Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (52 page)

Well, to tell you the truth,
old Jim, Ralph said, I don’t exactly see that blue Indian trout of
hope in the moon you’ve been babbling about. To tell you the
truth, I’ve always sort of seen something else in the moon, and
not some man either.

Well, pray tell, Ralph, just
what is it you see in the moon?

A goat.

A what?

A sort of goat, old Jim.
Really. The shape of a goat.

A goat in the moon. Ralph
sees a goat in the moon. Of course, Ralph does. Well, leave it to
you, Ralph, to have as your personal vision of hope and renewal a
smelly old goat.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong
with goats. I had me a goat once as a sort of pet when I was a boy.
I loved that old goat, too. Bert was that goat’s name. Bert the
Goat is what I called him. Poor old Bert.

Why poor old Bert,
Ralph?

Oh, poor old Bert the Goat
got tangled up in his rope somehow one day, and somehow he fell
over a big rock down in the field and hanged himself. It was a
freak accident even for a goat. Bert was a real good old goat, but
boy was he dumb. That didn’t make any difference to me, though. My
love for old Bert the Goat was unconditional.

And sweet and
childlike?

You bet it was. Will you
please pass that joint, please.

Ralph, I want you to tell
me, your best pal since the untimely demise of Bert the Goat, the
truth about something. Ralph, were you, being a typical little
rural-boy type, and Bert the Goat ever, you know, an item? Ralph,
truthfully now, did you ever get to know Bert, you know,
biblically?

No! No way, Jose! Never! Not
even once! I already told you, Bert was a good goat. Bert would
have never gone for any hankypanky like that. And if there’s a goat
heaven, old Bert is there right now.

Waiting for you,
Ralph?

You bet he is. Old Bert the
Goat would wait for me forever. Bert was a loyal type of goat. Jim,
I just noticed you have your gun stuck in your belt.

Yes, I do, Ralph.

How come, old
Jim?

Ralph, let me ask you
something. Did you rat me out about Mary Mississippi to
Lindsay?

Who? Mary who? What do you
mean, old Jim?

When was the last time you
screwed my wife, Ralph?

I never did that, Jim. You
know, screw. We made love, but that was a long time ago.

Okay, Ralph, Jim said.
—Think I’ll get me some target practice, Jim said, and took the
gun from behind his belt. Jim aimed his .38 at the moon and fired.
At the explosion Ralph gasped and jumped and stumbled backward
across the deck.

Missed, Jim said. —The goat
moved.

That’s against the law!
Ralph gasped. —Shooting a gun like that in the city limits. You
could get arrested or something.

Like I give a fuck, Ralph,
Jim said, and pointed the .38 at Ralph.

Jim, what are you doing? You
shouldn’t ever point that thing at anybody! That thing could go off
or something!

Like this? Jim said, and
pulled the trigger.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow! Ralph
howled as he staggered backward and tumbled over a chair onto the
deck.

Goddamn it, Jim said, and
lifted his .38 as though to inspect it. —Looks like I forgot to
load it all up. Wouldn’t you know.

That was an awful joke, old
Jim, Ralph whimpered from where he sat on the deck. —I think I
broke my arm. Really. In two, maybe three places.

What joke? Jim said. He
stuck the .38 back behind his belt and fired up another joint as
Ralph pulled himself to his feet. Ralph rubbed his arm as he
rejoined Jim at the edge of the deck overlooking the
Bay.

At that point in time Clint
Eastwood was shooting a movie on Alcatraz Island based on a
true-life book called Escape from Alcatraz. As a gift to the city
Clint Eastwood permitted the huge klieg lights he had erected to
burn continuously so that Alcatraz Island glowed throughout the
night through the fog like some enormous anchored ghost liner of
lights, or some distant luminous island city of spirits. Something
about that haunting, spooky sight unnerved Jim, but exactly what?
That illuminated island honeycombed with cells, cells opening onto
forgotten, undiscovered cells.

Would you mind sharing that
number? Ralph said.

So you believe there is a
goat heaven, Ralph? Here, goat-dick. Don’t bogey it.

If there’s any justice in
this world, there’s a goat heaven. I could use a hummer, too, old
Jim.

And you put your faith in
that?

Sure. You bet. Why not? I’ll
put my faith in a goat heaven any day of the week. Goat heaven is
an endless field of sweet green grass with no big rocks anywhere.
And there are no ropes in goat heaven either. And if I watch my p’s
and q’s from here on out, you know, wash my old paws before supper
and clean up my plate and say my prayers before bedtime and not
play with my, you know, thing in the lonely dark I’m probably
facing for the rest of my natural life, and if I get off the sauce,
and stay off, well then, who knows, maybe old Bert the Goat and I
will be together again someday up in goat heaven.

Isn’t it pretty to think so,
old Ralph? Jim said.

Living Memory

1

As the years passed by and
their lives set off in different directions, Jim and Ralph would
always attempt to tie one up on some pretext or other at least once
or twice a year, usually for a trip together somewhere, when they
would draw deeply from each other’s memories and rehash half to
death each shared event or disaster from the old days, and marvel
time and again at all the dirty deeds they had gotten away with or
for which they had come to forgive each other.

The final trip they took
together began, fittingly enough, in San Francisco late one August.
Jim had been on sabbatical leave that year from the Eastern
university where he considered himself in deep disguise as a deputy
professor. He had spent that year more or less bumming around, even
hitching back and forth across country, perhaps in some final
effort to recapture what he could of some romantic, rudderless,
vagrant vision of himself. As Ralph had a new collection of stories
out, he agreed to give a series of readings around the Bay Area to
promote the book, as though at that point in his career any book of
his needed promotion. The plan was to tie up in San Francisco, and
Jim would carry Ralph’s coat while he knocked off the readings, and
then they would head East together, pretending that they were
outlaw authors on the lam like in the old days, making the perfect
clean getaway in Ralph’s brand-new BMW. Ralph had
standing-room-only crowds at each of his readings. He would read a
few poems first, and then a story he had only recently completed
based on the protracted death of Chekhov, which, as it turned out,
was the last story Ralph ever wrote.

Ralph and Jim arrived in
Iowa City early in the evening of their third day of cross-country
driving. Although he had never lived there long, in many ways Iowa
City felt like a hometown to Ralph, a sort of hometown of the
spirit, for it was there that he felt as though his life had been
released into significance as a writer, and where, for better or
worse, he and Alice Ann had drifted firmly into that mythology that
had carried their marriage forth for so many more years. They had
been young and full of hope when they had first arrived in Iowa
City, but while hunting for what they thought was the beginning of
their real life together, they had merely figured out ways to
inhabit their daydreams.

Ralph and Jim had taken a
room at a large, new motel at the edge of Iowa City, and then Ralph
suggested that they drive into town for dinner at a joint called
the Mill, which Ralph described as being a big smoky barn of a bar
and family-style restaurant popular with the young, hip faculty and
students, and where Alice Ann had once waited tables in another
lifetime. The grub at the Mill would be decent sturdy fare and
plentiful and cheap, was what Ralph promised. At the Mill they
would be able to get huge platters of spaghetti loaded down with
fat meatballs, Ralph promised and, with any luck coming their way
at all, laid. The joint would undoubtedly be packed with the
current crop of young, hungry, would-be famous writers of tomorrow,
bevies of horny writer- babes just clamoring to fuck their way to
fame. Ralph had given a highly successful reading in Iowa City just
a few months earlier, and because of the current critical and
popular-press attention being given to his new book, Ralph was as
hot as the old proverbial firecracker on the literary front. If he,
old Running Dog Ralph Crawford, proclaimed high and low as the
American Chekhov, could not get his load lightened in Iowa City,
that hotbed of naked ambition and brazen, hungry heir-apparents,
then he might as well pack up his pecker and go home to Momma, for
what would be the worth then of fame for any man? Jim thought that
this was a splendid idea. For surely simply being Ralph Crawford’s
sidekick meant that he, too, might get a shot at cheap romance in
Iowa City.

Before they ate, though,
Ralph wanted to drive around Iowa city for a spell and wax
nostalgic. A light rain had come up as Ralph took Jim on a tour of
a town transformed by nostalgia, where the wet night streets shone
purely with the lights of the past. Ralph drove them out to a small
trailer-park at the western edge of town, where out front there was
a ramshackle motel and tiny restaurant, which appeared to be closed
up. Off to the right among a strand of stunted pines were a
half-dozen little frame cabins, also apparently boarded up and
nearly overgrown with wild shrubbery and vines. When Ralph and
Alice Ann had first come to Iowa City, they had rented one of those
tiny cabins, number 6, for a couple of weeks while trying to
arrange for student housing on campus. They had left their daughter
with Ralph’s mother in California until they got settled, so they
were really alone together for the first time in ages, except for
the fact that Alice Ann was pregnant again. But that didn’t
frighten them, for they were green and fearless in the face of the
future. They felt as fixed and steady in their course as those
stars which were as fat as fish in the vast Iowa night.

Sure, the facts of their
lives didn’t match the myth they had begun to make of their
marriage, but those two weeks of pure, wondrous, abandoned
six-and-seven-course sex in that shabby cabin fed the fantasy of
their lives for years to come. There, deep in the heartland, they
took new heart in themselves. They refound the freshness in
themselves, and they were never more certain that they would offer
each other solace and companionship forever, and that over the
years their faithfulness to each other would become legendary, and
that they would be able to submerge fully in their perfect passion
forever. Night after night, Alice Ann would come into Ralph’s arms
an illusion, like the future, of untouched territory. My green,
growing girl was just what Ralph would call Alice Ann, and press
his face into her only slightly as yet bulging belly, as they lay
on that old, violently creaky metal bed, night after night in the
hot Iowa dark, the steam rising from their wet, slick flesh, after
having once again made the most amazing abandoned love of their
lives. Even the cockroaches running across the nighttime linoleum
sounded like creatures transporting themselves joyfully into new
lives, and the faint, cross-fading voices on the old radio in the
corner sounded like whispery calls of encouragement from that
beyond we call the future.

Night after night Ralph and
Alice Ann lay there in that hot dark getting sweetly sleepy
together, wanting to fall asleep exactly as they wanted to die, at
the same moment. Submerged in that lovely and pure isolation of
love, they imagined an island called themselves, surrounded not by
hot dark infinite fields of corn but by imaginary fish in a vast
sea of perfectly still water, and any sound they heard outside
their open windows they called a splash. But all that was when they
were green and brave and beguiled by hope, back before the madness
had set in. Ralph’s last memory of those two weeks of true and
isolated love was a perfect portent of the times ahead. He could
see them still, late that last night, two phantoms in the rain,
right over there in the gravel and red-dog beside the road,
shouting at the top of their lungs, waving their arms crazily in
the air, stalking up and down the roadside in the rain, accusing,
accusing, Alice Ann’s blue eyes turned green with anger and rage,
green like those Iowa afternoon skies sometimes turned when storms
were rolling in and tornado warnings crackled over the radio.
Sooner or later, Ralph said to Jim, and popped the joint’s roach
into his mouth, everything that comes into your life leaves it.
Just passes in and passes out. Every love story is finally left
unfinished. And, finally, when the lovers are dead and gone,
history, and everybody who ever knew them is history, then
everything just passes at last from living memory and doesn’t
matter anymore, doesn’t mean dick, in the land of the currently
living.