Outer Banks (29 page)

“Jesus Christ!” Feeney yelled. “You did it! You really took the guy!” He was clapping Alvin on the shoulder and staring down at the man on the ground.

Alvin pulled his jacket and tie out of Feeney's other hand and shoved his arms into the jacket and slung the necktie around his neck without knotting it. He turned and started straight down the alley toward the street.

“Hey! Where ya goin'? What about the broad? Where ya goin'?”

“Home,” Alvin grunted and kept on moving, head down, for the street.

“Okay, I'll get your raincoat. You left it inside,” Feeney called to him.

“Yeah.” Then he was gone from sight.

Feeney turned around, a puzzled but still exhilarated expression on his face. “Jesus.” The sailors had gone back inside. The man on the ground was slowly, awkwardly getting to his feet. “You okay?” Feeney asked him quietly.

The man was bleeding from the mouth and nose. He stood, bent over, clutching his left side, breathing laboriously. His clothes were smeared with mud and fresh blood. “I gotta … busted … rib. I think… Tell Freddie… C'mere. Th' bartend-er…”

“Sure.” Feeney walked somberly inside, told the bartender he'd better check the guy out and maybe get him a doctor or something, the guy seemed pretty busted up. Plucking Alvin's tan raincoat from the coatrack, he pointedly avoided even a glance at the woman in the booth next to it and started walking out the door at the front.

“Where's the other one?” the bartender asked. He had come out from behind the bar and was on his way toward the back door. “I don't wanta see him in here again. You tell him that.”

“No sweat,” Feeney said, grinning. “No sweat at all.” Then he looked down at the woman. Serious-faced, she was sipping from her gin and tonic. She caught him staring, and without removing her pink lips from the rim of the glass, gave him the finger.

Feeney laughed and strolled happily out. When he reached the car and got in, he looked over at Alvin behind the steering wheel. He was smiling and the car motor was running.

“Feelin' pretty tough, ain't ya?” Feeney observed.

“Yeah. Like a bucket full of nails.” Then he jammed the car into gear, and they headed back to New Hampshire.

 

I
WAS GRATEFUL
for the story, grateful to Rochelle for having delivered it to me, for having written it in the first place. But the story complicated things for me far more than it simplified them. I asked Rochelle if it complicated things for her, too, and she said no, not really, which surprised me.

“But he sounds so
ordinary,
” I pointed out to her, “like almost any young man already determined at adolescence by social and familial past, one of those angry American youths locked into patterns of violence, drunkenness and sexual exploitation. Even if he eventually raised his consciousness to the point where he could direct his anger politically, rather than mutely against himself,” I observed to her, “he'd still be little more than another fee
ble example of the type called ‘working-class hero.'” And both Rochelle and I were claiming much more for him than that.

It was not exactly what I had been looking for in a story about Hamilton's brush with a college education. I had wanted him to be offered a full scholarship, say, by Harvard or Princeton or Yale, and after visiting one of those campuses and encountering there for the first time an example or two of the academic mind, to reject the offered scholarship with some sort of truth-telling gesture of defiance. It would have made a marvelously effective vehicle for social satire.

“My father is
not
Holden Caulfield all grown up,” Rochelle said, sounding a little hurt.

I couldn't tell if it was her author's pride that had been bruised or the pride of a daughter who believes that she understands her parent better than any stranger can. In either case, though, she was justified in feeling hurt, so I apologized, first for my persistently soft-headed expectations that Hamilton's past could be anticipated any more than could his future, and second, for not having immediately expressed my enthusiasm for the skill and restraint with which she had told her story.

“As always,” I explained to her, “your literary gifts amaze and delight me. Especially when placed next to my own awkward attempts.”

She smiled politely.

“Look,” I brightly said, “the sun has risen above the trees! Shall we go downstairs for breakfast? Or would you like to let me make love to you?”

“Oh, you devil. Don't you ever get tired?”

“Eventually,” I confessed.

“You some kind of billy goat, honey,” she purred in that southern accent of hers, the one that stiffens me with lust.

1. He drove past a hitchhiker without picking him up. The hitchhiker was a long-haired youth in an army field jacket whose stance and bulky physical proportions reminded him for a second, as he later said, of the author's younger brother, now dead, whom Hamilton had met only once, several years before.

2. He bought a new saxophone (tenor) but still preferred the old one.

3. After placing a classified ad in the Concord
Daily Monitor,
he sold his new saxaphone for $25 less than he had paid for it. He considered the loss not bad at all. “Self-knowledge always has a price.”

4. Between his second and third wives, he perfected a technique for getting out of bed in the morning in such a way that he had to make the bed only once every ten days or so. The technique involved spreading his legs under the covers to the far corners of the bed and then dragging his long body toward the top of the bed, where, springing his weight with his arms against the brass rail headboard, he lifted himself to the floor.
When he married for the third time he ceased this activity, but when the woman left he resumed it until he married again. He also employed the technique between his fourth and fifth wives and after his fifth wife had left.

5. He changed his brand of cigarettes twice in his life—from Chesterfields to Camels to Lucky Strikes, which he now smokes at the rate of one pack a day.

6. He never learned to fly an airplane, though he often expressed a desire to do so.

7. When he was twenty-six years old he learned to drive a bulldozer, an activity he still enjoys. So much so that when he was thirty he purchased his own bulldozer, a small Caterpillar that he painted black and keeps waxed and shiny, even the blade, which he retouches with black enamel after each use.

8. In winter he usually wears a navy blue woolen watchcap. He rarely covers his ears with it. They are small and turn red from the cold, but he doesn't seem to notice or care.

9. He cut down a dying maple tree behind his barn and that winter used the wood for his fireplace. He remembered having looked at the tree from his earliest childhood, and he thought of this while he was cutting it into fireplace-length pieces. He used his chain saw for the cutting, used it expertly, especially for a man who was not a bona fide woodcutter.

10. He never in his entire life wore a pair of sandals. Never even tried them on in a shoestore.

11. He never defaulted on a debt, and his checking account was never overdrawn. Once, however, he was tempted to default on a television set he had bought on time from Sears, Roebuck & Co. He made his payments punctually for fourteen months, and when the set broke down for the fifth time, he threw it away in anger, tossed it over the fence into the field in front of the house. With ten months remaining, and no television set to be repossessed or repaired, he threatened in a letter not to make any more payments, but instead sent his checks in nine days late
each month until the balance was paid. After that he was reluctant to purchase any more appliances on time; he said it made it more difficult for him to get rid of them when he wanted to.

12. At the end of each year he threw away the old calendar and posted a new one, making a careful point of using a different calendar altogether, different size, picture, advertiser, etc. He preferred calendars from plumbing and heating wholesale supply houses. The pictures were usually of New Hampshire winter scenes, though sometimes they were of bathrooms or furnaces.

13. One winter morning, as he prepared to leave for work, he observed that he always put his left glove on before his right. He reasoned that this was because he was right-handed. For the same reason, he reasoned, he always shaved the right side of his face before the left.

14. One summer afternoon, a Sunday, he tried to draw a picture of his house from the field in front of it. He made three careful attempts but wasn't satisfied with any of them, so he threw them away.

15. “If I was governor of this state, I'd let them all go to hell. That's the only way to govern.” (He was speaking to Democratic and liberal Republican critics of the present governor's policies.)

16. The most horned-pout
^*
he ever caught in one night was twenty-two, on June 17, 1964, on Bow Lake, alone.

17. Because of his size, he often had difficulty buying clothes until he was about thirty, when he came across an L.L. Bean catalogue in a privy. After that he always bought his clothes by mail order from L.L. Bean.

18. This is the sequence in which he read the several sections of the Sunday newspaper: comics; sports; obituaries; headlines and front page; editorial page; letters to the editor; classified ads. He followed this pattern with the weekday editions too. On Sundays, however, he was more conscious of there being a pattern and of his being free not to follow it if he so desired.

19. He talked to dogs in a gruff voice that seemed to send them cowering away. Once, however, he was almost bitten by a friend's unusually courageous dog, which ended the friendship, such as it was.

20. Drawn into a leather-goods shop in Concord by the attractive window display, he was about to purchase an eighty-dollar briefcase, but at the last minute he changed his mind and bought a new wallet instead. “I like the smell of new leather,” he later explained.

21. To an insurance salesman as the man stepped from his car: “Get the hell outa here! If I'd wanted to buy anything, I'd have sent for you!” The frightened salesman drove off quickly enough to satisfy him.

22–39. Once a week, at various, though unvarying, times, he performed the following chores:

40. As a matter of course he tossed all mail addressed to Occupant into the trash can in the kitchen or in winter directly into the wood stove. Once, though, as if on a whim, he opened and read a plea for contributions to Boys' Town. After that he resumed tossing all such mail into the trash can or wood stove, as before.

41. He liked to open the glove compartment of his car and find it neat and orderly. Flashlight, registration, New Hampshire road map, sharpened pencil, matches, extra fuses lightly rolled in a strip of electrician's tape.

42. To his third wife (Jenny): “I'd as soon wipe my ass with a corncob as this damned stuff. Can't you buy better toilet paper than
this?
It's like sandpaper, for Christ's sake!” To his fourth wife (Maureen): “You trying to give me piles or something? How much d'you save, buying this cheap shit? It feels like emery cloth!” To his fifth wife (Dora): “This stuff feels like pie crust, for Christ's sake! What
gives?
” He figured that, because of his size, he was more sensitive to the texture of toilet paper than normal-sized people were. He also knew that made no sense, but he didn't care. Whether a thing made sense or not had nothing to do with whether it was true or not.

43. He didn't like dogs. “All tongue, lips and flapping tails. No sense of their own worth. Which makes them worth
less.
”

44. He didn't like cats. “Sneaky bastards. They love dying even more than death. Which in
my
book makes 'em unreliable.”

45. He didn't like horses. “Should've gone extinct forty or fifty years ago, when they couldn't compete with tractors or trucks anymore for work or with cars and bicycles for transportation. Besides, they're ridiculous-looking. Bodies're too big for their legs. I'd like 'em if they were the way they used to be, before the Arabs started screwing 'em up—dog-sized things, like white-tailed deer, only smarter. Probably made good eating.”

46. He hated domestic fowl of all kinds. “I don't even like to eat one of the bastards, unless it's cut up so I can't recognize what kind of animal it was when it was still alive.”

47. He liked pigs. “Now you take your typical pig. That's an animal with a developed understanding of its life. No delusions. Not like cows. Cows are under the impression that people keep them around because they
like
them. Pigs never make that mistake.”

48. What he hated about sheep was the way most people regarded them: “Most people think sheep are sweet and gentle. The truth is, sheep sleep twenty-four hours a day. As far as being
alive goes, they're located only one step this side of lawn furniture. Three stomachs covered with a woolly mitten. Personally, if it wasn't for the mutton, I'd rather see a flock of cotton bales.”

49. “I'd make a lousy farmer,” he confessed. “Plants are okay, though. I don't mind being around plants, long as they don't get too cute, if you know what I mean.”

50. He claimed not to know his birth date. “I was barely there, for Christ's sake.” When asked how old he was, he would answer, “About thirty-seven,” or, “About forty-two,” or whatever, always, of course, giving his correct age. He claimed his sense of time was different from most people's in that it was more precise. Doubtless he knew his birth date and, when required by law, provided it, for he possessed a driver's license, union card, Social Security card, and so on, like the rest of us.

51. Whenever in conversation the word “Florida” came up, he would interject, “Coney Island with palm trees.”

52. He did not believe in God. He said that when God believed in
him
, then he'd believe in them
both.
He made his statement somberly, with care, apparently with full awareness of its theological, philosophical and psychological implications.

53. He had lifetime subscriptions to
The Farmer's Almanac, Reader's Digest,
and
National Geographic.
Frequently, however, he sneeringly referred to an individual as, “The type of man who has a lifetime subscription to
The Farmer's Almanac
,” or, “… to
Reader's Digest
,” or, “… to
National Geographic.
” Once, when someone had the temerity to point out that he himself owned lifetime subscriptions to these very periodicals, he answered, “Of course. How else do you think I'd know the types?”

54. He woke at six o'clock every morning of his adult life, even when he did not have to go to work. He did not own an alarm clock and could when necessary wake himself earlier than six and at exactly the time he wished to waken. He seemed to require no more than five hours' sleep a night. In providing this information, he explained that this was because when he went to
bed he went to sleep immediately and when he slept he concentrated on it. “Like a machine,” he explained. “No, like a rock,” he added.