Three Days Before the Shooting ... (136 page)

And now with a smile he saw himself as he’d been at that time of his life. Larger than most of the others, his bare upper body gleaming with sweat above the loose corduroy knickers that whipped beneath his pumping knees, the bill of his cloth cap turned to the rear as he sped into a knot of straining players who yelled and moiled, whirled and skittered as they formed a thicket of skate wheels, legs, and thrashing sticks—out of which a battered tin can suddenly exploded in the direction from which he’d sped. And now, crouching, pivoting, and pumping, he caught up with the can with his stick on the ready, and sent it straight as a bullet across the goal line. And then slaps on his back and yells from his teammates.

Once in a tight game he had swung at the can with such force that in missing he had splintered his stick against the curbstone, sending his skates from beneath him and gashing himself with the end of the shattered club just below his right ankle. Delivered with both hands, the blow had been less painful than the sight of the gash left in his flesh, and after stopping the flow of blood he had returned to the game. The wound had continued bleeding but with his team only a point ahead he had ignored it and helped with the winning goal. In those days the excitement of winning was enough to numb the pain, and within a few days a thick, puckered scab surrounded by a slight swelling was all that remained. And since it pained only when something pressed against it he moved carefully and forgot the wound.

But then, two months later, when rubbing at the itchy new skin that had replaced the scab he was shocked to see it burst with a watery spurt of fluid. And when he gave it a squeeze, what appeared to be the sodden head of an insect had slowly protruded from the joint of his ankle like a worm emerging from the pierced skin of an apple. And with the strange object setting off fantasies of blood poisoning the effect had been far worse than the sight of the original gashing.
But then, more fascinated than frightened, he had continued squeezing and watched with awe as two slimy inches of splintered pine wood emerged from the smelly, pus-filled wound. To his relief there had been little pain, but during the days that it took the wound to heal he had lived with the fear of tetanus….
That

too
, he thought,
but the worst of it was realizing that I’d lived that long with that thing buried so deep in my flesh and didn’t feel it or even know it was there. I must have been no older than nine years at the time, but I still have the scar—
And suddenly aware that he was thinking less about his early accident than about the strange letter from Janey, he thought,

Yes, it was a way of thinking about it while not approaching it too directly. It didn’t work, but sometimes you can be hurt in such a way that you can’t bear to face up to the full extent of your wounding. Like my being so afraid of blood poisoning that instead of telling my mother I simply refused to feel what was left in my ankle. So you slick some hurts over with forgetfulness and try to get on with your life as though nothing has happened, and after a time the body forgets what the mind refuses to acknowledge. And while the processes of the blood carry off any poisons that might have formed, the mind turns to other problems, other fears
.

But not always. Sometimes something happens and years later you’re forced to realize that something alien, something you couldn’t deal with at the time it happened, remains buried beneath scars you’ve long forgotten. Like bullets or pieces of shrapnel beneath an old soldier’s skin long after the war in which he recieved it has been won or lost. Then you have to recognize that whatever caused the wound has become so much a part of you that you remember it only when you bend the wrong way or accidently strike the scar. Some old wounds to the flesh act like barometers announcing changes in the weather, but wounds to the spirit can become encrusted in such a way that they lose all sensitivity to the pressures of time and change, becoming like embalmed shafts of experience that are armored against change but still capable of acting up when you least expect
.

And suddenly he understood why Janey’s letter disturbed him. It wasn’t its message so much as the voice which it evoked in his ear; a voice that clashed with the emotion-encapsulated image which was buried deep in his mind. For while the image was that of a girl whom he’d first known in the fresh bloom of womanhood, the voice which sounded from the letter was not only that of an elderly woman, but of a woman schooled in the suffering and uncertainties of living. It was having the two, the young image and the old voice, brought into unexpected conjunction that was disturbing. For it was as though an elderly woman were addressing him through the form and figure of a young girl—or as though a young girl had addressed him with a voice that echoed the experiences of age. That voice, issuing suddenly from the page, had assaulted a memory that had been inviolate for years, and he was shocked by the extent to which he had sustained an image of a reality that had long since faded.

Years ago there had been a moment when the girl of the image had caused him such unhappiness that he had thought he would never recover, but in time the
pain had dulled through the mysterious process by which memory selects that to which it clings and that which it puts out of mind. It was as though he and the image had been part of a motion-picture sequence in which at the moment he’d attempted to embrace a smiling Janey she had snatched out a pistol and fired at his heart. Her impulsive, unanticipated gesture had not been in the script he thought he was enacting, so with the action completed, he had carefully clipped the frame in which her smile glowed its brightest and set fire to the frames that recorded the disillusioning sequence in which she’d fired at his heart. Then, having encased that single frame in thick crystal, he had hidden it away in his trombone case. Shortly afterwards he had left town, but while over the years his image of himself had changed—and in many ways as drastically as it might had Janey actually fired an unfatal bullet—in his private relationship with the cherished image of the girl in the frame it was as though the two of them had been transported into a realm beyond duration and fixed in a deathless posture of appeal and rejection, with himself ever reaching out and Janey ever turning away.

Not that there had been no period of trauma, for again and again he had relived the painful moment of her rejection. But usually it was enacted in the breathless pantomime of dreaming. Then he had trained himself to return to sleep and dream of other women, other loves. And later, when the experience of rejection returned to haunt his waking mind with fantasies in which he appeared abject and prideless, he had learned to blunt his anguish with the same irreverent laughter which was evoked when he gave voice to the blues. The process had been something of a desperate maneuver, a blues-like laughing at pain. For gradually he had come to see that desperate emotions required antidotes that were drastic and had been so successful that he no longer thought of Janey even when singing or blowing the blues.

Then in his travels he had come to associate his experience with a stage routine performed by the Zephyrs, a team of dancers who were famous for a comic dance of epic chase and combat performed on a shadowed stage. Where, bathed in the flickering of stroboscopic lights, their violent, ultra-slow-motion, larger-than-life gestures took on the illusion of a fluid and dream-like struggle in which the two men danced out a riddle in which failure was a success, and a success a failure. The choreographed story of which presented the agony of a worm turning into a hero and a hero turning into a worm, a battle in which there was neither winner nor loser, but only a cycle of engrossing action. Clashing on the stage in soundless give-and-take, the dancers appeared to acquire a weightlessness discovered later by the men who walked on the moon, with the split-second flashing of the strobes endowing their exaggerated gestures with the appearance of a magical domination of time and space, gravity and pain. For as they fought with a flashing of knives, the imaginary wounds they dealt and sustained were no hindrance at all to their will to dominance. There was a magic evoked by the act and he, like the audience, had loved it.

And yet he knew that much of what the Zephyrs appeared to do took place only in the eye of the viewer. That each of their leaps, their blows, their turns, falls, and soundless winces, their snarls or cries, were but near-immobile segments in a pattern of carefully controlled and juxtaposed movements that were as carefully synchronized as those of puppets animated by invisible strings. Each gesture, raised leg, up-flung arm, dodging head, or falling body, was executed according to a strict count like that required when performing classical music or an arrangement by Ellington. Each movement was followed by the next and appeared to flow from it, but actually depended upon the flashes of light which filled in the blank spaces between and connected and gave them the appearance of a continuous flow. It was all illusion which depended upon the Zephyrs’ marvelous body control and sense of timing. Yes, it was an illusion assisted by the hypnotic lights that had given reality to the impossible and defied time, space, and the laws of gravity. But it was not that their success was due to the lights alone, for often he had watched them rehearse without strobes and was still impressed by their ability to make their bodies defy the laws of time and space. They had made him laugh with admiration; and, better still, they had taught him how to exorcise his pain by allowing him to laugh with admiration at the endless rise and fall of pride. And the point of his self-directed joke was that he, by having reached out for a love that was no more than a flickering light in his own self-hypnotized eyes, had been the composer of his own sad song of failure. It was a strange form of instruction, yet by associating his failure with the triumph of the Zephyrs’ illusion he had relieved his anguish. And he had learned that in some matters atmosphere and sheer timing were the key to success; just as selective forgetting was one way of dealing with heartache. Thus, by repressing his pain he had been able to retain Janey’s youthful image in a state that was illogical but invulnerable to time. Thank God, he thought with a smile, for the Zephyrs….

Now, riffling through the letter’s tightly written pages, he frowned and thought,
Here she’s given me a burning house and then a burning hearse, a snakebite and somebody she calls a “little man” who’s going around disturbing buried secrets. But what secrets, and whose? Why all this hinting and signifying? Yes, and why did she save the part about the “little man” for the last? Why not give him a name? After all, she’s used that phrase for years and it was always for one of those homeless boys she’s taken in and cared for until they went off on their own, or were removed by social workers or their parents. They were always her “little men,” never her sons. And neither did she allow them to call her “Mother,” come to think of it, even though there’s no question that she loved and mothered each and every one of them. But maybe it was her way of helping them keep their parents alive in their memory. Yes, and if I’m not mistaken it was her way of making it known that looking after them was her way of fulfilling her responsibility as a Christian. That Janey! That husbandless, virginal mother! For years, by taking in washing, sewing and cooking, and doing housework, she’s kept her house full of otherwise homeless boys. And not only feeding and clothing them, but sending them to school—and all of it, except for the help she got from a few
friends and neighbors, out of her earnings. Hickman, that took far more than faith and charity, it took a kind of love that’s past most understanding
.

And at her age she’s still at it! Because this Cliofus is a grown man now—at least in age—and he’s been with her since the day his folks got discouraged and threw up their hands. Well, time and Janey’s love have proved that he’s not the idiot they thought he was, but even with that admitted that Cliofus is one
strange
fellow! Thank God that the others she took in have gone on to make comfortable lives for themselves and are doing what they can to help her along, especially the one with a reputation for operating outside the law. He makes her uneasy but she loves him along with the rest, and no matter how big and rusty or smooth and educated they’ve grown up to be they’re still her “little men.” Talk about your matriarchs and extended families, Janey’s a one-woman institution!

Her “little men,”
his mind repeated, and suddenly, echoing an old spiritual, it was as though the phrase was trying to tell him something which he had no desire to hear.

Oh, death is a little man who goes from door to door
, he hummed. Then with a shrug he said aloud, “Now she’s got
me
doing it!”

But why doesn’t she know if this fellow in question is one of hers or not? Nothing else in here indicates that she’s lost her memory. And even if it happens to fail her once in a while, why didn’t she ask Cliofus? Because far from being an idiot he’s been blessed (or cursed) with too
much
memory, and she knows it! Why, that fellow remembers everything he’s ever seen, read, done, or heard talked about. And once he gets started on a subject he drones away at it like a talking robot. So if he says that this stranger—if he
is
a stranger—is one of hers, he must be. Because that Cliofus is a walking depository of happenings, whether they’re organized or unorganized, classified or beyond all classification. Say something to him and it’s like dropping a nickel into a slot machine that’s sure to pay off. But instead of producing the usable cash you hope for, any and everything comes pouring out. So by now he’s probably spilled every detail about whoever this man is, from his arrival at Janey’s to the times he was spanked, given castor oil, or had his diapers changed
.

So who does Janey think she’s kidding? Why write that she’s uncertain about this
particular
fellow? Could he be one of her strays who wandered away and she wants to forget it? If that’s the case, then she
isn’t
uncertain and expects me to recognize that she’s not. Maybe that’s why she’s skipping around her real meaning like one of these beboppers who try to stand a melody on its head and then turn it wrong-side out so that the listener will be more impressed with his flying and stuttering over the keys than with what he has to say. And yet she’s basically serious, too serious for her own good, so it might be her way of warning me to probe between the lines for her meaning…
.