Theory of War Page 12

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ Jonathan said in a gentle voice.

  ‘I wanted to sleep on my right side. There’s silence on the left side. I hate silence. I told you that, didn’t I? Jesus, I thought you were mute. That would have been – I just couldn’t – It’s on the left side: it hangs there, cold, gray, hazy, swinging a little in the draft and always on the left—’ Jonathan was shaking his head. ‘Well, so what side do you mean?’

  ‘Like that chicken,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘What chicken?’

  ‘The one that crossed the road—’

  ‘That’s not funny,’ College said petulantly.

  Jonathan helped him up the hotel stairs and put him to bed, making sure he lay on his right side, away from the left and the silence that had frightened him there once upon a time – and plainly frightened him still.

  8

  After the crash, the episodes that made up Jonathan’s life grew even more disconnected, each piece less and less related to what preceded and what followed it. No pattern remained except his recurrent nightmare, which became his constant companion. He and College went west to New Mexico for six months on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. From there they went to the Great Northern Railroad for a couple of months, then eight months on the Pennsylvania Railroad, then five on the New York Central. In the winter of 1881, they were back with Transcontinental, which had ferried a whole town out in the desert three years before; and Transcontinental brought them to that town again, to Mogul.

  From the safety of a train top, the adult town of Mogul probably did have charms hygienic enough for a modern taste; up close, it was a symphony in shit. In the years since Jonathan had seen it, horse shit around the hitching posts had grown mountainous enough to raise the level of the street by half the height of a man. In the streets, chickens strutted and shat. So did geese. Pigs rooted and shat. There’s nothing so pungent as pig shit, which was, in fact, the dominant smell, overwhelming the reek of human shit, slops and rotting offal. Over all this – and as bred in the bone as the dusting of coconut on my aunt Claire’s pièce de résistance, gâteau au noix de coco, which she was just finishing off as Atlas began to tell me about Mogul – over all, a layer of vegetable peelings and empty tin cans labeled ‘green corn’, ‘pears’, ‘peaches’, ‘oysters’. Mogul was growing up with America, no sewers, no trees, no street lights, no running water: a full-blown boom-town geared to the quick sale of everything alive or dead, worldly or divine. Walls of saloon and Methodist chapel alike advertised whiskey, shaving cream, dried beef and – without so much as a change of paint color or script style – God Himself and the virtues of cleanliness. False fronts towered above the streets, so wretchedly put together that they swayed with every gust of wind; behind them squatted cheap little buildings, jerrybuilt like everything else for hundreds of miles around.

  Jonathan and College arrived in the evening. The landlord of the Hotel Louis Quartz was just ringing the bell to announce supper. From my grandfather’s reports of it, this supper was no worthy ancestor for Claire’s gateau or for her pretty arrangement of chrysanthemums, either, in the cut glass vase on the plate glass table that was her pride (her style with flowers, as she said, owed a great deal to the Japanese): supper in Mogul cost twenty-five cents. Jonathan and College paid, fought their way to seats at a long dining-table, where a scrawny youth delivered platters as fast as he could ferry them from the kitchen – everything at once, mountains of pork, huckleberry pie, bacon, lakes of gravy. Guests snatched with bare hands, fork and Bowie knife; they beat away competitors with elbows, slapped booty down on plates over beans, potatoes and bread and shoveled it into their faces so fast that the meal took only ten minutes from payment to clearing.

  Afterwards, the weather broke. Rain poured down. The street outside dissolved into liquid manure; the fumes that rose up were strong enough to make the eyes water. Jonathan and College ran to a saloon and sheltered there with a bottle of bourbon.

  ‘How old are you?’ College said suddenly. ‘Are you twenty-one yet?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jonathan said. ‘Maybe – near enough, anyway.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I am above such things,’ said Jonathan, whose speech patterns by this time had come to reflect not only the ease he’d learned from College but a rough elegance all his own.

  ‘Everybody has a birthday. You can’t—’

  ‘Everybody but Johnny Carrick.’

  College frowned into his whiskey. ‘You are confounding me.’

  ‘Good. It’s about time somebody did.’

  ‘There’s nothing like a man with a flexible past, is there?’ College drank from his glass and then said, suddenly caught off balance by the thought, ‘You know, I know nothing about your past, absolutely nothing—’

  ‘That’s good, too.’

  ‘I do know you ran away from somewhere. From the look of you, you had to have been a runaway: you had to be. Frank Fleming – he was a good guy, Frank, wasn’t he? – he said—’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Forget it? Even that? Why?’

  ‘Just forget it. Please.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ College said. ‘Well, if you really mean what you say – and I know you well enough to know you always do mean what you say (unlike most people) – suppose I pronounce today your birthday? December the fifteenth? Any objections?’

  This is one of those odd coincidences that sound made-up but that happen all the time: this is my birthday, too. We share this day in December, my grandfather and I. I am delighted by it, entranced. As for Jonathan, he was delighted, too, as entranced as I. He writes in his diaries that it had never occurred to him that he might have a birthday all to himself. I would imagine that one of those rare smiles crossed his face because College laughed. ‘You really do mean it, don’t you? No birthday at all. So’ – he tapped out a tattoo on the bar – ‘today, December 15th 1881, is Johnny Carrick’s twenty-first birthday. And I, Rayner Hogg Malloy, will – to celebrate this coming-of-age—’ He clicked Jonathan’s glass with his own. ‘I’m going to give you a birthday present.’

  The pride of men is a remarkable thing, responsible for much both little and large. A brakeman’s light was red. Every brakeman had his own light, and every light was as identifiable as a calling card. Whenever a brakeman went anywhere – but especially to a whorehouse – he left his light outside to mark the spot: here fucks Brakeman Flynn, here fucks Brakeman Blake. This is why a red light district is called a red light district: for no other reason at all. Jonathan and College put their lights on the boardwalk outside Olympia LeCleve’s, the largest and most solidly built whorehouse in town.

  Olympia LeCleve herself opened the door, a tall woman in a bustled damask gown with a row of tiny buttons running from neck to waist.

  ‘My name is Rayner Malloy, Missis LeCleve—’

  ‘Miss,’ she said. Her tone was polite but clipped. ‘Miss LeCleve.’

  ‘—Miss LeCleve,’ College went on without a pause, ‘and my friend Elder French suggested I call on you next time I passed through Mogul.’

  ‘I know Elder,’ she said, standing aside. ‘Come in. Tell me your name again – and take off that dreadful fisherman’s coat.’ Not long after Jonathan bought his frock coat, College had bought himself a fisherman’s coat in New Orleans, a heavy, bulky, oilskin affair; he’d bought it to provoke Jonathan’s disdain, which it did and which amused him endlessly. The power of icons is too often underrated. Besides, College had worn the coat for three years. The joke was wearing thin. ‘And your friend’s name? Do come in.’

  The parlor was long and narrow, furnished like a railway passenger coach with cane-covered chairs and lamps hanging from the ceiling, a common kind of decoration for a whorehouse – a celebration of these most romantic of customers, these railroadmen, astronauts of their day, more exalted than war heroes: men from the future who dared where none of the rest of us dared and who lived every day with secrets the rest of us could only guess
at. A scarred player piano stood at one end of the room; a spray of cut daisies drooped in a large vase on top of it. Jonathan and College sat down, separated by a spittoon. Olympia sat opposite them. Her hair was bright orange. Pendants dangled from her ears down to her shoulders – a proper Hollywood whore of olden times.

  ‘Would you gentlemen like a drink?’ she asked. Without waiting for a reply, she called out, ‘Fritzi! Two whiskeys!’

  A girl of fifteen or sixteen appeared with a tray. She was plump and pink-cheeked, fair. She wore a white dress with a ruffled bodice such as farm girls wore to Sunday school. No Hollywood here, but even a hero fancies what he fancied as a boy and couldn’t get. Jonathan watched Fritzi with fascination and Olympia watched him. ‘You’ve never been to a place like this before, have you?’

  Jonathan shook his head. College had disappeared from time to time during their years of roaming around together; he’d never told Jonathan where he was going, though Jonathan had known he was going whoring and figured, older brother like, that Jonathan was too young for such entertainments. Jonathan had given in to the protectiveness because the idea of being physically close to somebody, a living person, touching the living flesh, a whore’s flesh or any woman’s flesh – or any man’s – terrified him. It brought to mind George’s girlish breasts, and not only that (in which there was an undeniable element of sex) but also the terrible weakness he had found in himself when George had touched him, which wasn’t sex at all but just human contact – that most elementary of contacts, that avenue into the heart nobody understands and everybody fears, even while hungering after it.

  ‘It’s his twenty-first birthday,’ College said. ‘On my twenty-first birthday I got drunk. What were you doing on your twenty-first birthday, Miss LeCleve?’ Olympia raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, you must have been lovely at twenty-one,’ College rushed on. ‘A red peony: paeonia lactiflora “Bower of Roses”: my mother grew them.’ He tilted his head to one side. ‘No, not a peony. Do you know the blooms on a Golden Chain tree? You must have glowed like a whole grove of them in June.’ Dimples showed in his pock-marked cheeks and chin. ‘Golden Chains are marvelous in July, too – Look, Johnny, see how she handles her shoulders. Were you a dancer?’

  Olympia laughed. ‘I was a whore,’ she said. College laughed with her, but Jonathan’s eyes lingered on the door through which Fritzi had disappeared. ‘You like my Fritzi, don’t you?’ Olympia asked, turning to him. ‘Tell you what, I’ll give you a dollar off with her since it’s your birthday.’ She laughed again. ‘Fritzi, come back.’ Fritzi appeared and sat on the arm of Jonathan’s chair. All of this is documented in his diaries. I make up nothing. I doubt Atlas knew anything about it, though; like Jonathan’s dream, his love of whores was a secret he kept from his children. Fritzi smiled at him. There was a gap between her front teeth. He tried to smile back, taking too long to do so, and her smile deepened.

  ‘And for you,’ she said, turning to College, ‘how about Lucretia? She can work the player best. It’s kind of moody.’

  Lucretia had black hair in ringlets; she wore a white Sunday school dress, too. ‘Do you like Mogul?’ she said to College. ‘I hate it. Shall I play for you? Do you sing? What do you want to sing?’

  She inserted the roll for ‘Careless Love’ into the opening of the piano and pumped at the pedals. What else would a whore play for a railroadman? for a hero of the age? College launched into the opening stanza, elbow perched on her shoulder:

  It’s on this railroad bank I stand,

  It’s on this railroad bank I stand,

  It’s on this railroad bank I stand,

  All for the love of a railroad man.

  College stopped abruptly. ‘Sing, Johnny,’ he said.

  Jonathan flushed and they all laughed.

  ‘Get him to sing, Fritzi,’ College said.

  Fritzi slid down the arm of the chair into Jonathan’s lap; she took his hand in hers and placed it on her bodice. Jonathan took in his breath and sang; he had a full, strong singing voice, resonant if not pure. He was hardly aware of being led upstairs.

  My father Rayner – you can see now that he was named for College – said sex had the power to blot out everything else. Perhaps it was his age: he was old for a beginner: twenty-two, a year older than his father, Jonathan, who was old for a beginner at twenty-one (if indeed he was twenty-one). Stallions mount mares and pump away, jerk, jerk, jerk, half-standing, sweating, faces expressionless, weight thrust forward as though they were working a recalcitrant treadle. Bulls mount cows and pump away. Dogs mount and pump, so do cats, pigs, whales, humans, even turtles for Christ’s sake – even turtles – same stance, same movement every time: jerk, jerk, jerk. Some animals have shells, some have fur, some have hair, some don’t: you could shift one beast for another and never notice any difference in rhythm: jerk, jerk, jerk. It’s even sillier in a whorehouse, especially before the turn of the century. Nobody knew what to do about the clap, but anybody who had any sense was scared. So here in the midst of all these profound fears about life, humanity, human relationships, touching the flesh, George: in the midst of all this and for the sake of this queer pleasure that engrosses humans just as totally as it does dogs and pigs, the whore gives the guy’s prick a deft twist, inspects it as though it were a suspect pudding spoon, washes it with disinfectant from a cracked china bowl with a ring of dirt around the edge. Then she lies down on the bed, spreads her stockinged legs – her still booted feet wide apart – and throws up her petticoats.

  Well, there are enlightenments and enlightenments. People who seek patterns in life are likely to find them from time to time. What young American isn’t in a state of grace when he realizes he can fuck his way across the continent? Fritzi was up and busy again. She pulled a half-full chamber pot out from under the bed. Jonathan, my grandfather, who had loved whores long before he even knew what they were for, rolled onto his elbow and watched her squat over it, petticoats raised to reveal the tips of her naked buttocks, enchanted with himself, enchanted with her, enchanted with whores all over again. Could this be why the diaries are in code? My grandfather writes about Fritzi without any whitewash at all. It’s likely, I guess. They were prudish times. Fritzi fetched the bowl of disinfectant, washed them both once more (to his further enchantment) and began to pull her Sunday school dress over her head.

  ‘Is there anything else, Johnny?’

  He studied her. ‘Again?’

  On his first day in Denver Jonathan had watched a man lean over the hand of a red-gowned lady, hold the pose a moment, then straighten, eyes on the red-gowned lady’s eyes. He’d thought of the scene off and on for the five years since. Fritzi had a farm girl’s large hands, raw around the knuckle, but when she said once more, ‘Is there anything else, Johnny?’ – when she said this for the second time, he took her raw hand in his without a word and bent over it, lips to her fingers just as though she were the elegant, red-gowned lady of Denver.

  Fritzi giggled happily and took hold of her skirt to show him. ‘This is real store-bought calico,’ she said. She was only six weeks out of a rural slum where all her life she’d shared a single-roomed mud hut with her mother and ten other kids, all of them dressed in potato sacks. She tilted her head to study the folds of this store-bought calico and whispered in awe: ‘Sometimes on a Friday we wear satin.’

  ‘Johnny!’ College’s voice came from downstairs. ‘Hurry it up, will you? We’re shipping out tonight!’

  9

  The rain had given way to drizzle. College wore his fisherman’s coat, this icon bought to combat Jonathan’s icon – this well-bred boy’s cock-a-snook at the ambitions of his friend who had grown up a slave (a subject of which he knew nothing at all, not a whit, not a hint) and whose frock coat lay carefully folded in the caboose – dressed in this coat, College alternated on the couplings with Jonathan as he always had: he did the first, Jonathan the second, then College again. The first six – stibnite from Mogul to replace canned goods and cod from Portland – we
nt without a hitch. Jonathan took the seventh. The pin wouldn’t drop. He bent over it, rain seeping through his shirt and trickling down the middle of his back.

  College said, ‘In the interests of keeping dry, might you lower yourself to don this working man’s coat while the working man himself gets on with the next coupling?’ He held out the skirt of the coat as he spoke, much as Fritzi had held out the skirt of her Sunday school dress.

  ‘Shut up,’ Jonathan said.

  College shifted his shoulders under the oilskin. ‘Sure?’

  Jonathan gestures irritably to indicate that the pin is in fact dropped and turns toward the caboose. College steps between the next cars. The gap is nearly a foot. College chooses what they called a goose-neck pin, fits it, cocks it and signals the engineer. The train slacks. The cars touch. The pin bends in the link. All of this is in Jonathan’s diaries – staccato phrases, present tense and all – just the facts, no emotion. The slots are too far apart. College signals the engineer again. The train draws away a little. He maneuvers his body between the cars once more, brakeman’s light (pride at the whorehouse) in the crook of his arm. While this happens, Jonathan is walking toward the rear of the train; he comes slowly to realize that the cars are creeping forward toward the engine.

  ‘College!’ he shouts, breaking into a run. ‘Slack running!’

  College makes a leap toward safety.

  In the moonlight the big coat billows out. For a moment he’s suspended there, mid-air. But the coat is too big: it’s a parachute of a coat: its direction is down, not up, and it will snag on anything. He falls back. The cars move lazily together. ‘Had a hole in his chest you could throw a frying pan through’: that’s what Mother O’Neill said about the brakeman whose clothes Jonathan had worn on his first day in Denver, and so it was with College. His left arm dangled above his head, the wide fisherman’s sleeve hooked to a bolt that stuck out above the coupling.