Americana (17 page)

“What’s new?”

“Too much,” she said.

“What?”

“Reeves Chubb, Carter Hemmings, Mars Tyler, Quincy Willet, Paul Joyner, Chandler Bates and Walter Faye.”

“Axed?” I said.

“Sandbagged, throttled and axed. Drawn and quartered. It’s official.”

“Jumping mother balls. A mass execution. The magnificent seven gunned down at the OK Corral. Some sweaty little infighting among the survivors, what?”

“I think you’re getting promoted,” Binky said. “It’s just a rumor at this point but Jody thinks it’s on the level.”

“Protect my interests, Bink, and I’ll take you to the top with me. We’ll be like Cary Grant and Roz Russell. Sipping martinis in my penthouse office. Has Weede begun hiring new people yet?”

“Just one so far.”

“What’s his name?”

“Harris Hodge.”

“How old is he?” I said.

“I don’t know, David. He won’t be starting until next week. I haven’t even seen him yet.”

“Find out how old he is. I’ll call you in a few days. Do you miss me?”

“I have to hang up now,” she said.

I went into the bathroom, took off my shirt and began shaving my chest with an electric razor. It was a ritual cleansing of the body, a prelude to the sacred journey. The rain had stopped. I was happy. Through the bathroom window, as I shaved, I could see most of the town of Millsgate, white houses massed in a jest of innocence, fresh sunlight on the steeple. A girl went along the street skipping rope, head back, eyes seeking the break in the clouds; two white sloops, heeling severely, played at the mouth of the bay. I tried to imagine, to remember really, what it was like to live without the terminal fears of the city, for I had loved a town once without knowing it, and the love would not release me. There was a vein of murder snaking across the continent beneath highways, smokestacks, oilrigs and gasworks, a casual savagery fed by the mute cities, and I wondered what impossible distance must be traveled to get from there to here, what language crossed, how many levels of being. My hair went willingly into the fish-mouth of the razor.

A woman came down the steps of an old house. She wore a blue dress and carried pruning shears. I stopped shaving to watch her. She was close to forty, I guessed, fair-skinned, wearing flat heels, appealing in the almost abstract way a waitress is appealing in her plain white dress and the easy cadence of her body as she walks away from your table. The woman began to trim the hedge, handling the large shears with uncommon ease, and then, perhaps feeling the intensity of my stare, she looked up and saw me. I did not move and soon she went back to work, humming softly, proceeding along
the hedge, her arms beating, somewhat like a bird discovering flight. I watched her for a least half an hour. She would never know it, of course, but she had given me the strangest, darkest, most horrifying idea of my life. It was an idea for a film I might make somewhere out there among the lost towns of America.

They were waiting for me. Brand locked the house and we carried our suitcases to the garage and put them in the camper. Then I trotted down to my car and drove it to the garage. I transferred my movie camera and tape recorder to the camper. Brand backed the F-250 out as we stood on the sidewalk counting the dents and bruises. Then he came out to give it one final look, circling slowly with a thoughtful expression on his face. He adjusted his glasses, blinking rapidly into the sun.

“She’s ready, Davy,” he said. “The old plastic bitch is ready to roll. You’re the captain. Which way are we going?”

“West,” I said. “Aim her more or less to the west.”

I put my car in the garage and Brand locked up. We flipped coins and it was determined that I would ride up front with him for the first fifty miles. We assumed our respective posts. The school bell began to ring. Brand put the camper into gear.

Men on small islands would do well to avoid the pursuit of philosophy. The island illusion, that solitude and wisdom invented each other, is a very convincing one. Day by day I seem to grow more profound. Often I feel I am on the verge of some great philosophical discovery. Man. War. Truth. Time. Fortunately I always return to myself. I look beyond the white lace of the surf to my own unassembled past and I decide to let others stitch together the systems. I enjoy the triteness of the situation, man and island, exile in the ultimate suburb. The surf is massing and rolling, uneven now, page after page of terrible wild words. All the colors borrow, sea from beach from sky, and after a while I follow my own footprints back to the house.

(The film is projected.)

There were many visions in the land, all fragments of the exploded dream, and some of the darkest of these visions were those processed in triplicate by our generals and industrialists—the manganese empires, the super-sophisticated gunnery, the consortiums and privileges. Something else was left over for the rest of us, or some of the rest of us, and it was
the dream of the good life, innocent enough, simple enough on the surface, beginning for me as soon as I could read and continuing through the era of the early astronauts, the red carpet welcome on the aircraft carrier as the band played on. It encompassed all those things which all people are said to want, materials and objects and the shadows they cast, and yet the dream had its complexities, its edges of illusion and self-deception, an implication of serio-comic death. To achieve an existence almost totally symbolic is less simple than mining the buried metals of other countries or sending the pilots of your squadron to hang their bombs over some illiterate village. And so purity of intention, simplicity and all its harvests, these were with the mightiest of the visionaries, those strong enough to confront the larger madness. For the rest of us, the true sons of the dream, there was only complexity. The dream made no allowance for the truth beneath the symbols, for the interlinear notes, the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one’s awareness. This was difficult at times. But as a boy, and even later, quite a bit later, I believed all of it, the institutional messages, the psalms and placards, the pictures, the words. Better living through chemistry. The Sears, Roebuck catalog. Aunt Jemima. All the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.

* * *

Old Holly was a suburb of New York only in the strict geographical sense; unlike the surrounding communities it was not an extension of the city’s monoxide spirit, a point of mere arrival and departure. The town did not have the sheen of a manicurist’s artistry about it. The houses were very old, most of them, and agreeably shabby, two or three stories with small shuttered windows, high ceilings, gabled roofs, porches which in some cases went entirely around the houses, repeating the eccentric angles sketched by the roof-edges. Through all the houses drifted some thin plasm of identity,
stirring the senses of the casual visitor. One enters here and tastes clove or mellow tobacco in the air; the next house smells faintly of mint, varnish somewhere, the soft thick snuff of an old rug; one hears music elsewhere, no more than intimations from the keys of a lidded piano, no more than cutlery and voices, the indolent sermon of a saw on wood, no more than silence or the stagnant inner sound which silence contains in all old rooms deep in sunlight. In certain rooms in some of the houses, the floors were slightly tilted, moldings loose, ceiling beams off-center, and when you got out of bed at night for a glass of water and there was wind and rain the sensation was not unlike that of being at sea in a storm. If you were a boy it was a simple matter to pretend your house was a ship, for the stairs creaked and there were small dark corners where you could put your hand to the wall and feel the house sigh in the wild currents of the wind. The dim persuasions of sameness, the low clean lines which imply neither victory nor defeat but only stalemate, equation, the century’s dry science, were nowhere present among these houses. Only two pieces of property included swimming pools. The country club was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Physically, then, Old Holly might have been set in the middle of Connecticut or in some Pennsylvania valley which owed the fact of its livelihood to no large city. In spirit, the town was even less suburban. It had not been built with the automobile in mind; the streets were somewhat less than broad and people could be seen walking at all hours of the day and evening to the stores on Ridge Street. There were no parking lots in the middle of town, no need for them, and no shopping center or aluminum custard stand flanked by a miniature golf course and a driving range. There were many small hills, nagging little curves instead of neat intersections, and the sight of headlights picking out trees through low fog was, to a boy, something beautiful and rare, for the car was alien to this environment, its passage difficult and bizarre. Most of the people who lived in Old Holly worked there as
well, tradesmen, factory hands, professional men, and the train depot was never crowded at the regular commuter hours. We were a town then, American in our outlook, plain and meat-eating, relatively unhurried, willing to die for our country, or for photographs of our country.

Harkavy Clinton Bell, my father’s father, spent the last seven years of his life in Old Holly. Before retiring he had been one of advertising’s early legends, the second man to use a coupon in a newspaper ad. It was he who left the house to my father. I was six when we moved from West End Avenue; Jane was nine and Mary ten. I was happy there as a child. It was a house of dubious architectural parentage, a bastard house, a stray, to be loved as mongrels are. Harkavy’s portrait was over the mantelpiece, misty hills behind his head, and he looked like Mona Lisa’s corrupt uncle. I filled my room with fishing rods, college pennants, baseballs and model planes.

Winter of my twelfth year.

The boys vanished in the heavy snow. I ran inside and took off my boots, coat and hat. I was always running then and I was always leaving on my hat till last. I stood by the window and watched the snow pile up. It was the first snowfall of the year, filling the evening with silence and falling heaviest inside the light of the streetlamps. A parked car was covered, humped in white, and nothing moved but soft light across sleeves of snow on the branches of every tree. It was warm inside the house and I could hear my mother and older sister preparing dinner. Soon my father came home and I ran to greet him. He stood in the hallway, big and pink, shaking off snow, clapping his gloves together, breathing smoke. After dinner I went back to the window and chewed on homemade cookies. Mary washed the dishes; Jane drew a picture of my mother with chalk on a slate; my father turned the pages of a magazine; the radiator whistled. All these sounds in the warm house, of water running and steam, of shrill chalk and the rustling of paper, of voices known and of time moving
down the grandfather clock, all these, inflections of the house itself, all-comforting and essential, told me that I was safe.

And then the first sound of men with shovels was heard.

I could not see them but I knew they were out there, bulky men folded behind their shovels. The shovels chipped at ice, scraped on concrete, and my father began to get interested. He stirred and put down the magazine. My mother quoted something she had read the day before, grim statistics about shoveling snow and heart attacks, about pneumonia, sprained backs, broken hips. My father said he had a long way to go before he started worrying about such things and in a little while he got up and put on his coat. There is no denying a man who wants to shovel snow.

Outside a car went by, slowly, wipers working, and then my father emerged from the basement with the shovel. I could see three streetlamps from the window and each beam of light brimmed with snow. Soon it would be Christmas and there would be visitors and gifts and too much food. And if we were lucky enough to have snow then it was that much better because there was nothing ahead but school and the bleak dark months before the first true day of spring. But it was too early to look forward to spring because there was still Christmas ahead. The worst stretch was after Christmas. It was a long time to spring and there was nothing but school. My mother began to cry.

I went outside and stood by the gate. My father was shoveling snow and didn’t see me and all up and down the street other men were shoveling and not talking and they were all breathing smoke and in the quiet and unfaltering tenor of the snow they looked like ancient men engaged in timeless professions, shepherds in a field or patient fishermen whose lines sprawl in the water of a winter lake. The night air was keen and thin. No cars passed and it was too cold now for walking your dog or for boys testing the snow for its snowball qualities. I wanted to do some shoveling myself but there was only one shovel and it was something I knew my father enjoyed so I
let it go. I thought of all the people in town I liked and all those I didn’t like. I imagined myself crawling through the woods, a commando, with a knife between my teeth. It was hot and the jungle birds were screaming. I moved up to the house on my belly through the trees. It was the doctor’s house, Weber’s, and I climbed through the window. He came downstairs and I stood behind the kitchen door. He walked in and reached for the light-switch and then quickly, hand over mouth, knife to throat, softly, softly, whispering my vengeance to his warm ear, I killed him.