The Centaur (10 page)

The cemetery appeared on our right; tablet-shaped tombstones rode at various tilts the settling tummocks. Then the stout sandstone steeple of the Firetown Lutheran Church leaped higher than the trees and dipped its new cross an instant into the sun. My grandfather had helped build that steeple; he had pushed the great stones in a wheelbarrow up a narrow path of bending planks. He had often described to us, with exquisite indications of his fingers, how those planks had bent beneath his weight.

My father and I began going down Fire Hill, the longer, and less steep, of the two hills on the road to Olinger and Alton. About halfway down, the embankment foliage fell away, and a wonderful view opened up. I saw across a little valley like the background of a Dürer. Lording it over a few acres of knolls and undulations draped with gray fences and dotted with rocks like brown sheep, there was a small house that seemed to have grown from the land. This little house presented to the view from the highway a broad bottle-shaped chimney built up one wall from field stones and newly whitewashed. And out of this broad chimney, very white, its rough bulk linking the flat wall to the curving land, the thinnest trace of smoke declared that someone lived here. I supposed that all this country looked this way when my grandfather helped raise the steeple.

My father pushed the choke all the way in. The needle of the temperature gauge seemed stuck in its bed on the left side of the dial; the heater refused to declare itself. His hands as they controlled the car moved with a pained quickness across the metal and hard rubber. “Where are your gloves?” I asked him.

“In the back, aren’t they?”

I turned and looked; on the back seat the leather gloves I had bought him for Christmas lay curled palms up between a rumpled road map and a snarl of baling rope. I had paid nearly nine dollars for them. The money came from a little “art school” account I had started that summer with money earned from my 4-H project, a patch of strawberries. I had spent so much for these gloves I only bought my mother a book and my grandfather a handkerchief; I so wanted my father to care about his clothes and his comfort, like the fathers of my friends. And the gloves had fit. He wore them the first day,
and then they rested in the front seat, and then when one day three people crowded into the front seat, they were tossed into the back. “Why don’t you ever wear them?” I asked him. My voice with him was almost always accusing.

“They’re too good,” he said. “They’re wonderful gloves, Peter. I know good leather. You must have paid a fortune for ’em.”

“Not that much, but aren’t your hands cold?”

“Yeah. Boy, this is a bitter day. We’re in Old Man Winter’s belly.”

“Well don’t you want to put the gloves on?”

Roadside scruff in a scratchy stream poured past my father’s profile. He emerged from thought to tell me, “When I was a kid, if anybody had given me gloves like that, I would have cried real tears.”

These words hurt my stomach, weighted as they were by what I had overheard while awaking. I had gathered only that there was something
in
him, and this thing, which I thought might be the same thing that made him resist wearing my gloves, I hoped I could elicit; though I did suspect that he was too old and too big for me to purge or change completely, even for my mother’s sake. I leaned closer and studied the edges of white flesh where his fists gripped the steering wheel. The wrinkles in his skin seemed fissures; the hairs, bits of captured black grass. The backs of his hands were dappled with dull brown warts. “Doesn’t the steering wheel feel like ice?” I asked. My voice sounded like my mother’s, when she had said, “You can’t feel such things.”

“To tell the truth, Peter, my tooth hurts so much I don’t notice it.”

I was surprised and relieved: a toothache was new; perhaps this mere thing was what was in him. I asked, “Where?”

“In the back.” He sucked; his cheek, cut in shaving this morning, wrinkled. The blood of his cut seemed very dark.

“You ought to have it looked at. That’s simple.”

“I don’t know which one it is. All of ’em probably. I ought to have every tooth in my head yanked. Slap a plate in there. Go to one of these butchers in Alton that pulls ’em out and puts ’em in the same day. They push ’em right into your bloody gums.”

“Is that really what they do?”

“Sure. They’re sadists, Peter. Mongoloid sadists.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

The heater, thawed by our run down the hill, came on; brown air baked by rusty pipes breathed onto my ankles. Each morning, this event had the tone of a rescue. Now that a margin of comfort had been promised, I turned on the radio. The little dial, thermometer-shaped, glowed wan orange. When the tubes warmed, cracked and jagged nighttime voices sang in the bright blue morning. My scalp tingled and tightened; the voices, negroid and hillbilly, seemed to pick their way along the tune over obstacles that made their voices skip, lift, and stagger; and this jagged terrain seemed my country. It was the U. S. A. the songs conveyed: mountains of pine, oceans of cotton, tan western immensities haunted by disembodied voices cracked by love invaded the Buick’s stale space. A commercial delivered with an unctuous irony spoke soothingly of the cities, where I hoped my life would take me, and then a song came like a choo-choo, clicking, irresistible, carrying the singer like a hobo on top of its momentum, and my father and I seemed ourselves irresistible, rolling up and down through the irregularities of our suffering land, warm in the midst of much cold. In those days the radio carried me into my future, where I was strong: my closets were full of beautiful
clothes and my skin as smooth as milk as I painted, to the tune of great wealth and fame, pictures heavenly and cool, like those of Vermeer. That Vermeer himself had been obscure and poor I knew. But I reasoned that he had lived in backward times. That my own times were not backward I knew from reading magazines. True, in all of Alton County only my mother and I seemed to know about Vermeer; but in the great cities there must be thousands who knew, all of them rich. Vases and burnished furniture stood upright around me. On a stiff tablecloth a loaf of sugary bread lay sequinned with pointillist dabs of light. Beyond the parapet of my balcony a high city of constant sun named New York glimmered in its million windows. My white walls accepted a soft breeze scented with chalk and whole cloves. In the doorway a woman stood, shadow-mirrored by the polished tiles, and watched me; her lower lip was slightly heavy and slack, like the lower lip of the girl in the blue turban in The Hague. Among these images which the radio songs rapidly brushed in for me the one blank space was the canvas I was so beautifully, debonairly, and preciously covering. I could not visualize my work; but its featureless radiance made the center of everything as I carried my father in the tail of a comet through the expectant space of our singing nation.

After the tiny town of Galilee, gathered, no bigger than Firetown, around the Seven-Mile Tavern and the cinder-block structure of Potteiger’s Store, the road like a cat flattening its ears went into a straightaway where my father always speeded. Passing the model barn and outbuildings of the Clover Leaf Dairy, where conveyor belts removed the cows’ dung, the road then knifed between two high gashed embankments of eroding red earth. Here a hitchhiker waited beside a little pile of stones. As we rose toward him I noticed,
his silhouette being printed sharply on the slope of clay, that his shoes were too big, and protruded oddly behind his heels.

My father slammed on the brakes so suddenly it seemed he recognized the man. The hitchhiker ran after our car, his shoes flapping. He wore a faded brown suit whose pattern of vertical chalkstripes seemed incongruously smart. He clutched to his chest as if for warmth a paper bundle tightly tied with butcher’s cord.

My father leaned across me, rolled open my window, and shouted, “We’re not going all the way into Alton, just to the bottom of Coughdrop Hill!”

The hitchhiker drooped at our door. His pink eyelids blinked. A dirty green scarf was tied around his neck, keeping his upturned coat lapels pressed against his throat. He was older than his lean figure glimpsed at a distance suggested. Some force of misery or weather had scrubbed his white face down to the veins; broken bits of purple had hatched on his cheeks like infant snakes. Something dainty in his swollen lips made me wonder if he were a fairy. I had once been approached by a shuffling derelict while waiting for my father in front of the Alton Public Library and his few mumbled words before I fled had scored me. I felt, as long as my love of girls remained unconsummated, open on that side—a three-walled room any burglar could enter. An unreasoning hate of the hitchhiker suffused me. The window my father had opened to him admitted cold air that made my ears ache.

As usual, my father’s apologetic courtesy had snagged the very progress it sought to smooth. The hitchhiker was bewildered. We waited for his brains to thaw enough to absorb what my father had said. “We’re not going all the way into Alton,” my father called again, and in impatience leaned so far over that his huge head was in front of my face. As he
squinted, a net of brown wrinkles leaped up behind his eye. The hitchhiker leaned in toward my father and I felt absurdly pinched between their fumbling old faces. And all the while the musical choo-choo was clicking forward on the radio; I yearned to board it.

“How far?” the hitchhiker asked. His lips hardly moved. His hair was lank and sparse on top and so long uncut it bunched in feathery tufts above his ears.

“Four miles, get in,” my father said, suddenly decisive. He pushed at my door and said to me, “Move over, Peter. Let the gentleman up front by the heater.”

“I’ll get in back,” the hitchhiker said, and my hate of him ebbed a little. He did have some vestige of decent manners. But in getting into the back seat he behaved curiously. He did not lift his fingers from the sill of my window until with the other arm, awkwardly pinching the bundle against his side, he had worked open the back door. As if we were, my selfless father and my innocent self, a treacherous black animal he was capturing. Once safe in the cavity behind us, he sighed and said, in one of those small ichorous voices that seems always to be retracting in mid-sentence, “What a fucking day. Freeze your sucking balls off.”

My father let out the clutch and did a shocking thing: turning his head to talk to the stranger, he turned off my radio. The musical choo-choo with all its freight of dreaming dropped over a cliff. The copious purity of my future shrank to the meagre confusion of my present. “Just as long as it doesn’t snow,” my father said. “That’s all the hell I care about. Every morning I pray: ‘Dear Lord, no snow.’ ”

Unseen behind me the hitchhiker was snuffling and liquidly enlarging like some primeval monster coming to life again out of a glacier. “How about you, boy?” he said, and
through the hairs on my neck I could feel him hunch forward. “You don’t mind the snow, do ya?”

“The poor kid,” my father said, “he never gets a chance to go sledding any more. We took him out of the town where he loved to be and stuck him in the sticks.”

“I bet he likes the snow real good,” the hitchhiker said. “I bet he likes it fine.” Snow seemed to mean something else to him; he certainly was a fairy. I was more angered than frightened; my father was with me.

He, too, seemed disturbed by our guest’s obsession. “How about it, Peter?” he asked me. “Does it still mean a lot to you?”

“No,”
I said.

The hitchhiker snorted moistly. My father called back to him, “Where’ve you come from, mister?”

“North.”

“You heading into Alton.”

“Guess so.”

“You know Alton?”

“I been there before.”

“What’s your profession?”

“Annnh—I cook.”

“You
cook!
That’s a wonderful accomplishment, and I know you’re not lying to me. What’s your plan? To stay in Alton?”

“
Ihnnn
. Just to get a job enough to get me south.”

“You know, mister,” my father said, “you’re doing what I’ve always wanted to do. Bum around from place to place. Live like the birds. When the cold weather hits, just flap your wings and go south.”

The hitchhiker giggled, puzzled.

My father went on, “I’ve always wanted to live in Florida, and I never got within smelling distance of it. The furthrest
south I ever got in my whole life was the great state of Maryland.”

“Nothin’ much in Maryland.”

“I remember in grammar school back in Passaic,” my father said, “how they were always telling us about the white stoops of Baltimore. Every morning, they said, the housewives would get out there with the bucket and scrub-brush and wash these white marble stoops until they shone. Ever see that?”

“I been in Baltimore but I never seen that.”

“That’s what I thought. They lied to us. Why the hell would anybody spend their life washing a white marble stoop that as soon as you scrub it up some moron with dirty shoes comes along and puts his footprint on it? It never seemed credible to me.”

“I never seen it,” the hitchhiker said, as if regretting that he had caused such a radical disillusion. My father brought to conversations a cavernous capacity for caring that dismayed strangers. They found themselves involved, willy-nilly, in a futile but urgent search for the truth. This morning my father’s search seemed especially urgent, as if time were running out. He virtually shouted his next question. “How’d you get caught up here? If I was in your shoes, mister, I’d be in Florida so fast you wouldn’t see my dust.”

“I was living with a guy up in Albany,” the hitchhiker said reluctantly.

My heart shrivelled to hear my fears confirmed; but my father seemed oblivious of the horrible territory we had entered. “A friend?” he asked.

“Yeah. Kinda.”

“What happened? He pull the old double-cross?”

In his delight the hitchhiker lurched forward behind me.
“That’s right, buddy,” he told my father. “That’s just what that fucking sucker did. Sorry, boy.”

“That’s O. K.,” my father said. “This poor kid hears more horrible stuff in a day than I have in a lifetime. He gets that from his mother; she sees everything and can’t do a thing about it. Thank God I’m half-blind and three-quarters deaf. Heaven protects the ignorant.”