Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel (14 page)

Now no explosion came. We tiptoed to our torn books, gathered them up, and threw again.

Later, at the gazebo, we reclined on cast-iron deck chairs and sipped the last of the beers. The chairs were straight and hard as church pews, arranged in a permanent circle, legs bolted into metal plates sunk into the wide gray floorboards. I sat facing Tom, with Jerry to my right and Bill and Abe to my left. An assortment of recently thrown books (the last no-hit salvo at the gazebo steps), and the backpack bearing more books and the beers, rested in the center of the circle, near our feet, within easy reach. The gazebo was an open, airy octagon, built of whitewashed wood and roofed in copper, and decked out in cornice-level gingerbread that threw intricate shadow patterns over the floor and our bodies. Past Tom’s head I could see untended lawn bordered by tall pines draped in crawlers and epiphytes that bloomed lavender and white. A cracked plaster birdbath was entirely overgrown, consumed by creeping vines. And bugs were everywhere, getting in our faces, hovering and landing on sticky metal surfaces of empty, set-aside beer cans.

“I do enjoy the way
The Riverside Shakespeare
rides the wind on a long toss,” sighed Tom.

“
The Riverside Shakespeare
does seem to float,” agreed Abe, taking a swig from his beer. What kind of animal would Abe be? Something furbearing and immense and ferocious, obviously, yet with the potential for softness, and a warmhearted, friendly aspect: a walrus, a bear.

Bill said, “For hang time, give me
The Poetry of Robert Frost
any day.” No telling about this guy. Bill Nixon could be any number of species of diverse phyla. Today he wore a sagging, unhappy face. Slouching in his gazebo chair, clutching his nth beer, he looked fungal.

Jerry swatted at a bee—several were circling in the air above our heads. Tom said, “Hey, Jerry, don’t piss them off, okay?” and got up and placed his beer can on the floor a few feet away. He called out, “Here, bees. Here, bees.” Sure enough, the bees descended, buzzing and congregating on the can’s silver metal lip.

“Good thinking, Tom,” said Jerry. Then: “You want to know what book I liked?”

“What?” asked Tom.

“Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.”

“The Kernberg?”

“Yes.”

We all drank, as if following a toast. Jerry elaborated: “I prefer a clothbound book with thin pages sewn in muslin to a medium-width spine. Anything with a lot of plates is going to be a problem. Art books for instance. You pitch one of those museum catalogues and you feel like your shoulder’s going to come out of the socket.”

“It’s the varnished pages,” Tom said.

I concurred. “They are a bitch.”

Was it a weakness, my facile desire to go along with the guys at the expense of the books? Or was it more complex, a sincere inclination to favor present human company, fellowship and community, over the obscure pleasures of printed narratives? Certainly the air was cool at this time of evening. A wail of birdsong ascended from the gray-green trees. The men’s voices were deep, the world seemed good, there were plenty of unimpaired books left lying on the floor and in the backpack. What did it matter
which
books? The essence of culture is found in all its artifacts.

With this in mind I surreptitiously took inventory of the assorted tattered volumes tumbled beside my chair. Pleasing to note were a quantity of university press editions, which would’ve been prohibitively expensive, new. One book, Thieleman J. van Braght’s hard-to-find classic of Anabaptist distress,
The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptised Only Upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Savior, From the Time of Christ to the Year
A.D.
1660,
struck me as an ideal gift for Meredith. It would show my love for her, by demonstrating enthusiasm for her commitment to religion and the spiritual life of children.

Martyrs Mirror
is a big book, eleven hundred plus double-columned pages of “eyewitness” and court-record accounts of severe bodily torments, punishments, and executions, encyclopedically detailed and chronologically arranged, many accompanied by engraved plates illustrating dramatic scenes like “Vitalus Buried Alive at Ravenna,” “Phocas Put to Death in a Lime Kiln,” “Two Young Girls Led to Execution,” and the poignant, closely observed “Georg Wanger in the Dungeon”—this last depicting the figure of a Christian (middle-aged, male, forlorn) reclining on a bed of straw. Gloom descends. In the etching’s foreground a pair of largish toads seem to gaze reverentially up at the martyr-to-be, while near his feet, one of which is rudely chained to a wall, a viper coils to strike. Looming contours framing the illustration’s lower quadrant may be mere rubbish, but they may also be skeletons and/or corpses. What a scene. It never occurred to me to include reptiles in my own dungeon. But of course. It made so much sense. What fun I’d have later, down in the basement, roughing out plans for a few 1:32-scale “bathsoap” bog denizens.

“You’re one sick fuck, Pete.” It was Nixon, leaning forward to examine the hefty volume open on my lap. He chuckled, a menacing, beery chuckle. “Heh heh.”

“True scholarship knows neither health nor infirmity, Bill, only esteem for the heritage of man, and fearlessness before the misery in all our hearts.”

That shut him up. Jerry said, “Pete, I take it you refer to the dark side of human nature. Is ‘misery’ the word you want to use?”

“Maybe not, Jer. Maybe just ‘pain.’”

“How about, um, ‘despondency’?” suggested Tom.

“‘Heartache,’” Abe said.

“‘Anguish,’” added Jerry. Which earned a “Hmn” from Bill, who contributed, “‘Rage.’”

We all thought about that for a minute, about rage. Jerry observed, “Good insight, Bill.” Both Tom and Abe nodded their heads in agreement with this, smiling and saying, in near unison and with genuine if slightly sodden enthusiasm, “Yeah, definitely.”

Which seemed to serve as a point of closure. It was that point during polite conversation when talk must either cease or become intimate, self-revelatory, deep … our cue to rise and begin gathering our things. Tom said, “Put the empties in the backpack, guys. I’ll take them home and saw them up for my pit. That is, if no one else wants them.”

The other guys shook their heads no, and I said, “Hey, why don’t I help out by taking these library books.”

Abe asked me, “What do you want with a pile of dusty old books, Pete?”

“Nothing. A little night table reading.”

“That stuff? Before
bed
?” Jerry meant, I guess,
Martyrs Mirror.

Bill said, “Barbara and I often enjoy thrillers before turning out the lights.”

“Well, Bill,” I said, commencing stacking—dictionaries and
Martyrs Mirror
on the bottom, miscellaneous professional-level science and psychology texts in the middle, a few soiled paperbacks on top—“Well, Bill, reading of any kind is better than no reading at all.”

Of course I left behind the thesaurus, which I honestly consider pernicious.

Evening, and the park’s dense thickets of trees and bushes seemed washed in eerie, nighttime shades. About that landscape one could truly claim: It was a jungle. Now off we went, single file down the gazebo steps, into it. The books in my arms rode heavy, towered head-high; I was forced to gaze around them in order to see the back of the man in front of me, Bill’s back. In front of Bill, Abe and Jerry pushed through the weeds. Tom walked far out in front—point man. The trust-and-estates lawyer was visible as the red fabric of his backpack, audible as the sound of beer cans clinking softly, musically inside the pack, and as a gentle voice drifting back down the line, man to man, issuing safety commands: “Step high,” or “Easy over these rocks,” or “Let’s go left around these wood lilies, okay?” Meanwhile the precious books shifted and slid between one another, their dark and light spines touching my face, bumping my face. Small dry kisses on the nose, and my arms aching from the cumbersome weight of paper. A few paces ahead, Bill lumbered through thorny briars that snapped back in his wake to slap or drag across the backs of my hands—a painful, localized flogging. Consider the martyrs. Here was my punishment: a hundred herbal lashes across the wrists and forearms for delivering literature out of the wilderness. How exciting, this difficult passage toward hearth and home. How I ached, along the long walk, for Meredith’s touch. Desire came, a dull electric hum situated low in the belly, giving me the beginnings of an erection. Or perhaps this was merely the result of the steady, jostling pressure against my groin of all the weighty books. The configurations of the erotic are many and varied, and who can deny the arousing and, might I add, altogether requisite function of narrative in sexual fantasy. I imagined us sprawled together, my fish wife and I, open-mouthed and fucking in lovely harmony atop a sea of books, some scattered open (I’d offer to recline on the books myself, to protect Meredith from the sharp corners of the bindings), their pages damp and turned to vital texts describing the orgiastic death wails of the burned, the impaled, the drowned, and the flayed. I couldn’t wait to get back to the house, to show Meredith my wounds and let her tenderly apply ointment and gauze bandages while I recounted the events of this brave day with the town fathers, The Day of Much Blood and Pain, and the Saving of the Schoolbooks. It gave me a nice idea for a mayoral-campaign slogan:
PETE ROBINSON BLEEDS FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE.
I made a mental note to scribble this gem down when I got home, so as not to forget it once my hands were healed and no longer hurting.

Sad to say, the comforts of domestic life would have to wait. For when Tom Thompson finally called out, jubilantly, “Guys, we made it, we made it, here’s the road,” I heard also, at my back, another voice, a familiar, boyish whisper rising softly on the breeze that bore salty ocean scents over the tortured land.

“Mr. Robinson.”

It was, in fact, my former pupil Ben Webster. So, he was still out roaming the gloom. I turned back briefly in the direction of the youngster’s voice, but the tyro guerrilla was nowhere to be seen. He’d sounded so close. Clearly Ben had become adept in the techniques of jungle subterfuge. What a fast learner. It made me proud.

I whispered into the trees, “Ben, wait here for me,” then turned and headed out to the road and our cars and a round of hearty farewells to Jerry, Abe, Tom, and Bill. Abe offered again to cart the books back to the library, seeing as he had the van and all. He was quite adamant, he kept at it, “Sure you don’t want me to drop those off? I’ve got the van. I’m going that way anyway. No trouble for me. Really, no trouble. Sure? Sure?” Finally Jerry snapped, “Abe, let Pete take the fucking books.” There was, for a moment, between the two friends, some tension; it was a miniature alpha male, beta male face-off, though in this case with no readily distinguishable beta. Jerry tends to lead the pack, but Abe is of substantial build, he’s physically intimidating, always a factor in these kinds of contests. Watching the two men glare at one another across the roof of Tom’s metallic Mazda, it occurred to me that perhaps Abe’s offer to return the books, his insistence in the matter, was actually cover for a visit—a tryst, even—with Jerry’s wife, Rita, and that, at some level, Jerry knew or suspected his friend’s mantled intent.

Bill stepped up to the Mazda and tamed the beasts by saying, “Hey, guys, come on, let’s go over to Sandpiper’s,” which is the name of a happy hour bar on South Main. It was pretty clear that the man had a problem with alcohol. None of his buddies seemed to notice or be bothered by this. They all answered Bill’s suggestion for continued drinking with hearty cheer: “Yeah, yeah,” “First round’s on me,” “Okay, let’s go for it.” Most likely, Bill’s friends misunderstood his heavy intake as a function of choice and disposition, of personal style rather than compulsion. Poor Bill. And poor Barbara. No wonder she always looked beat. Was she a drinker? Or merely suffering the ravages of marriage to one?

“You guys go ahead.”

One by one the men climbed into their vehicles and fired up engines, destroying the silence of falling night. I watched their ruby taillights grow dim along the narrow road to Main Street. At last the cars disappeared. Quiet returned. It was that eerie time of night when the air becomes calm and the birds settle down and the world seems timeless. I dumped the books in the Toyota, wiped my bleeding hands on my pants, and sauntered back to the woods.

A few feet inside the fringe of trees Ben greeted me. It’s amazing how much a person’s appearance can change in a week. The former A student seemed to have dropped twenty pounds, aged a good twenty years. His bony, unclean face was the face of an urchin, his eyes were fugitive’s eyes. Scrubby adolescent beard tinted jaundiced cheeks black; ripped clothes told of scrambling pursuits through the park’s untended greenery. Ben wore his gun belt low over the hip, in the rakish style of a movie-matinee quick-draw shootist. He smelled bad.

“Hello, Ben.”

“Mr. Robinson,” nodding, beckoning toward the jungle, a discreet, soldierly instruction to follow his wraith figure creeping away, now, without delay, noiselessly creeping over the forest floor blanketed in lichen and deadfall and unidentifiable black shapes that mushed underfoot like things wetly alive. Forward we advanced into the dark heart of the recreational grounds, skirting open areas and the relatively unobstructed pathways beneath the pine stands, blazing a trail instead through untamed tracts. The going was harsh. At one point I made out, on my right, the shadowy unlit facade of the boathouse. We stayed clear of it. According to Ben, Turtle Pond was regularly patrolled by hostile Bensons pedaling recreation-services fiberglass paddleboats. This news saddened me. Meredith and I had spent many pleasant hours lazily steering pink or blue or green paddleboats across the pond’s tranquil waters. Sometimes, far out at pond’s center, beyond sight of either sandy beach or boathouse dock, we’d stop and drop anchor, and Meredith would remove the top of her bathing suit, lie low on her back in the bow of the boat, and sun her beautiful breasts. Oh, love.