Silent Retreats (27 page)

Tomorrow we shall die. Or at least we could if we didn't already, not that dying is the enemy necessarily. I guess I didn't like the bomb tests much, the ones on TV in the early fifties, Sunday mornings. Right after mass you got to come home and watch while they showed in slow motion what the hydrogen bomb would do to your house if it was made of straw, if it was made of sticks, and if it was made of brick. It blew harder than the big bad wolf, you figured out, age five.

The time capsule was made from an old and very large footlocker I got at a garage sale. I mixed concrete in a wheel barrow after I dug the hole, set the footlocker in a foot of wet concrete and pushed it down in it. I had chicken wire in the concrete for reinforcement. I filled the locker with all the stuff, closed it, folded the chicken wire over the top of it, and then poured in the rest of the concrete. I waited a couple of days to be sure there were no cracks. In a few years I'll check on it again. Two thousand years hence, some other life form will bulldoze it up, crack it open, and put it in a museum. Or maybe, a monument to my terror and secrets, it will remain there in the dark for all time, undisturbed, unrevealed, unconfessed, steeping inside the drawn-out ravages of the long haul. Or maybe the doom I've been taught to expect will occur, and that odd rock will hurtle through space as one of the fragments, holding together even though the brick houses did not. Or maybe it too will be emulsified—but at least I tried.

So, what else did I bury? Old newspaper clippings I'd kept in a space behind a false wall in the house I grew up in—a picture of Jackie on the car trunk and Clint Hill jumping aboard, somebody's shoe sticking straight up from the back seat, speaking of ambushes; a picture of Musial, speaking of hero worship, standing on second after his three-thousandth hit; a picture of Laika, the Russian space dog, in a space suit—poor furry little corpse may still be in orbit for all I know; a picture of J. Richard Peck Hollander and his daughter Ann getting a trophy for winning the Kaskaskia Father-Daughter golf tournament; a clipping from the newspaper about the destruction by fire of St. Paul's, struck by lightning—I still remember how high the flames soared, and the urgent, disturbing flitting through the trees of the red lights of the local volunteers, running and shouting in their red helmets and yellow raincoats, neighborhood dogs howling in the red shower of sparks.

I also buried a photograph of my dad, a doctor, giving TB tests at school, his hands on someone's little white arm. I buried a portable TV, believe it or not—every time capsule should have one. I buried my chess set, from back in the days when I could concentrate, my Selective Service card which I won't be needing anymore, my dad's twelve-gauge automatic (broken into its two principal parts) and a box of shells. I buried some poems I never want to see again; two defunct suicide notes, 1969 and 1974; a dozen eggs in the Styrofoam egg holder (seemed funny at the time); a fading photo of Roger when he was in high school, shooting me the bird, taken in one of those K Mart foto-booths—he's using the doomed hand; drawings rendered by my boy, of a boat, bike, house with yellow sun. I buried all my Vietnam photographs, the friends living and dead, toasting the camera with Miller's High Life in steel cans, standing next to dark green helicopters whose motors I can hear the thump of this moment; and a plain old white towel—unbelievable story, but I ran a marathon in Louisville several years ago and the route went past the convent, and wouldn't you know, the nuns all came down to watch, and, I swear this happened, there she was, doing what marathon watchers do, holding out drinks and towels for the runners—I took the towel, Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus—Jesus, I loved that girl.

Maybe it wasn't her, I don't know. Never in one million years would I discuss my life with a shrink.

I buried my briefcase from when I was working, without even checking what was in it. I buried the sad letters my mother received from my dad during Korea—he never got over that one either, and damn sure never went to any conventions—and the manic letters my mother received from me in Vietnam. Naturally I buried the explanatory letters from the VA about the defoliants. Buried in the ground forever.

Sometimes I try to neutralize my thoughts by reciting poems to myself, like "Fern Hill." I feel that people pass through me, through my life, and through their own, like water, like different temperatures of water mixing.

Lately I've been thinking that maybe by burying my past, my lies and secrets and the enormous collection of mundanities and froth I've amassed, maybe instead of escaping from these things, I've preserved them. I guess it was only meant to be ritual anyway—there is no real-life absolution for the frightened and faithless, no grace, no way at all to explain it, or find relief, or to get away.

I also buried my ball glove and my bat, leather and wood all cracked from years of playing in the dew followed by years of no play at all. And, of course, I buried the series of pictures I'd taken of the wonderful center bronze-and-dancing nymphet of the University Park fountain—here she comes now.

When I was working, I would come over to the park at noon to eat. I was unhappy, sleep deprived—this was 1972 or so, and I couldn't understand anything that was happening to me, so it's no wonder I fell in love with a statue. It reduced the number of variables in love remarkably. Whoever the sculptor was, he loved this one, too. While the others, all of them dancing arm in arm in the center of the falling water, seemed blurred, this one was smiling like stars and like children smile, staring down into Fountain Circle through cascades and spray and attentive pigeons setting their wings to land. Her eyes would always seem to be looking at me. She was perpetually a little girl, as, face it, I'm perpetually a little boy—I never have wanted any of this shit about being grown-up. I'd gladly play an afternoon of Indian ball on one of the overgrown-in-weeds ball diamonds in the park or at the school. I have no illusions about getting ahead. I'd rather have it the way it was: a dancing nymphet forgetting the world, coming across the dark green lawns, and why? To love the neighbor boy, happy and fun.

But Erica had always been nice to me, and we'd had days happy and fun, be sure of that. When the life went out of it, however, it went all the way out and all of it went. You know about marriage, sometimes, especially among children of my generation, whose notion that "happiness must happen today for tomorrow we shall die" is tatooed to the back wall of their brain. How she rolled the bus without hurting anybody, I'll never know.

This would be called the homestretch. I'm now in the neighborhood of my boyhood again, and every front porch along here has had me under it and I've climbed every maple and chestnut, been in the attic of every garage, buried birds and cats in Ball jars and shoe boxes, and secret concoctions in plastic bowls, all along the alleyway. In crannies in the old foundations of all these houses, perhaps there are still notes and secret pocketknives. In this dark, I feel the presence of my past on either side of me—I sense the ghosts of the neighbors long gone and the neighborhood dogs, good companions then and two generations gone by now, the low voices of moms and dads in yard chairs who later grew old and withdrew inside—I see their amber lights in the windows now, and sometimes their shadows moving; I sense the echoes of the wheeting and tooting of little kids, parading down the sidewalk on roller skates and pulling wagons full of kids littler yet, or hiding in the bushes and laughing loud.

An ambush takes about one minute sometimes. The people on both sides of you get killed. They go down like a bale of hay, then maybe they roll around, dead but still terrified. Sometimes the bodies get hit so many times they start to dissolve. The air is electric with the ripping, snapping of bullets hitting, the dizzying popping of automatic weapons everywhere, and everybody firing wild, branches falling out of the trees. Adrenalin makes you think you can't die—you feel your nerves and blood jump the thin line between your hand and the plastic rifle stock and your actual being goes right down into the weapon to do its business. There's boys yelling and tree bark exploding in the hot, black air, and there's the ripping, the ripping sound, the soft, wet ripping of people around you, and then it's over. You aren't finished—"ambush interruptus," Roger calls it. You're pumped up but there's nothing left to shoot at and it's over to the extent anything like that ever gets over.

I had a daughter born with an open spine. I got a letter from the VA that explained that a bunch of government lawyers had proven in a court of government law that the defoliants aren't why. There were some good doctors in Chicago, and we got her there early. But I don't know. The past is never quite gone, it seems. Steeps inside, for the long haul. I buried, as I said, the VA letters, and my peace-sign belt buckle and my green, nylon-mesh jungle boots. I buried Skidmore's letters, including a fairly recent one:

Dear Wilbur,
I read some of the poems you sent me, and I want you to know they are the most worthless, pitiable utterances I've ever known to be authored by an adult. I get embarrassed just thinking about them. They're abstract and escapist and have very little to do with you. All I want to know about is your pain, Wilbur, and if you can't write about it, then hang it up. I'm telling you pain is all that motivates and everything you write should be an extended paraphrase of the word "Ouch." Stop mulling over abstractions and keep running, is my advice. If it hurts, run faster.
Here's my latest effort at metafiction—"Wilbur Gray Falls in Love with an Idea"—and who knows, you might see a little of yourself in it! I know it's contrived and shitty, so don't send comments. I think I agree with Roger (down here we call him Lefty): You're a real downer. I know it's been rough, but like Lefty says, the worst is over. You know what you need? You need Carol Canfield. Maybe you could catch her between husbands, take a hot bath with her, get her to give you a back rub, hit the road. You need to hit the road, Wilbur. That town will make you nuts. Keep in touch.
Your pal,
Skidmore

It would be nice, I think, to be a little boy again and to see my parents in patio chairs in shadows on the lawn, my mom talking in low tones about the choir, smiling and hoping for the best, my dad just spotting me now and rising up, arm extended, the hand reaching to touch mine. I imagine sometimes that I would talk with them better, given another chance, knowing what I know, discuss for instance Oedipus and why my own dad wouldn't do anything to get me out of what I went through if he was really my dad, and why his didn't either. But Dad and Mom were never any better at talking than I am, and maybe it wouldn't work. I had music, the Stones, the Doors, Joe Cocker; my parents had phrases representing what they believed, and prayers to speak aloud in church in unison with the community of the faithful. They had their war and childhood, I had mine.

The grass boulevard along Court Street here, it's a blessing to the knees. I see the gables on my house in the distance. The job I had, back when I had it, was quite interesting. I was hired by the culture to have and carry a briefcase, wear a dark three-piece suit, and have my hair razor-cut, to rush up and down the street (briefcase in hand), across the mall, to occupy the sidewalks, to have an office and use the phone energetically, carry a busy calendar of meetings and to participate in those meetings to the fullest, to state the obvious emphatically and as often as possible, and in as many ways, all in an effort to give the illusion of quality, productivity, upward movement, the rightness and nonfutility of democratic life in a guns-and-butter economy, action and activity, creativity and motion, motivation and, of course, obedience, go, go, go. I would buy a paper and read the editorials. I would catch the news and read
Time
magazine. I would watch the market, even daydream of buying stocks. I would think of good ideas and route them up the organization. I would make wind and then piss into it.

The lines in my forehead get deeper, I brood without control sometimes, sleepless, like a child in tears, and like all the hard-handed workers, smug patriots, and ordinary men on the street I've known in my life, for whom money, work, women, and the church are all there is and whose hearts these crazy days are breaking.

I have a new pair of running shoes. They cost sixty dollars because of the wing-shaped stripe they have on the side. They are my Sunday best. Hard to believe, but Skidmore and I were camping in the old chautauqua ground the night the burr oak was split by lightning. You could smell the ozone and the heat even after the rain.