The Captive Condition (7 page)

Dismissing the whole notion of abstinence with a knowing smile and a wave of her hand, the old woman proclaimed, “Sobriety is a myth. We all live at various levels of intoxication.” From a glass pitcher she kept close by, she poured him a tall drink, and they clinked their jars together like two old friends. “I learned it's easier to give up a mate than it is to give up the bottle. For nearly forty years I lived in this valley, sometimes with a husband, more often not. I lured them here, you might say, to the undertaker's old cottage because the asylum seemed too romantic. I'd reached my breaking point in the city, you see. Everyone has a breaking point, I believe that, but I reached mine sooner than most. Unfortunately, my ex-husbands didn't take to the valley.”

The Gonk looked at the wrinkled flesh of her small, animated hands and the long spirals of gray hair protruding from under her straw hat, and suddenly he wished this whispery husk of a woman, with her flair for psychotropic pedagogics, taught a class or two at the college. On those rare occasions when loneliness got the better of her and she didn't have the heart to putter around the headstones, she visited the college to deliver guest lectures to undergraduates. Unused to her odd way of speaking in grammatically correct sentences, the students grew restless and fidgeted at their desks. She hardly noticed. While standing at the podium, she sipped her moonshine and smoked her cigarettes, a bent and shriveled elf from a forest that had forfeited its sundry enchantments for the false promises of progress—a country road that served no purpose other than to bury the vegetation under miles of crushed gravel; a hideous tangle of power lines that cut through the canopy of hardwood trees—and with eyes sharpened by decades of living hand to mouth, she told her unenthusiastic audience, “I used to get drunk on art, you understand, but over the years I built up a tolerance to it. These days I find that I need something a wee bit stronger.”

Instead of fleeing to New York or Paris, what she called “the centers of cultural confinement,” Colette Collins chose to remain in Normandy Falls, where for most of her career she lived in the humble cottage. She chose the cottage not for its seclusion and scenic beauty but for its proximity to the ancient cemetery. Every morning, before the sun funneled into the valley, she rose from her bed and stood at her window, where, as if searching for a way to alleviate the burden of her genius, she surveyed the headstones and contemplated the ephemeral nature of existence. In this way her home became a kind of memento mori, an around-the-clock meditation and constant reminder that fame and fortune were as fleeting as the phantoms that, for a few brief hours in the night, floated freely among the monuments. For this reason a few excoriating critics dared to assert that she bore an uncanny resemblance to a medium at a séance, summoning spirits from the ether, a two-bit charlatan exploiting her gifts at some silly spook session for a bunch of gullible fools holding hands around a table.

Completely at ease among the gravestone slabs, she rested an elbow against the porch railing and said to the Gonk, “One of those instructors at the college, oh, what's her name? I'm having another senior moment.” Her arms were like winter branches, and the wind snatched the cigarette from her fingers. “Marianne Kingsley! She's planning a retrospective of my work on New Year's Eve, a modest exhibition for a nearly forgotten sculptor who spent more than four decades hiding in a tiny tinderbox in the woods. People ask why I no longer pursue fellowships and awards, and I tell them I don't want my tombstone to read: ‘She was always scrounging for money.' But deep down I'm as venally vain as the next sculptor or painter or pornographer, and this retrospective will serve as the epitaph to my career. I'll never enjoy another exhibition at a prestigious gallery. No, a farcical French bistro on the square in Normandy Falls, that's my last stand before my work is destined for the cultural trash heap. Takes courage to admit that.” She shrugged. “I'm told you have artistic ambitions. Even taking a couple of classes at the college.”

He shook his head. “I'm an amateur. Art is just a hobby. I do a little carpentry, too, but mostly I work with steel. Helps take my mind off things.”

Her smile became a disapproving frown. “My good man, art isn't a pastime, it's an ordeal, and it's apt to make your suffering a whole lot worse, intolerable even. Watch yourself. The human heart is an inexhaustible fountain of creativity, and those who drink from it have been known to develop a very dangerous addiction, one that all too often proves to be incurable, irreversible, and final.”

Not even noon, and already she was making a rambling speech, slurring her words, disguising her gaseous eruptions with a hacking cough, but the Gonk was in neither the habit nor the position of judging someone as accomplished and highly lauded as the great Colette Collins, a sculptor long retired from the world of art and now living in obscurity. In her prime she had been the recipient of several prestigious grants and high-profile commissions, the town's first hippie before anyone even knew what hippies were, but with the steady decline of her health, and some might argue her creative capacities, she made fewer public appearances and preferred to spend her days, what days were left to her, in almost total seclusion, drinking herself toward the sweet oblivion of a midafternoon nap.

“I'm not holding my breath, but I hope the college will hire a preservationist to fix up these headstones and do a little excavating. That's the sort of thing that excites them, fixing up graveyards. They wouldn't have an interest in this house, of course. It's petty and hypocritical, I realize, to think the college might raise a few dollars to put a small plaque beside the door, but I ask you, sir”—with difficulty she raised her bamboo cane and indicated an immense sandstone obelisk, cracked and jigsawed together, near a row of gargantuan white oaks—“what purpose does
that
hideous thing serve? I never dishonored the memory of my three husbands with anything so ostentatious. You can hardly make out the infamous name carved on that appalling edifice. I'll wager you're the only man in town who knows the poor fellow planted beneath that rock pile, am I right? The only descendant to return to this human wilderness, this moronic inferno to pay his respects?”

She swallowed the dregs from her mason jar, this time gasping at its searing heat, and all at once the thin film of intoxication that clouded her eyes seemed to vanish. The pale blue irises flashed with spinster eccentricity and artistic torment. As if reading his thoughts, she smiled and said, “Experience has taught me that God is quick to forgive crimes and slow to punish them. And sometimes He forgets to punish crimes at all. Oh, yes, I do believe the moonshine still will come in handy one day. One day very soon…”

The valley was even more isolated than the Gonk had anticipated, and for days at a time he saw not a soul. With no shopping plazas, no restaurants, no movie theaters, no friendly neighbors to happen down the dusty road curious to find out why he'd been banished to this lonely corner of creation, he learned, or at least forced himself to endure, the troublesome solitude of the place. To make everything official in his own mind, he painted his last name in bold Gothic script above the solid brass mail slot.

On the weekends he routinely worked in the dank cellar, building an unusually wide box made from the wood of a birch tree he felled in the forest, and in the hot summer afternoons he went to the cemetery, where he mowed the grass in a precise diagonal pattern, giving it the manicured look of a professional baseball diamond. Around the wrought-iron fence, he planted hostas and azaleas and decorative rosebushes and spent an inordinate amount of time pulling weeds. By leafing through the brittle pages of a book Colette Collins left on a shelf, he was able to identify several species of crabgrass, nut sedge, and common ragweed, the scientific name for which was
Ambrosia artemisiifolia,
a notion he might have found laughable if only he'd read Homer. Who could imagine the gods deserting the battlefield outside the walls of Troy to loll in the soft comforts of Olympus and enjoy the ambrosia that grew in a place like this, a remote valley where, for two centuries, disturbed men and women voluntarily exiled themselves for fear of what they might do back in the towns and cities?

The oldest graves dated from the early 1800s, though now there wasn't enough bone meal to appease the voracious appetites of the immortals. Even the white oaks looked famished, judging from their stunted and contorted trunks. With infinite patience and single-minded purpose, the roots searched the graveyard for nourishment, exploring every crypt and casket, coiling around every calcified femur and skull. In many places the roots were so dense that the Gonk had trouble digging the new hole, and he wondered how the homesteaders managed to clear away the heavy timber with their simple saws and felling axes. According to the headstones, some of the men buried here fought in the War of 1812 and then, with wives and children in tow, made the dangerous and grueling journey into the wilderness to conquer the land and its primitive inhabitants.

Insects scuttled over the upturned soil and burrowed into the earth, and all at once the Gonk understood that every living creature, no matter how insignificant, interacted in ways that could only be described as harmonious, so much so that to think of them as separate organisms was an illusion; they were all one and the same, a single entity, a family, indissoluble and complete, each with its own unique function, but all working together toward a fate unknown and irreversible.

Had it not been for the saving grace of old routines, the Gonk by that summer's end might have turned into a foul and filthy hermit, doomed to fitful fantasies and drunken rumination, but he was tough-minded, disciplined, and had little respect for those who daydreamed and harbored superstitions. Each weekday morning, bright and early, he arrived at the Bloated Tick and in a strong, clear voice rattled off a long list of commands from a clipboard stuffed with work orders. He then proceeded to scoff at the men for beatifying the storms and other natural prodigies, for always reaching into their pockets and clinging to cheap amulets purchased from self-proclaimed witches and necromancers. Evidently, there was something about Normandy Falls that troubled them. Worried that their crystals and coins and silver-mounted rabbit's feet held insufficient power to drive away evil spirits and bad luck, they started to build makeshift altars around the garage.

At first I made the mistake of dismissing the ticks as run-of-the-mill religious crackpots and ideologues, uneducated men whose convictions consisted of a patchwork of inconsistent creeds, a riotous Babel of disparate and ultimately irreconcilable Christian doctrines—Baptist, Pentecostal, Branch Davidian—and I envisioned them sitting on foldout chairs in the unbearably humid evenings, eating fresh bell peppers and beefsteak tomatoes scavenged from gardens and listening to the hypnotic cadences of televangelists who preached fiery sermons about the abominations of modernity, buggery, godless city slickers, and the sinister teachings of radical college professors who relished the opportunity to indoctrinate classrooms crowded with credulous communists in training. But it soon became clear to me that these men believed in the illimitable forces of Nature and the dominion of eternal darkness to hold sway over all things. Their personal savior, if they had one, was a nameless, faceless power that could only be appeased through ritual blood sacrifice, a notion that made little sense to a wayward Catholic schoolboy whose idea of a messiah was a gentle soul who would lead me safely to the healing waters of self-acceptance and there allow me to drink my fill.

I often bore witness to their peculiar form of worship. After an especially powerful storm ripped through the county, the men awaited the return not of sunshine and blue skies but of a deluge of apocalyptic proportions, the river rising above its shifting banks and sweeping them all away to the lake, and they felt an urgent need to appease their jealous and temperamental god, who kept a wary eye on them and who yearned to drown them one by one, slowly and with pleasure, for daring to transgress his innumerable and wickedly contradictory laws, pages and pages of arcane rules and regulations that proved impossible to memorize.

Inside the garage, high in the rafters, there lived an avatar of their redoubtable god, a white-breasted barn owl that hunted for prey in silent flight. At lunchtime and during their breaks, the men stomped across the cement floor and captured field mice, maiming and placing them inside the makeshift altar of a shoebox and offering them to the owl. They believed these humble propitiations, like a burnt offering from pagan days, would mollify this capricious deity, who might spare them from some future cataclysm. The mice, failing to understand the importance of their role in this scheme, tried to evade capture, squealing with fear and seeking out dark corners, but the men shook their heads and laughed as they twisted each tiny leg. Unlike human beings, mice had yet to learn that it was sometimes best to resign oneself to one's fate.

I met with my own disastrous fate on a Friday in late August when out of pure desperation I dared to trespass upon the Gonk's phantasmagorically peculiar lair. During the afternoon, when he should have been sorting through stacks of paperwork or managing his crew of incompetent groundskeepers, the Gonk stood behind an orange tarp in the back of the building where he wasted many productive hours perfecting a perfectly useless craft. For him this was serious business, and the men took it as a bad sign if he had cause to leave his workstation.

I'd been searching for a secluded spot where for one hour I could read
The Odyssey
in peace, and though I tried my best to tune out the laryngitic coughs and tympanic farts of my fellow ticks, I found it impossible to concentrate for very long on Homer's epic verse in the sweltering, fly-infested lunchroom. Sitting beside them at the table, I felt like I was chained in the cargo hold of a prison ship bound for a remote penal colony, an icy, windswept gulag where the use of one's brain was punishable by flogging and maiming. It seemed only a matter of time before one of the men pointed a knife at me and shouted, “Out with his eyes!” This was a thought that played over and over again like an evil memory, and I was convinced that in the end I would die in Normandy Falls, not from an act of random violence but from sheer boredom. Maybe that's why the men used so many illegal substances—to hasten the process of death and thus unburden themselves of another day's dull work.

All of this was distracting enough, but now the ticks crowded around a small transistor radio, and after fiddling with the dials and making several small adjustments to the antenna, they listened with unusual interest to a local talk show in which contestants phoned in to answer trivia. They silenced me when I asked them to turn down the volume, but when an ad came on they could hardly contain their excitement.

“Every year one lucky caller wins an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean. The islanders speak French and say a man can find a
maison close
on the beach where he can pay a
fille de joie
to do the things he's too ashamed to ask a normal woman to do. Yeah, the women on Delacroix Cay are martyrs for love and will gladly service your lust, nothing at all like those prima donnas who dance at Little Morty's joint. It's true. We sent away for the brochures and read about it. We'll never win the contest, but one day we'll sail to Delacroix Cay on our boat.” There was a general murmur of excitement, and then the men said, “Hey, kid, you've got some learning. Maybe you should try your luck. You gotta stop jerking it eventually and find yourself a new woman. Hey, where you going? The show's about to come back on. What, the thought of the professor's wench driving you bananas? Gotta go beat your meat again?”

With my heavily underscored copy of
The Odyssey
stuffed in my pocket, I stormed from the lunchroom and hurried into the shadows at the back of the building, but the moment I saw the Gonk I forgot about those dullards and their juvenile insults. Surrounded by long shafts of summer sunlight that filtered through a blue checkerboard of steel windows, the Gonk stood before a workbench, looking for all the world like a deranged holy man about to make some vast pronouncement. He ignited a blowtorch with a striker, he smoked cigarettes under his welding hood, he adjusted his balls with a chipping hammer, he uttered strange and blasphemous oaths under his breath, and the things he summoned forth from his disordered imagination beggared description.

With great concentration he slowly cut elaborate fish from long sheets of scrap metal—rainbow trout, smallmouth bass, yellow perch, and monstrous sea lampreys rumored to inhabit the foaming brown waters of the river and lake. After cutting three or four new fish, he brushed away a small pyramid of metal shavings and then clamped them one by one to several vices, where he prepared to chip away the slag and smooth the rough edges with a grinder.

Dozens of these miniature masterpieces already dangled from the ceiling by long wires, and when a current of warm air came through the open window, the fish began to spin and clatter against each other like wind chimes, their meticulously painted fins and scales transforming the colorless room into a riveting kaleidoscope of pink and purple light. There were small and startlingly realistic ones, large and curiously stylized ones, but there were other, less familiar specimens as well, cruelly shaped things that may have washed up in the fecal mire and interstitial wastes along the river, web-footed, membranous monsters of inconceivable ugliness. They were not vampire fish or anglerfish or blobfish or snakeheads or crooked-toothed goblin sharks, and as they floated freely and without consequence in the smoky air, they gonged weirdly and gave off a gangrenous and chlorotic glare.

In an era when so many part-time artists continually jockeyed with one another for gallery space to showcase their insipid, politically correct, paint-by-numbers artwork, shamelessly arguing for its profound cultural and social significance, I knew without question that the Gonk possessed serious talent. I wanted to applaud his vitality of style, and since the devil can cite scripture for his purpose I said, “I see the fishes but where are the loaves?”

No sooner had I spoken these imprudent words than an explosion of pain ripped through my skull, and though I cannot say for certain what happened next, I do remember how the metal head of the blowtorch, still blazing with blue jets of fire, hurtled through the air like a viper. In a bright flash and brutal burst of color, I tumbled into the hot slag and red embers, clutching my face and screaming, “I'm blind! I'm
blind
!”

The Gonk flung his goggles to the floor and through barred teeth said, “Christ almighty. Can't swing a dead cat in this place without hitting an asshole.” He dragged me to the first-aid station and flushed my eye with cold water and saline solution. “Aw, quit your bellyaching, would you? You're okay. Calm your ass down. Didn't they teach you etiquette at school? You don't creep up on a man that way.”

“Injury report…,” I said between inconsolable whimpers.

With the firmness of a pair of channel locks, the Gonk squeezed my head in his hands. “You wouldn't do that, would you? File a report?”

“Well, I'm not sure. Maybe I should—”

“A scratched cornea is all. Here, wear this for twenty-four hours and you'll be good as new. Hell, with a shiner like that you're practically a full-fledged member of the gang. Might as well finish your initiation, right?”

I didn't like his elusive, mocking smile or the sound of his harsh and broken voice. I just wanted to return to the row house, collapse on my futon, and forget that this accident had ever happened, that I'd ever worked for this wild man.

“You've been here all summer,” he said, “and I haven't invited you to the cottage for a drink. That means you haven't been properly initiated. Seems like a terrible oversight, doesn't it? Unconscionable. I think that's the word.”

Because I couldn't bear the idea of the other men ridiculing me, I nodded and against my better judgment followed the Gonk into the furnace light of a late August afternoon. He hoisted me into the wide bed of his truck and handed me my copy of
The Odyssey,
and even though I was beginning to doubt the great books could save me, or anyone else, from a world so full of menace and peril, I clutched it to my chest like a talisman.

“Where are we going?” I asked. The words echoed strangely inside my skull.

“Aw, just for a little ride, is all.” He started buttoning the mud-encrusted tarp over my head, and just before everything went totally black, he said, “Hey, kid, I just thought of a new name for you…”

A lance of burning sunlight punctured hundreds of tiny holes in the vinyl tarp under which, in the textured haze and stifling heat, I lay trapped and struggling to breathe. Abducted by alien gods who yearned to see me suffer, I moaned with the self-pity that so often comes to those whose blind faith has been smashed to pieces by reality, and I found it impossible to focus on anything other than my own survival. Desperate to see where we were going, I adjusted my new eye patch, and by pressing my face close to the tarp I could make out an impressionistic blur of woods so deep and dark that, even on this bright afternoon, the light looked green and tarnished.

The Gonk's pickup jounced downhill and abruptly fishtailed, and like a blue-collar version of Dorothy wishing for a safe return to Kansas, I slid along the eight-foot bed toward the rattling tailgate, the heels of my steel-toed boots clicking together three times. Above the revving engine and the din of gravel churning beneath the heavy-duty tires, I heard grunts of approval from the Gonk. He stomped on the accelerator, jerked the wheel hard to the left, and for one breathless moment the truck was airborne. As if under the spell of a sinister sorcerer, I levitated briefly above the bed and then, just as suddenly, came crashing down with a loud thud.

Something stabbed the small of my back, and in a panic I searched for the offending object. A jagged piece of steel, fashioned to look like the dorsal fin of a freakishly large freshwater fish, had sliced through my flannel shirt, drawing blood. When my eye adjusted to the darkness, I realized to my horror that the truck was littered with dozens of these ferocious, sharp-toothed piranhas. They clattered against the stamped-metal bed like a demented Friday-night fish fry in reverse, where the entrée was eager to leap from the platter and feast on the flabby flesh of the gluttonous diners. It then occurred to me that I was trapped not in the back of an ordinary pickup but in a surreal country bumpkin art gallery and that the fish were in fact the Gonk's lunatic contribution to the world of high culture.

To a certain degree every work of art had a claustrophobic effect on me. The most accomplished artists possessed an uncanny ability to lock me in their own personal prisons and torture chambers, and some works of art, if they were very good indeed, never relinquished their hold on me, not entirely, and as I tumbled across the bed, I believed the Gonk had taken the art of claustrophobia to the next level.

Now here they came, a whole school of metallic mackerel swimming through swift currents of open highway and darting along silent streams of lonely, gravel road. As the pickup slowed and trundled up a long driveway, I rubbed my good eye and through the small holes in the tarp saw the peak of a mossy roof and the crumbling stone chimney of an ancient cottage partly concealed from the road by a grove of white oaks, their knobby trunks infested with burrowing bugs. The windows of the cottage were cracked, the lopsided wooden shutters stripped of paint and starting to warp. Piled high next to the front door were plastic bags bursting with garbage that attracted a shimmering cloud of fierce flies, and surrounding the porch were dead yellow shrubs that served as a communal toilet. From under the tarp I caught the sulfurous stench of piss.

The truck came to an abrupt stop.

“Just sit tight,” he said, “and nurse your wounds while I grab a little contraband. Be out in a flash.”

I massaged the back of my head, and when I felt sure the Gonk had disappeared inside the cottage, I decided it was time to make my escape. For leverage I pressed my back against the wheel well and thrust both legs against the tailgate, kicking and stomping until my face turned bright red, but the thing wouldn't budge. I rested a moment, panting from exhaustion, then thought of a better idea. Using one of the steel fish, I began to saw at the tarp, but before I could make significant progress I heard heavy footsteps plodding toward me.

Through the small slit I'd made, I saw a mosquito land on a sun-freckled forearm and suck greedily at angry scar tissue. In one swift motion the Gonk flattened the bug and wiped the dark blood imprinted on his palm across the back of his jeans. A wad of tobacco exploded from his ruddy cheeks, and the juice dribbled darkly down his scruffy chin and through the thick stubble on his neck like a diseased river meandering through a forest of tree stumps. When he spoke, his words were slow and soft, a voice that seemed to ooze under the tarp and trickle like warm mud into my ear.

“Around these parts the bugs can sometimes get as big as sparrows. Damn annoying, too. Know anything about that, Cyclops? About pests? Parasites?” Stepping away from the bed, he twisted open a jar and swallowed the contents, and I saw the alarming way his Neolithic brow ridge contorted and how his close-set eyes came suddenly to life and glimmered like a pair of bayonets. “God
damn
is that fine. Might be the best batch all summer. Now listen up, Cyclops. You better settle down or I'll have to give you one hell of an ass whooping. Save your energy. Gotta be pretty hot under there. But try not to worry yourself about it too much. Your initiation will come to an end. Of course, I can't say for certain when that will be. Haven't given it a whole lot of thought, not exactly. All depends on how well you behave.”

“Excuse me, sir,” I rasped, “but I'm not sure I understand the purpose of this…initiation.”

“Everybody who works for me must be initiated. And remember, if you don't cause any more trouble you can be my guest tonight at the Normandy Cabaret. Haven't been there yet, have you? Sure as hell beats the adventures you've been reading about in that book of yours. Damn if there ain't a catfish there that can swallow a baby's leg.”

This remark brought on a bout of laughter, and the laughter turned into an inevitable coughing fit so loud and wet that the truck seemed to rattle with phlegm. “A monster fish with a powerful bite,” the Gonk managed to say with a loud gasp. “Her blood is pure, like my own, but I'm worried she doesn't have a taste for rednecks. Well, let's see what happens when I test her matronly instincts. I'll use you as bait, try to lure her outside. I suspect she'll have some sympathy for a cute college boy. Oh, you're gonna like her, too, Cyclops. You won't believe your eyes. I mean, your
eye.
” Another explosion of wet laughter, another coughing fit, and then the Gonk swung his enormous frame into the cab, stones flying from his long and leaping shadow.