In the Beauty of the Lilies (46 page)

He hardly had energy to strip off the Trojan (the damn pubic hairs always caught) and to drop it on the floor before turning his back and falling asleep. The bed was so narrow Hannah had no choice but to curl her arm around him and to fit her body against his. Between fits of cloud the moon, that debunked deity, poured its borrowed light through the invisible wind; the sash vibrated and coyotes sang mournfully to one another. Even the foxes have holes.

Fuzzy dawn light met his eyes when she awoke him. The frosted shade of the kerosene lamp had the shape of an old-fashioned big-hipped woman. The heater had purred all night and the cubicle was so hot his neck was sweaty. Hannah was bent above him, whispering insistently, “Clark. It’s six o’clock, darling. Shall I drive you back to Bighorn?”

“Bighorn,” he said, as his consciousness escaped from his
dreams, which had been as entangled and shallow as the pattern on Uncle Jared’s boastful boots. “They think I’m a jerk,” he told her. “Let me sleep, honey. I’ll give them a call later.” It was as when a boy he travelled to Europe with his mother, and after that first sleepless day of dazed excitement—the crooked damp streets, the shops with iron shutters, the strange rapid language, the buildings that looked different, solid and rhythmic and gray like monuments—a profound need opened within him, a need to fall and fall into the gauzy substance of oblivion, the bottomless world beneath the waking world—a need his mother would explain with the breezy phrase “a change of air.”

Uncle Danny had travelled a lot between Washington and the Far East in the years when Nixon was winding down Vietnam and visiting China, and he would stay a night or two en route with his famous sister. Clark didn’t go off to St. Andrew’s until 1973, when he was fourteen, so he was around, and he and his uncle would drive the freeways in Mom’s white Jaguar convertible while she was off working. His uncle seemed to own only gray suits, so the most casual he could get was to leave his jacket and necktie off and turn up the cuffs of his white shirt. He seemed to Clark tremendously tall, though his grandfather told him Daniel was no taller than his great-grandfather Clarence had been, and not as handsome. Uncle Danny had the dull pale-brown family hair, cut in a businessman style that seemed bizarrely short in those shaggy years, a sort of military statement, and thick glasses behind which his eyes wore a constant, slightly bewildered and evasive but not especially troubled squint. Behind the wheel of the Jag he looked boyish, the wind mussing his
hair and then flattening it in colorless patches, and he steered, Clark thought admiringly, with a very light, two-fingered touch on the steering wheel. Uncle Danny was sensitive; he scanned the dial for classical radio stations, tucked in among the loud rock and angry talk stations, and once took Clark to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, right next to the La Brea Tar Pits. Rex Brudnoy was gone from the household by then, and when Clark was eleven and twelve he and Uncle Danny would head down to Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm for a day of rides. But by the time he was thirteen he was too old for that, and it seemed more adult just to drive, south to San Clemente or north to Santa Barbara or west to the coast, enjoying the meditative sensation of eating up the miles, the miles of pink and powder-blue and adobe-colored houses, to views of the Pacific so vast you could see the earth curve or else out into the desert, where the L.A. megalopolis crumbled into little sun-flattened towns left over from the days when California was a part of Mexico. “Any time you want to turn around,” Clark would say. “Don’t do this just for me.”

“It’s pure pleasure for me, Clark. I don’t get to drive much on the job. I’m driven, but that’s not the same. Listen to that—pure milk and honey. And fire. That’s Mozart. You should learn to listen to these guys.”

“What is your job—is that O.K. to ask?”

“Absolutely it’s O.K. to ask. I am a State Department political officer stationed at present in our Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A very pretty country with a lot of problems. A beautiful people, Clark, and some amazing temples. Angkor Wat: the largest religious structure in the world, so they say. Make yourself a vow to see it before you die. It’s one of those countries, like Poland, that happen to be in the
wrong place. They’ve had some shaky times, under their two-faced little king, but we have a good man in there now, I think: Lon Nol. Heard of him?”

“Sure, I guess.” He knew Uncle Danny could tell he was lying. That was his job, to know when people were lying. “So what do you do all day?” he asked.

“Oh, hard to say. Push paper, meet people. Gather information, and pass it on. I guess I’m a communicator—people like me are the means whereby other countries communicate with ours, and we can present ourselves to them. Communication’s the difference between 1972 and 1914; it’s what’s kept the Cold War fundamentally cold. Know what the other fellow won’t stand, and go to the edge but not over. If you look at World War One, those people had no idea what they were getting into. Franz Josef didn’t even come down from his vacation house while his ministers were declaring war on Serbia.”

Beyond his uncle’s pale, amiable, squinting profile, bleached mountains crinkled up out of the desert. Nearer to the highway Clark could see a golf course—garish strips of green that had no business being there—and a foreground of gas stations and truck stops and cement-block stores advertising
PEPSI
and
HOAGYS
and
TIENDA DE COMESTIBLES
. Clark tried to picture hydrogen bombs wiping all this out, but it seemed too vast, too vast and too delicate, a semi-transparent vision spun out within a serene, basking, blue-tinted emptiness. “What do you think of Vietnam?” he asked.

“It’s over. All but the shouting. Henry’s in charge.”

“How could the U.S. make such an awful mistake?”

Uncle Danny pushed out his lips, thinking, so from the side he looked a little like Mom trying to be sexy. “Was it a mistake?”

“Well, it got us fifty thousand dead soldiers, and South Vietnam is worse off than when it started.”

“It got us into China,” Uncle Danny told him. “It got us the two SALT agreements. We’ve got Mao and Brezhnev each trying to kiss our ass. Nobody’s supposed to say this, but Vietnam impressed the right people. The superpowers all agree, the North Vietnamese are pricks. They’ve got Laos. They won’t get Thailand. They won’t get Cambodia, if I can help it.” He turned to face his nephew, the two fingers keeping their light contact with the wheel, as the speedometer needle quivered around eighty. “Vietnam was a hard call,” he said, “I’m glad you won’t have to fight in it. But somebody always has to fight. You and I walk down the street safe, if we do, because a cop around the corner has a gun. The kids today say the state is organized violence and they’re right. But it matters who’s doing the organizing. King George the Third, or George Washington. Joe Stalin and his disciples, or our bumbling American pols. I’ll take the pols, every time. What the kids don’t seem to see is that their freedom to grow long hair and smoke pot and shit on poor Tricky Dick is based on the willingness of somebody else to do their fighting for them. What you can’t protect gets taken away. The class or tribe or country that can’t fight gets swallowed up. I try to be cool about it—I mean, look at you, for Chrissake: your
hair
, that little Mary Jane leaf on your polo shirt—but frankly it pisses me off, Clark, this whole decadence thing, this whole spoiled stoned slogan-mouthing generation of rotten know-nothing ingrates, so I’m glad I’m not in this country for long at a time. I might turn conservative.” A new Mercedes with opaque windows whipped by as if they were standing still. “The U.S. doesn’t want trouble,” Uncle Danny said. “We don’t need more territory, more client states. What good has
South Vietnam ever done us? It’s just cost us a bundle, and no thanks either. But we can’t hide here between our oceans and let the bully boys have the rest of the planet. Their so-called system stinks—I’ve been there. Name me a Communist country where fair elections wouldn’t throw the thugs out. There’s real grievances and these thugs come in and steal the issues and screw up the solutions. If your mother weren’t my sister, it would really get my goat the way she and these other pinko Hollywood fatcats and bleeding hearts talk as if the late great Ho would suit them just fine. Let them try it on for a week. They’d all wind up in reëducation camp at best. Don’t get me started, I don’t want to get emotional. I try to be dispassionate about it, but I love this crazy, wasteful, self-hating country in spite of itself.”

“I don’t think Mom’s political really.” Clark, who had never had a brother or sister, was fascinated by his mother and uncle, who a minute after a quarrel over Mitchell or McGovern or whoever would fall to kidding and smiling as if it had all been a kind of rough-and-tumble play. She treated him like a little boy who loved his collection of cap pistols and lead soldiers and who was innocent of the real wars, the wars of Hollywood she had fought by putting her whole self on the line, her looks and muscle-tone and emotions and sex all out there on offer, for the bankers and the veteran flesh-merchants and the kids fresh out of film school to mock or ignore. She would flare up at Danny and say that he was a fascist, and he in his gray or seersucker suit from the height of his six feet two would give the Hitler salute and put two fingers on his upper lip for a Hitler mustache the way they must have when they were kids in that war. Her face unclenched and broke into her big smile. She loved him, Clark sensed, because he knew her, knew her as she had been before she was Alma
DeMott, and thus was one of the few who had witnessed the full, miraculous performance.

“You don’t know her,” Uncle Danny said. “She shot off her mouth about how we shouldn’t hunt down domestic subversion and cost herself being Miss Delaware Peach.” They were coming back into L.A. along the Pomona Freeway, the San Jose Hills off to their right, the Puente Hills Shopping Mall on their left, its acres of parked cars twinkling in the sun, which hung like a red moon in a silver band of smog. “Maybe just as well: if she’d won it, she might have gotten conceited and married some dumb local nob like this Ingraham she was dating. She wouldn’t have had her
drive
.” He squinted into the sun and looked like a professor, with his thick-lensed glasses. “To do the drill in life, you’ve got to have something to prove. You should meet my Uncle Jared some day soon, before he kicks off.”

“You’ve got a lot planned for me to do. See Uncle Jared, see Angkor Wat.”

“I don’t want you just to sit around here and be a beach bum. I want to have a famous nephew. I love my dad, but don’t play it safe like he did. Now listen to that. That’s
Sturm
. That’s Beethoven. The Mozart gloves are off. Beethoven goes for broke, every time.”

To Clark Uncle Danny seemed a treasure, a man from space who was somehow his own, a little like that robot who with his deep echoing voice and flashing lights waited on Will in
Lost in Space
, which Clark had faithfully watched as a child. He still thought
Lost in Space
was better than
Star Trek
. He asked his uncle, “What language do you communicate in, in Cambodia? I thought you had learned languages like Russian.”

“I’m picking up a bit of Khmer, but French does pretty well.
For some reason I’ve never had much trouble with languages. The secret is, don’t be easily embarrassed. I love trying it out, and seeing what the hell I get back. Your mother isn’t the only ham in our family.”

The sun was making longer shadows between the freeway and the mountains, and a thin transparent half-moon showed in the cloudless sky, to the right. Clark could never figure out the relations between the way the moon looked and where the sun was, though Mr. Sourian the eighth-grade teacher at Beverly Vista tried to show them on the blackboard. The cooling air, the radio thundering Beethoven close to Clark’s knees, the return into the smog-domed heart of Los Angeles against the pressure of commuters’ headlights, his youthful uncle companionable and protective in his white shirt beside him—this was one of the movies his head would sometimes run, though perhaps it actually happened only a handful of times, three or four. In the ninth grade he went off to St. Andrew’s. Uncle Danny was stationed next in Czechoslovakia, after Pol Pot had replaced Lon Nol in Cambodia and anti-Communism had been routed throughout old Indochina, so he didn’t fly through Los Angeles any more. He had actually gone and married a Cambodian woman, and having a family of his own further took him out of his nephew’s orbit.

Clark had been living at the Temple some months before Jesse took him on a summer’s morning into the sheep barn and showed him, in a loft behind a concealing wall built of bales of hay, the guns: shotguns, rifles, machine guns, pistols. Barrels and bolts and triggers of dark machined metal in wooden crates or wrapped in plastic, scented with oil, possessed of a smooth inarguable beauty, haughty in their power
to administer death. Clark sensed flagrant illegality but did not cringe, for Jesse was standing near in the semi-dark, watching closely for his reaction. Clark asked, “What are these for?”

“Brother, those are for the Day of Reckoning.”

“Do you have permits for them? There’s enough here for an army.”

“Why, yes, Zeb has a ton of permits, somewhere in his files. And those otherwise have their permits in the accounting of the Lord of Righteousness, stamped and dated right there where He sits on His Almighty Throne,” Jesse said in his husky, onrolling voice, which made the motes of hay dust swirl in the narrow beams of light the barn shingles admitted. “Some were bought legal, at a shop in Leadville doesn’t ask too many bothersome questions. Others, there are ways—you can order parts separate and make yourselves a dandy package. Brother Luke is right clever at that, from his days at a lathe in a machine shop.” He pulled a rifle from a crate and held it erect before his face. “You take an old AR-15 like this, and add an AR-15–M-16 upper receiver part, and you got yourself an M-16, fully automatic. You just pull the trigger and it’s
k-k-k-k-k
—goodbye, gook. The M-16’s what they issued us in Vietnam. She’s a sweetie, when she don’t jam. There were a lot of complaints from deceased users about it jamming, so they renamed it from the M-16A1 to the M-16A2 and it worked much better. Here, son. You hold her.”