“No,” I said, starting away. “I welcome the hangover. It’s what I drink for. You take it easy. I’ll be about a half hour.”
Under the oaks it was as black as a coal hole. As I groped down toward the pump house I heard a rustling on the right, and discerned a pair of glimmering presences sitting on the bank—no faces, only the faintest pale outlines. “Boy,” I said, stumbling a little more than I needed to, “this is like being lost in an elephant’s bowel. There must be a way out.” They did not laugh or speak. Who? The All-American and the architect’s wife? I had no evidence and no interest.
By the time I got out of the willows into the lane my eyes had adjusted. By the time I reached the pasture I could see the golden grass. The sky spread out, full of dim stars. From back of me radiated the full renewed volume of the party’s noise.
Then I heard sounds from ahead and below. I stopped and listened: a loud banging and pounding, and when it ended, a clamor of shouts and laughter that faded so that I could hear under it the tom-tom thumping of amplified guitars, Beatles or such. Natchez-under-the-hill was celebrating the glorious Fourth too.
Through brittle weeds I went over to the fence, and from there saw a glow of light on trees below me, and heard voices male and female, and the random picking of a banjo in a lull. Then began another three or four minutes of that tremendous banging, as if someone was pounding out a dented fender. What in hell were they doing? I could see nothing but the flicker of firelight.
From the covering dark I spied on them by ear, thinking with derision of Marian’s belief that they spent all their time debating the good life. If that wasn’t an orgy down below, I never heard the noise of one. With little effort I could imagine gleaming eyes and teeth, joints passing from hand to hand, and off in the edges of darkness the sounds of rut and riot, apache girls running naked and laughing through the brush until their hair caught in the poison oak and hairy hands grabbed them, and at the end, maybe, the tearing of the goat god, some victim whose blood the orgiasts could dabble in and whose flesh they could devour. Maybe that was what Peck wanted mascots like Julie and Dave Weld for.
What did go on at their parties? Mass hysteria? Mass fornication? Or only drunkenness, noise, and disorderly conduct such as that coming across the hill from the party I had just left? I stood between the revelry I despised without knowing what went on and the more elderly revelry I despised because I had just been part of it. And away off in the hills, audible in faint, excited bursts, I heard the yap and bugle of hunting hounds. The beagles must have got out. So every God-damned element of disorder in the universe was running loose with hair streaming and foam on its teeth, and there I stood by a fence post, tightening my eye muscles around a growing headache and thinking bleak thoughts.
Was this all there was to do? Was I all there was to be? Did we come west for no better reason than to set shirttails afire and make brainless sport of touchy friends, and periodically overturn habit, custom, order, and quiet in binges indistinguishable from those that went on down in the University of the Free Mind? Had we gravitated, despite ourselves, from suburbia to its cure, which is orgy? I had a considerable distaste for the good life as prescribed by Jim Peck, I disparaged his affection for the disorderly and irrational and his faith in chaos. But what better could I suggest? My withdrawal was even more finicky than his, and I preferred alcohol to pot. There was the real difference. Pot, I understood, did not leave hangovers. Maybe that was my total reason for repudiating Peck’s brave new world. It is bad enough to live with yourself with hangovers.
The dark fled away, I emerged into visibility, I saw my hand on the post, my hairy forearm, the ragged grass; and turned to meet the air coming at me with a soft heavy concussion and see the sky streaming fire. Apocalypse, and never better timed. With my socks full of foxtails I groped along the fence to the turnstile and through it into our drive. Rockets and cheering broke out of the dark behind me. An awakened mockingbird began to pipe in the screen of Eucalyptus globulus around the water tank.
6
When I curved into the level stretch below the hill I could see the bacchant camp: red fire, glare-and-darkness angles of tent and treehouse, moving silhouettes. A green rocket hung its doomsday light above the trees, and their cheers broke out raucous as the cries of savages. My lights picked out the corral, and in it Julie’s black gelding with his chin hung over the withers of Debby’s piebald. So she had made it, and mother be damned. For a slow-motion second the two pivoted at the base of their lengthening shadows, while a web of elongating legs and enlarging bodies and sharpening angles of corral posts raced counter-clockwise along the creekside brush beyond, and with a leap of overstretched darkness joined the shadows around the fire. My turning lights touched the Volkswagen bus and Dave Weld’s molded Mercury at the trail gate, and reached past them to reveal the gray, abandoned-looking wall of Marian’s house.
In my remembering mind that wall has a waiting look. It sits dark, quiet, and patient while bedlam howls through the woods around it, and while across the hill overprivileged middle-class revelers run cackling from the star shells they fire at the dim sky. Something is waiting in that cottage—maybe serenity, maybe sanctuary.
Nearly fifteen minutes later I got back around the five miles of crooked hill roads and found Lucio’s place boiling like a plowed-up anthill. The celebrants had set the oat grass afire. A bunch of them were beating and stamping along the edge of the parking area, and Lucio and others were squirting silver streams of water across my headlights. There was no wind, the thing was already over, but someone had seen the glow and turned in the alarm, and now before I could find a place to pull out, here came a fire truck in behind me, and after it eight or ten carloads of passers-by hunting excitement. Within minutes, one of them backed into the ditch trying to turn around, and the lane was clogged with happy pushers and angled cars and the not-very-amused members of the fire department. Obviously it might be an hour before we could get out.
But Lucio had a Portygee gate in the fence above his pump house, and rummaging in his garage, I found a pair of wire cutters. For the third or fourth time I caught Debby and got the door shut on her. I collected Ruth and Marian, standing off to one side with their stoles around them, and we nosed down the pump-house lane and out into the road. A stop for another Portygee gate, and we bumped through crackling weeds across the pasture. On our side I cut the fence to let us down into our drive. I was working in sullen, headachy silence, trying to get the day over. Ruth broke into lamentations when I cut the wire, saying what about Julie’s horse. I said, irritable with headache and depression, that there were more important things than that horse. I would fix the fence tomorrow, and hunt the horse if I had to. Marian said nothing at all; Debby, leaning against her, was already asleep.
We turned down the hill, and Ruth, seeing the fire across the creek, said, “Oh look, Peck’s having a party too.”
“A nice loud one,” I said. “We’ll be hearing it till rosy-fingered Dawn creeps out of Tithonus’s bed.” Then we pulled up into Marian’s parking area, and there were two cars that had been parked there beside her station wagon. “Damnation,” I said. “They think they own the world.”
“It’s all right, they won’t bother me,” Marian said.
“They’ll carouse all night and start grinding their starters under your window at five a.m.”
“No, really,” she said. “I’m not sleepy anyway, I’ll probably read in bed.” Carefully she propped Debby upright and reached for the door. I hopped out and opened it, and she got out, awkward with her pregnancy, holding onto my arm. “Won’t you come in?”
“You don’t want company at this hour,” Ruth said. “It’s pretty late.”
“Late? It’s only ten-thirty or so.”
“But it feels like two to this aging playboy,” I said. I lifted Debby out and heaved her sacklike onto my shoulder. Her hands hung down loose as strings. In the diffused glow of the headlights Marian was looking at me oddly. “If you didn’t .
.. mind waiting for a minute while I roll Debby into bed, I wish you would stop.”
I looked at Ruth. The last thing I wanted was to talk, even with Marian. I had the feeling I wasn’t fit company for her; I was skewered from temple to temple, Debby was heavy on my shoulder, her breath warm against my neck. “Why of course,” Ruth said. “We’d love to.”
Well, maybe she was afraid of entering her dark house alone. I should have thought of it. Dutiful but dull, I hoisted the warm slipping girl higher and carried her in. Marian switched on a floor lamp, then a wall switch that showed me the hall leading to Debby’s room. Marian was waiting with the covers turned back, and her smile flashed, but tiredly, as I eased the child down. “I’ll only be a second,” she said.
I went back into the living room where Ruth sat. The redwood paneling was so old it was almost black. It drank the light and was darkened by it as blotting paper is darkened by wet. “I never realized before,” I said. “This is a gloomy room.”
Eying me thoughtfully, she nodded. She rubbed one thumb over the other. We heard light sounds from the interior, then steps, and Marian came in and eased the door carefully shut. “Would you like something? A beer?”
Thanks, we wouldn’t. I wouldn’t, at least. I glanced at Ruth. She frowned, with a quick, impatient shake of the head. Her eyes were on Marian, and her air of watchfulness was so marked that I roused up, blinking. Almost diffidently, Marian sat down in a corduroy-covered chair. With her hands in her lap and her eyes downcast, she looked like a little girl going over in her mind a piece she would have to recite any minute. Then her eyes came up. A hot, painful flush burned briefly in her face, and faded almost as quickly, as if she had forced the blood out of her skin by an act of will. We stared back at her in the slack light. “Marian,” I said, “in God’s name, what is it?”
“I wanted to tell you,” she said carefully and steadily. “I saw the doctor yesterday. It’s back. I’ve probably got two or three months.”
Sickly staring, we took dumbly what we had wholly feared and half expected. I saw the fine tanned skin tightly drawn across the temples, the violet shadows under the eyes. All day, all through that hectic party, she had had that locked up in her. She had carried it up our hill, it had sat beside her in our patio while she quoted us verses celebrating the hard pleasures.
The air in the room was as thick as syrup, tumid with unspent heat. Marian’s hands were in her lap, thin, long-boned, long-tendoned, sheathed in skin as fine as silk. She turned them over. The palms were unnaturally pink. She blushed for that deadly stigma as if it had been shameful.
I find that I can’t remember that night except as a numbness, like a dream suppressed that persists only as discomfort. When I try to recall what we said, I slide off into things we said at other times. When I try to remember how I felt, I am like a man who wakes sweating and clutching the blankets, but what he wakes to, what he clutches, is not what he clutched in the reality of the nightmare. In the blunt minute when she announced her death, I suppose we felt it necessary to deny, doubt, comfort. If we didn’t shed tears, we held them back only to spare her. She herself did not cry. She wore one unchanging expression: fortitude had been turned on and left burning.
I suppose we must have suggested the last-ditch treatments we had seen other friends suffer through, trying to reverse the inevitable-cobalt, male hormones, radiation.
She said she was not going to take any radiation treatments. The baby.
Patiently she waited while I burst out at her, calling her a sentimentalist, crazy. I said she was making the choice that the heroine of a sticky novel would make. When I was through she said, “It isn’t a choice, Joe. It’s a race”.
I turn from it now as I turned from it then. I said I simply didn’t believe John would let her risk her life for a life that didn’t yet exist. I couldn’t understand why she would want to.
So in her quiet, controlled voice, looking at one or another of us for corroboration or approval, she told us: They gave her no hope that they could save her, radiation would only slow things down. Radiation was hard on the patient, which was all right, but the worst was that none could say what it might do to the fetus. They might keep her alive until she could have the baby, but the baby might be a monster, or damaged somehow. If she didn’t take treatments, she might not live long enough to bear the child, but it would at least be normal, and they could take it, if necessary, at the end.
She used the word “end” without a flutter, but for me it was as shattering as the crash of breaking glass. It destroyed all my will to argue with her, for though I could not believe she meant what she said, or would stick to the decision she had leaped to when they posed her her intolerable alternatives, I knew she thought she meant it, and it seemed cruel to make her defend it. We put our faith in John. We tried to get her to let Ruth stay the night. She would not. She didn’t want to evade it, she wanted to come to terms with it, and she would do that better alone.
We kissed her, we found smiles to answer the one she flashed for us, we made her promise all over again to try to reach John the first thing in the morning and bring him home no matter if he missed everything he had gone up there for. We told her to call us, no matter what the hour, if she got lonely or afraid. We said we would be down in the morning right after breakfast. Then we were out in the parking area, and the door that had framed her as we said good night was closed.
“Oh, God damn, God damn, God damn,” I said.
We did not get into the car, but stood as if waiting for something. Ruth came close and put her hand under my arm, and I squeezed it against me with my elbow. It was an unnaturally warm night, the air soft and damp. The living-room light went out, then some remoter light, and the cottage squatted blackly before us. I visualized Marian walking softly into the back bedroom, where she would undress her mutilated, misshapen body and lie down. Would she stare at herself in the mirror, searching for signs of what was happening within?
Then I became aware of the undiminished forces of disorder in the night. The intrusive automobiles were still parked without permission beside her old station wagon, the hounds were still baying off in the dark hills, the raffish crowd at Peck’s burst out bawling to a guitar, singing with gusto.
“Give me that old-time religion,
Give me that old-time religion,
Give me that old-time religion,
It’s good enough for me.”
On the sluggish air moving down the gully I smelled the wild fragrance of their fire. All the restless blood in that well-tempered exurb was out and roaming, turning night into day and yelling the delights of chaos, the mystical and curative pleasures of uncontrol. And in the gray cottage, in the still bedroom, in the organs and blood stream of the girl who liked the hard and painful things because they could so persuade her she was fully alive, and who believed the universe began in order and proceeded toward the perfection of consciousness, the stealthy cells, rebellious against the order that had created them, went on splitting to form their fatal isotopes.
7
The song bawled on through another verse and into the next chorus. Bleakly we stood and listened, and when it stopped we looked at one another doubtfully in the dark and I opened the door of the car for her to get in. Just as I did so the terrific banging that I had heard from the hill began again, this time in the beat of the singing. Gimme that BANG BANG BANG, Gimme that BANG BANG BANG, Gimme that BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” I said. I dug the flashlight out of the glove compartment and shoved Ruth across under the wheel. “Drive up to the foot of the hill and wait for me. I’m going to put that hoodlum outfit down.”
“Joe,” Ruth said, “do you think ... ? She said she didn’t mind.”
“Maybe she won’t be sleeping,” I said, “but she might want to think. She’s got plenty to think about.”
I was going through the trail gate by the time she got turned and started. I didn’t need the flashlight because of her
brightening lights that showed up the cars, the ratty shed, the path, the corral beyond. And the fire, with its jumping shadows, made a target for me to walk toward.
The lights moved past me up the lane and left me in deep darkness. The intolerable din across the creek stopped abruptly, and was succeeded by hoots, yells, screeches, laughter. “Next! Next! Hey, Miles, come on, emancipate the old ego! Man, that puts bees in your head!”
Easing along the path by feel, I ran into the corral fence and stopped to let the red glow of the fire fade off my retina as a green afterimage. It smelled like a Navaho encampment there in the bottoms—horse, wood-smoke, dung, leather, dust. The horses snorted softly, their feet thudded in the powdered adobe. I saw the shadow of a head and neck against the sky, the shine of an eyeball, and putting out a hand I felt a velvet nose and the moist hot blast of breath. The head pulled away, a shoe clinked on a rock. From my zone of darkness and soft sounds I saw the red light and black shadows across the creek, and heard the cacophony of their voices talking loudly and all at once.
I did not even then flick on the flashlight, because I was curious to know what that banging had been, and I didn’t want to scare them off whatever they were doing. While I stood there one of those amplified guitar records came on—loud, loud. Was there something the matter with their ears, that they needed that level of noise? Was it a protective result of growing up in an overcrowded, rackety world that they couldn’t have a good time without a boiler-factory uproar? And did they have no awareness that people who lived within range of that raucous uproar might take less delight in it than they?
I guided myself along the corral rail until I was as close as the corral came to the bay tree. Between me and the fire, which now threw up a shower of sparks as someone poked it, the looping bridge and all Peck’s rigging of lines and cables hung like lianas across the face of some fantastic jungle. Any minute bands of apes could have come swarming out on them hand over hand. But the apes, and I supposed their Tarzan too, seemed to be busy doing something else. A cluster of them was gathered over to the right of the tent; others were watching from the tent deck and from the porch of the treehouse. I moved a little to get a better look at those off to the right.