AEgypt (3 page)

And if hawks flew then, choosing to fly as they had chosen to alight, and if he failed to understand why—well, he hadn't understood why they alighted in the first place, had he? And that was, that must be, all right, if one were going to love hawks in the first place. Gentle hawks, kind-unkind.

Chalkokrotos.

I wish, he thought, I wish, I wish...

Chalkokrotos,
“bronze-rustling,” where had he come up with that epithet, some goddess's:
chalkokrotos
for her bronze-colored hair and the rustle of her bangles on a certain night;
chalkokrotos
for her weapons and her wings.

Good lord, he thought, and fumbled with his book, crossing his legs. He tossed his cigarette to the floor amid the sordid litter there of other butts, and counseled himself that perhaps daydreaming was not a thing he should indulge himself in just now, this week, this summer. He looked out the window, but the day had ceased to flow in toward him, or rather he outward toward it. For the first time since he had decided on this jaunt, he felt that he was fleeing and not journeying, and what he fled took up all his attention.

When he was a boy, traveling from the fastness of his Kentucky home east and northward to New York City where his father lived, he had seen signs directing people to these very Faraway Hills he now rode through, though the immense Nash crowded with his kinfolk never followed the arrows that pointed that way.

It was Uncle Sam at the wheel (Uncle Sam looked a lot like the Uncle Sam who wears red white and blue, except for the goat's beard, and his suit, which was brown or gray, or wrinkled seersucker on these summer trips) and Pierce's mother beside him with the map, to navigate; and next to her, in strict rotation, one or another of the kids: Pierce, or one of Sam's four. The rest contested for space along the wide sofa of the back seat.

The Nash held them all, though just barely, the swollen sides and fat rear end of its prehistoric-monster shape bellied out (it seemed) with their numbers and their luggage. Sam called his car the Pregnant Sow. It was the first car Pierce knew well; the remembered smell of its gray upholstery and the plump feel of its passenger clutch-straps still meant Car to him. There was something penitential about those long trips in it that he would not forget, and though he held nothing against the Nash, “pleasure driving” would remain an oxymoron for Pierce the rest of his life.

Leaving the eroded and somehow unfinished-looking woods and hills of Kentucky, they would descend through country not much different though with now and then a further prospect of folded hills in sunlight that meant Pennsylvania; and then, by ritual passage through wide gates and the acquisition of a long ticket, they would enter onto the brand-new Pennsylvania Turnpike, and on its broad back be carried into country both new and old, country that was at once History and the gleaming clean Present as well. History and the blue-green distances of a free land, a new-found-land uncircumscribed and fruited, which Kentucky did not seem to him to be but which America was described as being in his school texts, was contained for him not only in the rolling hills they rolled through but in the roll of Pennsylvania names on his tongue and around his inward ear—Allegheny and Susquehanna, Schuylkill and Valley Forge, Brandywine and Tuscarora. They were never to see anything of Brandywine and such places, nothing except the turnpike restaurants located near them, clean, identical, sunlit places with identical menus and identical lollipops and waitresses—that were, however, not really identical at all, because each bore on its fieldstone front one of these lovely names. Pierce would ponder the difference between Downingtown and Crystal Spring as they sat around a long table breakfasting on exotic foods not found at home, tomato juice (orange only and always at home) or sausages in little burger-shapes, or Danish, and even oatmeal for Sam, who alone of them relished it.

And then on, through land forested and farmed and seeming underpopulated and yet to be explored (this illusion of turnpike travel, that the land is empty, even primeval, was more strong in those days when cars first left the old billboarded and well-trodden ways for the new-made cuts) and—best of all—into the series of tunnels whose beautifully masoned entrances would loom up suddenly and thrillingly: all the children would call out the name, for each tunnel had one, the name of the intransigent geographical feature it breached and left behind so neatly, so curtly—there was Blue Mountain and Laurel Hill, there was (once Pierce could say them all, like a poem, he no longer could) Allegheny and Tuscarora ... One other?

"Tuscarora,” Pierce said aloud, on his bus. O Pennsylvania of the names. Scranton and Harrisburg and Allentown were hard and dark with toil; but Tuscarora. Shenandoah. Kittatinny. (That was the last tunnel: Kittatinny Mountain! They plunged into darkness, but Pierce's heart had been lifted as though by music into a height of summer air.) Never once had the Nash left the turnpike, never followed signs inviting it to Lancaster or Lebanon, though the Amish lived there, or to Philadelphia, built long ago by the man on the Quaker Oats box; they went right on, up the Jersey Turnpike, a pale shadow of Pennsylvania's it seemed to Pierce, though just why he didn't know: perhaps it was only that they drew closer to New York and his old reality, passing out of History and the splendid Present into his own personal past, pressing on toward the Brooklyn streets that he would take up and put on like an old suit of clothes, too well known and growing smaller each time he came back to them.

There had always been other choices, up to the last minute, up to the Pulaski Skyway anyway and the hellish flats it crossed, after which the Holland Tunnel like an endless dark bathroom was inevitable. They could turn away (Pierce found the places on the map his mother held) to these strange Dutch-named places north, or south toward the Jersey Shore—the very word
shore
was for him full of the splash of salt surf, gull's cries, bleached boardwalks. On the way there they could visit unimaginable Cheesequake. Or they could turn toward the Faraway Hills, which did not seem so far, they could leave the turnpike just here, and in not too long a time they would find themselves passing the Jenny Jump Mountains and entering the Land of Make-Believe. It said so on the map.

He couldn't urge Sam to turn aside, really, the journey had too strong a logic, the Nash a juggernaut compelled by the turnpike habit. And he didn't really want not to see his father in Brooklyn. Yet he would wish silently:
I wish we could go now to this place
, his finger touching it, covering it: even—closing his eyes and throwing all caution to the winds—
I wish I were here right now
: not actually expecting the car's roar and his cousins’ hubbub to be replaced by silence and birdsong, or the smell of the sun-hot upholstery by meadow odors: and a moment later opening his eyes again to the turnpike still shimmering ahead with false pools of silver water, and the billboards advertising the attractions to be found in the city fast approaching.

And a good thing too, on the whole, Pierce thought now, looking out at the meadows, ponds, and townlets of the place. It was all nice enough, surely, more than nice, desirable, and yet not really that otherwhere, that place where the grass is always greener. He couldn't have known it as a boy—he didn't always know it as a man—but wishing is different from yearning. Yearning, a motion of the soul toward peace, resolution, restitution, or rest; a yen for happiness, which momentarily is figured in that duck pond overhung with maples, that fine stone house whose lace curtains beckon to cool rooms where the coverlet is turned down on the tall bed—a hard-won wisdom distinguished between such motions, which had fleeting objects, and true wishing, which carpentered an object of desire with such care that it could not disappoint.

Goshen. West Goshen. East Bethel. Bethel. A choice between Stonykill, three miles, and Fair Prospect, four, they chose Fair Prospect, good.
I wish I were here right now, in Fair Prospect in the Faraway Hills
: and there, or nearly there, he was, only a quarter-century later.

But something meanwhile seemed to have gone badly wrong with the bus he rode. It was laboring to complete a long curving climb less steep than many it had already swept over; somewhere deep within it there was a hard basso rhythm, as though its heart were pounding at its ribs. The noise subsided as the driver sought a gear it could be more comfortable in, then began again as the way steepened. They had slowed to a creep; it seemed evident they would not make the grade, but they did, just barely, the bus snorted and blew like a spent horse, and there was the fair prospect, framed by a dark side-wing of heavy-headed trees like a landscape by Claude: a sunlit foreground, a zigzag silver river greenly banked, a humid distance blending into pale sky and piled cloud. Leaf shadow swept over them, and a terrible jolting twang shook the bus—a torn ligament, a stroke, they had not made it after all. The bus shuddered all along its length, and the engine ceased. In silence—Pierce could hear the hiss of the tires on the road's surface—it coasted down the far side of the hill and into the village at the bottom, some stone and frame houses, a brick church, a single-span bridge over the river; and there, before the interested gaze of a few folks gathered on the porch of the gas station-general store, it came to rest.

Well, hell.

The driver let himself out, leaving his passengers in their seats, all still facing front as though traveling, only not traveling. There were sounds without of the engine compartment being opened, looked at, tinkered with; then the driver ducked into the store, and was gone some time. When he returned, he slid again into his seat and picked up his mike—though if he had faced them the fifteen or so people on the bus could have heard him well enough, maybe he was embarrassed—and said metallically, “Well, folks, I'm afraid we won't be going any further on this bus.” Groans, murmurs. “I've called down to Cascadia and they'll be sending on another bus just as fast as they can. Be an hour or so. You're free to make yourselves comfortable here on the bus, or get off, just as you like."

It had always astonished Pierce how, no matter what inconveniences they thrust on you, buses and their minions never let drop the pretense that they were offering you comfort, luxury, even delight. He thrust his book of Solitudes into the side pocket of his bag, shouldered the bag, and got off, following the driver, who intended it seemed to hide out in the store.

"Excuse me!"

What a day this was though, really, what a day! The real air filling his lungs as he drew breath to call again was odorous and sweet after the false air of the bus. “Excuse me!"

The driver turned, raising his eyebrows, could he be of any service.

"I have a ticket to Conurbana,” Pierce said. “I was supposed to catch a connecting bus at Cascadia. Will I miss it?"

"What time?"

"Two."

"Looks like it. Sorry to say."

"Well, would they hold it?"

"Oh, I doubt that. Lots of folks on that Conurbana bus, you know. They got to make their connections too.” A small smile, facts of life. “There's another though, I believe, from Cascadia, about six."

"Fine,” said Pierce, trying not to get testy, not this guy's fault as far as he knew; “I have an appointment there at four-thirty."

"Hoo,” said the driver. “Hoo boy."

He seemed genuinely grieved. Pierce shrugged, looked around himself. A breath of breeze lifted the layered foliage of the trees that overarched the village, passed, and restored the noontide stillness. Pierce thought wildly of hiring a taxi, no, there would be no taxi here, hitchhiking—he hadn't hitchhiked since college. Reason returned. He walked toward the store, rooting in his pockets for a dime.

Up until this summer, Pierce Moffett had taught history and literature at a small New York City college, one of the little institutions which following the upheavals of the sixties had come to cater chiefly to the searching young, the scholar-gypsies who had seemed then to be forming into a colorful nomadic culture of their own, Bedouins camping within the bustle of the larger society, striking their tents and moving on when threatened with the encroachments of civilization, living hand-to-mouth on who knew what, drug sales and money from home. Barnabas College had come to be a caravanserai of theirs, and Pierce had for a time been a popular teacher there. His chief course, History 101—nicknamed Mystery 101 by his students—had been heavily subscribed at the beginnings of past semesters; he had the knack of seeming to have a great, a terrific secret to impart to them on his subject, a story to tell that had cost Pierce himself not a little in the learning, if they would only sit still to hear it. Lately, it was true, fewer and fewer had been sticking to the end; but that was not, or not chiefly, the reason Pierce would not be returning to Barnabas College in the fall.

Peter Ramus College, where he had been headed, was a rather different affair, as far as he could judge; an aged Huguenot foundation that still enforced a dress code (so he had been told, it couldn't be so), inhabiting smoked stone buildings in the suburbs of a declining city. Its picture was on the dean's letter, which Pierce pulled, somewhat crumpled and sweat-stained, from his pocket, the letter inviting him for an interview there: a little steel engraving of a domed building like a courthouse or a Christian Science church. Pierce could imagine the new poured-concrete dorms and labs it was now immured in. Below the picture was the college's phone number.

A tin sign advertising bread, the blond girl and her buttered slice much faded, was attached to the screen door of the little store; Pierce hadn't gone through such a door with such a sign on it in years. And inside the store was that cool and nameless odor, something like naphtha and raisins and cookie crumbs, which is the eternal smell of stores like this one; stores in the city which sold much the same goods never seemed to have it. Pierce felt swept into the past as he dialed the number.

There was no one alive at Peter Ramus at this August noon hour except other people's assistants; no one would reschedule his appointment, but he didn't dare cancel it outright; he left a number of vague messages that were only half-heartedly accepted, said he would call again from Cascadia, and hung up, in limbo.