Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (3 page)

Cliff knew who his parents were, ironically, because of the three he was the one everyone thought of as a bastard. He certainly behaved with the rudderless ease of one unencumbered with parents. He was named Cliff because his mother had conceived him
on the edge of one, overlooking the local lovers’ leap. She had gone there near the war’s end, despondent over the death of her imagined true love, and there she’d met greasy, lithe Chick Burns, an unlikely lady-killer who’d finally been killed back and figured literal death should follow. Dizzy with the height, the two agreed to make love on the spot, as a farewell to life’s absurd sensuality. After their bout, the momentum toward suicide had passed, and when it became clear later that a baby was on its way, they married. This was as impetuous as their lovemaking, because Chick and Kitty—both had had parents who diminished them even in naming them—were as repellent to each other as identical magnets, and they quarreled with the same passion with which they waged sex. Cliff had feral black hair, with a sheen that made it seem blue; he was an alarmingly healthy thirteen-pounder who was two weeks overdue, which may have disposed him to his lifelong habit of showing up late but triumphant.

Before he was five his parents divorced—a greater scandal then—and the sullen handsome boy was shuttled between Kitty’s diner and Chick’s gas station, which lay on opposite sides of a busy freeway, only a few perilous yards apart. Dangerous as it was, impatient Cliff found it easier to race across the road than to walk a mile down to the pedestrian overpass. His reflexes were good, and he was always lucky.

The diner and the garage were both failures. People resented Chick as they do doctors and lawyers, suspecting he was overcharging them to exploit their
ignorance. He wasn’t, and this made him bitter. Men assumed Kitty to be of easy virtue because she ran a truck stop. She was, and this made her bitter. The neon signs above their respective establishments were each sadly half missing—her restaurant sign read only
RANT
, and his garage sign read only
RAGE
.

Unsupervised, young Cliff entertained himself by jumping on the garage driveway’s bell cord, imagining he had the power of a sedan pulling in for more gas. It maddened his father, who occasionally lost customers when he wrongly guessed the bell was just his son pretending to be a car. When he was with his mother, Cliff would drink cup after cup of black coffee, which one truant officer later suggested had made him adult before his time. More likely it was the ill-advised playfulness of the truckers who ate at the diner, teasing his mother with leaden double-entendres and teaching him dirty words as they would a parrot, to laugh when so tiny a thing should pipe up with their own jumbo obscenities.

On either side of the road, Cliff was an outsider, just as Carlotta was in her department-store-window home, and Van—lost in an orphanage-sized crowd—was
e pluribus unum.
It may have been this keen sense of exclusion that governed them and brought them together, and was recognized gratefully by so many millions later on. The ideal of individualism includes an unsounded bass chord of loneliness.

CHAPTER FOUR
 

Carlotta and Julienne both grew into pretty teenagers. Carlotta, having come from nothing, demanded nothing, which gave her a lustrous, accepting quality, as unwittingly seductive as a landscape. Her friendly silence caused the boys at Sacajawea High School to project their fantasies onto her like movies on a blank screen. She was sympathetic, and boys confused that with love. Conversely, though Julienne was beautiful, she made boys think she wasn’t. Partly from her inherited faith in falsity, she developed the unconvincing, self-seeking good cheer of a singing commercial. She didn’t realize deliberate perkiness offended, the way the smell of ammonia becomes associated with the odors it’s supposed to remove. Carlotta waited to see what would happen, whereas Julienne was perpetually tensed for success, like a game-show contestant straining to collect while looking good on camera. She knew all the rules, but she still had to fear chance.

However, fate usually withholds destruction until adulthood. Julienne managed to become head cheerleader at Sacajawea, and had frequent solo yells. She urged her seemingly pepless stepsister to go out for cheerleading too, and was hurt when Carlotta mildly pointed out that it seemed needless and self-involved to her, since sideline activity distracted from the game and didn’t help the players except with pressure disguised
as love. Julienne was further frustrated by Carlotta when the team members themselves flocked to Carlotta’s repose more than to her own obstreperous approval. Carlotta was even drafted to portray the Spirit of Freedom in a school pageant, though she was instructed not to speak. Finally, her driver’s ed teacher created a small scandal when he sped off with her during her first lesson, mesmerized by her stoplight-red hair. He was halfway to Chicago before state troopers got him for what only looked like drunk driving.

Worse, or perhaps better, Carlotta attracted the attention of Culvert Booney, son of Vertigo Park’s would-be founder, head of the local Legitimate Sons of the Pioneers, and also its best-known playboy. He first noticed Carlotta when she accompanied Mother Hover to the TV studio in Pompey, where she helped Vaseline a roast. A plumpish
bon vivant
, Culvert had found undemanding renown as the local television weatherman. He routinely predicted high winds and frigid temperatures to encourage people to buy storm windows from his family business, and he had done quite well with it, so well that parents were patient with the liberties he attempted with their daughters.

Mother Hover, duly impressed by a celebrity’s interest in Carlotta, even an alcoholic like Booney’s, invited him to dinner, inexplicably if understandably draping the house in Christmas lights to encourage good feelings. Carlotta responded with innocent indifference, and guilelessly galled Booney by talking throughout the meal about the two boys she had crushes on, student council president Van Walker
and poor misunderstood Cliff Burns. Already she was trapped between the antipodal loves that would wrack her life, though she was still too young for full-tilt confusion. Julienne shook with envy to see her ignore an opportunity like Culvert, and Mother Hover served the dessert liqueur in secret despair. Booney drank to unconsciousness, and had to be taken home in a neighbor’s car. Although it was a night he would never remember, it was to prove to be a night he could never forget.

CHAPTER FIVE
 

Van did seem to pursue Carlotta, but clumsily and chastely, convinced as if by an imaginary friend that she was the cure for his unhappiness. Although an honor student with good teeth, his will to virtue stymied and bemused people; his first major act after reaching puberty was to announce his vegetarianism and lie down naked in the neighborhood butcher shop window. It was meant to be an evocative protest, but made him better known as an exhibitionist than a moralist. Then, in his search for athletic activity that wouldn’t pit man against man or get anyone dirty, he tried to organize a synchronized swimming team at Sacajawea, though no one else would participate. Nevertheless he persisted, swimming for hours every evening in the school pool, perfecting routines for scores of nonexistent teammates, and he often
recruited Carlotta to help him time a particularly complex sequence.

She respected Van’s feverish idealism, but she was more romantically drawn to Cliff, regally brooding and commanding, despite the widespread presumption he was to be a failure. He became particularly notorious after desecrating a supposed miraculous image of the Virgin’s face, which some perceived at a certain angle in the rust stains on a local septic tank. Righteously annoyed, he threw red paint on it, simultaneously obscuring the local chamber of commerce’s hope that the image would become a tourist attraction. People gossiped even more nervously when Culvert, jealous of Cliff’s place in Carlotta’s affections, one day in a hungover haze offered him a hundred dollars to pedal his bicycle into the path of an oncoming truck. Cliff was used to dodging traffic, and impulsively accepted. At the last second Culvert repented and stopped Cliff, promising him the hundred dollars anyway. However, Cliff was intrigued and went ahead with the stunt, spinning nearly sideways under the truck’s high chassis, amazingly without injury. Carlotta perceived in both these incidents a holy misfit’s honor, unaware that it was more likely a delinquent’s stupid compulsion.