The Moon Pinnace Page 16

  John chipped in for the beer and they picked up Gracie and Loretta at Loretta’s mother’s small bungalow in a neighborhood of such houses. This way Gracie’s father wouldn’t be subjected to the sight of randy boys.

  They passed, on the way out of town, a Shell station where a bright red-and-silver car, mangled beyond the immediate identification of its make, had been towed and was on display. Several people stood back a few feet from it, bending, as if over an invisible railing, to peer inside.

  “That’s Roger’s car,” Gracie said as they passed, turning away from it. “I don’t want to see it.”

  He and Gracie rode sedately in their places in the back seat, the top down though the evening was cooling quickly in a northwest wind that must have come from the Dakotas and Canada. “I just don’t want to see it,” Gracie said.

  “It’s a ’48 Pontiac, but you wouldn’t know it from the front,” Miles said. He drove with one hand casually on the wheel, his right arm along the back of the seat, ready to turn and talk when he wanted to, as though he were controlling something as uncritical as a sailboat on a lake.

  “Miles, would you watch the road?” Loretta said. Miles laughed and turned back to his driving.

  As they left town on a narrow concrete highway, Miles drove faster, so that wind isolated the two compartments of the car and John and Gracie moved closer together, a blanket around their shoulders. The late-setting early-summer sun descended at their left as they passed immense fields of pale young corn like sparsely planted new grass. He asked Gracie what had happened to Roger.

  “Dead,” she said. “He killed himself on purpose.”

  Though they had lived in different parts of the country they had in common the deaths of contemporaries in torn and folded automobiles.

  In the front seat Miles and Loretta were silent. Loretta stared ahead, her dark hair in a ponytail with its long fringes, after the tight ribbon, blowing against her regal neck in that reverse convertible wind.

  Gracie adjusted the blanket so that it went over their heads, and in that insubstantial cave told him about Roger and Alice. The story was, in its main events, known. Alice wanted to stop going steady with Roger. She had decided she really didn’t love him, but agreed to go with him one last time to the parking ground at the reservoir because she still liked him and felt sorry for him. He strangled her, and when he saw what he had done he left her body there and drove for hours through the night in the new Pontiac he had bought in part to impress her. At three in the morning he stopped at a telephone booth in Perch Lake and called his older brother, who was married and lived in Minneapolis, and told him what he had done. His brother talked to him for a long time and finally convinced him that he should give himself up. When Roger promised, the brother called their parents, a lawyer—Miles’s father—Reverend Griswold and the police and told them all to meet Roger at the police station, that Roger was coming in to give himself up. But Roger drove the rest of the night on the country roads and at dawn into a cement bridge abutment at eighty miles an hour, the speed still registered on the smashed speedometer of Roger’s new red Pontiac.

  “Nobody ever thought Roger would do anything like that,” Gracie said. “Roger was a nice boy, and Alice was a nice girl.”

  So, he thought, a cautionary tale, close to these people. Alice stopped loving Roger, so he killed her and then he killed himself. Of course, John Hearne believed himself immune to such insanity. Gracie Lundgren, this girl, rode beside him, compact, contained; to touch her would be like touching something as consistent along any part of its surface as a basketball, he thought at first, before they did touch. She was too husky for him, but her nerves were on her skin and to her he seemed a marvelously exciting force. Even the dime-store perfume behind her ears sent a poignant message of crushed petals and ethyl acetate wafting to him like a plea. Girls who wanted to please were all alike—extremely pleasant—yet they were always having to find forgivable ways of saying no to reckless and importunate boys. But he did feel demeaned, somehow, by his inflexible estimation that Gracie was too sturdy for him, and when, later, in the woods when it grew dark and the fire died down and she let him put his hand beneath her blouse on the wide, bare mounds of her breasts, the sweet acquiescence with which she let him commit this impropriety caused him to feel protective toward her, as though he ought to tell her that she shouldn’t let strange boys do what he was doing.

  “I never let Jimmy do that,” she said wonderingly. “It feels so strange.”

  But that was later, after the weenie roast, the potato salad, the beer and the singing (“Careless Love,” “Down in the Valley,” “The Wabash Cannonball“). Miles had a few chords and a clear tenor voice that was unexpected, his bland speaking voice suddenly amplified when it turned to song, so they mainly listened to him. The other couple, Jack and Laura, though pleasant, said very little and didn’t sing at all. Gracie told him that they had been going together since junior high, that they were practically married.

  They all disappeared into the shadows as the fire died down. Once, when the fire blazed up for a moment of its own accord, John raised his head to look and found Loretta’s head up like a periscope, checking them out. Miles’s arm came around her and pulled her back down, but her eyes, smaller without her glasses, remained on John as long as they had time to.

  “Loretta’s keeping an eye on us,” he said to Gracie under their blanket.

  “She’s always worrying about me,” Gracie said fondly. “She’s my best friend.”

  “Does she always take care of you?” he asked.

  “Sometimes I think everybody takes care of me.” She meant to indicate wry exasperation, but he thought he also heard the pride of the infantile, the cute. For a moment his kind feelings toward her turned cool, though his hand was on her breast, and he wondered at his being here disguised as an adult in the damp summer woods. He lay touching another organism suddenly reduced in his mind to its components—veins, glands, white expanses of skin over flesh. This momentary vision didn’t exclude his own morphology; two strange organisms lay here inexplicably entwined.

  “My father’s the limit. And then there’s my mother—and even Irma, but she should talk,” Gracie said.

  He said, “Did Irma want to marry the guy she had to marry?”

  Gracie thought about it. He could feel through her skin the general pause for such a large consideration. “I don’t know. Irma’s always been mad for boys, but Gus Rasmussen? I don’t know.”

  The waste, the aftermath of passion. Well, there was that other question he might ask, in this mood. “Do you know anybody named Estelle Lundgren?”

  “My aunt used to be Estelle Lundgren. Now she’s Estelle Hilberg. She works at the Herald. Why?”

  “I think my father used to know her, that’s all.”

  “Go ask her tomorrow. She’s nice.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Maybe he wouldn’t.

  “Oh,” Gracie said as he idly touched her nipple. She squirmed toward him and kissed him, her tongue long, changing the subject.

  He moved his mouth back from hers and said abruptly, “What are you going to do with your life? What do you want?”

  If she recognized this as aggression she didn’t show it. She told him of her internship in physical therapy at St. Luke’s, of new techniques for getting old people to move their atrophied limbs, to help crippled children and accident victims of all ages, to make them well again. Hydrotherapy, massage, special exercises—how wonderful, how exciting to help people! Did he know how terrible it was not to be able to walk, to take care of oneself, to do the little things we never even think about, like being able to go to the bathroom without help?

  He supposed he really didn’t know. “I can imagine,” he said. “But are you going to get married and have babies and all that?”

  “Oh, sure, someday,” she said gently, guardedly, and pulled his head down to hers.

  From the other sides of the fire came murmurs and the chink of bottl
es. She allowed him more and more of her skin, and her hums and sighs of pleasure grew quieter and more intense. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t.” But her fending hands were so weak he couldn’t believe them. She didn’t signal that she wanted to get away because she didn’t want to be anywhere else or to be doing anything else. “Oh, oh,” she sighed into his ear. Why do this? he thought. You approach the edge of a cliff just to look over the edge, not to jump off, so maybe it was all right. No, there was a mean strain here. Examine that. A memory: once when he was five or six he was petting a cat, and its silken flanks evoked some dark proto-urge or other. He’d wanted to go on petting the cat when the cat wanted to go somewhere else. Of course the cat won, but that brief moment before the cat turned into needles and fishhooks—no confusion in its desires—struck him forever, a permanent memory to be sorted out later, if possible. He’d known and feared the strength of giants, because he was so small, but for that one moment, before the reality of needles and teeth and the cat’s unalloyed will took over, he’d had an eerie intimation of the pleasure of cruelty.

  Her slacks were now off and he touched her slippery places. She didn’t seem to hear him when he whispered that he was prepared; in his wallet were those devices—ghost white, mythy, clinical—so it would be all right, or at least safe. This she would not hear. If she were to submit there wouldn’t be any cold-blooded pause for that sort of thing. There would be no mind here, no collusion; what she would accept was her own unconditional surrender or nothing.

  She was about to let him, no precautions at all, and he was amazed. This was very bad judgment on her part. She must be mad. This was what happened to her sister—did it run in her family, this blackout of sense? Did it run in the state of Minnesota? He suspected that she really was without guile, and he felt sinful and avaricious, but when had he ever denied himself what he could have?

  He should not accept possession; he would have no moral passport out of here. His later indifference would be purely cruel. She wouldn’t understand his coldness. She would wonder what she had lost.

  But with the dreamy quiescence of her flesh she said yes, she said now.

  Unless he was a monster, he created his life second by second. He could quench this burning by immediate immersion, but not without the knowledge of consequences. One consequence might be a later memory of pleasure tainted by cruelty—seduction as a kind of rape. There was also the shamefully interesting fantasy of leaving one’s progeny scattered over plain and valley, each with a sad little mother, and then would come the pity and blood love for those abandoned strangers.

  That he was no longer an irresponsible child was in part his own idea, undocumented. Once, a grown child in his bath, looking down at himself engorged, he marveled at what had risen from his body and been endowed by the dark reaches of evolution with shaft and glans for the one purpose, to penetrate the silken sheaths of women, those difficult, soft, flighty, dangerous, vulnerable creatures of his race. He was made to fit all of them. They were all his, fat or thin, short or tall, all were created to be his scabbard. Gracie seemed to be in a swoon. Sense, the thicket of care and fear, had burned away and his lower motors hunched him like a goat, but still he didn’t enter her.

  “Gracie! Gracie!” Loretta called across the embers. “What are you doing?” Then Loretta was over them and pulled his head up by the hair. “What are you doing?” she cried. The interruption was intense enough so that some glimmer of consequence came back to Gracie. Loretta was not just trying to wake them from their madness. With all her wiry strength she tried to peel them apart, and did. Gracie was contrite; as they sorted out their complications of limbs and clothing her healthy leg searched desperately for the entrance to her slacks.

  At this point Miles threw his guitar into the fire. Loretta ran over and snatched it out, whereupon Miles erupted into apparently dangerous violence. He punched the air near Loretta, though she was not fazed and he never quite hit her. He took the guitar out of her hands, threw it down and jumped on it, its compression like the last scream of a small bony animal. Upon its remains Miles danced slack-handed and slack-footed, a comic imitation of a marionette, and John saw that in Miles there was no real danger, that his object had been simply to gain Loretta’s attention. Miles threw the remains of the guitar on the fire and they watched as it caught, the sudden light making columns of the trees, whose branches spread high above them like the ribs of a Gothic ceiling. They listened to the crackle and plink as the fire detuned what was left of the guitar.

  Loretta found her glasses and stared through them at Miles, as if better vision might enlighten her. Jack and Laura were the last to emerge from their privacies. Their faces rose from the dark of their hollow as if from the underworld into the light of the burning guitar. They looked; it was only Miles, so they descended again.

  Miles ran off into the woods, down the slope toward the reservoir. They listened, Loretta’s arm outstretched like a conductor’s to hush them, and heard Miles crashing around down there in the dark.

  Out of the blankets the night was cold and still. A thin moon seemed to have quenched the wind. Loretta shrugged and raised her eyebrows above the lenses of her glasses: what could you expect of such a nincompoop? Lord, did she have to live her life in a world of fools?

  From down by the water began jungle screams and screeches—giant macaws and gibbering monkeys, baboon hoots and shrill soprano staccatos that were surprisingly real, or real for Tarzan of the Apes. Then came a splash, and more splashes, as if Miles were beating the water with a branch.

  “I’ll get him,” Loretta said with disgust.

  John helped Gracie carry things to the car—blankets, bottles, food and wrappings. When they were through picking up they stood next to the car, waiting. There seemed to be the necessity to speak, though he feared what they might say. Gracie finally said in a small, almost babyish voice, “Did we?”

  “No,” he said hastily.

  “You could have.”

  “Yes, I guess so,” he said, looking back toward the fire as if preoccupied with Loretta’s and Miles’s whereabouts.

  She moved up to him in the semi-darkness, her pretty face round as a clock, and felt for his hands. Her short presence was massive and thermal. “You guess so?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said coolly, to suggest that the subject had been adequately covered.

  “You could get a job here. You don’t have to go to California.”

  He told her, with a creaky shifting of tone, that he had to see the rest of his country, that he had to travel on—a compulsion, certainly irrational, but there it was.

  Gracie understood perfectly and let go of his hands. “I just lost control,” she said. “I’m glad you didn’t lose control, John.” His name on her lips was possessive.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You could have taken advantage of me, but you didn’t. I guess I fell in love with you.”

  For that word Roger had strangled Alice, thousands had died.

  Gracie said, “I felt sorry for you about your father and I guess I didn’t have my guard up. Here you are, a handsome stranger and then it turns out you’re really a local boy and I could tell you were upset, so I guess I just let my guard down. It was pretty serious between me and Jimmy—I guess you don’t know that. One of the reasons we broke up is I wouldn’t let him do anything, and then the next thing I know you’ve got my bra off and then practically everything else and I didn’t even try to stop you. I must have been in a crazy mood. Maybe it’s a rebound, or something like that. It doesn’t feel like it, though. But why didn’t you, when you could have? Jimmy would, all right.”

  “I might have. I don’t know,” he said, feeling vile and ungenerous.

  “It’s because you’re a nice boy. I know. Loretta thinks she stopped it, but you could have done it anytime. I must have been in an absolute trance.”

  Loretta came back with Miles, the now passive buffoon. He walked behind her, chuckling, a little drunk, a little stunne
d but nonchalant, jaunty in his disgrace. He was covered with swampy muck, so Loretta wrapped him in a blanket and made him get into the backseat. “A blanket can be washed,” she said disgustedly—disgusted with all of them. “Gracie, get in front. I’m going to drive.”

  As soon as they were in the car Miles reached forward and took Loretta’s thin neck in his muddy hands. “Break her goddam neck!” he said exultantly.

  “Miles! Mi-yuls!” Loretta yelled.

  “Break her goddam neck and take her while she’s still warm!”

  “That’s enough!” Loretta said, disengaging his hands and throwing them back over her shoulders. “God!”

  The ride back to town was cold, but Loretta wouldn’t stop to put up the top. Miles asked her once, then lapsed into what seemed to be indifference. He and John were let off at Miles’s place. The car would be at Loretta’s, the keys under the floor mat. Loretta was stiff with disdain, her glasses glinting.

  “Good night, John,” Gracie said.

  “Oh, shut up!” Loretta said.

  “But, Loretta,” Gracie said as the car whined down the driveway in reverse.

  “Jesus, take it easy on the transmission,” Miles said.

  In the bathroom John was scrubbing at Gracie’s pink lipstick when Miles came in behind him. “I love her,” Miles said. “I can’t help it. So why do I always do something that pisses her off?” He put one mucky foot, sock and sneaker still on it, into the toilet and flushed. Before the cascade ended he substituted the other foot. John was startled but then he had to admire this innovation. His countrymen, as far as he’d had a chance to observe them, were always difficult to classify. He doubted if Loretta would admire such originality, however.