Hush Hush (2 page)

In Siberia the principal mountains are the Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper ranges. In Siberia all people are striped, so there is only one race. In Siberia some people are naturally tall but other people get to be tall one day a week so it doesn’t matter. You can’t tell them apart. People say, I’m taking a tall day today. People say, Let’s dance, and beautiful music starts playing from the sky. People say, I don’t want to go to bed yet, and they don’t have to. People say, I’m so sleepy, and lie down wherever they are and fall asleep. People say, I love you Elliott, you’re not weird at all. People say, Oh, don’t go Elliott, not yet. Stay here with us. People say, Ememtottot, and they disappear.

They were both dead drunk. It had all started inside, the guy had been riding him, talking trash, and then Mitchell began to remember, it was like a procession, people he didn’t much like, people who had given him a hard time, guy named Jeff at school, that must’ve been grammar school, and Robin, and that guy at that sad little dinner party in Boston, who hated Southerners and out of nowhere said, “Yeah, Texas is hell,” and wanted to “go outside,” the morons always want to “go outside,” so this time he had gone, and some women, too, the big one who said, “He can talk,” and others, and that’s how he’d gotten out here in this oily Fort Worth parking lot behind the bar, the blacktop broken but glistening in the city lights from beyond this ditch or whatever it was, the night wind blowing grit into his eyes, and his nose bloody, kneeling on this guy in the plaid cowboy shirt, watching the loudmouth’s eyes roll back, and his hands tight on the guy’s neck, he was hardly resisting at all anymore. I’m really no good at this, Mitchell thought—a lucky punch had put the guy down—he sort of stepped into it, shit, this is easy, no wonder they like it so much, I’m going to kill this fucker.

But Mitchell wasn’t paying attention. He felt like puking, and his eyes were closing, and his mind was wandering, to a day he had spent with his father—Quinn, his real father—twelve years earlier. He hated his father. Even when his father died, he had not stopped hating him, but only thought, She
didn’t need fancy doctors to tell her that, when they discovered that his heart had a hole in it. His father had been 45.

•  •  •

They found the snake in August in a pile of stones in the only shade near a dry creek bed, long and white, lying oddly still, almost stunned, in the midst of big white blocks of limestone. Coachwhip, Quinn thought, and although he knew what it was, he told Mitch to get the book from the car. “We’ll look it up,” he said. “Watch the barbed wire. Bring the pillowcase, too.”

It hadn’t been hard to catch. Quinn had gotten his foot on it quickly, before it knew it was prey, or slow maybe from the heat. He’d never seen a slow Coachwhip, except ones that had been in cages for years and had no place to go.

Quinn sat on one of the rocks, holding the snake behind its head. It was about two and a half feet, a young one. Light, the color of sand, but Coachwhips varied a lot; some were red. Looking around at the bleached limestone the creek had cut its bed through, it was obvious why this one was almost white.

Mitch came back from the road.

“What’ve we got?” Quinn said.

“Just a minute,” the boy said. He was sitting on the ground with his short legs splayed out to the black cowboy boots Quinn had bought for him. The boots looked ridiculously large, even though the boy was fat. He hadn’t wanted boots, but Quinn had insisted. Got to have boots if we’re going snake-hunting next summer.

“Look under ‘Racers,’ ” Quinn said. “Or
Masticophis
.” Now he was showing off. Jesus, the Latin name, no less.

The boy noticed. His expression changed, some of the joy went out of it. “You’re teaching me,” he said. His eyes had gone to slits. His too round face didn’t look angry; he just looked like someone else’s kid.

“Somebody’s got to. Teach you, I mean. C’mon, what is it?”

“It’s a Racer?”

“No, but you’re close,” Quinn said. “Did you find the pictures? Find the pictures.”

The boy was back to tearing pages as he flipped through the
Field Guide
in his lap. He brushed the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. They’re so forgiving, Quinn thought. He’s already forgiven me.

“Here it is!” Mitch said. “Lemme see it.”

Quinn held the snake out to him, and it started to move again, but he tightened his grip.

“Western Coachwhip,” the boy said, and then looked down at the color plates in the book again. “Maybe it’s Eastern Coachwhip.”

“They have maps in the back,” Quinn told him. “They show you where each kind lives.” When he heard a car, he glanced up, over the rocks and past the mesquite tree by the little creek, toward the road, but it was just a pickup.

When Mitch had checked the ranges of the two varieties and decided—Western—he looked up again. “I can keep him, Daddy?” And then, when he saw his father’s hesitation: “You want him?”

Quinn laughed, involuntarily, and shook his head. “No.” He shook his head again. “I was just thinking maybe it’d be better to let him go. You know, sometimes they die, you put
them in a cage.” But he felt uncomfortable, telling the boy he couldn’t have what he wanted, and he tried to find some feeling behind the words, but all he thought was, Sometimes they die when a car runs over them, sometimes they die when a hawk catches them, sometimes …

“I can keep him, then?” Mitch said. “I’ll take good care of him. He won’t die.”

“Before winter,” Quinn said, “you have to let him go. He won’t make it through the winter.”

The boy’s nod, as he reached for the snake, was so slight that Quinn wasn’t sure he’d even seen it.

“Mitchell?”

“Okay,” the boy said.

“October first. And here. We’ll come out here and let him go. Okay?”

“All right.”

With luck, Quinn thought, it’ll make it to October. And they walked back to the car.

•  •  •

Son of a bitch used to come by once a week, or once a month, and pretend to be my father. Teach me things. He was a Boy Scout all right.

The guy in the cowboy shirt started to rise, brought a hand around and caught Mitchell’s ear so hard he thought he was going to black out, and he slammed the guy’s head back down against the blacktop. “Fucker,” he said. “You miserable drunken slut.” He held the cowboy’s head down against the pavement, but the man was still.

If I kill him, Mitchell thought, they’ll put me in Huntsville, I’m not rich enough to get out of it. He felt weak, and tired. His ear hurt. I shouldn’t drink, he thought, not so much. We took the snake back and put it in that aquarium. It died, later. Never took me to let it go. He was afraid of me.

•  •  •

Joanne was waiting in the front yard, pretending to be watering, but Quinn knew that she was there because they were late, so he was surprised she didn’t complain, about the time or even about the child’s new pet. Instead she asked him in.

“Stewart?” Quinn said.

“He’s not here,” she said, shutting off the hose. She was wearing sandals, and a light cotton dress, busy, blue marked with black.

She had moved in with somebody, but not until five years after the divorce, and by that time they had developed an easy friendship, so that she would say, We had a miserable marriage, but a happy divorce. Stewart did something with computers and telephone systems. In the wide, light living room, Quinn settled opposite her, on the arm of a big off-white armchair. She was sitting on a couch.

“You’re sure it’s not dangerous?” she said, when Mitch had disappeared into the back of the house with the snake.

Quinn shook his head. “If it bites him, put some peroxide on it. Just like any other scratch.”

“Well, maybe he’ll learn some responsibility,” she said.

Quinn looked at the carpet. “Jesus, I wouldn’t want to be a kid again. Always getting taught stuff.”

She looked at him.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.

Her silence was worse, he thought, than any of the things he was imagining her saying, things about responsibility, about his being still more kid than man, about what he should be doing for his child that Stewart was now doing and how good Stewart was at it.

“I just meant that sometimes I wonder whether what I’m teaching him is right.”

“You have the leisure,” she said. Then she looked down. “I’m sorry. I wanted to talk to you, I really did. And now we’ve gotten into this. It was a rotten thing to say. I’m sorry.” She shrugged, and showed him her open hands.

“None taken,” he said, and took her hand, releasing it quickly. “It’s just talk. Relax.”

“Tell me something, Quinn,” she said, and looked away. “When you were … when you used to sleep with Marianne and come home to me, how did you feel about me? I mean, did you—” She smiled. “I don’t know what I mean.”

“You mean Stewart is …”

She shook her head, slowly, and her look was tentative, wary. “Me,” she said, and looked up.

“You want an answer?” He waited for her to nod, but she didn’t, just kept staring, so he looked away. “Well, it’s not very useful, but what I felt was—I loved you both.” He smiled. “I still love you. Don’t know where she is. So it goes, I guess.”

“You’re right. It’s not very useful.” The boy said something, from the back, coming down the hall toward the living room. Outside it was beginning to get dark. She looked toward the hall. “Stewart is sweet,” she said.

Quinn rolled his eyes at her.

•  •  •

Mitchell got up. Some kid came out of a door in the back of the dark bar, carrying a silver tub, poured it out, looked at them, walked back inside. The cowboy opened his eyes and got up on his elbows, then his knees, then stood.

Mitchell looked at him, vague, uncertain, and then he stopped caring. The cowboy began swinging, hitting him, first softly, clumsily, and then, when Mitchell just stood with his arms hanging, harder and harder until Mitchell’s cheek was cut below his eye and his nose was gushing blood and he wobbled and then fell. The cowboy spit. No wonder they like it so much, Mitchell thought. It’s easy. He was afraid I wouldn’t like him. Didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t have a clue. And then he died. Mitchell smiled, and closed his eyes. That must’ve come as a shock.

The poet delicately picks his nose while talking on my telephone, his old abraded sneakers up on my coffee table. This is authentic behavior, the poet is proving that he is a poet, at least I assume that’s what he’s doing. He glances up at me and then continues his picking and his conversation. “
In this country!
” he shouts into the receiver. It’s a joke; he is talking to a poet about a poet. Much laughter. He puts something in the ashtray.

Is he a good poet? He is thought by poetry authorities to be a good poet, but what do they know? I love him, but this does not blind me to his poetry. In the poem he wrote about me after my death, I wrote the only good line. He was quoting me, but the attribution was somewhat vague. I was dead twenty-one minutes before he got to the typewriter.

My sister, inexplicably, doesn’t want to sleep with the poet, though I have offered him to her on several occasions. My sister said she’d design her own therapy, thank you. He looks like he needs a bath, she said, he looks a touch gamey, gamey is the word. Poets prize that look, I said. He sleeps with women by the dozens, I said. Golly, she said. Poets get them down any way they can—liquor, B-pluses, enigmas. This isn’t winning, she said. Making up for high school, I said.

Heaven. In heaven, no hardwood floors and no baseball and poets caught talking about sports get the rack. Yesterday I saw Jesus in a leather hat.

Here is what the poet is saying on the telephone: “Back
together? Really? In Vermont she and Bruno and Tige got naked in the lake and
alors
,
voila …
” Another part of it is like this: “… 
and so her pants were on inside out, har har har …
” It’s a long distance call.

Here is what the poet says in the classroom: “Be inexplicable, but not inexplicatable. Be emendatious but not cementatious (Not in my dictionary; suspect that’s a coinage). Be abominable yet abdominal. Make it newt. (I hear poorly, so this could have been ‘Make it new,’ although he loathes Pound; it may have been ‘Make a note’—sometimes he feigns a boffo French accent.) Oh, and see me after class, Caitlin, Feta, An Li, Eschscholzia, Daisy, Zinnia, Dahlia.”

Before being admitted into heaven I suffered ninety days in purgatory, which is how I know he wrote a poem about me after I died. It was okay. Some people get the exercise bike. Apparently there’s no hell.

The poet drives a Land Rover, of course. Loves his wife. Rubs dogs with great gusto.

In heaven Scotch is blessedly harmless, and my back has finally stopped hurting, and my body’s really buffed. Didn’t require crunches, either, which are what I got into poetry to avoid. But the poet has written, “All a poet really needs is a six-pack and a six-pack. Grolsch—and really ripped abs,” he explained. “But Grolsch is expensive!” I cried. “In
this
country,” he said.

Heaven resembles a very large Days Inn where God is always wandering around saying, “Have you seen Jesus? Have you seen Jesus?” They argue constantly. Jesus says, “ ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise?’ ” alluding to something his Father said (1
^st
Corinthians, I looked it up) and snaps his fingers. “Fundamentally unserious, Dad.”

“I guess I should
frown
more,” his Father says, and gives
a weary look. The building, heaven, goes on as far as the eye can see, into the clouds. In the lobby in the morning an enormously long white tablecloth appears, with coffee and one lemon Danish, which renews itself endlessly. Angels are everywhere, dancing.

The poet’s life has been lived on the edge, in several countries, in his friends’ apartments. The poet spent twelve years working for the John Deere Corporation, two weeks in law school in Boston, a night and day in jail on a vagrancy charge (inspiration for the poems, later, in
I Fought the Law
), and once played tambo in a rock band. The band got him started in poetry when he discovered deep feeling and first wore a perm. “Candy from a bebe,” he says of that period.