“Didn’t know you were married, Lightcap.”
“I’m not. But I was.”
“No kidding. Seriously?”
“Not seriously. But legally. She left a month ago.”
“Sorry to hear that. Does she write?”
“I get these documents from deputy sheriffs. Subpoenas and such.”
“Don’t let it get you down. Every man has to go through three or four wholesome divorces before he finds the right woman. Old story in the Park Service. Remote duty stations. Hazardous work. Marriage is largely a matter of trial and error.”
“Or the other way around.” Henry dropped a plate on the tiled floor. The plate bounced once and rolled away into the corner. They ignored it. Tupperware. Henry took another hearty gulp from his glass to steady his nerves.
The superintendent did the same. “Well, I hope you have a happy divorce,” he said.
“All happy divorces are the same,” Henry said. “But unhappy divorces are unhappy each in a different way.”
“True. It’s an old story in the Park Service. Remote duty stations. Isolation. Hazardous rescue operations. Low pay. But we survive.”
“If you live that long.”
“Right.”
“The important thing, I think,” said Henry, “is to avoid succumbing to cynicism—to that weary resignation which passes, in the decadent West, for wisdom and wit.”
“Exactly what I always say, Lightcap. Sort of. I like the way you put it.”
They returned to the “living” room, full of dead objects: the velvet painting, the head of a bighorn sheep mounted on the wall above the fireplace, the closed and locked spinet piano, the foldout sofa and reclining chairs covered with genuine Leatherette, the shampooed orange shag rug of 100 percent virgin polyester. And so what? thought Henry. So it’s cheap, ugly, strictly functional, what of it? We live in a pragmatic socioeconomic system. Charles Peirce, John Dewey, William James got us here. It’s tough but it’s fair and if you don’t like it see the chaplain, get your t.s. card punched. (Eliot? No; tough shit.) They continued their discussion of employment opportunities in the park system and other aspects of life in general until the bottle was empty and no replacement magically appeared.
Taking the hint, Henry rose from his chair—the vinyl clung to the back of his moist shirt, releasing him with a lingering polymeric kiss—and shook hands with Gibbsie, thanking him for the great dinner and the frank exchange of views.
“Nothing, nothing,” said the super. “I always like to get to know a new man his first week on the job. Especially an intellectual type like you, Lightcap, we don’t get many of them here in Alkali County. Glad to have you aboard.”
Henry stumbled forth into the dark. The super followed, kind of, switching on the front porch light but not immediately.
Henry rose to his knees at the foot of the steps.
“You all right?”
“Oh yes sir, yes sir.” He stood up fairly straight, brushing the dust and weed seeds from his pants. He peered around doubtfully for his Park Service vehicle, located it, took a bearing. “Thanks again, Gibbs.” He lurched toward the pickup truck, climbed in, raced the engine to show that all was well, and proceeded forward in first gear into the night, slowly and carefully. The truck blundered through what felt and sounded like a wall of rocks, climbed beyond and reached the comparative ease of a paved street that led to the road. Henry shifted into higher, finer gears, switched on the headlights and chugged north on the highway. Twenty miles to go before he reached the turnoff, the dirt road that led east for ten miles into the rocks, the desert, the little housetrailer that would be his home for the next six months.
Henry felt he was doing pretty good, considering the alligators that paddled back and forth across the boghole of his brain. And despite the fact that one headlight seemed out of order. Rumbling forward at a safe and sane 55-60 mph, he passed the sign that declared OPEN RANGE. He knew that sign: ten miles to go to the junction. On cue, a cow and calf emerged from the shadows of the junipers on his left and ambled directly into his path.
Henry veered sharply to the right—no chance for a braking stop—and around the cattle, then saw the concrete abutment of a bridge looming ahead. He jerked the truck to his left, moving too fast for stability, and the machine rolled on its side, sliding like a base runner into the cement wall. His bags of groceries, his case of Blatz beer (on sale, cheap) and his body himself hurtled to one side of the cab then the other, upside down. He shut his eyes, felt a rough blow on his shoulder and everything came to a halt.
The wheel remained clutched in his hands. The engine was still running and the one headlight still beaming. He thought of gasoline and fire and turned off the motor. He thought of police, publicity, and switched off the light. All was quiet. A fog of dust floated through the open window above, through the broken windshield before him.
He waited for a time, afraid to move, of discovering that he was dead. But felt no pain, only shock and the taste of disaster: Lightcap—you blew it again. The best job you ever had and you’ve blown it. Driving while drunk, wrecking a government truck your first week on the job.
When nothing seemed to be happening, he extended his limbs, cautiously—all in working order. No muscles torn, no bones shattered. He heard, in the dark, the trickling of liquids, and felt about his body for open wounds. Hard to locate. Smelled the fragrance of beer, of bourbon, and realized he’d smashed up some of the next two weeks’ supply of potables. Better get out of here before the investigation commences. He opened the door on the driver’s side, climbed up and out, felt weak, tired, sat down on the gravel under the slowly revolving left front wheel. He rested.
Fucked up royally, old pardner. Never mind. We’re nothing but bubbles in the cosmic flow. Detachment, man, that’s the thing. For a moment he considered attempting to jack up the truck, righting it, getting the motor started, going home and into bed. Hopeless project. Best salvage what he could, pick up his baggage and beer, his bourbon and bacon, and slink off into the dark, never to be seen again by man, wo-man or dog. Alas, the darkness. Think of Boethius, Henry, and the consolations of philosophy. No help. The poverty of philosophy, actually, when you really need it. There wasn’t a problem he couldn’t solve right now, when you come right down to it, with a simple annual perpetual grant of about twenty-five thousand dollars from some reputable philanthropic agency. Was that too much to ask?
The stars looked kindly down on Lightcap in his misery. A sick yellow waning moon cast its pallid light upon his inconsequential affairs. The cow and her calf stared at him from the other side of the highway, offering sympathy but no practical assistance. And here came a pair of yellow lights through the dust, following his track. Complications closing in.
Henry roused himself, arose, kicked broken bottles into the ditch, concealing evidence. Futile efforts. Skid marks, broken glass, a curving stain of spilled beer revealed the full extent of his crime. Guilty. Henry sat down again and waited. The car pulled up, stopped. Red gumball light on the roof. The driver emerged wearing a uniform, a gunbelt with gun, a stiff-brimmed Smokey Bear hat.
Pause. “What happened?” asked the superintendent. “Smells like a brewery here.”
Only a job, thought Henry. I can always find another one. But a drunk driving charge: this’ll cost me a month in the county slammer. “That cow,” he said pointing. But the cow had fled.
“You know,” the super said, “you drove right through that stone wall in front of my house.”
“Sorry sir. It won’t happen again.”
“Looks like you totaled the truck.”
Henry shrugged. They contemplated the wreckage. What the hell, thought Henry, Vita brevis and our days are full of trouble. Off in the bleak he heard a coyote cry in self-pity. That coyote sounds like I feel.
“You say it was a cow? Cow crossing the road? Interfering with traffic?”
“Well sir, I ain’t sure. But I think—”
“Sure you’re sure. It was
a cow. This cow jumped in front of you like a rabbit out of a bush. You tried to save its life, I suppose, by swerving around it?”
“Well, sir, there was a little calf—”
“Of course, a poor innocent little calf, following its mother across the highway. You think anyone will believe your story, Lightcap?”
“No sir.”
“Of course they’ll believe it. I believe it. Headquarters will believe it. Highway Patrol will believe it. Close enough for government work. We’ll make out the accident report first thing in the morning, you sign it, I’ll sign it, we send it in, the government buys us a new truck. That old Ford was due for replacement anyhow. Now let’s clean up this mess and go to bed.” The superintendent pulled a broom and a shovel from his patrol car. “You think we can find a few beers in the cab? Not broken, I mean? Christ, it’s almost breakfast time.”
II
At the end of his first season as a park ranger, in October, when the mule-ear sunflowers, the purple asters and the sore-eye poppies were in full autumnal bloom, he was terminated. Without prejudice. “End of tourist season,” said his dismissal form, signed by Superintendent Gibbs Pratt, “recommended for rehire.” His employment future was secure, for the moment. He could forget mathematical logic, the general theory of axiology, the meaning of meaning, the methodology of science, the dissertation and the Ph.D. He changed the oil in his Chevy, added antifreeze and oatmeal to the leaky radiator, filled the tank with sixteen gallons of government surplus gasoline and headed east for New York, New York. Why?
Dear Henry,
Please come back. Let’s not give it up yet. Let’s try it one more time. You’ll like it here. We have a rent-free apartment in Uncle Sid’s brownstone in Weehawken. [Uncle Sydney the slumlord.] We’re only ten minutes by Tubes from the Village. I’ve got a gallery on 10th Street. I’ll be in a group show in December. I know you hate New York but you also know why I had to come back. Dad’s only got a few months to live. Try to understand, Henry. Think of someone besides yourself for a change. If you work on it you can become a warm and giving person. Even you. I’ll help. We’ll find you a job. Uncle Sid needs somebody to help him collect the rents. You’ve had six months alone to find yourself. [Find myself? Where to look? Didn’t know I was lost.] Also there’s one more thing I should tell you. [Oh-oh….] Remember that last night in Albuquerque? In March? When we made love by the gas heater? [No!] Well Henry I have some wonderful beautiful sacred news for you. [Catastrophe!] I am pregnant, Henry. Yes I know we used the diaphragm [We?] but there must have been a tiny hole in it. In about six months you are going to become a father. Please come back to us!
Love, your Myra
Trapped. His reason, his common sense, his horse sense, his instinct, his emotions instructed him to head south for Tucson, Tubac, the Sea of Cortez. Send Myra enough money for a safe decent abortion in Toronto or wherever available and keep going south till he reached the end of Baja California and the tranquil little city of La Paz—peace!
The sensible solution. But some dark malevolent power from his Calvinist childhood—duty—would drag him eastward. How could he quit her now, simply because they had never been able to agree on the simplest things, like where to live (she preferred New York, he hankered after a beach-front lean-to on the coast of Mexico), or how to live (she wanted electricity, plumbing, stability, the full-time job for him with two-week annual vacation, pension plan, medical insurance, a mortgaged home—everything he hated, despised, condemned—while he yearned for woodsmoke and a cabin in the woods), or even why? Or even why to live?
Dilemma. Trilemma. Polylemma. Not a difficulty in the world, he recalled, that could not be banished with a simple fifty-thousand-dollar annual grant from some well-endowed charitable institution. If only you were rich! he’d bellowed at her more than once, we wouldn’t be in this mess; you’re so damned Jewish, why aren’t you rich? Don’t you bellow at me, she cried. I’ll bellow when I want to bellow, he bellowed.
He reached for her. Weeping bitterly, she fell into his arms. They dropped to the mattress on the floor and “made love,” as it was said, by the light of the antique unsafe open-burner gas heater in the corner. With music on the record player: the Baroque Wind Ensemble, or was it the Viol Consort, playing something sedate and polyphonic from Henry’s (Henry Purcell’s) suite for The Virtuous Wife, or, Good Luck at Last.
That must have been the fatal night, he thought, driving through a freak snowstorm into Grand Island, Nebraska, for that was the last night he had spent with her. The next day, for no reason that he could remember, she came at him with a beer-can opener in each hand while he was reading a Tolstoy treatise on domestic bliss and the military life. An hour later Henry started off for Utah, alone, followed briefly by a flying copy of War and Peace, Modern Library edition, which bounced off the rear of his pickup as he drove away.
Yes, that would have been the night, thought Henry, near the end of March. And then a second thought struck him: that night was six months ago.
Six?
Six.
III
He parked his truck with its New Mexico license tags at the handiest fireplug and walked a half block to the three-story brownstone row house on Hudson Street. Three stories plus a dim dank basement apartment for the building superintendent. The superintendent, in this case, was Jewish: he owned the building.
Henry climbed the stoop, sliding his hands up the polished brass rails, and rapped the brass knocker on the door. Through the frosted glass and lace curtains of the oval window he saw, after a time, a female form present itself in the dimness of the hallway.
A female form? Only in the human race, among the mammalian class, is the form of the female so readily distinctly unmistakably apparent. Henry felt the usual contradictory emotions: a lustful twitching of scrotal hairs in the region of his groin; a chill of fear in his heart.
Myra opened the door. She looked more beautiful than ever, in her ample opulent Oriental way—eyes large and dark and lustrous, the rich mane of curly hair (chrome yellow this year) draped about her head and neck, the twinned bosoms swelling up like bumper guards on an Eldorado. She stared at Henry. “What are you doing here?”
His mouth gaped open. “You asked me to—”
“Shhhhh!” She put a finger to her lips, looked down the hallway behind her. A smell of carbolic acid in the air. The sound of a thin high querulous voice demanding succor. She looked again at Henry. He noticed now that her eyes were ringed with fatigue, her face even more pale than usual. “You’ll have to be very quiet,” she said. She gave her head a jerk, commanding him to enter.
He followed her into the gloom of the hall and up a broad banistered stairway to the second floor. Myra was wearing the latest from Carnaby Street, a miniskirt and black tights. Among the avantgarde, Myra was always avantest. He ascended dumbly, helplessly, led by the blind but most predacious member of his bodily crew. Even as desire drew him upward, he knew in his soul that he was advancing upon the intersection of gonadal greed and dire predestined calamity.
They entered her apartment. Enormous canvases six feet by ten hung on the walls, their surfaces slathered with great clots of nonobjective paint smeared on like butter with a lavish palette knife. In the corners of the room stood shapeless sculptures of newspaper, cardboard and chickenwire with painted staring faces, glued-together survivors from the holocaust of the Tenth Street Imagination.
She turned toward him, twirling the little skirt. In the black tights she looked like a well-developed pageboy from the court of King Arthur; he felt like a blundering Yankee from Connecticut.
“So,” she said, “what do you want?”
Again he was dumbstruck. But rather than fall to quarreling immediately he held out his arms. “My wife,” he croaked. If she was pregnant he could see no sign of it yet; she always did have a pleasingly convex belly.
Reluctantly, she let herself be enfolded. Grudgingly, she allowed him to nudge her toward the bed, another blanketed mattress on the
floor, where they sank together awkwardly. But before he was permitted to lower her drawers she tried to lift his spirits.
“Be gentle, please. My father is dying downstairs.”
Henry muttered condolences with half a heart. He was familiar with this subject. Her father had been dying for the last five years, making a sloppy job of it. It was the other subject that Henry wanted to broach—but that, he felt, could best wait for about five more minutes. Whispering regrets in her left ear, he struggled with the inconvenient inconsiderate infuriating tights. The task required two hands and she had his left arm pinned beneath her shoulders.
“You don’t mean it,” she said. He mumbled, cursing quietly. “He really is this time. He’s in an oxygen tent. He’s under morphine. He’s been in and out of the hospital four times in the last six months.”
If these remarks were meant to discourage Henry’s lust, they failed. In fact the nearness of the angel of death produced an aphrodisiac effect on him. Lightcap, after all, was a Lightcap—a redneck—an Appalachian hillbilly. With sudden effort he yanked free the accursed tights, exposing his woman to bestial assault.
“Be gentle,” she snarled, biting his lower lip, wrapping her thighs around his waist, raking his flanks with her red claws, drawing blood. Three minutes later—both of them still breathing hard, but spent—he brought up the subject:
“Okay Myra, who’s the father?”
She smiled, staring up at the ceiling. A plastered ceiling ten feet above, decorated with the twelve signs of the zodiac, and a sun, a moon, a few casual stars.
Henry waited. He laid a hand on her smooth belly. “Are you really pregnant?”
“Three months.” She continued to smile her sibylline smile, self-content and satisfied.