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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101191613 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2001 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 379 KB |
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Chapter One
The long two-headed shadow their shape cast eastward moved across the marshland of that country as improbable and quixotic as the pair themselves, the lean dark young man and the small boy with the bright red hair. The sun was low in the west and the fields around Florien met the edge of the road and lay out flat and wet forever and gave back the sky between the grasses. The trees lining the slough stirred heavily in the wind. For a long time the man had been listening to the boy who was humming as if he was going to shake. The man's legs were spraddled wide which shortened to his knees the already short pantlegs of his bib overalls and his knees pumped up and down steadily and grazed the plastic grip of the handlebars and the hollow metal on the other side where the grip was missing. He wore an army field jacket buttoned to the chin against the cold and a pair of lace-up engineer's boots. His hands were bare. He gazed into the distance. As if it was coming toward him faster than it was. As if he expected it to be recognizable.
The man's name was Zach. He leaned back until the back of his head rested on the boy's forehead. Look over one of my shoulders, he told the boy, and pick the farthest point in the land and pretend that we're just leaping over it and if we look down we'll scrape our bellies so don't look down and keep your eyes on that farthest point until it is not the farthest and then choose another point still farther, over the other shoulder to trick the shaking. But don't worry Samuel, he said, you're not going to shake.
And then there was glass and minutes later Zach himself began to shake, wobbling the bars. He leaned to turn the bicycle and when the wheel did not come back he had to jam his foot down hard so as not to spill. And he did not curse; he just kicked the stand down and dismounted and turned and held the bike steady for the boy who climbed nimbly down from where he sat under his red hair in that dairy crate they had wedged and bolted to the seatpost and fender behind them. Silently Samuel already had the patch kit out from the torn and frilly basket in front and silently, not looking at Zach's eyes but two feet askance to the left of his ear which was the boy's ruminating wont, he turned to the man with that familiar, that almost permanent expression on his face which seemed to say, I am too old in my soul and too patient to exhort you or anything to perfection. I am Samuel.
It was the rear one again and Zach knelt and peeled back the old tire with the Swiss Army driver and inched along pulling it around the rim with the boy kneeling and catching the lip of the rubber to prevent it from springing back. It must have hurt him but he was just humming with his knuckles jammed between the rubber and the steel. Humming the way he did when he was scared or when there was an accident at The Lake or if he was about to start shaking or very much afraid that he would. Zach removed the glass from the tire and Samuel pursed his lips and asked with his eyes if he could spit on the tube and Zach pumped vigorously and they watched the slit in the rubber froth forth and hiss and he wiped it away and placed the patch and spread his thumbs to seal it and they put back the tire in the reverse way with the boy keeping the rubber inside the rim with his knuckles jammed up against the steel and just humming. Zach inched around the wheel finally overtaking the small fingers and Let's go, he said.
Yes, the boy beckoned, moving his head up and about the way a horse does to warn a challenger, as if to the trees lining the west side of the slough which ran along that road which they had been on for the good part of the afternoon he was saying, Move off, which trees took his gesture into their afternoon light and held it, it seemed, absorbed momentarily in the brief windless repose of their lit barely burgeoning branches as if they would suddenly slam it back upon the two travelers in retribution, this boy's gesture, which Zach loved beyond all reason and which he likened to wilderness, to wind at night or rain on the lake because the boy, like the forces of nature, was entirely speechless. Are you hungry? Zach said.
Are you? Samuel's eyes said.
He was not worried when they approached the store. They had been only a day and a half on the road and already they'd had a policeman pull them over and a busload of children jeering at them for a stretch of nearly five miles and a group of three teenagers firing BB guns in their vicinity and an elderly couple peering at Samuel at a roadside market and comparing him to the drafted image of a lost or dead or kidnapped child on a milk carton. So he didn't even register whether the men on the gallery were whispering. He put the kickstand down and steadied the bike and Samuel climbed out of the crate and stepped deftly down and swept his silent gaze across the street signs blowing in the empty intersection and the half dozen stores of the diminutive town and lastly across the loitering men on the gallery as if he were taking in an altogether new country and they went up the bootworn stairs. Zach asked the clerk if he had any bicycle tubes and the clerk said no. Another man's look must have shot out at him over Zach's head from behind because the clerk who owned as well as tended the store came around the counter and to the front door to see something bearing already a look of comic awe before he even saw what was supposed to be funny. He stood in the doorway of his store expanding and relaxing his suspenders with his thumbs and the men sat or stood where they were on the trodden boards of the gallery and on the steps. The raw late brumal air on them all, roiling them there, not into confusion but focusing them, communal, predatory. There was a storm to the north and the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees in as many minutes. The storm front cut the sky in half almost on a plumb line and it was windy and the clouds north above the awning shouldered like greyhounds, east, against them.
There were seven men on the porch, a few of whom had known one another longer perhaps than Zach had been alive. Another man was coming up from the paddocks visible on the northern flank of a seemingly defunct barn, limping. A few of the men moved slowly aside for him and nodded. One said his name. The clerk didn't nod at the man. He stood in the doorway and looked out at the debris gusting up in the street and then he settled his gaze on the bicycle. He was paunchy, balding, commanding; he had that comfortable haughty bearing of smug men who are admired in but never deviate from their finite realm. He bent forward and looked out from the double doors which were propped open each with a boot scraper. That there's a girl's bike, he said.
It was as if the men had waited for him to speak, to come out and put forth some judgment on the event (on all event) as if they were incapable of opinion themselves; as if if he had come out and stood and praised the novelty of the strangers and their audacious enterprise and asked them to dinner they would have fallen all over themselves to do the same.
Some wind lifted at them then. For a moment no one spoke.
I believe that seat was pink at another time, one man said.
With flowers, said another, bending forward and scrutinizing and then lifting up the tattered basket which did indeed have along its rim an all but completely faded and frayed floral design.
Samuel's hair moved in the breeze and Zach nearly put out his hand to anchor it.
The man from the paddocks looked at the collapsed tire. You need a tube?
Zach nodded at him once.
Go see Frank.
He had one foot raised on the last porch step and his hands rested on that knee and even through his trousers his knee bulged as if it was filled with metal. He studied the pair, one at a time. Turn down toward the bottom after Wheeler's sign where the buckshot live oak's at.
It's a goddamned banana, a banana seat, said one of the men.
Call your girls, Freddie, we could have ourselves a regular Tour de France right down Main.
A grown man on a banana boat with a carrot in the back, the clerk said.
And at that the men roared, those who stood slapping their thighs and those who sat pounding the old porch boards with the fleshy bulbs of their fists. Shaking their heads. But for the paddock man. You can't miss it, he said. He'll have what you need.
He looked at the others and spat and turned stiffly on his good leg and looked down the road and repeated himself. He sat, he lumbered downward with difficulty and braced himself and stretched his leg out in front of him and put his hands on his knee as if to warm it from the wind which was colder now by the minute.
He'll have what you need, he said.
So they rode on, the windblown dust off the road filling their lungs and Samuel's forehead on Zach's back to keep out the dust and the boy breathing the jacket between his shoulders. And Zach was thinking this is a child and he can hear but he cannot speak or sign in the language of the deaf I am hungry he is hungry we are riding on a girl's bike with a hissing rear tire down a dirt road in Louisiana with eight or more pairs of eyes drilling the backs of our necks to see a man named Frank who has parts apparently for any device or machine my knees are coming up and down like humor and pathos, humor and pathos by turns do not intellectualize this that is not the raison d'être of your life the what? the what? you are pedaling it is cold there is a boy older than you will ever be behind you in a crate
Zach was twenty seven years old. Samuel, he said, though the boy did not speak.
Samuel, what are we doing? I have been sick. You are a child. Do you want to go back to The Lake?
Samuel put one index finger in the blades of each of Zach's shoulders which meant no or you or pedal or good. And they moved on, homeless, ludicrous, hungry and weary, weaving in the cold gloamingdust like a vision, like some warped memory's apparition a chimerical land gives to senility or exhaustion. 'Whither are we moving now,' Zach said, 'away from all suns?' He said it to the air, to no one and nothing at all. He thought of Lazar. That last night in November on the landing of his home, downlit by the porch light and reluctant beyond all measure to leave it, to step out from under it into nothing but a direction called Window Rock, a West, with his wife under the lintel leaning there and her apron still sullied from the sweetbread she had made him for the road, the old man had said, I've never known anyone to trip who wasn't trying to run. And when Zach had lifted his eyebrows at the trite, avuncular phrase, Lazar had said, Aw hell, give me a break for godsake. I've lived long enough on this planet to say anything that sounds foolish enough to be true. All I'm saying is you're not sick. You don't even have a mote of dust under your nails. It's your goddamned birthday. Because dead or alive your blood kin are only part of it.
And he had stepped into his house and stood for a moment and turned and stepped back out to the porch and embraced the young man vigorously like the comrade (or perhaps even the son, this man with only daughters) he had in that short time come to be.
Zach, he had said over the young man's shoulder, you are not sick.
Chapter Two
Zach was a philosopher. All but dissertation at the University of Virginia. When he went to lie down in the road it was early September and already the first molted leaves of the season were awash and clumped in the street rivulets and the air was woozy already with that sharp autumnal afterdark cold which feels on the summer's throat like a handheld knife chafing on a wire. That evening-no, that morning he had rolled up the carpet in his flat against the foot of his makeshift bed and he had lain on the floor on the diagonal and watched the light on the shade and onward across the room and onward still across all the east of the room, fading even as he watched it, turning his head so that when the east wall snuffed to darkness he had traversed, like a starless planetarium's dome, the entire breadth of his room. He moved. He lifted his arm off the floor and rested it down to see if it would make a noise. To see if some cymbal would crash in his mind which would mean a tomorrow and a tomorrow and another tomorrow. No sound. Just the drip of the faucet. It was completely dark now in the room. Just the car wheels' rubber dry on the asphalt but for one diminishing splash from a heavy rain two days before puddled out there in the intersection, that sound too like something washing over his body in the morning as he lay and then he forgot it for awhile through the afternoon and then by evening the sound, the puddle, was almost dry and he heard it only faintly in what he thought was an imagined whisper which whisper became a voice, a last interdiction against reality-if reality is one sensual present impeding on another sensual present, he thought, trying still to hear the puddle splashing under the cars-and then the voice became some orchestra of voices as if the linear time past and experience of his life was one increasing voluminous Voice hoarding an infinite now and he lifted his arm off the floor and dropped it, over and over again and faster for sound, all but beating it on the floor-but no sound. He got up then. He went into the bathroom and flossed his teeth. He had not even brushed them in three days which he did now after, in the darkness, not looking at himself in the darkling glass but some shadow of a head and even the slight protuberances of the ears, even the mussed not quite cropped but still short hair, just a shadow, a shade. He was wearing the clothes he had been wearing for three mealless and sleepless days. And then he did turn on the light to look, just before he left the room. He stood squinting a moment until his eyes adjusted. Then he pointed at himself. Zachary, he said to the mirror. You Zachary. He turned off the light and stood until even the image of himself which the retina ghosted before him faded also into the dark glass. Then he put on his shoes. He bent over and felt the ripeness ascending his back from the motion, the stiffness of the prostrate days. He knotted his laces very carefully and evened their bows, left and right. He took off his belt and put on another belt. He tucked in his shirt. He went to the closet and chose a middle-weight jacket and then he stood with his hand on the knob for several minutes. He let go the knob and went to the sink and got himself a drink of water. He could feel it in his toes as he drank, the water; he could feel it filling slowly like diminutive reservoirs the soft lobes of his ears. Then he walked out of his life forever.
He went first to the Rotunda on the university campus. He stood on the grass and studied the buildings, the little rooms along the Lawn, studied the square places the lights made flooding finitely out on the finite grass of the grounds, the circumscribed places. He walked down onto the Lawn. Here too the leaves already lay, the columns lit downward on both sides Pavilion to Pavilion toward Old Cabell Hall; the air was pungent, getting toward cold, that autumn bite of cold. It was after eleven o'clock. It was Friday night. He did not walk about. He stood in what he hadn't even known was very nearly the exact center of the Lawn. There were fires in many of the hearths along the promenades. There were students sitting out in front of their rooms with fires in the hearths and the front door wide open so they could see the homish flames' shadows gamboling on the wall, so they could hear the logs' quaintly burning pop pop pop while they sat outside. Zach could hear the logs. He could hear the students' low polite talking where they sat on their steps or in chairs, their voices charged even from this distance with the sibilant low whispering of the gratefully fortunate, the selfconsecrating and faultless young unmolested and striving and nearly pure in their floating lapse between the naïvete of the child and the true man or woman, the human being contending with humanbeing, the long sightless surge toward the soul-or not, the man or woman who would refuse even the simple and natural accruement of consciousness, who would soon begin to slay, slowly, his or her heart's innocence and dark mystery both until the child was but a memory of a memory and this brief, windless repose, this college, but four all but disappeared years: a few awkward lovers, some forgotten books, and the smell of beer. He could hear them talking gracefully like wind in the grass, their laughter from another world.
He turned. He walked back up Rugby Road, past the beautiful mansions out from whose windows young men leaned and called out to women in cars blocking traffic in the road, or out from which music blared from a propped speaker, curtainless. In one second story window a man sat with his legs dangling over the edge and another stood below him in the yard and threw, from a crate between his legs, ripe fruit upward to his perched partner who then swung at the soft exploding tomatoes and oranges and peaches and nectarines with a baseball bat, a crowd of bystanders shrieking applause if some peel or pulp made it out over the cars, to the other side of the road.
There were parties spilling out of almost every other house and sometimes the revelers-the women especially-called to him (namelessly) from their safe inebrious numbers but he did not even hear them and he walked north until the houses were sparser and the quiet came upon him again and his steps. He continued on Rugby Avenue, walking fast, upright, purposeful. Now the houses were all brick and white trim with broad lawns and even private copses and then whole small plots of wood in between. He passed a lady on the street calling for her cat which cat did show at her summons and the lady's pleasure was all gaudy and disproportionate under the stillness of the night, the enlarging night because he was walking clear out of town now. He passed a couple kissing against the hood of a car. He passed through a group of teenagers weaving slowly down the lane on bicycles, the one in front saying Yo to him as he parted them in the middle of the road like water. And then he was nearly in country. The road was a deep blackness ahead and behind, just a few lit house lights spilling weakly out of the darkness. The trees hanging over, and still. He did not look up for stars. He did not so much as turn his head right or left once but his eyes focused, pierced, and moved on as if they would nail the world permanently into the brain. He passed a cart full of soil with some claw rakes and trowels in it glittering in the light from a garage, some inexplicable hooks hanging from a dormer, a galvanized trash can in which some first of the year's leaves were still smoking. He passed some bags of mortar in stacks by a hole in the walk and some flowers strewn in the curb and then there were no more houses and a three-legged dog came to him out from the shadows, so gaunt that it seemed it could be skewered through its midsection with the not even violent thrust of an index finger. So scared, its tail already way up under its legs, its face shying side to side as from remembered blows. The dog followed him, looking up at him, and Zach did not look down or slow his stride and the dog stayed, halflimping, halfjumping after him. He was on highway 250 now, heading east, walking not quite on the shoulder of the road and not quite in the lane either, the dog askance, slightly behind him. He had begun to taste sweat around his mouth. He reached up his hand and knuckled it across his upper lip and he was amazed at the perspiration (because it was cold; he knew, theoretically, that it was getting cold) and he flicked his thumb across his knuckle to slough off the sweat and the dog leapt away from the action as from a thrown object and Zach stopped suddenly. Go home, he said. Go.
The dog looked behind him and then out into the woods as if he hadn't heard. Go, Zach said again, pointing.
The dog just stood panting. Go, Zach said, louder.
He made a little rush at him and the dog turned and trotted and looked back and Zach rushed at him again and the dog walked, limped in that sidelong jumping action, back into the woods.
Then the road lay out straight before him. Then he walked down it stiffly, no longer fluid at all so that his bones seemed to be strung tighter now on their hinges. Then there was no light at all, but for the few speeding cars. He could hear them coming for minutes before they came. He could hear the pistons slamming under the hot hoods of their passing. He could smell something burning in the air. He could taste something metal in his mouth. He could feel his clothes on his body heavy with sweat. And then he could see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing: time past and present, the trees, the road, the air, the sky just some tasteless odorless effluvium his body impelled through toward some zenith of its own compulsion, its own design. The road made a bight around a cluster of trees and he passed them and he walked out into the center of the highway and stood looking down at the infinitely black asphalt and because he loved Nietzsche, because when he read him at the very last it was not so much reading as thought itself, his mind leaping, overtaking the words themselves and laying them down in prolepsis as if he was the very generant man himself-because Nietzsche had lain down in the road, Zach felt it as an obligation. Two o'clock in the morning. Highway 250. Nine miles east of Charlottesville Virginia. He lay down in the middle of the road.
And he slept. And when he woke he found himself with saliva all over his chin and his face wet and streaked, and alive. He was surrounded by police officers and he did not know how long he had been there and he could not account for himself at all. He got up and brushed himself off and apologized and walked away and they caught him up and cuffed him and admitted him, later that morning, to the psychiatric ward. And now he wanted his books.
— Reprinted from The Lake by Daniel Villasenor by permission of Viking Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 2000 by Daniel Villasenor. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.