Genoa (22 page)

The house is quiet, the lights out. Pausing a moment in the hallway, I can hear Linda’s breathing. Then I pass down the second flight, and out the front door . . .

The air is chilled, but the wind is quiet . . . the blackberry winter, the catbird storm, subsiding as we push past midnight, into the early hours . . .

Returning to the kitchen, I think of eating—cold meatloaf, a piece of rye bread, another bottle of ale. There is an urge to turn on the television, hunt for some late show, a bit of fiction that will haul me into the screen, the eye of the thing. Hesitating between the two—refrigerator and
TV
—I am drawn both ways. Then I pass beyond them, move quietly to the stairs and climb again, both flights, moving swiftly through the dark, through the familiarity of many years in the old house. I climb once more to the attic.

FOUR

A card came from Carl, postmarked St. Louis. He said that he had left the coast for good, was in St. Louis, but gave no address.

Later I discovered that his departure, and the break-up of the band, was coincidental with the death, under mysterious circumstances, of the singer named Joey. Joey was a good sailor, had managed boats all his life—but he took a small catboat out when the storm warnings were up, headed the thing into the rain and wind . . . and, according to the Coast Guard, deliberately capsized her, turning downwind, and then coming about, so that she jibed. His body—what was left of it—was never found . . .

Why Carl came to St. Louis, in particular, I didn’t know . . . although I found out later. I also found that he was not alone: he had brought Concha with him . . .

There followed a succession of weird illnesses, disconnected physical manifestations, and, as with the epilepsy, he took the trouble to report to me: random cards, postmarked St. Louis, giving the strict details, and no address.

He reported the appearance of a succession of shapes and markings in odd areas of his body—stars, crosses, and various abstractions, like microscopic cell life . . . One after another, or in groups, they appeared, and vanished . . .

                                        
(M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“. . . the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and recrossed with numberless straight marks in thick array.”

                                        
“By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was
much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.”

These shapes and forms finally resolved into a set of mammary rudiments—a mere suggestion of nipples, appearing in lines from the crotch to the true breasts, to the armpits. They remained for some time, and then disappeared.

Later, during the summer—with the intense heat beating up from river, brick, and asphalt, as it can only in St. Louis—he reported what appeared to be Elephantiasis of the Scrotum—the scrotum swollen and hanging to his knees, the penis enveloped, with only an invagination to indicate its presence. Whether he treated this condition, or allowed it to pursue its course, in any case, he eventually recovered.

Over a considerable period of time, he lost several teeth. Nothing seemed to happen to them, they didn’t decay or cause pain—they simply fell out. And, in every empty socket—after an extended delay—he grew a replacement; so that, by the time the process ended, he had, to a large extent, a third set of teeth.

At one time, he developed an abdominal swelling, so marked and painful it could not be ignored. For this, he went to the hospital, and underwent surgery. The result was the removal of a teratoma, or dermoid cyst—containing bits of skin, hair, nails, teeth, and tongue, fully developed. The only explanation was the predatory conquest by Carl, at some very early prenatal stage, of an unfortunate, competitive twin. The lesser organism, attacked and overcome, had nevertheless managed to place random cells within the folds and envelopes of the conquering embryo; and these, now fully developed, had waited until Carl’s full growth to present themselves.

Recovering from the operation, he became involved in a drunken brawl. The trouble started in a tavern, spread to the sidewalk, and eventually to the whole block, and Carl, resisting the police, turned
on an officer and attacked him. I never discovered the nature of the attack, but it put the officer in the hospital and Carl in jail.

Locked in solitary, in a cell remote from the others, Carl remained out of control, raving and screaming long after he was sober.

Then he suddenly became quiet. He began chatting with the guards, and, through them, sent messages to the other officers. In a short time, he was in a front office, having an interview . . . and a little after that, he was on the street, a free man, all charges dropped. He had simply conned his way out . . .

Once when I asked him about this, he laughed, put his arm on my shoulder, and quoted Melville, with appropriate flourish: “. . . men are jailors all; jailors of themselves.”

. . . and added, matter-of-factly: “I liberated myself . . .”

For a while, Carl seemed to desert Concha, or at least two-time her. He took up with his final companion, a creature named Bonnie—fat, blowsy, alcoholic . . . she would sit in a rumpled bed, drunk, dirty, her stringy hair falling down, and quote Wordsworth and Keats . . . sneezing and weeping violently, lamenting that she suffered from “Rose Fever”: unconsoled when Carl told her that Hart Crane, American poet, was similarly allergic . . .

Carl once bragged to me, confidentially, that he had accomplished intercourse with Bonnie twelve times during thirty hours . . .

Whatever else he did was mysterious . . . but the law was on his heels again—his position in St. Louis became untenable. Expecting to hear of his arrest, I was surprised to hear, instead, that he had committed himself to a private institution. It was a shrewd gesture: the police gradually lost interest in him, and yet, the commitment having been his own act, he was free to leave whenever the heat was off.

I tried very hard to locate him, but could find no trace—as usual, he had left no address. For many months, I knew nothing of him, and I began to feel that he was passing, or had already passed, into institutional oblivion.

FIVE

The New York Central train, westbound for St. Louis, rumbled out of the Indianapolis station, and I settled myself by the window, with little thought of sleep.

Slumping, I let my shoulder and the side of my head rest against the window. My bag was in the rack overhead, and in my pocket, my breast pocket, was the letter from Carl: I had, at long last, an address, and I was using it quickly, before it passed, like all the others, into obsolescence.

He had written of his discharge from the institution—and had taken the trouble to enclose a letter from the staff, proclaiming him cured. He announced, further, that he had opened a one-chair barbershop, in the old section of St. Louis, on 4th Street—and he went so far as to invite me to spend the weekend. Coming off the swing shift at midnight, I had packed my bag, and headed for the first train.

I thought of Carl as a barber, and wondered where and how he had learned this skill—or if he had taken the trouble to learn at all. My eyes closed, I became numbed, insulated, like the dim interior in which I was riding. I may have slept, I’m not sure; I had the sense, in any case, of entering and passing through something . . .

When I opened my eyes, there was gray in the sky. It was not dawn—just a dull, general lifting of the dark. We were in southern Illinois, the tracks slicing diagonally across flat, squared-off farm land. Snow remained on the ground, and occasional gusts of sleet and cold rain washed the outer glass.

I may have slept again. When I looked through the window, it was full day, though still overcast. But the land had changed, and I didn’t quite understand how . . . the flatness was there, but there was a different tilt to it, a kind of flow, an imminence. Sitting up straight,
I bought coffee and a dry cheese sandwich from a vendor. As the hot, strong liquid went down my throat, I realized that we were approaching St. Louis, and the river . . .

All at once, I understood why Carl had come here, to St. Louis, of all places; why California had been only a stopping place, and this, the Mound City, had become his inevitable destination. I could see ahead, in the distance, some elevations of earth: I couldn’t tell whether these were part of the original Indian mounds, or railroad embankments, or perhaps part of the levee system. In any case, the contour was low, level, and smooth; with the knowledge of the location of the city on the river, and the river’s place in the face of the land, I realized that St. Louis was “home,” the very eye and center of centripetal American geography, the land pouring in upon itself. I thought of China, and recalled that Carl’s journey from there, from all that had happened there, was an eastward voyage, across half the globe; and, perhaps like Ishmael on board the
Pequod,
he was hunting back toward the beginnings of things; and, like the voyage of the
Pequod,
—or of any of the various caravels of Columbus that struck fierce weather returning from the Indies—perhaps Carl’s eastward voyage, his voyage “home,” was disastrous . . .

We entered East St. Louis, and the train slowed, as we passed through mile after mile of factory, tenement, dump, and slum, an abandoned industrial desolation . . .

Rising over the earth mounds, the tracks entered a bridge, and we approached the river. The cold rainy wind blew waves onto the surface—dark black and purple, the wind squalls rushing across it, here and there turning a white cap. Through the steel girders I watched the water as long as I could see it. When we reached the other side, I felt that we had passed over a great hump . . .

Leaving the train at Union Station, I headed for 4th St., and had little trouble finding Carl. Tucked in a corner, in an ancient loft building, it looked like a poor spot for business. But the shop was open, and he was busy.

The sign read
CARL AUSTIN MILLS, MASTER BARBER
, and underneath, “I Need Your Head In My Business.” As I opened the door, he looked up from his work, and I detected in his glance only surprise—I had not told him I was coming—and pleasure. Stepping forward, he offered me his hand, and his grip was familiar and sturdy—warmth and affection in it, such as he had seldom shown me, but nothing patronizing: it was the glad warmth of an animal. Returning to his customer, he gestured me to a chair, the sweep of his arm embracing and offering his hospitality, making rich and desirable the confines of his shop. He asked many friendly questions . . .

I looked around. Every inch of space, beyond what held his equipment, was taken up with pictures, decorations, objects of one sort or another. I had no idea how he had made such a collection. There were rocks, minerals, semi-precious stones of all shapes, sizes, and colors, some of them shining. There were souvenirs and toys from every carnival and circus in the land. Airplane parts hung from the walls, a split half of a propeller was suspended on thin wires from the ceiling. Pictures, paintings, and textile fragments appeared everywhere, the subjects ranging from Mayan, Aztec, and Inca stone and art work, to movie stars, nude girls, and pornography. Relics from Alaska, and other Indian artifacts were stuck on shelves. The magazine table included the morning newspaper, and thirty-year-old copies of the
National Geographic
and the
Police Gazette.
There was a settled look, a look of age . . .

Hanging in front of the mirror, directly back of the chair, so that strands of black hair descended among the bottles of oil and tonic, was the shrunken Indian head that he had won in a poker game in Alaska. Carl stepped back to survey his customer, his own great cranium coming close to the shrunken one . . .

He began telling a story—a wild tale about barbering among primitive Eskimos in Alaska, the natives being confused between haircuts and scalping. The customers seemed to know that he was lying, and this added to it . . .

I listened to him talk, watched him cut several heads of hair. The warmth of the shop entered me, became quieting. In addition to being a storyteller, he had a skill at his trade; his hands moved deftly over the men’s heads, weaving a phrenological spell.

The city of St. Louis, with the advent of the railroads after the Civil War, had turned its back upon the river and faced westward, had abandoned the old continental blood stream . . . Carl, setting up in this section, hugging the river, now drew warehousemen, truckers, straggling barge- and riverboat-men from blocks, perhaps miles around . . .

I became sleepy, began to drowse in my chair. Carl gave me the key to his room, suggested that I take a nap . . . I was almost asleep, as I stumbled out the door.

He lived in a furnished room, not far from the shop. It was small, poor, and bare, with the simplest furnishings—as barren of his personality as the shop was rich with it . . . too tired to look further, to dig beyond this front, I stretched across the bed and fell asleep.

When I awoke, it was midafternoon. Shaking myself, I sat on the edge of the bed, took a slower look around. On the floor, by the bed, were three books: a volume of Sappho, one of Homer, and the poems of Hart Crane . . .