I heard the hack light a cigar behind me and scrape his chair. Buddy looked past my shoulder, then put his pack of cigarettes on the table with four books of matches.
“I better roll, babe,” he said. “I’ll bring some candy bars and magazines tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Become popular with your bunkies. But look, man, the cabin’s yours when you get out. None of this moving into town because you think you got to do something. Besides, the old man wants you to stay there.”
“When did he say this?”
“This morning.” He answered me in a matter-of-fact way, then looked at me with a new attention. “Why?”
“I just wondered. I thought I might have burned my welcome.” But it didn’t work.
His eyes studied mine for even the hint of some private relationship between his father and me, and I was probably not good in concealing it.
“Keep the butts and the matches,” he said. “You never did learn how to split them, did you?”
He put on his mackinaw and walked down the hall toward the front door of the courthouse, that square of brilliant natural light with the snow blowing behind it, and the trees along the street hung with ice, rattling and clicking in the wind, and the people in overcoats and scarfs, their shoes squeaking on the sidewalks while they walked toward homes and fireplaces and families. I put Buddy’s cigarettes, along with my own and the books of matches, into my denim shirt pocket and waited for the hack to put his hand around my arm for the walk upstairs.
The days passed slowly in the cell, with the endless card games and meaningless conversation and the constant hiss of the radiator. Beth visited me every afternoon, and I almost asked her to stop coming, because I wanted her so badly each time after she left. At night I lay on the bunk and tried not to think of being in bed with her, but when I drifted into sleep, my sexual heat embraced wild erotic dreams that made my loins ache for release. Then I would awake, my mattress damp with sweat, draw up my knees before me like an adolescent child suddenly beset with puberty, and debate the morality of masturbation.
I didn’t think it was going to be so hard to pull fifteen days. But after nine days I would have volunteered to pull thirty on a road gang to get away from my seven cell mates, their explosions into the toilet, their latent homosexuality (which they disguised as grab-assing), and finally a definite hum that was beginning in the center of my brain.
I noticed it at the end of the first week when I was sitting on my bunk, with my back against the wall, and staring at nothing in particular. Then I saw a plastic Benzedrex inhaler on the concrete floor, and the hum started like a tuning fork beginning to vibrate. It was like that dream you have as a child when you pick up something small and inconsequential off the ground, and suddenly it grows in your hand until it covers the whole earth, and you know you are into a nightmare that seems to have no origin.
Somebody in the cell had gotten hold of some inhalers and was chewing the cotton rings from inside, which was good for a high that would knock the head off King Kong. But for some reason my glance on that split-open plastic tube brought back all the listless hours in my cell at Angola and all the visions I had there about madness in myself and madness all over the world. My mother had killed herself and my sister Fran in the house fire, even though my father always pretended that it was an accident, and as I grew up, I always wondered if she had left some terrible seed in me. But in Korea I believed truly for the first time that I was all right, because I realized that insanity was not a matter of individual illness; it was abroad in all men, and its definition was a very relative matter. I even took a perverse pride in the fact that I knew the lieutenant was lying when he said we couldn’t take six gook prisoners back to the rear and we had to blow them all over a ditch. Four members of the patrol did it and enjoyed it, but they never admitted later that it was anything but necessary.
Even my father had the same strange dualism about war and people at their worst in the middle of an inferno, and their failure to recognize it later for what it was. He went all the way across France in the Great War, as he called it, a seventeen-year-old marine who would be hit twice and gassed once before his next birthday. But he refused to talk about it in even the most vague or general way. I often wondered what awful thing he carried back with him from France, something that must have lain inside him like a piece of rusted barbed wire.
But he was working an oil job at Texas City when it blew up in 1947 and killed over five hundred people, many of them roughnecks whom he had known for years. A ship carrying fertilizer was burning out in the harbor, and while people watched from the docks and a tug tried to pull it out to the Gulf, the fire dripped into the hold and then the ship exploded in a mushroom flame that rained onto the refineries and chemical plants along the shore. The town went up almost at once—the gas storage tanks, the derricks, the entire Mont-santo plant—and blew out store windows as far away as Houston. The men caught in the oil field, where blown wellheads fired geysers of flame into the sky under thousands of pounds of pressure, were burned with heat so great that their ashes or even their scorched bones couldn’t be separated from the debris.
A year later my father and I were cane fishing for bream in some tanks on a stretch of bald prairie about six miles from Texas City, and we walked around a huge, scalloped hole in the earth where a sheet of twisted boiler plate, the size of a garage door, had spun out of the sky like a stray, ugly monument to all that agony back there in the flames. The hole had filled partially with water, tadpoles hovered under the lip of the rusted metal, and salt grass had begun to grow down the eroded banks.
My father rolled a cigarette from his package of Virginia Extra and looked out toward a windmill ginning in the breeze off the Gulf.
“I lost some of the best friends I ever had in that thing, Son,” he said. “There wasn’t any reason for it, either. They could have gotten that fertilizer ship out of there or shut them rigs down and taken everybody out. Those boys didn’t have to die.”
So the madness in war was an area that was sacrosanct, not even to be recognized, and there was no correlation between that and the death of your best friends because of corporate stupidity.
But I lost my point, with that description of the hum in my head back in Angola, that distant echo of a bugle that went even farther back to a hole in Korea. The Benzedrex inhaler had conjured up my old cell in the Block, on a languid Louisiana summer afternoon, with the humidity damp on the walls and the bars, and my cell mate W. J. Posey across from me, wiping the sweat off his naked, tattooed body with a washcloth. We were both stoned on Benzedrex and the paregoric that he had stolen from the infirmary.
“So you killed the son of a bitch,” W. J. said. “A punk like that has it coming. You iced people in Korea that didn’t do nothing to you.”
“He broke the shank off in him when he went down. He bled on the bandstand like an elephant.”
“You’re breaking my knob off. You got two years. Take another drag on ole Sneaky Pete.”
I got out of jail on Tuesday. Buddy was waiting for me at the possessions desk with a crazy grin on his face.
“How did you know what time I was coming out?” I said.
“They always flush you wineheads out about ten in the morning.”
I had hoped Beth would be there, and he must have seen it in my face.
“She couldn’t leave the house,” he said. “Both of the kids swoll up with mumps yesterday.”
“Are you putting me on?” I picked up the brown envelope with my belt, shoestrings, and wallet inside.
“I know you never had them, Zeno. I wouldn’t put you on like that.”
Damn, I thought.
“Figure it this way,” he said. “You could have gone over there one day earlier and had your rocks swell up like a pair of basketballs.”
The woman behind the desk looked up with her mouth open.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“There yo
u go, babe. Let’s boogie on down the street, because your daddy is about to get into a gig again.”
We walked outside into the cold, sunlit day, and the sharp air cut into my lungs. The green trees on the mountains were heavy with snow, and the sky was so clear and deeply blue that I thought I would become lost in it.
“Let’s walk to this place,” Buddy said. “My tires are so bald you can see the air showing through. I didn’t park the car at that angle. It slid sideways through the intersection.”
“What’s this gig?”
“I thought I might clean up my act and get back in the business. A guy I know runs this college joint up in the next block, and he wants to try a piano player to bring in all those fraternity cats and their sweet young girls. Somebody with class, such as myself. Someone to keep them plugged into magic sounds so they won’t bust up the place every night and puke all over his crapper.”
“That sounds good, man.”
“Well, he’s not real sure about me. Thinks I’m crazy. Undependable. I might show up with a hype hanging out of my forehead. Anyway, he asked me to come down this morning and play a few because his wife will be there, and she knows music. Now dig this, man. I used to know her in high school when she was in the band, and she couldn’t tell the difference between a C chord and a snare drum. She was so awful that the bandleader put the tubas in front of her to blow her back into the wall. She used to wear Oxford therapeutic shoes and these glasses that looked like they were made out of the bottoms of Coke bottles. She also had gas all the time. Every two minutes you could hear her burping through her alto sax.”
I was shaking my head and laughing.
“Zeno, you don’t believe anything anybody tells you,” he said.
“Because nobody in the world ever had experiences or knew people like these.”
“All right, you’ll see, partner. Just be prepared to meet humanity’s answer to the goldfish.”
I never did know why Buddy boozed and doped. He could get high in minutes on just himself.
The bar was a beer-and-pizza place with checker-cloth table covers and rows of fraternity steins on the shelves. The contraceptive machine in the men’s room had long since been destroyed, and young, virile Americans had punched out big, ragged holes in the fiberboard partitions. I sat at the bar and had a sandwich and a beer while Buddy played the piano for the owner and his wife, who looked exactly as Buddy had described her. (This is why I could never tell whether he was lying, fantasizing, or telling the truth.) She stared at him a few moments with those huge orbs of color behind her glasses, then began washing glasses in a tin sink.
I watched Buddy play. I had forgotten how really good he was. He started out with “I Found a New Baby,” and he played it the way Mel Powell used to at the Lighthouse in California: a slow, delicate, almost conventional entrance into the melody, then building, the bass growing louder, his right hand working on a fine counterpoint, and finally he was way inside himself and all the wild sounds around him. He didn’t even look the same when he played. A strange physical transformation took over him, the kind you see in people who are always partly out of cadence with the rest of the world until they do the one thing that they’re good at. As I looked at him, with his shoulders bent, his arms working, the eyes flat and withdrawn, I would have never made him for the Buddy I knew the rest of the time.
Later the owner bought us a beer and told Buddy to come to work the next night. He wanted to hide it, but I could see he was truly happy. He hadn’t worked as a musician since he went to jail, and that was six years ago.
“Let’s make it,” I said.
“One more beer. I have to ease the effect of joining the work force again. It really blows my self-image.”
“One, damn it, and that’s it. I’m not getting into any more of your bloody capers.”
“Oo, oo, oo, oo,” he said, his face in a feminine pout. “Dig who’s coming on about capers. The mad fire bomber of Missoula.”
“Hey, man,” I said, hoarsely.
“Anyway, I wanted to tell you this story, since it just rolled into my gourd while I was into that 1950 Lighthouse shot. I never told you about the Legend of the Gigantic Fart, did I?”
“Put the beer in a paper bag. Let’s get it on the road.”
“No, man, this story became a legend and is still told in the high schools around the county. You see, it was at the junior prom, a very big deal with hoop dresses and everybody drinking sloe gin and R.C. Cola outside in the cars. Now, this is strictly a class occasion if you live in a shitkicker town. Anyway, we’d been slopping down the beer all afternoon and eating pinto-bean salad and these greasy fried fish before we got to the dance. So it was the third number, and I took Betty Hoggenback out on the floor and was doing wonderful, tilting her back like Fred Astaire doing Ginger Rogers. Then I felt this wet fart start to grow inside me. It was like a brown rat trying to get outside. I tried to leak it off one shot at a time and keep dancing away from it, but I must have left a cloud behind that would take the varnish off the gym floor. Then one guy says, ‘Man, I don’t believe it!’ People were walking off the floor, holding their noses and saying, Tew, who cut it?’ Then the saxophone player on the bandstand threw up into the piano. Later, guys were shaking my hand and buying me drinks, and a guy on the varsity came up and said that was the greatest fart he’d ever seen. It destroyed the whole prom. The saxophone player had urp all over his summer tux, and they must have had to burn the smell out of that piano with a blowtorch.”
Buddy was laughing so hard at his own story that tears ran down his cheeks. He caught his breath, drank out of the beer glass, then started laughing again. The woman behind the bar was looking at him as though a lunatic had just walked into the normalcy of her life.
We drove back to the ranch, and later in the afternoon I walked up the gravel road to the general store on the blacktop and used the pay phone to call Beth. I told her that I had never had the mumps and couldn’t come to the house because I didn’t feel like becoming sterile; then I waited with my hand tight on the receiver during a long, heart-beating pause. She said she didn’t have anyone to stay with the boys and couldn’t leave them for any period of time anyway, and that was the end of that. So that meant another two weeks on the shelf, I thought, as I walked back down the road in the cold air between the rows of pine trees.
During the next week I helped Mr. Riordan feed the birds in the aviary and start work on a new barn, but I couldn’t go to sleep at night, even though I was physically exhausted, until I had sat at the kitchen table alone for two hours with a botde of Jim Beam. I was back with the band on the weekend, and one night I went into town with Buddy to the pizza place and called Beth again in a beer fog, hoping that she would say, Yes yes yes. Check into the Florence. I’ll be there in a few minutes. However, like most drunken wishes, it didn’t have much to do with reality. I liked to hear Buddy play, but I couldn’t sit long in the middle of that college crowd.
I don’t know why they bothered me. It wasn’t their loud and bullish behavior that came after three beers, or even their curiosity about my foreign presence, which was like the appearance of a dinosaur among them. They reached down and touched something else in me that I couldn’t articulate. Maybe it was just the fact that they were young and still standing on first base with all the confidence and expectation of stealing second. There was no such thing as a clock in the universe, and all of them knew that they would never die. I walked down the street to the Oxford in the light snow and sat on one of the high wood chairs in the side room and watched the strange collection of late-night characters play cards until Buddy got off.
Monday afternoon we caught part of a storm that blew over the mountains from Idaho, and my hands got so cold hammering nails into the side of the barn that I could hardly feel the blow when I missed once and came down on my thumb. My ears felt like iron inside the hood of my coat, and when the light started to fail, I waited for Mr. Riordan to stick his hammer through the loop of his overall
s; but instead he kicked a bunch of scrap boards into a pile, poured gasoline over it, paused long enough to relight his cigarette in his cupped hands, and dropped the match into the pile. We finished the side frame in the light of the fire, which flared into a cone of flame and then flattened into a white circle of heat each time the wind sucked under the boards.
When we got back to the cabin, Buddy took off his clothes, dropped them on the floor, and turned the hot water on in the tin shower just long enough to bring the feeling back into his body. He stood naked by the wood stove and dried himself with a towel. His ribs drew tight against his sides each time he breathed. There was a tattoo of a pair of dice showing a six and a five inside one thigh.
“Wow, I’m tired,” he said, rubbing the towel into his face and hair. “And I’m late, and my fingers feel like balloons, and I didn’t press a shirt this morning, and I don’t feel like making that gig, Zeno.”
“Do it,” I said. I sat at the table, with my wet clothes dripping on the floor and a damp cigarette in my fingers. I had poured a glass of neat whiskey, but I hadn’t had the strength yet to pick it up.
“That’s very cool. While I entertain these college cats, you’ll be sitting home by the fire digging on some whiskey dream about southern freight trains. So I have a suggestion. Why don’t you zip on my Uncle Zeno suit and try filling in for me. If you think playing for a bunch of shitkickers is a zoo scene, do a shot with the junior lettermen that ask you to play ‘Happy Birthday’ for a chick they’re going to assault in the backseat that night.”
“Go to work, Buddy.”
He went into his bedroom and came back with his suit on the hanger, his underwear, and the soiled shirt that he had worn last night. He dressed by the stove, his body thin and yellow in the light of the electric bulb overhead. I took a drink out of the whiskey, and I felt the first warmth come back into my lungs.
“Where did you get that tattoo?” I said.