The Early Stories (88 page)

“Death is part of life,” Ben's father said, as if reciting a lesson learned long ago.

Ben asked Reiner, “Were you in Vietnam?”

The man took off his hunting cap and displayed a bald head. “You got me in the wrong rumpus. Navy gunner, World War Two. With those forty-millimeter Bofors you could put a two-pound shell thirty thousand feet straight up in the air.”

Dutch emerged from his workshop holding a bit of metal in one hand and a crumpled beer can in the other. He put the cylindrical bit down
amid the scattered parts of the bolt, fumbled at them, and they all came together.

“Does it fit?” Ben asked.

Dutch's clownish loose lips smiled. “You ask a lot of questions.” He slipped the bolt back into the .22 and turned back to the workshop. The four others held silent, but for Ben's father's breathing. In time the flat spank of a rifle shot resounded, amplified by cement walls.

“That's miraculous to me,” Ben's father said. “A mechanical skill like that.”

“Thank you very much,” Ben said, too quickly, when the gunsmith lay the mended and tested .22 on the counter. “How much do we owe you?”

Rather than answer, Dutch asked little Murray, “Didja ever see a machine like this before?” It was a device, operated by hand pressure, that assembled and crimped shotgun shells. He let the boy pull the handle. The shells marched in a circle, receiving each their allotment of powder and shot. “It can't explode,” Dutch reassured Ben.

Reiner explained, “You see what this here is”—holding out the mysterious little slab with its bright ring—“is by putting in this bushing Dutch just made for me I can reduce the proportion of powder to shot, when I go into finer grains this deer season.”

Murray backed off from the machine. “That's neat. Thanks a lot.”

Dutch contemplated Ben. His verdict came: “I guess two dollars.”

Ben protested, “That's not enough.”

His father rescued him from the silence. “Pay the man what he asks; all the moola in the world won't buy God-given expertise like that.”

Ben paid, and was in such a hurry to lead his party home he touched the side door before Dutch could switch off the burglar alarm. Bells shrilled, Ben jumped. Everybody laughed, even—though he had hated, from his schoolteaching days, what he called “cruel humor”—Ben's father.

In the dark of the car, the old man sighed. “He's what you'd have to call a genius and a gentleman. Did you see the way your dad looked at him? Pure adoration, man to man.”

Ben asked him, “How do you feel?”

“Better. I didn't like Murray having to listen to all that blood and guts from Reiner.”

“Boy,” Murray said, “he sure is crazy about guns.”

“He's lonely. He just likes getting out of the house and hanging around the shop. Must give Dutch a real pain in the old bazoo.” Perhaps this
sounded harsh, or applicable to himself, for he amended it. “Actually, he's harmless. He says he was in Navy artillery, but you know where he spent most of the war? Cruising around the Caribbean having a sunbath. He's like me. I was in the first one, and my big accomplishment was surviving the Spanish flu in camp. We were going to board in Hoboken the day of the Armistice.”

“I never knew you were a soldier, Grandpa.”

“Kill or be killed, that's my motto.”

He sounded so faraway and fragile, saying this, Ben told him, “I hope we didn't wear you out.”

“That's what I'm here for,” Ben's father said, adding, as if reading a motto on the wall, “We aim to serve.”

In bed, Ben tried to describe to Sally their adventure, the gun shop. “The whole place smelled of death. I think the kid was a little frightened.”

Sally said, “Of course. He's only fourteen. You're awfully hard on him, you know.”

“I know. My father was nice to me, and what did it get him? Chest pains. A pain in the old bazoo.” Asleep, he dreamed he was a boy with a gun. A small bird, smaller than a dot in a puzzle, sat in the peach tree by the meadow fence. Ben aligned the sights and with a learned slowness squeezed. The dot fell like a stone. He went to it and found a wren's brown body, neatly deprived of a head. There was not much blood, just headless feathers. He awoke, and realized it was real. It had happened just that way, the first summer he had had the gun. He had been horrified.

After breakfast he and his son went out across the dead strawberry leaves to the dump again. There, the dream continued. Though Ben steadied his trembling, middle-aged hands against a hickory trunk and aimed so carefully his open eye burned, the cans and bottles ignored his shots. The bullets passed right through them. Whereas, when little Murray took the gun, the boy's freckled face gathered the muteness of the trees into his murderous concentration. The cans jumped, the bottles burst. “You're killing me!” Ben cried. In his relief and pride, he had to laugh.

Son
 

He is often upstairs, when he has to be home. He prefers to be elsewhere. He is almost sixteen, though beardless still, a man's mind indignantly captive in the frame of a child. I love touching him, but don't often dare. The other day, he had the flu, and a fever, and I gave him a back rub, marvelling at the symmetrical knit of muscle, the organic tension. He is high-strung. Yet his sleep is so solid he sweats like a stone in the wall of a well. He wishes for perfection. He would like to destroy us, for we are, variously, too fat, too jocular, too sloppy, too affectionate, too grotesque and heedless in our ways. His mother smokes too much. His younger brother chews with his mouth open. His older sister leaves unbuttoned the top button of her blouses. His younger sister tussles with the dogs, getting them overexcited, avoiding doing her homework. Everyone in the house talks nonsense. He would be a better father than his father. But time has tricked him, has made him a son. After a quarrel, if he cannot go outside and kick a ball, he retreats to a corner of the house and reclines on the beanbag chair in an attitude of strange—infantile or leonine—torpor. We exhaust him, without meaning to. He takes an interest in the newspaper now, the front page as well as the sports, in this tiring year of 1973.

He is upstairs, writing a musical comedy. It is a Sunday in 1949. He has volunteered to prepare a high-school assembly program; people will sing. Songs of the time go through his head, as he scribbles new words.
Up in de mornin', down at de school, work like a debil for my grades
. Below him, irksome voices grind on, like machines working their way through tunnels. His parents each want something from the other. “Marion, you don't understand that man like I do; he has a heart of gold.” His father's charade is very complex: the world, which he fears, is used as a flail on his
wife. But from his cringing attitude he would seem to an outsider the one being flailed. With burning-red face, the woman accepts the role of aggressor as penance for the fact, the incessant shameful fact, that
he
has to wrestle with the world while she hides here, in solitude, at home. This is normal, but does not seem to them to be so. Only by convolution have they arrived at the dominant/submissive relationship society has assigned them. For the man is maternally kind and with a smile hugs to himself his jewel, his certainty of being victimized; it is the mother whose tongue is sharp, who sometimes strikes. “Well, he gets you out of the house, and I guess that's gold to you.” His answer is “Duty calls,” pronounced mincingly. “The social contract is a balance of compromises.” This will infuriate her, the son knows; as his heart thickens, the downstairs overflows with her hot voice. “
Don't
wear that smile at me! And
take
your hands off your hips; you look like a fairy!” Their son tries not to listen. When he does, visual details of the downstairs flood his mind: the two antagonists, circling with their coffee cups; the shabby mismatched furniture; the hopeful books; the framed photographs of the dead, docile and still like cowed students. This matrix of pain that bore him—he feels he is floating above it, sprawled on the bed as on a cloud, stealing songs as they come into his head
(Across the hallway from the guidance room / Lives a French instructor called Mrs. Blum)
, contemplating the view from the upstairs window (last summer's burdock stalks like the beginnings of an alphabet, an apple tree holding three rotten apples as if pondering why they failed to fall), yearning for Monday, for the ride to school with his father, for the bell that calls him to homeroom, for the excitements of class, for Broadway, for fame, for the cloud that will carry him away, out of this, out.

He returns from his paper-delivery route and finds a few Christmas presents for him on the kitchen table. The year? 1911. Without opening them, he knocks them to the floor, puts his head on the table, and falls asleep. He must have been consciously dramatizing his plight: his father was sick, money was scarce, he had to work, to win food for the family when he was still a child. In his dismissal of Christmas, he expressed a fact: his love of anarchy, his distrust of the social contract. He treasured this moment of revolt; else why remember it, hoard a memory so bitter, and confide it to his son many Christmases later? He had a teaching instinct, though he claimed that life miscast him as a schoolteacher. His son suffered in his classes, feeling the noisy confusion as a persecution, but now wonders if his father's rebellious heart did not court confusion,
not as Communists do, to impose their own order, but, more radical still, as an end pleasurable in itself, as truth's very body. Yet his handwriting (an old pink permission slip recently fluttered from a book where it had been marking a page for twenty years) was always considerately legible, and he was sitting up doing arithmetic the morning of the day he died.

And letters survive from that yet prior son, written in brown ink, in a tidy tame hand, home to his mother from the Missouri seminary where he was preparing for his vocation. The dates are 1887, 1888, 1889. Nothing much happened: he missed New Jersey, and was teased at a church social for escorting a widow. He wanted to do the right thing, but the little sheets of faded penscript exhale a dispirited calm, as if his heart already knew he would not make a successful minister, or live to be old. His son, my father, when old, drove hundreds of miles out of his way to visit the Missouri town from which those letters had been sent. Strangely, the town had not changed; it looked just as he had imagined, from his father's descriptions: tall wooden houses, rain-soaked, stacked on a bluff. The town was a sepia postcard mailed homesick home and preserved in an attic. My father cursed: his father's old sorrow bore him down into depression, into hatred of life. My mother claims his decline in health began at that moment.

He is wonderful to watch, playing soccer. Smaller than the others, my son leaps, heads, dribbles, feints, passes. When a big boy knocks him down, he tumbles on the mud, in his green-and-black school uniform, in an ecstasy of falling. I am envious. Never for me the jaunty pride of the school uniform, the solemn ritual of the coach's pep talk, the camaraderie of shook hands and slapped backsides, the shadow-striped hush of late afternoon and last quarter, the solemn vaulted universe of official combat, with its cheering mothers and referees striped like zebras and the bespectacled timekeeper alert with his claxon. When the boy scores a goal, he runs into the arms of his teammates with upraised arms and his face alight as if blinded by triumph. They lift him from the earth in a union of muddy hugs. What spirit! What valor! What skill! His father, watching from the sidelines, inwardly registers only one complaint: he feels the boy, with his talent, should be more aggressive.

They drove across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania to hear their son read in Pittsburgh. But when their presence was announced to the audience, they did not stand; the applause groped for them and died. My
mother said afterwards she was afraid she might fall into the next row if she tried to stand in the dark. Next morning was sunny, and the three of us searched for the house where once they had lived. They had been happy there; it was said, indeed, that I had been conceived there, just before the temper of the Depression worsened and nipped my possible brothers and sisters in the bud. We found the library where she used to read Turgenev, and the little park where the bums slept close as paving stones in the summer night; but their old street kept eluding us, as we circled in the car. On foot, my mother found the tree. She claimed she recognized it, the sooty linden tree she would gaze into from their apartment windows. The branches, though thicker, had held their pattern. But the house itself, and the entire block, was gone. Stray bricks and rods of iron in the grass suggested that the demolition had been recent. We stood on the empty spot and laughed. They knew it was right, because the railroad tracks were the right distance away. In confirmation, a long freight train pulled itself east around the curve, its great weight gliding as if on a river current; then a silver passenger train came gliding as effortlessly in the other direction. The curve of the tracks tipped the cars slightly toward us. The Golden Triangle, gray and hazed, was off to our left, beyond a forest of bridges. We stood on the grassy rubble that morning, where something once had been, beside the tree still there, and were intensely happy. Why? Only we knew.