Everett’s technique hadn’t improved much since our fight a year ago. He charged at me with a body block and cracked the boards of the dressing room missing me; then he got up to do the same thing again and I couldn’t help stomping him a scornful one in the ribs — it was like I owed him one for being so stupid.
He howled in pain.
Then the big guy with him who had been holding me, a first-string end, moved in on me, and when he wrapped around me, it occurred to me for the first time that they were not intending a fair fight. “You ain’t going to start slugging, buddy,” the big guy said. He was a weight-lifter and ate three pounds of food every meal. Before this, I’d always sort of admired his great, ugly strength.
Everett hovered up, and the big guy let me go, and they both came in on me with fists, while also trying to hold me in arrest in a formal way. I got a feeling of soft clubs falling on my head, then something sharp arching up deep in my stomach, and I passed out.
I woke up by the lake in front of the house. Tonnie Ray was with me, wearing an aqua swimming suit that I could see in the bright moon of the night. It seemed terribly cold to me. Cold gray sticks were set around us — the May willow trees on the bank. There was a group of ducks just now putting out in the pond right below us. Tonnie Ray was so wretchedly pale that she glowed. Thistles, I was lying on a carpet of thistles. The shore mud and pond scum gave off a fertile odor: like Coca-Cola poured over a heap of new cow manure.
“I thought you were dead,” says Tonnie Ray. She has been keeping watch over my corpse. Then I start seeing the yellow-greenness of the willow leaves, little things, on the limbs, and a hump of weed the same color in the pond, and hints of the same yellow-green color in the grass around us, in the inch of it right next to the ground. A huge fish or serpent wallows in the water under a willow tree for an amazing five seconds — some creature waking up and crazy, strutting like fury on the margin between the water and the air. Quite something to hear, this something with scales tearing, sloshing. Makes you afraid.
It’s wearing, it’s horrible to feel this. I have a nauseous, chalky sensation in myself, and I’m waking up with nature, and Tonnie Ray has my head in her lap and is holding me with her arms, telling me that Everett broke his hand when he missed hitting me and hit the wall and the other guy was ashamed of the way they beat me up. They became concerned about my having passed out, and Tonnie Ray came out dressed in her bathing suit all ready to go and told them in so many words that they had made a horrible mistake, and then she and Lala Sink had walked me around the yard many times.
“Lala?”
“Yeah. She just now left when she saw you were all right.”
I turn around and see little Lala, indeed, walking up the slope and just now making the hill in front of the picture window. I see her little body striving, and the hearth burns pink on the window. There leaning against the window is Sherry, her natural blond hair and her full but lean hips pushed out on the window, alone, the Tulane romeo is not with her and her backside looks lonely and broken off from that National Geographic scene with him I had seen earlier. I chuckle, and laugh, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Yet agony too. Lala goes into the house without a look back at me. She only wanted to make sure I was alive.
And I’m stuck here seeing spring come on yellow-green, the ducks, the smell of manure and cola, the writhing of the unslumbering creature, and the waking of the earth, with Tonnie Ray, falling on me with her plastic aqua swimming suit, tickling me with her roach antennae.
“You are such a character. Who else could be beat up and wake up laughing?!” she says.
“I don’t feel good at all.”
“Oh, don’t you?”
“I feel worse than I have in my life.”
“Oh, do you? Now, now. We’ve hit it off so good together. Listen, Harry. Let’s get married.” She made some kind of Southern twirl out of that word married. I’m sure she wanted to sound fetching as a siren. Bless her heart, after all. She wanted me forever, something awful. And it was do or die for her. She was not going to college. She smiled, knowing she’d failed with the voice; then, clutching her underlip in a desperate bashfulness, she tried the last bravest thing, and eased her hand under my trunks with trembling, awkward fingers. By the way I looked at her, she must have known it was No all the way. She bent her head down, squeezed me lightly, and fell into a crumple into her own lap.
I got up and went walking up the slope. We were in the gray of the rising sun. I made it halfway up the slope and looked back at her. She rose up and really shook. God knows what new self she was putting on, but she got straight — she had put it on, whatever new self this was she was coming back with — and I grabbed her hand.
We went up and had pleasant conversation between one another while we ate that greasy house-party breakfast of burned undone pork. I remember Tonnie Ray held her piece out and squeezed it like a sponge, and we saw the grease drip out in an unbelievable amount, on the rug. We thought it was very funny.
10 / This Boy Sheds Dream of Pines
In 1960 Dream of Pines began turning into plastic. The Sink boys put up a corrugated aqua fiberglass fence around the mills. The tracks ran in two lanes into and out of the mill yards. The sun was scalding that summer. It boiled out the heart of everything you looked at and you could sense the hot ooziness of innards breaking out of wood, brick, and even glass. Intestinal slime burst out in tears on the steering wheel of your car if you left it in the sun any time.
What had happened to me? I lived in a woodsy glen in a nice wet shade, where late in the afternoon the deep cane patch and the overhanging oaks manufactured their own breeze, and strange blasts of almost frigid air blew through our house. I never had to suffer. I could lie in bed all day, naked, and will myself into one hard-on after another, detumesce (an unstudied pleasure all in itself), maybe go over to the desk and write my name over and over, lift up the stack of records and let them go again — Cannonball Adderly, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Mose Allison: new heroes — or take a cup of coffee, sit at the kitchen table, and wait for Tonnie Ray to call. She made out like every call to me caused her a crisis. She always took up five minutes apologizing for having called. Was I busy? She would just die if she were interrupting something. She must’ve called a hundred times that summer. Oh, Tonnie Ray knew we were not lovers, but couldn’t we be friends? I never agreed to anything.
Fifty times she wanted me to assure her everything was going to turn out right for her. She had some secretarial position lined up in New Orleans. She was going out with a business-major greaser from the nearby junior college who was after her to “prove her love.” What should she do? What should she do when her brother Lloyd stared at her for a whole minute one morning, then went outside the kitchen, down the steps, and came back with a teaspoon full of soil and dumped it in her coffee? What was her life turning into, that…
One afternoon she asks me, “Harry, do you think God is really keeping up with me? Most of the time I feel like I’m just not… watched.”
“There are so many trillions of people on the earth,” she told me. Her self-esteem increased considerably when I mentioned, by way of fact, that there were really only a couple of billion. This was generally the kind of smart-aleck consolation I gave her. Her calls were a bore, but on the other hand, they weren’t. When nobody else was in the house, I’d come to the phone wearing nothing but a sheet draped around me, like a monk-bard. Why? Just for the irony and fun, I suppose. I’d hold the phone out and peel off a shattering belch while she was weeping away at some story of crucial disappointment; then I’d come back to the speaker and make a tiny faraway voice, like at the bottom of a well, reading names passionately out of the phone book. Sometimes I’d hang up, flat. Nothing turned her away. She was always so concerned that she’d called while I was practicing my trumpet. I waited for her call, lifted the receiver off the hook, put the bell of my horn over the speaker end, and blasted off several bars of “On Wisconsin!” I answered then with a mild hello.