Meeks (3 page)

Move along! I said. As you can see, Brothers, I am alive and well.

I went to the bench and waited. In the distance, the factories hummed with power, chugging white smoke. I heard the low, long morning whistle, and the great windows filled with light, and I tried, in vain for the millionth time, to make sense of the procession of shadows suddenly sweeping across them. Machines? People?

The fruit vendor set up his cart nearby, collapsing the delivery boxes and arranging the fresh fruit, pyramiding the limes . . . the plums, plump and purple-black, flecked with lavender, and the oranges constellated with fine drops of cool water, and the lemons bright and indomitable in the sunlight, and the polished red apples still bristling with dark, sweet leaves. A breeze rushed through the high branches of the park trees. I thought of how pleasant it would be to line the interior of my head with layers of the cool green leaves. I thought of how I loved the healthy green give of the grassy slopes, the sound of the breeze through the grass growing uniformly on the surface of the earth, the warmth emanating from it, the perfect scent of things just broken open. I love this world as I loved my very mother.

The fruit vendor brought me a few warm, soft plums wrapped loosely in some old paper. The day before, the baker had thrown a sugar bun my way. I took it from my coat pocket and halved it carefully, arraying the pieces neatly beside the plums.

That morning, as of yet, nothing had changed for me, so I was content watching the people coming in and out of the park, the people for whom things were under way. Their ships had sailed, and they smiled in the ship's breeze of an amiable open sea, and they smiled at the sights and sounds beyond the ship's rail, and they were people who were
launched
and it was a pleasure to watch them inhabit their pleasures without embarrassment. Young bachelors were leaning on their elbows along the green, sunny slopes, the young shadows of the trees overlapping in the grass, mild yellow nectars burning on their wicks, young women strolling in and out of lemon-yellow bands of sunlight, while the bachelors lounged in the shade like kings. Newly hatched, innocent and soft and warm, from the hulls of their houses, their heads swimming with dreams about the future: the face of a young man hangs like a pocket watch in his father's fog-choked silver shaving mirror, the face of a young woman hangs like an apple in the yellow haze of her mother's hand mirror. Mystery of mysteries: people alone in their houses. Perhaps it seems wrong for a mere policeman to feel such proprietary love for the society he watches over, but this was my world, as much as anyone's, and a policeman can be forgiven for thinking of his beat as his kingdom and the citizens as his subjects.

Meeks!

I jumped, discombobulating the plums. I arranged them again on the old paper, and Bedge sat beside me on the bench, looking out over the park and the clusters of new bachelors, comparing their suits and whistling after women.

Another summer, another season, Bedge said and sighed with a sort of contented resignation.

Plum? I asked.

Bedge poked one of the ruptured plums I had laid out for him. No, thank you.

Bread? I said, offering him half of the sugar bun.

Um, no. You have it, Meeks.

Are you sure you won't have something? I said and scooped up the old paper so that the plums and bread were floating conveniently right in front of his face. I had counted on my offering to lay the foundation for congenial negotiations.

No, no. Nothing for me, he said. But I've brought something for you. He removed his policeman's cap and said, I'm getting a new hat today—I thought you might like this one.

I need a gun, I said, moving directly, if awkwardly, to what was foremost in my mind.

Absolutely not.

But I am a policeman.

Meeks.

Bedge.

Why do you need a gun?

Why does anyone?

Which is precisely why we don't issue guns left and right, among the people.

I meant: why does any policeman?

Shall I take the hat away, if you don't want it?

No, no, no. I do want it.

Allow me, said Bedge, laying the hat upon my head as if it were a crown and then yanking it down, almost to my ears, with inhuman force. Now you're the very picture of a policeman.

I smiled uncertainly; my hands, having developed a kind of panicked free agency, flew to the sides of my head and tried uselessly to loosen the cap. The
hat,
I gasped, trying to give a name to my discomfort and confusion. Bedge ignored me.

You and I have a lot in common, Meeks. Considering our differences. Our situations couldn't be farther apart—me the Chief of Police, you the . . . (he seemed to search for the word) . . . rookie. But we share a requirement to be students of life.

Yes, I said, struggling as politely as I could against the efforts of the new hat to separate me from my body.

Bedge said, Do you remember the man in the black jacket?

I forgot the hat immediately. Man in the black jacket? I said. Man in the black jacket!

Bedge didn't answer me at first. He crossed his arms and stared petulantly into the distance. Perhaps he had thought that I would react to this news by nodding sagely and gratefully in my new hat, reflecting philosophically on the name of the ruiner of my life.

Apparently he's back in the city, said Bedge, trying to punish me, I suppose, by skipping over several lines of delectable back and forth that might have transpired between us.

Back in the city? I realized I was right up against Bedge, and I had compressed the plums and bread between us. He looked down at his juice-stained trousers with disgust.

Relax, said Bedge and pushed back me back down the bench to my regular spot. I won't tell you another word, he warned, unless you get a hold of yourself.

He took everything from me, Bedge.

I know the story well, Meeks. And now I'm telling you that the man in the black jacket was spotted in the city this morning by one of my men. Listen to me: If you see him, you must come find me. Do you understand?

Stay here. Find him. Get you.

That's right, said Bedge and patted me on the shoulder as he stood to go.

I looked down at the flattened plums, the stained paper, the golden quarry of the uneaten sugar bun—and I wanted none of it. My mind was busy spooling out the razor wire of an old hatred, coiling it mercilessly around every thought that entered my head, until my head was full of bad blood, and the whole day had gone.

The civil servants were collecting and folding the green-slat park chairs and sewing them together with thick, padlocked chains, and the people were drifting home to peaceful family dinners, to low lights, to quilts and cool, clean sheets and soft pillows, to glasses of refreshing night water. I stayed in the park, of course, having nowhere else to go. I waited for the evening bells to sound. I saw the lights go on in the street cafes. I smelled smoke from the cigarettes of the waiters, who smoked outside in loose ties before the dinner hour.

I made my way to the statue of Captain Meeks. I unlaced my boots and coiled the laces into my coat pockets. I unwrapped my feet and hung the foot cloth over a low branch. I struggled pointlessly with my hat, which seemed to be glued to my head, and then stretched out on my back under the fluttering black leaves . . . the boundless heaven at night. I felt better lying there beneath the Captain, just as my mother always did and once had, when I once wasn't was.
I once wasn't was.
The phrase swam drowsily through my brain. I could hear the garbagemen, always the last out of the park, making their way toward the gate, stabbing at garbage with their garbage stabbers. The smell of their cheap apple tobacco faded, and then it was just Mother and me again, me on the surface of the earth, her slightly under it, gazing past the tops of the nighttime trees just as we always had, when she would take my hand and speak directly into the vastness of space and say, My son will be the greatest of sons.

Ben

In the face of immediate disappointments, a person must take stock of the advantages that remain. He had a room at a reputable Bachelor's House; that was promising. He was lucky to be home in early summer; he was lucky to have the friendship of the tailor. One way or another, he would soon have a fine pale suit: he would devour the ground with long strides, yank apples from leafy branches and bestow them upon women in the park; he would kick the dew from the weeds that lined the streets, and women would drop their cups of tea, their smooth slices of iced lemon cake would topple from their plates and collapse on the grass, and his would be a vector of desirability cutting through the daily rounds of all women everywhere—transactions disastered, paths abandoned, children neglected, as the young women of the city were swept up in the fleet shadow of his apparently oblivious perambulations. But Ben would be long gone, walking on, preoccupied by work on an eternal problem.

Ben imagined two piles of men in the tailor's brain: the nameless, numberless bodies he had dressed, and, in the other pile, the tailor's son—and Ben. An advantage and a peril, to be so close to the tailor's heart.

Ben reached the Nines, the row of Bachelor Houses along the north side of the park. He stopped to watch a city muralist at work on the freshly plastered sidewall of a Bachelor House. A classic scene: the river a ribbon of blue sateen, the bright green of the park trees, the towering buildings laying gray and ghostly parcels of shadow along the smooth, clean grand avenue, and, curling over the horizon, the vast and open sea.

The artist ticked his brush lightly along the edges of the waves of the harbor to give them an optimistic trim of white foam uncharacteristic of the dark, sluggish swells one could see from the city. Through the clear blue waters of the mural sea, Ben could make out the shapes of ancient creatures.

"There's a whale!” he observed, delighted.

"Yes,” said the painter gloomily. A whale stared up at them benevolently from behind the blue-green veil of water.

"My great-grandfather used to see them in the harbor,” said Ben. “Hard to imagine."

Ben could see sailors on the ships that bobbed in the fresh white surf, the needlelike masts bristling, the shapes of people at ease in the park or bustling along the grand avenues, and along the edges of every scene, the murky figures, shadowantine, ashamed, the gray laborers armed with their pronged garbage stabbers, stabbing at scraps of shadow along the periphery. Ben recognized the scorched terrain of the opposite bank, and his heart sank: the Enemy's Territory laid to waste. He returned his gaze immediately to the beloved city. There was the statue of Captain Meeks peering from his great height through the trees; there were the bachelors, perfectly suited, at ease and as if facing an eternity of ease; there were the shapes of young women pouring into the park through the main gates. He looked again at the wrecked land across the river. A few preserved tufts of hard green forest where he had soldiered, the black masts of the Enemy's ships sunk in the rocky shallows. “What's this—the black smoke on the ridge?"

"Soldiers’ camp."

"And what about this smoke here?” Ben pointed to the inland wilderness beyond the train station.

"Listening Party. Bachelors around the fire."

"Much better,” said Ben and reached out to touch the lovely curls of pale smoke.

"Please don't touch,” said the artist and grabbed Ben's wrist.

"Sorry,” said Ben but continued to reach.

Ben found the number on the street: Bachelor House 902. A solid white house, fissures in the plaster facade. Dark gray shutters. Rows of windows orderly as paintings on a wall. The window boxes were faded black, empty or soft and disorderly with wild grasses. Ben saw a face hovering in an upstairs window; he bounded up the front steps so the other bachelors could see his strength and his ambition, and be defeated, put down their smoldering cigarettes (he mustn't smoke, he mustn't smoke), stop harvesting silk ties from the tie-trees in their rooms, in order to worry.

Ben stepped into the dim entry hall; he could smell cold grease and the loamy stench of long neglect. After a moment, he could see a loose boot tongue on the floor, one or two sun-bleached postcards, the edge of a coin wedged between the floorboards. Just pass through, he instructed himself—this is but a necessary passage, and life is waiting just beyond it. A man must suffer the confines of this life in order to reach the spacious enchantments of the next. Ben edged forward uncertainly. At the end of the hallway, he could make out the silhouette of an old-fashioned clock hanging over the fireplace, cool and shadowy in the warm spring air.

Another bachelor stepped into the hallway, smiling in shirtsleeves.

"Hey. I'm Albert."

"Ben,” said Ben. Albert stepped up to shake his hand. Ben took note of Albert's thin, uneven beard.

"The tailor said we should expect you,” said Albert, yanking self-consciously at his beard. “Let me show you your room."

"I like the beard,” Ben said, tapping his own clean-shaven chin.

"Oh, thanks. You know . . . new development."

Ben glanced into the open rooms as they walked through the labyrinth of hallways. Young, intent bachelors—the tall, the hunched, the fat-faced, the over-groomed—alone in their rooms, honing their bachelor skills: one bachelor stood on a ladder with a paintbrush, painstakingly filling out the trompe l'oeil trees with fragments of green; another bachelor smoked a pipe and carved a bear's head out of a wet block of plaster (he glared up at Ben as he passed, the stem of his pipe clenched in his teeth); a bachelor pinned insects into a canvas-lined collector's box, pausing to brush the folded wings of his specimens with a soft brush, as if soothing them to sleep. As it was for Ben, it was for them: beneath the necessary intensity of mastering a bachelor skill churned the real restlessness, the great and thrilling imprecision of desire.

Ben wanted to be home, at home in a warm, unregulated place, with the background family fountain of talk, little talk, talk, little talk, and orderly tables suddenly disorderly with the passing of plates. Until then: pushups, statistics, scrimshaw—enviable craft! Albert looked back to smile reassuringly—he looked so young. Ben was not as young as he once was. What if he had waited too long? He had been forced by duty to postpone things and now had to work from the disadvantageous location of a Bachelor House where illness could spread quickly through overcrowded halls and where the defeatist routines of ailing and luckless bachelors in adjoining rooms could demoralize, and even an ambitious bachelor might soon find himself falling into a malaise. At which point, a doomed man (not himself, Ben soothed, but someone else) might die very quickly, even suddenly, perspiring alone in his room, or at the hands of the police, or as a thrown-away man, a worker in the various factories by the waterfront that milled foodstuffs and pumped fresh water and slaughtered animals and electrified the night streets and who knew what else, horrible and communal, until one died of exhaustion or was yanked from the factory floor by the trailing teeth of some awful machine, as had once happened to a friend's unmarried uncle. A loveless, childless man chewed beyond recognition and what did it matter?