Truants (7 page)
Then as I stooped to take a drink from the fountain, I saw the pale specter of Hippo. Well, I didn’t see him exactly. Just his white head and the ropey silver drool that slid continually in and out of his mouth like the tell-tale jewelry of his name.
He was in the parking lot.
I couldn’t be sure for a minute because of the distance, but by squinting I could see him way out there in the sea of cars, his head protruding like the monster in Loch Ness.
Taking my life, for the first time, in my own hands, I jogged out to him in Area B-3, past several groups of men scattered here and there dealing drugs and beating up suspected homosexuals, I guess.
To the casual observer, Hippo looked like he was guarding the parking lot all right. In fact, he looked like he was capable of guarding most of the great Southwest. He was tethered by his nose ring to the flimsy side mirror of a Camero in such a way that his rear-end had mangled the passenger door of a Thunderbird convertible. The Thunderbird had suffered most, however, from the energetic metabolic and digestive processes any body the magnitude of Hippo’s entertains. It was full of bull manure, and when I first saw the heaps, I thought The Blob might be driving.
On one of the pay phones near the Administration Building, I phoned Ramirez out at the shack: “Ramirez, there is a bull parked in B-3.” He liked that, and he and Hector came out directly, followed by Captain Fowler who was hot as a raw appendix. When he first ran up to me, I thought his mind had come loose, but soon I realized that the boiling sound was the coinage which he rifled in his pockets. I think he wanted to shoot somebody.
Before he could choose me, he found a collage note pasted to Hippo’s flank that indicated this bovine reparking scheme had been a prank by one of the fraternities from Arizona State University. So, the Captain changed tacks, trying to chuckle the prank away, showing the note to Ramirez and Hector several times to show that the mess wasn’t his (or my) fault. I was pleased when he accidently leaned all the way to his elbow in the messy recycled silage in the Thunderbird.
As I left, Ramirez shouted from where he cautiously untied the tether, “Orphano! Later for lunch!”
Cows wait for no man and I hurried across the darkened fairgrounds passing many families exhausted by fairgoing activities. Fathers carried sons like sacks of sleeping flour. People were going home. I was glad for a while that I had someplace to go, at least next. I was trying not to think of when I should slip away into this night, and
begin
.
Rounding the Pigeon Building, which cooed and fluttered, I saw Barn Number Two swollen with hay and yellow light, transporting itself through the Arizona night like a steamboat full of cattle. It was the biggest room I’d ever been in, my room, and I was glad to be home and glad that Steele had not returned.
My aisle awaited like the stalled conveyer belt of pies that it was, and I commenced the comfort of good, honest work, hefting things with new energy to avoid thinking. There were but a sprinkling of citizens, so in my pre-flight dread-euphoria, I sang. First I sang “Waiting on the levee, waiting for the
Robert E. Lee
,” etcetera, which I embellished with a little dance, tapping the shovel, and it went over pretty well. I mean, the cattle were visibly stirred. Then halfway down that long lonesome corridor, J slowed a bit and did an evocative rendition of “Get Along Little Dogies,” which I got fairly mournful over, singing the “Tie-yi-yi” in half-time. I liked the line: “It’s your misfortune and none of my own,” so I repeated that more often than it actually comes up.
I had a sheen up from the shoveling and singing, and had nearly convinced myself that they were none of my own, when two legs came out of the ceiling loft. Following the legs down the loft ladder came Connie, a Coke and taco woman I had once respected. Her pink jumper was darkened by sweat. Before she reached the floor, here came the smirking Steele, descending two rungs at a time. I didn’t even bother to look up Connie’s dress.
“Who’s singing, Cowboy?” she said, walking over to me. “Hey, Collin?”
I didn’t respond. I hoped Steele would walk over so I could crush his head with my shovel.
“Collin.” She always said my name. Girls shouldn’t be allowed to say your name. “Hey. Come on. Sing some more.”
“Hey buddy,” Steele said, hitching up his jeans. “Feel like punching someone out? Look what you did to me.” He lifted his shirt to reveal a blue impression of my fist on his belly.
But he wasn’t close enough, and when I swung the shovel, he darted away. If the shovel had not been so long and heavy and taken such a large are to get around on top of his vile head, he should certainly have been my first murder victim. I had had
enough
, which, as Popeye says, is
too much
. The shovel rang on the cement and shuddered my arms clear to the shoulders, and the bang startled all the livestock awake, and I just did not care.
Connie didn’t scream, but she had already disappointed me so much that this barely registered. She was a grown woman and was not supposed to be in the loft of Barn Number Two; she was not supposed to be up there. She walked into the blond square of light on the pavement outside the barn and turned. Steele joined her. I stood and looked at them, my hands and elbows still buzzing from the concussion.
“Oh, Collin …” she said. She said it as if it were a sad fact, as if it were: “Your parents have run away and you are now an orphan.” When they stepped away out of the light, I yelled, “Don’t come back here Steele!”
For a while I stood leaning on the shovel staring into California. I didn’t sing anymore. I dropped the shovel twice, thinking I might split that very second, but both times I just picked it back up. If I’d had matches, I would’ve burned the whole goddamned place to the arid soil of Arizona, the forty-eighth state.
*************
At quarter to twelve, I’d settled a bit. Hector came in leading Hippo and reinstalled him. The bull did not seem exhilarated by his escapade. He just stood like a huge alabaster monument to genetic engineering.
“Amigo!” Hector yelled, laughing: “the bull.”
Fowler scooted around the corner in his cart, whipping into the barn on two wheels, nearly chipping Hector into the hay. He weaved the machine up my way and stopped. Hector tiptoed out.
“Say, young fella,” the conciliatory address began, “I know you and your partner get off at midnight, but tonight, seeing we’ve had this bit of unforeseen difficulty, heh, heh, I mean this
prank
.” He reached in the pocket of his plaid yellow double-knit sportcoat to show me the note again.
“I’ll stay,” I said. “But without my partner. Send him home and give me twenty-five bucks. I’ll stay all night if you want.”
“Hey, hey, wonderful, wonderful.” He patted my shoulder with every syllable, and then handed me the bills. “I mean, it would be unfortunate if something else happened to our prize bull.”
Then the Captain was all smile and nod-nod into his golf cart anxious to lug his particular guts otherwards. I was alone in the household of the barn, attending the bovine chorus, and I was scared of moving into the future.
Outside, the thunder a la Holz was commencing with a new ferocity which I mistook at first as only his tubercular version of motorcycling. I cocked my head to listen. The explosions had never seemed quite so deep, so magnificent. Then the air in the barn lifted nicely, suddenly, like a conductor’s hands. Straw floated and I drew a breath. I smelled the warm pavement rushing through, and I heard the quick flat applause of the rain. It was raining! The straw fell, the air settled and hushed, and for a minute it was that quiet of the first rain in sixty days. Then the acute gurgling of the motorcycle reemerged.
I walked to the door to glimpse Ring Holz’s daughter for the last time. Horticultural Square was deserted in the falling rain. I could see Mr. C. B. Borkanida guiding the spotlight, dripping and undaunted by the rare and resplendent deluge. Water ran off his reflected face. Ring Holz, that daredevil, was halfway up the cable, blinded by the rain and the laser-beam of light. He waved at the empty square. Mr. C. B. Borkanida waved back. Holz’s daughter sat clenching the trapeze like a sparrow. I could see the silver water dripping from her bare ankles.
Near the top, the grooved wheel of the cycle began to slip on the wet cable. Ring Holz stopped waving. He sat down. He began plying the accelerator handle for speed, the way you should over an abyss. Things were getting serious on the last day of the old world. His daughter did not move.
In the round, wet circle which trembled only as much as the rainy arms of Mr. C. B. Borkanida, she was cut like the silhouette of fear. Blue smoke rose from the friction of the wheel and the cable. I heard the rain walk up a notch in volume, and in the new blur of water I thought I saw the bike slip backward. The whole mechanism was slipping backward. Ring Holz did not turn. If anything, he leaned more tenaciously forward, as if to gain speed by ducking the wind. With smoke thickening, and the tire glowing red and screaming on the wire, the entire Ring Holz contraption, trapeze and all, began to slide down, faster and faster. Ring Holz was finally defying death.
As tribute to Mr. C. B. Borkanida’s training and integrity, the complete sequence was focused in his beam. He must have been a man of singular fortitude and intensity. We saw it all.
We saw Ring Holz employ the brakes, but it was similar to closing a fist on a greased pole. We saw Mr. Holz’s lips rippling openly in a last imprecation at the sky. And then we witnessed the Holz family relinquish hope and slide wickedly down the last length of cable with the speed of a rabbit in a shooting gallery—WHHHHOOOOOSSSSSSAAAAAAAASSSHHH!—in the spotlight at thirty miles an hour: the wrong way.
The cycle struck the platform like an axe. The trapeze carrying the girl jammed between the lower supports and broke away. She flew against the chickenwire underneath, like wet tissue thrown against a wall.
Ring Holz, the fearless backwards motorcyclist, however, was not stopping. The bike bounded off the platform forty feet, dribbling like a ball across the soggy Horticultural Square. It was pure rodeo; I’ll never know how he stayed on that motorcycle. Instead of having his brains smeared in small portions across the front of the Horticultural Building, Ring Holz was saved by the sculpture. He slashed into the giant cornucopia like a one-way meteorite. He did not come out the other side.
For five seconds it was silent in the square, quiet as a little village, everyone asleep. The rain fell. The spotlight focused steadily on the huge raw gash in the tons of papier-mâché pumpkins.
In my peripheral vision, I saw the girl peel herself off the back of the platform and get up on two feet. She was okay or at least conscious, so I ran over to where Holz had been interred. I couldn’t see him in the hole he’d made, but I could smell the smouldering tire in there. If we didn’t get him out, Ring Holz would be one roasted daredevil.
By the time I returned with my shovel, Ring Holz’s daughter was frantically shredding a huge throng of grapes that spilled out of the horn of plenty. Mr. C. B. Borkanida had walked over and was staring into the mess. His eyes were open much too wide: shock.
There was more smoke now, and I could see the potential bakery we had on our hands. I ran around to the tail of the thing and hacked it off with the shovel blade, before I even considered that I might remove one of Holz’s hands or his head with the same blow. The future may have been simpler if I had.
I probed around in the horn, dug with my hands, and reaching in, grabbed an ankle. The girl was incoherent, swearing, tearing savagely at the sodden, smoky structure for her father. There was blood on her neck. Mr. C. B. Borkanida stood by inscrutably with his hands in his mouth. I had to slap him and crank his ears for a moment to get him to help me withdraw the comatose Holz.
When we had him halfway out, the girl started wailing, which I took as a good sign. People make noise and it means they are alive. Old Ring wasn’t making any noise. There was a muted “pop” as we unplugged him entirely from the now flaming horn of plenty, but he didn’t say anything. He did have a heartbeat, though, and he was breathing. Those things, and the fact that Mr. C. B. Borkanida had begun blinking, were comforting.
“Now go shut off your light,” I told him.
When he left to do so, I knew we might possibly be all right.
Ring’s daughter came over and knelt with me above her father. As she did, her torn suit fell open. It folded to the waist like the simple presentation of her white breasts.
Ta-da
. They were wall-eyed and swollen beautifully, and one pointed right at me. Then the spotlight went out like a crash and the impression of her foaming white breasts raged against the inside of my eyelids for half a minute.
Take these eyes from my head, set me free
. I offered her my workshirt, though it was soaked too, and she put it on there in the new dark. The rain was warm on my skin, and the moment waved over me like a passing tumescence.
When Holz did not come to in four minutes, I called Foreman Ramirez and told him to get medical help. While we waited, Holz’s daughter and I knelt over the old man, watching him breathe. He looked like a retired shoe repairman. Mr. C. B. Borkanida moved around us slowly picking up used motorcycle parts by the light from the cornucopia bonfire.
Miss Holz was in my shirt, remember, and she looked at me. I could feel her looking at me. When I returned her glance, she said, “Louisa.”
“That’s your name? Louisa?” I said.
She nodded in the firelight, water sliding off her chin.
“My name is Collin Elder.” The glance held like a charged wire. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay.” Her auburn hair was pasted against her head by the rain, and her face ran awash with the cherry and charcoal make-up. But her eyes were pure glass. In her fat, black pupils I caught the perfect reflection of Ramirez’s pickup truck careening into the square.
As my friends Ramirez and his son, Hector, ran over to us, the ambulance charged upon the scene, a cartoon of red and white.