The Cry of the Sloth (22 page)

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Dear Vikki,

It’s all over. I enclose the letter I am mailing out to everyone. I should have done this years ago. I tell myself that, but it doesn’t help. I feel emptied out, hollowed and cored. I look into myself and it’s like peering into a dry cistern. I shout into it, “Is anybody
down there
?” You can imagine what I get for an answer. I still have a lot of things to do.

Much love,

Andy

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Dear Contributor,

We are returning your submission unread. We would have enjoyed reading it, probably, but were prevented doing so by the thought that you doubtless would like it back sooner rather than later, so you can submit it somewhere else, should that be your intention. For, alas,
Soap
is no more. The forces of conformity contrived to starve it of nourishment until it died. It is survived by its editor Andrew Whittaker, who was observed crawling from the wreckage last Friday afternoon and was seen again, several hours later, waving from a bus.

Sincerely,

Walter Fudge,

Executor for the Estate

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Dear Jolie,

For the past couple of days, ever since I threw the Royal typewriter, the big gray thing we got from Papa, out the bedroom window, people stop on the sidewalk across the street and point. The police came in three cars and I told them I was typing on the windowsill and it fell out. There is not going to be a Soap Festival. I can’t imagine why I ever thought that would be an interesting thing to do. Come to think of it, I am not sure I ever told you about it. No point now.

Andy

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Dear Stewart,

I did get the questionnaire and I did fill it out, but I never mailed it, and now it is lost. The inside pocket of my jacket is torn, and I sometimes forget this, and then the things I slip in there vanish for good, unless I happen to hear them hit the ground, which in the case of your questionnaire I am sure I did not. Since it was only one sheet it would not have made much noise anywhere it fell, and I have lately spent a lot of time walking on grass. Furthermore, as we are now in October, a falling questionnaire would have had to compete with the sound of descending leaves aptly described as a rustle.

But losing it was probably for the best, as I have come to have second thoughts about some of my answers. I was, in any case, embarrassed by the condition of the sheet, which bore on its wrinkled surface evidence of once having been tightly balled up. I want you to know that this balling up, if it occurred, was not connected to my feelings about you and Jolie or the things you said about the accident with the vase, but was a result of the state my nerves are in these days and the frustration occasioned by some of your questions. Marital status, for example. There I just had to take a wild guess. Also the question, “Do you consider yourself innocent?” Here we have a question which kept Kafka and Dostoevsky, to name just two, on the mat, not to mention Kierkegaard, and you want
me
to check “Yes” or “No”? I puzzled over that one for hours before hitting on what I thought at the time was a satisfactory solution. But on reflection I now think that checking both boxes was probably more confusing than helpful. And even if I could have settled decisively on one or the other—or even on both or neither—that would still leave the whole question of degree as wide open as ever. I usually think I am thirty percent innocent, but you did not provide any place for that. I don’t suppose the judge is going to let me talk about this. Finally, your request that I describe myself in twenty-five words or less has me stumped, though I have made a start.

Andy

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Smart aleck

Wiseass

A storm of criticism

A shadow of himself

A blind man in a blind house

A coruscating ape

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Adam raised an edge of the window shade. A sliver of afternoon sunlight raced across the room, forcing Fern to lift a slim hand to her face in order to shield her eyes from the impact of the sudden brightness. Adam turned and leaned an elbow on a narrow dresser from which the veneer had begun to peel in jagged strips. He did not need to open the top drawer to know that in it was a Gideon Bible, for this hotel room, with its yellow wallpaper and iron bed, was all the hotel rooms he had ever stayed in. Leaning there, he looked at Fern sprawled on the bed, bisected by the beam, half in light and half in shadow, one arm raised as if to ward off his gaze, while with the other she struggled with something in her lap, and she was all the women he had ever been with. And now he thought of the previous night, and of her in that night, and his mouth, hitherto a resolute crease, twitched merrily at both corners. Fern saw this and smiled wanly, for lack of sleep and an abundance of alcohol had reduced her to a stupor. Chuckling grimly, he turned from her, to peer cautiously through the crack at the edge of the shade. For a moment he could see nothing, while his bloodshot eyes adjusted to the glare. Then, as the scene across the street seeped into focus, the chuckles died like strangled marbles in his throat. From the bed Fern could see his whole body heave as if seized by some spasm. She was not surprised, as she also felt queasy. She could not, however, supine as she was at the far end of the room, small though it was, actually glimpse what he was looking at.

This was a low brick building, resembling a warehouse, with STINT BROS. TOWING in white paint above the doorway. The doors were open and Adam could see the back half of a wrecker parked inside, its iron hook hanging from the steel cable like an upside-down question mark. But it was not just this that had caused him to stagger backwards two steps. At the side of the building was a dirt yard, and there he had spotted the familiar remains of his vehicle, the remains of his familiar vehicle, stacked in several neat piles: fenders together in one place, doors in another, the smaller parts in little heaps of their own. And in the midst of them all the once-powerful engine lay on its side in the dirt, wires and tubes cruelly severed, their mutilated stubs sticking up. Adam knew there was no mechanic on earth able to fit those pieces back together, and he cursed himself for having stayed in bed so late, and cursed Fern too for twice dragging him back when he had tried to get up. Dozens of other cars, mostly luxury models in various states of dismantlement, were scattered about among the puddles and dismal weeds that tufted the yard here and there. Around it all ran a high chain-link fence topped by three rows of barbed wire. Adam had seen operations like this before, for he had been an investigator for one of America’s leading insurance companies probably, before his life had taken the turn which had brought him to this place, which was as near nowhere as a place can get, and into the arms of this woman, who was now sitting on the edge of the bed trying to get the cap off a vodka bottle. Adam walked over. “This way,” he said, showing her which way to turn it. “I know how to fuckin’ do it” she slurred irritably.

Adam shrugged and resumed his vigil at the window. His eyes hurt and he was annoyed by the continuing sounds of struggle behind him. And then he saw the dog. It was lying on a car seat in front of a rack of chrome bumpers, concealed, as it were, in their dazzle, and it appeared to be asleep. Adam had mistaken it at first for a large bag of garbage, of which there were indeed many scattered about the yard, one of the most untidy places he had ever witnessed, but now he saw that it was a Doberman pinscher. The animal must have felt his gaze upon it, as dogs are wont to do even as they sleep, for it opened one eye and stared at Adam, who quickly let the shade drop. He turned back to the room. Leaning a pensive elbow on the dresser, he looked at Fern working at the bottle cap with her teeth. He contemplated her smeared lipstick, dirt-streaked face, the bits of straw in her hair, the torn flower-print blouse with sweat stains at the armpits. Then he thought of his wife Glenda in her white tennis shorts, leaping over the net at the end of a vigorous match, her shirt still neatly tucked. His mind reeled.

He slumped, sliding down the wall to the floor, where he sat with his back against the yellow wallpaper, legs outstretched and toes pointing up at the ceiling. Fern wandered over and sat beside him, similarly. From the street below the window rose the babble and clang of a typical small town, the excited cries of children, both joyous and not, mingled with the chatter of townspeople bumping into each other on the streets, as they did every day with equal freshness. From up in the hotel room they sounded like chickens. This caused Fern to think of the farm and the pitiful bunch of vitreous-eyed gallinacae there. She pictured them pecking irritably at bits of gravel, tinfoil, and the filter tips from her father’s Tareytons, tossed carelessly this way and that, and she saw them stagger as if inebriated. The tiny eggs, about the size of walnuts, were sprinkled in disorderly patterns about the farmyard, and sometimes the chickens tripped over them; and she pictured that too. Thinking of the chickens made her think ineluctably of her father, for whom the chickens, even though sick, unattractively bald in spots, and feculent, were cherished reminders of his departed wife, who used to call them by clucking on the kitchen steps. She recalled her final glimpse of the old farmer through the rear window of the big truck, little more than a dark smudge in the huge cloud of dust they had churned up behind them. His pathetic questions about the mower hung in her memory.

Was it because their bodies had cleaved in passionate embrace for the past several hours that their minds had so intertwined and fused that Adam too was thinking of chickens? Even as he stared numbly at the yellow wallpaper in front of him, which at that moment seemed to pulsate? For the first time since he had seen the figure crossing from Glenda’s bedroom to the beach—an apparition that had propelled him on this ill-fated journey back to the ancestral plot—he let himself imagine another life, one without the tormenting presence of Glenda and Saul, if that apparition had indeed been Saul, which he could never know for sure, or of Glenda and Saul and someone else, in case it had been someone else, as it surely might have been, given the dim light and the possibility, nay, even probability, that what looked like a goatee was really a piece of something hanging from the departing person’s mouth, toast or lettuce, for surely Adam’s arrival had interrupted the lovers’ meal, as was attested by the half-gnawed lamb chops under the table, hurled there obviously in haste. He shook his head violently from side to side in an attempt to drag his mind from this morass, and to imagine another, better, life, one without so many commas. Even as he sat in ungainly abandon, his legs sticking out in front of him, on the floor of the dingy hotel room across the street from Stint Bros. Towing, where he most surely would be going soon, to what end and consequence he knew not, he let his imagination play with the idea of a life shared with Fern on a little chicken farm, clinging, as it were, to this desperate vision as to an inflated inner tube. He imagined sunlight streaming into a modest kitchen and fresh eggs for breakfast.

Fern looked over at Adam and attempted to take his hand in hers, but he drew it back, as if burned. Indeed, he got to his feet. “I’m going to see Dahlberg,” he said in a voice of surprising flatness, and stepped to the door. Fern’s wide eyes pleaded mutely even as they filled with salty liquid. Then she uttered something, but whether lamentation or warning, he could not tell, for her speech was slurred and indistinct. Tearing his trouser leg from her grasp, tearing it as he tore it, he looked a last time at her upturned face and flung himself from the door, flung himself out the door.

Meanwhile, in a small office at the rear of the garage, Dahlberg Stint sat with his feet up on a large wooden desk. His big brother Tiresome stood behind him, his huge hands hanging at his sides. Dahlberg was eating a sandwich. Though it was lunchtime, Tiresome had no sandwich, for he had consumed his on morning break, as he was wont to do daily despite his oft-uttered resolutions to the contrary, resolutions which he had repeated strenuously to himself that very morning even as he was removing the rubber band and unfolding the wax paper. Dahlberg munched slowly, occasionally lifting the bread to peer inside, thus exposing to Tiresome’s gaze the gaudy interior of salami, pickles, tomatoes, and mayonnaise. There was some malice in this, for Dahlberg already knew what was inside. Now he closed the sandwich a final time but did not resume chewing or even swallow what was in his mouth, for he had glimpsed above the crusty rim of the bread the figure of a man silhouetted in the doorway of the garage. Indeed it was the silhouette of a man whose figure was strangely familiar.

He removed his feet from the desk and lowered the sandwich until it rested firmly on the blotter. The bread was white with long black smudges made by Dahlberg’s fingers, nail-bitten appendages that he was now wiping briskly against the front of his coveralls, upon which the gaudy entrails of sandwiches from days gone by were thickly spread, for there were no napkins. He shot a quick glance at Tiresome, a glance which said clearly, “There is the figure of a silhouette in the doorway. Be prepared.” Tiresome nodded in mute assent, for such was the rapport between the eye-sets of the two, then let his own gaze drop quickly to the sandwich. As he stared at it, half-eaten and isolate in the center of the desk blotter, it seemed to pulsate. In order not to shoot an arm out and snatch it too soon, before he was certain his brother had abandoned it for good, a precipitation which could earn him a rap on the knuckles with a box wrench, he forced his huge hands into the pockets of his coveralls, pockets that were constricted by the prior presence of sundry other items, and so held his hands firmly once he had worked them in there up to the wrists. Dahlberg stood up, if “up” is the word for someone that short, his scrawny neck convulsing as he struggled to swallow the final dry mouthful of sandwich.

Adam crossed the garage, walking carefully to avoid the scattered tools and oily rags, and stepped through the doorway of the office. He looked at the two men standing behind the desk, and he almost smiled. There stood the slack-jawed giant, his dull gaze oscillating between Adam and what appeared to be a piece of moldy sponge on the desk, and next to him, head barely reaching his chest, his brother’s chest, was the homely little man with squiggly pig eyes, rotting teeth, and a bad complexion.