You Will Never See Any God: Stories (12 page)

He had known it all, that there was no more than this, he had known it but he had not believed it. He had needed to come here this time to find out. And the wry revelation struck him like a blow on his forehead. The energy of their listless bodies, their dull lust, their passionless pretensions could not make them whole.

He felt unclean, like a fat, briefcase-carrying businessman dropping through town to surreptitiously and dispassionately satisfy neither love nor lust, but to bulwark his pretense.

“So what have we got now?” he cried again and closed his eyes.

“We’ve got a great deal,” she said.

“We have? You and I?” his voice croaked.

“I don’t understand you at all,” she said, the hostility rising in her eyes and face. “Even if we possessed each other—if we were married, what would we have?” Who has said that this sexual combat could save us all? he asked himself, who has said the thrust of loins, the twin orgasms, the clenched teeth, the straining muscles, the bleats and sweat at night would redeem us? What blasphemy was this, dissolved into the routine placation, the casual embrace, the promiscuous ritual, the ugly usage?

“I would not use an animal or a machine as we have used each other,” he said.

“Used!” she said, in astonishment at him, her eyes coating with tears. “I have not used you. I haven’t.” She turned her face against the wall and began to cry. “I’m sorry I displeased you so much,” she sobbed. “Now that you have what you want you dislike me.”

“Wanda, Wanda,” he said, shaking his head, as he looked at her distorted white face, wrenching its tears into her thin hands. They had made themselves ciphers, he thought, routine memories to be counted up. To her new men friends she would say he was the college professor who had “loved” her and had courted her and would have married her too but she didn’t want to, she wanted to keep her independence, a man who was nice enough and treated her well and bought her nice things, but didn’t mean a thing to her; and in the company of friends he would be, if she came to talk of it, that intellectual companion that she had known who was going to write her story; and in the remote, occasional honest depths he was the man—only man, not love, not lover—
who had exchanged orgasms with her for three years and twice thereafter. To him she was the woman who had been his mistress during his time in graduate school (his “shack-up” to those more gross), whom he could visit when back in town (in his undergraduate days he had seen two dormitory janitors talking, two ancient, gnarled, ugly old men with gold-rimmed glasses and dentures, who had looked at the girlie picture on a student’s wall, and the one said, “I can remember when I held a woman like that in my arms,” and McDonald could see himself with that prostatic, arthritic clutch, spittle erupting along his thin and ancient brown lips, saying to himself, “Yes, I held such a one naked in my arms one day,” the beautiful young woman, Wanda).

“Ciphers,” he said. Indistinguishable ciphers in the routine of friendship, reduced by their sophistication to this. “No passion or energy or excitement or love,” he said slowly and viciously, while she simply stared at him, her eyes red from crying. “What have we made? What have we got? Five years of this and what? . . .”

The boy banging open the door, letting the rush of cold air in, moved them to stand and go to the other room. The boy was red-cheeked and sniffly from the cold. Stiffly, almost with careful politeness, they talked about the movie he’d seen and a little later the boy said goodnight and went upstairs to bed.

Wanda smiled at McDonald; the tears had not been vigorous or deep.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said. “You always were so intense.”

“Yes,” he said.

Her hand touched his with surprising hotness. “You can stay here if you want to,” she said. “Trevor will sleep late and I can fix you breakfast and take you to the station in the morning.”

“What will the neighbors say?”

“They better not say anything, the nosey bitches. I don’t care what they think anyway.” She smiled suddenly. “Anyway, they’ve seen you here before.”

“What about Trevor?” he asked, remembering the times they had made love with the boy sleeping in the next room, or how they had frozen when he had gone to the bathroom, and there they waited in strange posture until he returned to his bedroom.

“Trevor knows what it’s all about,” she said.

“He knows about you and me?”

“Well, we’ve never talked about it, if that’s what you mean,” she said with a laugh, “but he should know. If he doesn’t know what grown people do with sex, then it’s high time he found out.”

It takes a wise son to know his mother, McDonald thought, smiling too. And what are you, James R. McDonald? he asked.

“No,” he said abruptly. “I’ve got to go. I can catch a late train.”

“Don’t you want to stay for a little while?”

“No, Wanda,” he said, going to her, kissing her compressed mouth one time. He got his coat and put it on.

“I will see you again?” she asked, with her wistful face on again.

“I don’t know,” he said, and went to the door.

“I don’t want to see you go like this,” she said. “I think you might be angry.”

“I’m not angry.”

“Write me,” she said. “Write me, won’t you? I really miss those letters you used to send.” Her eyes were suddenly stricken, as if she too saw the loss of it all, the recognition of what they did not have and had never had.

“I’ll see you again, won’t I?” she asked, and then she looked acutely at him, with a sardonic perceptiveness that frightened him, and said, “Yes, I’ll see you again.” She patted his shoulder almost maternally and she said, “Write me,” and called almost as an afterthought, “Merry Christmas,” through the closing door.

He went out into the bitter cold, into the gray dirty night with the snow gray and ugly upon the cruel landscape. He huddled into his coat, feeling in his pocket the soft and crackly package with the gloves for Wanda, and he thought of returning and giving them to her, but he changed his mind, shook his head, said to himself, no, let it be as it is. He walked on, down the street where the houses huddled like cringing dogs against the cold, and he bent his head into the wind, walking toward the sore of light reflected above the center of the city.

The Metal Sky

It was early when he brought the tractor down the hill from the farmstead to cultivate the corn. The cultivator hung on the tractor like a spider, moving and jerking and groaning with the movements of the tractor. It was cool in the hollow by the ditch, and the heavy dew hung in silent and plastic rainbow-colored droplets from the willows and from the bayonetshaped corn leaves, and when the tractor raced through, the droplets shattered and rained on the tractor and on the blue denim legs of the man who was driving. The tractor went fast and the black earth curled up and turned like something alive before the cultivator shovels.

The ditch was broad and steep. It had been part of a pasture, but the man had plowed the fertile hill and put it in crops and then he had cut a few of the willows that grew in thicket-like profusion along the bank and had planted corn there too. There were still willows growing in the ditch and struggling along the edges of the bank. There was no water there except with heavy rains, and sometimes a puddle stood for days, hidden in weeds at the bottom of the ditch and hovered over by yellow butterflies.

The noise of the tractor was very loud in the hollow and the
birds in the willows scattered when the tractor came by. The man turned at the end of the field and swung back into the corn and the shovels spun the earth up, loosening the earth and shaking it, and he worked near the edge of the bank, the large hind wheel of the tractor skirting the weed cover there.

The bank gave way almost soundlessly and leisurely far behind the tractor, and the earth slid quietly down into the ditch, and the moving crust of bank ate away and pursued the tractor. The man was looking forward and he did not see it eating away behind him, and he felt it finally, the escaping earth tugging at the wheel. He looked and saw the almost casual destruction below him and he swung the wheel of the tractor hard, away from the bank, but this gesture only assisted the moving earth, for it threw the weight on the outer wheel. The front of the tractor rose and the spider arms of the cultivator sprang into the air above the corn, and the bright steel shovels glittered, and then with the sigh of the escaping earth the tractor slid and rolled and fell. The man held the wheel and he tried to move with the roll of the tractor but the steel bars caught him and pulled him in and he was held there, vised in between the wheel and the earth in the ditch.

The sun was looking at him when he recovered consciousness. It was all he could see at first, the hard and insistent yellow eye probing him. And around the sun the sky was a polished and bright metal blue. It occurred to him that he was yet in bed and the sun was already up and he strove suddenly to move, and it was then he felt that other insistent scalpel touch in his legs, and he remembered. He lay on his side, and his right arm was twisted under him and his face was burrowed partially into the hard dry earth; his face had struck the pebbly wash of the ditch. His legs were beneath the wheel of the silent tractor; he felt a great numbness there, broken by flashing and gritty sharpness at intervals. He tried to fix the moments of sharpness and he discovered that they
came whenever he breathed. When he held his breath the pain did not come at all, there was only the rather satisfying numbness.

He was aware of a gurgling sound nearby and he lifted his head with great effort and looked about him. The sound was from the gasoline tank slowly leaking the fuel. The gasoline dribbled out around the closed cap and streaked down the painted metal and made a little pool in the ditch, at the man’s elbow. The tank had been full, he thought, it would take a little while to empty, and he tried to think how long he had been there by the way the tank was emptying. There would be help soon, he thought, as soon as he was missed there would be help. He felt his overall bib for the pocket watch and he labored with the fob, dragging the watch out, but it was smashed. The hands had even been driven off, and the hands pointed nowhere from the bottom of the crushed crystal. The man looked dumbly at the watch, and he felt the smashed, still creased-together crystal, as if it were impossible that the watch could not run. The man squinted at the sun, and it too looked like a watch dial. The sun hung over his head, but it could not be noon, he thought, and he looked again and the sun was directly over him. If it is noon, they will surely miss him, he thought, and they will come searching for him, and this knowledge made him feel a little better. It was hot and the sweat streaked into his eyes and smarted, blinding him at moments and then all he could see was the blurred yellowness of the sun. There was great heat and the sun seemed to focus on him, the heat and the light white and hot and blinding, and he knew it was just his imagination, the sun was the sun and it was always hot and it did not choose to focus on anyone or anything. He would have loved that heat before, he thought, the sunlight that pulled the growing corn and fattened the growing animals, and warmly rubbed his shoulders when he was on the tractor. The sun did not choose him to burn, he thought, and yet it was too hot.

The sharpness in his legs was coming more quickly now, and it was rising, too, feeling up to his thighs, and he tried to recall the connection he had worked out before and he remembered his breathing. He was breathing very quickly and each time there was the sharp hurt, climbing from his legs to his hips, and he tried to slow his breathing, but he could not. The sun, it is too hot, he thought, and he remembered his hat, but the hat had fallen somewhere. He lifted his head and looked carefully and slowly about him. To lift his head caused him great pain. The straw hat rested against the foxtail beyond the wash, perhaps two yards from him. One end of it was tipped up and the hat swayed from time to time as little breezes eddied down the gulley. The man looked at the hat and he watched, straining his head and eyes to see it. The man did not feel any of the breezes that moved the hat, and it was as if the foxtail swayed of their own accord and thus swayed the hat with them. The man reached for the hat but it was far far beyond him.

The exertion wore upon him and he turned his head down again. The sun poured down. He felt the heat and he closed his eyes to rest. But there was another yellowness and he squinted and saw the sun very close to him and very bright and hot. It glittered and it moved and swayed delicately. The sun had moved, he thought, and he looked where the sun was supposed to be and it was still there. The other light was the sun reflected clearly from the shiny metal that the pouring gasoline had cleansed and he could not look anywhere now without the sun being there.

Perhaps he could dig, he thought, perhaps there was loose dirt beneath his legs and he could pull himself away to the shade. He reached along his body and touched the area where the pain was growing to and he felt the earth beneath his legs. It was hard and dry and pebbly there in the wash of the gulley. He dug there and even his hard, calloused hands could do nothing; he scratched at the ground and made a little hole that he could just put his hand
into, after great exertion, but his hand was bleeding then and exhaustion came on him. He cursed to himself, he cursed the hard dry ground and he cursed the tractor with its weight upon him and he cursed the pain and the land and the hard yellow sun. He let his head drop upon the pebbly earth and the sun lavished its yellow heat upon him.

The low strange sound awoke him; it was a heavy sound, like a groan or a sigh and he heard it dimly and listened and it was close to him. He thought of men coming in search for him, with shovels and strength to free him, but the sound was too strange and too heavy and he knew then it was himself, breathing, and he could listen to himself as from a distance. He moved his body slightly and the instant pain shot through him and seemed to burst in fire through his skull. He was truly awake then, and the heat was very heavy upon his face. He knew he was badly burned and he tried to pull his shirt up to cover his face, but he could not pull it far enough and if he moved too much the pain from his legs came driving up so that he could not do anything. Breathing was beginning to be hard for him now. The sun had moved slightly, he thought, for the reflection from the tractor was dull, and yet the sun was there, still above him. He looked across the sky for clouds, for the floating cotton clumps that collected on summer afternoons and sometimes glowered together to cause rain. But there were no clouds. The sky was hot and blue, shaped like a metal plate and with the color of the flame of a gasoline burner, and the blue became pale and brittled and yellow around the watch-dial sun.

He thought there were sounds and he listened. It was mid-afternoon and they would surely be looking for him, he thought. He pictured them coming through the corn rows and following the tractor tracks and noticing the cave-off beside the ditch. And he remembered he had told no one that he would be cultivating
the corn in the hollow; the day before he had worked in the upper fields, and if he were missed, the children and the wife would go there first. And here, he thought, the ground dried quickly and the tractor tracks were obliterated by the harrow teeth that followed the wheels of the tractor, and there were the protective, hiding clumps of willows. Because of the trees it was difficult to see far along that winding ditch. There the clusters of willows and the tall weeds and cave-offs were frequent; the rains often undermined the banks and pulled the earth in and perhaps they would not detect this place where the fallen earth was already dried and where it looked like an ancient wound in the bank. The man turned his head to scan the bank and there were trees up there, protecting the slide, and only a very observant one would even notice. But they will have to come soon now, he thought.

He listened above the growing concentration of distractions that he knew was pain that grew in his brain. The birds were chattering and flitting among the willows and they were singing. The birds had been silent for a long time after the accident, or perhaps he did not hear before, the man thought. The birds were there in groups and they were singing, as they sang on any afternoon. And the breeze moved through the willows delicately, sinuously, moving the light-green leaves into tentacles, but the breeze did not reach the gulley bed, did not even touch the cattails and the Indian tobacco and the foxtail where the hat still rested.

The mid-afternoon sun tortured the earth around him and wilted the weeds and grass. And yet they did not come. He would shout, he thought, perhaps they would hear. He opened his mouth, but the tongue, foreign and huge, filled up the cavern, and he tried to shout, but his voice escaped drily and he could only croak something he could not understand. He tried to swallow, but the alkali dryness in his mouth prevented it. He croaked the sound again and was satisfied when the chattering birds hesitated
in their noise. Perhaps they will yet hear, he thought, and he tried again with all his energy, and a few of the birds flew away this time. He tried again and again to make a sound, but he knew they were not shouts anymore. The birds came back and he could not even hear his voice above the raucous and cheerful noise they made.

His thirst was violent. The man moved himself on his elbow and he looked at the bed of the ditch. Near him the pool of gasoline glittered rainbow-colored in the sun, and as the gasoline evaporated it caused the light to shimmer and the colors to diffuse. A distance away there was a puddle of water, perhaps the size of a man’s head, and a cluster of yellow butterflies moved above the muddy, tiny pool. The butterflies surged in and out, restlessly, and without any sound. They fluttered and turned and milled in the brilliant light of their own coloring so that it was impossible to distinguish them one from another. The butterflies arose suddenly and hovered in a mass above the bank, and the man raised his head to look at the water, only three arm’s lengths away. Now that he saw the water clearly, the thirst grew worse, and even the evil pain in his legs was insignificant.

The butterflies returned. One felt the man’s motion and came to flutter in his face. He felt the faint elastic brush upon his burning skin. He knew the butterflies did this to drive other moving creatures away; it was the season of their breeding. The legs walked coolly on his cheek and rested, and the gorgeous yellow wings moved ever so slightly to give it balance.

The man felt the butterfly there, and it was unconcerned, as if he were already dead. The man lifted his free hand slowly and he brought his fingers up and then very carefully and quickly snapped the fingers shut on the arched yellow wings. The butterfly struggled, but its wings were caught and its fragile black body vibrated in its writhings. The yellow dust on the wings rubbed off and filtered down, lightly.

It will know I am not dead, the man thought. It alone, if nothing else, will know. He held the fragile wings of yellow light, with the wings so delicate he could not even feel them between his hardened hands. The butterfly tried to move and could not and the claws of its legs clasped the air. Perhaps it thinks it is near death, the man thought, it has not been in this position before and it knows it is strange and terrible to be near death with nothing else around. How easy it is to give death, the man thought, how easy to crush out something, to say, “I give thee death.” But how impossible it is to say, “I give thee life.” What was once something, something perhaps delicate and beautiful, becomes nothing in that terrible and decisive moment of death, and there was nothing dead that was ever beautiful. And there is nothing anyone can ever do to change it. How little it took sometimes, and he thought of the usual afternoons in the field, and where he would be, cultivating the tall corn on the hills now, where there was a breeze and coolness, where the sun was warmly light on his shoulders, and where the crops grew, and the wind was caressing, and he remembered the water jugs and how he turned his face up and the cool water splashed over his face and down his shirt, and he remembered his son riding on the tractor with him, and it had been pleasant, for he took pride in that powerful machine, and in the good, rich soil, and in his son. But something had said, or they had conspired and said, “I give thee death,” and in one moment of a usual morning, he lay half-crushed and enfeebled in the ditch.