Approaching Oblivion

  The ground was hard, but I dug with enthusiasm, and the moon gave me more than enough light. Down and down I dug, knowing eventually I would come to the dragoon.

  He was there. The bright paint rusted off his body, the saber corroded and reduced to a stub. Lying there in the grave I had dug for him thirty-five years before. I scooped the little metal soldier out of the ground, and cleaned him off as best I could with my paisley dress handkerchief. He was faceless now and as sad as I felt.

  I hunkered there, under the moon, and waited for midnight, only a minute away, knowing it was all going to come right for me. After so terribly long.

  The house behind me was silent and dark. I had no idea who lived there now. It would have been unpleasant if the strangers who now lived here had been unable to sleep and, rising to get a glass of water, had idly looked into the backyard. Their backyard. I had played here, and built a world for myself here, from dreams and loneliness. Using talismans of comic books and radio programs and matinee movies, and potent charms like the sad little dragoon in my hand. But it was now their backyard.

  My wristwatch said midnight, one hand laid straight on top of the other.

  The moon faded. Slowly, it went gray and shadowy, till the glow was gone, and then even the gray afterimage was gone.

  The wind rose. Slowly, it came from somewhere far away and built around me. I stood up, pulling the collar of my topcoat around my neck. The wind was neither warm nor cold, yet it rushed, without even ruffling my hair. I was not afraid.

  The ground was settling. Slowly, it lowered me the tiniest fractions of inches. But steadily, as though the layers of tomorrows that had been built up, were vanishing.

  My thoughts were of myself: I’m coming to save you. I’m coming, Gus. You won’t hurt any more…you’ll never have hurt.

  The moon came back. It had been full; now it was new. The wind died. It had carried me where I’d needed to go. The ground settled. The years had been peeled off.

  I was alone in the backyard of the house at 89 Harmon Drive. The snow was deeper. It was a different house, though it was the same. It was not recently painted. The Depression had not been long ago; money was still tight. It wasn’t weatherbeaten, but in a year or two my father would have it painted. Light yellow.

  There was a sumac tree growing below the window of the dinette. It was nourished by lima beans and soup and cabbage.

  “You’ll just sit there until you finish every drop of your dinner. We’re not wasting food. There are children starving in Russia.”

  I put the dragoon in my topcoat pocket. He had worked more than hard enough. I walked around the side of the house. I smiled as I saw again the wooden milk box by the side door. In the morning, very early, the milkman would put three quarts of milk there, but before anyone could bring them in, this very cold winter morning in December, the cream would push its way up and the little cardboard cap would be an inch above the mouth of the bottle.

  The gravel talked beneath my feet. The street was quiet and cold. I stood in the front yard, beside the big oak tree, and looked up and down.

  It was the same. It was as though I’d never been away. I started to cry. Hello.

  Gus was on one of the swings in the playground. I stood outside the fence of Lathrop Grade School and watched him standing on the seat, gripping the ropes, pumping his little legs. He was smaller than I’d remembered him. He wasn’t smiling as he tried to swing higher. It was serious work to him.

  Standing outside the hurricane fence, watching Gus, I was happy. I scratched at a rash on my right wrist, and smoked a cigarette, and was happy.

  I didn’t see them until they were out of the shadows of the bushes, almost upon him.

  One of them rushed up and grabbed Gus’s leg, and tried to pull him off the seat, just as he reached the bottom of his swing. Gus managed to hold on, but the chain-ropes twisted crazily and when it went back up it hit the metal leg of the framework.

  Gus fell, rolled face-down in the dust of the playground, and tried to sit up. The boys pushed through between the swings, avoiding the one that clanged back and forth.

  Gus managed to get up, and the boys formed a circle around him. Then Jack Wheeldon stepped out and faced him. I remembered Jack Wheeldon.

  He was taller than Gus. They were all taller than Gus, but Wheeldon was beefier. I could see shadows surrounding him. Shadows of a boy who would grow into a man with a beer stomach and thick arms. But the eyes would always remain the same.

  He shoved Gus in the face. Gus went back, dug in and charged him. Gus came at him low, head tucked under, fists tight at the ends of arms braced close to the body, extended forward. He hit him in the stomach and wrestled him around. They struggled together like inept club fighters, raising dust.

  One of the boys in the circle took a step forward and hit Gus hard in the back of the head. Gus turned his face out of Wheeldon’s stomach, and Wheeldon punched him in the mouth. Gus started to cry.

  I’d been frozen, watching it happen; but he was crying—

  I looked both ways down the fence and found the break far to my right. I threw the cigarette away as I dashed down the fence, trying to look behind me. Then through the break and I was running toward them the long distance from far right field of the baseball diamond, toward the swings and see-saws. They had Gus down now, and they were kicking him.

  When they saw me coming, they started to run away. Jack Wheeldon paused to kick Gus once more in the side, then he, too, ran.

  Gus was lying there, on his back, the dust smeared into mud on his face. I bent down and picked him up. He wasn’t moving, but he wasn’t really hurt. I held him very close and carried him toward the bushes that rose on a small incline at the side of the playground. The bushes were cool overhead and they canopied us, hid us; I laid him down and used my handkerchief to clean away the dirt. His eyes were very blue. I smoothed the straight brown hair off his forehead. He wore braces; one of the rubber bands hooked onto the pins of the braces, used to keep them tension-tight, had broken. I pulled it free.

  He opened his eyes and started crying again.

  Something hurt in my chest.

  He started snuffling, unable to catch his breath. He tried to speak, but the words were only mangled sounds, huffed out with too much air and pain.

  Then he forced himself to sit up and rubbed the back of his hand across his runny nose.

  He stared at me. It was panic and fear and confusion and shame at being seen this way. “Th-they hit me from in back,” he said, snuffling.

  “I know. I saw.”

  “D’jou scare’m off?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t say thank you. It wasn’t necessary. The backs of my thighs hurt from squatting. I sat down.

  “My name is Gus,” he said, trying to be polite.

  I didn’t know what name to give him. I was going to tell him the first name to come into my head, but I heard myself say, “My name is Mr. Rosenthal.”

  He looked startled. “That’s my name, too. Gus Rosenthal!”

  “Isn’t that peculiar,” I said. We grinned at each other, and he wiped his nose again.

  I didn’t want to see my mother or father. I had those memories. They were sufficient. It was little Gus I wanted to be with. But one night I crossed into the backyard at 89 Harmon Drive from the empty lots that would later be a housing development.

  And I stood in the dark, watching them eat dinner. There was my father. I hadn’t remembered him as being so handsome. My mother was saying something to him, and he nodded as he ate. They were in the dinette. Gus was playing with his food. Don’t mush your food around like that, Gus. Eat, or you can’t stay up to hear Lux Presents Hollywood.

  But they’re doing “Dawn Patrol.”

  Then don’t mush your food.

  “Momma,” I murmured, standing in the cold, “Momma, there are children starving in Russia.” And I added, thirty-five years late, “Name two, Momma.”

  I met Gus downtown at the newsstand
.

  “Hi.”

  “Oh. Hullo.”

  “Buying some comics?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You ever read Doll Man and Kid Eternity?”

  “Yeah, they’re great. But I got them.”

  “Not the new issues.”

  “Sure do.”

  “Bet you’ve got last month’s. He’s just checking in the new comics right now.”

  So we waited while the newsstand owner used the heavy wire snips on the bundles, and checked off the magazines against the distributor’s long white mimeographed sheet. And I bought Gus Airboy and Jingle Jangle Comics and Blue Beetle and Whiz Comics and Doll Man and Kid Eternity.

  Then I took him to Isaly’s for a hot fudge sundae. They served it in a tall tulip glass with the hot fudge in a little pitcher. When the waitress had gone to get the sundaes, little Gus looked at me. “Hey, how’d you know I only liked crushed nuts, an’ not whipped cream or a cherry?”

  I leaned back in the high-walled booth and smiled at him. “What do you want to be when you grow up, Gus?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Somebody put a nickel in the Wurlitzer in his booth, and Glenn Miller swung into “String of Pearls.”

  “Well, did you ever think about it?”

  “No, huh-uh. I like cartooning; maybe I could draw comic books.”

  “That’s pretty smart thinking, Gus. There’s a lot of money to be made in art.” I stared around the dairy store, at the Coca-Cola posters of pretty girls with page boy hairdos, drawn by an artist named Harold W. McCauley whose style would be known throughout the world, whose name would never be known.

  He stared at me. “It’s fun, too, isn’t it?”

  I was embarrassed. I’d thought first of money, he’d thought first of happiness. I’d reached him before he’d chosen his path. There was still time to make him a man who would think first of joy, all through his life.

  “Mr. Rosenthal?”

  I looked down and across, just as the waitress brought the sundaes. She set them down and I paid her. When she’d gone, Gus asked me, “Why did they call me a dirty Jewish elephant?”

  “Who called you that, Gus?”

  “The guys.”

  “The ones you were fighting that day?”

  He nodded. “Why’d they say elephant?”

  I spooned up some vanilla ice cream, thinking. My back ached, and the rash had spread up my right wrist onto my forearm. “Well, Jewish people are supposed to have big noses, Gus.” I poured the hot fudge out of the little pitcher. It bulged with surface tension for a second, then spilled through its own dark brown film, covering the three scoops of real ice cream; not tastee whipee freezee gunk substitute; real ice cream. “I mean, that’s what some people believe. So I suppose they thought it was smart to call you an elephant, because an elephant has a big nose…a trunk. Do you understand?”

  “That’s dumb. I don’t have a big nose…do I?”

  “I wouldn’t say so, Gus. They most likely said it just to make you mad. Sometimes people do that.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  We sat there for a while and talked. I went far down inside the tulip glass with the long-handled spoon, and finished the deep dark, almost black bittersweet hot fudge. They hadn’t made hot fudge like that in many years. Gus got ice cream up the spoon handle, on his fingers, on his chin, on his T-shirt, on the top of his head. We talked about a great many things.

  We talked about how difficult arithmetic was. (How I would still have to use my fingers sometimes even as an adult, when I did my checkbook.) How the guys never gave a short kid his “raps” when the sandlot ballgames were in progress. (How I overcompensated with women from doubts about stature.) How different kinds of food were pretty bad tasting. (How I still used ketchup on well-done steak.) How it was pretty lonely in the neighborhood with nobody for friends. (How I had erected a façade of charisma and glamour so no one could reach me deeply enough to hurt me.) How Leon always invited all the kids over to his house, but when Gus got there, they slammed the door and stood behind the screen laughing and jeering. (How even now, a slammed door raised the hair on my neck and a phone receiver slammed down, cutting me off, sent me into a senseless rage.) How comic books were great. (How my scripts sold so easily because I had never learned to rein-in my imagination.)

  We talked about a great many things.

  “I’d better get you home now,” I said.

  “Okay.” We got up. “Hey, Mr. Rosenthal?”

  “You’d better wipe the chocolate off your face.”

  He wiped. “Mr. Rosenthal…how’d you know I like crushed nuts, an’ not whipped cream or a cherry?”

  We spent a great deal of time together. I bought him a copy of a pulp magazine called Startling Stories, and read him a story about a space pirate who captures a man and his wife and offers the man the choice of opening one of two large boxes—in one is the man’s wife, with twelve hours of air to breathe, in the other is a terrible alien fungus that will eat him alive. Little Gus sat on the edge of the big hole he’d dug, out in the empty lots, dangling his feet, and listening. His forehead was furrowed as he listened to the marvels of Jack Williamson’s “Twelve Hours to Live,” there on the edge of the “fort” he’d built.

  We discussed the radio programs Gus heard every day: Tennessee Jed, Captain Midnight, Jack Armstrong, Superman, Don Winslow of the Navy. And the nighttime programs: I Love a Mystery, Suspense, The Adventures of Sam Spade. And the Sunday programs: The Shadow, Quiet, Please, The Mollé Mystery Theater.

  We became good friends. He had told his mother and father about “Mr. Rosenthal,” who was his friend, but they’d spanked him for the Startling Stories, because they thought he’d stolen it. So he stopped telling them about me. That was all right; it made the bond between us stronger.

  One afternoon we went down behind the Colony Lumber Company, through the woods and the weeds to the old condemned pond. Gus told me he used to go swimming there, and fishing sometimes, for a black oily fish with whiskers. I told him it was a catfish. He liked that. Liked to know the names of things. I told him that was called nomenclature, and he laughed to know there was a name for knowing names.

  We sat on the piled logs rotting beside the black mirror water, and Gus asked me to tell him what it was like where I lived, and where I’d been, and what I’d done, and everything.

  “I ran away from home when I was thirteen, Gus.”

  “Wasn’t you happy there?”

  “Well, yes and no. They loved me, my mother and father. They really did. They just didn’t understand what I was all about.”

  There was a pain on my neck. I touched a fingertip to the place. It was a boil beginning to grow. I hadn’t had a boil in years, many years, not since I was a…

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Rosenthal?”

  “Nothing, Gus. Well, anyhow, I ran away, and joined a carny.”

  “Huh?”

  “A carnival. The Tri-State Shows. We moved through Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, even Kansas…”

  “Boy! A carnival! Just like in Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with the Circus? I really cried when Toby Tyler’s monkey got killed, that was the worst part of it, did you do stuff like that when you were with the circus?”

  “Carnival.”

  “Yeah. Uh-huh. Did’ja?”

  “Something like that. I carried water for the animals sometimes, although we only had a few of those, and mostly in the freak show. But usually what I did was clean up, and carry food to the performers in their tops—”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s where they sleep, in rigged tarpaulins. You know, tarps.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I know. Go on, huh.”

  The rash was all the way up to my shoulder now. It itched like hell, and when I’d gone to the drugstore to get an aerosol spray to relieve it, so it wouldn’t spread, I had only to see those round wooden display tables with their glass centers, under which were bottles of Teel
tooth liquid, Tangee Red-Red lipstick and nylons with a seam down the back, to know the druggist wouldn’t even know what I meant by Bactine or Liquid Band-Aid.

  “Well, along about K.C. the carny got busted because there were too many moll dips and cannons and paper-hangers in the tip…” I waited, his eyes growing huge.

  “What’s all thaaat mean, Mr. Rosenthal!?!?”

  “Ah-ha! Fine carny stiff you’d make. You don’t even know the lingo.”

  “Please, Mr. Rosenthal, please tell me!”

  “Well, K.C. is Kansas City, Missouri…when it isn’t Kansas City, Kansas. Except, really, on the other side of the river is Weston. And busted means thrown in jail, and…”

  “You were in jail?”

  “Sure was, little Gus. But let me tell you now. Cannons are pickpockets and moll dips are lady pickpockets, and paper-hangers are fellows who write bad checks. And a tip is a group.”

  “So what happened, what happened?”

  “One of these bad guys, one of these cannons, you see, picked the pocket of an assistant district attorney, and we all got thrown in jail. And after a while everyone was released on bail, except me and the Geek. Me, because I wouldn’t tell them who I was, because I didn’t want to go home, and the Geek, because a carny can find a wetbrain in any town to play Geek.”

  “What’s a Geek, huh?”

  The Geek was a sixty-year-old alcoholic. So sunk in his own endless drunkenness that he was almost a zombie…a wetbrain. He was billed as The Thing and he lived in a portable pit they carried around, and he bit the heads off snakes and ate live chickens and slept in his own dung. And all for a bottle of gin every day. They locked me in the drunk tank with him. The smell. The smell of sour liquor oozing with sweat out of his pores, it made me sick, it was a smell I could never forget. And the third day, he went crazy. They wouldn’t fix him with gin, and he went crazy. He climbed the bars of the big free-standing drunk tank in the middle of the lockup, and he banged his head against the bars and ceiling where they met, till he fell back and lay there, breathing raggedly, stinking of that terrible smell, his face like a pound of raw meat.