Tell me. Did Our Saviour die because he was right, or is it that he simply was right and then he died? Tell me, let’s chat. I’ll be mostly in the shop.
The Agony of T. Bandini
TIGER BANDINI WAS A SHORT SORT OF PROWLING FELLOW WITH plump red lips and black ashy cheeks. He came from sports people but even to other hard-bitten fans he was over the line. He knew intimately about all the quick and larger hitters in American football. Above all he liked the linebackers and other violent crushers. He worshiped the violent crush. His eyes would close as if in a dream when he talked about Lawrence Taylor, for instance. He would begin screaming and white liquid would form at the corners of his lips. Giants fans in the bars who had begun in agreement with him would edge away and huddle together to avoid him. But Bandini was in a zone of screaming delight and was not conscious of this. One day after a Giants game on the television he went into a tirade of celebration and lost consciousness. They let him lie there on the floor, and in a few minutes he was back up on the bar, his eyes gone to slits and a vicious grin wrapped around another whiskey. He was whispering, “Taylor. Taylor.” He had been there since morning and when he left he got in his car and killed another man in a bad head-on accident.
He was forbidden a driver’s license in perpetuity by the judge. His family had struggled in measures grievous to them to keep Bandini out of prison and Bandini advised himself that he could no longer exist in his own town in upper New York state under the burden of shame and guilt.
Before his college experience was interrupted by the accident Bandini had met a pair of Southern boys who were crazed for the work of William Faulkner, and even more crazed as their homesickness grew. They could quote long passages from Faulkner that sounded to Bandini like a black preacher schooled on an enormous dictionary. Bandini sided with blacks, especially now that he was in disgrace and felt shunned. The Southern boys, like Faulkner, had elaborate reasons for doing almost anything. Bandini was impressed by this. He felt he was in the world of pain and ruin now after the wreck, but he saw there were elaborate reasons for it, and he relished this, as he drank only beer now at the end of the bar, only sometimes shouting. Ruin talked to him.
For instance, their college was not a very good college and was even falling apart physically. The buildings were erected by inferior contractors supported by the New York Mafia. Around the campus, interior and exterior walls fell down in chalky gravel that the students walked over daily. Sections of ceiling were apt to drop out, especially after a big snow or rain. Bandini liked to expatiate on the complexities of this in a patient beered-up review of the history of the New York Mafia. The Southern boys agreed nothing worthy was as plain as it seemed. The only worthy subjects were coiled up and crossed like nylon fishing line. Like them, Bandini began to speak much of destiny and twists of fate. This comforted him. Much was inevitable and bound to the blind dice-thrower fate. Fishing line left overnight would coil of its own.
So he thought it was in the dice and natural that he wind up way down south in a rental home in the precincts of the great author Faulkner himself. The town was storied and cozy, filled with shady lanes under great oaks. Around even his poor house in the student section was a bank of weeping willows.
One night, uncommonly drunk on Jägermeister, Bandini fell into them. It was midmorning when he awoke in a dream of green wigwam. A skinny cat came in there with him. Bandini took off all his stinking clothes, picked up the cat, and began weeping. This seemed a sad and wonderful place in here. He cursed the pavement and steel outside and did not come out of the trees until evening, when the cat began mewing loudly. The animal continued mewing in the house but he had got too drunk all over again on a pint of sloe gin thrown out of a car into the willows and did not understand what it wanted since he hardly ever ate himself. He looked at the creature and passed out on his nasty fluorescent sofa.
In the night he woke up the cat was still calling out and he recognized what it wanted because now he was hungry too. He put the cat in his overcoat pocket and walked a mile and a half to Kroger’s intending to provide a feast for the both of them and pushing the cat down by the shoulders. It scratched and hurt Bandini’s hand gravely but he staggered on. His cheeks were blown and red, and were like somebody had thrown a full ashtray on them.
Bandini had forgot his wallet, and he was far, far from his resources, a cold desert away it seemed. So in the lonesome store with scant personnel he put his free hand down into the aquarium and shoplifted two great lobsters and set them in the other pocket. Now he was truly fastened in by the hands on both sides and he went out the front electric door with a rictus of his big red mouth and some kind of song it might have seemed to the policeman, bored in a car. He got far out in the lot before he could truly whimper. The night manager came out and the policeman swung toward Bandini in his vehicle but Bandini saw this and scampered like a goat-fiend over the hill behind a branch bank and into the thorns, dead wortvine, and minor gullies where only the most wretched of animals went, and down closer to another road he stumbled on yet another bottle with half its liquor, so he secured the lobsters and drank, then he stayed to the backyards and overcame the trifling fences of the middle-aged and wifeworn, where had they shined a light on him they would have seen a man near vomitous with joy.
Tiger Bandini had got new lungs and legs off the boon of drink and he was again that twisting shifty dodger who had almost made the team nine years ago in the town close to the Canadian line. He came out of an alley into the town square free of the police, crafty and game, rid of the pain in his hands, which failed against the found whiskey. He tossed the bottle into a grate and saw in the cold moon before him the courthouse statue of the lone Confederate looking curiously southward. He became infatuated right off and with great conviction he emancipated the cat and lobsters, then began climbing the ten feet of pedestal and statue. He did not see the cat remain in the gutter only a short time before it ran at both lobsters huddled and alien there.
Bandini had a free wide heart for the vanquished. He scaled toward the man, all fours engaged, in an act of hunching and embracing. The policeman had driven up to witness this remarkable love, as Bandini almost reached the boots of the defeated. The policeman heard the man cry out like a thing impaled and then it was too ugly for him to watch anymore. The odor of rank sea and a low hissing brought the officer to kneel with his light. Above him, Bandini was going nowhere.
In jail Bandini was given the drunk tank where Cruthers, a lean black man, squatted. Cruthers was a police informer and chauffeur for a town writer who specialized in the burden of history.
Cruthers had twelve or fourteen DUIs. He claimed to be a sergeant in the Vietnam conflict who carried about an M-60, his sweet big baby, and mowed down hundreds. He slept in a tree and went native, a lizard of death from above, abandoned to independent slaughter by an army who did not love it enough and did not have the hair.
Cruthers would drive the writer to far parts, even New York, where the writer would introduce him to his cronies as the burden of history. Late at night with enough whiskey the writer and Cruthers would listen to Sinatra and Presley on a small cassette player and began weeping over the Vietnam dead and the Confederate dead, and, appropriate to the writer’s novel, the Korean dead. When Sinatra sang, it was the dead of World War II.