Mr. Vertigo (7 page)

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Because you wouldn’t have believed me before. That’s why I’m telling you now. Because the time is coming. If you listen to what the master tells you, it’s coming sooner than you think.”

W
hen spring rolled around for the second time, the farm work was like a holiday to me, and I threw myself into it with manic good cheer, welcoming the chance to live like a normal person again. Instead of lagging behind and grousing about my aches and pains, I surged along at top speed, daring myself to stick with it, reveling in my own exertions. I was still puny for my age, but I was older and stronger, and even though it was impossible, I did all I could to keep up with Master Yehudi himself. I was out to prove something, I suppose, to stun him into respecting me, to be noticed. This was a new way of fighting back, and every time the master told me to slow down, to ease off and not push so hard (“It’s not an Olympic sport,” he would say, “we’re not out here competing for medals, kid”), I felt as if I had won a victory, as if I were gradually regaining possession of my soul.

My pinky joint had healed by then. What had once been a bloody mess of tissue and bone had smoothed over into an odd, nailless stump. I enjoyed looking at it now and running my thumb over, the scar, touching that bit of me that was gone forever. I must have done it fifty or a hundred times a day, and every time I did, I would sound out the words
Saint Louis
in my head. I was struggling to hold on to my past, but by then the words had become just words, a ritual exercise in remembrance. They summoned forth no pictures, took me on no journeys back to where
I had been. After eighteen months in Cibola, Saint Louis had been turned into a phantom city for me, and a little more of it was vanishing every day.

One afternoon that spring the weather became inordinately hot, boiling up to midsummer levels. The four of us were working out in the fields, and when the master removed his shirt for greater comfort, I saw that he was wearing something around his neck: a leather thong with a small, transparent globe hanging from it like a jewel or an ornament. When I approached him to have a better look—merely curious, with no ulterior motive—I saw that it was my missing pinky joint, encased in the pendant along with some kind of clear liquid. The master must have noticed my surprise, for he glanced down at his chest with an expression of alarm, as if he thought a spider might be crawling there. When he saw what it was, he took hold of the globe in his fingers and held it out to me, smiling with satisfaction. “A pretty little widget, eh Wait?” he said.

“I don’t know about pretty,” I said, “but it looks awful familiar to me.”

“It should. It used to belong to you. For the first ten years of your life, it was part of who you were.”

“It still is. Just because it’s detached from my body, that don’t make it any less mine than before.”

“It’s pickled in formaldehyde. Preserved like some dead fetus in a jar. It doesn’t belong to you now, it belongs to science.”

“Yeah, then what’s it doing around your neck? If it belongs to science, why not donate it to the wax museum?”

“Because it has special meaning for me, sport. I wear it to remind myself of the debt I owe you. Like a hangman’s noose. This thing is the albatross of my conscience, and I can’t let it fall into a stranger’s hands.”

“What about my hands, then? Fair is fair, and I want my joint back. If anyone wears that necklace, it’s got to be me.”

“I’ll make a bargain with you. If you let me hold on to it a little longer, I’ll think of it as yours. That’s a promise. It’s got your name on it, and once I get you off the ground, you can have it back.”

“For keeps?”

“For keeps. Of course for keeps.”

“And how long is this ‘little longer’ going to be?”

“Not long. You’re already standing on the brink.”

“The only brink I’m standing on is the brink of perdition. And if that’s where I am, that’s where you are, too. Ain’t that so, master?”

“You catch on fast, son. United we stand, divided we fall. You for me and me for you, and where we stop nobody knows.”

This was the second time I had been given encouraging news about my progress. First from Mother Sioux, and now from the master Himself. I won’t deny that I felt flattered, but for all their confidence in my abilities, I failed to see that I was one jot closer to success. After that sweltering afternoon in May, we went through a period of epic heat, the hottest summer in living memory. The ground was a caldron, and every time you walked on it, you felt that the soles would melt right off your shoes. We prayed for rain at supper every evening, and for three months not a single drop fell from the sky. The air was so parched, so delirious in its dessication, you could track the buzzing of a horsefly from a hundred yards away. Everything seemed to itch, to rasp like thistle rubbing against barbed wire, and the smell from the outhouse was so rank it singed the hairs in your nostrils. The corn wilted, drooped, and died; the lettuce bolted to grotesque, gargantuan heights, standing in the garden like mutant
towers. By mid-August, you could drop a pebble down the well and count to six before you heard the water plink. No green beans, no corn on the cob, no succulent tomatoes like the year before. We subsisted on eggs and mush and smoked ham, and while there was enough to see us through the summer, our diminishing stores boded ill for the months that lay ahead. “Tighten your belts, children,” the master would say to us at supper, “tighten your belts and chew until you can’t taste it anymore. If we don’t stretch out what we have, it’s going to be a long, hungry winter.”

For all the woes that assailed us during the drought, I was happy, much happier than would have seemed possible. I had weathered the most gruesome parts of my initiation, and what stood before me now were the stages of mental struggle, the showdown between myself and myself. Master Yehudi was hardly an obstacle anymore. He would issue his commands and then disappear from my mind, leading me to places of such inwardness that I no longer remembered who I was. The physical stages had been a war, an act of defiance against the master’s skull-denting cruelty, and he had never withdrawn from my sight, standing over me as he studied my reactions, watching my face for each microscopic shudder of pain. All that was finished now. He had turned into a gentle, munificent guide, talking in the soft voice of a seducer as he lured me into accepting one bizarre task after another. He had me go into the barn and count every blade of straw in the horse’s stall. He had me stand on one leg for an entire night, then stand on the other leg for the whole of the next night. He tied me to a post in the midday sun and ordered me to repeat his name ten thousand times. He imposed a vow of silence on me, and for twenty-four days I did not speak to anyone, did not utter a sound even when I was alone. He had me roll my body across the yard, he had me hop, he had me jump
through hoops. He taught me how to cry at will, and then he taught me how to laugh and cry at the same time. He made me teach myself how to juggle, and once I could juggle three stones, he made me juggle four. He blindfolded me for a week, then he plugged my ears for a week, then he bound my arms and legs together for a week and made me crawl on my belly like a worm.

The weather broke in early September. Downpours, lightning and thunder, high winds, a tornado that barely missed carrying away the house. Water levels rose again, but otherwise we were no better off than we’d been. The crops had failed, and with nothing to add to our long-term supplies, prospects for the future were bleak, touch and go at best. The master reported that farmers all over the region had been similarly devastated, and the mood in town was turning ugly. Prices were down, credit was scarce, and talk of bank foreclosures was in the air. When pocketbooks are empty, the master said, brains fill with anger and smut. “Those peckerwoods can rot for all I care,” he continued, “but after a while they’re going to look for someone to blame their troubles on, and when that happens, the four of us had better duck.” Throughout that strange autumn of storms and drenchings, Master Yehudi seemed distracted with worry, as if he were contemplating some unnameable disaster, a thing so black he dared not say it aloud. After coddling me all summer, urging me on through the rigors of my spiritual exercises, he suddenly seemed to have lost interest in me. His absences became more frequent, once or twice he stumbled in with what smelled like liquor on his breath, and he had all but abandoned his study sessions with Aesop. A new sadness had crept into his eyes, a look of wistfulness and foreboding. Much of this is dim to me now, but I remember that during the brief moments when he graced me with his company, he acted with surprising warmth. One incident stands out from the blur: an evening in early October
when he walked into the house with a newspaper under his arm and a big grin on his face. “I have good news for you,” he said to me, sitting down and spreading out the paper on the kitchen table. “Your team won. I hope that makes you glad, because it says here it’s been thirty-eight years since they came out on top.”

“My team?” I said.

“The Saint Louis Cardinals. That’s your team, isn’t it?”

“You bet it is. I’m with those Redbirds till the end of time.”

“Well, they’ve just won the World Series. According to what’s printed here, the seventh game was the most breathless, riveting contest ever played.”

That was how I learned my boys had become the 1926 champions. Master Yehudi read me the account of the dramatic seventh inning, when Grover Cleveland Alexander came in to strike out Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded. For the first few minutes, I thought he was making it up. The last I’d heard, Alexander was top dog on the Philly staff, and Lazzeri was a name that meant nothing to me. It sounded like a pile of foreign noodles smothered in garlic sauce, but then the master informed me that he was a rookie and that Grover had been traded to the Cards in midseason. He’d hurled nine innings just the day before, shutting down the Yanks to knot the series at three games apiece, and here was Rogers Hornsby calling him in from the bullpen to snuff out a rally with the whole ball of wax on the line. And the old guy sauntered in, drunk as a skunk from last night’s bender, and mowed down the young New York hotshot. If not for a couple of inches, it would have been another story. On the pitch before the third strike, Lazzeri drove one into the left field seats, a sure grand slam that hooked foul at the last second. It was enough to give you apoplexy. Alexander hung in there through the eighth and ninth to nail down the win, and to top it
off, the game and the series ended when Babe Ruth, the one and only Sultan of Swat, was thrown out trying to steal second base. There had never been anything like it. It was the maddest, most infernal game in history, and my Redbirds were the champs, the best team in the world.

That was a watershed for me, a landmark event in my young life, but otherwise the fall was a somber stretch, a long interlude of boredom and quiet. After a while, I got so antsy that I asked Aesop if he wouldn’t mind teaching me how to read. He was more than willing, but he had to clear it with Master Yehudi first, and when the master gave his approval, I confess that I was a little hurt. He’d always said how he wanted to keep me stupid—how it was an advantage as far as my training was concerned—and now he had blithely gone ahead and reversed himself without any explanation. For a time I thought it meant he had given up on me, and disappointment festered in my heart, a hangdog sorrow that dragged down all my bright dreams and turned them to dust. What had I done wrong, I asked myself, and why had he deserted me when I most needed him?

So I learned the letters and numbers with Aesop’s help, and once I got started, they came so quickly that I wondered what all the fuss had been about. If I wasn’t going to fly, at least I could convince the master that I wasn’t a dolt, but so little effort was involved, it soon felt like a hollow victory. Spirits around the house picked up for a while in November when our food shortage was suddenly eliminated. Without telling anyone where he’d found the money to do such a thing, the master had secretly arranged for a delivery of canned goods. It felt like a miracle when it happened, an absolute bolt from the blue. A truck arrived at our door one morning and two burly men began unloading cartons from the back. There were hundreds of boxes, and each box contained two dozen cans of food: vegetables of every variety,
meats and broths, puddings, preserved apricots and peaches, an outflow of unimaginable abundance. It took the men over an hour to haul the shipment into the house, and the whole time the master just stood there with his arms folded across his chest, grinning like a crafty old owl. Aesop and I both gawked, and after a while he called us over to him and put a hand on each of our shoulders. “It can’t hold a candle to Mother Sioux’s cooking,” he said, “but it’s a damn sight better than mush, eh boys? When the chips are down, just remember who to count on. No matter how dark our troubles might be, I’ll always find a way to pull us through.”

However he had managed it, the crisis was over. Our larder was full again, and we no longer stood up from meals craving more, no longer moaned about our gurgling bellies. You’d think this turnaround would have earned our undying gratitude, but the fact was that we quickly learned to take it for granted. Within ten days, it seemed perfectly normal that we should be eating well, and by the end of the month it was hard to remember the days when we hadn’t. That’s how it is with want. As long as you lack something, you yearn for it without cease. If only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you’re right back where you started. So it was with my reading lessons; so it was with the newfound plenty jammed into the kitchen cupboards. I had thought those things would make a difference, but in the end they were no more than shadows, substitute longings for the one thing I really wanted—which was precisely the thing I couldn’t have. I needed the master to love me again. That’s what the story of those months came down to. I hungered for the master’s affections, and no amount
of food was ever going to satisfy me. After two years, I had learned that everything I was flowed directly from him. He had made me in his own image, and now he wasn’t there for me anymore. For reasons I couldn’t understand, I felt I had lost him forever.