Waiting for the Galactic Bus (6 page)

He launched himself at the miserable Grubb, spotlight following the fine body as it hurtled to vengeance. A scant inch from Grubb’s breast, the dagger became a limp daisy. Not that Booth could have done any damage, but Coyul hated even the idea of violence.

“Wilksey, you silly ass, knock it OFF! Mr. Grubb, if you please.” Coyul ushered the trembling teacher to the door. “The matter is in my hands. Meanwhile, you need no longer review.”

“Thank you, Prince. Thank you,” Grubb effused. “It means so much. So far behind in my professional reading.”

“Not at all, I completely understand. Once a scholar... good day.”

With Grubb no longer part of the problem, Coyul addressed himself reluctantly to the ongoing burden of idiotic Booth, who brooded now in the center of his amber spot. “Wilkes, we’re closing
Hamlet.
The women love it, yes, but even those loyal ranks are thinning.”

Booth raised his head with its fine raven curls. “My finest role.”

“With the imagination of the ages at beck, why always Hamlet?”

“Because he suffers,” Booth intoned. “Torn by what he must do and cannot until too late — as I was torn between art and my country. As I suffered.”

“Edwin suffered.” Coyul turned critical. “Edwin
was
Hamlet. You were too busy drinking, wenching and having a darkly dramatic good time plotting against Lincoln to suffer for a moment. Please turn off that ridiculous light. Jake is the only man Below Stairs who broods with any depth. You look merely petulant or constipated.”

“Though you wrong me, that is true.” Booth dimmed his aura. “Jake broods like a definition of sorrow itself. But close
Hamlet?
For what, pray?”

“Romeo.
There, Wilksey, was triumph unalloyed.”

“Play again that puling Veronese adolescent?”

“By Thespis, not as
you
played him,” Coyul reminisced. “Well do I remember.”

So did the women among Booth’s audiences, who still grew faint with the violence of his passion; so did his leading ladies, who usually sustained a bruise or two, and the hapless Tybalts, who had to fight in earnest to remain unmauled. Even Shakespeare, down for a weekend, was impressed: “There, sirrahs, is a Romeo with a scrotum.”

“In your reading of ‘she doth teach the stars to shine,’ one could hear the undiluted hormones of a mating call.” Coyul did not flatter in this. Edwin’s brother was mad as a hatter but not without talent. But for his deplorable eleventh-hour politics, the world might have loved him as well.

“Close
Hamlet,
” the Prince bargained, “and I myself will find a part worthy of you — or a vehicle, playing all the roles if you like. Sparing no expense for lighting, scenery, costumes or music.”

Booth was skeptical but interested. “With love scenes and swordplay? Can I die?”

“In color and often. Strong men will weep and ladies faint.”

“Don’t they always?” Booth preened. “What is this role?”

Coyul had nothing in mind beyond getting back to his music — and perhaps wondering what Barion heard from America to trouble him. He tried to keep his people happy or at least short of revolt, slanderously called King of Liars because no one really wanted truth, Wilksey least of all.

“Do Romeo first,” he hedged. “Make Edwin green. He was never your equal in the role. Then we will follow it with...”

“Nay, speak,” Booth urged, hooked solidly now. “With what?”

“Well may you ask.” Coyul favored the demented actor with a smile of pure anticipation, then dissolved in flattering, soft blue light. “The ages will remember you for it.”

Booth stretched out a staying hand as to a ghostly father. “Stay and speak —”

“Remember thee for it...”

You had to stage everything for Booth. Like most actors, that was the only way it sank in.

Meanwhile the voices from America grew louder, uglier.

    6   

Slouching toward Plattsville

Barion rode the wind over desert and flatland, listening to the sound of American voices. Hovered over the steel-and-glass cities, drifted in autumn haze over gas station and 7-Eleven store crossroads, back and forth along the freeways of a country sliding down the long decline toward second-class nationhood while still the most powerful in a turbulent world. The voices he searched out would not be in the cities but out somewhere beyond them across a widening gap, among the have-nots, the small, the disenfranchised and vengeful. The common people toward whom Lincoln had presumptuously ascribed a large affection on Barion’s part. As he turned east again, hunting with the concentration of a hawk, he heard the sought voices more clearly. He was coming closer.

Government? Sell us downriver like always. Give the country away to niggers and queers. Don’t give a shit about folks like us.

Never had much school, but I know what’s right. Liberryfull of dirty books, Commoniss books. Klan got the right idea: kill’em all.

Well, I don’t hold with that, but you can’t make a living. Man can take a lot if there’s enough to live on. Closed the plant... ain’t worked since. Bad as’29.

Barion veered north now, closing on one place, one town where the voices resolved to dangerous coherence and — somehow known in the eons of his experience — a pivot point in American time. He knew that cry made up of many cries, remembered how it muttered through the sixteenth century, became an ugly but catalytic insanity in the eighteenth, an obscenity in the Germany of the 1930s. The place changed or the language, but not the voice. Coming from America now, from the great vindictive mass, always vocal but never heeded — ignored through the’50s, lampooned in the liberal’60s, polarized in the apathy of the 70s, returning now with ax-grinding leaders. True believers coming to the fore with the same old theme —
don’t you make out you’re better than us —
defining a narrow God by what they themselves hated and feared.

Contrary to American myth, Barion was no fonder of that nation than he was of Ghana or Finland; just that America bothered him more and more as the twentieth century grew old.

“Cash-register heart and a fairy-tale mentality,” he fumed to Coyul in the early 70s. “Savage, sentimental and moralistic.”

“Well, that’s the thing about the Charmed Princess mystique,” Coyul observed. “As often as they lose their virginity, it always grows back.”

Barion’s pulsing energy followed the great, rounded wrinkles of the Appalachians north.
We the people,
he remembered, recalling the look of the mountains when transplanted Englishmen wrote those words and few but Indians cut trail over the smoky ridges.

We the people, the ones who came first, turned out of England, Ireland, the Highlands for the sake of sheep; out of Newgate and debtors’ prison scabrous and dying, but living long enough to sow an American seed. Someone wrote a paper calling us free and equal, but no one made it stick.

Hard men and women, from Barton’s firsthand recollection: not always thinking of God but seeing Him hard as themselves when they did. Their descendants much the same, not as hard but needing that peculiarly American form of religious ecstasy blended of poverty, ignorance, degenerated mysticism, collected injuries and the need for vengeance. Helped to some extent by social advances, unions and insurance, but somehow always at the bottom and the last in line.

The plant closed, relief checks run out. No more credit at the store. Sweet Jesus, Sweet White Jesus who wasn’t never a Jew, give us —

A target!

“That’s Roy Stride.” Barion dipped sharply, shot down through darkness to the dim lines of light clustered along a highway. “Charity, are you there, too?”

Sweet Jesus, tell us who to blame, that’s all. Give us a government with balls that ain’t ascared of Russia or niggers, queers and Jew liberals. Give us the true faith of Jesus Christ.

All of which might have sickened Yeshua were he not grown used to it through the Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation and other outbursts of sanctity perpetrated by the true believers.

“What is this White Jesus nonsense?” he implored of Barion once. “They’ve spent two thousand years turning me into something out of Oxford or a Tennessee Bible college.
Both
my parents were Hebrews, I look like an Arab, spent all my life in the desert, and if they let me into one of their nice ‘white’ restaurants at all, I’d get the table by the kitchen door. What do these people
want?”

“You know the lyrics,” Barion reminded him. “‘Gimme that old-time revulsion.’”

Roy Stride knows folks that been buying guns, says a day’s coming when they send’em all back to Africa or Jew-rusalem and sink the boats halfway.

The muttered threats, the idle talk, but the anger very real under it and the message clear even though no one listened. No one had ever listened.

Listen, you fuckin fat rich bastards: you cry over Indians and send money to Africa, but when you see our homes and farms going up for taxes, three, four generations of blood gone down under the gavel, that’s just five minutes on the late news to you. Heart of your country gone, it’s nothing to you but a few more cents at the supermarket.

Hey, listen good: we may be rednecks but some of us are rich rednecks now. You watch on TV what we say and do. Watch the folks in the TV tabernacle, plain folks come to hear the Word with their own kind of understanding —

Barion had seen them, the tears washing down the faces scarred with work and want, broken promises and broken dreams, pustulant with anger —

We got the TV now and a media voice. Think we’ll go down without someone’s to blame? Roy’s got the right idea. Roy says...

The Plattsville town square with its ancient obelisk could manage no charm even in soft autumn dusk. A greenish plaque admitted the town’s founder and age to an uncaring present. The World War I cannon’s mouth was a trash-lined haven for transient birds.

“Depressed,” said Barion. “In every sense of the word.” His energy drifted like purposeful mist toward what remained of Plattsville’s commercial area, past the closed and padlocked defense plant, the one movie house, letters awry on the worn runners of the marquee. Past the dark bar, sullen with slow-drinking men whose anger slammed at Barion out of the entrance along with the loud country-and-western music. Through the ship’s graveyard of the failing used-car dealership, no car that Barion saw less than five years old.

Prosperity was a brief, bright strip along Main Street. Very quickly the street ran to boarded-up stores. Lake a garish gold molar in a row of bad teeth, McDonald’s was still open for business.

Still early in the evening; McDonald’s had a dinner crowd of families, work-tired husbands, house-tired mothers trying to get fast food into squirming, bickering children. Young people — brusque, callow young men munching hamburgers and wondering what, if any, excitement the evening might bring. More cautious girls with essentially the same question. Young couples...

Barion moved, invisible, through the loud babble and paused at one wall table. Roy and Charity. Their physical attitude at the table, close as possible though straining together from separate seats, told the story. They were in love — as they defined that agony — and physically possessive of each other.

Young as he was, Roy’s face brought the word “ravaged “to Barion’s mind: gaunt cheeks, thin black hair already receding swiftly, complexion scarred from acne. A mustache, carefully nurtured but of no specific character. Poor nutrition and worse circumstance, a face festered with violence that Barion knew from every riot or protest meeting since Imperial Rome. What character or statement there was resided in Roy’s self-conscious costume: camouflage fatigues, jump boots and field jacket, a black beret bearing some insignia in pewter shoved through one shoulder strap.

Charity Stovall was even more poignantly familiar to Barion, who had glimpsed that face through Europe since the fall of Rome or even earlier, seen it suffer and starve under successive waves of Huns and Vandals.

I know this girl.

Charity Stovall died, raped and burned, under the westward sweep of the Visigoths; burned in her thatched hut along the Humber or drowned in it at the hands of Viking raiders. She searched the field at Hastings and after a hundred other battles to find her own dead. Died in the Black Plague or survived pox-scarred; burned for her Protestant faith in France, raped for her Catholicism in Germany. Her face glared out of the surge of doomed peasant revolts with a growing genetic rage that carved its God and faith from bloodstained granite. Rembrandt painted it and found a deep spirituality. Delacroix romanticized her, but Goya and Breughel knew her better.