TWELVE
Wolfman, he had an enterprise, you dig, a regular satisfaction, an amazing grace. Wasn't no man could touch that, you see, for he was a long time paying dues and he be where he was now because he been where he was before.
Where he was now was in the high silence, in the cool dome, the smooth air, the high pressure. The sweet rocking, low buzzing, endless blue juju eye of duh god-dam worl, man.
Flying alone, aha, yes.
Yes.
It was the best kind of flight. Twenty three thou and without turbulance, seamless air. Jus you and de view...
Winston Romulus Hunt could -- did perforce -- exist on several planes, you dig, pun -- truly -- intended. Airplanes and metaphysical planes, time frames and mind games, woofin' and rappin' and signifying, mystifyin', almos' dyin'.
He felt good, he had to admit. Righteous even. Reconciled.
"Mr. Jack Flynn, a former associate and adversary, has requested my assistance, baby, and you know how the Wolfman be of assistance..."
He had had to laugh. That woman she knew from nothing about assistance. All she knew was she was sleepy-eyed and mean-minded, and it was five a.m. and the brother he was duded-up and talking of flyin, man.
He knew she just wanted to put that pillow over her head and roll over again and dream of sugar, Sugar, dream of sugar and 'cain and lazy afternoons. But Wolfman had to be flying. The low pressure system had gone through, pounding up along the Great Lakes and into Canada, rattling the roofs of Montreal and the roofless field of ratty Olympic Stadium, raining out Les Expo, and rolling on out to sea.
Rollin' on out to sea, leavin' smooth air fo' me...
It amused him to talk so, to hum them bluesy lines like some baadass bro in the hood. It was truly another plane, like the ladder of altitudes coming out of O'Hare, lifted from one life to another -- height to height-- like some ole croaking bullfrog all legs and throat. And when you reached the top, when they gave you over to Great Lakes control, there you was on top of the air --on top of yo' airs, you dig?-- high flyin and unafraid of dying.
And everything below was still yours, you dig. Every level, every plane, there to be had, a whole ladder of attitudes and altitudes.
For enterprise sake one could be the redoubtable Mr. Hunt, former ath-e-lete and now entrepeneur, based in Cleveland but citizen of the world, responsible spokesman, leading citizen, force for change, of assistance to all and sundry, yet still able to talk on the square, my man, still able to lay a rap down.
For amazing grace one could resume the island attitude, calypso cadence and aristocrat eyes, gentle manners but purposeful stride. Yes, mon, he com' a long way home, yes he do...
Yes he do.
But what could one be for Flynn?
Flynn, he was mostly a lame sucker, that be fo' sure. Given to booshit, blue-eyed, bogue-ass sentimentality. Verily a prince, but a prince of lames, a place-bet all the way, a certified second place finisher, born under a bad sign and deaf to the blues, half-assed, raggedy assed and blameless, but goin back a long way.
And a gamer. Yeah, baby, a gamer and carryin a heavy burden and going back a long, long way. Yes maam, a long, long way.
And I owe him, Wolfman thought. If the truth be told, I owe him more than one.
He sighted the worn mountains ahead of him, the abraded hills of the Adirondacks far ahead, some sad mounds filled with little round eyes of blue water, the hills themselves blue from this height. To the left was the silver band of the river, the shed skin of an eyeless serpent. Off farther to the left and about three thousand feet up was the C-1-whatever the hell, all army-green like some flying hill and full of weekend soldiers about to jump on Drum. The air was full of traffic here, rickety farmer-built general aviation and military junk, Hueys and low screamers from the Canadian forces, swooping down over the horizon and supposed to be laying down ground fire and rolling fires for the weekend warriors out there playing their games. It made the Wolfman nervous to think of it, him and the farmers circling there, held in their patterns for fifteen minutes while the game went on, seeing the smoke roll up from the ground of the military reservation far off ahead, seeing all them dumb, damn surplus bombers and transports painted green.
Not even sense enough to make em grey like the Air Force do so as to disappear in air. Brother could shoot him down a plane or two if he fitted himself up with a nose gun or a few heat-seeking rockets. Alien attack, Jack.
Ought to put up some motherfucking balloon on a cable with traffic lights if the motherfuckers gonna close down the damn sky for christ's sake.
Wolfman, he went to rocking his wings, oh so gently, holding there and circling in a wide arc waiting for the light to change, waiting for de life to change. Nigger show them farmers a thing or two, yes he do. Put himself to rocking and singing.
Amazing grace, how sweet thou art...
She was sweet, Lord knows. Esther, a sweet star, that's what it meant. But she wasn't meant to live, not like most folks live, Bertie knew.
There had been something like this on "All My Children," many of the same questions. It was about the time that that sweet girl, the Quinlin, was in a coma in Boston or wherever it was. If you had any kind of mind, and watched closely, you could see when they did that on teevee. It was interesting in a way, to see that there was something real behind a story like that. It made you think.
She would never bloom. Like the chinese hibiscus in the parlour, its main cane clipped mistakenly to an eyeless stump, a smooth scar, she would leaf but never bloom. It wasn't easy for Jack to see that, a whole canopy of dark green leaves and all the family he had left.
It wasn't easy.
But that didn't excuse him. The old man snored in the wing chair, his snout covered with the paper mask, the chair bedecked with toilet tissue bunting. Little fibers from the paper remained in the velvet each time, the chair had already begun to look like it was in a fog.
And now a negro coming. It didn't excuse Jack, what Esther's state was.
The girl and Emma weren't so bad, women in a house were never so bad. They knew silence and where to stand or sit. Even a woman like Emma with all her notions, she knew what to do with a soggy tea bag, how to make a bed in the morning.
She had slept there. It was a modern thing to do, though it ended innocently enough, with Jack on the sofa where the girl, Molly, had been, and Molly with her mother, where, Bertie assumed, Jack had begun.
It wasn't half as scandalous as she'd thought it would be. You got used to things, television and the changing times made you used to things. She had even had to confess to a certain excitement about it. Afterall they were two adults, and Jack had lived in a fast-paced world. Even Karen, the first time Bertie saw her, looked like nothing else but an expensive whore, all done up in silver eye-shadow and neon tangerine lips and frosted nails, tanned to the roots of her hair.
Lying out in the yard of a morning, the discarded bikini top in her outstretched fingers like a gaudy hankie, and Jack standing guard over her like she was an expensive china cup. He had tried to explain to Bertie that, in Arizona, Karen had gotten used to being able to do that. That people thought nothing of it there.
Jackie would always be a North Country boy.
You could see then that Karen would never give him children. Her body was too hard for that, the wishbone of her pelvis too narrow, and you could never be certain when a woman had those little nipples. Children don't feed on rosebuds, they used to say. Still, Karen had sadness in her eyes and Bertie had come to like her.
She liked Emma too, don't mistake. It was just that she was trouble. You could see it in her. Skittishness and temper, hardness of the will rather than of the body, and all those fears submerged there, like weeds along the shallows of a channel.
Emma gave the fears to the girl. It was the storm that made Molly move in with them, a girl her age going in to sleep with her mother on account of some rolling thunder off the river!
And she wept at the sight of the china doll, whined for her mother to take it away. She feared its eyes, Emma had explained, and Bertie didn't mind, not even after pawing through the whole camphor-smelling attic to find the trunk with the old toys. Bertie didn't mind the child's fears. For young girls were given fears by nature; fears gave a glimpse into the nameless changes, the emptiness, to come.
A child born with empty eyes and swollen head. They had wanted to take it away right away but Nell wouldn't let them. She wouldn't ever bloom, you could see it then, but Nell had a willfulness of her own. She made them bring it to her, each day, fed it at her breast, called it Esther. A china doll.
And who would've thought it could have lived all these years? Born into the emptiness, and never quite, really, to experience the nameless changes.
Even so, that had been the fright of it. Esther's body had gone through all the changes, blood flowing and growing heavy-chested, desires budding in her gleeful eyes, though no flowers to come. And they weren't always careful, the attendants. In the years after Nell had given the girl up to the state, you would sometimes go to see her and her backside would be hanging out of the gown, or she'd sit with her legs spread wide. Back then the old hospital was a dark and closed place, there used to be rumors now and again of misuse of the women patients. And you could never tell, Esther could tell you nothing sensible. They would walk her into the dayroom for visits and leave her there, bright-eyed and large-browed, a swollen brainless creature, no different from a slug, despite the simple things they taught her to do. It could break your heart.
There was something monstrous about her sweetness, no less monstrous than the sight of Joey at the end, shrunken like a beanpod, his bones screaming at the weight of the breezes in the room. Or Red, beautiful pale-skinned Red ashen and blue at the lips, unable to swallow air.
Nell herself had died beautiful. The pneumonia made her birdlike and pale porcelain. No different really than poor Esther looked in her waking sleep, even Esther had a beauty to her, Nell's beauty. Every day the nurses came in and washed her all over, combed the dark, beautiful strands of her China-black hair. It was a crew of negro nurses from Ogdensburg in their white dacron dresses, a skinny girl and a plump one like The Jeffersons. The plump one was always talking to her, talking soft to Esther and combing her black hair. There had been changes. The retarded were cared for now.
Now they married. There was a teevee show where these two retarded married and lived in an apartment. That nice young Cassidy boy from the Brady Bunch had played the part, and very convincingly too. It was brave of him to do that, being a teen idol as he was, and instructive for the kids who watched him, Bert supposed.
She'd have to ask Molly about David Cassidy.
She missed her really. Already she missed her. It was nice to have a young girl moving around the house, even if she argued and cussed with old Walker, even with all those fears in her sad, little eyes.
Fears could fade. Even so, it wasn't right for a mother to give her daughter them, for they came naturally enough, and, though they faded, they remained always in some dim portion of the mind. Like a china doll in a steamer trunk.
Like buttons. Bertie had feared buttons as a girl. She still felt faint when someone ran their fingers through a tin of buttons hunting among them. On and off for years now she had begun to suspect that there was some connection to sex in that. She looked for mention of it in the quizes in magazines and the Sunday supplement. You didn't have to be one of these psychologists to think there was something to that.
Maybe a girl can see what she hasn't a name for. Maybe she gives it the name of something else.
Bertie feared the arrival of the black man. It wasn't right. She would, for instance, never give Mr. Willard the satisfaction of knowing her fear. A lot that's ugly went under the name of prejudice. But this man was no more than a common thug. Despite what he had become, he had still nearly bludgeoned Jackie to death on a baseball field.
Wolfman. They all had names. There was a man called Wolfman on teevee who talked down in his throat and laughed all the time, he was popular with the teenagers. Bertie could not help but like that one, there was something soft and childish about him. But Jack's Wolfman she had only seen in the team photographs and in the films of the assault.
It was a brutal attack, now and again they showed the tape of it on some sort of sports show on teevee. He had struck Jack again and again, and if you looked closely you could see that all the while Jackie was trying to help him, all the while Jackie whispered to the black man, trying to get him to stop.
It was a dream you had. Black men and they will not stop. She was ashamed to think it, but it was a sort of dream.
"I know what he's up to," she said aloud.
Damn this weather, she thought, it is what has left me irritable. Electricity lingers in the air after storms like these. Though the air be clear as a bell jar, you can see the clouds of electricity which linger and slant the light.
She knew what Jackie was up to. Flynn's and their ideas! The whole family died of ideas. The brown screamer and Jack's anger drove Jim to the river. Nell wasted away with some idea that it would save them all. Joey's innards were consumed by ideas, by his own cells hating themselves -- that was a fact, there was a report on the news said cancer was caused by the nerves-- it was like the old story, how the eagles came down and gnawed at the liver of the chained man.
Esther's death was the inevitable result of the idea that she could have a life that would flower. She would die. Whether Jackie told them to take her off the machines or not, Esther would die. The idea of life would kill her. Jackie could not stop that. Let him fill the house with strangers and madmen, witchdoctors, children, and blessed ladies, he could not save her.
It was clear what he wanted to do, it was nothing more than to save himself from whatever idea persued him. It wasn't even his to choose, the young doctor had told him as much. Esther was a ward of the state and the responsibility was with the doctors and the nurses. They did what they did only because Jackie had been who he was. Even that was over.
She was very tired she knew. She had been awake half the night. Jets screamed over the house, flying loud and low, coming from Canada. It wasn't good to think at times like these, when life seemed monstrous.
Once an eel washed on shore down near Clayton with a penis as big as a man's.
They embalmed and put it on exhibit until the preachers stopped them.
The paper snout flapped whenever old Willard snored, drool covered his stubbled chin.
The girl feared china dolls and buttons. Children have come near to drowning when the water became electrified, only the eyes of their grandmothers held them from death. Esther's eyes were ever open.
Alberta Flynn's eyes closed slowly into uneasy sleep, persued by ideas no more monstrous than most, untouched by the fantastic colors of the silent screen before her, the remote control in her hand, thinking she was no more than daydreaming, remembering a performance of The Emperor Jones in a white-sided pine building somewhere up along the river, an island place where city women put on summer theatricals and couples strolled out afterward into the fine summer air, yet confusing it all maddeningly with some other production in which the black men played harps and laughed and reclined on cotton clouds with great flappy wings, aware the dream would not let her go back to recapture the title, forcing herself to think on it, staying off sleep, thinking of Green Mansions and of the coming darkness, of being lost and being found, of the blind now seeing.
Next