Atlantis: Three Tales (24 page)

“Well, maybe,” I said, “since they were only running around five or six minutes—” It had seemed to take hours while it had been happening; but it hadn't, I realized now, been
all
that long—“it won't make them
that
tough.”

This seemed to be an argument that he could partially accept. He wiped his nose.

Then he turned and shouted: “That
god
-damned dog!” The profanity fit in Robert's mouth as awkwardly as it would have in mine.

I said: “Let's go inside until your mom gets back.”

As we walked across the grass toward the farmhouse's white steps that went up to the kitchen porch, occasionally Robert would sort of quiver—and now and then sniffle as though he were going to start crying again. Through the whole thing, I hadn't really been upset. But, once more, lost between compassion for my friend and a selfish worry that his state would ruin the rest of my visit, I decided I had to say something that would change things.

“Robert,” I said. “Your father's dead.”

He turned to me and blinked—either because what I'd said was true, or because I'd voiced the fact that, certainly, no one else among our classmates had yet dared speak to him of.

“You probably feel like you're responsible for
everything
.”

He stopped.

We looked at each other.

We were both wet. Our shirts were out of our pants. Buttons were missing. Our clothes and faces and arms were stuck all over with grass blades, duck down, and leaf bits. Robert had more cuts and scratches than I did. But I had a bruised knee, and there was a tear in my shirtsleeve where King's tooth had torn it, raking down my forearm to leave the smallest trickle of blood—which I'd decided not to mention to anyone, since back at school Hugo had told us about rabies injections directly into the stomach wall and how much they hurt. It
just
didn't seem necessary.

“You didn't do it on purpose, Robert,” I went on. “It wasn't your fault. And it's probably not going to be as bad as you think, anyway.”

Robert blinked, sniffed, then shook his head, with small quick motions, as if to say I just didn't understand at all.

“A duck gets tough from running around and exercising and things the same way a . . . a body builder's muscles get big and tough.” I had no idea
what
made a duck tough—or tender. But it sounded good, even scientific.

“I know,” Robert said. “I've got a lot of responsibility, now. My mom says so.” There were still tears in his voice, but they were not the tense, terrified tears of someone fighting the descent into deeper and deeper misery but the easier tears of someone rising at last toward reason—a distinction children can all make, though sometimes adults forget it.

“Robert, a duck would have to run around a lot more than five minutes to grow
that
kind of muscle!”

He actually smiled a little. The notion of those quacking pillows with muscles like the pictures in the Charles Atlas advertisements on the back of the comics we traded
was
funny.

Inside we got washed up. Looking in the medicine cabinet, I volunteered to put mercurochrome on his scratches, but Robert decided against it.

“It's iodine that stings—”

“I know. I still don't want it. I'll be all red and look funny.”

That evening, after his mother got back, and we were at the kitchen table eating hot dogs and baked beans (both of us still barefoot, but cleaner and drier), Robert, with a mouthful of frank, told her:

“The ducks got out this afternoon. King almost caught them. But we got them back in.”

“That's good,” his mother said. “You know, Bill told you, when he said you could take care of them, they're not supposed to run around too much—or they won't be fit to eat!”

That was all there was to it.

I could hear, neither in his words nor hers, no trace of the physical exertion or moral despair the adventure had put Robert—and me—through.

That evening Robert's mother told us she had arranged a trip for us
the next morning. The farm's cows generally produced two full milk cans a day. When the milk driver came to pick up the farm's milk, we would join him and ride the rest of his run to the dairy. We were to be up and ready by five.

Robert told me he had been on the trip before and that the milk truck driver, Eric, was a great guy. Robert's mother added that Eric had worked on the farm back when he was a teenager. Her husband had always liked him. Then Eric had gone away for a year—into the armed forces. But he'd been back awhile now, and for the last two months he'd been just as nice and as helpful—well, she didn't know what she'd have
done
without him! So that night, I went to sleep in a small room with a sloping ceiling, and Robert went to bed in his own room—“Because you two can't talk all night if you have to get up at four-thirty in the morning,” Robert's mother told me, turning out my light.

I'd wondered if I should make another stab at introducing Robert to sex once we were in bed—Robert could be slow about things. But since we weren't in the same room, I decided—again—to forget it. I turned over under the country comforter, and went to sleep.

Getting up in the middle of the night was kind of interesting.

“Oh, don't worry,” Robert's mother said. “It won't be dark for long.”

Down in the kitchen, by the time we finished our cornflakes, the windows had lightened to an indigo as deep as evening's.

Robert got in an argument with his mother about whether we could go on the ride barefoot.

“Running around the farm is one thing,” she told us. “But you don't know where you're going. So I want you both to put some shoes on. Now!”

“But I
know
where I'm going!” Robert insisted. “I've been there before!”

“And
I
don't want to argue anymore! Put your shoes on, or I will phone Eric right this minute and tell him that you're not coming!” She stepped toward the phone—which got a capitulatory squeal from Robert.

She was angry, too.

Robert's mother actually had a pretty short temper—shorter than my mom's, anyway. I wondered if that came from having her husband die.

We sat at the table, bending down, Robert to tie his sneakers, me to lace my shoes.

Then, outside, we heard a truck.

“That's Eric!” Robert cried. We were both up and out the door, with Robert's mom behind us.

The milk truck was just a little bigger than a pickup. The back was open, and a dozen upright milk cans stood in it from previous farm stops. A lanky guy with bronze hair under a red cap was already hoisting up our two (filled by the electric milking machine Bill in the barn had shown us working the evening before).

“Mornin', ma'am. Hey, Robert—this your little friend from New York City? Howdy, there!” Squatting on the open tailgate, Eric grinned. “You two fellas ain't gonna give me no trouble now, are ya'?” He pushed up his cap visor and reached over to shake my hand.

Robert's mother said: “I've told them they have to do everything you say.”

As I took Eric's hand to shake, I saw that for all his hard, country-soiled calluses, he was as bad a nail-biter as Robert. It gave me a kind of start.

Twenty-three or twenty-four, with a pleasant smile but not a whole lot of chin, Eric was a gangling, good-natured, upstate farmboy. His jeans were frayed at knee and cuff. His high-laced workshoes were big, scuffed, and muddy. His plaid shirt was rolled up from forearms showing an anchor and an eagle from his Navy stint. “Don't worry, ma'am,” he said to Robert's mother, standing now and pulling his cap visor back down. He jumped to the ground. “I'll have these little guys back here by eight-thirty, nine o'clock in the morning—at the latest.” He pushed up the tailgate, clanked it to, and stuck in the iron bolt on its jingling chain that held it closed, hammered on it once with his big hand's hard heel, then walked us around to the cab, where the door—the truck sat on a slope—hung open. “Come on, now, you two. Get on up in there. Bye, now, ma'am.”

“Bye, Eric. You two be good, now, and do what Eric tells you!”

That milk run through the paling New Paltz dawn was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me.

As Eric grasped the wheel (the top arc covered with oil-blackened carpet, fixed at the ends with electrician's tape), to haul us round onto the road, one wheel
chunked
down and up, into and out of, a pothole. “
God
-damn, if that ain't some shit!” Eric broke out, then glanced over. “Now you ain't gonna tell on me, huh? You let your mom know I'm cussin' around you little fuckers like this, an' you'll never see
my
ass again! You two remember that, you hear me?”

Yeah, sure. We nodded vigorously. Oh, his friend would never say anything about something like that, Robert spoke for me—as if his own assurance had been given long ago.

Over the next thirty yards of bumpy road, however (we were still not off Robert's property), by the time we reached the highway, I'd realized that, while—if he
had
to—Eric could maintain country decorum with farmers' wives and mothers, turned loose in a truck with a pair of boys he became the
most
foul-mouthed man I'd ever met!

Of course I'd heard “bad words” shouted in anger on Harlem streets. But this open joviality was as heavily weighted with profanity and scatology as speech could bear. Nor was it bawled in the anonymous urban distances. It was directed, without an ounce of ire, straight at Robert and me—“How you little shit-asses doin' in that fuckin' school you fuckin' go to down in that ol' shit-ass city? . . . You messin' 'round with that science-crap, huh? I never knowed shit about no fuckin' science. Or pretty much about no school-shit either. But you bastards are probably pretty smart little sons of bitches about all that fuckin' shit now, ain't ya'?” Then, when he would gun the truck to pass a rare car out on the early road, he'd grunt toward the window, “
Suck
my fuckin' asshole, cocksucker!” Then, back to us with mock frustration: “What do these early mornin' fuckheads think they're goddamn doin' anyway, this fuckin' early, on the fuckin' highway, gettin' in shit and everybody's fuckin' way besides? Trippin' over their goddamn dicks like they left their fuckin' flies open!”

I and I guess Robert, too, were in ecstasy!

We had to stop at one more farm to pick up a last milk can before going on to the dairy. “A fuckin' little one-can shit hole—and that can ain't
never
fuckin' full. I'm not supposed to take the fucker if it ain't fuckin' full. But I'm a soft-hearted son-of-a-bitch; so I do it. Now your daddy—” this to Robert—“he always kept a
hell
of a good-lookin' farm. And your mom's done pretty well by it since. But this ol' shit hole we're goin' to now ain't worth a damned dog turd!” The farmhouse we came up to, though, looked as neat as it could—if a lot smaller than Robert's. Unshaven, with bib-overalls and long johns beneath them, a heavyset, elderly man came out; and without noticeable transition Eric managed once more to put his profanations aside. “Hello, sir. How you doin' this mornin', sir?”

“Hi, there, Eric. You want me to give you a hand up with that can—?”

“No, sir!” Opening the door, Eric leapt from the cab. “No, sir—you don't have to do nothin' with it, sir. I'll get it—that's what they pay me for. So you just relax.”

From our seat in the cab, we heard Eric in the back, the can first rolling across gravel, then rasping on the truck bed.

From inside, we heard Eric call down from the truck, “How's Bubba doin'?”

And from the ground the farmer answered, “Why, he's doin' just fine.”

“You tell 'im,” Eric said, “not to get in no trouble with that motorcycle.”

“Now, I'll tell 'im
just
that.”

This apparently was some joke that set the two of them off laughing.

“You tell 'im,” Eric declared. “You tell Bubba that Eric said you was to
tell
him that!” (Eric pronounced his own name as one diphthongized, down-swung syllable that, for all the slurring of the Negro speech around me in Harlem I could sometimes assume, would have been beyond me.) “You tell 'im, I say!” They were still laughing. “Tell 'im! Don't you forget it, now, neither!”

“Oh, I'll teil 'im!”

Eric's boots scudded on gravel. (In my mind I saw him vault.) A moment on, cap in hand, he swung up into the cab and slammed the door. “Bye, now, sir!” With one hand back and the other front, he tugged it over spiky hair the color of light coffee. “Bye, now—so long, sir!”

“Bye, Eric!”

Eric grabbed wheel and gearshift.

The motor revved beneath.

We started again.

“Now
we're fuckin' outta here, boy—like pig-balls on butter! Let's get the
fuck
on the road!”

We jogged along awhile. Eric kept up his banter. I remembered Robert's awkward curses yesterday. By now Eric's sentences seemed just as awkward when curses were missing. For, during this stop, I'd heard, as I hadn't at Robert's farm, the faint halts and false starts you couldn't really write without burlesquing, that nevertheless told where a
fuckin'
or a
shit
dearly yearned to fall.

“You know—” We went round another curve, with Eric's near elbow getting my ribs and me pushing Robert against the door (tools rattled in metal below the seat)—“when I throwed up the goddamn Navy an' come the fuck home (Oh, they fuckin' wanted me to stay but I told 'em to get fucked, I knew where
I
fuckin' lived!), I shoulda gone the hell to Texas and been a goddamn cowboy, herdin' fuckin steers and ropin' fuckin' calves—
then
I bet you little scumbags would
really
like shittin' around with a wild-ass bastard like me!” He put his head back and sang out:
“Whoopie-Fuckin'-Tye-Yi-Yippy-Shit-Ass-Yay!
Well, now,
hey
—” His gold-stubbled cheeks filled with air as he whistled, then his chin came down as we bounced over another stretch of broke-up macadam—“I bet I'd be a fuckin' movie star by now, with fuckin'
fine
music every time I turned the knob—that would be a goddamn sight better than rustlin' fuckin' milkcans for a bunch of shit-machine cows, you better
believe
your fuckin' balls when they spit on ya'!” We bounced down the straightaway. “But it ain't that fuckin' bad around here, now, is it? You an' your ma keep comin' the fuck back.”