I went out into the darker end of the garden beyond the lights of the now empty pool, and sat on a pedestal, sharing it with a welded woman perched upon one steel toe. I smoked a cigarette and felt again the monstrous dejection which had nearly foundered me in Francine’s tub. There can be a special sort of emotional exhaustion compounded of finding no good answers to anything. Too much had faded away, and the only target left was a grotesque pornographer with a voice like a trapped bee, and he seemed peripheral to the whole thing. Too much blood. Too much gold and intrigue. Too much fumbling and bumbling. It was like taking a puzzle apart and having the pieces disappear the instant they came free. From the talk with Sam, all the way to the hard tasteless gallop in Francine’s bed, I had handled myself like an idiot, suffering all the losses, enjoying no gains.
And, except for Nora, the whole thing had seemed like a long bath in yesterday’s dish water. The house lights faded the stars, but I looked up at them and told myself my recent vision of reality had been from a toad’s-eye view. The stars, McGee, look down on a world where thousands of 4-H kids are raising prize cattle and sheep. The Green Bay Packers, of their own volition, join in the Lord’s Prayer before a game. Many good and gentle people have fallen in love this night. At this moment, thousands of women are in labor with the fruit of good marriage. Thousands of kids sleep the deep sleep which comes from the long practice hours for competitive swimming and tennis. Good men have died today, leaving hearts sick with loss. In quiet rooms young girls are writing poems. People are laughing together, in safe places.
You have been on the underside of the world, McGee, but there is a top side too, where there is wonder, innocence, trust, love and gentleness. You made the decision, boy. You live down here, where the animals are, so stay with it.
I got up and went back to the party. A new batch of faces had arrived and some had fallen off. A dusty little man in his middle years, with fierce eyes and a froggy bassoon of a voice was standing orating in the big room, surrounded by a mixed group of admirers and dissidents. He wore a beret and a shiny serge suit and he had a great air of authority. I drifted into the edge of the group and heard an earnest woman say, “But Doctor Face, isn’t it part of our heritage for anyone to be entitled to say what they think, right or wrong?”
“My dear woman, that is one of the luxuries of liberty, not one of the definitions thereof. And it is traditional and necessary in war that we forgo the luxuries and concentrate on the necessities. My posture is that we are at war, with a vile, godless, international conspiracy which grows in strength every day while we weaken ourselves by giving every pinko jackass the right to confuse our good people. I ask you, my dear. Who takes the fifth? Known hoodlums and fellow travelers. Our so called traditional liberties provide the bunkers in which these rascals hide and shoot us down. I say we must work together. We must silence all the divisionist voices among us.
“If we are to be strong, we must impeach all traitor justices of the Supreme Court, give greater powers to the investigating committees of the Congress, decentralize our socialistic central government, institute wartime censorship of all mass media, expand the counterespionage efforts of the FBI, smash the apparatus of the Communist Party as it exists within labor unions, the NAACP, the CLU, and the hard core of sympathizers on all college campuses, both students and faculty.
“We are engaged in a bitter war for the hearts and minds of men, and our enemy is without soul or mercy. To be strong we must silence, once and forever, every jackass who tells the people that we can win through weakness rather than strength. Over twelve thousand people have signed up as Crusaders. We’re tough. We’re smart. We’re wary. And we raean to save this country in spite of itself.”
The delivery was effective. It radiated sincerity, concern, earnestness. But he had it all down just a little too pat. He had said it too many hundreds of times. And as I stood there I had a curious feeling I had been there before. It took me a time to remember. Then I recalled it, lifetimes ago, as a small kid in a Chicago park, hanging onto the big hand of the daddy, listening to this same dusty little man with his smeared lenses and the same general impression of dirty underwear. Not the same man, of course, but the same mechanical messiah approach. And that duplicate little man of long ago had been calling upon all decent men to arm themselves against the dirty capitalistic conspiracy, bread for the workers, break the chains, unite, save America.
I moved away, to a different level of the house where, over the goopy strings of the grass skirt music I could hear his occasional clarion phrase “… ninety miles off our doorstep… sense of purpose… show them we mean what we say… bleeding hearts…” but I could not follow the strange line of his reasoning. There are a lot of them running loose these days, I thought, fattening themselves on the sick business of whipping up such fear and confusion that they turn decent men against their decent neighbors in this sad game of think-alike.
It seemed an odd business for Tomberlin to be backing, but I have long since learned that the very rich specialize in irrational causes. Insulated from the brute reality of the money drive, they expand into the unreality of Yoga, astrology, organic foods and marginal politics. Tomberlin was immersed in the mismatched fields of erotica and the clanking of crypto-Fascist right. Next year it might be voodoo and technocracy. It was the search for importance, and the ones who could recognize that could con him very nicely and profitably.
I found that one of the strategic little bars had a fair brand of domestic brandy, so I got three fingers and one lump of ice and sat on a corner couch and looked across to where a group of young were sprawled up the side of some wide stairs. Some of them were the pool people. They had their private jokes, and their cool-eyed apartness from the rest of the party. They were a swinging little pack, with a flavor of tension and disdain.
There is one typical characteristic of both nightmare and delirium. Both these conditions of mind involve the grouping of people from random points in the past. A dead childhood companion will appear with last month’s girl. A man who once tried very earnestly to kill you dead will show up and tell you symbolic things about your dead brother’s wife.
When there is an inexplicable association of people during a waking and rational moment, it inevitably recaptures that faint and eerie flavor of nightmare.
Suddenly one of the little blonde cupcakes on the stairway jumped into focus as though I was using a zoom lens. It was the nameless sun bunny from the pool at La Casa Encantada, the one who had come over tipsy, sat on her heels with brown thighs muscularly flexed, wanting to know if I’d been an end with the Rams. She wore a little white linen dress and had her hair piled high and wore considerable eye makeup, but it was the same one. I felt as if I could not take a very deep breath. I looked at the others. There had been five of them on that motor sailer, three young men and two girls. I found one of the men, a big dark hairy one, the one who had seemed to be in charge of the scuba outing. What had she called him? Chip.
I could accept the presence of Claude Boody. A mild coincidence. But I could not accept the presence of the sun bunny. It was a little too much. And so nothing had been as I had imagined. I had to let the structure fall down and then try again. I had to find a new logic. I was frightened without knowing why I should be. It was fright with a paranoid flavor. All I needed was for Heintz or Arista or Colonel Marquez to show up, humming a Hawaiian melody.
I knew the awareness was mutual. The bland, sensual little pug-face made automatic smiles and grimaces at the things people said to her. But she would angle her eyes at me now and again. Never a direct look, but only when her head was turned. It was unconsciously furtive. I could not read her big hairy friend. He was further up the stairs and seemed totally involved with a little brunette who squirmed and giggled and squirmed.