The Hair of Harold Roux (23 page)

“Mark, damn it!”

“Just thought you ought to be the first to know Federal Government ran out of good trips. Inside information.” Mark laughed for a while, too long a while, then sighed. “Sorry. Strictly unimpeachable source. High up in Pentagon. Unimpeachable!
No fun even burning babies any more. Up to the ass in cooked babies. Oh dear, here I go again, giving the wrong impression. Don’t mean a word of it. Scout’s honor.”

“Where are you, Mark?”

“Oh me, I can see I’m not making my point again. Where I am is in this box, smelling slightly of piss, with teeny-tiny cracks in it. Or did I mention that before. But Aaron, are you there? Lately people tend to go away, don’t know why. Giving absolutely wrong impression again, but anyway I’m in this box with heretoforementioned teeny-weeny cracks. But Aaron, in the glass—right in the middle of the glass is this pretty silver wire. How the hell did they get it
in
there? I mean it kind of makes you proud just thinking about it. I’d like to just spend the rest of the day looking at it and feeling proud, but I’ve got a date, you know, and now I really do have to run.”

“Frank Hawkes told me you were down on all of us,” Aaron says.

“Shit, I’m surrounded. Cute little pissers, full of warped love, which is why they want to kill, but they don’t. No alternatives, right? Even that ol’ boy deputy sheriff broke my hand way back in the ancient age, the old times, man, when there wasn’t any black and white. Remember? Salt and pepper then. Now spade cats I was in jail with won’t shake my hand. Fucking honky. I understand. Understand perfectly. Ta, ta, comrade. Perfectly all right.”

“Mark, please tell me where you are.”

“Broken record, dad. Broken record. You ought to hear yourself. Where are you Mark where are you Mark where are you Mark where are you Mark. On and on like that. Lack of communication. Ill of our times.”

“Okay, but you don’t sound exactly normal either.”

“Oh well now. Let’s not get insulting about it. Not worth it, you know. Shall I say that I rather sense that I’m a little
quick
? Yes, I’m very
quick
at the moment. Very quick. Got to slow down a little. Got to see the elevator man. Genius. Control. Up and down. A little down will fix me up. Down, up,
right? Dichotomy, paradox, Professor? Oh shit, there I go again, giving the wrong impression. Communications failure. Short circuit in the intercommunication complex. Absolute flop. Just terrible.”

“Mark, how can we help you?”

“You’re awfully slow, Aaron, or shall we say that you’re a real pile of goo? Shit, I mean you’re a perfect sweetie, a perfect marshmallow. We’ll keep in touch, huh? I mean, don’t call me, I’ll call you.” Suddenly the hornlike voice turns hard and angry. “And in any case, Aaron, fuck off, will you?”

A woman’s flat, businesslike voice says, though with a certain institutional breeziness, “Deposit sixty-five cents for three more minutes, please.”

“I haven’t got the change, honey,” Mark says.

“Mark, give me the number. Let me call you back.”

“I told this guy to fuck off, operator. What do I do now?”

Then silence. Far off in the the ether, women’s voices chat busily, just below the level of understanding.

Suddenly Aaron remembers another dream he had last flight. First comes its heavy mood—horror at a lack of horror. Deep calm. It was on a lake with an Indian name—Min-netonka, Iduhapi, Pasquaney—a calm, clear lake surrounded by forest, with only a few cabins on its shores, and those were old dark cabins made of logs or rough lumber some time in the teens of the century. In those cabins would be found mounted antlers, beaded doorway curtains, hand-operated pumps in the kitchen sinks, blue enameled tin dishes and cups, bare pine studding dark orange with age, stone fireplaces with half-log mantels, owl’s-head andirons, kerosene lamps. In the dream Aaron stood up to his waist in the cool water, near the end of the dock, tying the mooring line of his small sailing dory. It was dusk, the sky darkening into an orange the color of oak leaves in the fall—that rich subdued orange-umber that seems so warm. Several yards away, on the float, Agnes sat, gleaming from her swim, touched on smooth shoulders and arms by the sky’s orange light. He did not speak to her, nor she to him, but she watched him carefully,
levelly. Her hair, darkened and flattened by the water, covered her head like a hood. The evening wind, barely felt, was warm. His feet were down in darkness, in the slightly risky other-world of water things, but he could look down his body past chest, sternum, ribs, into the darkness. Currents of delicately changing temperature passed his thighs. Upon the float, Agnes, still watching him, pulled her legs up to sit with her arms around her knees. It did not seem startling that the Negro body floated next to him, impassive black face up. It was the body of a husky man. The dead eyes were open, showing a brown stain in the whites. Bluegum, he thought, the blackest of the black. The body nudged him, and he pushed it slowly away, his hand white against the thick, shiny hair on its head. Another body floated near the dock, just the back of the woolly head and onyx shoulders above the water. Out in the lake, several more naked black bodies, men and women, floated low in the calm water. It did not occur to him to wonder what event had caused these well-formed black bodies to be here, floating with stern calm in the evening water. The fact signified its own inevitability. Someone would have to remove the bodies from the lake, but he did not feel immediately responsible. It would be taken care of later. Perhaps he would write about it, but it didn’t fit into his plans for the next morning’s work, nor would it interfere with this evening’s calm enjoyment. Perhaps there was a slight doubt; it seemed sadly ominous that the bodies were here. Of course if they weren’t removed for several days they would begin to pollute the lake. When he had finished tying the dory for the night he looked deep into the water and saw the buoy anchor line going down, down, fading into that other element. He then felt some fear. Agnes slipped without a splash into the water and slid toward him as if propelled by fins. Briefly their cool mouths touched, and they walked, pushing the weight of the water aside, to the shore. Here, the one white body, that of an older man with shaggy gray hair and beard, lay in the shallows, his mouth wide open, torn-looking, as though he had died in the midst of a scream.

He has been holding on to the telephone, and now he puts it back into its cradle. He is still stunned and bemused by those dignified bodies, and by his attitude in the dream of calm acceptance. “In dreams we are other people,” he says out loud, his voice startling him as though someone has sneaked up behind him and spoken into his ear.

But in dreams we are really, truly ourselves, aren’t we? Except that in dreams all is supposed to be in code. Nothing is what it seems.

He wanders into the kitchen. He’s just had two beers. If he doesn’t drink any more at all he can at least
think
coherently about the hair of Harold Roux. He ought to call Mark’s mother, but he can’t stand the idea. Maybe he’ll send her a post card, but what can he tell her? That Mark called and said not to worry in a voice that obviously had the heebie-jeebies. “Mark’s fine, Mrs. Rasmussen, he’s just a hair strung out, is all. On his uppers, you might say. Can’t get off E (Empty), but I don’t believe he’s on H …” But what the hell does he know about it? He’ll have a drink; he knows about addiction, all right. It’s right now, reaching for the half-gallon of Beam, not wanting it but having to have it. Or watching a student who takes whole minutes to find a ragged manuscript in his book bag, moving so slowly, so slowly. That’s heroin, probably. Or is it Seconal? In the recent past they have written him stories and poems about all the stages along the way, about smack and a one and one nosin’, and a two and two, about so and so’s OD’d and he’s dead so they leave him. He’s
dead
, so what can they do? Heavy, man. Heavy.

The chemicals stain the ice cubes. C
₂
H
₅
OH: ethyl, or ethanol. He knows that language. He’s smoked pot occasionally over the years, too, but there’s that mean, nasty business of the law hanging over it, and like it or not he’s got too much to lose; he’s got insurance policies, a mortgage, a profession, children to feed and doctor and educate. But the state’s own commission hustles the booze, so that’s okay. He drinks. Blagh. The dope goes down and assaults his pyloric valve. It’s a depressant, for Christ’s sake, and who needs to be depressed?
He lights a cigarette, another kind of dope with its grinning skull of blue smoke, gray after his lungs efficiently filter it. He swings his hand through the hemorrhage of smoke, roiling it madly.

With his drink expertly in hand he is, as always, drawn back to his study, to the scene of the crime. Commission or omission.

The dormitory room, its bland maple furniture, its putty-colored cement block walls, on a spring afternoon. Outside it is raining and has been misting and dripping all day.

Nathan Weinstein, at this time, was having a very short infatuation with sparkling burgundy. He didn’t really like whiskey or beer; he wanted his drinking to be fancy and ceremonial, the way it would someday be when he was important, suave, consorting with the influential of the earth. So he’d bought a case of sparkling burgundy, a thirty-five-pound block of ice, a washtub, a set of six champagne glasses with hollow stems, a box of fancy unsalted crackers, and several jars of salmon and whitefish caviar. Knuck Gillis busily chipped the ice with the bayonet from his souvenir Arisaka rifle. Before they thought to lock the door against thirsty visitors, Hilary David Edward St. George ambled amiably in, so they invited him to stay.

“Oh, I say!” Hilary said. “My! You fellows are preparing to have a bash, what?”

Hilary had come over to give Allard a set of photographs of Mary. He often followed the two of them around, snapping pictures, preferably of Mary alone. At the Student Union or downtown they’d see him, waiting for them, following them, or sitting across a room mooning at Mary. It made her genuinely upset and sad to see this, but it didn’t bother Allard. If bloody Christopher Robin wanted to shadow them, it was no harm, which was strange because Allard didn’t like to be followed at all. He was the hunter; if any stalking was to be done he would do it. So what it meant was that Hilary David
Edward St. George hadn’t the force, or the presence, to irritate him that way. Yet Hilary was a legitimate hero, a former RAF flight sergeant who had flown “Hurries,” as he called the Hawker Hurricane fighter. He’d shot down an Me iooe, a Henschel 127, and (he laughed deprecatingly about this) a Feiseler Storch. Allard had seen the documents and the gun camera series that confirmed these victories. It was true, all of it, and what a lark it had been for Hilary. A tall, gangly boy of twenty-seven, he looked fifteen, with his thick black hair standing up from his head like a busby, his cheerful, vacuous smile and constant chatter. His father was English, his mother from a somewhat Brahmin family in Boston. Hilary’s accent was somewhere in between. He made model airplanes in his room, charmingly confessed that what he really enjoyed was to sit in his bath and squeeze little whiteheads from his scrotum, so he missed his mother’s house in Boston where they had wizard great tubs. He had asked Mary to marry him and taken her down to meet his mother. (“Hilary’s mother is awful—both meanings of the word,” Mary had said afterwards. “And how could I marry someone I always want to pat on the head?”) One of Hilary’s stories was about a time he’d gone, just for a lark, as a gunner on a Lancaster flown by his friend, a four-engine type named Bunny Berkhamstead. Good old Bunny! On the way home over the Channel the bomb-bay doors were jammed open and the navigator, silly clot, forgot and stepped out. No parachute. They all got to giggling so hard Bunny almost lost his way back to Blighty. Funniest thing that ever happened. “Oh, that clot, that silly, silly
clot
! They were all laughing so hard Bunny could hardly bring the aircraft down, nearly forgot to lower his undercart!”

Allard was fascinated by all this. Christopher Robin at ten thousand feet in his Hurricane, being shot at by real guns, with real bullets. He couldn’t get over it. He’d think, My God, was the war fought by children? Hilary was like one of his own double exposures: Allard could accept the official certification of Hilary’s combat, and he could accept charming, candid, living Hilary, but how to believe the two together?

Hilary spread the photographs out on Allard’s desk. “See this one. It’s got part of your motorbike in it, there on the left, but
tant mieux
it’s a lovely shot of Mary. Lovely! And here’s a smashing close-up of the two of you looking at each other. No,
you
Ve looking at something over the top of her head. I wonder what? It’s simply impossible, Benson, to snap a poor picture of Mary. I thought you’d like to have them!”

Allard thanked him, wonderingly. He also thought, but didn’t say, Hilary, old chap, I have
Mary
; what do I need a flock of photographs
for
?

“Hey, you bloody lime-juicer!” Knuck Gillis said. “Pass the mucking bubbly!” Knuck drank, his big pinky carefully cocked. “Pip pip, cheers and a jolly good show, what?”

“Absolutely! First-rate!” Hilary said.

In Knuck’s eyes the last pale shade of blue seemed about to fade away. He was all pale—his hair, his skin, his fingernails. Bloodless force. Nathan once wondered aloud if there could be such a thing as a partial albino. “I’m a white man,” Knuck informed him.

Knuck had other strangenesses. Nathan and Allard studied him. He made little nests of soiled clothes on his desk and on his bed. His face would go dim, go away somewhere while his hands arranged the circular piles of cloth. His face assumed the faraway, instinctive, compelled expression of a beagle who turns around several times before lying down, even though the ancient grass has been a thousand generations gone. The big hands patted, changed, rearranged a jockstrap, a sock, a T-shirt, a pair of shorts until something deep inside said, Yes, that’s the proper order, now it’s all right.

While Allard and Nathan studied him, Knuck was amazed that he lived among these strange new friends. He was a member of Kappa Sigma, a fraternity even more jock, then, than most, but he chose to live in a dormitory and have for friends a small Jew, a bewigged, flirty (probably) mackerel-snapper, and an intellectual-type English lit. major. He couldn’t get over it, because he knew who he was, and what he was just didn’t go with such types. The School of Hard
Knocks was his college; he was a phys. ed. major. He couldn’t get over it. It was miraculous; it added another dimension to his life. “I
like
this little Jew here, for Christ’s sake! I even like that skinny pansy with the hair piece!”