For better or worse, the place he derived from. Precisely what made him smile fascinated him. He seemed to have passed through some barrier into an earlier and simpler time, and at the same time to have exposed himself to feelings that he had thought completely outgrown. Was this a worse place to grow up in than some more worldly city? Didn’t Salt Lake, once, save him, or let him save himself? Would delight have been any more delightful, or friendship any warmer, or young love any more delirious, or unhappiness any bleaker, or the terror and awe of adolescence any more potent, in another town and another society?
He had not come back, consciously, to look up the past. Yet if you wanted to hunt the yeti, you went where he lived. If you came to find young Bruce Mason, and more and more that seemed to be what he was doing, you looked where he had been seen.
And found him, if you went clear back to the beginning, rat-eyed and watchful in some corner, or gnawing his own trapped limbs in his agony to escape. In the Sky Room murmuring with voices and the discreet sounds of service, while dusk came in the west windows and the canyon breeze freshened the conditioned air, Mason sat abstractedly eating, remembering a day during his first months in this town.
4
When his Latin teacher said she had always wanted a scale model of a Roman castra so that pupils reading Caesar’s Gallic Wars could see exactly how the legions built their defenses, of course Bruce volunteered. He was always volunteering. The year was 1922, he was thirteen years old. Around East High School he drew two kinds of attention, one kind from teachers and another from boys, especially the big boys and most especially the stupid ones. He would have given a good deal to be big and stupid so that he, too, could sneer at his little peaked face focused on the teachers ready to cry answers, and his little skinny arm flapping at every call to special duty.
“A castra? I’ll make one!” he said. “I know a slough where there’s good clay. I’ll get some tonight after school.”
“Now that, Bruce,” said Miss Van Vliet, “is the spirit I like to see.”
They lived then on Seventh East, across from Liberty Park. The slough was clear down on Seventeenth South below Fifth East, where streets began to fade out into big truck gardens with shanties and staked-out goats. A good sixteen blocks, more than two miles, added to his walk home. A month before, he had made another volunteering expedition out there to get hydras and paramecia and amoebas for his zoology teacher, but this trip, in late November, was not quite the sunny autumn holiday the other had been. By the time he was laying his books on dry ground at the edge of the slough, the afternoon was already late and blue. The wind went dryly through tules and yellow grass, and the sky over the mountains was the color of iron.
It was too cold to take off his shoes and wade. He had to hop from hummock to hummock until he found a place wet enough to dig in. The clay lay under the sod like icy blue grease; it numbed him to the wrists as he filled his lunch pail. He saw a mouse dart through the reeds, and the sad cry of a marsh hawk coasting over made him feel little and alone, and wish that he had brought someone along. He had to remind himself that though it was less fun to do things alone, there was more distinction in it that way. Anyway, who would have come?
The slimy clay stuck like paint to his hands, and it was impossible to get to open water where he could wash. He wiped them as well as he could on the grass, but he had a hard time, working with wrists and elbows and the very tips of his fingers, trying to get his books tucked down inside his belt without smearing them and his clothes with mud.
His way home led across fields and down wide streets with many vacant lots, some of them planted to gardens now gone by. As he walked, the day grew bluer and colder, the wind cut his face, his hand carrying the heavy lunch pail stiffened into an iron hook. Every time he shifted the pail from hand to hand he had to stick out his stomach hard to keep the books from sliding down inside his corduroy knickers. If they had slipped clear down he wouldn’t have dared, with those hands, to get them out.
The heroic and indispensable feeling he had started with, the spirit that Miss Van Vliet liked to see, had leaked away. He was not a hero. He was thin and pale, weak, stick-armed, a baby. And no matter how he hawked and shuffled, no matter how many times he cleared his nose through his mouth, a clammy and elastic gob began to droop lower and lower on his upper lip.
His muddy claws couldn’t have handled a handkerchief if he had owned one. They couldn’t have got it out of his pocket. Working his face against the sting and stiffness of the wind, holding his stomach pouted out against books and belt, miserably snuffling and spitting, he went crabwise down a road, across a corner shortcut, past a yard where a dog leaped out roaring. At last he came to the big cabbage field, still unharvested, that spread over considerable ground below the Surplus Canal along Thirteenth South; and passed it with his face sideward to the wind so that the cabbages made changing ranks and then diagonals and then new ranks down the gray field; and finally, his shoulder blades aching and his arms dead and his hands numb and bloodless under the mud, he made it through the sagging picket fence and up onto his gingerbread-framed front porch.
There was a car in the drive. There often was. He was too far gone to pay it any attention. The books were held by one slipping corner, the clot sagged frantically under his nose. It was like a nightmare in which he had to get to some special place before whatever was behind him made its grab. This time he made it to the door, fell against the jamb, and braced the books there. Some rule would be violated, something would happen bad, if he set the pail of mud down before he was clear inside. He hung on to it, braced against the jamb, and pressed his frozen thumb on the bell.
Down each side of the door, relics of some time when this had been a fairly pretentious house, went a panel of leaded panes of glass of many colors. Through a violet one just level with his eyes was a neat bullet hole. Nobody knew how it had come there. It hinted of old crimes, feuds, jealous lovers, better days. Sometimes, inside the hall, he had felt through it a thin cold secret draft like the stream of air a dentist squirts into a cavity to dry it out before he fills it. Now he put his tongue to the bullet hole, but there was no draft, only cold glass. He remembered that the doorbell hadn’t worked since last week, and raised his dirty fist and pounded. Instantly such pain went through his frozen knuckles that he moaned in fury and kicked the door.
The books slid down inside his pant leg. The clot dropped a dangerous eighth of an inch on his lip. Then his father opened the door.
He was very annoyed. “Have you lost the use of your hands?” he said.
Desolately snuffling, tilted into agonies by the contrary strains of the heavy pail in his hand and the heavy books in his pants, Bruce whined, “I was all muddy!”
His father looked him over in silence. His look was like a hand in the scruff of Bruce’s neck. Then he said, “What’s the matter with your handkerchief?”
He was extraordinarily fussy about things like that. A runny nose or somebody who smacked at the table or the sight of somebody’s dirty fingernails could drive him half wild. And Bruce had gone off to school again without a handkerchief. He said once more, “I’m all mud!”
Somehow he sidled past into the hall, wonderfully warm with the dry breath from the register. But he didn’t dare set down the pail or relax, so long as he was being looked at that way. “Jesus Christ,” his father said finally. “Thirteen years old and running around with a lamb’s leg under your nose, making mud pies.”
That stung. Bruce whirled around and howled, “I was not! I’m supposed to make a castra.”
“Oh you are,” his father said. But he was stopped for the moment. Bruce knew he hadn’t the slightest idea what a castra was, and wasn’t going to ask and expose his ignorance. He knew things that his father had never heard of: that was a sweet fierce pleasure.
In the parlor somebody had started to play Bruce’s new Victrola record, a piece called “Nobody Lied,” with a big slap-tongue baritone sax solo embedded in it. The clot drooped
, and he dragged at it wetly, his nose stuffed shut with the warmth of the hall. His father’s lips turned inside out. He gave Bruce a push on the shoulder. “Go get yourself cleaned up, and stay out of the front room. There’s company.”
He didn’t need to say so. Company meant there were people in there buying drinks. That was what they were, a speakeasy. Practically all his life they had been something like that, something shameful and illegal and not to be spoken of.
He had no inclination to go into the parlor, but he said to himself that he wished the damned company would quit wearing out his record. He started for the kitchen, spraddling because of the books in his pants, and his father said after him, “For God’s sake, have you messed your pants, too?”
That really made him bawl. He started yelling, “No! My books slipped down, and I couldn’t …” But his father cut him off with one furious motion of his hand. The kitchen door opened and his mother, with an instant cry, stooped to help him. He had finally made it home. Behind him, as the parlor door opened and closed, he heard his father saying something humorous to the company.
“Great day!” his mother said. “You’ve got yourself tied hand and foot. What on earth!”
She wiped his nose. She pried the pail out of his frozen fingers. She slid his belt buckle open and reached down and got the books. Then she stood him at the sink and ran warm water on his hands until they stung and tingled and grew clean and red, while he snarled and complained. Last she rubbed lotion into the bleeding cracks in his knuckles and put him at the kitchen table and made him a cup of cocoa.
All he would tell her when she asked what he had been doing and why his lunch pail was full of mud was that his Latin teacher wanted him to make a castra. What was a castra? she wanted to know, and he flew out at her bitterly. It was a thing for school, a thing the legions built, what did she suppose? Finally she found out that it was something he was going to build with clay on some sort of board base, and gave him an old breadboard to build it on. Before supper he spent an intent hour, sitting stocking-footed soaking up the warmth pouring from the kitchen register, drawing a castra to scale on the clean bleached wood.
Life in that house was full of tensions. For one thing, they were afraid of the law, and were constantly poised to move, though a move meant losing customers who might never find them again. For another, Bruce’s mother was the wrong woman to be the wife of a man who ran a speakeasy. She had been brought up in a stiff Lutheran family, and without being at all religious, she had a yearning belief in honesty, law, fairness, respectability, and the need for self-respect. When Bruce looked around him and envied the home life of students he vaguely knew, he was envious mainly for himself, but also in part for his mother. She would have loved being part of some friendly town or neighborhood, she would have been immensely thankful to have friends. When company came, she stayed in the kitchen. If the party in the parlor got loud, she sat wincing as if she had cramps, and threw looks at Bruce, with grimaces and jerky movements of her shoulders. She was a humble, decent woman married to a boomer. All it ever took to remind Bruce of how abused he was, was to catch sight of her face when she didn’t know anyone was looking.
His father was a perfectionist, he had standards, he aspired to run a classy and genteel joint. Even in the old tin-wainscoted, Congoleum-floored houses they rented, he went around with a towel on his arm, always flicking and dusting, cranking the Victrola, making conversation, setting up a free one for good spenders. When, as sometimes happened, he needed help, he expected his wife and son to hop.
Bruce escaped him all day at school. His brother Chet escaped completely, for as a halfback on the high school football team he was living at the team’s training camp on the coach’s farm in Murray. Lacking so thorough an escape, Bruce relied on homework. He saw to it that he had loads of it. At home he was not a volunteer, and his mother abetted him, for though they never spoke openly about it, they were in mutinous league against their life.
That night new customers came in after six. His father took a plate into the dining room, which could be shut off by sliding doors from the parlor but from which he could hear the customers if they wanted anything. Bruce and his mother sat in the kitchen. Once, coming in for hot water to make a toddy, his father stopped in the doorway to talk for a moment. He parted his hair in the middle and slicked it down like some old-time German bartender with a sense of vocation. As he stood flicking his towel, his eyes drifted over to the table where the breadboard lay with its walls and ditch half molded and its wad of blue clay in the middle. His glance came back across Bruce’s like saw teeth across a nail. Through the register, sounding plain but far away, there was a dark, remote throbbing, the last beats of the slap-tongue sax, and the voice started chanting, with what seemed inappropriate vivacity,
Nobody lied when they said I cried over you.
Nobody lied when they said that I ’most died over you
Got so blue I don’t know what to dooooo.
All my life before me looks so dreary and so black
I think I’ll choose the river and I’ll never come back …
“Don’t you want some pie?” Brace’s mother said.
“I’ll get it later,” his father said, and took the teakettle and left.
After supper Bruce went straight back to the castra. He wanted to take it to school with him in the morning and dazzle Miss Van Vliet with the speed of his accomplishment, and force reluctant admiration from the big and stupid, and set the girls to twittering. One girl in that class thought he had a roguish face—someone had told him. The knowledge was like a secret twenty-dollar gold piece in a deep pocket that no one knew of.
Carefully he went on smoothing the clay into walls, gates, rows of little tents. He would make such a castra as Caesar and all his legions had never thrown up in all the plains and mountains of Gaul—roguish Bruce Mason, that bright little boy, with the spirit the teachers liked to see.
Behind him his mother tipped the coal scuttle into the range. From the sound, he knew there was nothing in it but dust and papers, but he did not rise to get her a new bucket of coal. He bent his head and worked on in great absorption while she went past him and the door let a cold draft across his feet and closed again, while the returning scuttle knocked against the door and then went down solidly on the asbestos stove mat. Later there was a noise of dishes in the pan, the smell of soap and steam. Nothing disturbed him. Eventually she stood behind him and he heard the squeak of a towel on china.
“Oh!” she said, pleased. “It’s a little fort!”
“It’s a castra,” he said in scorn. “A Roman camp.”
About seven-thirty his father came in again. “Have your pie now,” Bruce’s mother said. “I’ve kept it warm. Who’s in there?”
He took the slab of pie in his clean, round-nailed hand. “Just Lew McReady and his lady friend, now.”
“His lady friend. One week he’s here with his wife, and the next with his lady friend. Which one, that nurse?”
“Yeah.”
“I wonder if she knows he’s got children seventeen years old?”
“Oh, Lew’s all right. He just likes a change.”
He was trying to kid her, but she would not be kidded. Glancing up under his brows, Bruce saw her unbelieving look. “What a life we lead,” she said. “What friends we have.”
“If you can’t tell the difference between a friend and a customer you don’t know which side your bread’s buttered on.”
“Maybe that’s the trouble. All we have is customers.”
“If we’re starting on that again,” he said, “I’m going back in the dining room and read the Post.”
With a push of the shoulder he was gone from the doorway. Bruce’s mother smiled at him bleakly. He made no response—went on smoothing with the back of a paring knife the triangular bits of clay that served as tents. Their wrangling was not his concern. He did not live in that house. He lived at school, where teachers lighted up when he came around and girls th
ought he had a roguish face. In this country inhabited by hostile barbarians he erected his defenses and mounted guard.
“It’s beginning to look real good,” his mother said after five minutes of clock-ticking, stove-ticking, tap-dripping silence. “You do a nice neat job of things.”
Praise made him businesslike. “I wish I had a little eagle.”
“A what?”
“An eagle. Legion standards had eagles on them. In camp they planted the standard in front of the commander’s tent.”
“I guess … I don’t quite know what a standard is,” she said.
He didn’t bother to answer.
For a while she read a magazine at the other table. Bruce had not heard any noise, either from his father or from the company in the parlor, for some time. The radiator puffed its warm breath against his legs, the dust puppies fluttered in its grill, the tin pipes sighed and popped.
“I’ve got a pin shaped like a bird,” his mother said. “Would that help you? Maybe you could fasten it onto this—standard—some way.”
She bothered him, trying to horn in on this thing she didn’t even understand. On the other hand, maybe he could use the pin. He leaned back. “Let’s see it.”
“We’ll have to wait till they go, in there. It’s in my sewing basket.”
“I think they’re gone.”
“I haven’t heard the door.”
“They’re gone. I’d hear them through the register.”
He was already up, skating on stocking feet across the slick linoleum. “Well, I’ll have to find it for you,” she said. “You’d never know where.”
Down the darkish hall, lighted only by a high dim bulb that brought a shine out of the newel post and tangled in the shadows of the coatrack, he stroked with skating strides, made a detour to pass his hand across the cold stream of air at the bullet hole, and slid up to the half-open parlor door.