Bullet Park

  “Oh, my God,” he said, “she was the one who stole, wasn’t she? Maybe it’s a ring of thieves. Maybe the Swami’s an accomplice. Magic is the only thing we haven’t tried but I’m not up to it.”

  Nailles’s struggle to get into the city on the train had become so acute that he finally had gone to Dr. Mullin, who prescribed a massive tranquilizer. He took this each morning with his coffee, telling Nellie that it was a vitamin pill. The tranquilizer gave him the illusion that he floated upon a cloud like Zeus in some allegorical painting. Standing on the platform waiting for the 7:46 he seemed surrounded by his cloud. When the train came in he picked up his cloud and settled himself in a window seat. If the day was dark, the landscape wintry, the little towns they passed shabby and depressing, none of this reached to where he lay in his rosy nimbus. He seemed to float down the tracks into Grand Central, beaming a vast and slightly absentminded smile at poverty, sickness, wealth, the beauty of strange women, the rain and the snow.

  On the morning after the party Nellie was waked by the sound of gunfire.

  There had been riots in the slums and she wondered for a moment if the militants had decided to march out of the ghetto and take the white houses of Chestnut Lane by force. Nailles was not in bed and she went to the window. What she saw was Nailles in his underpants on their broad lawn, firing his shotgun at an immense snapping turtle. The sun had not risen but the sky was light and in this pure and subtle light the undressed man and the prehistoric turtle seemed engaged in some primordial and comical battle. Nailles raised his gun and fired at the turtle. The turtle recoiled, collapsed and then slowly raised itself up like a sea tortoise and began to lumber towards her husband. She had never seen, outside a zoo, so big a reptile, but it was Nailles, not the reptile, who seemed out of place in the early light. It was the turtle’s lawn, the turtle’s sky, the turtle’s creation, and Nailles seemed to have wandered mistakenly onto the scene. He fired again and missed. He fired again and she saw the turtle’s huge head swung to one side by the charge of buckshot. He fired again, put his gun on the grass and picked the turtle up by its jagged tail.

  “Oh darling, are you sure it’s dead,” she called down from the window.

  “Yes,” he said. He seemed surprised to see her at the window. “It’s dead. Its neck is broken.”

  “Where do you suppose it came from?”

  “The bog, I guess. It must be a hundred years old. I got up to go to the bathroom and I saw it crossing the lawn. At first I thought I was dreaming. The shell must be three feet long. It could hurt a child or kill a dog. I’ll bury it later.”

  In the bedroom Nailles, his right ear ringing from the gun and his right hand shaking a little, knocked a tranquilizer, his last, into his hand but his hand was trembling so that the tranquilizer fell to the floor and rolled under a piece of furniture. Nailles waited until Nellie had left the room. He bent a metal coathanger into the shape of a hook and lying on the floor he tried to recapture the pill. The piece of furniture—a dressing table-was flush to the floor and darkness concealed his pill. He hooked two pennies and a button. He then took the lamps off the top of the dressing table and moved it away from the wall. It was a heavy piece of furniture with loaded drawers and was a struggle to move, and when he got it away from the wall there was no pill but there was a crack in the flooring into which it must have fallen. He ran his coathanger along the crack but his only catch was dirt.

  The thought of taking the train without a pill gave him all the symptoms of panic. His breathing was quick and his lips swollen. The place pain took in his memory was curious—he thought he had no memory for pain—but now the agony, confusion and humiliation of getting off at Greenacres and again at Lascalles, of getting off at Clear Haven and again at Turandot—returned to him with nearly the intensity of fact. He could not do it. Courage had nothing to do with his suffering. If he forced himself to go to the station he knew he would be unable to board the 7:46. Cold baths, self-discipline, prayer, all seemed like the moral paraphernalia of his first year in the Boy Scouts. He had to get into the city to fend for Nellie and his son. If he could not get into the city they would be defenseless and he imagined them as besieged by enemies—cold, hunger and fear—refugees from a burned city. He took a cold shower on the chance that this might help, but water had no calming effect on his image of the 7:46 as a portable abyss. He didn’t know what hours the doctor kept but he knew that he had to get a new prescription before he did anything else.

  The doctor’s office was in a development of two-story apartments called garden apartments although there were no gardens to be seen. He rang and a man in pajamas opened the door.

  “I must have the wrong address,” Nailles said.

  “You looking for the doctor?”

  “Yes. It’s terribly important. It’s an emergency. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  “You got the right place but he’s not in practice any more,” the stranger said. “The county medical society closed him down three weeks ago. He’s doing laboratory work in the city.”

  “What happened?”

  “Pills. He was giving out all sorts of illegal pills. But I’m right in the middle of my breakfast …”

  “I’m sorry,” Nailles said. He could drive into the city, or could he? He could take a bus. He could take a taxi. A man spoke to him from a car parked beside his. “You looking for the doctor?”

  “God yes,” Nailles said, “God yes.”

  “What was he giving you?”

  “I don’t know the name of it. It was for the train.”

  “What color?”

  “Gray and yellow. It was a capsule, half gray and half yellow.”

  “I know what it was. You want some?”

  “God yes, God yes.”

  “I’ll meet you in the Catholic cemetery, out on Laurel Avenue. You know the one I mean. There’s a statue of a soldier.”

  Nailles got to the cemetery before the stranger. It was an old-fashioned place with many statues, but the monument to the soldier stood a head taller than the host of stone angels and was easy to find. Gravediggers worked in the distance. Nailles had guessed that graves were dug by engines, but these men worked with a shovel and pickax. He passed an array of motley angels—some of them life-sized, some of them dwarfs. Some of them stood on the tombs they blessed with half-furled wings, some of them clung with furled wings to the cross. The soldier wore the uniform of 1918—a soup-plate helmet, puttees, baggy pants, and he held in his right hand, butt to the ground, a Springfield, bolt-action, 1912. He had been carved from a white stone that had not discolored at all but it had eroded, obscuring his features and his insignia so that he looked like a ghost. The stranger joined Nailles, holding a few tulips that he must have stolen somewhere. He put these into a container in front of the ghostly infantryman and said: “Twenty-five dollars.” “I’ve been getting a big prescription for ten,” Nailles said. “Look,” the stranger said, “I can get ten years in jail for this and a ten-thousand-dollar fine.” Nailles gave him the money in exchange for five pills. “You’ll need some more on Monday,” the man said. “Meet me at the railroad-station toilet at half past seven.” Nailles put a pill into his mouth but he needed water. Rainwater had collected in one of the commemorative urns or ewers and he scooped enough up with his hand to get the pill down. Driving to the train he waited for the pill to take hold, for his cloud to gather, and by the time he got to the parking lot it had begun its wonderful work. He was moderate, calm, a little bored and absentminded. He forgot to put a quarter in the parking meter but when he had completed his painless journey into the city he telephoned Nellie and asked her to try the guru.

  X

  After lunch Nellie poured herself a whiskey. I should go to a shrink, she thought, until she remembered the doctor circling his invisible dentist’s chair. She hated him, not for his real-estate business, but because she had always felt vaguely that in any crisis psychiatry could be counted on to work a cure, and he had taken this solace ou
t the door with him. She remembered that the cleaning woman—the thief—had false teeth. Her favorite disinfectant had been a chemical, advertised to smell of mountain pine woods, but this imitation of the sweet mountain air was so crude, flagrant and repulsive that it amounted to an irony. Snowcapped toilet seats. Eliot had asked her to see the guru and so she went.

  The slums, the oldest part of the village, were down along the banks of the river. She never had any reason to go there. She had read in the paper that women were mugged and robbed in broad daylight. There were knife fights in saloons. The rain was heavy that afternoon; the light narrow. All rain tastes the same and yet rain fell for Nellie from a diversity of skies. Some rains seemed let down like a net from the guileless heavens of her childhood, some rains were stormy and bitter, some fell like a force of memory. The rain that day tasted as salty as blood. So down into the slums went Nellie, down to Peyton’s funeral parlor. This was a shabby frame building with a peaked door—a stab at holiness under which the dead (murdered in knife fights) entered and departed for the black cemetery at the edge of everything. There was a door on the left leading, she guessed, to the rooms upstairs, and she opened this onto a bare hallway with a staircase.

  The strangeness of this environment disturbed her deeply as if she inhaled, in the rooms of her own house, not only the buttressed proprieties but an essence that conditioned her chromosomes and lights. The alien reek of the hallway—the immemorial reek of such places-seemed to strip her of any moral reliability. She looked around for something familiar—a fire extinguisher would have served—but there was nothing in the hallway that belonged to her. Had one of the legendary rapists she read about in the evening paper approached her she would have been helpless. She was lost. She was frightened. Her instinct was to turn and go; her duty was to climb the stairs; and the division between these two forces seemed like a broad river without bridges-seemed to give her some insight into the force of separateness in her life. She seemed to be saying goodbye to herself at a railroad station; standing among the mourners at the edge of a grave. Goodbye Nellie.

  She had no role in this place and she felt it keenly. Census taker? Relief worker? An advocate for planned parenthood, distributing free pills? An adviser to unwed mothers? Lady bountiful dividing the proceeds from the church bazaar? She was none of these. She was a woman with a sick son, looking (at the advice of a thief) for a magician. I am a good woman, she thought. This foolishness was unintentional—compulsive—she seemed helplessly to ridicule herself. I’ve never once run over a squirrel on the highway. I’ve always kept seed in the bird-feeding station. She climbed the stairs. There was a window at the head of the stairs where someone had written on the dirty glass: “Sid Greenberg chews and smokes.” There were two doors off the hall. One had a sign saying: “The Temple of Light.” There was music beyond the door—singing—the voices compressed and funneled through a radio. She knocked and when there was no answer she called: “Swami Rutuola, Swami Rutuola …”

  From behind the second door there was a loud sound of giggling—lewd or alcoholic—and then a woman imitated Nellie’s accent. “Oh Swermi Rutaholah, Oh Swermi Rutaholah …” A man joined in the giggling. They must have been in bed. “Oh Swermi …” the woman said. She was nearly helpless with laughter. Nellie knocked again and a man asked her to come in. She stepped into a room where a light-colored Negro was tacking upholstery webbing onto a chair frame. There was a smell of shavings. Which came first, Christ the carpenter or the holy smell of new wood? There was an altar in the corner. A votive candle burned in a display of wax flowers. Wax flowers meant death—death and Chinese restaurants. “Welcome to the Temple of Light,” he said. The voice was high, definitely accented. Jamaican, she thought. The face was slender and one of the eyes was injured and cast. A war, an arrow, a stone? This eye, immovable, was raised to heaven in a permanent attitude of religious hysteria. The other eye was lively, bright and communicative. “I’m Mrs. Eliot Nailles,” she said. “Mary Ashton gave me your name. My son is sick.”

  “Would you like me to come with you now?” he asked. The voice was a very light singsong.

  “Oh yes,” she said, “if you could, if you think you can help him.”

  “I can try,” he said. “I’ll just wash my hands. I don’t have a car and it’s most difficult to find a taxi in the rain.”

  She described Tony’s trouble and some of its history as they drove back to her house. The accent, she decided, was not Jamaican. It was a rootless speech, aimed at fastidiousness or elegance. She took him up to Tony’s room and asked if he’d like a drink. “Oh no thank you,” he said, “I have something within me that’s much more stimulating than alcohol.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I would like to be sure that we won’t be disturbed.”

  “I’ll make sure of that,” said Nellie and went down and poured herself another drink.

  “My name is Swami Rutuola,” he said to Tony, “and I’ve come here to help you, or that’s what I hope to do. First I will tell you about my eye. When I was fifteen years old I had a most unfortunate impulse to steal a bicycle. It was a bright-red English Schwinn with three-speed gears. It was irresistible. I hid it in the cellar. When my father found it he beat me most severely and then went with me when I returned it. The father of the boy who owned the bicycle had no wish to prosecute me but my own father and mother insisted that I be taken to court. They were afraid I would become a thief if I were not punished. They were gentle people and I think I have finally come to understand them but they were very frightened of everything. I was sentenced to six months in the reform school in Livertown. Among the prisoners, as is so often the case, were some gangsters who operated a government within the prison government. They were exceedingly brutal and in order to protect myself I developed a limp. I thought that if I limped they would not subject me to their brutality but one day in the mess hall I forgot to limp and when they saw how I had deceived them they beat me up. I was two weeks in the infirmary and as a consequence of their savagery I lost the use of my left eye. I mention all of this because I have observed that when men and women talk with one another they count on communicating with their eyes almost as much as they do with their voices and since one of my eyes has no means of communication some people find it very disconcerting. I will hold my head in the shadow while we talk so that you will not be perplexed by my bad eye, but before we do anything else I would like to tidy up your room. Godliness is next to cleanliness—is that what they say—or is it the other way around?”

  “I think it’s the other way around,” Tony said.

  The swami began to gather the clothing that hung on chairs and doorknobs. He found a laundry bag in the closet and stuffed the soiled linen into this. He hung a jacket on a hanger, treed Tony’s shoes, closed the closet door, and gave the chair cushions a shake. “Well that looks a little better, doesn’t it,” he said. “Another thing I would like to do is to burn some incense if you don’t object.”

  “I’d like you to do everything you want to do,” Tony said, “but I don’t really like incense. Any kind of perfume. I never use after-shave lotion. I like to smell perfume on girls but I don’t like it when it’s all over the place. I don’t like the way department stores smell.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” the swami said, “but this isn’t sweet or strong. It’s sandalwood. It has a clean smell.” He took a narrow stick of incense from his pocket and lighted it.

  “That’s all right,” Tony said.

  “I was born in Baltimore,” Rutuola said, “to poor people, but the hardships of my race are well known so I won’t bother you with them. I went to school until the eighth grade and I can read very well but I cannot do much arithmetic. My father was a carpenter and when I was paroled from reform school I went to work for him. It was much later that I went to New York where I found a position with the New York Central. It was not a distinguished position. What I did was to clean the toilets in Grand Central Station
eight hours a night, five nights a week. I mopped the floors and so forth but what I spent most of my time doing was wiping off the walls the writing people had put there. The walls are white and you can write on them easily and after a Saturday night those walls would absolutely be covered with writing. At first I was troubled by this and then I realized that these people wrote on the walls because they had to. They hated to have the writing erased as if it seemed to be some part of them. They’d carve their messages in the wooden doors with a knife. You couldn’t put them down as freaks because there were thousands of them and it gave me a very deep insight into how lonely and horny mankind is. So then one night—one morning, really—it was after three o’clock, it was closer to four—I was mopping the floor when this man came up to me and said help me, help me, help me, I think I am going to die. He was a well-dressed man but his face was very gray. So then I said a patrolman came through the concourse about now and I could go upstairs and get him and he could call an ambulance. But then he said don’t leave me, I don’t want to die alone, so then I said let’s go up to the concourse together then, I’ll help you. So then I took his arm and we went up to the concourse very slowly—he was groaning—but when we got there there wasn’t any patrolman around, there wasn’t anybody around, and he said that he had to sit down and we sat down on some stairs. It was very gloomy and cold and bare and empty there but that great big colored picture that advertises cameras was lighted. It was a picture of a man and a woman and two children on a beach—a lake I guess—and behind them, way off in the distance, were all these mountains covered with snow. It was a beautiful happy picture but it seemed more beautiful because the concourse was so cold and bare and had nothing happy about it. So then I told him to look at the mountain to see if he could get his mind off his troubles. So then I said let us pray and he said he couldn’t remember any prayers and I realized I couldn’t remember many prayers myself so I said let’s make up a prayer and then I began to say valor, valor, valor, valor, over and over again and in a little while he joined me. So then I said some other words and he said them along with me and then he said that he felt better and after a little while he said he thought he’d take a cab to a hotel and get some sleep and he said goodbye and I never saw him again. A few weeks later I came out here to work with Mr. Percham who is my cousin and a carpenter.”