Collected Stories, page 3
The gophers below had been thoroughly scared, and for a long time nothing happened. Idly the boy read through his poetry lesson, dreamfully conscious of the hard ground under him, feeling the gouge of a rock under his stomach without making any effort to remove it. The sun was a hot caress between his shoulder blades, and on the bare flesh where his overalls pulled above his sneakers it bit like a burning glass. Still he was comfortable, supremely relaxed and peaceful, lulled into a half-trance by the heat and the steamy flower smells and the mist of yellow in the buttercup coulee below.
And beyond the coulee was the dim profile of the Bearpaws, the Mountains of the Moon.
The boy’s eyes, pulled out of focus by his tranced state, fixed on the page before him. Here was a poem he knew … but it wasn’t a poem, it was a song. His mother sang it often, working at the sewing machine in winter.
It struck him as odd that a poem should also be a song, and because he found it hard to read without bringing in the tune, he lay quietly in the full glare of the sun, singing the page softly to himself. As he sang the trance grew on him again; he lost himself entirely. The bright hard dividing lines between individual senses blurred, and buttercups, smell of primrose, feel of hard gravel under body and elbows, sight of the ghosts of mountains haunting the southern horizon, were one intensely felt experience focused by the song the book had evoked.
And the song was the loveliest thing he had ever known. He felt the words, tasted them, breathed upon them with all the ardor of his captivated senses.
The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story. …
The current of his imagination flowed southward over the strong gentle shoulder of the world to the ghostly outline of the Mountains of the Moon, haunting the heat-distorted horizon.
O, hark, O hear! How thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O, sweet and far, from cliff and scar. …
In the enchanted forests of his mind the horns of elfland blew, and his breath was held in the slow-falling cadence of their dying. The weight of the sun had been lifted from his back. The empty prairie of his home was castled and pillared with the magnificence of his imagining, and the sound of horns died thinly in the direction of the Mountains of the Moon.
From the coulee below came the sudden metallic clash of the trap, and an explosion of frantic squeals smothered almost immediately in the burrow. The boy leaped up, thrusting the book into the wide pocket of his overalls, and ran down to the mound. The chain, stretched down the hole, jerked convulsively, and when the boy took hold of it he felt the terrified life at the end of it strain to escape. Tugging gently, he forced loose the gopher’s digging claws, and hauled the squirming captive from the hole.
On the way up to the chicken house the dangling gopher with a tremendous muscular effort convulsed itself upward from the broken and imprisoned leg, and bit with a sharp rasp of teeth on the iron. Its eyes, the boy noticed impersonally, were shining black, like the head of a hatpin. He thought it odd that when they popped out of the head after a blow they were blue.
At the cage by the chicken house he lifted the cover and peered through the screen. The weasel, scenting the blood of the gopher’s leg, backed against the far wall of the box, yellow body tense as a spring, teeth showing in a tiny soundless snarl.
Undoing the wire door with his left hand, the boy held the trap over the hole. Then he bore down with all his strength on the spring, releasing the gopher, which dropped on the straw-littered floor and scurried into the corner opposite its enemy.
The weasel’s three good feet gathered under it and it circled, very slowly, around the wall, its lips still lifted to expose the soundless snarl. The abject gopher crowded against the boards, turned once and tried to scramble up the side, fell back on its broken leg, and whirled like lightning to face its executioner again. The weasel moved carefully, circling.
Then the gopher screamed, a wild, agonized, despairing squeal that made the watching boy swallow and wet his lips. Another scream, wilder and louder than before, and before the sound had ended the weasel struck. There was a fierce flurry in the straw of the cage before the killer got its hold just back of the gopher’s right ear, and its teeth began tearing ravenously at the still-quivering body. In a few minutes, the boy knew, the gopher’s carcass would be as limp as an empty skin, with all its blood sucked out and a hole as big as the ends of his two thumbs where the weasel had dined.
Still the boy remained staring through the screen top of the cage, face rapt and body completely lost. And after a few minutes he went into the sleeping porch, stretched out on the bed, opened the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and dived so deeply into its fascinating pictures and legends that his mother had to shake him to make him hear her call to lunch.
Beyond the Glass Mountain
Someone had left a funny paper in the booth, and while he waited with his ear intent on the regular buzzing rings, Mark let his eye follow the pictured squares. I know somebody that likes your new hat, Emmy, Kayo’s balloon said, and Emmy’s pleased balloon said, Well, for thirty-nine-fifty they ought to, who is he? and Kayo’s balloon said It’s Beefy McGuire, he’d like it for his bird’s nest collection, and on the fourth ring the line clicked and Mel’s inquiring voice said, “Hello?”
The voice was as familiar as yesterday, a voice whose wire-filtered flatness Mark had heard over telephones ten thousand times. The rising hairs prickled on the back of his neck; he felt as he might have felt if a door had opened and the face of someone long dead had looked casually out.
And he noted instantly, in refutation of his fears, that the voice was sober. He found himself leaning forward, grinning into the mouthpiece.
“Hello, you poop-out,” he said. “This is Canby.”
The old password came naturally, as if he were back seventeen years. In their college crowd everybody had called everybody else Canby, for no reason except that someone, probably Mel, had begun it and everyone else had followed suit. There had been a real Canby, a sort of goof. Now he was a CPA in Denver, and the usurpers of his name were scattered from coast to coast.
“Well, Canby!” the filtered voice said heartily. “How’s the boy?”
There was a pause. Then Mel’s voice, more distorted now, beginning to be his clowning voice, said suspiciously, “What was that name again?”
“Canby,” Mark said. “Cornelius C. Canby.” He raised his head, grinning and waiting for the real recognition.
“Cornelius C. Canby?” Mel’s thickening, burbling voice said. “I didn’t get the name.”
“It’s a hell of a note,” Mark said. “Your old friend Canby was here, and you didn’t even get the name.”
Mel’s voice was thick as glue now, like something mired down, except that on occasional syllables it fluttered upward like a mud-heavy bird. It was a maudlin, wandering, caressing voice, very convincing to strangers and drunks, and it always made any drunk his instant pal. “Canby?” it said. “D’you say Canby? Cornelius Canby? Well my God. Wonnersnevercease. Canby, after all these years! Come on over here and shake my hand. Where are you? Hire a car. Wait a minute, I’ll come and get you myself.”
“Don’t bother,” Mark said. “I can walk over in five minutes.” He grinned again into the mouthpiece. “Are you at home or out at some bar?”
“Just down at the corner pub having little drink,” Mel said. “But I’ll be home in minute, home quick as you are. Not far away.” There was another pause. “What was z’name?”
Mark was beginning to feel a shade uncomfortable. The clowning was routine, but there was a point where it should have stopped. It left things uncertain. “You stinker,” he said, “this is Aker. Remember me?”
The drunken voice was an amazed buzz in the earpiece. Out of the buzz words formed. “You mean Belly Aker, the basketball player, erstwhile holder of the Big Ten scoring record?”
“The same.”
“Not Mark Aker, the eminent penicillinologist?”
“It is he.”
“Well my God,” Mel said. “I remember you. Seen your name in the Alumni Magazine.”
The words degenerated into a buzz, then became articulate again. “You old spore-picker. How’s boy?” Then in a moment the earphone bellowed, “What the hell you standing around there for?”
“Hold it,” Mark said. “I’m on my way.”
He hung up and stepped out of the booth self-consciously, looking around to see if anyone had been close enough to hear the nonsense he had been talking. As he walked through the drugstore and out into the street he found himself explaining as if to some critical stranger. Just to listen to Cottam, you’d think he was a maudlin sot, but that’s just a manner he wears. He puts it on for the same reason some people put on dark glasses. …
He found himself at the corner of College and Dubuque Streets in lowa City, at a little past ten on a Sunday morning in May, and as he stopped on the corner to let a car pass, the utter and passionate familiarity of everything smote him like a wind. Mel’s voice on the wire had prepared him for nostalgia. Now the past moved up on him in a wave; it was as if he had never left here, or had just awakened from a long confused dream and found the solid and reassuring edge of reality again.
The brick street ran warm and empty down across the powerhouse bridge and up the other side, curving under big elms and hickories. On the crown of the hill across the river the Quadrangle’s squat ivied towers barely topped the trees, and over on the other hill to the right the stone lace of the hospital tower rose above the massive rectangularity of the medical buildings. The lawns below Old Capitol were almost deserted, and the locusts were shrilling in the streetside trees.
Odd compulsions moved him. He found himself reciting the names of all the main university buildings. Crossing the river, he ran his hand along the cool cement rail as if establishing a contact, and halfway across he looked back to see how the union and the reserve library strung out along the riverbank, and the footbridge arched across to the experimental theater. The banks of the river had been landscaped since his time, but otherwise he saw no change. The highway traffic west poured across the lowa Avenue bridge, and the law commons clung to the limestone bluffs. Mark looked curiously at the few students he met, wondering if they felt as he felt the charm and warmth that lay in the brick streets and the sleepy river and the sun-warmed brick and stone of the university. Probably no one appreciated things like that until they were gone and lost and irretrievable.
On his left as he stepped off the bridge he saw the little eating shack where he and Mel had had long johns and coffee practically every morning for four years. The mere look of its outside, patched with Coke signs and Baby Ruth signs and Chesterfield signs, filled his nostrils with the peculiar and unique odors of the place: coffee and smoke and slightly rancid fat, oily-sweet doughnuts and baked paint and the reek of the bug-spray they used on the cockroaches, and under all the watery, tarry, wet-mud smells of the river.
The metal rasping of the seventeen-year-locusts rose loud as a crescendo in a symphonic poem as he climbed the hill, and it struck him as amusing that he too should return here at the end of exactly seventeen years. He couldn’t quite imagine where those years had gone; it did not seem that either he or the town had changed a particle. The tennis courts he passed reflected hundreds of remembered mornings like this, and in the field house beyond them were whole lifetimes of recollection.
He would have liked to go in under the big round roof just to soak himself in the sensations he remembered: smell of lockers opened on stale gym clothes and stiff sweated socks; steam and thumping radiators and liquid soap smell; sweat and medicated foot baths and the chlorine smell and the jiggly reflecting chemical blue of the pool; splat of naked feet on concrete, pink of bare flesh, lean bellies and tiptoe bunching calves, the bulging triceps of the gymnastics team working out on the horses. Most of all, the barnlike cold of the basketball floor, and the tiny brittle feeling of coming out before a game to warm up in front of that crowd-faced emptiness, and the clubbing roar of crowd-sound as you drove in for a set-up. It was the same roar whether you made it or missed it.
All of it was still there—unimaginably varied smells and sounds and sights that together made up the way he had once lived, the thing he had once been, perhaps the thing he still was. He was in all of it, and Mel with him. It came to him like a pang that never since the days when he and Mel used to fool around after lunch in the Quad cafeteria, throwing rolled-up paper napkins at water tumblers, had he had a completely relaxed and comfortable ability to enjoy himself. They had made games out of everything; whole Sunday mornings they had spent throwing curves with pot covers in Mel’s mother’s kitchen. In those Damon-and-Pythias days there had been a sharp and tingling sense of identity and one intense and constant comradeship, and those were the best days of his life. Passing the field house, he passed himself and Mel as they had used to be, and the feeling that he had not merely lived it but was somehow contained in it was as pervasive as the mild spring morning, as insistent as the skirring of the locusts. It was like skywriting on the big warm sky.
The light over the whole hill was pure, pale, of an exaggerated clarity, as if all the good days of his youth had been distilled down into this one day, and the whole coltish ascendant time when he was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, had been handed back to him briefly, intact and precious. That was the time when there had been more hours in the day, and every hour precious enough so that it could be fooled away. By the time a man got into the high thirties the hours became more frantic and less precious, more needed and more carefully hoarded and more fully used, but less loved and less enjoyed.
Then he was pushing the doorbell button, bracing himself obscurely for something—for joy? for recognition? for a renewed flood of this potent and unexpected nostalgia?—and the door opened. Mel stood there in his shirt sleeves, a little mussy as usual, still deceptively round-armed and round-faced, with his beaked nose and his tender child’s mouth.
He was either drunk or playing drunk. He smirked, and his eyes blinked in owlish amazement. “Let me shake your hand!” he said, and hauled Mark inside.
Tamsen got up off the couch where she had been sitting with a highball in her hand. As she came forward, smiling, transferring the glass to her left hand, Mark noted how she adjusted her face for greeting. She was probably prettier than she had ever been, her hair in a long bob with sun-bleached streaks in it, her face smoothly tanned, her eyes candid, her smile white and frank. Presumably the two of them had been drinking together, but where Mel was frowsy and blinking, with red-streaked eyeballs, she was smooth and sober and impeccable.
“Of all the unexpected people!” she said, and gave him a firm hand. She left him in no doubt who was in command in this familiar house, who had established dominance.
Mel’s hand pulled him around. “Canby, you old snake in the grass, where you been? I’ve tried to call you up every night for ten years.”
“You did,” Mark said. “Twice. Once in New Haven and once in New York. Both times at two in the morning.”
Tamsen laughed. “Old Melly,” she said, almost as if affectionately. “Every time he gets tight he wants to call somebody up. The further away they are, the more he wants to call.”
Mel was standing spraddling, a little flickering smile on his mouth. One hand was on Mark’s shoulder. With the other he captured Mark’s right hand again and shook it slowly. His breath was heavy with whiskey, and Mark felt dismayed and half sick. He had been so sure at first that the thickening voice had been put on as part of the old clowning act. Now he was bothered precisely as he had been bothered by those telephone calls. Even while he laughed at the ponderous solemnity, the incoherent, bumbling, repetitive nonsense, the marvelously accurate imitation of a soggy drunk, Mark backed away, because he couldn’t be quite sure that the act was conscious any more. The act had become the man, and he went around living and acting out a grotesque parody of himself; or if it hadn’t become the man, then it had been put on defensively so much that communication was no longer possible. Nothing had come of those telephone calls except a mumble of doubletalk and affectionate profanity, and yet Mark felt that there had been in each instance a need, a loneliness, a reaching out. He felt that there was the same thing now, if Mel would let it show. The old comradeship was there; this drunken parody was embarrassment as much as anything, the defense of a thin-skinned organism.
“Been peeking down those microscopes,” Mel said solemnly, pumping Mark’s hand. “You biological old pot-licker. D’you invent penicillin?”
“I’m a modest man,” Mark said. “Two or three other people helped.”
He got his hand free, and as his eyes crossed Mel’s there was almost communication between them, a flash of perfectly sober understanding and warmth. Mel’s delicate, bruised-looking lips pursed, but then the look slipped and was gone, and he was pawing for Mark’s hand again, saying, “Canby, you old Rhodes Scholar, slip me the grip.”
Tamsen was amused. “You should charge him. Remember when he paid a barfly a dollar an hour to shake his hand down at Frank’s?”
“Kept me poor,” Mel said, with a sweet imbecilic grin. “Lose all your friends, got to buy more.” He smiled into Mark’s face, hanging to hand and shoulder, and Mark looked deep behind that idiot alcoholic smile trying to compel expression of what he knew was there: the recognition and the pain. Mel beamed at him.
