All of these things, these prospects, too vivid to need any thought, are in her nerves as she feels the weight of the mattress between her breasts and thighs, and now she is ready to show the extent of her power. She tightens the grip of her arms on the soft-hard bulk and raises the mattress to the height of her shoulders.
Watch out, my God, says Ernie, you’ll rupture yourself!
Not I! says Olga, I’ll not rupture myself!
Ha ha, look here! she orders.
Her black eyes flash as she coils up her muscles.
One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to GO!
Christ Almighty, says Ernie without much breath or conviction, as the mattress sails, yes, almost literally sails above the rail of the gallery and out into the glistening air of morning. Fountains of delicate cotton fiber spurt out of at least a thousand ruptures in its cover the moment the wornout mattress plops to the ground.
Hmmm, says Olga.
The act has been richly completed. She grips the rail of the gallery with her hands that have never yet been fastened on anything they could not overwhelm if they chose to. The big brass bangles she has attached to her ears are jingling with silly but rapturous applause, and Ernie is thinking again, as he has thought so often, since death so thoughtlessly planted a slow seed in his body: How is it possible that I ever lay with this woman, even so long ago as that now is!
With an animal’s sense of what goes on behind it, Olga knows what her invalid husband feels when she exhibits her power, and her back to him is neither friendly nor hostile. And if tonight he has a cramp in the bowels that doubles him up, shell help him to the bathroom and sit yawning on the edge of the tub with a cigarette and a Hollywood fan magazine, while he sweats and groans on the stool. Shell utter good-humored “phews” and wave her cigarette at the stench of his anguish, sometimes extending a hand to cup his forehead. And if he bleeds and collapses, as he sometimes does, she’ll pick him up and carry him back to bed and fall asleep with his hot fingers twitching in hers, doing it all as if God had told her to do it. There are two reasons: He is a mean and sick little beast that once mated with her and would have been left and forgotten a long time ago except for the now implausible circumstance that she bore two offspring by him—a daughter employed as “executive secretary to a big wheel at Warner’s.” (She has to stay at his place because he’s a lush and needs her constant attention.) And this one, “My God, look at him.” A blown up Kodachrome snapshot of a glistening wet golden youth on some unidentified beach that borders a jungle. He makes his nakedness decent by holding a mass of red flowers before his groin. Olga lifts the picture and gives it five kisses as fast as machine gun fire, which leave rouge stains on the glass, as bright as the blossoms the grinning boy covers his sex with.
So those are the circumstances she feels behind her in Ernie, and yet they cast no shadow over the present moment. What she is doing is what is usual with her, she’s thinking in terms of comfort and satisfaction as she looks down at the prostrate bulk of the mattress. Her eyes are soaking up the possibilities of it. The past of the mattress was good. Olga would be the last to deny its goodness. It has lain beneath many summers of fornications in Olga’s summer hotel. But the future of the mattress is going to be good, too. It is going to lie under Olga on afternoons of leisure and under the wonderful rocking-horse weather of Southern California.
That is what the veteran mattress has done for the past few summers. The rain and the sun have had their influence on it. Unable to dissolve and absorb it into themselves, the elements have invested it with their own traits. It is now all softness and odors of ocean and earth, and it is still lying next to the prodigal patch of tomatoes that make me think of a deck of green-backed cards in which everything but diamonds and hearts have been thrown into discard.
(What do you bid? demands the queen of hearts. But that is Olga, and Olga is bidding forever!)
On afternoons of leisure she lies out there on this overblown mattress of hers and her slow-breathing body is steamed and relaxed in a one-piece sarong-type garment that a Hollywood pin-up girl would hardly dare to appear in. The cocker spaniel named Freckles is resting his chin on her belly. He looks like a butterscotch pudding with whipped cream on it. And these two indolent creatures drift in and out of attention to what takes place in Olga’s summer hotel. The quarrels, the music, the wailing receipt of bad news, the joyful shouting, everything that goes on is known and accepted. Without even feeling anything so strong as contempt, their glances take in the activities of the husband having words with a tenant about a torn window shade or sand in a bathtub or wet tracks on the stairs. Nobody pays much attention to poor little Ernie. The Ernies of the world are treated that way. They butt their heads against the walls of their indignation until their dry little brains are shaken to bits. There he goes now, I can see him out this window, trotting along the upstairs gallery of the projecting back wing of the building with some linen to air, some bedclothes on which young bodies have taken their pleasure, for which he hates them. Ernie treats everyone with the polite fury of the impotent cuckold, and they treat Ernie in such an offhand manner it turns him around like a top till he runs down and stops. Sometimes while he complains, they walk right past him dripping the brine of the ocean along the stairs, which Ernie must get down on his hands and knees to wipe up. Pigs, pigs, is what he calls them, and of course he is right, but his fury is too indiscriminate to be useful. Olga is also capable of fury, but she reserves it for the true beast which she knows by sight, sound, and smell, and although she has no name for it, she knows it is the beast of mendacity in us, the beast that tells mean lies, and Olga is not to be confused and thrown off guard by smaller adversaries. Perhaps all adversaries are smaller than Olga, for she is almost as large as the afternoons she lies under.
And so it goes and no one resists the going.
The wonderful rocking-horse weather of California goes rocking over our heads and over the galleries of Olga’s summer hotel. It goes rocking over the acrobats and their slim-bodied partners, over the young cadets at the school for flyers, over the ocean that catches the blaze of the moment, over the pier at Venice, over the roller coasters and over the vast beach homes of the world’s most successful kept women—not only over those persons and paraphernalia, but over all that is shared in the commonwealth of existence. It has rocked over me all summer, and over my afternoons at this green and white checkered table in the yellow gelatine flood of a burlesque show. It has gone rocking over accomplishments and defeats; it has covered it all and absorbed the wounds with the pleasures and made no discrimination. For nothing is quite so cavalier as this horse. The giant blue rocking-horse weather of Southern California is rocking and rocking with all the signs pointing forward. Its plumes are smoky blue ones the sky can’t hold and so lets grandly go of…
And now I am through with another of these afternoons so I push the chair back from the table, littered with paper, and stretch my cramped spine till it crackles and rub my fingers gently over a dull pain in my chest, and think what a cheap little package this is that we have been given to live in, some rubbery kind of machine not meant to wear long, but somewhere in it is a mysterious tenant who knows and describes its being. Who is he and what is he up to? Shadow him, tap his wires, check his intimate associates, if he has any, for there is some occult purpose in his coming to stay here and all the time watching so anxiously out of the windows…
Now I am looking out of a window at Olga who has been sunning herself on that smoking-car joke of a mattress the whole livelong afternoon, while she ages at leisure and laps up life with the tongue of a female bull. The wrestler Tiger has taken the room next to mine, that’s why she keeps looking this way, placidly alert for the gleam of a purple silk robe through his window curtains, letting her know of his return from the beach, and before he has hung the robe on a hook on the door, the door will open and close as softly as an eyelid and Olga will have disappeared from her mattress by the tomato
patch. Once the cocker spaniel had the impudence to sniff and bark outside Tiger’s door and he was let in and tossed right out the back window, and another time I heard Tiger muttering, Jesus, you fat old cow, but only a few moments later the noises that came through the wall made me think of the dying confessions of a walrus.
And so it goes and no one resists the going.
The perishability of the package she comes in has cast on Olga no shadow she can’t laugh off. I look at her now, before the return of Tiger from Muscle Beach, and if no thought, no knowledge has yet taken form in the protean jelly-world of brain and nerves, if I am patient enough to wait a few moments longer, this landlady by Picasso may spring up from her mattress and come running into this room with a milky-blue china bowl full of reasons and explanations for all that exists.
1953 (Published 1954)
The Kingdom of Earth
Talking about Salvation I think there’s a great deal of truth in the statement that either you’re saved or you ain’t and the best thing to do is find out which and stick to it. What counts most is personal satisfaction, at least with most people, and God knows you’ll never get that by straining and struggling for something which you are just not cut out for.
Now I passed through a period in my life in which I struggled. It grew out of all that talk which the Gallaway girl had spread through the county about me having a mother with part nigger blood. There wasn’t a word of truth in it but as long as there is such a thing as jealousy in human nature, and that will be a long time, there are bound to be certain people who will give ears to slander. I was what is called a wood’s colt. Daddy got me offen a woman with Cherokee blood in Alabama. I am one eight Cherokee and the rest is white. But the Gallaway girl had spread them rumors about me all through the county. People turned against me. Everyone acted suspicious. I went around by myself, having too much pride or character or something to try and force my company where I wasn’t wanted. I was hurt bad by the way that the Gallaway girl had acted when we broke up. I was lonesome as a lost dog and didn’t know which way to turn.
And then one evening while Gypsy Smith was preaching around this section, I dropped in there and heard this wonderful sermon on spiritual struggle. It started me thinking about the lustful body and how I ought to put up a struggle against it. And struggle I did for quite a while after that. The chances are it might of still been going on if Lot hadn’t brought that woman back with him from Memphis which showed me just how useless the whole thing was, as far as I personally was concerned anyhow.
Lot come home from Memphis one Saturday morning last summer and brought this woman back with him. I was working out in the south field, spraying the damned army worms, when I seen the Chevy come turning in off the highway onto the drive. The car was yellow all over with dust and the spare tire was off. I guessed he had hocked it to pay for gas on the road.
I went to the house to meet them and Lot was drunk.
This is my wife, he said. Her name is Myrtle.
I didn’t say a word to them. I just stood and looked her over. She had on a two-piece thing, the skirt part white and the top of it blue polka-dotted. It was made out of two big dotted bandannas, which she had hitched together. It hung on crooked, and showed a part of her tits, the biggest that I ever seen on a young woman’s body, sunburned the color of sorghum halfway down to her nipples and underneath that pure white and pearly-looking.
Well, she said, hello, Brother, and made like she would kiss me, but I turned away in disgust because I wanted her to know how I felt about it. It was a real bitch trick to marry a dying man which she must have known Lot was. Lot was a TB case and he had it so bad they let the air out of one of his lungs in Memphis. I guess she must have known what the setup was, that the place was Lot’s and not mine although I did all the work on it. But Lot was a son by marriage and so, when Dad died, it was Lot that he left the place to. After Dad died and I learned how I had been fucked, I quit the place and went to Meridian to work in a stave mill there but I got these pitiful letters from Lot, saying please come back and I did with the understanding that when Lot died, which was bound to be pretty soon, the place would be mine.
Well, I thought to myself after meeting this woman, the sensible thing to do is just lay low and see how things work out, at least for a while. So I went back out to the field and continued my spraying. I didn’t come in for supper. I told the nigger girl, Clara, to bring my supper out to me. She brung it out in a bucket, and after I ate it, I went to the Crossroads Inn to drink me some beer. Luther Peabody was there. He offered me to a liquor and while he was drinking he said to me, What’s this I hear about Lot bringing home a wife. Who said wife, I asked him. Well, said Luther, that’s what somebody told me, that Lot had brung home a woman about as big as a house. A house and Lot, said Scotty, who works at the bar, and all of them hollered. He’s brung home a woman for practical nursing, I told them. And that was all that I had to say about it.
It must of been half past ten when I come back to the house. The lamp was on in the kitchen and she was in there heating up something or other on the stove. I didn’t let on like I even noticed her presence. I walked right past her and on up to the attic. I pushed my cot in the gable to get the breeze but there wasn’t a breath of it stirring.
I thought things over but didn’t decide nothing yet. Along toward morning I started to hear some noise. I went downstairs barefooted. The bedroom door was open and they was in there panting like two hound-dogs.
I went outside and wandered around in the fields till it was sunup. I then went back to the house. The nigger was there to fix breakfast and after a while the woman came into the kitchen. She had on a light-blue satin kimono which she didn’t bother to fasten around her even. The black girl, Clara, kept looking at me and giggling and when she set my plate down she said. What are you looking at? I said. Nothing much. And then she let out a laugh like a horse. I couldn’t blame her. Me saying nothing much about them two huge knockers!
When breakfast was over I called Lot out on the porch for a little talk. Look here, I said, I overheard you last night in the room with that woman at half past five in the morning. How long do you think you’ll last in your condition? Inside of a month that lovely Miss Myrtle of yourn’ll fuck the last breath from your body and go on back to the Memphis cathouse you must of got her out of as fresh as a daisy!
That speech of mine made him sore and he acted like he was going to take a sock at me but I got mine in first. I knocked him off the back steps. Then she come out. She called me a dirty prick and lots of other nice things like that and then she started to crying. You don’t understand, she bawled. I love him and he loves me. I laughed in her face. Last winter, I told her, he took the sheets himself. What do you mean? she asked me. Ask Lot, I told her, and then I walked off and left them to chew that over.
I went off laughing. The sun was up good, then, and hot as blazes. I had my jug of liquor stashed in a clump of snow-on-the mountain. I went out to it and took a pretty good drink. It made me drunk right off because I had drunk a good deal the night before. The ground kept tilting up and down like a steamboat. I’d run a ways forward and then stagger back a little and laughing my head off at what I’d said to the woman. It was a hell of a thing to tell a woman. It wasn’t exactly nice to tell anybody. But I was mad as blazes at what he’d done, come swaggering back with a whore he called his wife for no other reason than just to put on a show of independence.
I went back out to where I’d left the sprayer. The niggers was setting around it swapping stories. They got on up in a sort of half-hearted way. I said. Look here, if you all don’t want to work, clear off the place. Otherwise hop to it! Well, they hopped. And by time to quit we had sprayed the whole north field from the road to the river. (You got to keep after them buggers or, Jesus, they sure will ruin you!)
When dark had come down I parked the sprayer under a big cottonwood and went back to the house. The lights was out so I turned on a lamp in the kitchen and warmed up sup
per. I had what was left of the greens and some corn and some sweet potatoes. There was some coffee left in a pot on the stove. I drunk it black, against my better judgment. It keeps me from sleeping in summer, especially when I am horny from not getting much and it had been six weeks since I’d laid a woman. I thought to myself, I am twenty-five and strong. I ought to quit fooling around and get me a girl to go steady with. The reason I hadn’t till now was them false stories the Gallaway girl had started. The Callaway girl was not in town this summer. She’d gone up North, knocked up and not by me neither, but not till after she’d spread them lies about me all through Two River County. The girl who worked at the hamburger joint on the highway told me she’d heard it but wouldn’t say who from. I figured it must of been Lot that done the first talking. I called him on it. Of course, he swore that he never. I give him a licking within one inch of his life, because nobody else would have a reason to do it except he was jealous, and Lot was so fucking jealous he barely could breathe.