The Heavenly Table (25 page)

After a few minutes, Johnny slipped up to the car cautiously. Looking in on them, he saw the baloney salesman lying on top of the woman with his pants gathered down around his ankles. They were both passed out. He reached inside and moved his hand around until he found the wallet in the man’s back pocket, and then discovered a nearly full fifth of gin and half a roll of some sort of lunchmeat in the front of the car. He and Eddie took off up the rutted road and went a mile or so before they stopped and looked through the billfold. There was nearly twenty dollars inside, enough to keep them drunk for a week. They spread their blanket under a tree and drank the gin and gorged on the meat and carried on until dawn. When they came to that afternoon, they walked back to Waverly to buy another jug and see if Spit Job was ready to do some more dancing.

34

A
S THE
J
EWETT
Gang slept along the weedy bank of a dried-up stream near Otway, Ohio, a geologist named Arthur Vaughn, originally from New Haven, Connecticut, and now working as a surveyor for a Pennsylvania mining company that was buying up tracts of land all over Kentucky, came across what appeared to be just another deserted homestead, the third in less than a week. For Arthur, each of these places had its own particular sadness—and this one was no exception, as he looked to the right and saw the weather-beaten remains of a little girl’s cob doll protruding from a waste heap—but they also shared a common loneliness, more akin to a long-forgotten graveyard than a spot where people had once lived and worked and loved. However, as he led his pack mule up closer to the house, he realized from the look of the slashed vines around the tumbledown porch that someone else had been here recently. Perhaps this place wasn’t abandoned after all. “Hello,” he called out several times, but got no response. He shaded his eyes with his felt hat and peered through the open doorway. He could see a book lying on the floor near the fireplace. Arthur had brought a copy of
Huckleberry Finn
with him when he started this assignment, but he had finished it over a week ago and was starving for something new to read. He studied the stomped path through the weeds leading away from the porch to a crude shed. “Hello,” he yelled again. “Anybody home?” He waited a minute, then tied the mule to a termite-riddled post and stepped cautiously inside the house.

When he turned the book over and saw the title, he said, under his breath, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Then he let out a little laugh. It was one of those trashy dime novels that he and his brother, William, bedridden with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him, used to read on the sly when they were young. In fact, of all the books that Arthur had sneaked into the sickroom, this had been his brother’s favorite. He swatted the book against his leg, then stood in the middle of the hot room contemplating what remained of the tasteless artwork on the torn and faded cover. A sinister-looking desperado draped in a poncho stood defiantly in the middle of a desert, pointing two pistols the size of cannons at some shadowy figures approaching on horseback in the distance.
“The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket,”
Arthur said aloud, trying to imitate the overly dramatic voice his brother had sometimes used jokingly when it was his turn to read. “By Charles Foster Winthrop the Third.” Because the doctors had warned their parents that William should avoid all manner of excitement, they had to keep the book hidden behind a loose piece of molding in the closet. And when his brother finally choked to death on his own blood, Arthur had managed to slip it into his coffin without anybody knowing.

He leafed through it, skimmed a few vaguely remembered paragraphs. It was obvious from the smudged fingerprints and dog-eared pages that it had been pored over a number of times. Looking about the room, he saw a couple of bloody dressings tossed in the corner, some empty bean cans in the fireplace, three different sets of boot tracks in the dust. Jesus, he thought, what the hell had went on here? And how did this book, this moldy, crumbling relic from his own familial past, ever end up in an abandoned hovel in the backwoods of Kentucky? For some reason, he suddenly recalled a conversation he’d had with his father last year when he was home for a visit. “Mark my word, Arthur,” the old man had told him, “before long there won’t be a spot on the globe that hasn’t been infected with this
progress
they keep on about.”

“But what’s wrong with that?” Arthur had said. It was a bright but chilly day right after Thanksgiving. They were sitting in the library and he was staring at his brother’s portrait hanging on the wall. By then, William had been dead ten years. Arthur took a sip of the warm wine the maid had brought in and reminded himself to visit the grave before he left the city.

“Because, son,” his father had said, lifting his beloved copy of Plato—the leather cover cracked from age and the spine broken from a thousand hours of examination—from the table by his chair, and waving it about like a call to arms, “in another hundred years, everything we deem worthwhile, over three thousand years of thought and tradition and learning, won’t be considered any more important than what some tribe of dark-skinned savages has to say about a spirit they believe lives in a damn seashell. Don’t you see? Everything will be looked upon as equal when really it’s not.”

Arthur had known well enough not to argue. The old man had practiced law for forty years and had never lost a case, as far as his son knew. Still, the future was coming, whether people liked it or not. Granted, the state of Kentucky certainly wasn’t some South Sea island filled with savages cut off from the rest of the world, but this house felt just as isolated and backward as he imagined a place could be, which was maybe why finding this particular book here was such a surprise. Taking one last look around, he wondered again about the cast-off bandages. Then he shoved the book in his pocket and stepped outside.

He was headed into the woods when he noticed sunlight glinting off something in a briar patch on the other side of the house. Dropping the mule’s lead, he held his arms aloft and made his way through the tall weeds toward it. As he got closer, he began to smell the rot, could hear the flies buzzing. He covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief, then pushed forward a few more feet. To his horror, he saw two large crows pecking away in short bursts at a man’s upturned face. Arthur lurched back, then stopped himself. What had initially caught his attention was a pair of spectacles hanging from one of the man’s ears and shining in the bright light. His swollen limbs had turned a bluish-green color and were about to burst through the seams of his ragged clothes. A clot of maggots boiled forth from a hole in his chest and dripped like raindrops into a muddy well of water right below him. Pulling a .32-caliber Iver Johnson pistol from his pocket that he used to kill snakes with, Arthur cast another look around the perimeter of the property before firing a shot into the air to scare the birds away.

His heart pounding, he watched them flap through the air and land on the roof of the house. Then he turned and stumbled to the mule, waving the gun about wildly. Grabbing the rope, he began tugging and cursing the goddamn dumb beast to get moving, his only thought to flee from this haunted, godforsaken place as fast as possible. And though the crows were already sated, they waited patiently until the intruder disappeared into the trees, then flew back to the briar patch to tear away some more of the softer parts the clerk had left to offer.

35

O
N HIS WAY
to lunch in the officers’ mess, Bovard came around the corner of a building lost in thought and almost tripped over Wesley Franks seated on the ground reading a letter. The lieutenant had learned yesterday that Dr. Lattimore, his adviser at Kenyon, had dropped over dead from an aneurysm a couple of weeks ago, and he’d just realized this morning that the many times the man had brushed up against him when they were alone together in his office were not as “accidental” as he’d claimed. He couldn’t believe how naive he’d been. Clearly, the old classicist had wanted to fuck him. Had it been so apparent that he was homosexual? Even before he knew himself? “Pardon me, Private,” Bovard said, as Wesley dropped the pages and scrambled to stand up and salute.

“My fault, sir,” the private said.

“A letter from home?”

The boy stared straight ahead. “Yes, sir.”

Bovard let his eyes wander for a moment over the slim body. Though it didn’t make a big difference in the way he imagined he and Wesley might die together, it was nice to know that at least he could read. He wondered if he should offer to loan him the copy of
The Oxford Book of English Verse
that his parents had sent him the other day. Accompanying the book was a note in which his father informed him that they had gone to Elizabeth’s wedding in New York, and that she sent her regards. It sounded almost like an apology, the way it was worded, as if the old man were afraid his son might look upon their attendance as a betrayal; and Bovard reminded himself to write and reassure them that he was more content than he’d ever been, that he had no ill feelings whatsoever toward the money-grubbing bitch. If they only knew how happy he was not to be stuck in that life anymore. He looked down at the letter on the ground near Wesley’s feet, two sheets of paper covered with a large, childish scrawl, and suddenly realized this was the perfect opportunity to ask a question that had been on his mind ever since he’d first laid eyes on the boy. “Fiancée?”

Wesley twitched a little, but stayed at attention. “Well, sort of, sir.”

“At ease, Private.”

As the soldier bent down to pick up the letter, the lieutenant sneaked another quick glance, then turned and walked away. So what if Wesley had a girlfriend? As Lucas had told him the other night, half the men he’d fucked over the years wore a wedding ring. Though most of them endured marriage only because it provided a cover-up for their deviant behavior, hating every minute of it, there were some who actually got a thrill out of living a double life. “Think about it,” Lucas said. “Sucking a prick one day, knocking up the wife the next. It’s like walking a tightrope that never ends, knowing that one little slipup could ruin you forever.”

By the time he arrived at the mess hall, most of the men had finished eating, and Bovard settled for just a cup of coffee. “I’m telling you, fatso, that’s a bargain,” he heard First Lieutenant Waller say to a chubby gunnery officer. “Four dollars a shot for a pretty little wench that speaks French? You can’t beat that with a stick.” With his black curly hair and pencil mustache and endless talk of sex, Waller had quickly established a reputation around camp as a master fornicator, and quite a few inexperienced men sought out his advice before they made their first trip to the Whore Barn. He claimed to know every crack and crevasse of every working girl within a thirty-mile radius of Meade.

“Yeah, but you could choke it with your hand,” another lieutenant joked.

“Ha!” Waller said. “No doubt in my mind, Bryant. You probably try to strangle that snake of yours to death every night, don’t you?”

“Why would I do that?” Bryant said. “Just hang out at the Majestic long enough and that ol’ boy that runs the place will do it for you.”

“Isn’t he a friend of yours, Bovard?” Waller asked, winking at a couple of other officers sitting across from him.

“Who are you talking about?”

“The funny boy that runs the theater uptown.”

“Oh, him,” Bovard said, trying to act casual. “No, I’ve talked to him a time or two, but I wouldn’t call him a friend. I can’t even recall his name now.”

“Snyder here says he tried to grab his cock in the men’s room last night.”

Bovard’s stomach did a flip, but his face remained calm. “Good Lord,” he said. “You mean intentionally?”

“Hell, yes,” Snyder said. “He had his hands all over me. I’ll give him this, though, the little bastard can take a punch. I must have hit him seven or eight times before he stayed down.” He raised his fists up for them all to see the red abrasions on them.

“Looks like you nailed him pretty good,” Bovard said weakly.

“Did he ever try any of that stuff with you?” Waller asked. Several men at the next table laughed.

“What stuff?” Bovard said.

“You know, that queer stuff?”

“Certainly not!”

“Well, maybe he thought Snyder was another one of his kind,” said an aide named Hurley who worked for Major Willows.

“It’s an abomination,” said Second Lieutenant Elkins, a teetotaler since birth and head of Camp Pritchard’s newly formed Morality Committee. He saw this as an opportunity to let everyone know where the organization stood in regard to faggots and dykes. Granted, only one other man, a little Bible-thumper from Ironton, had showed up at the first meeting, but, as his mentor, the clap doctor Eisner, later reminded him, it takes only a single spark to start a fire.

“I never thought I’d say this, but for once I agree with you, Elkins,” Waller said. “Goddamn queers. If they’re not going to hang ’em, they ought to at least round them up and stick ’em on an island out in the ocean somewhere away from decent folks. What do you think, Bovard?”

“Well,” the lieutenant said, as he sat down at the table and recalled the opiated fantasy he’d had about Wesley the other night, “it sounds to me like you might have hit upon the perfect solution.”

36

E
LLSWORTH WAS CUTTING
corn in a field he rented off Clyde Ferguson’s widow when he saw a colored man sporting a light gray bowler hat sauntering down the dirt road. He stopped working and watched the man pause and remove his hat, then proceed to pull a broad-toothed comb through his black, wiry hair. He wore a pair of threadbare pinstripe trousers and a faded yellow shirt. Recalling the black man he had seen working in the field that day outside Meade, Ellsworth decided to look upon the stranger’s appearance as a good omen, though he was a bit concerned about the primping. One that liked bright colors and carried a comb was likely to be damn near useless when it came to getting blisters on his hands; and it was a known fact that you could hypnotize some of them with a mirror, although he reckoned you could do that with any fool who thought himself pretty, no matter what the color of his skin might be. He looked around at all the corn that still needed cutting. The way things were going, there would be snow on the ground before he finished. “Yo!” he yelled to the passerby. “Yo!”