Slippage (16 page)

But I must have taken a wrong turn again, because I could see the big circular house above me, but I couldn't get to it; and finally J did come into an empty lot with one or two cars in it, below the house, and I figured that had to be where I was supposed to be. So I parked, and hitched up my pants, and climbed a stairway to the house.
 

But I couldn't find a door to go in.

The house was marvelous. Apparently, parts of it turned like a flower to catch the sun, and the front door was somewhere on the other side. What I didn't know was that I had come up a service road, not the front entranceway, and I was lost again. So I walked around and around the back of the house till I found a door, and I went in. But it was on the second floor, and I wandered through the bedroom level till I came out on a balcony that went halfway around the central court, and I looked down into an enormous white living room, all bathed in sunshine, and down there sitting on a huge sectional sofa was Carl Sandburg. I recognized him immediately. I was thrilled.

He had been hired by Mr. Stevens to write narration for
The Greatest Story Ever Told,
and he was staying there. I could now see, through the big picture windows, that the party was actually out on the sloping lawn in front of the house. But the living room was empty except for Carl Sandburg, who sat on the sofa doing the most peculiar thing.

Propped up on one of those plastic book-holder devices used to hold open a cookbook when making something intricate for dinner, was a large book. Lying on the big coffee table that held the propped-open book, in front of Carl Sandburg, was a roll of brown butcher's paper, the kind meat markets use to wrap up lamb chops. It was partially unrolled, and Carl Sandburg was writing on the open section with a quill pen that he would dip into an inkpot. He would look at the book for a moment, and then write something on the butcher's paper. I watched him for a long time. He would look at the book, dip the quill, write a line on the paper, and then repeat the process until he'd filled the paper handily. Then he would rip off a big chunk of the paper and toss it onto a hurly-burly haymow of butcher's paper on the floor beyond the coffee table.

I watched till I couldn't contain myself any longer; then I walked around the balcony over the living room till I found a staircase that descended to the big room. I went down and walked daintily toward Carl Sandburg, because I didn't want to disturb or interrupt him. But I had to find out what he was doing. I stood there for a few minutes till he saw me, and he smiled, and he said
hello young man,
and I came over to him, and he patted the sofa and told me to sit down and take a load off. So I sat down, and watched a while; and then I asked him,
Mr. Sandburg, what in the world are you doing?

And he said, "Did you know the typewriter was invented in 1873?"

I said no, I didn't know that. He chuckled. "Well, son, I always traveled around with a little portable typewriter in my pack. I wrote almost all of my poems on that typewriter. On cheap yellow paper. Dollar a ream. So now it seems they want to preserve all my originals in a museum or a library or something, and I'm just too embarrassed to send them all those typed yellow pages. They just don't look important enough."

And he looked into that copy of THE COLLECTED POETRY OF CARL SANDBURG, published by Harcourt Brace, that had been bought for him a few days earlier at a bookstore in Westwood Village, and he memorized a line, and dipped his quill in the inkpot, and copied the line on brown, important-looking, butcher's paper, and he tore off the poem he had copied, the poem he had written years before, and tossed it onto the ever-growing mound of elegant forgeries. I stayed sitting there for a long while, and was very impressed. Aboard the Friendship VII, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth and Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose and President Kennedy sent federal troops to protect James Meredith as the first black student seeking admission to the University of Mississippi.

1975

The Vietnam War ended and Francisco Franco died. There was a serious water leak through the wall of the bedroom in my house, caused by ivy that had been growing up the outside wall and penetrating the stucco. Dozens of excellent books in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase were stained and waterlogged and mildewed. I had to throw them out, and some of them have never been replaced. One of them was a book I'd first read in junior high school about people living in the mountains of West Virginia who had never seen an airplane or a radio, and who still spoke in something like old Chaucerian English. An earthquake destroyed the beautiful Great Temples of Pagan in Burma.

1980

Ex-California governor Ronald Wilson Reagan became the 40th, and oldest, President of the United States in a landslide victory in which he won 483 electoral votes. A dear friend of mine was bludgeoned to death in her apartment in Santa Monica and I spoke at her funeral. A friend I'd known for almost thirty years revealed himself to be a terrible, cold person, and I could speak to him only distantly ever after. My nephew went to work in his father's store in Cleveland; and I don't think that's what he had intended for his life's work. Zimbabwe emerged as an independent state.

1992

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics vanished, and a menace that had clouded the mind of the world for a century, something they had called Communism, dissipated like morning fog, almost without anyone noticing. Doves have built a nest in a tree just outside the front door of my home. When I go out to put garbage in the cans, the mother bird sits among the cactus, watching me. I smile and try to reassure her that she's safe.

I go out less frequently now. Always to a 7-Eleven or Wal-Mart. I let them see me. Sometimes I hang around at a Taco Bell or McDonald's till someone begins watching me, till they start whispering to each other, till one of them seems ready to come over and ask me. Then I get up, very quickly, and I leave. I always park a block away so no one can see where I went or if I had a car or simply levitated to a flying saucer. I do it for him.

Jesse Garon came to him first in Las Vegas. He didn't need to tell him who he was, they looked at each other and saw the same face. He read to him from the book that he had kept all those years. Then he went away, telling his brother he would be with him when the time came.

He was in the bathroom, and Jesse sat with him on the floor, and cradled his brother's head in his lap, and they recited together. "Jesus, I now admit that I am a sinner, going to hell, and need You as my Saviour. I now cease to rely on myself, my church, my religion, or anything else that I might do to save or help save me. I now completely trust You as my Saviour, to pay for my sins and keep me from going to hell. Thank You Lord Jesus."

And his younger brother's face became as sweet as it had been, and he closed his eyes, and he sighed; and Jesse Garon kissed his temple, and laid his head on the furry chenille throw rug. He took the book of his life, and went back out the way he had entered, and found his car parked a block away, and drove the long drive back to his home.

Some few years later, he began going out regularly, wearing his hair much longer and darker. Jesse Garon did not die. Jesse Garon is alive.

And Elvis is alive and well, and flourishing on black velvet.

Berlioz wrote, "Time is a great teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its pupils."

The pale silver dollar of the moon pays its way and makes change.

The Lingering Scent of Woodsmoke

“Don’t get your shorts in a twist,” she said, leveling the Walther 9mm parabellum's four-and-a-half-inch barrel at a spot just south of the waistband of his woodland green walking shorts. "Stand totally, absolutely still as a weed and I won't have to blow you in half."

Near sundown, they stood facing each other in a small forest stand of spruce and Polish larch in the Oświęcim basin of southern Poland. Even under the smothering canopy of woven branches, they could hear the Vistula rushing fast and deep toward Czechoslovakia; they could smell the high Carpathians just to the north. She had stepped suddenly from behind a thick-trunked fir and ordered him to stand still. Even in the dimming light that filtered through from above, he could see she was extraordinarily beautiful, with exotic, almost Eurasian planes sculpting her features. The thick, filtered falling light gave everything a deep green tone, even her skin; her wide, green eyes; the imposing weapon in her hand.

"You're Ernst Koegel," she said to the old man. She spoke in German, with possibly a Bavarian crispness.

"My name is Dário de Queluz. I am from São Paulo. That is in Brazil. I walk here on a walking tour of Eastern Europe."

"I
know
where Sao Paulo is, there are some luxurious jungles nearby; and if you move like that again, I will most certainly shorten you
and your:
shorts."

"So you are some lowlife Polish thug lying in wait for decent tourists? You can have the few thousand zlotys I'm carrying. It is sad for you that my money is back in my hotel room in Krakow." He started to reach into one of the gusseted front pockets of his shorts, with the sound of Velcro. She waggled the barrel of the Walther and shook her head.

"You are Ernst Koegel, you're German, you were nineteen years old in 1944, when you worked in this area, and we've been waiting for you for fifty years."

"Waiting here? What if I had not decided to take this little journey? And you have my name wrong."

"Here; in the Amazon rain forest; in a woodland in upstate New York; anywhere your foot would tread among the trees. And don't try to bluff, old man: I can smell the lingering scent of woodsmoke on you."

"Take my money and let me go. I want to move."

"You stand still. I'm not a robber. I'm here to make you pay for killing my people. You worked just a half mile from here. In your language it was called Auschwitz. You worked with Mengele. You were in charge of stoking the great furnaces. Koegel, young Ernst Koegel, youngest SS officer in the death block, beloved of Dr. Mengele. When he fled, you went with him. Now you've come back, and we've been waiting."

The old man chuckled. Nothing could touch him. He had lived well. Even if she shot him now, he had lived well. "So," he said, smirking, "just another renegade Daughter of Esther, one of the
Juden
who managed to slip through."

"A Jew?" she said. "No, I'm not a Jew."

"We were disposing of twelve thousand a
day,
and I fed the furnaces. So do your worst, little green-faced kike."

"I tell you I'm not one of those poor unfortunates. My people you fed into the furnaces weren't the Jews. We are the forest people...and we wait for the last of you who used chain saws and cut down our families and sliced them into convenient sections and fed them into the furnaces. We can still smell the woodsmoke on you."

"You are crazier than most of them. But still you need the gun, that fine German-made weapon,"

"Oh this," she said, and let the Walther drop to her side. "I only needed this to keep you still long enough for my sisters to caress you properly."

And she smiled at him, and he realized that he no longer
could
move. He looked down, the old man who had run from this place half a century earlier, and he saw that the roots had already slithered up over his hiking boots, over his bare shins, up over his handsome woodland green cargo shorts, and bark was already beginning to form around his waist.

He screamed once, a short sharp sound, because she was still smiling her deep green smile at him. And as the tree grew around him, the dryad dimpled prettily and said, "You should live, oh, I should say, two or three hundred years like this. The winters are rough, but you'll like the spring, and the smell of woodsmoke. That is, unless parasites infest you. Welcome to the neighborhood, cousin Ernst."

The Museum on Cyclops Avenue

The jaunty feather in my hatband? I knew you’d ask. Makes my old Tyrolean look rather natty, don't it? Yeah, well, I'll tell you about this flame-red feather some time, but not right now.

What about Agnes? Mmm. Yeah. What
about
Agnes.

No, hell no, I'm not unhappy, and I'm certainly not bitter. I
know
I promised to bring her home with me from Sweden, but, well, as we say here in Chapel Hill,
that
dog just ain't gonna hunt.

I'm sorry y'all went to the trouble of settin' up this nice coming-home party, and it truly is a surprise to walk back into my own humble bachelor digs and find y'all hidin' behind the sofas, but to be absolutely candid with myself and with y'all...I'm about as blind tired as I've ever been, fourteen and a half hours riding coach on SAS, customs in New York, missing two connector flights, almost an hour in traffic from Raleigh-Durham...you see what I'm sayin'? Can I beg off this evenin' and I
promise
just as soon as I get my sea-legs under me again with the new semester's classes and the new syllabus, I swear I
promise
we'll all do this up right!