Old Glory (18 page)

What?

“He called up over the radio. He says he’s going to take you down the cellar in the morning.”

I heard myself give out a high whinnying laugh. “He wants it to be a surprise, see?”

“What’s … uh, in the cellar?” I had noticed earlier, without particular alarm, that the main item of furniture in the living room was a locked glass arsenal of rifles, shotguns, pistols and crossbows.

Beverley was looking coy. It was not an expression in which she’d had very much practice, I thought. Something happened behind her glasses. She had winked.

“Radio,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s where he keeps all his equipment. Bob’s a real big ham. Only don’t ever say I told you. He’d kill me. He likes to surprise people.”

It was nearly midnight when Bob arrived, his shift finished. He was indeed a real big ham. Only a cartoonist like Rowlandson could have managed the bell-shaped curve of his basic construction. An ellipse of bristled stomach showed between his T-shirt and jeans. It was, on the whole, his most expressive single feature. When he laughed, the fat quaked and creased; when he grew solemn, it swelled hugely and took on the shape of a downturned mouth. He and Beverley were one flesh. They must have had six hundred pounds of the stuff between them. Seated on the sofa together, they had a perfect symmetry, looking more profoundly married than any couple I’d ever seen. Bob scoffed a pint or two of his wife’s popcorn.

“What ya been doing, then, Vicious?”

“Talking,” said Vicious.

“That’s what I call her—Vicious. ’Cause she’s real vicious—ain’t you, Vicious?”—and he tickled her. She heaved, flopped, and swung a right hook at his paunch. “See what I mean?”

We talked about England and the U.S.A.F. base on which Bob had been stationed until I could keep my eyes open no longer. Beverley had given up her own bedroom for me, but I was too tired to sleep. Over my head hung a framed poem set in illuminated Gothic letters:

—and so on, for fifty lines or more. There was, surprisingly, a book bound in imitation leather on the bedside table. I opened it. It was full of quotations from the Gospels, neatly copied out in round schoolgirl handwriting.

I read on, torn between a sneaking guilt at having trespassed on Beverley’s secret life and the suspicion that she had left her book here deliberately for me to find. I thought that I’d met an enormous slut. That was not the person who was revealed here. Few of her favorite passages were consoling ones. She liked the knotted theology of St. John and the severity of St. Paul. In her book there was more suffering and perplexity than there was hope of redemption. Alone here at night, after the TV had died to a glowing dot and her husband had gone to his own bed, Beverley would feel her way around the gloomier vaults of Christian metaphysics, her pen tracing the letters onto the page with meticulous regularity of space and shape.

I wondered if she ever showed her book to Bob. Maybe he kept one of his own. The real question, though, was why I should be so astonished by this discovery. As I traveled, glancingly, through the lives of other people, I had learned to trust to surfaces and appearances, as travelers must. Reading Beverley’s private book, I felt chastened. I knew nothing of her at all, and the notebook, far from filling in some specific depth of character, had made her even more unknowable than she had been with her bag of popcorn and her weak eyes fastened to the colored screen.

After breakfast, Bob exhibited the secrets of the cellar. He had a complete radio studio down there. From his sagging swivel chair, he was in touch with the world. His teletype machine kept up a continuous chatter of small talk. An old-fashioned microphone on a stand was linked to a transmitter powerful enough for him to talk to Korea and Rio de Janeiro. He found a buddy up in Montana for me to talk to after failing
to raise a contact in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. I read off the previous day’s messages from the yellow roll of teletype paper. Here was Bob, off to work in the afternoon …

Duane had come in later.

I said that I couldn’t see very much difference between this kind of broadcasting and calling up people on the phone.

“Radio’s public,” Bob said. “Any ham with a license can listen in. There’s a whole community of guys out there. You seen my call cards?” One wall of his studio was papered with them, their foreign stamps looking like pinned butterflies.

went the teletype.

“That’s Jim, K9ZZ.”

A voice on the loudspeaker in front of us was saying something in Japanese. Bob turned it down. “On the radio, you get to meet all different kinds of people. Like I said, it’s public, it’s a
community
. Hey, you know about radio teletype art? That’s a whole new radio art form. Look—you like this? That’s ‘Miss Black America 1969.’ ”

Miss Black America was composed in densely patterned x’s and z’s.
She had been transmitted across the airwaves by a coded system of computerized instructions. To my eye, she had lost a great deal of her allure in the process.

“There’s ‘Bung’ … ‘Sarge’ … ‘Nancy’ … ‘Cookie’ … ‘Birds.’ That’s a real nice pic, that ‘Birds.’ ”

I saw from the roll of paper that there were mass-produced radio teletype jokes, too.

“Funny, huh?” Bob said. “Not bad.”

“Bob—” The metallic voice came out of an intercom speaker over Bob’s head. He picked up a hand mike. “What you want, Vicious?”

“Can you run around to the store in a while?”

“Sure. What you want?”

“Beans,” said the voice.

“Okay, Vicious.” He put the microphone back on its hook. “You want to come with me to the store? We’ll take the Bronco.”

The Bronco was Bob’s pickup truck. His C.B. set was fancier than any I’d seen before. “You want to know my handles? I’m Moose … then I’m Dirty Pierre … The Minnesota Grit-Gobbler … and Bullwinkle. Bullwinkle, that’s the one I use the most.” We drove through the outskirts of Winona, taking a very roundabout route since Bob wanted to show me every school and college in the city—not out of any spirit of civic pride but out of simple hatred of all educational institutions.

“You know what that is?” he said, pointing furiously at what was obviously the campus of the College of St. Teresa. “Tax-exempt property! Look over there. There’s more of it. Tax-exempt property! Look, I pay my goddamn taxes; why can’t those sonofabitch shysters pay theirs?”

“You sound like a man who’ll be voting for Ronald Reagan next year.”

“I don’t vote for no one. If Jesus Christ Himself was running for
President, he wouldn’t get my vote. Them politicians, they’re a bunch of outlaws. You know the only thing those guys in Washington ever agree about is giving themselves pay hikes? Look! Look at that!
Tax-exempt property!”

Outside the Piggly-Wiggly, he got on to Vicious over the C.B. and checked his shopping list. As he wandered up and down the avenues of food, Bob went into a long, bemused grumble about how America had let him down. Everything on TV was “junk” made by “Madison Avenue jerks.” “Who do they think we are? I’ll tell you: to them this is Flyover Land. You live in Winona, you’re nobody. They serve you up with junk ’cause you don’t amount to a hill of beans to those jerks. They can’t even see you, you’re so goddamn small.” His protesting bulk filled the
CRACKERS-’N’-COOKIES
alley foursquare, his gut protruding from him like a giant watermelon. “The
beautiful people
. We got some of them beautiful people in Winona. They’re a gang of assholes too.”

On the way back, Bob said sadly, “You ever get the feeling you was born in the wrong time?”

He had a right time in mind—a notion of an open West where Bob, reconstituted as Daniel Boone, could have walked out of his drafty cabin each morning and shot his breakfast. The only picture in his house was a Remington print of a bull moose at bay. That hung on one wall of the dining room, facing the mounted head of an elk with schizophrenic glass eyes. Each year Bob and two of his friends applied for hunting licenses in North Dakota. Every second or third year their numbers came up, and for two weeks they shared a log cabin, tramped through the snowy forest with their guns and pretended to be frontiersmen. Bob had a wad of Polaroid photos taken on these hunting holidays. He was just recognizable in them: a comically squat Leatherstocking, lost in his fur parka, his belly crisscrossed with ammunition belts. In one, he was sitting on the body of a dead buck. I was surprised that he hadn’t crushed it flat.

“That’s
me.”
He wasn’t simply identifying the character in the picture; he was trying to tell me who he really was.

“You know where I’d be happy? In the woods. I could live in the woods.”

“I don’t want to live in the woods,” Beverley said. “You don’t know nothing about the woods. So don’t talk about what you don’t know about, Vicious.”

“I’ll stay right on in Winona.”

“And
that’s
okay by me.”

Snorting, Bob unlocked his arsenal for me. He laid the guns out on the tabletop. “That’s my prize baby,” he said. “You just take a squint
through that.” It was an automatic rifle with telescopic sights. It smelled of machine oil and polished mahogany. Its heavy barrel wavered in my hands. Peering into the sights, I tried to adjust the knurled cylinder of the lens. The suburban room swam into and out of focus. Eventually I got the hairline cross on target and saw what I was supposed to see: Washington politicians, Madison Avenue jerks, college presidents and beautiful people. One by one they staggered to their knees like struck deer.

By afternoon I was back on my boat, with an east wind, this time, blowing up hard against the grain of the current and the hull clanking on the sharp edges of the waves. Glad to be alone again, I drove happily downstream into Blacksmith Slough. I was accompanied by a slow-moving train on the Burlington Northern which looked, at first, as if it too were afloat in mid-river. The tracks had been raised on a thin causeway, and for five miles the grain cars walked on water like a line of angular type on an empty sheet of flecked duck-egg blue.

I also had the ghostly company of Bob and Beverley. After lunch, I’d run away from them, but they had taken up a fully furnished apartment in my head and nothing would budge them, not even the heavy wake of an upriver tow. I puzzled over the strange social space they occupied. There must be a connection between Bob’s ethereal “community” of radio hams, his dream of living “in the woods,” and his furious rejection of all the official ties and responsibilities of organized society. In the disembodied freedom of the airwaves perhaps he had found the illusion, at least, of an open territory where human relations were still improvised, optional, do-it-yourself. As W9HWQ he could be the lone gun-slinger prowling the shortwaves, a tough guy to run into over a microphone. Bullwinkle, Moose, Dirty Pierre, The Minnesota Grit Gobbler … like his Polaroid pictures of himself as a hunter, his bullish handles asserted that the real Bob wasn’t a tax-paying citizen of Winona at all but a displaced person from an imaginary and sentimentalized West. And Beverley …

The tow’s wake scooped me up and set me down. The water felt as hard and fibrous as muscle tissue, and the whole structure of the boat throbbed as it hit each successive wave. It wasn’t frightening now. The river was simply the biggest and most powerful natural force I’d yet encountered, and I was learning with elation that if only I rode it with proper humility it would, in its turn, sustain me and carry me home. Seesawing over the last of the high crests, I watched the sun flash on the bow and catch the toppling edge of a beer can in the wave; and from the corner of my eye I saw the great white mansion of the towboat pass
behind me; and I wondered how on earth the young men in the bars produced those yodeling whoops with which they greeted winning kicks in football games. If I’d known how, I would have whooped.

 … But Beverley. Copying out her texts from the New Testament like a Victorian girl working on a sampler, she was as lost to Winona as Bob in his basement studio. The couple were so grossly corporeal that they looked as if they must be rooted in a very literal world indeed; a world of things as dense and weighty as Bob and Beverley were themselves. Yet exactly the reverse was true. Their fatness was the fatness of balloons; it was as if they were filled with oxygen and floated remotely over the top of the suburb in which they only seemed to be living. Bob was away on his frontier, Beverley out in her metaphysics. No wonder they needed two-way radio in order to talk to each other.