SIX
WINTER
“End
it with a parade.” –Meyer T Meyer
“The Call of the
Wild, he mourned.” –anon. Freak
Winter
was the Season-elect just as Richard Nixon was the President-elect.
November was brutal, but nobody at the Factory had time to notice.
They were too busy going to Holy Ghost. Meyer dressed all the men in
dark Republican suits and all the women in sensible shoes and Pat
Nixon cloth coats. There was a flurry of visitors to the dying. Meyer
called it “the Mission to the GOP”. Jerry called it nonsense.
“I
don’t want to dress like a Republican,” he told Meyer at the
Meeting to discuss the Mission to the GOP. Jerry was as annoyed and
upset as anyone remembered seeing him. “I don’t want to
masquerade as someone who vated for Nixon, no matter how noble it
seems to you. You didn’t even vote!”
“Meyer
didn’t even know there was an election,” Yodel added, smiling
like a fool, “how could he have voted?”
“Meyer
doesn’t even know what a Republican is,” Sugar interjected,
trying to calm Jerry with a pat of her hand, “and he only imagines
he knows how they dress.”
“This
isn’t about politics,” Krista added, “it’s about compassion.”
“Jesus
Christ!” Jerry said, looking wildly around the room. “I’m
surrounded by Whigs and Know-Nothings! Doesn’t anyone here have a
political opinion?”
“Reed
used to,” Sandy offered from the back of the room, “but he gave
them up along with reading.”
Reed
tried to remember his opinions about politics. Since he was the son
of a corporate lawyer, the product of a military school and an
Episcopalian, he imagined he most likely would have voted for Nixon.
So, he kept quiet.
Meyer
rattled the mobile above his bed with a hockey stick. That was the
sign that discussion was over.
“Here’s
the truth, Jerry,” he said, solemnly, “Republicans and Democrats
both have to die. There is a what I’ve heard called ‘a window of
opportunity’ here. We can visit the staunch Republicans at Holy
Ghost and pretend to be members of the Nixon campaign staff
dispatched by the great man himself. It might ease their passage into
the great beyond, the void, heaven or hell, whatever is after this
earth. If that fast-talking little chipmunk from Minnesota had won,
we’d be visiting Democrats this week. It’s that simple.”
“So,
if we were in Germany after Hitler came to power,” Jerry said
sarcastically, “we’d be visiting dying Nazis this week?”
Meyer
smiled at Jerry the way the Pope would have smiled at a child who had
flawlessly recited the Baltimore catechism. He spoke gently,
lovingly. “That’s right, Jerry. You’ve got my drift now. I’m
very pleased….And Nazis die too. Whatever else they did or thought
in their lives, they deserve a little attention on their way out that
secret door.”
In
the end, it was Jerry who briefed people before their visits to Holy
Ghost. Jerry would tell them key things to mention. “Lower taxes,
breaks for business, peace with honor, prayer in the schools, a hard
line against communists, no patience with those who attack the
American way of life,” he told those in their Republican uniforms
as they prepared to troop down to the hospital.
One
night during the Mission to the GOP, Reed found Jerry sitting alone
in the kitchen drinking what appeared to be his tenth Schlitz. He had
lined up the first nine cans in three rows of three on the table and
was draining another. Reed sat down beside him. Jerry’s eyes didn’t
quite focus and he spoke carefully, straining not to slur his words.
“I
visited this old retired major this afternoon. He served in both
world wars. Started as a private in the Great War and stayed on,
working his way up to Major. He told me about the farm he grew up on
in Hanover, New Hampshire and still remembered the names of all the
horses and dogs he knew back then….” Jerry looked at Reed as if
he had forgotten who he was talking to. “He talked about the ‘boys’
he commanded like they were his children, since he never married
except to the Army. A really great old guy. Major Stanley Phelps.
Very funny guy—told me jokes. But he was so thrilled that Nixon was
elected that it made me a little nauseous. Just as I was leaving he
said something like, ‘We’re
going to get those pansy-assed draft dodgers now, ain’t we?’
I wanted to strangle him, but then I remembered what Meyer said
about even Nazis deserving a good death. So I told him we probably
would get them.”
Reed
had to wait until Jerry went to the bottomless beer cooler and bring
back another Schlitz. Before he opened it, he rearranged his cans on
the table into two rows of five.
“Bunch
of ‘dead soldiers’,” he said, “just like Major Phelps. He
said something else to me as I started to leave. I didn’t hear what
he said so I went back to the bed. He took my hand and tried to
speak, but I’ll never know his message because he threw an aneurysm
at just that moment and died holding my hand.”
Reed
remembered Virgil Trucks. “Is that the first person you’ve ever
seen die?” he asked softly.
Jerry
looked at him, at least he looked over Reed’s left shoulder. It
passed for looking at him after 10 ½ beers.
“I’ve
seen dozens of people die,” he said, vacantly. “Remember, Reed,
I’m a priest. Seeing people die is part of my job description.”
Jerry
drained his eleventh Schlitz and tried for a while to form eleven
empty cans into some orderly pattern. Finally, he swept all the cans
from the table with his arm. They clanged and clattered around the
kitchen floor. Jerry was crying.
“Here’s
the thing,” he said to Reed through his tears, “until today I
would have told you Major Phelps was an asshole, he didn’t have a
clue. He never had a thought in his life I agreed with. But I pushed
his bell and was giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until a
nurse and an orderly pulled me off him. The nurse said, ‘Let him
go….’ She was an oriental woman, Thai or maybe Vietnamese. And
this big Black orderly was trying to comfort me. ‘Major Phelps is
in a better place now,’ he kept saying. And I was crying just like
this. Everything about Major Phelps should make me hate him, but here
I am, drunk and sloppy and crying about him some more.”
Reed
sat in silence while Jerry drunkenly picked up all the cans and put
them in the trash. When he finished, he looked around the kitchen
like there was something there he needed to find.
“That
goddamn Meyer just won’t leave well enough alone,” Jerry said,
stumbling toward the stairs.
Reed
sat at the table for half-an-hour before he got up, turned out the
lights and went to his room. Sandy was already asleep. Reed undressed
and fell into bed with her and fell almost instantly into a dreamless
sleep. As he slept, artic air pushed out of Canada and mixed with the
warmer air over the Bay and the Atlantic to produce the first snow
fall of winter. The snow had rainbows in it.
Rainbows
were among Reed’s favorite thing. Reed had found rainbows in
fountain spray, in insect wings, wrapping Massanuttin Mountain like a
crown, on the necks of pigeons, on patches sewn on hip pockets, on
posters, arched across the Charles after a rain, in oily puddles,
and, late that night, Sandy showed him rainbows in the snow.
Sandy
and Reed woke at about three a.m. from a black sleep, heavy-eyed and
fat-lipped. They both could sense it was snowing. From the window,
frosted with strange ice patterns on the outside, framed like a
Christmas card, they watched the snow falling on Broadway. “The
snow woke us up, Reed,” Sandy whispered, fogging the window in
front of her face. She went to the dresser for a pipe and some grass
so they could smoke a little. Reed seldom smoked marijuana because it
usually gave him mild paranoia. But this time, it gave him snow
rainbows.
Wordless
and tingling, feeling like finger-tips all over, they dressed in
bear-like clothing and drew hoods around their ears. They went
outside to hear the snow. Sandy said she could hear it falling, could
hear it touch her face.
They
walked and ran and stopped and hugged and kissed and danced. They
touched softly, like snow touches. They did their snowy dance in
front of the Cambridge City Library. Inside, the books slept:
unmoving, unread, with only their awesome murmurs.
A
gray dawn came creeping in, all pockets and bursts of light among the
flakes. Before Reed’s face, in clouds of breath and dawn’s light,
dancing as Sandy danced, lightly in the kissing snow, Reed saw
rainbows.
“There
are rainbows in the snow!” Reed said. “Rainbows!”
Sandy
looked at him with secret knowledge and leaned her head like a dear
leans its head. Her eyes were doe-like, true.
“Of
course,” she said, laughing, “of course and always….They are
always there, waiting for us, always waiting for us to see them.”
The
rainbows swirled, spiraled, danced, turned, shifted as the colors
blended, merged, became each other. Reed reached out to try to touch
them—the rainbows in the wordless, timeless snow.
*
Sometimes
snow can be like music. Like a choir is singing it. Singing it white
on white on white. Forever.
That’s
the way the snow can get in Boston Common—a whole cantata of snow.
One
night in that long winter of 1968-69, Meyer got such a yearning for
the snow in Boston Common that he almost ended his stay of this
earth. And with him, Reed, Sandy and Sugar would have returned to
dust. The VW bug was like a sled and the four of them were sliding to
a concert of snow. Coming down ice-covered Joy Street, right beside
the Gold Dome of the capitol of the Commonwealth, Meyer ran the car
into a snow bank like a softball runs into a mitt—at about 40 miles
an hour. After all of them agreed that they were still in the land of
the living, though a bit shook up, Meyer explained: “It wouldn’t
have stopped otherwise.”
Then
he put his mitten-ed hand to his ear. “Listen, you can hear a choir
singing a cantata of snow.”
Sugar
held Meyer’s hand. Reed held Sandy’s hand. They ran across Beacon
Street right in front of a police car. The policemen waved at them
and they waved back. Snow does such things to people.
There
were many people in Boston Common watching it snow. Some of them were
laughing and running and holding hands. Some of them were as solemn
as if they were reading the Bible. Some made snowmen and called them
Seth and wrapped scarves around their snowy necks. A few people made
snow-women, put snow breasts on their chilly chests and called them
Sarah. And some, mostly Freaks, rubbed their shoes on the snow, like
little kids, and made an ice-slide down one of the gentle hills of
Boston Common.
All
the fountains and statues in the Common were covered with snow and
looked like anything but fountains and statues. They looked like
Greek freighters and Oldsmobiles and state maps and things inside
a cave. A statue of some governor or another looked like a buffalo
covered with snow to Reed.
“That
looks like a buffalo I once knew,” Reed said. “He was covered
with snow in West Virginia.”
“I
never knew a buffalo,” Meyer said, “but I knew a camel once in
Egypt. He wasn’t covered with snow, but he was ill-tempered and
smelled bad.”
“That
kind’a looks like a camel,” Sugar said, pointing to a fountain,
“but there’s no smell at all except the smell of falling snow.”
It
was snowing as hard as your heart beats when you are really scared,
like when you see a child about to fall off something high. Everyone
in Boston Common looked like walking Alps with snow on their summits.
They
walked through the snow toward Boylston Street and came to a
bandstand, covered with snow. Meyer got on it and pretended to be a
band. He made horn sounds and drum noises and directed himself. Sugar
joined in as the cymbal section. Sandy was the woodwinds and Reed,
who could make many sounds, became the strings.
They
played a Sousa march with lots of cymbals for Sugar. Then they played
“Hail to the Chief” because they all knew it. Some of the other
people gathered for a while around the bandstand to listen. But when
Meyer insisted on beginning Bach’s “Mass in B minor”, most of
the people wandered away. Maybe they didn’t like Bach or maybe they
had begun to worry they’d be buried in a snowdrift. So they
wandered, Alps looking for Switzerland, all going in different
directions.
The
four of them struggled through the snow toward the Public Gardens,
but Meyer stopped in front of a lot of benches, standing at
attention, waiting for a parade to pass. The snow made the benches
look like sports cars or power boats or snow covered hippopotami—none
of which would have worried about an impending parade.
“This
is where the old men sit,” Meyer said. “They sit here and get
drunk on port wine to pass out or else they talk about politics or
the old country or people they know who are dead.”
Sugar
was worried about the old men because she said, “Where do they go
when it snows?”
Meyer
had started walking again. “The swans?” he asked, “do you mean
the swans?”
“No,”
Sugar said, sure of what she meant, “the old men.”
Meyer
nodded and about a bushel of snow fell of his head and shoulders. “I
thought you meant the swans from the Public Gardens.”
“No,”
Sugar said, “I meant the old men from the benches.”
“In
summer they move like the wind through brown water,” Meyer told
her, “with high school boys peddling them.”
“Who?”
Someone besides Sugar said, but it was hard to tell who in all that
snow.
“The
swans,” Meyer said, still pushing through snow on the sidewalk.
“They aren’t really swans, they’re boats that look like swans.
But they do move silently through the brown water.” Then he said,
“Have you ever seen snow like this before Thanksgiving?”
Apparently,
no one had. But someone said, “What about the old men, Meyer?” It
wasn’t Sugar or Reed. That left Sandy.
Meyer
stopped in his tracks. He turned and looked at Sandy like she was a
statue covered with snow that looked like the Star of David.
“Meyer,”
Reed told him, “you were talking about the old men….”
“You
know what I’d like?” Meyer asked, “Really like?”
They
all shook their heads and snow fell on their shoulders.
“Some
donuts,” Meyer said.
So
they slid and sloshed through the snow to a Dunkin’ Donuts across
the street from the Common. Meyer ordered a dozen. “Mix ‘em up,”
to told the donut girl, surprised to find a snowy, skinny walrus
ordering donuts in her shop, “And don’t spare the lemon-filled.”
Meyer
gave her a twenty dollar bill and told her to keep the change. She
smiled wildly at him. She had a nice face—the kind of face you see
on girls on buses who seem to be going to visit their grandmothers.
She was smiling at a walrus who came out of the blizzard to get some
donuts and give her a $17.45 tip.
“A
smile like that,” he said, “deserves to know what happens to the
old men.”
“What
old men?” she asked.
“The
ones who sit in the Common and get drunk and read Tolstoy and wait to
die. The ones who aren’t there when it snows.”
Everyone
waited for him to tell them, even the old woman behind him in line
that shouldn’t have been out in such weather, even the Black
delivery man and the two stoned Freaks sitting on stools and the two
sailors drinking their coffee by the window, looking out at the
winter wonderland. They all waited like donuts waiting for the coffee
to be perked.
“They
go with the swan boats. They go wherever the swan boats go. And they
glide like the wind through
After
several further adventures, one of which involved sliding down the
ice-slide the Freaks had made, the four of them finally found the VW.
With the help of a policeman, a sailor and a Freak, they pushed it
out of the snow bank. Meyer gave them all a donut.
“There
go two of the lemon-filled,” he said as they slid out of Boston
toward Cambridge, toward home. When they got to the Igloo Factory,
they made coffee to keep the donuts company in their stomachs.
“Where
do they really
go?” Sugar asked when they were all warm, dry and drinking coffee
in the kitchen. “You know, the old men….Where, Meyer? Really?”
her face was like a shellfish, all wrinkled and serious.
Meyer
drank some coffee and ate half a Boston Cream donut before he
answered, “They go where old men go.” His voice was as devout as
the Koran, as serious as cancer. “They go where donut holes and
lost puppies go. Where the words you meant to say and never did go.
Where the mates to your socks go. Where hope disappears to. They fall
into the same bottomless trap that Truth happens upon. To their tiny,
lonely, under-heated single rooms where no one ever visits. That’s
where they go. They go to that place.”
Sugar
seemed very sad, but she nodded and said she understood. Reed wasn’t
at all sure he understood, but he believed Sugar did. And so did
Sandy.
Meyer
and Sugar went to watch an old horror movie with Marvin Gardens, one
Meyer had been looking forward to for a long time. Sandy and Reed
went to bed.
“It
was beautiful, wasn’t it, Reed?” Sandy whispered in the middle of
the night. She had awakened him from a dream about buffalo and snow
and donuts. She woke him to tell him, “It was a wonderland, the
Common and all, the snow and everything. Even the old men who weren’t
there, even the old men who go where lost quarters go.”
Obviously,
to Reed, Sandy was someone who had spent her life in Florida, in a
place where snow is rare, if ever. Reed had always lived in places
where snow was simply part of life: enjoyable for a while and
annoying after that. But he didn’t mention any of that. Instead, he
said, “It was like a choir singing it.” He said that softly
because he was still half-asleep.
“You’re
right,” Sandy told him, kissing him on his forehead, “it was just
like that.”
In
the dark, Reed could feel Sandy smile. Sandy smiling beside him in
bed was like a snowy caterpillar walking across his belly, singing,
singing like it was a choir, singing it tingly—warm and cold all at
once.
*
Thanksgiving
and Christmas brought a shit-load of snow to Cambridge and an
avalanche of visits to Holy Ghost. Meyer wasn’t satisfied with only
the members of the Factory visiting the dying and would sometimes
stop people in Harvard Square and ask them if they’d like to ‘visit
themselves’ in the hospital. Most people thought he was as crazy as
the dozens of other people who stopped them in Harvard Square—asking
for spare change or introducing them to a new religion or wanting
their signature to save the whales or the Vietnamese or lesbian
caribou in Alaska. Almost everyone in Harvard Square was looking to
save something or someone: wetlands, frogs in Brazil, old growth
forests in the Pacific north-west, ethnic Kurds, children sold into
slavery, the world from Nixon. It was, Reed came to believe, a noble
place to be. In Harvard Square you were surrounded by people who
believed in salvation in one form or another.
One
snowy day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Reed and Sandy were
walking through Harvard Square with Sam Houston Barber IV, who had
been graduated from Princeton University with an honors degree in
Political Science the previous June. Sam Houston was, as one might
imagine, from Texas, a tiny town in West Texas with more cattle than
people. Sam’s daddy owned most of the cattle in that town and not a
few of the people in one way or another. Sam’s daddy wanted him to
go to law school at the University of Texas and come how to practice
long enough to be elected prosecuting attorney and then judge of the
huge, empty county in West Texas where Sam had grown up. That was
Sam’s daddy’s dream since he had only finished eighth grade
before quitting school to help with the family ranch. It was also
Sam’s granddaddy’s dream from his nursing home since he had only
finished eighth grade before taking over the family ranch all
together. Sam’s great-granddaddy didn’t have any dreams since
he’d dropped dead at 38, making it necessary for Sam’s granddaddy
to drop out of school and turn a struggling ranch into a ranch with
more land than Rhode Island and more cattle than their were people in
the whole county. Each of these men was named Sam Houston Barber.
Sam’s daddy was called ‘Trey’ because he was the third Sam
Houston Barber. Sam’s granddaddy, still kicking in the nursing home
but paralyzed on his right side since 1958 from a stoke, was know as
‘Deuce’, since he was Sam Houston Barber, Jr. Sam’s nickname
was ‘Kind’, shortened from ‘Four of a Kind’ since he was Sam
Houston IV and everyone plays poker is West Texas.
‘Kind’
had shown up at the Factory in October. He’d met Jerry at the
Counseling Center since he was trying to figure out how not to go to
South East Asia instead of Texas. He thought being in New England
made sense because it was so close to Canada. It wasn’t that Kind
was opposed to giving his life for something, it’s just he would
rather give his life for his cattle and his family and a judgeship in
West Texas than for whatever the war in Viet Nam was about giving
your life for. Jerry liked Kind and told him about the Factory, so
Kind showed up one day.
His
‘initiation ritual’ was short because Meyer needed the Meeting to
deal with the increasing activity at Holy Ghost. But when Meyer asked
Kind ‘what he made’, the West Texan said, in an accent as open
and broad as his home county, “I make people feel good.” Everyone
held their collective breath while Meyer considered that as a
possible contribution to the Tribe.
“Well,”
Meyer finally said, grinning as wide as Texas, “why the hell not?
That’s what we’re all about here anyway. And Florence has some
people for you to practice on.”
Florence
was wrapped in the Union Army Cape. Her clothes were piled neatly on
Meyer’s bed. Underneath the cape, she was as naked as a jaybird,
whatever that means. Both Kind Barber and Jerry would have said
“necked
as a jaybird”.
Florence
leaned off the bed to hand Kind three or four 4 by 6 cards. The cape
fell away, revealing her breasts. Kind took the cards and smiled at
her. “I apologize for lookin’, M’am,” he drawled, “and it
was a pleasure.”
Florence
laughed and hit Meyer on the arm. “He’s right,” she said, “he
makes people feel good.”
Kind
became a regular at Holy Ghost before the day he and Reed and Sandy
were walking across Harvard Square in spitting snow. Jerry had called
Kind’s doctor in Texas and discovered Kind had a faint heart murmur
that made him 4-F as well as Four-of-a-Kind. Yet, Kind continued to
hang around the Factory, visiting the hospital and making people feel
good.
Not
even Pierce was immune. Kind had given him a pair of cowboy boots
because he saw Pierce wearing sneakers in the snow. Pierce polished
those boots almost every night. “Damn”, he was heard to say,
“that Kind is a good guy.”
Whenever
Krista saw Kind, she would take his face in her hands and peer into
his eyes. The bell over the sink would quiver and sometimes tinkle.
“Kind,” Krista would tell him, “your name does you justice.”
Kind
would blush and lower his eyes from Krista’s mystic gaze. “Thank
you, M’am,” he would always say, “that’s a pretty thought,
almost as pretty as you.”
Each
time Kind said the word ‘pretty’, it came out ‘purdy’. Four
years in New Jersey and a few months in the Commonwealth hadn’t
changed that. A hundred years couldn’t.
And
each time he said it, it made Krista feel good.
There
was as little guile in Kind as in Sugar. So, when he and Reed and
Sandy passed through one of the gates of Harvard Yard and emerged
into Harvard Square, Kind tensed up. He wasn’t able to brush by the
shaved-head of the Hari Krishna who wanted to sell him a flower. He
bought the flower and told the young man his saffron robes were as
‘purdy’ as a Texas sunset. Kind wasn’t able to walk away from
the two young women, one in a black robe and the other in a red robe,
who wanted to tell him about “The Process”, a religious cult as
close to Zoroastrianism as a cult could be. He stopped to listen, ask
questions and give them money. He handed out dollar bills like they
were free advice to the Freaks—the real ones and the ones from the
suburbs, Kind couldn’t tell the difference. He also stopped to be
told why he should sign petitions to the U.N. or the President or the
Cambridge City Council about left-handed walruses or incursions into
Cambodia or affordable housing for dangerous, mouth-breathing morons.
And he gave them all money.
By
the time Kind caught up with Reed and Sandy at the newsstand kiosk
half-way across Mass Ave at the entrance to Harvard Square station,
his eyes were wide and his pockets empty.
“Could
one of you buy me an ice-cream?” he asked. “I seem to be out of
money. I’ll pay you back….”
They
both smiled and felt good. Buying Kind an ice-cream cone would give
them pleasure.
Just
then, a girl about 13, dressed in torn jeans and heavy makeup came up
to Kind. She offered to do unimaginable things for him with her body
for only $20. At the same time, Saul, the Harpo Marx Freak was asking
Kind if he knew where he could find some really good grass and the
little dog that belonged to the guy who ran the newsstand started
barking at Kind in a pleading way. The dog—a Corgi—had been hit
by a trolley on Mass Ave a year or so before. His back legs were
paralyzed, so the little man had tied him to a skateboard. The child
prostitute, Saul and the handicapped dog were too much for Kind to
absorb all at once. He started moving away from them, a look of
terror on his face.
“Sorry
about the ice-cream,” he called to Sandy and Reed, “I need to go
back to Texas now.” He said that just before darting across the
road, back toward Harvard Yard. The last glimpse Sandy and Reed had
of Kind was as he ran over the Hari Krishna and helped him up. He
tried to brush the snow off the young man’s robes before dashing
off toward the Igloo Factory.
“Isn’t
Kind neat?” Sandy said as they watched him disappear.
“He
always makes me feel good,” Reed answered. Then they bought the
hooker and the Freak some ice-cream at Brigham’s.
The
last thing Sam Houston Barber IV did before flying out of Logan and
back to Texas, was visit an old cowboy in the hospital. His name was
‘Buck’ something. Kind and Pierce pretended to be old friends of
his from the rodeo circuit. Meyer found Pierce a cowboy hat to wear.
Kind had his own.
“Jesus,
you should have heard them,” Pierce said that night around the
kitchen table, polishing his boots. “That old coot saw right
through me, but he and Kind started talking Texan and you would have
needed an translator to understand them.”
It
was odd for Pierce to talk so much, so everyone at the table was as
quiet as cabbages, as attentive as beagles.
Pierce
looked up from his boots and smiled. “Kind convinced that old man
that he knew his daddy and his nephew. Shit, for all I know, he
really did. And he was telling him about delivering a calf in a
tornado in 1955 or some such shit, when the old man took his hand and
died.”
Everyone
was quiet. Pierce spit on the toe of his boot and rubbed like a crazy
man.
“What
did Kind do when Buck died?” Sugar finally asked.
“What
would you expect him to do?” Pierce asked, polishing so hard that
no one could see how damp his eyes were. “He closed that old
fucker’s eyes, crossed his arms and kissed him on the forehead.”
Pierce
raised his head. Reed was shocked to see a tear slip out of Pierce’s
right eye and roll down his cheek. “Jesus,” he said, momentarily
unashamed of his emotion, “that Kind could make anyone feel good.”
Right
after that, Pierce went to his room. Sugar followed him without
apology and Meyer gave Sandy and Reed two handfuls of money.
“It
was the money I had for Kind’s airplane ticket,” he explained. “I
took it from the puzzle box, forgetting Kind has tons of money and
didn’t need it. He told me to tell the two of you to give it to
people in the Square.”
They
promised that they would, and they did.
*
It
was clear Meyer was becoming obsessed by the holidays. His room was
full of bags and boxes. The bags were from Jordan Marsh and Filenes’.
The boxes were from various catalogs. Florence told Reed Meyer had
spent over $7000 buying presents for the people at Holy Ghost. There
was something there for every terminally ill patient.
“Being
the Angel of Death isn’t enough, apparently,” Florence said, “now
he wants to be Father Christmas.” Then, after gazing over the gifts
that filled Meyer’s room, she said, “This is going to stretch the
costuming.”
“Why
are so many people at Holy Ghost dying?” Reed asked her.
She
smiled. Florence’s smile was broad and bright and a bit unsettling
from someone who knew death so intimately. Reed liked her immensely.
When he lay dying, he thought, he hoped someone like Florence would
be beside him.
“Death
is what we specialize in,” she told him. “Oh, we’re a general
hospital and treat lots of people who aren’t dying. But mostly,
we’re a hospital for the terminally ill. And we take welfare
folks—people who can’t pay their bills. Since some hospitals
won’t, those folks sort of gather at Holy Ghost. People dying with
no one to pay their bills.”
Reed
considered that for a long time while Florence moved presents from
one pile to another for reasons he never understood or asked about.
The Holy Ghost specialty seemed ultimately sad to him. He asked
Florence about that.
She
shrugged. “Sadness is relative,” she said, “like everything
else. Holy Ghost is like a hospice, though that’s not what our
license says. That has its own joys and rewards. And Meyer—all of
you—make such a difference. Everyone on the staff is happier now
that there are people to visit the patients who have no one who
cares.” She bit her lip for a moment. Her teeth were as white as
snow and her lips were painted a pale pink. “Dying isn’t all that
bad if someone is there with you.” She said that almost wistfully.
“You’ve seen it yourself. I see it every day. When I come on
duty, I ask the other nurses, ‘who snuck off home when I wasn’t
here?’. That’s what I say. We all talk about death now as ‘going
home’. I know it’s corny, but it feels right. I don’t know, it
just feels right.”
Florence’s
face became calm and flat. She looked at Reed and smiled, her eyes
full of liquid.
Reed
thought some more about death that day—about Lysander and his
father and even Ms. Masselman, the first person he visited at Holy
Cross. Now he had visited dozens, a bunch of dozens. Reed decided he
hated death, the loss and waste of it all, and the pain it brought,
the tears. He didn’t think of death as ‘going home’. To him, it
was turning off the lights and being scared. That simple. That basic.
That primitive.
He
looked around Meyer’s room at all the gifts. They were brightly
wrapped and piled up like mountains—like the Rockies, the Pyrenees,
the Alps. And each day, as people dressed up and carried gifts to
dying people, the piles were worn away the way mountains are worn
away by eons of erosion into peneplains.
*
It
all went well until Meyer asked Pierce to take some dried, salted cod
to Imelio Imbroglio, a 95 year old Italian man. Meyer had arranged
with the kitchen at Holy Ghost to cook the fish for Imelio. Meyer had
given them a recipe he’d gotten from Mack, the once and future fish
butcher. It was a time consuming and complicated recipe, but everyone
at Holy Ghost, from the Chief Administrator to the kitchen staff
would have done naked back-flips in the snow for Meyer. Since Meyer
had insinuated himself at Holy Ghost, there had been almost no staff
turnover. Nobody got depressed and left anymore. So a recipe for
salted cod was easy to accommodate.
Pierce
was okay until Meyer mentioned the fish.
“Oh,
no!” he said, “Shit no! I’m not carrying fish to anyone. I
don’t do fish.”
Everyone
in the room was startled. Meyer was not someone to cross on anything.
You only complained once that all the beer was Schlitz and all the
soda was Coke. After one lecture delivered with his eye patch turned
up to reveal the marble of white, Schlitz and Coke were your drinks
of choice. That milky eye and Meyer’s barely controlled rage were
enough to convince most anyone of most anything.
And
never, never, did you cross Meyer about a visit to Holy Ghost.
Everyone
held their breath. Meyer flipped up his eye patch and Florence
started massaging his back and whispering in his ear.
“What
the fuck does that mean—you don’t do fish?” Meyer edged toward
the side of the bed, the side the Yataghan was stored under.
“When
I was in ‘Nam,” Pierce said, his voice clear and unafraid, “five
of us bought some fish from a little boy. We cooked it over the fire
and ate it. We were so hungry we couldn’t think. Three of the guys
died. Macon, a big Black dude from Baton Rouge and I vomited for
three days, but we lived. That little boy sold us poison fish. A Viet
Cong deal. I don’t do seafood.”
To
everyone’s surprise, Meyer flipped down his eye patch and leaned
back. “Is that true?” he asked Pierce.
“The
God’s truth,” Pierce said. Everyone believed him.
Meyer
shook his head and said, “Yodel, you have any seafood deal we
aren’t aware of?”
Meyer
always respected death.
But
Meyer had no respect at all, not any, none, for fear.
JoAnn
Adams came up out of the file card box for Sandy. It was one of those
frenetic nights in December when Meyer was playing Santa Claus to the
dying at Holy Ghost. Florence was beside him on the bed, keeping
track of the cards, dressed in her nurses uniform since there was no
time for sex in such a season. Seven residents of the Factory—Reed,
Krista, Yodel, Sandy and three Wanderers on the Earth—were gathered
around Meyer’s bed like seedlings around an oak tree, ducklings
around their mother, planets around the sun.
“Ah,”
Meyer said the way he always did when one of some file card was a
perfect match. “JoAnn Adams…This one’s for you, Sandy.”
“Who
do I have to be?” Sandy asked, brightening. She loved the game, the
masquerade, the ‘make-believe’ of it all.
“Easy
part,” Meyer told her, still looking at the card, “you have to be
yourself.”
“What
do you mean?” Sandy’s voice was no longer quite so bright or
excited.
Meyer
read from the card: “JoAnn Adams, 19. Pensacola, Florida. According
to witnesses, she dropped three tabs of acid and jumped….”
Somewhere
in there, Sandy started screaming. “No! No! Not that JoAnn!” she
screamed. “Not Jody….Oh God, no!”
“…off
the roof of a Leslie College dorm,” Meyer continued, over Sandy’s
screams, “where she was a freshman majoring in music. Her insides
are scrambled like a breakfast egg. Her brain is dead, according to
all the machines, and the family is going to take her off
life-support day after tomorrow. Best guess is that she’ll die
within minutes….”
Sandy
tore away from Reed and ran from the room. He had been trying to hold
her, but she was strong and terribly upset and got away.
Reed
ran up the stairs to their room and found Sandy on the bed in a fetal
position, holding her cat. Reed rushed to her and took her in his
arms. Pajamas, the cat, bit him on the hand and ran from the room,
meowing loudly. Sandy simply sobbed and gasped.
“What
is it, Sandy?” Reed asked. “What is it?”
Between
sobs and shutters, she told him that JoAnn—Jody—Adams had been
her friend since grade-school, since marbles contests, since forever
and before then. And when she ran away from Florida, the last thing
Sandy told Jody was that she and Carlton were hitting the road and
doing drugs and that it was a great trip.
“Don’t
you see, Meyer,” Sandy said, calmed down a bit when Meyer came to
find her, “she must have started drugs because I told her it was
good. And now she’s dying. I can’t go to see her. I can’t face
her. I’m scared….I’m so scared.”
Meyer
looked at her like a one-eyed walrus trying to imitate the Sphinx.
His voice was harsh and condemning when he said, “do you think I
really care about your fear? Do you imagine for a moment that your
pitiful fear is of any concern to me? How afraid was JoAnn when she
leaped from so far above the pavement? Was she afraid or was she just
trying to fly—the way the LSD told her she could? Maybe she was
just flying like a bird, a butterfly, a flying fish. Now she’s all
scrambled inside and you, my dear Sandy, are going to go and visit
her and say goodbye. You are going to look your fear in the face and
spit in its eye.”
Sandy
and Jody had been cheerleaders together. They had slept over at each
other’s houses dozens of times, talking about boys and algebra,
boys and clothes they liked, music and boys. They had designed ‘slam
books’ together and fell in love with Paul McCartney together. They
had even been chosen, the two of them, to go to the UN in New York as
guests of the Pensacola Odd Fellows.
“We
were on a city bus with these kids from Mississippi and Georgia,”
Sandy told Reed in the middle of that sleepless night. “Those kids
were acting like fools with the people on the bus, asking them where
to get grits and sausage gravy for breakfast, if they knew the words
to ‘Dixie’, things like that, using their accents like weapons
against the dumb Yankees. Jody and I got off the bus without the
chaperones noticing when it stopped in the middle of Manhattan. We
were on Third Avenue somewhere, 16 and lost as hell.”
Reed was holding Sandy like something fragile and precious, a bird’s
nest or a snowflake. He brushed her hair from her face and his hand
came away wet with tears.
“Somehow
Jody and I got across that huge city to the UN on foot. We got yelled
at by the Odd Fellows and didn’t get in the group picture, but
there were so many people in the picture I convinced my mother I was
one of them.” Sandy shuttered and shook. “And you know what,
Reed?”
“No,”
he said softly, “I don’t know what.”
“Kindness
got us across Manhattan, good people and kindness.”
Reed
went with Sandy to visit Jody/JoAnn at Holy Ghost. She was a
beautiful girl, perhaps the most beautiful girl Reed had ever seen.
She had high cheek bones and pencil thin eyebrows and long blonde
hair. Even immobile in the hospital bed, with tubes running out of
her nose and throat, Jody was beautiful.
While
Sandy was talking to Jody’s un-listening ears, talking about Junior
High School and the nights they’d slept over, Reed was startled and
embarrassed because he found this good as dead woman attractive. Then
he hated himself for wondering how she had fallen five floors and not
damaged her face.
Finally,
Sandy stopped talking and just held Jody’s hand and touch her face
and sat beside her. Reed hung the little wind chime Meyer had sent as
a Christmas gift to the bar that held Jody’s broken legs elevated.
He found an old Glamour
magazine in the waiting room and waved it toward the wind chime until
the seashells and aluminum tubes moved and kissed and dainty, subtle
tones emerged.
“She
hears it!” Sandy cried from the bedside. “She squeezed my hand.
Keep waving, Reed!”
Reed
waved the magazine and kept the wind-chime playing for almost
half-an-hour, until Mr. and Mrs. Adams came into the room. They were
tall, elegant people, too tan to be from the Northeast though their
grief made them look more dead than their daughter. Sandy leaped from
her chair and started talking madly, apologizing, weeping, nearly
dissimilating before everyone’s eyes. Her voice got more and more
shrill and her face more and more agonized until Mr. Adams reached
for her and held her near. Mrs. Adams joined him and they held Sandy
everywhere they could touch her and murmured soft words and sounds to
her until she was finally calm.
Reed
stood in the corner of the room while the three of them talked—or
while Mr. and Mrs. Adams talked to Sandy. From what he heard, they
told her Jody hadn’t started taking drugs because of Sandy, Jody
hadn’t started taking drugs at all. She had mourned for Sandy and
vowed to find her someday. “What a gift to her,” Reed heard Mrs.
Adams say, “that she found you now.”
“They
weren’t angry with me at all,” Sandy told Reed later, just before
she fell asleep. “They told me they had prayed for me. They even
wondered now that when Jody decided to come to Boston to college if
it was because she thought I might be here somewhere.” Sandy had
used all the tears she had in Jody’s room and was leaning against
Reed on the edge of their bed. “They were so kind to me, Reed, so
good and kind. How can people in that much pain find such kindness
within them?”
Reed
had no answer for that question. Sandy layed down on their bed and
fell asleep. Meyer and Florence came in to kiss her head as she slept
and to pull the blanket over her sleeping form.
“That
poor child JoAnn,” Florence said, back in Meyer’s room. “Her
roommates swore she never did drugs. Just wanted an aspirin for her
slight headache and found a bottle of Bayer’s children’s aspirin
in another students room. She took three, never knowing they were
LSD. And then….”
“Then
she flew,” Meyer finished.
Reed
told them about how wonderful Mr. and Mrs. Adams were. Mr. Adams
shook his hand and Mrs. Adams kissed his cheek before he and Sandy
left. “They told me to take care of Sandy,” he said.
“And
you should,” both Meyer and Florence said. They laughed and both
said ‘bread and butter’ at the same time.
“Kindness
and good people can get us through most anything,” Meyer said.
Reed
spent the night beside Sandy, not once even dozing off. Just after
10, Florence called to let everyone know the Adams’ had turned off
the machines and Jody died in their arms.
Sandy
was cried out until she tried to call her mother in Pensacola to tell
her about Jody and ask her to go to the funeral. The phone was
disconnected.
*
The
last gift of Meyer’s cache was a bottle of aromatic oil for a young
African man. Jerry delivered it too late though he sat by the dead
man’s bed for a while and sprinkled the oil around the room. The
next night he talked with Florence.
“What
was wrong with Munumba?” he asked her.
“It’s
‘Mutumba’,” she told him, “names matter to the dead.
“Sorry,”
said Jerry, “but why did Mutumba die? He was in his 20’s but he
looked like a football with half the air let out. He was like an old
man. What killed him?”
“Nobody
at the hospital can figure it out,” Florence said, sadly, “it’s
a mystery. His body just quit fighting. He died from the common
cold.”
Jerry
was shaking his head until she spoke again. “He’s not the
first—not even the first at Holy Ghost. Word is that there’s lots
of research going on about why a healthy person’s immune system
would simply shut down. No name for it yet, that I know of. But we’ve
had four—two recent immigrants from Africa and two young men from
Jamaica….And here’s the killer, we think they all were either
bi-sexual or gay.”
Jerry
considered all that for a long time. “Someone should do something,”
he said.
“Obviously,”
she answered, “maybe you can….”
Florence
was wrapped in the Union Army Cape. Things had calmed down enough for
her to get undressed with Meyer—all the gifts were gone.
“That’s
my cape, you know?” Jerry told her.
“It’s
a wonderful cape,” she said, smiling. Then she said, “I think
it’s Christmas Eve.”
“It
is,” Jerry replied, “it’s my job to know.”
*
Christmas at the Igloo Factory was good for Reed. It was the second
Christmas since his fathered died and the first Christmas he’d not
spend in Cleveland in his whole life. Had he gone home to Cleveland
to be with his mother and Caroline, they would have sat around like
moth balls, smelling of death, listening to cars passing in the snow
and Bing Crosby carols, watching the tree lights shimmer. Clinging
like Strangers. And his mother would have tried heroically not to ask
him when he was going to return to real life. She didn’t believe,
not for a moment, that Reed was illiterate. She imagined he was a
drug addict and knew for certain he should be in therapy instead of
living in some commune in Boston. She couldn’t, for the life of
her, ever keep it straight that the Igloo Factory was across the
Charles from Boston in Cambridge. And she couldn’t have possibly
understood that the silent, psychic manatees were healing him better
than a Cleveland psychiatrist could.
The
truth was, Reed knew, that if he went to Cleveland he might not have
the force of will to leave after a week and come back to the Factory.
If he took Sandy with him, she would give him the will he needed. But
Reed’s mother would silently compare Sandy to Angela and Sandy
would come out the loser. Mrs. Daley would find Sandy odd. And Reed
couldn’t have endured that.
So
he stayed at the Factory and called his mother on Christmas day to
wish her a Merry Christmas and tell her he loved her. He talked to
Caroline, who sounded lonely, and told her he loved her even though
he didn’t know her well enough to love.
“How
are you, Reed?” Mrs. Daley said over the hundreds of miles of
cable. There were voices faintly in the background, saying Christmas
greetings to each other.
“I’m
fine,” Reed said.
“But
how are you really?”
she asked. And even though she almost whispered the question, as if
someone where Reed was or someone crackling on the line might
overhear her, Reed heard her loud and clear.
“Really
fine,” he said. “I got lots of presents. I got the books you and
Caroline sent me and a candle with three messages on it I can’t
read, a red and yellow scarf, some cookies and bread and currant
wine, and….”
“Oh,
Reed,” she said. He knew it was coming.
“Are
you still smoking Kent cigarettes?” Reed asked, trying to distract
her, delay her.
“Reed….”
It was very close now.
“I
met a man in the Common who smoked Kent cigarettes. He was a nice
enough man, about 50….”
“Reed….”
“Did
you and Caroline get the presents I sent? Oh, you already told
me….Well, mother, there are some people here and….”
“Reed…,”
her voice was somber and commanding.
“Yes,
mother?” Reed relented, giving into a force as irresistible as
gravity—a mother’s refrain.
“You
are so much….” She said it like a prayer, “so much.” A
litany.
“I
know,” he said, “everyone says so.”
R.I.P.
Thomas
Reed Daley
“So much….”
Otherwise,
Christmas at the Factory was good for Reed.
Everyone
gave him presents.
Sugar
gave him a scarf. It was red and yellow and seven feet long. It
wrapped around his neck five times. Sugar gave everyone scarves.
Meyer
gave him currant wine. He had never made currant wine before and was
quite proud of it. Reed thought it tasted like a mixture of prune
juice and Dr. Scholl’s Wart Remover. But, being from the Midwest,
he was effusive in his thanks. Meyer gave everyone currant wine.
Jerry
gave him cookies shaped like Christmas trees and Santa Claus and the
Christ Child.
“I
found the Christ Child cookie cutter at Jordan Marsh,” Jerry told
everyone. They have a whole crèche scene of cookie cutters. They
have everything at Jordan Marsh.”
The
Christmas trees were iced green. The Santa’s were iced red and
white. The Christ Child had no icing. He was a plain sugar cookie.
“It
seemed sacrilegious to put icing on Jesus,” Jerry explained.
“Especially
since he’s a personal friend,” Meyer commented. Meyer was
sampling everyone’s currant wine. He said it was for quality
control reasons.
Jerry
gave everyone cookies.
Everyone
at the Factory gave everyone else what they gave them anyway. It was
simply more special at Christmas.
Marvin
Gardens cooked Christmas breakfast and even ate it with everyone. He
cooked Canadian bacon and French toast and fried apples and oatmeal.
He bought lots of orange juice and brewed lots of coffee and, by the
time everyone had eaten, it was all gone.
Reed
gave everyone their favorite noise. He gave Meyer the sound the phone
made when Sandy dialed Cleveland for him. He gave Sugar the sound of
the falling Irish Setter from that hot day when he first arrived. He
gave Krista the sound of rain falling on the trees in a commune in
Kentucky. That was a hard sound to make. Reed gave her a soft rain
and a harder rain and a full scale rain storm. They all sounded a lot
alike but Krista said she could tell the difference.
When
Reed asked Teresa, one of the Wandering Ones, what sound she wanted
for Christmas, she told him she’d like the sound of an airplane
flying to St. Paul, Minnesota. Krista was a small Black girl, truth
known, not much older that John Henry Davidson III. Teresa had run
away from home because her father drank too much and her mother
tended to sleep around. Teresa told Meyer she was 16, but everyone
knew that was a gross exaggeration. Meyer had been trying to send her
home every day of the week she’d been at the Igloo Factory. He had
the cash for her ticket in a jigsaw puzzle box he kept under his bed,
beside the yataghan. The picture on the box showed some rowboats tied
to a dock in a large body of water, probably a lake.
“I’ve
never been away this long,” Teresa said, though she had run away
before. “Maybe if I hear the sound of the plane, I’ll go home.
Maybe they’d stay with me at Christmas.”
Reed
did the airplane sound as well as he could. He told her it was the
sound of a Northeastern Yellow Bird though it could have been another
airline altogether.
Meyer
was on the phone, making a reservation, while Teresa gave Reed a
Good-Bye-Christmas kiss. Meyer handed Jerry the puzzle box and he
drove her to Logan Airport.
“Will
they stay home with her?” Sugar asked Meyer after Jerry and Teresa
left.
“Hell,
no,” Pierce said. He was on the floor over near the silent Air-Temp
in Meyer’s window. Most everyone had forgotten he was in the room.
“Nothing changes….”
Meyer
looked profoundly sad, like a walrus in mourning. “Probably not,”
he said, taking Sugar’s hand in his own, “Pierce is most likely
right. But you and I know that Teresa has now ‘chosen’ her home.
It isn’t something that was foist upon her just because she was
born there. She’s ‘chosen’ it, and that, if nothing else, makes
a difference.”
Everyone
was quiet, like at Christmas Mass.
“Here
is the sound I want,” Pierce said, his voice full of anger and
despair, “make the sound of young men dying in a jungle far away.”
“I
can’t make that sound,” Reed said, after a long silence. “I’m
truly sorry, Pierce.”
Then
Meyer said, “Listen, children, to this sound I will make….”
Everyone listened, even Pierce. Meyer sighed deeply, with a little
sob at the end of his sigh.
“That
is the sound of our pain,” he said, “of all our pain.”
No
one said anything after that. One by one they went to their rooms
until only Reed and Sandy were sitting with Meyer. He sighed deeply
and sobbed a bit, for Pierce, for Teresa, for all of them and for
himself.
Earlier,
Krista had given Reed a huge candle for Christmas. She molded it in a
piece of sewer pipe with seven pounds of wax and, when it was cool,
carefully broke the pipe from around it. It was light brown—tan—which
she knew to be Reed’s favorite color. It was the color of wet sand,
paper bags, Sugar’s hair.
There
was writing on the candle.
“There
are three messages,” Krista told him. “Three is a magic and
wonderful number for messages. One is from Meyer. One is from Sugar
and one is from me. I carved them with a scalpel and painted the
carving black. No one will tell you what the messages are since we
have all agreed that you should wait until you can read again to
receive them. They will be messages from the past—which will be
exciting. But they may come to you in tragedy and pain. They will
soothe you and make you glad you can read again.”
Reed
thanked her reverently and carried the candle to his room. He put it
in the corner near the window that showed him Boston. Before he took
it there, Krista gave him a mystical Christmas kiss. The candle was
two and a half feet tall.
And
when Reed started reading again, that candle was the second thing he
read. First he read all the lies in the Globe
about Meyer and Pierce and the Igloo Factory. Then he read the
candle. The candle was the only thing that made him glad he was
literate again.
Here
are the messages on Reed’s candle:
Sugar’s
message said, god
is Love. God
had a lower case ‘g’ and love had an upper case ‘L’, just as
Sugar wanted.
Krista’s
message was longer. It said:
These
are the days when the birds come back,
A
very few.
A
bird or two,
To
take a backward look.
That
message was from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Krista liked Emily
Dickinson a lot.
Meyer’s
message was last. All it said was:
We’re
all in this thing together.
*
Sandy
gave Reed a mobile for Christmas. She cut The
New York Times Sunday
Magazine into various shapes and waxed them to make them stiff. She
hung the mobile over their bed on Christmas night.
Sandy
blew on the mobile to show Reed how it would rock and spin and
spiral. The balance was perfect.
“To
most people it’s just a mobile of a newspaper magazine,” she
said, “but for you, Reed, it can be a mystery, secrets, the
unknown. For you it is yesterday and tomorrow, but not today. Today
you can’t read it.”
“You
think I’ll read again?” He really wasn’t sure.
“Of
course,” Sandy laughed, “of course you will. It’s a way of
ordering your life and when you life truly needs order, you’ll know
how to read again. You forgot so you could drift free for a while.
But someday order will be more important to you than the drifting
simplicity you’ve found. You’ll need order, Reed, everyone does.”
“What’s
your ‘order’? You don’t seem to live with order.”
“Look
at that mobile,” she said, elbowing him in the rib, “can you look
at that and say there’s no order in my life?”
He
had to admit that the mobile was orderly.
She
began to speak after a while, quietly and slowly, with great order.
“My order used to be traveling with Carlton and finding a fix. Then
it was the order of Newman’s clinic. Now it’s the Factory—and
you and making mobiles. A mobile hangs one way and no other, Reed,
and it is a great task to find the way it wants to hang. The art of
it is finding out what the string and the paper already knows,
discovering the order there.”
She
was as serious as a famine. When she was serious, her eyes narrowed
and her forehead creased like a plowed field. Reed kissed her
furrows.
“I
love you when you’re serious,” he said.
“And
do you love me other ways?”
He
thought for a while. “I think I love you all ways.”
“Me
too,” she said shyly.
“Then
we must be in love….”
“On
Christmas night at that,” she said, smiling.
Reed
gave her two presents. The first was the sounds from the wind chime
they had hung above Jody’s bed. That made her smile with sadness.
The
second made her smile with joy. It was the night sounds they shared
as they lay in their bed. He did the sirens from Boston, the whisper
of passing cars on Broadway, the street-washing machine passing like
a gentle monster, the late walkers shuffling their feet on the
sidewalk, the sound of the sheets when they moved to touch.
*
One
January day, Meyer and Reed sat in Cambridge Common, watching it
snow. Meyer had heard there was going to be a movie crew there.
“They’ve been the Square all week,” he told Reed, “giving
people a dollar for their signature so they could walk by and be
immortalized on film.”
Meyer
didn’t want to be in the movie, he just wanted to watch them make
it. Life, Meyer thought in one of philosophies, is in large measure
like being in a Grade B movie.
“Did
I ever tell you about my Philosophy of Life according to the movies?”
he asked Reed.
He
had, but since nothing much was happening except snow, Reed said no.
“It’s
like this—we’re all trapped in a Grade B movie. We’re
underpaid, poorly blocked, the script is spotty and no one is sure
who the director is.” There is a lot more to that philosophy, but
Meyer caught sight of some people who looked like movie makers and
didn’t feel like telling the rest.
“I
don’t feel like telling the rest,” Meyer said, “I just want to
watch them make this movie.” Then he mentioned, off-handedly and
casually, that Ali McGraw was supposed to be in the movie. Meyer had
a not-too-secret crush on Ali McGraw. That was why they were sitting
in the snow in the first place.
So,
it snowed. The movie making people were apparently waiting for the
snow to lessen up a bit, just standing around. And it didn’t.
Freaks covered with snow came by. They talked with Meyer, who they
knew, and he gave them change and talked back.
While
Meyer talked with the Freaks, Reed watched an old man, about 200
years old, crossing the Common. When he finally got to the statue of
Lincoln, the old man leaned against it, breathing in gasps. Reed was
afraid the old man might die right there beside the statue of the
16th
President of the United States. The statue had red hands and names
written all over its base. Some of the names were of men who had died
in war, making war sacred. The rest of the names were the names of
Freaks who had traveled from all over the country to Cambridge Common
to find happiness. The men who died in war had their names carved
into the granite of the base of Lincoln’s statue. The names of the
Freaks who had come to find happiness were spray-painted in the same
red that covered the hands of the 16th
President.
Reed
was still watching the 200 year-old man, wondering if someone would
add his name to either list if he died beside a statue of Lincoln
covered with snow. Reed was wondering that when one of the Freaks
tried to sell him a newspaper the size of the Grit
that was about ‘The Revolution’. At least that’s what the Freak
told him. After the Freak told him that, he called Reed ‘brother’.
Reed
told the Freak that he was illiterate or else he would surely buy one
of the papers and read about ‘The Revolution’.
The
Freak stared at Reed as if he had said, “The universe is hollow”,
or some equally ridiculous thing.
“Will
you buy a paper,” the Freak asked again, “brother?”
“Honest,”
Reed said, “I can’t read.”
Meyer
had been listening and started laughing so hard he fell off the bench
where they were sitting. The snow started covering him where he was
sprawled on the ground.
The
Freak frowned at Reed and said, with venom, “Then fuck you,
brother!”
Meyer
stayed on the ground in front of the bench. He said he didn’t mind
the snow, which seemed to be letting up a bit. Suddenly, the far end
of the Common was a flurry of activity. A large group of people
carrying cases and boxes and complicated equipment began to work
rapidly, stringing cables and such. Half-a-dozen policemen started
roping off part of the Common with bright yellow tape. They were
sealing off a large spot where no one had walked through the snow. A
woman surrounded by several people came walking down to the Common
from the direction of Brattle Street. She had on sun-glasses and lots
of coat and, from that distance, could have been Ali McGraw. The
dozens of movie people were putting things together like life-sized
tinker toys and a sudden crowd of people surrounded the yellow tape.
Back
on Reed’s end of the Common, the old man had made his way from
Lincoln’s statue to the bench were Reed was sitting. He almost
stumbled over Meyer, half-covered in snow. Some kids—10 or 11
years old as best Reed could tell through their jackets—were
throwing snowballs at the old man. He cursed them in a language that
sounded like a truck running over tin cans. Two other kids, a little
older, were leaning against a tree, kissing and holding each other
very close. They seemed to be growing out of the tree and out of each
other, vines and branches, holding and kissing. They had moved so
little that a lot of snow covered them. It looked natural.
A
lady with cat-eyed sunglasses and wearing a fur coat was letting her
Pekingese relieve himself on another tree. She acted like the dog was
doing something else, buying a pretzel or reading a newspaper. Not
too far from her, a large Black man was helping two small Black
children make a snowman. The Black man wore one of the hats that Reed
associated with the Black Panthers—a knitted beret in red and green
and black. The children were pulling at the man’s arms, laughing,
until he put his hat on the snowman’s head. Reed had never seen a
white man—snow or otherwise—wearing one of those hats. The man
and the children laughed at the sight.
Not
far from the Black Power snowman, a Freak was sitting inside a big
wire trashcan with lots of Clark Bar wrappers and Coke cans and God
knew what else. The Freak was smoking a huge marijuana cigarette and
singing a song he must have been making up as he went along. “Trash,
trassssh, trash, traaash,” was all the song said.
In
the middle of all this, an idiot boy with his face all pushed in,
began to dance.
The
idiot boy was a fixture at the Common. He must have been thirty and
still would mess his pants and smell to high heaven from time to
time. Not even Meyer knew where he came from or where he went at
night. Though he couldn’t talk much at all, he would stop people in
the Common and talk a blue streak to them, as if he knew the secret
of the universe or something new about the French Revolution.
He
started dancing and laughing. He danced back and forth, back and
forth, like a pendulum. And besides the Freak’s trash song, there
was no music. Besides the Freak’s song, there was nothing for the
idiot boy to dance back and forth to. There was only people making a
movie and people making love and old men wheezing and people smoking
dope and people throwing snowballs and making snow men for Huey
Newton and Pekingese dogs, their coats heavy and sagging like
stalactites from the snow, relieving themselves. Only that.
Yet
the idiot boy danced.
Back
and forth.
And
laughed.
“Here
is a test,” Meyer said. He was sitting up in the snow, leaning
against Reed’s bench. “There are only two questions on the test.
The first question has one answer and one only. The second question
follows the first and has no answer—unless it’s a trick answer,
which doesn’t count. The second question has no answer at all, only
utter silence.
Reed
nodded, shaking snow off his head. He knew better than to interrupt
Meyer at such a moment.
“Here
is the first question,” he said, his voice as even and soft as the
taped-off patch of snow, “What are we doing here?”
He
looked up at Reed, his face sad and serious. “Do you know the
answer, Reed?”
Reed
thought it most likely had something to do with ‘being in this
thing together’. But he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “No.”
“We’re
all here being in this thing together,” Meyer said. “In fact,
we’re probably here to
be in this thing together.” He was silent for a while, as if unable
to decide which was the ‘one’ answer to the first question on his
test.
“And
the second question, Reed, the one with only silence on the other
side of its asking, do you know what that question is?”
“No”,
Reed said. This time he meant it.
“Here
is the question,” Meyer said, as if he were reading it from a
large, antique book with rich leather binding: “Does
it matter?”
The
snow began to fall hard again. The movie makers stopped making their
movie. The Freak stopped singing his trash song. The idiot boy
stopped laughing and shuffled away. Even the hiss of passing cars on
Mass Ave stopped for a red light. For a moment, there was no sound.
There was only a vibration from the farthest regions of the Universe.
Soundlessness.
*
One
day, in the dead of winter, Meyer decided to go to Springfield and
visit the Basketball Hall of Fame. It was in Springfield, west on the
Mass Pike, that James Naismith invented basketball. Basketball, it
seemed to Reed, shouldn’t have had to be invented. Basketball
should have been there all along, like protoplasm. But James Naismith
had invented it all the same and Meyer wanted to see the place, the
very place.
“The
very place, Reed,” he said, “where it all started. Where he hung
those peach baskets in the YMCA and started us all down the long
double dribble path to today. There was Wilt the Stilt and Lew
Alcindor and Adolph Shayes and Clyde Lovellette and Walt Bellamy.
Willis Reed. There was Cousy and Sharman and John Havlicek. My God,
where would John Havlicek be without James Naismith? Where, Reed?”
Reed
wasn’t sure.
“Selling
Chevrolet pickups in Wheeling, West Virginia, listening to country
music….The very place, Reed!”
“I’m
really tired,” Reed told him. “All this snow exhausts me. Why
don’t you get someone else to go with you?”
“Someone
else!” Meyer exclaimed, “but, Reed, you’re the athlete of the
Factory. You’re the basketball player. You told me you scored 37
points against Greentree Military Academy.”
“Greenbrier.”
“Right,
Greenbrier. 37 points, Reed! Where would you be with James Naismith?
How would you have spent that glorious night if he hadn’t invented
basketball? Why would those chubby-calved cheerleaders have craved
your scrawny body otherwise? Reed, you’ve got to go.”
Reed
thought about it. The memory of those cheerleaders in Massanuttin was
changing his mind. He didn’t feel nearly so tired any more.
“Besides,”
Meyer said, “everyone else said ‘no’. I’m not too confident
driving that far with someone who can’t read road signs.”
Reed
drove the VW bug. Vincent Price slept in the back seat. Meyer guided
him through Cambridge and told him basketball stories about the great
scorers—Chamberlain, Selby, ‘Pistol Pete’ Maravich, Bevo
Francis.
“Bevo
Francis from little Granada College—turn right here…well, circle
back….Bevo was the greatest scorer of them all. The greatest. Left
at the next light. He played a slower game with a slower ball.
Maravich is a nothing compared to Bevo. He’s a trickster—oh,
shit, this the wrong street…a show-boat, a hot-dog….”
Meyer
even told Reed about the “Ohio State Play” from the early 60’s.
“Get
this,” he said, as excited as a basketball loving, one-eyed,
underweight walrus could get, “Larry Siegfreid would throw the ball
into Havlicek and just before half-court, Havlicek would give the
ball back to Siegfreid and call the play from half-court—HALF-COURT,
Reed—by waving his right arm over his head. Then Jerry Lucas would
start to move, slowly at first, to the head of the key and then drift
down the lane toward the basket. Siegfreid would fake back to
Havlicek and then cut right, toward the sidelines. Then he would toss
the ball, ever so calmly, toward the basket from 30 feet out. Lucas
would explode toward the backboard and be there, already in the air,
when the ball was coming down, to catch it and in one motion….”
Meyer demonstrated Lucas’ move as best he could in the front seat
of a tiny German car—swooping, rising swanlike….”And in a
motion as graceful and magical as a swan in brown water, Lucas would
lay the ball in the basket the way we’ll be dropping quarters in
the baskets on the Mass Pike. Amazing! Amazing!”
Meyer
was shaking his head in wonder and admiration, and, in spite of his
bad directions and Reed’s illiteracy, they found themselves at a
long, gently curving entrance to the Mass Pike. Dozens of people were
there, standing in the snow, hitching. Some of them had signs that
said “New Haven” or “New York” or “Philly” or “Florida”.
At least that’s what Meyer told Reed, just as he told him to stop
at ever hitch-hiker so he could explain to them about the big
sleeping dog in the backseat and wish them well.
Cars
behind them were honking and bleating during Meyer’s explanations
of why they had no room. “Big damn dog,” he’d say, “no room.
Sorry, man.”
All
the hitchers looked in at Vincent Price, smiled, nodded their heads
and gave Reed and Meyer a Peace V. Two fingers held up. It was easy,
natural.
One
girl, barely as big as her sign, had a baby on her back, papoose
style. Her sign said, “Sandusky, Ohio.”
“Do
you know Krista Saulstein?” Meyer asked her. “She’s Jewish and
sees the future. We’ve got a big damn dog in the back seat….”
The
girl said she didn’t know Krista, smiled about Vincent Price and
flashed a Peace V.
“Damn,”
Meyer said on the slow way to the next hitcher, “we should have
brought the bus. We’d have room then.”
“But
no one is going to Springfield,” Reed offered, though it didn’t
matter. Meyer glared at him with is good eye. He was probably glaring
as well with his bad eye, but an eye patch covered it and Reed
couldn’t tell. “That’s not the fucking point,” is all Meyer
said.
The
next to last hitcher they stopped to talk to was a solider, in his
uniform, with a sign that said, “Viet Nam”. He had two days to
get to Georgia to join his regiment and ship off. The soldier had a
red face from a bad complexion and the cold. He told them he had
never been outside New England except for basic training in Texas and
he was leaving a pregnant girlfriend back in Dorchester. He said he
was scared because he wanted to be a daddy and didn’t want to die
in some rice paddy. Meyer gave him $600 he had in his pocket and told
him to fly to Georgia and send the rest of the money to his
girlfriend and stay away from dying. When they pulled off, the
soldier flashed them a Peace V. It took two fingers. The other three
fingers were gripping the money.
At
the end of the long line of hitchers, slumped against his backpack,
asleep or stoned, was a Freak whose sign said, “Nowhere”.
Meyer
grew solemn and said, “There we are, Reed, all of us. We’re the
Wandering Ones and there’s nowhere to go.”
Meyer
was silent until they were well past Newton.
“I’ll
bet his mother has an apple pie face, smells like Clorox and misses
him a lot,” he finally said.
Reed
couldn’t be sure whether he meant the Freak who was going ‘Nowhere’
or the soldier. It didn’t much matter which.
Reed
was getting well every day. The Factory and Sandy’s love were like
large sea creatures moving in his heart. His sign, if he could have
written one, would have said, “Somewhere Special”.
Reed
was well enough to know that Meyer’s fight was gone. The trip to
Springfield was off. He took an exit near Boston College and somehow
found Commonwealth Avenue. They drove through the chill of the
impotent afternoon toward the snows of Cambridge in silence.
*
Boy
Daniels only lived at the Factory for five days. No one, not even
Sugar, thought Boy would make it. And he didn’t.
The
Igloo Factory has two kinds of residents—the ones who stayed and
stayed and the ones who dropped by, like a visit to a maiden aunt
they hardly knew. Boy Daniels was one of those and might not have
been remembered except for his gentle, sweet way and the call of the
wild.
Newman
came down from Rockport the first night Boy was at the Factory.
Newman came because Meyer called, but Boy Daniels wouldn’t listen
to Newman. And if he wouldn’t listen to Newman there wasn’t
anyone else who say much to make a difference. Newman offered ‘hope’
and Boy wasn’t buying.
Boy
said “no” to Newman’s offers with great calm and no bitterness
at all. Newman himself observed that he almost believed Boy Daniels
knew exactly what he was saying. But, of course, he didn’t, it was
the heroin talking, all full of itself and confident without reason.
“I’ll
be just fine, Dr. Newman,” Boy told him. “I’m just keepin’
level, you know what I mean? Like the top of a table is level. That’s
where I am. I’m not fallin’ off the edge. But I really appreciate
your concern for me….”
Reed
was there when Newman asked him, for the last time, “Give me two
weeks, Mr. Daniels,” he said, “come up to Rockport with me, you
and your dog, and if after just two weeks you want to leave I’ll
drive you back myself.”
Boy
Daniels looked at Newman the way you look at someone you truly love,
and he said “No”, calmly, softly, lovingly, “but I can’t tell
you how much it means to me that you care….”
Sugar
was there. She was crying. She hated to see people die. “Won’t
you just go with Newman for a while,” she begged, “I’ll ride up
with you. I’ll take care of your dog. Just give the doctor a
chance. Oh, Boy, won’t you just give him a chance?”
And
he wouldn’t, though almost anyone in the universe would have given
in to Sugar, especially since she asked him so gently, like a brown
bird fluttering.
But
Boy Daniels said “No” to Sugar, even Sugar, without bitterness.
“You’re so sweet, Miss Sugar,” he said, his brown eyes glazed,
“but Boy Daniels is alright. You’ll see.” It wasn’t Boy
talking, it was the poison.
This
is about Boy Daniels and his dog—their too short stay at the Igloo
Factory. Those two were among the greatest Wanderers on the Earth
that Meyer ever found and the Factory ever welcomed. And if there was
a title for this, it would be “The Call of the Wild: He Mourned.”
The
‘call of the wild’ began the day they took Boy Daniels away from
the sidewalk in front of the Igloo Factory on Broadway in the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The ambulance came and the ambulance
people knew he was dead on the spot. Boy and his dog had arrived on a
Monday, and this was Friday morning, just after he had injected more
poison into his body than even his great heart could bear. He shot up
on the steps, which was against the rules, but by then, Boy Daniels
and rules, even Meyer’s rules, even the Factory rules, were not in
the same space/time continuum. He shot up, walked about seven steps
and his heart exploded. He dropped like a rock. The ambulance people
remarked about how young and fit Boy Daniels seemed before they put
him on a gurney and drove him to Holy Ghost, the nearest hospital, so
a doctor would pronounce him dead and sign some papers. It didn’t
take a doctor to know, but it was the law. It was also the law that
his body would be autopsied for the records of the Commonwealth
before Meyer could claim his body and fly it home to Mississippi.
Boy
Daniels had come from his Grandma’s home in the Mississippi Delta
and, at 17, had ridden his thumb and his boot bottoms all the way to
New England, to Cambridge Common, to the Igloo Factory, to the
Medical Examiner’s lab. To find happiness, no doubt.
Instead,
he found a death as white, cold and pure as the heroin he shot into
his veins. That death was as white and cold and pure as the snow that
never falls on the Mississippi Delta.
Boy’s
dog—that nameless black German Shepherd that traveled every mile
with him—started howling when they put Boy in the ambulance and
wouldn’t let him come. Five days later, when Meyer claimed Boy’s
body and sent Jerry to Mississippi to return Boy’s dust to the rich
black earth that bears sweet fruits, the dog was still howling. When
Jerry came back, three days later, he was shaken and stayed in his
room, reading the Gospel of John over and over and praying for Boy
Daniels’ soul, just as Boy’s Grandma had asked him to do. Jerry
tried, he really tried. By then, the dog’s voice had given out, but
he still held his snout to the heavens and pretended to howl.
There
were arguments for months about how long the dog stood there, near
the sidewalk in front of the Factory and mourned the passing from
this earth of Boy Daniels. It was surely more than a week and
probably not the two weeks that all the Freaks who came each day to
watch him claimed it was. The first few days, the howl of the dog
(who the Freaks named “The Call of the Wild”) could be heard in
Harvard Square. Police came to apprehend the dog or else shoot him,
but Meyer got on the phone to Mack Quinn and put an end to that. The
truth be known, some of the Cambridge Police would come by on their
breaks to drink coffee, eat donuts and watch the dog in solemn
silence. The Freaks from the Common would sit with the police in a
strange Shiva, smoking dope and drinking coffee together.
Nothing
could stop it. The people at the Factory and the Freaks put food and
water near the dog, but he ignored it. Sometimes people in the
neighborhood or passers-by would throw snow balls and rocks at him,
but it didn’t work.
“It’s
maddening, man,” one of the Freaks told Reed on the third frigid
afternoon. “You can’t stand that ‘ooooollll’ for too long.
But it draws you, man, you know what I mean?”
Reed
didn’t know exactly what the Freak meant since he had to live with
it the five or six days until the dog’s voice died. Others might
‘leave’ and be ‘drawn’ back. But Reed had to live with it. He
had no where to go.
A
week into the ritual, after Call of the Wild’s voice died, the
whole thing became legend with the Freaks. They gathered in dozens
and twenties to watch the dog. They emptied the Factory’s Schlitz
cooler three time and three of them had to go with Florence to the
Holy Ghost ER to be checked for frost bite. After 10 days, the dog
grew gaunt by doing nothing except standing in a stiff, unnatural
position and moaning to the moon, the sun, the clouds, the snow.
There was something in the dog’s eyes after a while—they were
fish eyes—fixed staring, immobile, unable to follow form and
movement that kept bringing people back to watch him. Something in
those eyes would have stopped the police from shooting him, even with
out Mack Quinn’s interventions. Something in those eyes kept
everyone from beating him to be death to end his mourning.
Saul,
the little Freak who looked like Harpo Marx with his top hat and
swallow tail coat and hockey socks, and Zack, the Freak who sold
pretzels from a wagon, never tired of telling the story, even to
Reed, who knew it first-hand.
“Boy
went to sleep right there, right where that dog is standing. He went
to fucking sleep and never woke up—big fucking smile on his face,
like it was a great high. They came and took him away and that dog
hasn’t eaten or slept or pissed since. He just
howls…’Oooooolllll’….”
The
combined moan of Saul and Zack didn’t nearly match “The Call of
the Wild”. Like a fierce wind through the trees, like a coming
storm, like the faraway sound across the ocean that you think is just
ringing I your ears, like the sound of blood coursing wildly through
your body, like the distant call of a freight train headed somewhere
you’ve never been and never will go. Like that: “Ooooooollllll….”
He
finally died there, in the yard of the Igloo Factory. His throat had
been dead for days before the rest of him caught up. To the end, he
kept his snout raised, his eyes fixed and his mouth open as if the
“ooooolllll” were still coming out. The last forty-eight hours,
none of them—not the Freaks, not even Meyer—could stand the sight
of him. The last two days, he mourned alone.
Meyer
and Jerry and Reed, two Freaks and Tony DeLuca, an 80 year old
neighbor of the Igloo Factory who constantly kept watch on the house
from behind his Venetian blinds, dug the dog’s grave. They dug it
in spite of the deeply frozen earth, dug out rocks that hadn’t seen
the light of day since the American Revolution. It was if the
tireless obsession of the great dog had been transferred to his
gravediggers. They wrapped the animal’s cooling body in a sheet
Meyer brought out from the Factory and covered him gently with chill
dirt.
Tony
said, pushing a handful of dirt into the grave, “I’ve never
trusted you people.”
Meyer
laughed. “Why should you?”
“But
this damn dog—letting him grieve like that, not letting the police
take him away…,” Tony shook his head.
“What
else could we have done?” Meyer asked. “Grief needs space and
time….”
Tony
looked at him for a long time, like he was trying to remember his
face completely. “What is this place about?” he finally asked.
“Space
and time,” Meyer responded, “and not a little grief….”
Tony
hugged all of them, even the Freaks, before stumbling back to his
house.
“His
wife, Maria, died about a year ago,” Meyer said, to whoever was
listening, which was everybody. “She brought Italian pastries and a
bottle of Tony’s plum wine when I moved in. I convinced her to give
me all his fruit wine recipes. That’s how I learned to do it.”
“You
make wine, man?” one of the Freaks said.
Meyer
ignored him. “When she knew she was dying she asked me to look out
for Tony,” Meyer continued. “I haven’t done much in that
regard….But I have given him space and time….”
One
of the Freaks, no one ever knew who, scratched an epitaph on the
bottom of a Table-Top Pie tin with his pocket knife. It said:
The call of the wild:
He
mourned.
Meyer
pressed the pie tin on top of the dog’s grave. Then he went into
the Factory, came back with a bottle of his wine, and headed toward
Tony’s house. Within a week or so, Tony was visiting dying Italians
at Holy Ghost.
For
about two weeks, Freaks and members of the Factory, bought fresh
flowers from the Hari Krishna’s to put on the Call of the Wild’s
grave. By spring, the whole thing was mostly forgotten.
***
“Someday,
Reed,” Meyer said, late in the night, only a few days after the
burial of the Call of the Wild, during the time when their were still
fresh flowers each morning on the grave, “someday, you’ll have to
record all this. Write it down.”
“Meyer,”
Reed said, “I can’t write.”
“Oh,
I know all about your temporary illiteracy,” Meyer told him,
passing him some plum wine. “But that’s a passing thing. You may
have to write it on grocery bags and cancelled checks, but you’ll
be able to do it—you’ll record all this.”
“This?”
“This…,”
Meyer said, his arms wide, his face mellow, terrier-like. “All
this….”
“You
mean the Factory?”
“Right.
And all the people and what happens here—the mood of it all. Mostly
the mood. And the shadows and echoes and silences. The interludes.
The forgotten conversations and insignificant events. The little
things. Moments captured like you see a hummingbird hovering above a
red flower out of the corner of your eye. Like that. The whole
thing.”
Meyer
got out of bed and crossed the room to his closet. He wrapped himself
in the Union Army cape. “It’s very cold,” he said.
“Yes,”
Reed agreed, because it was true, “it is cold.”
Meyer
sat beside him on the floor, draping the cape around both their
shoulders, taking the wine and draining it in one long drink. He
wiped his mouth with the back of his hand like a thousand cowboys in
a thousand cowboy movies. He threw the bottle across the room and
turned toward Reed, lifting his eye patch. Reed was staring into one
sky-blue eye and one eye as white as snow—white on white on white.
“And
you must make it True,” Meyer said.
“This
book I’m going to write?”
“Precisely.
It must be as true as the air under your fingernails and the gaps
between your teeth. That True. Really True.”
“Sure,”
Reed said, fairly drunk, “True.”
“You
need to understand how True I mean,” Meyer said. “I’m not
talking about some Midwestern, white man, rich boy, bullshit true. I
want True like True. Hard as diamonds, soft as clouds, green as
grass, wild as the ocean True. Do you understand?”
Reed
said he did, though he didn’t really, not then.
“And
one other thing, big Reed, you must end it with a parade.”
“What?”
“A
parade. You know, like a Fellini movie, like a Mexican holiday, like
the Rose Bowl….No matter what happens, and terrible things might
happen, I just have this feeling, it must end with a parade. A
celebration. A ritual. And it must be like a parade that is
passing….Always passing….”
The
two of them grew sad, melancholy, almost maudlin, talking like that.
They talked more and more as winter grew worse and worse. It seemed
it would snow forever. White on white on white, out to the darkling
river, out to the frigid sea. Forever.
It
made them moody.
***
Every
spring, I get a terrible cold. It is like clockwork. Baseball season
begins, and I get a cold. It starts in my head. I sneeze for a day or
so and blow my nose constantly. I have, Sandy tells me, an obsessive
interest in bodily fluids. I am fascinated and amazed by the amount
of fluid I blow out of my nose each spring. I’m not sure how the
human body works—it is a marvelous contraption—and the most
remarkable thing about it is how much mucus it can create, ex
nihlio.
Like God created the Universe, the body creates mucus in abundance. I
have often wondered how much mucus each of us creates in a life
time—how many quarts or gallons or liters we blow out our nose and
cough up from our lungs. I made the mistake of wondering this out
loud to Sandy once. She’s never let me forget it. She calls it my
obsession—I consider it honest and natural curiosity.
After
a day or two in my head, the mucus takes a journey down my throat,
removing my sense of taste to the extent that Thai food tastes like
oatmeal, before settling in my lungs and bronchial tubes. There it
creates vast amounts of mucus in wondrous colors—colors like the
rocks you find on New England beaches, coughed up by the Atlantic.
After a day of that, I finally give up and go home to bed.
“Whoo-eee,”
Peaches said, walking by the circulation desk as I was adding two
teaspoons of mucus to my life-time quota and spitting it into a
napkin. She fanned in front of her face, like an old woman shooing
away gnats in September. “Take that cold home before you kill me
with it. It’s disgusting, Reed.”
So
I called Marta Lee Bennett, the alcoholic ex-school teacher who
substituted at the library when she was sober enough. It was 10 a.m.
and she answered on the second ring instead of the 16th,
which was her record.
“Marta
Lee,” can you come and fill in for me for a couple of days, I’m
sick,” I said into the phone. I knew peaches would doubtless spray
the phone with Lysol after I left. I was so congested it took me a
while to say the words clearly enough to understand. But I could tell
from her saying “What did you say, Reed?” over and over that the
Buckhannon Public Library would be in sober hands.
I
gathered my tissues and Sudafed and Hall’s Mentholyptus drops and
walked home. I was looking forward to two days in bed with no library
and no writing to worry about. The faint, early April sun felt good
on my face. But when I came into the kitchen, Sandy was sitting at
the table crying. She tried to hide it as she often tries to hide the
extremes of her feelings, bu;t I had caught her in the act.
“What’s
wrong, Sandy?”
“What?”
she said, sniffling.
I
repeated my question. It came out something like “Whutz wong,
Tandy?”
“Are
we going to Long Beach this year,” she said, finally understanding
me, “last week of August, first two weeks of September, like
always?”
“You’re
crying over vacation uncertainty?” I said, ironically. However,
since my cold kept her from understanding, it was wasted irony. She
started crying again. I noticed a stack of lunch bags under the
brochures from the Realtor from Oak Island, North Carolina, where we
always go for vacation.
“Wat
ur doz?” I
asked, pointing to the table.
“You
mean the brochures?” she asked, all innocent through tears.
“Doe,
da utters.”
“I
was looking through your stuff and found these,” she said, touching
the lunch bags.
“You
look through my stuff?” I asked, more surprised than upset. (I’ll
spare you all the complications my opening-of-baseball-season cold
caused in this conversation—the repetitions, the “What, Reed?”
questions, the mucus that talking so much broke up and brought
forth.)
“I
look sometimes, when I’m here and you’re not.”
“How
come?”
“I
don’t know. I’m just not sure. Curiosity mostly and a little
nostalgia, wondering what you were thinking back then and what you
were writing about. Stuff like that.” Her eyes were brimming.
“And
what did you find?”
“Something
I want you to write just the way you wrote it back then,” she said,
“every word the same. It’s part of your life and what went on at
the Factory I never knew. It’s you and Meyer and Jerry and
Sugar—you four always were ‘the four’, you know. You four
talking. And whatever else you do with all your scribbled memory,
preserve this for me, just the way you wrote it.”
Sandy
seldom makes such clear requests. Whenever she does, I honor them.
Her requests are special and precious gifts.
She
handed me the paper bags and smiled her best, weak-chin smile. A
smile to die for.
“Dank
jew,” she
said, mocking my cold. “I’ll wake you up in a couple of days.”
I’ve
always had a great capacity for sleeping through illness. When I was
six or so, before I went to Massanuttin, I had measles and chicken
pox at the same time. I slept for three days, only waking to drink
water and go to the bathroom, and when I woke up the shades of my
windows were drawn and I felt fine. Only one measles scar on the
corner of my left eye remains to remind me that ever happened. So I
climbed the stairs to my bed room and slept for 36 hours except for
water in and water out. Then my cold was over. But before I went to
bed, I read what Sandy had been crying about. I dreamed about it over
and over. It was like being there again. And it was the perfect place
to insert it in this story.
Here
is what it said:
It
was the winter that made us mellow, like apples too long on the
ground, bruised and brown.
We’d
sit in Meyer’s room like boxes of matches and guard each other
against the world. It ordered our lives. It was ritual for us.
Outside,
it would snow—white on white forever.
To
pass the time until spring, Jerry tried to learn to play Sugar’s
guitar. He could only learn four chords and played them badly, so
Sugar would play and sing to us against the world. But nothing
helped—not even that. We waxed and mellowed.
We
told secrets.
Here
is a secret I told. “The only buffalo I ever saw was in Buckhannon,
West Virginia. I saw it first with my friend, Lysander. The buffalo
seemed as big as a garage and was very hairy. He ate grass and
dreamed a buffalo dream about a place where he could be a buffalo
instead of a hairy garage. He tried to go to that place once,
Lysander told me, but the fire department of Buckhannon, West
Virginia hosed him until he went back inside the fence.
“When
my friend died, I went to Buckhannon again and watched them make the
ground sacred with Lysander. Lysander’s father took me to see the
buffalo right after the funeral. I knew people were gathering
somewhere to eat sandwiches without crusts on the bread and fruit
salad, but all I could think of to say to Dr. Martin was, ‘can we
go see the buffalo now?’ and all he could think of to say to me
was, ‘Yes, of course’.
“It
was snowing and the buffalo was behind his fence being covered with
snow yet again. If he had shaken himself, the snow would have fallen
off. But he was, I imagined, dreaming his buffalo dream and simply
let the snow cover him. Lysander’s father and I hugged each other
against the world, watching the buffalo disappear into white.
“That’s
all,” I said. “That’s my secret and I don’t even know why
it’s been a secret or why I’ve never told it before. But it is a
secret I had to tell you.”
Everyone
sat very still, like hot chocolate waiting to cool.
Then
Sugar told a secret, sipping her cocoa.
“I
miss Vachel,” she said. “I know that he told my father where I
was and all that, and that he’s stopped looking for his world where
he could be. But, you know, I miss him. Sometimes I think about the
way his hair fell across his face and he brushed it back with his
hand. Just that makes me miss him.”
Sugar
lowered her head and played her guitar and sang a song for us, a song
Vachel wrote about a world he’d stopped looking for.
We
listened like wine bottles with candles burning in our necks, waxing.
Jerry’s
secret was about the times he spent with Jesus on the banks of the
Potomac River.
“Here’s
what I wonder sometimes,” he said, quietly, like he was embarrassed
by his wondering, “what if that wasn’t Jesus? What if that was
just some guy on disability from the B&O who had spent a lot of
time reading up on The War? What if he was a history professor from
John’s Hopkins who came to the river on his day off? Or what if I
just made him up, imagined him, and he wasn’t there at all? What
about that?”
We
sat as still as sea shells you found at the beach and brought home to
put on a shelf.
“That’s
my secret,” Jerry said after we had sat as still as sea shells for
a long time. “It haunts me in the night.”
“Secrets
will do that,” Meyer said. The he told his secret. It was not so
much a secret as a story and not so much a story as a parable. But
Meyer called it a secret. And we listened like light bulbs waiting to
shine, waiting for moths to come and beat their dusty wings against
us.
“When
I was in Istanbul,” Meyer whispered, telling his secret, “looking
for the ultimate hot, I was befriended by the son of a Sheik. The
Sheik had a Sheikdom and seven wives and guards around him with
scimitars as long as Guernsey cows.
“The
Sheik had many children—dozens—but his favorites were Abdul, my
friend, and young daughter named Joch-e-bed, who wanted more than
anything to be a ballerina. ‘To dance the ballet’, is how my
friend, Abdul, put it. But because of his accent, he said ‘ballot’
rather than ‘ballet’.
“So
the Sheik, who was as rich as Texas, sent to Russia for the best
ballet teacher in the world. With the Russian, Joch-e-bed studied
ballet for nearly three years. She was not yet polished, but the
Sheik wanted her to dance at a particular celebration, I don’t
remember what. Abdul invite me to come and watch his little
half-sister. ‘Joch-e-bed is very beautifulness’, Abdul told me.
“I’d
been looking for hots for almost a year. I was 30 years old. I had
never seen Joch-e-bed, who was eleven, until that night she danced in
public for the first time. She wore a blue ballerina’s outfit and
blue ballet slippers. They were the blue of Istanbul’s sky—a blue
paled by the sun and bleached by the heat. A soft, shining blue.
“Joch-e-bed
danced in a huge hall of the Sheik’s palace. A spotlight the Sheik
had bought for the occasion followed her across the floor. These huge
Turkish moths, as big as your hand, were bumping against the
spotlight, making the light on Joch-e-bed even more wondrous. The
room was filled with the scent of mint. She was the loveliest thing I
had ever seen, so small and so grave and so dark. Beautifulness in
itself. I saw only her. For me, she danced in a perfect circle of
light.
“I
don’t think I breathed until she finished dancing. Then her English
governess, who Abdul called ‘Cat-ter-an’ and her Russian teacher,
Olga, rushed to Joch-e-bed and helped her into her braces.
Joch-e-bed’s spine was like a capital C, like a scimitar. The best
doctors in Europe could not uncurl her. Only ballet freed her from
her braces. In a perfect circle of light, she danced away pain.
“I
never went back to the palace,” Meyer said, his voice was like
smoke. “I never saw Abdul or Joch-e-bed again. I went to my western
hotel, got very drunk and sniffed ground pepper up my nose until I
thought I was blind. The next day I flew back to Boston and bought
the Igloo Factory. I’ve been here ever since.”
That
was Meyer’s secret of a story of a parable. He started drinking
wine instead of hot chocolate when he finished telling it and ended
up with an Istanbul drunk. The rest of us watched like exquisite jade
statuettes. We didn’t say anything until Meyer fell asleep.
Over
and over in the winter, we did things like that, as if they were a
ritual.
It
was the wine and the snow that made us mellow…and sad.
This
is a sonnet to winter.
It
is like a sonnet because it is short. But it is not like a sonnet
because it doesn’t rhyme and doesn’t look any more like a sonnet
than it looks like a German Shepherd eating hamburgers. Or a yellow
school bus full of nuns. Or anything.
I
call it a sonnet because sonnets, even happy ones, always seem somber
to me. And sad in a way. And longer than they really are.
I
think that is because sonnets rhyme in so many places. That makes
them seem longer.
Winter
in Cambridge rhymes in many places. It is as long as a muddy river or
a bad dream. It is as cold as a starving dog with no hamburgers to
eat. Or anything. It is as solemn as a bus full of nuns.
And
it snows.
And
it snows.
The
snow is always white,
On
white,
On,
White.
Forever.