The Centaur (11 page)

I dimly appreciated that my father had conjured up Heaven and my mother as a protection for me, as a dam against the flood of vile confidences with which our guest was brimming; but I vividly resented that he should even speak of me to this man, that he should dip the shadow of my personality into this reservoir of slime. That my existence at one extremity should be tangent to Vermeer and at the other to the hitchhiker seemed an unendurable strain.

But relief was approaching. We came to the crest of Coughdrop Hill, the second, and steeper, of the two hills on the way to Alton. At the bottom, the road to Olinger went off to the left and we would have to let the hitchhiker out.

We began the descent. We passed a trailer truck laboring toward the crest so slowly its peeling paint seemed to have weathered in transit. Well back from the road, Rudy Essick’s great brown mansion sluggishly climbed through the down-slipping trees.

Coughdrop Hill took its name from its owner, whose coughdrops (“
SICK
? Suck an
ESSICK
!”) were congealed by the million in an Alton factory that flavored whole blocks of the city with the smell of menthol. They sold, in their little tangerine-colored boxes, throughout the East: the one time in my life I had been to Manhattan, I had been astonished to find, right in the throat of Paradise, on a counter in Grand Central Station, a homely ruddy row of them. In disbelief I
bought a box. Sure enough, on the back, beneath an imposing miniature portrait of the factory, the fine print stated
MADE IN ALTON, PA
. And the box, opened, released the chill, ectoplasmic smell of Brubaker Street. The two cities of my life, the imaginary and the actual, were superimposed; I had never dreamed that Alton could touch New York. I put a coughdrop into my mouth to complete this delicious confusion and concentric penetration; my teeth sweetened and at the level of my eyes, a hollow mile beneath the ceiling that on an aqua sky displayed the constellations with sallow electric stars, my father’s yellow-knuckled hands wrung together nervously through my delay. I ceased to be impatient with him and became as anxious as he to catch the train home. Up to this moment my father had failed me. Throughout our trip, an overnight visit to his sister, he had been frightened and frustrated. The city was bigger than the kind he understood. The money in his pocket dwindled without our buying anything. Though we walked and walked, we never reached any of the museums I had read of. The one called the Frick contained the Vermeer of the man in the big hat and the laughing woman whose lazily upturned palm unconsciously accepts the light, and the one called the Metropolitan contained the girl in the starched headdress bent reverently above the brass jug whose vertical blue gleam was the Holy Ghost of my adolescence. That these paintings, which I had worshipped in reproduction, had a simple physical existence seemed a profound mystery to me: to come within touching distance of their surfaces, to see with my eyes the truth of their color, the tracery of the cracks whereby time had inserted itself like a mystery within a mystery, would have been for me to enter a Real Presence so ultimate I would not be surprised to die in the encounter. My father’s blundering blocked it. We never entered
the museums; I never saw the paintings. Instead I saw the inside of my father’s sister’s hotel room. Though suspended twenty stories above the street, it smelled strangely like the lining of my mother’s fur-collared winter coat of thick green-plaid cloth. Aunt Alma sipped a yellow drink and dribbled the smoke of Kools from the corners of her very thin red lips. She had white, white skin and her eyes were absolutely transparent with intelligence. Her eyes kept crinkling sadly as she looked at my father; she was three years older than he. They talked all evening of pranks and crises in a vanished Passaic parsonage whose very mention made me sick and giddy, as if I were suspended over a canyon of time. Down on the street, twenty stories below, the taxi lights looped in and out, and that was abstractly interesting. During the day, Aunt Alma, here as an out-of-town children’s-clothes buyer, left us to ourselves. The strangers my father stopped on the street resisted entanglement in his earnest, circular questioning. Their rudeness and his ignorance humiliated me, and my irritation had been building toward a tantrum that the cough-drop dissolved. I forgave him. In a temple of pale brown marble I forgave him and wanted to thank him for conceiving me to be born in a county that could insert its candy into the throat of Paradise. We took the subway to Pennsylvania Station and caught a train and sat side by side as easy as twins all the way home, and even now, two years later, whenever in our daily journey we went up or down Coughdrop Hill, there was for me an undercurrent of New York and the constellations that seemed to let us soar, free together of the local earth.

Instead of braking, my father by some mistake plunged past the Olinger turnoff. I cried, “Hey!”

“It’s O. K., Peter,” he said to me softly. “It’s too cold.” His face was impassive under the cretinous cap of knitted blue.
He did not want the hitchhiker to be embarrassed by the fact that we were going out of our way to take him into Alton.

I was so indignant I dared turn and glare. The hitchhiker’s face, unfrozen, was terrible; a puddle; it mistook my motive and moved toward me with a smear of a smile and an emanation of muddy emotion. I flinched and rigidly cringed; the details of the dashboard leaped up aglitter. I shut my eyes to prevent any further inwash of that unwelcome unthinkable ichor I had roused. Most horrible in it had been something shy and grateful and girlish.

My father reared back his great head and called, “What have you learned?”

His voice strained under a high pain that bewildered the other. The back seat was silent. My father waited. “I don’t follow you,” the hitchhiker said.

My father amplified. “What’s your verdict? You’re a man I admire. You’ve had the guts to do what I always wanted to do: move around, see the cities. Do you think I’ve missed out?”

“You ain’t missed a thing.” The words curled back on themselves like offended feelers.

“Have you done anything you like to remember? I was awake all last night trying to remember something pleasant and I couldn’t do it. Misery and horror—that’s my memories.” This hurt my feelings; he had had me.

The hitchhiker’s voice scribbled; maybe it was a laugh. “Last month I killed a goddam dog,” he said. “How’s that? Damn suckin’ dogs come up outa the bushes and try to grab a piece of your leg, so I get myself a hell of a big stick and I was walkin’ along this cock jumps out at me and I cracked him right between the eyes. He drops down and I thump him a couple times more good and boy there’s one suckin’ dog won’t be tryin’ to grab a piece of your leg just because you ain’t got
no car to go haulin’ your ass around in. Christ right between the eyes the first crack.”

My father had listened rather dolefully. “Most dogs won’t hurt you,” he said now. “They’re just like I am, curious. I know just how they think. We have a dog at home I think the world of. My wife just worships that animal.”

“Well I fixed that one bastard good I tell ya,” the hitchhiker said, and sucked back spittle. “You like dogs, boy?” he asked me.

“Peter likes everybody,” my father said. “I’d give my eyes if I had that boy’s good nature. But I see your point, mister, when a dog comes up to you in the dark along a strange road.”

“Yeah and then nobody picks ya up any more,” the hitchhiker said. “Stand there all day your balls freezin’ off and yours was the first car in a hour stopped for me.”

“I always pick ’em up,” my father said. “If Heaven didn’t look after fools I’d be in your shoes. You said you’re a cook?”

“
Annh
—I done it.”

“My hat’s off to you. You’re an artist.”

I felt within myself like a worm hatching the hitchhiker beginning to wonder if my father were sane. I cringed with the desire to apologize, to grovel before this stranger, to explain.
It’s just his way, he loves strange people, he’s worried about something
.

“There’s nothin’ to it except keep the griddle greased.” This response came cautiously.

“You’re lying, mister,” my father shouted. “There’s a fine art to cooking for other people. I couldn’t learn it if you gave me a million years.”

“Buddy, that’s horse poop,” the hitchhiker said, lurching into intimacy. “Just keep the burgers thin’s all the bastards run these suckin’ joints give a dick about. Give ’em grease and
spare the meat; if I had one of those bastards gimme the word I had a hundred. The great god Dollar’s the only one they’re looking out for. Christ I wouldn’t drink the nigger piss they call coffee.”

As the hitchhiker grew more and more expansive I felt myself shrivel and shrink; my skin itched furiously.

“I wanted to be a druggist,” my father told him. “But when I got out of college there was no do-re-mi. My old man left us a Bible and a deskful of debts. But I don’t blame him, the poor devil tried to do what was right. Some of my kids—I’m a schoolteacher—go off to pharmaceutical school and from what they tell me I just wouldn’t have had enough brains for it. A druggist is an intelligent man.”

“What are you goin’ to be, boy?”

My desire to become a painter embarrassed my father. “That poor kid’s as confused as I am,” he told the hitchhiker. “He ought to get out of this part of the country and get down where there’s some sun. He has a terrible skin problem.”

In effect my father had torn off my clothes and displayed my prickling scabs. In the glare of my anger his profile seemed that of a blind raw rock.

“That right, boy? How so?”

“My skin is blue,” I said in a congested voice.

“He’s just kidding,” my father said. “He’s a hell of a good sport about it. Best thing in the world for him would be to go down to Florida; if you were his father instead of me he’d be there.”

“I expect to be down in two three weeks,” the hitchhiker said.

“Take him along!” my father exclaimed. “If ever a kid deserved a break, it’s this kid here. My wad is shot. Time to trade in on a new old man; I’m a walking junk heap.”

He took the image from the great Alton dump, which had appeared beside the road. A few fires smoldered here and there across its tattered gay acres. Things revert, through rust and rot, to a hopeful brown, and in their heaps of ash take on fantastic silhouettes, frazzled and feathery as ferns. Like a halted host of banners, colored bits of paper were pressed by a constant riverside breeze against upright weed stalks. Beyond, the Running Horse River reflected in its strip of black varnish the cobalt blue silently domed above. Elephant-colored gas tanks, mounted to rise and fall in cylindrical frames, guarded the city’s brick skyline: rose-madder Alton, the secret city, lining the lap of its purple-green hills. The evergreen crest of Mt. Alton was a slash of black. My hand twitched, as if a brush were in it. Railroad tracks slipped silver along the highway; factory parking lots flashed full; and the road became a suburban street curving between car agencies, corroded diners, and composition-shingled homes.

My father said to the hitchhiker, “There it is. The grand and glorious city of Alton. If anybody had ever come to me when I was a kid and told me I’d die in Alton, P-A, I would have laughed in his face. I’d never heard of it.”

“It’s a dirty town,” the hitchhiker said.

To me it looked so beautiful.

My father stopped the car at the intersection of 122 and the Lancaster Pike; the light was red. The pike to the right became a concrete bridge, the Running Horse Bridge, on whose other side Alton began in earnest. To the left it was three miles to Olinger and another two miles to Ely. “This is it,” my father said. “We got to put you out into the cold.”

The hitchhiker opened his door. Since my father had announced my skin, the flirtatious emanations in the car had weakened. Nevertheless, perhaps by accident, the back of my
neck was touched. In the open air the hobo hugged the paper tight against his chest. The liquid face turned stiff. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” my father called to him.

The hitchhiker sneered. “Nnnnyeah.” The door slammed. The light turned green. My heart slowed its beating. We nosed onto the pike and drove against the current of the Alton-bound traffic. Through the dusty rear window I watched our guest, looking like a messenger with his undisclosed bundle, dwindle. The hitchhiker became a brown wisp at the mouth of the bridge, flew upwards, vanished. My father said to me in the most matter-of-fact tone, “That man was a gentleman.”

There was a tantrum rich and bristling within me; I coldly intended to berate him all the way to school. “This is really great,” I said. “Really great. You’re in such a hurry you won’t let me eat a rotten bite of breakfast and then you pick up some rotten bum and go three miles out of your way for him and he doesn’t even thank you. Now we
will
be late for school. I can just
see
Zimmerman, looking at his watch, stamping up and down in the halls, wondering where you are.
Really
, Daddy, I’d think you’d have more sense once in a while. What do you
see
in these bums? Is it
my
fault I was born so you couldn’t be a bum? Florida. And then telling him about my skin. That was very nice, I thank you very much. Whyncha make me take off my shirt while you’re at it? Maybe I should have showed him my crusty legs. Whydya keep telling everybody every damn thing there is to tell? Who cares, nobody cares, all that moron cared about was killing dogs and breathing on the back of my neck. The white stoops of Baltimore, for Heaven’s sake. Really, Daddy, what do you
think
about when you babble like that?”

But you can’t keep scolding when the other person says nothing. For the second mile to Olinger we were silent together.
He was pressing, panicked now at being late, passing entire rows of cars and hogging the center of the pike. The steering wheel slithered in his hands when our tires got caught in the trolley tracks. He was lucky; we made good time. As we passed the billboard on which the Lions and Rotary and Kiwanis and Elks all welcomed us to Olinger, my father said, “Don’t worry about him knowing about your skin, Peter. He’ll forget. That’s the one thing you learn in teaching; people forget everything you tell ’em. I look at those dumb blank faces every day and it reminds me of death. You fall through those kids’ heads without a trace. I remember, when my old man knew he was dying, he opened his eyes on the bed and looked up at Mom and Alma and me and said, ‘Do you think I’ll be eternally forgotten?’ I often think about that. Eternally forgotten. That was a terrible thing for a minister to say. It scared the living daylights out of me.”