WILLIE WOLFE — Cujo
The exact meaning of those sprawling urban stucco barrens evaded him. Not that he’d been looking for it. But what did it all mean, the ugliness they’d wrapped themselves in, the beaten cars and shabby houses and dingy streets? He saw boys on the corner carrying golf clubs, black boys, a little younger than he was, never been near a golf course in their lives. He saw two men drive up to a house and furtively unload unopened cases of Viva paper towels and bring them inside, then come out on the tiny porch laughing when the chore was done. He saw two used condoms in the gutter and a third that had been inflated and a stylized girl’s face drawn on it with lipstick. It was like observing something a million miles or years distant.
Tania said that what they needed was to break out the Polaroid Pronto and take plenty of clear, crisp SX-70 pictures. Why? So he could look twice at everything, once to live it and again to try to understand, she said.
Typically for her, it was just apolitical enough to make perfect sense while seeming like a non sequitur.
You took the picture, you listened to the motor whine as it ejected the print, and then you held it by the one-inch border at the bottom, shaking it to get it to develop faster. She’d demonstrated, waving dry a snapshot of a grinning Cujo who looked just a little too much like Willie Wolfe, the all-American boy.
It was also apolitical enough to enrage Cinque, who only liked to use the camera these days to take heroic pictures of their army, the seven-headed Naga banner pinned to the wall behind them.
General Gelina cut his hair that afternoon. Gelina breached security to remove the surveillance drapes from the window over the sink and let a little daylight in. A towel was draped over his shoulders, and he sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, watching his damp hair fall to the cracked linoleum.
It was quiet that day, with Teko, Yolanda, and Tania gone. He wanted to talk about Tania but didn’t know how to go about it. He shifted restlessly. There were other things to talk about, but he didn’t want to talk about them. The arrow of his consciousness flew directly to her.
Gelina understood, he thought. He and she and Tania were what he once would have thought of as “friends,” though the bourgeois connotations of the term could be quite simply mind-boggling, as could be the bourgeois connotations of almost anything. He had never realized how hard it was just to live.
Anyway, Gelina was a comrade, a very sympathetic and intuitive comrade, and as she snipped his hair, cutting away the remains of the bright red dye job that had so bothered Tania, guiding his head into position with gently prodding fingers, she gradually brought the conversation around to where he wanted it.
“I think your comrades will appreciate your new look,” she said.
“One comrade,” said Cujo.
From behind him he could hear Gelina sharply expelling breath through her nose, an understanding laugh.
“Sometimes a pretty effective costume isn’t what you’d call the most suitable,” she said, holding out a clipped lock of dyed hair for their scrutiny. “In acting, you learn how to get past it, get outside the sense of yourself to play a role you couldn’t ordinarily identify with.”
“As a guerrilla I could definitely appreciate the costume.” Cujo nodded as Gelina paused, scissors upraised, allowing him his gesture. “But as a man …” Cujo let the sentence hang.
Gelina began cutting hair again. “Hasn’t anyone been feeling comradely toward you lately?” She sounded amused.
“Well …”
“Sometimes some people feel more comradely than others,” she continued. “I see you gave Tania that little stone monkey face, the whatchamacallit. It’s cute.”
Cujo blushed. “The Olmec monkey. It’s Mexican.”
And Gelina very exaggeratedly put her hand to one side of her mouth, as if to shield her speech from eavesdroppers, and said in a stage whisper, “Sometimes when the heart speaks, you gotta listen. The bourgeois aren’t wrong about everything, you know.”
Cujo nodded.
“Some people shouldn’t talk,” she said.
“Like Gabi and Zoya and all their dykey dramatics. I mean, come on, what, is this a soap opera?” she said.
“Like you-know-who and you-know-who whose last name rhymes with Shepard, give me a break. It’s like The Honeymooners. You remember The Honeymooners?” she said.
Cujo agreed. “Yeah, Tania was saying, like, this is a big problem.”
“Oh, I can see how it would be for her. I really relate. I’m so glad I’m not on their team. Anyway.”
Gelina dipped a comb in a basin of water and ran it through Cujo’s freshly cut hair. Gradually, over the last few weeks, the awkward postadolescent had repossessed him. First he’d ditched the beret, then the wispy experiments with Ché-like facial hair. Now he sat, slunched forward, clean-cut and shorn, a silly smirk on his smooth face.
“All finished, hon.”
After the haircut Cin called Gelina to bed, and Cujo stayed sitting on the kitchen floor because he didn’t feel like watching them fuck. He felt lonely and blue and wanted Tania to come home so he could surprise her with his new hair. He dozed off.
It was about six o’clock in the evening when there came a knock at the door of the house on Eighty-fourth Street. A pretty odd thing to be happening at a secret hideout, thought Cujo, as he came awake. The phrase, secret hideout, just appeared in his thoughts from out of the past, the days when he was Willie Wolfe; from out of backyard stands of elms and sycamores and maples and other craggy trees of the Northeast, kids in striped tees and jeans and U.S. Keds scrabbling through, heading for some crude structure of plywood and two-by-fours, secret doings under the high armadas of furrowed cumulus drifting through a honed October sky and the wind shaking leaves from the trees, the explorations of that after-school wilderness ca 1963 fueled by Tang and Twinkies, Ovaltine and Oreos, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.
Wait a second. Huh? He was still waking up.
Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil were well-known as primary components of homemade explosives. The thought excited him, the thought of a bomb factory, another piquant phrase.
A knocking, an insistent knocking on the door in this tough neighborhood, where it paid to be what was the word? Reticent. Circumspect. His lips formed the name: Tania.
More of a thudding, now, the ham of an impatient fist striking the door: not Tania.
Back when Cujo was Willie Wolfe, when he was falling out of trees and kissing Amy Alderson on her sun porch and serving as sports editor for the Mount Hermon Clarion and swimming varsity, his dad, Skip, was the one who strode to the door in response to the chimes, brimming with authority. Young Willie had watched this banal act about a thousand times, slumped on the sofa or wherever he happened to be when it came to pass that Sally Brooks arrived to collect for the Shriners or Santo the gardener needed to get into the basement or little Kerry Sherman came around with her Girl Scout cookies and had never thought twice about it. And now here he was, Cassandra’s “my brother the Communist,” and was he supposed to draw his gun and take cover or answer the knock?
But it was a safe house and he was not Cassandra’s weird little brother anymore; now he was a revolutionary, committed, divested of emotional baggage and material wealth. But as soon as Cujo began thinking of his dad, his family, the jig was up; he was a basket case, meditating deeply on a loss that was politically incorrect to mourn and that marked a definite reduction of himself.