Back at the house I lent Pa money and stared with my new power through the notch of the tree outside my window.
But one day the curtain was closed.
Great God, they always dig the tunnel right where you love, don’t they? Somehow they have known the route all along, then they are right next to you, plundering jackals, bothered spies eating toward your heart in their envy, fiends with cutting nails and their dread offices. Just at your high tide too, everything smiling, your old parents in your hands like glass animals; the orange bitch humping herself, so glad for your arrival.
He was a relative of hers, a detective, he said, wearing an even bigger hat than the beggar and as in Pa’s dreams, his boots and long gun. You could see Pa crumpling in envy.
With my parents gathered at our eating table, he continued.
In essence, you killed her, he says. With her stroke, she could not take her eyes away from you. Neither stop your nasty suggestive horn playing every tune she most abhorred.
The whole point of her later life in fact was to escape wherever horns were. She only wanted a little liquor and great silence, poor thing.
I did not, could not, I said.
Mother witnessed against me.
Next Pa crept from his station of hunched envy. Might I have a look at your peacemaker there under the coat? he wondered.
Stand back, little missus, warned the man. After much unbuckling came out his exquisite almost interminable gun, practically a hand rifle. Unduly long and quarrelsome in its chromium. Then it was back in his coat, snapped into harness, a cruel aid to his searches and legal destruction. Pa was stunned as by a miracle snatched away in full bloom.
The man wore provocative and immense boots too. Sort of a dancing cream leather boot poured on the end of his heavy legs.
After the end you still kept on, the man scolded me. She must have been gone in the chair two days, three, while you went on mocking her.
How could you know?
You were at it even as they discovered the body. This looked to be such a decent lovely neighborhood. However.
He stared at me all over again, refreshed by pure loathing.
In my line of work you seem to find at least one monster in every block. A sorry rule, but one without which I wouldn’t be necessary at all. There isn’t hardly any kind of human ugliness can live by itself forever. It can’t keep, it’s got to leap out on parade. Then they call me.
How wonderful, said my pa, the borrower.
Who sent you? I asked. I deny everything. It was her fault, when I was young. She ate floating bread. You weren’t there.
Here is the evidence by witness: you switched from an old horn, a bent one, to a new one even shriller and more bombastic. Is this the case? He put away his notes.
It is, said my mother. He resumed.
You can’t obscure this in mysticism. Your “floating bread.” When you were young. You were hardly a juvenile when you finished her.
Bread, long brown bread floated toward her face from out of the curtains, I swore.
Wonderful and sad, my pa spoke again. I should have known, so instantly feral and willing to attack the first wounded among us.
There will probably be a fine, which I might get reduced, since you two in your ignorant disgrace, have, I feel this deeply, been the salt of the earth, ignorant of this man’s troubles.
We are ignorant, said Pa. You can’t know.
The man recited a tale of another’s crime so vile and lethal they were relieved in the comparison. Such tears of innocence gathered in Mother’s eyes I could have smashed her. Now I seemed merely a squalid pile they could talk around.
There it is, that’s how they find your route and burrow right into your works. The ruin of your ambitions, your virtues, love’s persistent dream. The orange boxer bitch turns its butt to you, slinks off with your kin, the shocked traitors. Next the imposition of a monstrous fine all of them agree is most lenient. I would be ruined for years along with my father. He was so happy, Mother and he without hope, at last, after the niggling prospects, the ray sent back from the future now and then. Finally a tragic humiliation from which there was no recovery.
I never had even time to mourn her. They took it away.
Then I was cashiered by the pastor and priest both, because the old begging had crept back into my tone. The protestations of a swatted rooster, this tone, which drove some of their sheep, they swore, into the arms of atheist gloom.
Left with memories of the sea, but like a slug launched into low tide never to swell in my horn work again, oh no. They know you.
It hardly matters now what I have paid in coin of words, angry reader, or what I have paid in time and money until a few years ago my breakout, my wives and wealth, my long hard pistol of a car. One wife hardly ever left the car, as I pressed her further and further into relating every morsel, leave nothing out. Hearing enough descriptions of other men, I finally borrowed a personality for my own.
An altogether different tale. Rest assured however that no lush ecstasy, no minutes of sweet confusion, have ever come near the woman seated in the chair, that green shawl down on her shoulders, bare, and the long bun aloft, nearing her face. She was so startled as she prepared her mouth for it, wider and wider. After that, ruin and our haunted fellowship.
But I remember she was dazzled looking up in the curtains at the bald man’s approach through a raised single drape colored purple. She wore an amazed smile on her face suddenly as she complied.
After all, my life has been a slow and mistimed one, but it is good, good, I testify, even at the bottom of my melancholy. I dare you to argue with me, digusted counselors. You never had a joy nearly so fine.
Two Gone Over
I WAS IN NORTH DAKOTA AROUND THE SAC BASE IN MARCH. The wind blew hard across the beetfields and the tarmac, wherever it was. I had done my duty in Grand Forks and we talked in a bar. She and her girlfriend were both in cowboy boots. The woman I was interested in had very excellent calves. Her face was high cheekboned with huge eyes like china marbles. Her forehead was touched around by brown bangs that made my stomach ache. She was a Florida beauty, Tallahassee, just a slight quarter inch heavy with winter flesh, that’s all, a slight quarter inch.
I told her she was the one who broke my heart in high school and made me cry on my pillow. She was the type. Little Anthony and the Imperials sang about her. I loved Little Anthony because he could gasp so good, he wrung it all.
Later, when I was alone with her, she said she wasn’t really that type. She was a simple Southern girl, but her father was Satan. We were in those couples apartments near the SAC base. The apartment was similar to rooms I had down South when I was first a bachelor, divorced. But they were even smaller and poorer, with a feeling of transience, little attempt at decoration.
My home woman and I had become, I think, old friends more kindly than passionate. In fact she was still married although long separated. We had hung together in a vast common loneliness almost like love. I liked to see her onstage in a gown playing her flute in the orchestra, very well. She had a doctorate from Boston University, which I understand is something.