Stones

He walked up and down twice before he even answered. Then he sort of looked out the window and said: “I never had a job.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All that money and everything—was Katie’s.” I hadn’t had a clue.

  I didn’t say anything though. I was sort of angry and I wanted to cry too. I’m not just sure why. And then he said: “You knew that, didn’t you?” I said no.

  “Well it’s true. That’s the way it was. So I need some money.”

  I don’t make much money. I have this important job I told you about—but it’s more the people I meet than the money I make. So I didn’t have anything to give him. Besides, I thought he should make his own.

  “Can’t you get a job?”

  “Well, no.”—the classic answer. “You see there’s this chance of a trip home free—on a boat. I’d sort of work my way, you see. And that’s liable to just happen any day. So I can’t—I mean I just don’t dare to take up a job I’d have to throw down in two days or something.”

  He could go on talking like that for hours. I’ve heard him. All about why he doesn’t work.

  He walked up and down.

  “I can give you a pound,” I said.

  “Ah, thanks Neil—that’s terrific, boy—really it is.”

  I gave it to him.

  “But what’ll you do when that’s gone?”

  “I’ll go down to Dad’s office tomorrow and borrow some from old Davies.”

  My father’s firm had a sort of branch in all the world capitals.

  Then he said he’d go now, because he was tired and hadn’t slept since Katie left. He was really lonesome for her too—you could tell. I gave him some canned food and some cigarettes. I tried to make him take that other Scott Fitzgerald book, Tender Is the Night, but he said he was too tired to read. He wanted my old magazines, though. He’d look at the pictures. I was sort of sorry, even, that I didn’t have any of those men’s magazines with the women in them. I didn’t really care about him not taking Tender Is the Night because he was so lonely, pictures would be easier. I didn’t see him after that for a long time. Weeks even.

  Then it was his birthday. He was twenty-six. Still no job. He must have made a big touch on Mr Davies. And then Katie was always writing to him—and she’d sent some money too.

  I phoned him up and said I’d take him for a birthday party—a good meal. To a restaurant. I thought he’d like that. I wanted him to have a steak—not because steak was his favourite or anything, but because it made a nice picture; Bud eating steak.

  But he wanted to have a drink instead. We’d go somewhere quiet and talk. His boat would come soon and he wanted to say goodbye in case he had to leave in a hurry. This boat was always coming. I don’t even know what name it had.

  So I gave up the steak idea and we went out and got sort of drunk. I bought him a bottle of gin to take away with him and got in a taxi. I felt suddenly so old. Older even than Bud—and of course, he’s older than me—way older.

  I gave him two pounds. I wasn’t drunk any more; I just gave it to him because I kept hearing these two things over and over in my brain. “It’s your name too,” was one of them and the other was, “If Scott Fitzgerald came in here and saw your mantelpiece he’d just be ashamed.”

  Well, I meant to leave him at his place and go on home alone. But I couldn’t. I got out of the taxi with him and he invited me up for a drink of that gin I’d bought.

  The house was all dark—they hadn’t even left the light on in the hall for him. I remembered the last time I came. He went first. I went second.

  The first thing I noticed was how bad his breathing was—really bad, like a man with asthma or something like that. Then I hung back so that I could watch him going up in front of me. He was all bent over and all the way up he kept talking in between these very noisy breaths.

  He kept calling me Katie by mistake, and kid and boy and “Neil-hopper.”

  “Neil-hopper” was a name I had when we were children but I’ve forgotten why.

  And he looked so bent over and his coat was all undone and it made him look like an old man with some sort of sickness.

  We got to his floor—but we didn’t turn off. “I forgot to tell you,” he said, “Kittyhawk put me up in the cheap room.” He laughed.

  Cheap room! You should have been there!

  He went in first and turned on the light. It was just a bulb to one side of this old window.

  There wasn’t any cupboard for the army, so they were all lined up on the hearth. He told me which ones to use for ashtrays. Special ones—plain glass so that you could see inside. He didn’t light the gas fire at all. When he went out I put some money in and lit it up. It was really cold in that room. Icelandia. Icelandia was a skating rink at home.

  But he didn’t go out just yet. He put his coat on this very tatty Victorian sofa and told me to put mine there too. I looked around a bit. It was all neat—but there were no rugs and the eiderdown was lumpy and the bedspread had a hole right in the middle and there was a bit of old green stuff—dead—left over from Christmas, months ago. He’d put it in one of the officers on a table. There was a picture postcard too—one that I’d sent him from somewhere. He had it on the mantelpiece—all alone.

  Then he went out. When he went by me I saw his shoes. They were as clean as a whistle. And do you know what else? His shirt was clean too. I couldn’t get over that. He looked much neater and even cleaner than I did. Self respect.

  It began to get warm. I turned on the radio but the battery was dead and you couldn’t get Luxembourg any more. You couldn’t even get London.

  Then he came back.

  “If you hit it on top you get music.”

  I hit it—the radio—and you could just hear it, far, far away.

  I went to turn it off.

  “Leave it on,” he said “Please. I like to hear it.”

  “But you can’t hear it,” I said. “Yes I can. I can hear it.”

  He gave me some gin in a pink plastic cup he’d stolen from the bathroom. We just sat.

  I looked around a bit more—not too carefully. I knew he’d know I was looking for books. But I could tell there weren’t any.

  And this is the hard part now. I mean I can’t explain it at all. But I just started to cry. I cried. I cried from way down inside—you know, where it hurts you to cry. And I couldn’t stop. I tried—but I couldn’t.

  It was crazy. I can’t describe it—but suddenly this something came up inside me and I kept remembering everything I’d said to him and thought about him. And I felt like—I don’t know—a heel I guess, because (I don’t know why) but I kept thinking that it was my fault that he was living like that—in that awful room and I just hated it.

  And then I suddenly thought that he just didn’t realize—he didn’t have any idea at all, about how lousy I am and what a fraud I was and how I’d really meant it when I called him a horse. That was when I remembered the postcard—on the mantel all by itself—from me.

  And then I saw this bit of paper—it was just lying on the floor, to keep the bottle that was on it from marking the boards, I guess. And I saw what he’d written there—over and over again in ink.

  He’d written out—“Sir Thomas Cable—Bart.” (that was his real name—Thomas) “Sir Thomas Cable—Bart.” all in writing over and over on this bit of old paper to keep the floor clean.

  Well—that’s sort of when I understood. I wish I could explain it better—but I can’t, because I’m not too sure just what it really means. But I know that I understood it—and I still do. All I have to do is say it over to myself and then I understand.

  “Sir Thomas Cable—Bart.”

  I guess you ought to know—I haven’t seen him since. I’ve wanted to—really I have—but I’m not the same any more. I go on reading my books—but I’m not the same. And I think about him—I think about him all the time.

  But I can’t. I just can’t face it again, that room and the bottles and my postcard and that p
iece of paper—and Luxembourg.

  I wish he’d come to see me. But he won’t. I guess he has real pride. You know—“Sir Thomas Cable—Bart.” That sort of thing.

  REAL LIFE WRITES REAL BAD

  I had an accident, once, and my dog was killed. This was a long time ago. I’d been riding my bike and the dog, whose name was Danny, had been running along beside me on the road. It was a country road and there was a lot of dust because it hadn’t rained. A truck came by and it knocked me off my bike and Danny went under the wheels and he disappeared. The truck drove on and Danny’s body went on with it.

  Bud, my brother, came running—I don’t remember where he’d been. I refused to leave the side of the road. My arm was fractured and my legs were pitted with gravel and they were bleeding—but this was nothing compared to my grief and the shock of Danny’s disappearance. “I won’t go home without him,” I said. “I’d rather stay here and die.”

  Bud said: “Okay, Neil. I’ll go and get him.” Just like that: an everyday occurrence.

  One whole hour he was gone. I remember that afternoon precisely—every detail. I crouched beside the road and I brushed away the flies that were coming after my legs and I kept my eye on the long, hot road where Bud had gone out of sight beyond a railroad track. The heat—it was July 15th—made waves in the air and I think I was close to fainting when I finally saw him coming back.

  I swear I saw him growing before my eyes, that day. He was like a man we had seen unfolding from a box at the circus, once. The box had been collapsed with the man inside and when the magician waved his wand, the box was whole again and the man came out. And that was Bud that afternoon. A miracle.

  He was carrying Danny, dead, in his arms and he said: “We can go now. I found him.” The dog had been lying in a ditch full of water, two miles down the road. I guess the driver had thrown him there.

  We left my broken bike behind and we went back home to where our mother was waiting. It wasn’t really home, but a farm where we’d been staying. This was the summer of 1941 when our dad was in the army and Bud was twelve and I was ten.

  “Danny is dead,” Bud told our mother. “But this dog’s alive.” He put his hand on my head and smiled.

  Bud thought—even then—that each scene had to have its tag-line. This dog is dead, Errol Flynn had said in Captain Farrago. But this dog is still alive.…

  In spite of all that’s happened since and all the hell he’s put us through, I often recall the image of Bud unfolding along the road that afternoon, as if the magician had waved his wand and out had stepped my brother—whole—with Danny in his arms.

  He might have thought he was Errol Flynn; who cares? To me, it’s the only image I have of Bud the way he was before his dreams took over; the ones about the end of time and the ones about the box before it was collapsed.

  I guess we were all expecting it—all of us prepared for the worst—but everyone praying it wouldn’t happen yet. This is what they call the Scarlett O’Hara syndrome. You know the one: I’ll think about that tomorrow. The only trouble is, in real life, tomorrow has a funny way of turning up today.

  Bud always had a love of books and a prodigious memory. The two, when combined, produced his unpleasant habit of dropping acid quotes into life’s worst moments. Bud was the one who was always there to remind you how many times he’d told you not to play with matches, just when you’d burned the house down.

  Sadly, he wasn’t good at using this fund of plagiarized wisdom when it came to himself. For instance, the day we found him, a piece of paper was discovered—by the telephone—on which Bud had carefully written out for someone else’s benefit a poem by Dorothy Parker. Here it is—but you have to imagine Bud’s handwritten version of it, the way he made all the letters perfect because he was so afraid he’d lost his powers of concentration. In the margin he had written: Hartley—484 9842—April 2. And then:

  Razors pain you;

  Rivers are damp;

  Acids stain you;

  And drugs cause cramp.

  Guns aren’t lawful;

  Nooses give;

  Gas smells awful;

  You might as well live.

  Bud’s oldest friend, Teddy Hartley, killed himself on April 9th.

  It may well be that I’m maligning Bud by saying he never applied his found advice to himself. All I have to go on is my witness. And my witness was that Bud ignored all good advice—the way most desperadoes do—until it was too late. Maybe, on the other hand—just before his brain burned out—he did remember what he’d written down on that piece of paper for Teddy Hartley. And maybe it made him want to live. I’ll never know, but my guess would be—it made him laugh.

  Was Bud, my brother, a true desperado?

  Yes; I think he was. He lived his life strung out as far away from reality as he could get. Back when he was twenty-seven, Bud decided life had been best when he was twenty-six. Time must be made to stop if he was going to survive. And so he chose to live in a world rendered timeless by alcohol.

  Bud was a destructive man and people turned away from him in droves. He wasn’t easy to take; he came, almost, to delight in driving you away. When I add up all there is to say, I’d have to say I didn’t like my brother, Bud. I loved him, though.

  If I had been a writer and if Bud had been a person in a story, this is where, in that story, there would be a description of Bud before the fall, in all his glory That way, in stories, writers justify their failing heroes. The trouble is, Bud had no glory. What he had, instead, was anti-glory: fear and rage and disappointment.

  All his life, Bud wanted out of being who he was. It wasn’t so much that he hated being Thomas “Bud” Cable as the fact that Thomas “Bud” Cable hadn’t been given “the breaks.” Everyone else, according to Bud, had been given something at birth that made for an easy passage. Money, looks and talent were the main things he lacked. He also lacked what he called “a name to go by,” meaning he might have managed getting by if his name, at birth, had been John Paul Getty.

  Bud never knew this was funny, by the way. Once he retired from the world he never got the chance to see that everyone else might want a different birthright than the one they had. That even Errol Flynn might want to be Cary Grant.

  Katie, Bud’s wife, once asked him why he didn’t go out and make his own fortune “instead of hanging around the house waiting for the money tree to bloom.”

  Bud said he couldn’t do that.

  “Why not?” said Katie. “Everybody else does.”

  “I know,” said Bud. “But it takes them so long…”

  When Katie told me this, I laughed out loud and said: “so much for money!”

  “No,” said Katie, “so much for work.”

  Bud not only wanted out of who he was, he wanted out of his body, too. He would stand in front of mirrors and curse the elongation of his bones.

  “Look at my head,” he would say, his voice always rising up the scale and getting louder. “Look at the shape of my fucking head! It’s like a goddamned shoe box!” he’d yell. “A goddamned shoe box and the fucking shoes inside are goddamned size fourteen!”

  Every time he looked, you might have thought he’d never seen himself in mirrors or photographs before. He was constantly appalled and panic-stricken by what he saw. He always cringed while peering at himself through narrowed eyes—a voyeur watching through a window. “Look at his hands!” he would say, as if the person in the mirror wasn’t him. “Look at the size of his bloody hands, Neil!”

  This much was true: Bud stood so tall he had to crouch when passing through doorways, reaching up with his fingers to protect the top of his head. He stooped wherever he went and he even stooped when he was lying down—his middle caved, his legs drawn up, his back an arabesque. All his clothes were bought at what he called The Grotesquery on King Street East—a store for oversized men and women. Katie had to do the shopping. Bud had gone there once, but the size of the exaggerated mannikins had traumatized him. “I don’t really loo
k like that,” he kept repeating. “Tell me I don’t really look like that…” He didn’t, of course, but nothing would persuade him of it.

  He told me, once, he’d had a dream in which there was a spa for the oversized. “They can perform an operation there where they saw your bones in half,” he said. “You go to sleep and wake up two feet shorter!” There were also magic baths in which you steamed your height away. Contraction Waters, they were called. Shrinkage guaranteed!

  But the best thing of all, Bud said, was the fact they had “a magic shampoo for reducing the size of shoe-box heads…”

  It was sad, I guess. Bud didn’t like to walk in the streets. He became alarmed when the prospect opened up that he might be asked to meet a stranger. “What will they say,” he would ask, “when they see me?”

  Somehow, it never occurred to him they might just say hello.

  During Bud’s early revels, Katie would join him, lending her sense of fun to everything he did. She withdrew only when, at last, it came to be obvious that Bud had no intention of stopping. Ever. It took until they were in their early forties for this to happen—not until their money was running out and their friends had begun to turn down their invitations. The trouble was, Bud showed no inclination to believe that either dwindling funds or loss of friends had anything to do with how much he drank.

  Neither was he inclined to support his drinking habit by getting a job. I’m talking about the early-to-mid-1970s here, and Bud had not set foot inside the workplace since 1962 when, for a month, he had answered a telephone somewhere downtown for one of those fly-by-night firms that used to sell household cleaning products after midnight on television. Bud, in fact, didn’t answer anything. He listened to a recording device on which the potential customers were meant to leave their names and addresses. The reason he quit this job, so he told me at length in one of his endless monologues, was because so many of the recorded phone calls were obscene. The world, he informed me, is a rotten apple and to hell with it!