October Light (41 page)

“Ah, Peter,” Santisillia said with a smile, “you know there's no god, no devil.”

“Shit,” Dancer said.

Peter Wagner turned his head away. He wiped sweat from his forehead and compressed his wide lips, glancing left and right like a cornered rabbit. He knew there was something he had to figure out, but he was drunk and high, too foggy to get it straight.

Jane lit a cigarette, indifferent to it all, and held the marijuana in her lungs. At last she lay back on the flat stone and looked at the stars. Still no movement in the sky, no sign of life. The ground was cool now. The fire had burned down to coals, so that the walls had only a faint glow.

Santisillia said, “Everything's got to be an accident unless you decide there are gods and devils. We do nothing. Peter Wagner's uncle plows out snow and saves freezing people by pure accident, because he's caught in the Sundayschool bag, or his father was a doctor, or God knows what. Captain Fist does all these ungodly things because it happened to rain all through his childhood, or his father was a drunk, or he's an
XXY,
or his blood's deficient in, say, riboflavin. So everybody's a machine, an automaton, unless you decide there are gods and devils and there's some magic way they can get to you.”

“Luther, are you telling me there
are
gods and devils?” Peter Wagner said.

“There are no laws but the laws of science,” Mr. Nit said.

Dancer looked disgusted. “Shit man, gwon down where you come from.”

“A fact,” Mr. Nit said.

“An' I say shit.”

“Take it easy, Dancer,” Santisillia said. “Mr. Nit's right enough, far as he goes. What's physically knowable, science will sooner or later know.”

Peter Wagner bowed his head. “I've heard all this,” he said dully.

“Everybody has,” Santisillia said. “But nobody understands it.

Listen. Nothing's knowable but the present and the past. That's the bucket of ashes.”

Peter Wagner sighed. “Terrific. Maybe tomorrow there will be gods.”

“Exactly!”

Jane looked at Dancer and thought him handsome. Maybe she'd saved his life that night; no telling. Maybe he'd have come around anyway. She got up on one elbow to get her pipe and plastic bag of grass from her tight jeans pocket. Pipes had more oomph.

Santisillia said: “Think about it, though. It disgusts you that Fist blows up Mexican villagers he doesn't even know.”

“I understand all that,” Peter Wagner broke in impatiently. “‘I assert for all men for all time ta-dum-ta-dum.'”

“Wrong,” Santisillia snapped. “It's not some arbitrary, private assertion, like Bluebeard's assertion that murdering wives would be the meaning of his life. Those Mexican villagers were innocent, vulnerable, like everything alive—like your imaginary sister crossing the street when some fat-head wasn't watching the light.”

Peter Wagner pressed his hands to his head, avoiding the sore place. “Say it again. I don't follow.”

Dancer said, pretending he understood, “Break it down for him, Luther.”

Jane leaned upon her elbow again, holding the lighted pipe out toward Dancer. “You want some?”

“Grass?” he said.

She nodded.

He took the pipe, held one hand over the bowl and drew in. When he started to hand it back she nodded toward Mr. Nit, and Dancer passed it on. Mr. Goodman got out his own pipe, loaded it, and lit it. When he'd drawn in, he passed it to Santisillia. Santisillia waved it off. “Man, I can't smoke and think,” he said. “Shall I be tempted to infringe my vow in the same time 'tis made?”

Dancer smiled. He said, “Hey, Luther, we still gonna try the Captain for atrocities?”

Santisillia shrugged. “How can we? We just finished proving that nobody's responsible for anything.”

Dancer looked doubtful. “Maybe we could figure something out, if we once got into it.”

Mr. Goodman said soberly, holding out the pipe again, “I think we should try him.”

Again Santisillia laughed, and this time it sounded, to Jane at least, downright sorrowful. “Try him, don't try him, what's the difference?” he said. “Better to shoot him, or let Injun Joe here strangle him. We were supposed to be talking about something more important—justice for the future, how to make gods that exist.”

Peter Wagner continued to sit with his head down. If he tried to walk, Jane saw, he would be sick.

Mr. Goodman said, “The future's all there is.” “Mr. Goodman,” Santisillia said, “you're stoned.” It was true, she saw. He hadn't gotten down from the last one, and was rising again like a balloon at the Zoo. She felt her mind crinkling open like wadded up paper. Maybe she was stoned herself. She tried to remember if she'd ever seen a leprechaun. Whenever she was able to remember it clearly, it was a sign that she was stoned.

They sat for another half hour, or two hours, she had no idea, drifting like a glider, a leaf on a brook. Santisillia kept trying to talk philosophy. She smiled, and eventually even he understood that it was useless. Dancer lay with his head in her lap. She put her feet on Mr. Goodman's chest, her free hand on Dancer's. The bare skin was hairless as a boy's. Peter Wagner looked over at her and suddenly, drunkenly, got to his feet and staggered out to find more sticks. They laughed at him, too high to be bothered by his anger—all but Santisillia—and like a devil, a misanthrope from the woods, he laughed back. After a moment Luther got up, cold sober and graceful, and went to help him. She inched her hand down under Dancer's belt and under the elastic of his underpants. Peter Wagner and Santisillia came back—hours later, it seemed—with their arms loaded, dropped their loads with a crash by the fire, put on a few sticks, and poked it back to life. Then they stretched out on the cool rock a little way away from her, judgmental. Even now Santisillia was trying to make Peter Wagner talk philosophy.
Dear God save us from fanatics,
she thought. “It's a matter of life and death,” he was saying. Peter Wagner was rubbing his aching head, watching her. Dancer's hair, under her fingertips, was soft as silk. Her desire was an ache—for Peter and Luther especially. She would, she knew, have to be the one to act, but she was so dopey she could hardly think. She unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse, smiling sleepily toward Peter and Luther, to show she was theirs if they wanted her, then put her hand back down inside Dancer's pants. She said softly, just loud enough for him to hear, “Peter, come be close to me!” He didn't move at first. Then suddenly, making up his drunken mind, he came to her, took her shoulders in his hands, and kissed her forehead and cheek. She smiled, then lazily raised her head to kiss him on the mouth. She felt as if she were floating, one hand sliding down to close gently on Dancer's enormous crooked penis, the other sliding to Mr. Goodman's. “Luther!” she called softly. “Oh God, Luther, come help!” He thought a moment, then threw his cigar away and crawled toward her, his expression half hunger, half anger.

Quickly Luther and Peter finished unbuttoning her blouse. She felt her breasts tensing more. Their fingertips rang like church-bells on her skin. Peter's lips came to her right nipple, then Luther's to her left. She groaned, then laughed, and in a moment they too were laughing, finally even Luther and Peter. Mr. Nit, over by the fire, was bent like a monkey, jerking frantically, pulling off his pants. Dancer was sliding her jeans and panties off. The laughing gave way to a great, silent tenderness that seemed to her almost holy. She felt herself opening like the Grand Canyon and pulling as if to draw in the whole calm night. She gave herself to them, hardly knowing who was where, as though she were, say, a field of wheat. They hugged each other like lovers as they took her. She felt beautiful, unspeakably alive, loved like a saint in a passionate vision.
This is my body …
She thought of poor somber, stiff-necked, ridiculous Nebraska.
Take, eat . .
. She kissed the drunken Indian's tear-stained cheeks.

Then, piled like alligators, they slept. Mr. Nit, small as a boy in her arms, moaned, troubled by bad dreams. She patted his head.
Suffer the little children …

Hours later, Peter Wagner sat up suddenly. There was the drone of an engine—a plane, a boat, he couldn't tell.

“Luther!” he whispered.

Santisillia sat up, shaking his head to clear it. Jane sat up too and snatched about wildly, hunting for her clothes. There were lights and noises over by the shaft that led down to where the boats were hidden. Near the cave, Santisillia hunted naked for the guns. At last Santisillia found the machine gun. “Come on,” he called. Peter Wagner followed, jumping as in a sack-race, trying to get into his pants as he ran. On the flat rock at the mouth of the shaft they found a trembling, wild-eyed old man in a wheelchair. There was no one else. Whoever had brought him and the wheelchair was gone.

“My name is John F. Alkahest,” the old man whimpered, sniffing the air like a mouse. The eyes behind the thick glasses looked terrified.

Santisillia aimed the machine gun at him but did nothing. “Man, this isn't happening,” he said. “This has got to be that grass.”

“Got to be,” Peter Wagner said. But he had another theory. He was still falling from the Golden Gate Bridge, and all his adventures were a split-second dream, one more cheap illusion of freedom. It came to him that the old man was Death. He smiled and raised one hand to his mouth, a gesture he'd gotten as a child from Little Orphan Annie. Something was wrong. The fingers stank of sex and marijuana.

“No man, I believe, ever had a greater choice of difficulties and less means to extricate himself from them.”
General George Washington, December, 1776

5

The Old Man and the Old Woman Choose Violence

1

Teeth clenched together, chest full of wrath, James Page shot his truck past the cars in his yard, nearly killing his own chickens, and started down Prospect Mountain. The right side window was partly open—it would no longer close—and ice-cold wind sliced in at him. It would be colder by morning, cold as a cane. He could smell a change in the weather moving in—hard wind, likely rain that would tear off the last of the leaves and turn the pastures drab, make the cows hang close, to the barn, dismal. Locking time, his uncle Ira had called it. In a day or maybe a week—or then again a month; there was just no predicting the weather in Vermont—he'd look out his bedroom window and the fields would be frosty, and when he went out to chores there'd be thin panes of ice on the watertrough. Locking had begun.

The lights of his house were no longer in the mirror. He was coming to what had been the Jerome place twenty-five, thirty years ago—huge barns, huge house; all gone long since, burned to the ground. There'd been a black and white sign,
Horses Stabled: $1.00 per day for Hay Grain & Stabling.
His elder boy

Richard had worked there some. The place was grown up in weeds, bone-gray in the glow of his headlights. Sometimes old Jerome—the man's first name escaped him at the moment—sold apples by the peck or bushel crate off a two-wheeled cart by the roadside. Man blew his horn if he wanted to be served. Nobody stole, in those days.

He passed the Crawfords'; he remembered how the Crawfords had used to haul logs, a square Ford truck with hard-rubber tires with chains on 'em, and a sledge behind; a single load brought a thousand board feet. He remembered the sawmills, the slap of the belts, the scream of the big steam-driven saws and the smell of the wood, the sawdust piled up into mountains where he and his friends had played while his father and uncle unloaded. The sawdust would be frozen stiff in winter. He remembered the longhaired horses in the snow—seemed as if winters had been colder then—remembered the flat-cars, the raw-log railroad ties.

He came to the Reynolds place, family all in bed, two limp, unlighted Halloween men propped by the door like sleeping watchmen. They'd raised sheep on the Reynolds place, years ago, called Horned Dorsets. Lambed in September instead of in the spring, lambs born so woolly it was amazing. Vermont had been famous for sheep-farming once. Killed by the Democrats. When the weather warmed, he'd go with his father and uncle to help shear, the two of them long-bearded, sharp of eye and silent, and he remembered as if it was yesterday how surprised he'd been, when he was seven or eight, at how the wool came off all in one piece, like a soft white overcoat. They'd been hit one time, some of those Horned Dorset sheep, by a Bennington & Rutland railroad train. He remembered looking from the cab of the truck, where his father'd had him stay. His uncle stood turning around in a circle, warding off the evil. A crowd of neighbors moved among the dead and dying sheep—there were splashes of blood, bits of clotted wool, there was a whole lot of baaing—and the neighbors would sometimes bend down, sometimes pose for a photograph. They always liked having their picture taken. They'd pose by a wrecked car, a flood, a dead bear … When the Jennings house burned, sometime in the twenties, as soon as they found there was somebody had a camera, the people all ran up on the porch and posed, the flames leaping out through the high doors and windows behind them.

That had been a whole different world; gone for good. There weren't many who, like him, remembered. It was a world so forgotten that people now scoffed about “the good old days,” made out they were nothing but misery and pain, superstition and narrow-mindedness, and all that was true and firm in them, all that was honest and neighborly and solid as a mountain was some fool illusion. So pygmies hacked the legs off giants—always, of course, for some high-minded purpose, some glorious, bellowing ideal. Like Burr or the State of New York against Ethan Allen. “There's gods of the valleys,” Ethan Allen said, “and there's gods of the hills,” and scairt them with his eyes. He was ready to make war on the whole United States if they dared steal his land. But the giants were losing to the pygmies, no question. James Page had seen in the paper where somebody claimed it was wrong to have picture-cartoons of Uncle Sam, because America's the melting pot, and Uncle Sam was male and white. Lord God! You couldn't say nigger or Polack anymore, but you could still say wasp. You could write it in the
New York Times.
That was progress. He'd like to see that black-eyed Popish Mexican push ice-crusted logs through a saw sometime, ten hours straight in the freezing cold, the way Wasps used to do in his father's day, before the Jewish and Irish and Italian politicians, the Japanese and Mexicans and the God damned city-slicker Donkey party killed the lumber business, and then the railroads, and then finally the farms. It used to be a man took pride in his work: he built you a wheel or a window-sash, you could pretty well figure it would last you a while. Not now. Why? Because nobody cared a mite anymore, cared not one tunkit,
that
was why. These days they had unions, and against the law to try and fight 'em. Whatever kind of work a man might do, you couldn't turn him out till he'd killed somebody. All that mattered now was seniority and raises. Come to that, if a man's work happened to be honest, what good did it do him?—And what point anyways in trying to make an “honest” disposable syringe—that was all they had at the hospital anymore. What point in trying to make a really good, Class A, machine-molded Styrofoam cup? So now if a man bought a chair he'd just better not set too hard, and if he bought himself a truck he'd better try it out first in the haylot. No use anymore to go looking around for a hired man, or a boy to help out at the grocery store. They'd be in town joining unions or drawing unemployment, all the smart ones. Had no choice. Good workmanship hadn't just died in this country, it had been murdered, shot dead in its sleep like a bear in the sugarhouse. You take glass-blowing. Priced right out of the market by strikes—unions destroying their own workers, and nobody could stop it. You take coal.—Between the unions and the city politicians, between crazy demands and confused regulations, the only inalienable right there was left in this country was the right to Relief. And you needn't go pointing a finger at where it went wrong—that want American!