Mortal Leap, page 2
And I knew he would mean me, the gloomy silent boy who needed a haircut, all neurasthenic with the pale cast of thought. It never occurred to me that there was anything in common between Brother Lorenzo’s love of books and his urge to travel and my own strange restlessness—it was only years later that the thought struck me I was more like my great-great-grandfather than I thought, that he too had been a misfit when he ran away from a Tennessee farm to join the Mormons, that probably his relatives had said the same things about him that mine said about me—that he was queer as Dick’s hatband, that he had bats in the belfry, that he would never amount to a hill of beans. For example, I am probably the only other Backus after my great-great-grandfather to have read Dante. But in those days, I couldn’t see it that way. I didn’t want to be queer as Dick’s hatband. Nobody does at sixteen or seventeen. I wanted to be like the others.
Confronted with the creepy problems of adolescence, I grew queerer and queerer. I hid in Mr. Poulsen’s pigeon-barn next door when it was time to go to church, and I spent my lunch money on the clandestine girlie magazines which were sold under the counter in the local drugstore. The drugstore was run by the only Jewish merchant in Spanish Creek, a lonely bespectacled Brooklyner named Feigel. I knew next to nothing about Jews and I had the vague impression that somehow Mr. Feigel had invented voluptuousness, that it was a specialty of his race. Poor soft-eyed sad Mr. Feigel! I wonder if he read the magazines too. He was a widower who had lost his wife years before and he had no children. The magazines had names like Panty Antics and Nifty Pics, and they were full of pictures of healthy girls bouncing around playing badminton and other violent games without their bras on. Whoever published them was probably only trying to earn an honest dollar and I hope he never got caught; I have a soft spot in my memory for him. The magazines, and Mr. Feigel, were my first contact with non-Mormon culture.
Then around the time I was sixteen I made another discovery. Like eighty-five percent of all other adolescents, I heard about Krafft-Ebing and I went to the library to see if I could find Psychopathia Sexualis. But I imagined the author’s name started with C, and looking for it on the shelf I stumbled across Conrad instead. Heart of Darkness: the title leaped out at me from the row of books. I took it home and read it only half understanding, and then I went feverishly on through Nostromo, Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus, An Outcast of the Islands. I didn’t quite understand why Conrad fascinated me, but it was probably because he was the first human being I had encountered who was like myself: this Polish boy, born in a landlocked country, who had a strange call to become two things he was not, a sailor and an Englishman. I read everything I could find about Conrad and the sea. I pored over atlases until I knew Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, the Solomon Islands better than I knew the map of Utah. Somehow I had the premonition that the books were unholy, that they had led to transgression, darkness, oblivion, the opposite of everything that was familiar and secure—my family, the warm house, my room with its neatly folded bedspread. And yet I couldn’t stop. After I was supposed to be asleep, I read Victory under the blankets with a flashlight. I only half understood the books and I didn’t understand myself at all. Nobody else I knew read Conrad under the blankets; it was like a sickness. I didn’t tell anyone about it, and no one knew I read the books.
We would sit at supper, my parents and I and my sister Veronica, and there was no sound but the ticking of the kitchen clock and the click of the forks against the plates. My father was preoccupied with his wholesale hardware store and the business of the bishopric. He had three hundred souls and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of doorknobs, bathroom fixtures, and square-cut shingle nails to think about and it didn’t leave him very much time to think about his family. But my mother noticed; she saw that I didn’t eat and that there were circles under my eyes. “Larry, your carrots. Larry, you haven’t eaten a thing. Larry, if you don’t eat, I’m going to see Dr. Nielssen.” She stoked me with cod-liver oil and tonics that made me faintly nauseated and left me as skinny as before. She was bewildered; in her world if you took your cod-liver oil, got plenty of exercise, and went to Mutual with other clean-minded youths you grew up strong and happy. Across the table my sister Veronica ate everything on her plate; her shoulders were strong and brown and she was as placid as a young heifer. What was the matter with me? A voice that seemed to come out of the walls, from under the table, from inside my chest, ordered me to go forth; I was cast out, unworthy of Zion. I was probably a little crazy; I really heard the voices and they were no metaphor. I knew that my heart was evil, wicked, rebellious.
There was no one who could help me, and no one I could explain it to. What would I tell them? That I read too much, that when I tried to go to sleep, I heard the surf in my ears beating on the beaches of Java? My complexion suffered from too much brooding indoors, and I think my father attributed it to self-abuse. As bishop of his ward, he was aware of adolescent vice. To my mother it was simply a problem in alimentation. “The poor thing can’t live on air,” I would overhear her saying plaintively to my father. “Last night he left half his broccoli.”
There was a night when, at eleven o’clock after I should have been asleep, I was reading The Secret Sharer under the covers. The beam of the flashlight turned yellow, then a brownish orange, and then there was only a tiny red glow in the center of the lens. I suffered from a lack of broccoli and the flashlight needed new batteries. I came out from under the covers and turned on the bedside lamp and went on reading. A half an hour later my father saw the bar of light under the door, and when I heard his footsteps coming down the hall, I knew it was too late to turn out the lamp. Instead I did a queer thing, out of an impulse I didn’t understand then and have never really understood since: I stuffed the Conrad under the covers and pulled from the nightstand one of the girlie magazines from Mr. Feigel’s drugstore. Perhaps it was because there was something secret and personal about my relation to Conrad that I wanted nobody to see; I preferred to be caught in a common vice rather than one that was unheard-of and incomprehensible even to me. At any rate, when my father took the magazine out of my hand, he found it open to a picture of a girl with breasts like ice cream cones, wearing a cowboy hat and a dazzling smile and pretending unconvincingly to lasso a calf. He was more baffled than indignant. “Where have we failed?” he asked me earnestly as if he really wanted to know the answer. “Where in the home we have provided for you did you get the notion of polluting your mind with such trash? Was it in Church that you got such ideas? Was it in Mutual? Is this what your teachers in school give you to read?” I didn’t answer. All I could think about was that I would never again be allowed to shut my bedroom door. I might have whispered hoarsely “Feigel’s drugstore”. If I kept silent it was not out of loyalty to that lonely little Jewish merchant who sat all day long behind his counter for a few nickels and dimes but simply out of a vast emptiness, an inability to say anything that would communicate the way I felt or explain why I behaved as I did.
My father stood by my bed for some time with his eyeglasses glinting, and then he closed Nifty Pics and looked at the cover. When he saw the price, he finally managed to work himself up to a convincing anger. “And this cost thirty-five cents!” he said, his voice shaking. It was the middle of the Depression and he was really shocked.
For an hour I lay in the darkness abandoning myself to the daydreams that most seventeen-year-olds indulge in under these circumstances: a rope thrown over a rafter, a ghastly form swinging at dawn, my parents’ remorse, etc. But I only succeeded in terrifying myself thoroughly, and instead of hanging myself in the garage with my sister’s jump-rope I ran away from Spanish Creek that night and never came back. I waited until everybody else was asleep and then I groped in the kitchen and found the grocery money in the jar in the cupboard, a little over thirty dollars in bills and small change. I went by the library and dropped the copy of The Secret Sharer and Other Stories in the night box (the statue of Andrew Carnegie contemplated me stonily in the moonlight) and then I caught the Greyhound bus that stopped at the cafe on the highway at one-thirty in the morning. I thought how many times I had heard that bus as I lay awake reading Conrad in bed: the bleating of brakes, a tired hiss of air, voices, then the door slamming and the rising growl of the exhaust in the night air as it pulled away down the highway again—now I was the outcast, the Secret Sharer, the traveler setting out into the heart of darkness! I wasn’t sleepy and I sat in the back of the bus, as wakeful and solemn as an owl. It was not odd that I ran away from home or even that I had briefly considered committing some form of suicide; I suppose everybody does at seventeen. The odd thing was that when I set foot on that bus I still believed in God (I still do, but I mean the old angry God of Moses and of my father who was bishop of his ward) and I believed that by my act I was damning myself, utterly and eternally. And yet I had to go; my demon gripped me. It was not that I had been caught by my father reading a magazine which as a matter of fact I hadn’t been reading. I understood even then that this was only an excuse. What then? I didn’t know. I bought a ticket and got on the bus. I was calm and almost happy.
At Salt Lake City at three o’clock in the morning I had to change buses, and in the depot, I sealed my fate completely by buying two packs of cigarettes. Having set one foot in Hell I knew there was no reason not to go on. I had heard it explained often enough: after cigarettes came apostasy, blasphemy, fornication, murder, and finally the electric chair. I opened the first pack and lit one with hands that trembled, burning half the end off it in my ignorance of how the thing was done. A crisp sensual aroma, with a tang as of houris and half-naked odalisques, rose into my mouth. Sitting there in the bus I experimented cautiously, sending the smoke in twin plumes from my nose. Nobody paid any attention to me. As the bus boomed through Grantsville, Utah, I crushed out the first cigarette and lit another one.
On the trip to Oakland, which took a little less than twenty-four hours, I smoked all forty of them, one by one. By the time we crossed the Sierras my mouth tasted yellow and there were spots before my eyes, but I went on, dizzy and half sick but feeling a magnificent Byronic contempt for the abyss that yawned under my feet. Lonely and cold, half nauseated by the cigarettes and the stench of perspiration in the bus, I was oddly happy. At last, somewhere in the Sacramento Valley, I went to sleep. When I woke up the bus had stopped. We were standing in a depot and all the other seats were empty.
“Okay, stovepipe, end of the line,” the driver told me.
It was after midnight. I walked out of the depot into Oakland. Everything was alien and unreal. Even the air was different; the city smelled of stagnant water and fog. I walked for perhaps an hour through the streets, staring through red neon signs into beer joints and waterfront cafes. My eyes burned with sleeplessness. Old men who smelled of whiskey lurched around me as though I were invisible. Stifled laughter, cheap music, the smell of fried food came at me out of doorways. I hadn’t eaten for almost thirty hours, but I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was sleepy but I didn’t want to go to bed. I went on walking.
Finally, I left the lights behind and I was somewhere near the waterfront. I couldn’t see the bay but I sensed that it was near from the smell of salt and rotten weeds. I was on a street lined with vacant lots, decayed wooden buildings, empty shops with broken windows. At the end of the street there were docks, and over the roofs the slanted funnel of a ship dimly outlined in the floodlights. I walked toward a ruby clot of neon signs, and there, where the hungry cats coiled along the gutters, I found a Mexican girl, fat and gaudy, standing in the light from an all-night cafe. From a block away she was only an indistinct plump figure in a purple dress, silhouetted in the pink light from the window. Her skirt was too short and she stood on tiny spike heels that seemed too frail to support her weight. Three sailors from the naval air station were coming up the street toward her, and now they were almost abreast of her. In their tight-fitting summer whites they were exactly alike, like a musical comedy team, except that they all wore their hats at different angles. They stared around at the Mexican girl as they passed, then they made a small circle on the sidewalk and came back toward her. I could hear their voices coming thinly up the deserted street.
“Lissen honey, I’m not kidding, your type appeals to me.”
“Okay buddy, you’re second in line, right after Long John. I seen her first.”
“You saw her?”
“I seen her.”
She went on looking down the street as though they weren’t there.
“Oh, go peddle your papers,” she told them after a while in a bored voice.
There was a sotto voce comment I couldn’t catch, then a burst of laughter.
“You think you’re funny but you’re not very funny,” said the fat girl.
“Whaddya standin’ around waitin’ for then, the Prince of Wales?”
“Come on, I told you, there’s nothing doing here.”
“Wait now, lissen—”
“You heard her, no sailors or dogs.”
“She didn’t say nothin’ about dogs.”
“Arf, arf,” one of them began yelping hopefully, bounding around the street on stiff legs.
The fat girl sighed and looked scornfully the other way, down the street.
“Come on, I tell you we’re wastin’ our time.”
The other two pulled the dog-impersonator away and they came up the street toward me, casting back several mocking fluty farewells. They passed by me so close I could hear the starched rustle of their whites and smell the acrid scent of male sweat and alcohol. The fat girl turned around, arranged a lock of hair in the reflection from the cafe window, made a grimace into the glass to press out her lipstick, and then turned back on her tiny heels toward the street again. The sailors were a half a block away. One of them flung a falsetto birdlike greeting at a band of girls on the other side of the street and was rewarded by a stifled peal of laughter. Then they were gone. I went slowly down the sidewalk and looked into the cafe as though I were uncertain whether to enter. I was alone on the street with the fat girl. She glanced at me and then shrugged, a tacit comment on the scene that had just taken place.
“Sailors!” she said contemptuously.
Her manner was amiable, placid, but indifferent. After the first glance she hardly bothered to look at me. Her plump feet overflowed out of the tiny spike-heeled shoes, and her face was made up clumsily like a picture drawn by a child: round cupid-bow mouth, mascara lashes, mauve eyelids as bright as humming-bird wings. I saw now that she was probably not much older than I was.
“They’re just looking for a little fun,” I suggested, groping for something to say.
She accepted both my presence and the remark. “They’ve got more jokes than money,” she commented without rancor. “Sailors, the town is full of them. Far as I’m concerned, they’re trash.”
“I guess they’re a nuisance,” I conceded, feeling that the subject was rapidly becoming exhausted.
“They’ve got more jokes than money,” she said. This epigram seemed to please her, since she repeated it for the second time.
She raised her hand mechanically to lift the hair at the back of her head, yawned, and let it fall.
“How about you? Do you know any jokes?”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and finally she burst out laughing. “Well then, maybe you’ve got some money.”
Her room was large and musty, with an odor of damp wood and a faint and not unpleasant scent of cheap perfume. The two windows were hung with imitation-velvet drapes. There was a sagging bed, a dresser, and a table with a faded chintz flounce tacked around it like a skirt. The table was littered with various objects: a flaxen-haired doll, piles of underclothing, a portable phonograph. On the dresser was a miniature shrine with a gimcrack plaster saint who held up his forefinger rather stiffly, as though he were pointing at something on the ceiling. A yellow palm branch was tacked over the bed.
She moved around the room mechanically, patting a satin pillow, throwing a stray blouse out of sight behind the furniture, switching on a lamp by the bed. Then, yawning, she sat down on the bed and lazily peeled off her stockings, shaking each one and ‘hanging it carefully over the back of the chair.
“You didn’t even tell me your name,” she complained perfunctorily as though she were reciting a part.
“Larry.”
“Larry what?”
“Backus.”
At this she made a small stifled titter, a kind of hiccup of amusement.
“Okay,” I countered half-annoyed, “what’s your name?”
“Connie.”
“Connie what?” It was an insane litany, but at least it was better than talking about the sailors.
“People like me don’t have last names,” she said vaguely. After a while she asked me, “How old are you, anyhow?”
“Twenty.”
This produced a small skeptical shrug; her lips stretched a little and she raised one eyebrow.
“I bet you don’t even like me after I asked you up to my room,” she remarked as though she was thinking about something else.
“I like you fine,” I said loyally.
I felt more at ease now; these efforts to entertain me, perfunctory as they were, made me realize the purely economic nature of what was happening. Earlier, in the street, she had seemed like a figure of mysterious evil, a kind of Stygian sorceress, painted and enigmatic. Now I saw that she simply wanted to provide me with a service for a price, and that what I had taken for contempt was perhaps only uneasiness over whether what she had to offer would be worth the money. For the first time I began to see her as she really was: an inexpertly painted fat girl, not very pretty, that nobody in her hometown had wanted to marry.
