Tours of the Black Clock (2 page)

S
HE KNEW HE’D LEAVE
someday. When he was eleven he got it into his head he wanted to be a monk. Every day he built a small cathedral out of the iceblocks in the dirt; after a while all that was left of his monkdom were the ice cathedrals on which he would lie and listen to the crackling of the melting blocks. It seemed like the sound of ticking. It would be many years later, when he was sailing the boat back and forth to the island, that he’d forgive the men who found release in the legs of his mother. It would be many years before he forgave her, too.

T
HE ONLY NEGOTIATION GREEK
Judy ever had with the Chinese of Davenhall concerned the bodies in the trees out in the northern graveyard. The town could be crossed on foot in six or seven minutes walking up mainstreet, and the island in something between twelve and fifteen depending on the season. In the hard rains of autumn the graveyard flooded and the island diminished, shrunk at its northern border where Marc remembered seeing one afternoon, in a storm that came faster than any consideration of shelter, blue bubbles floating up around the tombstones; something unimaginable was gasping up from underground. The Chinese peasants of Davenhall routinely hung on the graveyard trees the bodies of the Davenhall dead, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, before interment. It was the peasants’ conviction that if one died without speaking his or her name in the final breath, then to seal away the corpse that had been wrenched loose of its identity by death would exile the spirit to some netherbetween place. At each funeral witnesses would be called forth to verify that, before dying, the dead one had established without doubt his memory of himself. If no witness could attest to such a thing, the body would hang in the graveyard trees until the universe chose to write his or her name in the sky, so that he or she could read it and call the name out. Sometimes a body hung in the trees for quite a while. Sooner or later one of the peasants would wander into town and report to the others, “I heard him today, today he said his name,” and with satisfaction the body was then buried. In the summer, especially when it was very hot, the bodies tended to remember their names much more quickly. It came to pass that the inhabitants of Davenhall kept on the tables by their beds small index cards with their names written in large letters so that should the moment of death come suddenly, and with it perhaps a paralysis of instant recall, they could read their names from the cards and cry them out in the night in order that someone walking by in the street might hear it. But when Marc saw the blue bubbles floating up around the tombstones, he realized that the interred had come to find they preferred crucifixion in the trees to slumber in the cold wet ground of the Davenhall marsh, and that they were casting out from under the rising river their very memories so that they might hang amnesiac and free before the sky and the pale rosy smear of sunset, and the writing of the universe. When Marc, huddled that day beneath a wood shack in the rain, saw the blue memories of a hundred ghosts drift off riverward to finally and vainly burst, he gathered up his innocence in all its fierceness and directed it toward the leaving of this town forever.

T
HE NIGHT THAT MARC
saw the stranger lying dead at his mother’s feet, he was nineteen. He turned and walked down the hotel stairs, out into mainstreet, down to the dock in time to catch the last boat to the mainland. He’d thought about doing this many times but this was the first that his nerve caught up with his imagination. Over the years he’d watched old man Zeno with his red riverbitten face and his long blue coat with the dingy gold buttons sail his small human ferry back and forth each day, bringing over the years thousands of strangers to the black and amber lights of Greek Judy’s tavern. Now in the dark Zeno didn’t give a second look to the boy as he stepped onto the boat, crowding in with the others, huddling against them in the fog and reek of Judy’s bourbon. But at some point during the twenty-minute journey, the old man looked Marc’s way and said something to the effect of, “Boy, that hair’s some kind of white.”

They got to shore and the tourists piled out of the boat and onto the buses that were waiting to take them twenty miles northwest to the city of Samson. It’s possible Marc wouldn’t have gotten on the bus even if he’d had a ticket, nerve having lost ground to imagination once again. Nothing irrevocable had yet been crossed. But there was no boat back to Davenhall until the morning, and so he stood there in the dirt watching the lights of the last bus vanish down the highway and then looking over his shoulder at the river behind him, and Zeno’s boathouse in the remaining desolation. Zeno sized things up. He stood in the doorway of the boathouse where he lit the gaslamp next to the window, and after blowing out the match and tossing it on the step he called out to the boy’s white hair, “Just what is it you imagine you’re doing?” I imagine, the boy answered, that I’ve lived on that island long enough, and am now about to put some real distance between us. “Not tonight, I’d say,” the old man answered. After a moment he added, “Come on in and drink something stiff, and I’ll take you back first boat of the morning.”

I’ll come in and have the drink, Marc answered. But I’m not going back.

They played cards in the boathouse, in the light of the lamp. The old man bet the gold buttons of his blue coat, since he plainly cheated and there was never the slightest danger of his losing them. He fell asleep against the wall while the boy made various accusations.

Marc did not go on to Samson the next day. Rather he did return to the island with the old man, much as the old man had figured, though he refused to step foot on it. Back and forth three times he sailed with the old man and more busloads of tourists, refusing to enter the town and waiting on deck as Zeno went to get some of Judy’s beer. Once Marc glimpsed in the distance his mother walking up main-street in a tattered salmon-colored dress he recognized, her arms folded in that way of hers and her face set with a familiar and incomprehensible determination. He glimpsed her long hair in the rising dust of the town, the gray hair that once had been a tarnished panic of fool’s-gold yellow. Marc lay low on the deck of the boat facing out toward the river, away from town and the island, leaning over the side and dragging his hand in the water, lunging for fish that he had no intention of catching.

M
ARC DID NOT GO
to Samson the next day either, or the next. He continued sailing with old Zeno back to the island, hiding on deck and never stepping ashore. Zeno put him to work collecting the fares; it also became his job to yell at passengers who leaned too far over the side, and lie to them about things in the river. It might be alligators one week and piranha the next. The old man filled Marc in on how to operate the boat through the sophistication of the currents. Sometimes, on the trip over, the fog would clear enough for a moment so that Marc could see the whole of the island as he’d never seen it. Beyond the island, beyond the interminable river in which the island rested, he might almost have believed he saw the river’s other side; in the distance a red train crossed on its tracks high above the water. The dust out over the plains were the herds of short-haired silver buffalo that had begun appearing out of nowhere at the turn of the century’s final decade. “You don’t eat one of those,” Zeno said, “however hungry you are. Light you up like a city boulevard.” Past the end of the island was the old rubble of a small shelter that had been built on wooden pillars out over the river; it was charred black from a fire that had taken place before Marc was born. The boy believed he could still see the smoke of the inferno. It was something nobody, including his mother, talked about. Know anything about that fire? he asked the old man. “Not something I talk about,” the old man muttered.

T.O.T.B.C.—2

A
FTER SEVERAL WEEKS MARC
said to the old man one night, I’m not getting to Samson very quickly this way. “Don’t say it like it’s my fault,” Zeno snapped back, “I’m not stopping you.” Well, the boy said after thinking about it a moment, I don’t have a ticket for the bus. “I’ll give you the money for the ticket,” said Zeno, “you can leave tomorrow. I’m not stopping you.” You don’t have any money, the boy said, those fares don’t add up to anything, how do you get by with charging them four-bits anyway? What kind of business is that? “It’s my business, that’s what kind,” the old man answered, “the fares don’t mean puckey. Pocket money. I get my main cut from Judy on the island, a percentage of her take. I bring her the tourists and she provides a place for them to be brought. Don’t worry about my business.” He pulled a canvas sack from beneath his mattress. He pulled from it some ratty old bills and a lot of loose change. The boy turned away. He built a fire in the stove and lit the gaslamp, not looking at Zeno who stood with the money in his gnarly hands, affronting the boy with it. Marc’s head was light and pounding from the final trip back—the liquor of the passengers and the fumes of the boat’s motor. What about you? he muttered finally, still not looking at Zeno who by this time had dropped the money to his side. “Hell I got along forty years without you, punk,” said Zeno. The two of them sat and had a drink together, and at last the boathouse began to warm though it never lost its dampness. The fire burned down and the boy fed and stoked it again, and when it burned down again, before they slept, Marc said, A couple more days. Then I’m gone. The old man nodded and muttered back, “Sure. You can leave tomorrow if you want.” When Marc was sure Zeno was asleep he added, You fucking cheat at cards anyway. Closing his eyes he heard, “Sure, leave tomorrow. I’m not stopping you.”

A
COUPLE MORE DAYS
and Marc still hadn’t left. It wasn’t long after that, on an afternoon when the sun broke glancingly through the fog, that the old man plopped with a thump down on a fruit crate near the side of the boat; thirty or forty quarters fell through his fingers and skipped across the puddles of the deck. Marc instinctively knelt to retrieve them, and only when he looked almost casually at old Zeno did he see a face that was as white as his own hair. A fat man with a hat and camera said, “Is he OK?” and began picking up quarters. Marc shook Zeno’s shoulder and said, Hey. When Zeno didn’t respond the boy said, Old man? He still didn’t respond. Oh Jesus, the boy exclaimed, torn between attending to Zeno and steering the boat, which was now beginning to veer wildly off course. Other passengers were looking around in confusion. Finally the old man’s breathing resumed, his head lifted and he peered around, but he still didn’t move and everything he said was jumbled and without sense. When the boat reached shore he couldn’t feel his legs. Marc took Zeno into the boathouse and put him on the mattress. He canceled the rest of the day’s schedule. He got into a fight with the fat man in the hat and camera over the quarters he’d pocketed. “Shouldn’t have to pay to come back anyway,” the man protested, “people should have the right to go back where they came from.” Not on my river, said Marc.

Zeno was back out on the boat the next day for a couple of trips over, but his legs still weren’t right and things said to him had to be repeated. Then he collapsed on the rail and almost fell in the water. For the next several days the business didn’t run at all. Judy came over to see where everyone had gone. “You could have let me known,” she said. Not on that island, the boy answered back. The two discussed getting a doctor while Zeno lay on the mattress listening. “Forget doctors,” he croaked, in one of his more lucid moments.

Marc woke that night when the light of the gaslamp was only a point and the sound of Zeno’s voice in the dark was only a scrape of life against death. “I set it on fire,” Marc heard him, “are you listening? That house on the pillars out over the river, forty years ago. …” There was a pause; in the dark Marc, from his side of the boathouse, could feel the old man struggling. He began to say, Don’t struggle; but the old man said first, “Say nothing and listen. I … are you listening? The hand that set it on fire was my own and now I have to tell someone. Because a man died, see. A man burnt up. City man, some kind of gangster or private eye … your mother knows. He came looking for her. He waited in that house over the river, and at night when he slept I set it on fire. Never quite knew why I did it. So I have his ashes on my soul now, now I have to tell someone because your mother’s knowing isn’t enough. She’ll die with the secret the same way she hasn’t spoken to me since it happened, it’s not a secret that should be died with. …” Marc heard him gasp. He tried to keep the old man talking, if only to reel him back from whatever he was sinking into. Old man, called Marc. Nothing. Old man?

I
T WAS OBVIOUS AND
appropriate that the old man should be given to the river; Marc wasn’t about to let him hang in a tree for a week. So in the middle of the night he took Zeno into the river and bound him with rope to the bottom of the boat. He cried as he did this. The next day, wearing the blue coat with the dirty gold buttons, he opened up business; his first decision was to raise the fare to a dollar each way. As weeks and then months passed, he came to forget about Zeno tied to the bottom of the boat, except for those odd moments when his bones rattled in the currents of the river; the passengers would look curiously to their feet at the sound. But the new captain was certainly mindful of the old man that first trip across the river when the fog closed in and there was nothing but a world of water and vapor, leaving him to ask himself, Where in the universe am I? Which he might just as well have asked all those years his boat was only a floating chinatown. And that he asked it now without ever having asked it before was what made this moment the first lapse in a life of innocence.

T
HROUGH THIS LAPSE STREAMED
a hundred wanton nights, the first of which brought a slightly boyish blonde with straight short hair and glasses who worked in a bank three hundred miles away. She came to Davenhall Island looking for just such a moment when someone might leak his life into hers. She was on the last boat of the day. She had a wallet of androgynous men. He’d been anchored twenty minutes at the island and was lying on deck waiting the two or three hours until the passengers’ return when the dark sense of her form fell across his eyelids. Since there was no sun it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a shadow. He opened his eyes and looked at her. She was poised like a kitten who’d just seen her first bird and felt her first predatory instinct. “You can go on sleeping if you want,” she said to him. Thanks, he said, and dozed for a bit until he realized the boat was moving and opened his eyes and saw she was still there, the anchor cut loose and the island about sixty feet away and drifting. She took off her shirt. “You can go on sleeping,” she said again. She took off the rest of her clothes and then her glasses; she knelt for a moment, unsure. He got up from his place and went over to her. He wrapped his hands around her head and pulled her face up to his; as she groped for something to hold she fell back on the deck. Sprawled on her hands and knees in the middle of that moment when land was nowhere in sight she tried to rise when he plunged himself into her. As she pounded their small wooden planet with her fists, Zeno’s bones beneath them clattered in response. After that the accomplices were endless. There was at least one every couple of weeks, secretaries and teachers, roaming housewives, beachgirls and therapists and communists, orientals looking for lost uncles, community representatives and necklace saleswomen, photographers, film editors, South American beauty contest runners-up. Pretty ones, plain ones, goofy ones, neurotics, polemicists. For a while he was seeing one constantly, a tough little Italian from Samson on a motorcycle. She was five feet one with wild brown hair and starlet legs and a low voice. She lived with her folks and refused to spend the night with him; later he learned she was sixteen. On the deck of the boat, sheathed in fog and cut loose from shore, they stripped and lay across his blue coat; he took her into his mouth and drank her. They dropped into the black river where they couldn’t see each other at all and he entered whatever part of her his fingers could find. After three months she met a magazine writer one day on the trip back from the island and put him on the back of her motorcycle and took him down the highway to show her mother and father. For some time after his wild little Italian girl left he was alone, then it all started again, with girls he sometimes thought he remembered from before. He couldn’t think of a way to ask tactfully if they’d met and they were always too shy for him to be sure. He was sure he hadn’t met Kelly and Cyrise; they worked in a casino in a resort town two borders away. Kelly was a plump strawberry blonde with lipstick so wet the fog seemed to streak red when it wafted past her mouth. At the dock when she gave him her dollar he could tell she’d already been drinking; her laugh held a drenched gurgle somewhere in its middle and she had a hard time keeping her balance. Cyrise was a melancholy blackhaired Iranian so voluptuously beautiful the other tourists followed her onto the island talking to her past her friend which only seemed to make Kelly drunker as she contemplated everything she would drink at Greek Judy’s in order to stand all the attention Cyrise received. By the time the two women returned at nightfall Kelly was having trouble getting on the boat. The trip back to shore sobered her a bit, but when the women reached mainland they wound up in the boat-house having a drink with their strange captain. The gas-lamp burned low and the three played cards. Eventually Kelly spilled out naked onto the mattress halfconscious as Cyrise lowered herself onto him with almost willful compliance, riding him while he filled his hands with her spectacular chest. She rode after almost an hour to her morose ecstasy; but not his. She captained and abandoned him, and removed herself to the mattress. Kelly babbled in the deep corner of the gaslamp shadows. I’m not done, he said to Cyrise, erect; she shrugged and looked at her friend, cocked her head a moment and nodded at Kelly slithering across the floor. He took Kelly’s plump pink body and rolled it over on its front and opened it up and mounted it. Kelly sort of gawked in surprise at the ravishment behind her. “I’ll hold her down for you,” said Cyrise, taking her friend by the wrists. After a while Kelly started to cry out; it was difficult to tell what she was trying to say. She thrashed beneath him against the mattress while Cyrise held her fast to the floor; at some point someone kicked over the bottle of brandy. “She’ll forgive me later,” Cyrise explained, “we’ll talk about what a beast you were, and comfort each other.” When she said this he looked at her face in the light and felt himself fall into the deep Persian heat of her eyes, and everything emptied out of him and for a moment he’d forgotten that it wasn’t her into whom he emptied it. He stumbled off to the other wall and could only admire in terror how she’d fucked him and left the hot white consequences of it in some other body than her own. Later that night in the dark he woke to see Kelly crashing around the boat-house in confusion, opening the door and disappearing outside. A moment later Cyrise went after her. He didn’t remember later if he heard them come back. He was aware however that he had just enough of a shred of innocence left to feel guilt-stricken about having cheated at cards. The next morning the casino girls were gone, the night’s only evidence the empty brandy bottle rolling on its side.