prisoners came double-timing alongside the tables where everybody was eating their lunch and this guy made a break for it. So they tackled him and pinned him down, called him by his name and beat him up with their clubs. I can still hear his screams. But this trunk going down four levels. There's a magazine on each side on the third and fourth levels crammed full of live ordnance. They even, the brig prisoners are made to shine the Marines' boots, shine their brass and scrub their white web belts in Ivory soap, that's why those jungle bunnies look so sharp and well-disciplined. It's a priviledge that they have. Well you go down this trunk and check the magazines and then up again, and two levels below the mess deck and directly on top of tons and tons of cordite and gunpowder are the prison spaces. The brig. There's a Marine guard but you don't look at him. Maybe you just glance in at the block of cells shining like stainless steel as you hurry past, but you don't think. You don't even think. And as you start up the ladder you glance across at the other side of the trunk and there's another Marine guard in his undress blues, packing a pistol and standing at parade rest in front of a magazine hatch with a logbook and an intercom. Do you know where they keep the atomic bombs on that heap of pig iron?"
The sun was rising over Detroit, a bright, clear spring morning. The girl got up from the bed and flung back the curtains and opened the venetian blinds.
"Black curtains!"
"Yes, we dyed them in the bathtub. All-purpose Rit. Howie had wanted to hold a black mass in an abandoned church."
"Have you ever taken part in a black mass?"
"No."
She went over to the card table and found the rosary with the upside down crucifix.
"Did you get this on the aircraft carrier?"
"Yes. They were hanging on a hook in the chaplains' office."
"Like this?"
She held the upside down crucifix into the light and peered at it.
"No, I did that."
She tossed the rosary back on the card table and turned and came and sat down on the bed. He buried his face in her shoulder as she hugged and rocked him.
"I think you should have this," she said.
Wondering, he saw the girl lift the fine silver chain from around her neck and felt her press it into his hand.
"Here. It's yours if you want it."
He looked closely at the small silver cross which had rested in her cleavage. It was warm from her. It was a Celtic cross.
"Are you Catholic?" he asked.
"No," she laughed. "We're Baptists."
* * * * *
"So you finally got what you wanted."
The cats were in the kitchen eating. Howie just sat there refusing to look at him.
"It's what I was born to do."
"What? Get what you want?"
"She's a wonderful girl."
"Who, Marty? What kind of music does she like?"
"Well, she likes Hank Williams..."
"Hank Williams. Hank Williams is a baseball player!"
He didn't know what to say. So he took the box with the one dozen Sheiks out of the paper bag and stood it on edge on the desk so Howie could see the picture on it. Instead the man now raised his head and looked him in the eye.
"What color is her hair?"
"It's kind of dishwater blonde, I guess."
"What does Rachel call it?"
"I don't know what Rachel calls it."
"Sure you do. What does she call it?"
"I don't give a damn what she calls it."
"Yes you do. With a little soul-searching that's exactly what you do. Admit it. Now what does Rachel call it?"
"She calls it pavement-colored hair. Listen, Howie, the girl is lovely."
"She's butch."
"She's sweet..."
"Bullshit! She fucked with a dildo out behind the Cabildo."
"Yeah. Something like that." The paper bag smelled like the drugstore. He wadded it into a ball and flicked it at the Octavian features.
"Buddy and Terry don't like being stood up! No cop in this city is going to lift a finger for you if somebody decides they want to give you trouble. You know that, don't you?"
"Incidentally, I've given notice. I'm leaving."
"You've quit your job. You didn't tell me. When?"
"A week ago. I'm going to New York. Andy's got a job at the American Can Company in Jersey City. He makes $3.75 an hour."
"As compared with what you make at . . . you got a job at Chrysler Missle and you quit."
"Chrysler beer can, Howie. Come on."
Howie was crying. Aaron went over to the man and knelt down and put his arm around him.
"Poor Jud. Poor your mother. How long was she walking around with an ulcer?"
"For years . . . she just had this knot in her stomach all the time. It was my father, he never had time for her or for me. He spent all of his evenings at a bar in Royal Oak, one of those sportsman's paradise places where they use beef jerky swizzle sticks..."
Ralph and Boris came parading in from the kitchen. The red cat hopped up on the card table and began polishing his phiz.
"Do you suppose this whole thing could be their doing. Ralph's and Boris's?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean bird in the hand is the same as kidney in the bush, isn't it?"
"Now you're being facetious. Just like your friend Jack."
The man got up and went over to the desk and brusquely flipped through his albums.
"I'm going to be staying at my mother's for a week longer, helping her with the housework. Then I suppose the Willow Child will be merrily on his way."
"You going to mow the lawn?"
Instead of replying he simply gave the young man a nod and went for the door. Aaron heard the expansive, almost cheerful plaintiveness of the Mahler theme. It was Das Knaben Wunderhorn.
"Thanks, Jud. Be seeing you."
Some side streets, Riopelle, Dequindre, St. Aubin, homed-out strip farmers a block wide and long as to the arctic circle. Slash and burn agriculture.
From the kitchen cupboard Martha took a medicine bottle and from the drawer a spoon. Aaron asked her what they were for. "It's his tranquilizer. His mother told me to give him a spoonful when he gets like this."
Little Dougie was a frenetic child. Now he was playing another of his games: he would overturn every third object he encountered if it could be budged by his four-year-old's exertion. Around and around the house he went deliberately upsetting lamps and ashtrays, books and potted plants until every third thing was accounted for, then around again until pretty soon everything would by topsy-turvy.
"How do you know that's number three?" Aaron asked him.
"Because that's number two," the little towhead explained, pointing to a still-standing kitchen chair.
Mild Martha refused to get cross, "We'll just give him some of his yummy tranquilizer," she said.
But the pink mouth wouldn't open for the pink liquid, pouted tightly and shook its head. A buttoned-up grin when he succeeded in knocking over the kitchen chair.
"That was number one," he crowed.
"You come over here, Douglas, and take your goody. Now!"
Dougie capered gleefully out of the kitchen with both hands clamped over his mouth. Aaron ran after him.
"Let me catch him!"
In the living room the child dove behind the couch, which Aaron shoved against the wall trapping his prey. Shrieks of delight turned to ones of rage when Aaron dragged the little boy out by his ankles and carried him kicking back into the kitchen.
"Don't be rough with him," Martha cautioned, "or he'll throw up just for spite."
"Oh, this'll make a better citizen out of him." Aaron permitted the child to stand, tethered by a wrist, and challenged him, "Bet you can't swallow anything upside down."
Dougie said nothing, just scowled stubbornly away from the brimming spoon which Martha still proffered.
"I can swallow upside down, but I bet you can't," Aaron repeated, shaking his head resignedly. "I'll show you how, but you can't do it. Want to see?"
They trooped out to the backyard, Aaron holding a bottle of beer and Dougie's fist and Martha the medicine and spoon. The little boy stood still and watched Aaron swing up onto a limb of the sycamore tree and hang by his knees from it.
"Now Douglas, please hand me my beer."
Their heads were at the same level and their eyes met in earnestness as Aaron put the bottle to his lips and gulped, amazingly, until half its contents had vanished, undeniably upwards. The bottle was returned to Dougie's honored grasp and Aaron got down from the tree. Martha whistled with admiration.
"So. Do you think you'd like to try?"
Dougie yelled and stamped his foot, so Aaron carefully held him upside down by the ankles. In his precocity the child forgot that he didn't like the taste of beer. Eagerly he swung the bottle to his lips and then, gagging and sputtering, dropped it. Martha popped the waiting spoonful into his mouth and he immediately swallowed the welcome sweetness. Back on his feet he scampered, tricked but triumphant, whooping around the yard. Aaron hugged Martha so hard she squealed.
"You're wonderful with him!" she exclaimed. "I'm sure you'd make a wonderful father."
"Oh, I don't know about that," he replied. "I really can't stand the kid. I think he should have been lobotomized at birth."
Little Doug's father and mother both worked days and Martha got room and board and pocket money for looking after him. But she was not a governess. She had only the responsibility for keeping him from injuring himself or damaging the house and furniture. They lived in a subdivision just north of Sixteen Mile Road, and except for superficial architectural variations the houses were all alike. Aaron liked seeing his racing bike leaning up against the front porch. It was a custom-built metallic green Urago road machine, with ten-speed Simplex gears and wing nuts, from Mike Walden's bike shop on Livernois. It had cost $113 which he paid out of his second paycheck from Chrysler Missle, and he enjoyed zipping around on it in the streets of Motor City. But he could think of no better reason for having it than to scorch out Woodward every day and visit Martha Jenks.
He had a heavy crush on her and they could kiss and make out for hours. They courted openly in front of Douglas and it seemed to have a stabilizing effect on the little guy, for he only saw his parents briefly each day and on Sundays his father slept the whole time. A couple of years before the bulldozers had cleared a tract of undeveloped land on the other side of Sixteen Mile. Houses would be built there, bringing the metropolis closer, but as yet the sewers had not been laid and the area was left overgrown with a few trees standing here and there for landscaping purposes. Aaron and Martha discovered it on one of their walks in the neighborhood, holding hands, Martha wearing shorts and a white sleeveless blouse. Dougie's mother offered them a blanket, and in the evening they went out to the place they had found.
He liked to cycle back into the city by way of the side streets, in the unpeopled, different world made by the shadows the street lights cast, in the wee hours zeroing in on East Jefferson from Riopelle or the razed area on the other side of the Grand Trunk cut. One night he was wheeling through an industrial street in the neighborhood of the Packard plant. He heard the car approach behind him and the blare of its horn just as he was braking to cross some railroad tracks, then "Fucking cocksucker, get off the road!" and the shaken fist out the window. The bicycle swerved over the end of the heavy planks between the tracks and came to an abrupt stop and he took a hard spill. Dazed and bruised, he picked himself up and looked at the Urago. The front wheel was buckled. He picked it up. The machine didn't weigh much over nine pounds. He hung it on his shoulder and walked on.
In the Ohio countryside at a bend in a road, beside railroad tracks and vistas framed in the trees which abound at natural demarcations, along watercourses and right-of-ways and denoting geological features, silver maple, American sycamore, mockernut, shagbark hickory, oh the oak and the ash and the dogpaddle tree, boxelder and sassafras and the slippery nuttal willow. In the fragrant green Ohio evening with the mist rising off the cornfield and the sky like bronze. Lo, a hitchhiker with springy step. Perhaps a cheeky Shropshire lad with duffel bag and Wunderhorn, or Johnny Appleseed making his way on a stretch of axle-tax Ohio asphalt in the direction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
He may have been aware that the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway traversed the biggest bituminous coal field in the world, and that it moved upwards of fifty million tons of coal a year, but that was not what he thought about when he saw the train. It was going pretty fast, about 40 mph, and he appreciated the beauty of the massive motive power, a compound steam locomotive polished to a lustre and with silver driving rods, white driving wheel tires and footboards. He would think of the sound of the driving rods as it clicked past him. It must have been over a mile long, over a hundred and fifty gondola cars full of coal, he didn't think about who dug it out of the ground and what it was worth. He didn't have a thought for John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers. It was beautiful, the moment and the mathematics of it, and that was all he thought about. And when the caboose passed and its lights vanished, the sky now the color of tempered copper, it didn't occur to him that the coal might be going to power the night.
Copyright © 1998 by Kenneth Tindall