A Garden of Earthly Delights (52 page)

“She's a goddamn filthy bitch,” he would say to his friends. “I'd like to slit her up and down and hang her out to drain.” And he spat onto the ground, his face contorted with disgust. One of his friends was over twenty, in and out of the Navy already (he had been let go), and he always asked about Clara: did Jon ever see her undressed? Did she walk around without all her clothes on, ever? Jonathan flushed at his questions, embarrassed and angry. Clara ran around the house any way she liked, barefoot and with her hair wet and loose down her back, dripping onto her blouse, and at night she
made popcorn for herself and Swan, wearing one of her many robes and not always bothering to see that it was buttoned—but he was not going to tell anyone about this. It was nobody's business what Revere's wife did.

“Why the hell do you want to know?” he sneered. Skinny as he was, no match for this guy, he had no care for how arrogantly he talked—it might have seemed he was asking for a punch in the mouth. “You wouldn't ever have no chance with her, so forget it.”

“Wouldn't be too sure of that,” his friend said.

So Jonathan laughed scornfully and nastily.

The girls they drove around were the same girls who had been on the school bus for years with them. Now, suddenly, everyone was older. Some girls had already quit school, were married and had babies. It went so fast—the years went so fast, Jonathan thought. He drank more than anyone else because he had more to push out of his mind. They drank for fun but he drank for serious reasons; then, after a certain point, he forgot the reasons and was able to have fun. They drove twenty, thirty miles to get beer and liquor, knowing in mysterious ways just where a certain roadhouse was, what its prices were, what its manager was like. They knew everything, yet no one could have said how they knew; it was mysterious knowledge, breathed in with the air around them.

They went to all the outings and charity picnics. But when the Lutheran church had its outing Jonathan stayed home alone, he didn't say why. While Clara and Revere and Swan and Clark went, he stayed around the house, acting strange. The idea that just a few yards back in the cemetery his mother and brother were buried made him sick: how could people wolf down hot beef sandwiches and all that beer, those barrels and barrels of beer, when out back bodies were rotting and stinking in the soil? Didn't anyone know that?

So he stayed home, feeling shaky, and played poker with the few hired men who hadn't enough money to go out. When Revere and the others came home that evening, he was sitting on the porch steps as if waiting for them. He knew Revere liked that. Or he had liked it, in the days when he still liked Jonathan. It was after dark, so he had taken down Revere's flag and folded it up right.

Clara had talked Revere into buying that flag. She had said that she was proud of being an American, and didn't he want a flag? So they bought one and were American. When Jonathan wandered back from the woods with his gun, he had the desire to shoot the flag into tatters, he didn't know why. What would happen then? What would his father do to him?

He didn't sleep well at night but not because of dreams. He had the idea he never dreamed. He had nothing to dream about.

Clark had warned him about the girls he went out with: “They're pigs, so be careful. You know what I mean.”

Clark knew everything, he knew about all the girls. Twenty miles away they'd heard of Clark and were surprised that Jonathan was his brother. But any girl so sluttish that Clark would have nothing to do with her was just right for Jonathan, he thought; she would have to like him. Who else could she get? They weren't ugly, exactly, he and his friends, but there must have been something wrong with them—the prettiest girls ignored them. They had enough money, or at least Jonathan did and he could lend money to the other boys, but still the best-looking girls avoided them and they were always crowded by a certain kind of heavy, lipsticked, sly girl who liked them well enough and laughed uproariously at their jokes. These girls were always impressed by Jonathan's car and the remote prickly excitement of knowing he was a Revere—even if he himself was a disappointment, too thin, and with skin that was never clear. Wasn't he a Revere, might there not be a chance of catching him? Clark went out with a pretty, long-haired girl from Tintern who worked in the drugstore, and this girl certainly wasn't good enough for Revere—he would never let Clark marry her—so the girls Jonathan was able to get were so low that Revere would not even have spat on them, and he felt satisfaction in this.

Maybe he would bring one of them right into the house someday and announce he was marrying her: she was pregnant and that was that. He would stare into his father's face to see what he thought. “You're not the only one in the family that can marry a whore,” he would say to his father.

And what would his father do? Whip him again?

The most he could do would be to kill Jonathan.

He thought about getting a job, since his friends had “jobs.” They worked part-time in a service station. By now, his father would have given him a job somewhere if he was ever going to; he had given Clark a job when Clark had been only sixteen. So that was out. He was not going to ask his father about it because it was evidently settled that he wanted no part of Jonathan. Or he might be waiting for Jonathan to straighten out. But it came to the same thing. So he thought vaguely about finding a job somewhere, but he had no skills, knew nothing, could hardly change a tire. He hated the smell of gas, so how could he work in a filling station?

He thought, the hell with getting a job. He didn't want one anyway.

He had a year and a half of school yet to go but he did not go back in the fall. As far as he was concerned, he was finished with it forever. Since he was stupid, there was no point in bothering—he might as well be dead. “Did you ever wish you were dead?” he asked Clark. But Clark, running off to his girlfriend, had no time for him. “Did you ever wish you were dead?” he said to his uncle Judd, whom he resembled closely; but questions like this made Judd nervous. Since that time in the back meadow—the accident with Robert's shotgun—Judd had seemed more nervous. Or was Jonathan just imagining it? Sometimes he himself could hear that blast, then the screaming.…

(He had jumped off his horse and run back, and at first he hadn't seen anything at all. Then he saw it. He saw what the shot had done to Robert and how what had been Robert was shattered forever. Just like that. It did not matter that he died later, because he was dead right then. You couldn't fix up anyone who looked like that.… A few feet away Swan had been standing.)

“Did you ever wish you were dead?” he said to one of his father's men during harvest. The men all worked hard and were paid well, so they had to like Revere. They saw him rarely enough, so it was easy to like him. Jonathan supposed that they did not like him but he was so scrawny, so punky, that they couldn't be jealous, at least, because he was a Revere. The men thought he was crazy and all they asked him about was Clara—when he told them to shut up they lost interest.

The night he ran away and disappeared, he was out with a girl from a small farm some miles away. She was only fourteen but she looked older: she had a big, sturdy body and long bleached hair that fell past her shoulders. She wore pink lipstick and her fingernails were painted to match. They got beer from a roadhouse and drank it for a while on the back porch of that place until the manager said they'd better leave, some state troopers were probably going to drop in, so they drove around for a while in the dark drinking it while the girl complained about her mother, and finally they parked and finished what was left of it. In the backseat of the car Jonathan wrestled around with her and she teased him, giggling drunkenly, and when she finally gave in he felt that something dangerous was approaching him. He could feel it coming as if he were standing on a railroad track and it had begun to vibrate. For years he had fooled around with girls like this, it meant nothing to him, it was nothing more than going to the bathroom—almost the same thing—but now he felt icy with fear. He tried to make love to the girl but something was wrong. He went cold, dead. Then, when she tried to get up, he began hitting her. He screamed into her face.

“Slut! Filthy bitch!”

He bloodied her face and punched her in the stomach and breasts. He wept with the ferocity of his hatred. Then he pushed her out of the car and left her, his tires kicking up pebbles and dust behind him as he pulled away—and that was that.

Outside the high school building it was a cold, clear November day. Many boys had skipped school to go hunting; that was against the “law,” but the principal was a cheerful manly man who would not expel anyone. So there was a strange sense of holiday or half-holiday in the air—the usual girls had come to school but only about half the boys had showed up. Swan liked the relative peace in the corridor around his locker. The girls chattered and giggled the way they always did, but it was not quite so high-pitched, so self-conscious. There were no boys nearby to hear them except Swan, who did not count.

He was only sixteen but a senior already, and he must have carried this fact around with him without knowing it like a stamp or tattoo on his forehead that identified him as a freak. In the locker room he could not approach any group of boys and join them, because he didn't know how, nor did he want to know how; out in the corridors or on the stairs or outside in the parking lot, he could not sidle up to any girl and tease her in that certain winning way, because he did not know how and he supposed he did not want to know. Revere had told him about girls and that he should be careful of any situations that might lead to temptation. “Temptation.” It was a word out of the Bible and Swan bowed his head in admiration for its holy and ancient uselessness. These days, Revere spoke a little loudly but you had to pretend nothing was unusual. He was hard of hearing, Clara explained; that always happened to men. But she thought it better to let someone else tell Revere about it. So he instructed Swan in a loud, slightly embarrassed voice that he should avoid temptation. He was not yet old enough to understand the complexities of his own body, and when he was old enough, Revere would explain it. For the time being, he should just avoid temptation.

When he'd been only twelve, Clara had told him all about it. He had gotten the idea from her that it was something he would be doing sooner or later, preferably sooner because then he could “grow up better,” that it always made the girl happy, but only if she was the right kind of girl. Clara was emphatic about this. “Someone like your cousin Debbie—no. Nobody around here. Nobody on a big farm. But some of those people that live down by the river in those dumps—with all the junk around them—and any time you see a girl standing around a bunch of boys and they're all laughing together—probably she's all right. You understand?”

He respected Revere's standards but he supposed that his mother was right and Revere was wrong. So he stopped thinking about it. He had so much else to think about that he would have to put off anything like that for a while—when he got older, and when Revere had explained to him everything that he had to know, then he would have time for himself. He would then have the rest of his life for himself.

So he did his homework in free periods at school and at home he did additional work and read books that were related to his courses. He did not let these books interfere with his teachers' teaching, though. He could respect their kindly limitations. And he went with Revere on small errands, to Tintern and to other small towns and once all the way to Hamilton, sitting beside his father in his father's new big black car and inclining his head toward him, listening to what his father had to say about money, taxes, buildings, land, wheat, gypsum, and men that had to be hired for the lowest possible pay. He could feel his head filling up slowly. At times he woke to the fear that his head would burst, that facts and ideas were being squeezed into his brain too fast, before he was able to make room for them. But he kept on studying and working at school and at home, he kept on listening to Revere and to the men Revere talked with. His ears were like holes in his head that sucked in information and stored it away, useless as it might seem to be at the moment. Everything he heard was sucked in. He never forgot anything. Along with the important equations he memorized in physics and chemistry were jumbled conversations he had overheard between his mother and someone's new wife she was trying to befriend, or vicious oaths spat out on the cramped little gym floor when the boys were playing basketball, or the sweetly sickish popular songs the girls hummed to themselves out in the corridor. He never forgot anything.

That day he felt a sense of holiday too, but it made him apprehensive. He did not trust unusual feelings. In English class, half the desks were vacant and it was easy to figure out that the toughest boys weren't present: just Swan and two or three boys who would never succeed at anything, especially not at being boys, and a dozen girls. Swan despised this English teacher because she was so like himself, so uncertain. She was a new teacher, just graduated from college the spring before, and he had to turn his pencil round and round in his fingers as she spoke, to find some outlet for his own nervousness. She looked around the room, fearful of seeing something out of place, and finally, ten minutes after each class began, her gaze would come to rest timidly on Swan's face; she could sense that he was different, like herself, he was quiet and that maybe
meant he was shy; at least he was intelligent and the rest of the students were stupid. Stupid. Of course they were all stupid, who would expect anything else? Swan did not dislike them for being stupid, he was grateful to them. Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought; you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.

Swan sat in the outer row near the windows. A few feet away the window was open a crack, slanted downward, so that the fresh hard air eased onto the side of his face. With one part of his mind he listened to the teacher and with another part of his mind he thought about what he was going to do. Clara talked more and more about living permanently in Hamilton, and he would have to help her with that. It would take them a few years to convince Revere. His father spoke vaguely of how Swan and Clark were to take over everything of his someday, when he got “old and worn out,” as he put it—with a special forlorn grin that meant he was joking, he'd never get old and worn out. Swan thought about that. Clark was twenty-four and that meant he was eight years older than Swan. He talked to Swan only the way you'd talk to a child. He would always talk to Swan that way, he would never be able to accept Swan as an equal.…