The Hair of Harold Roux Read online

  “George?” Helga calls. “Look who’s here!”

  George turns his head, smiles and jumps up. He immediately goes down again, then gets up smiling ruefully and massaging his left calf. “Leg went to sleep!” he says, limping toward them. “God, it feels like a bag of nails!”

  “How’s it going?” Aaron asks, thinking not only of the general but of the specific, meaning George’s dissertation, which concerns the verse of one Henry Troy, 1548-1610, brewer, wool factor and occasional, lousy, poet.

  “Pretty good. Pretty good,” George says. “Not bad. Can’t complain.” His wide honest blue eyes seem never to indicate that they reflect any previous knowledge or opinion, but that whatever they gaze upon is new and fascinating, even quite wonderful. George is thirty-one, Helga twenty-nine. She turns away, looking at the dark earth of the garden.

  “Hmm,” Aaron says.

  George is looking at him; is there a gleam of resentment somewhere in that innocent blue? George decides to smile. “Well,” he says. “Well. I’m a liar, yes. Things aren’t really too good.” He suffers a spasm of the lips, turns away, turns back shrugging apologetically.

  A cloud passes across the sun, making them look up. More are coming; dark anvils grow in the west above the wooded hills. A gust of wind turns the field hay dull silver in swathes.

  “I’d better put my motorcycle in the barn for the moment,” Aaron says. George hurries ahead to open the barn door. When the machine is safe inside the barn they go back to the house and join Helga in the low, beamed living room George loves so much. Little light comes through the narrow old windows, less as the dark cumuli move over the house. Helga turns on two warm table lamps and it might be night.

  “How about a beer?” Helga says. “Aaron?” She looks to him, a little gleam of conspiracy in her eyes, and he answers correctly. She brings them beer and glasses on a black stenciled tray, and they ceremonially, silently, pour.

  “It’s going to storm,” Helga says.

  “I guess I’m letting things get me down,” George says.

  “Who can blame you?” Aaron says.

  “I mean, what we’re doing to the world. I can’t believe it, Aaron. Sometimes I forget it for a few minutes and when it all comes back it’s worse. It’s like remembering at four in the morning that you’re going to die, only it’s worse than just you dying. Christ, it’s everybody, everything!”

  “I have the same hallucinations.”

  “But you still get your work done!” George says, meaning that it must not bother you enough.

  It is two-thirty, and now the storm surrounds them. The electricity goes off with none of the fading, brightening, fading that predicts only a temporary failure. It goes off as though God’s hand has pulled all the wires like hair, in snarled handfuls. They sit in the white flashes, the narrow old windows printing their framed lights intact upon the optic nerves. Aaron wonders if George welcomes these moments of blackout as he himself does—these moments free of guilt about his work. Right now he cannot work, and though he enjoys this feeling of lightness it also shows him how constant and heavy is the burden of his work.

  “I love storms,” Helga says. “I love anything powerful that isn’t caused by man.”

  Hmm, Aaron thinks.

  As yet there has been only distant thunder, but now it comes rolling across the hills toward them, sharp breaking sounds within softer rumbles. The only metaphor Aaron can think of has to do with some game or other of man’s. Barrage, etc.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to be scared of thunder again!” Helga says.

  “Yes,” Aaron says. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be scared of God.”

  “Instead of some nasty little men,” Helga says.

  “Christ, yes,” George says. He gets up; in the lightning flashes each movement is frozen, framed like a still camera shot. Soon he comes back from the kitchen carrying a lighted oil lamp and puts it on the table. Its truly yellow light brings out their faces, seems to hang them like glowing portraits against the darkness. Warm, ice-blue, warm, ice, as the lightning arcs across its polarities. When the wind and rain begin, the old house creaks and releases its secret mustiness into the air, cool breath from ancient interior spaces.

  “So nice to be under this old roof,” George says dreamily.

  George’s dreamy impracticality exasperates Aaron. He knows better than to grab George by the arm and talk straight to him. For one thing, he’s done just that before, and he knows his words will be greeted with hysteria in one form or another—sullenness, partial deafness, a counter-lecture about the evils of The System. But here is George Buck, after having spent ten years of his life preparing himself for one profession, and he still won’t let himself believe in its simplest technicality: that the advanced degree is necessary for promotion. And the plain simple hardfast rule, printed clearly in the Staff Handbook—surely the language is clear enough for a teacher of English to decipher—states that without promotion no contract will be renewed after the fifth year. Aaron wants to shout, Look, George! This is incredible! You’ve been told over and over again! Believe it! But what good will that do? Aaron does have some understanding of George’s beautiful baroque set of rationalizations. George works so hard, he teaches so hard, he is so close to his students and so necessary to them that he has to believe that somehow he is above such crassly technical considerations.

  As the intensity of the storm grows, George’s dreamy mood changes into excitement. He goes from window to window to stare at the wildness outside. “Beautiful! God damn, look at that!” Beside the house their four-foot avocado tree, set out for the summer, writhes frantically in the rain and wind, flashes rich green, bows nearly flat, then comes partially back upright, its leaves like hands in religious ecstasy. “Shee-it, man! There goes a limb off that white pine!” He turns joyfully, his hand strongly caressing the thick boards of the window frame. “This old house knows how to roll with it, by God! Strong! I know how bloody strong!”

  A bolt hits so near it really scares them all—its tearing crack felt in the fingertips, and then the slightly delayed knowledge that they are still alive.

  “Wow!” George yells gleefully. “That one hit the transformer on the pole! I saw it!”

  The faint smell of ozone breathes through the house.

  “I must admit I’ve had just about enough of this storm,” Helga says, a little shakily. The oil lamp flickers, though there is no obvious draft

  Aaron is slightly nervous, too, so his tone becomes as nearly pedantic as it ever does. “But you love this power, Helga. This primeval energy that belittles nasty man.”

  “Well, I don’t like it when it belittles us too much,” she says.

  “Oh, come on,” Aaron says. “We need something we’re too scared to enjoy. Anyway, something up there that isn’t controlled from Houston. The Furies—that’s what we need, or we can’t even enjoy a good old roof.”

  CRACK! BLAM! says the storm.

  “Jesus!” George answers.

  After a time of slightly less apocalyptic explosions and gusts, they realize that the storm’s salvos are just perceptibly diminishing.

  “I wonder if it’s safe to go into the kitchen yet,” George says. “Sometimes we get these little fireballs zapping around between the stove and the water heater.” As the storm subsides into rain and mist, he grows quiet and sad. “Well, it looks like it’s over. As dear old Henry Troy once sang,

  ‘The Furious Surge hath sped away;

  Soft smiles now galeth all the pretty day…’

  or some such immortal couplet.”

  “So how is it coming?” Aaron rather carefully asks.

  “Okay. It’s shaping up, little by little.” And George jumps up to get some more beer.

  Aaron looks at Helga in the lamplight. She seems to have lost her vernal green, and stares, loyally, away from his eyes. “I’ve told him,” she says in her whispery voice. “I’ve done all I can. Aaron, he just can’t believe it. He prepares harder and harder for hi
s classes… .”

  “Christ,” Aaron says, keeping his voice low, “I don’t even think he knows I’m a senior member and have to vote on his case—because you know there were a couple of exceptions, a long time ago, and even if it’s only theoretical we’re still supposed to have the power to break the rules—only we don’t in this case because it’s really up to the dean, and we know what he’ll say, and the president and the trustees. But mainly I don’t think George knows what sort of machinery gets set in motion. What do you think?”

  “I don’t think he thinks about it at all, Aaron. I mean, he knows but he won’t consider it for a minute. He’d rather think pleasanter thoughts, like about pollution, the military-industrial complex, racism, overpopulation and the cobalt bomb.”

  Usually Helga does not mix irony with her worries, and Aaron looks at her carefully. She becomes unbearably important to him because he is devastated by this change in her that sounds like despair. For the moment she is the only other person in the world and he becomes her, feels his nerves leading to all her muscles and glands and tendons; even her small bones seem to shiver with a kind of ticklish pain beside his own, inside his flesh. He is a man with a woman inside him, and he seems to feel and understand her womanness, the vulnerability of something like incompleteness, of empty womb, empty everything—though here he begins to doubt his evaluation of female helplessness and tries to shiver off this excruciating union.

  George comes back with the beer, a flashlight held in his armpit. For a while they talk, deliberately, about storms, those great natural explosions, their mostly benevolent power of sustenance and change.

  This storm, sending its farewell rumbles back from the east, moves on, and the narrow windows lighten again toward day. “It’s clearing,” George says.

  The sun comes out for a moment, printing a window upon the varnished pine floor. “I wonder if there’s a rainbow,” Helga says.

  They go out onto the front lawn, where the evenly trimmed wet grass seems to grow greener by the second. Part of a rainbow in the northeast, pale pastels, can be seen against a black bank of cloud. The sun comes across the house again, just as a gleaming yellow school bus, tires dripping, red lights flashing, stops at the mailbox. Its front door opens to the cries of children, and out comes Edward Buck, a second-grader, with his tin lunch box and green book bag. He looks like his mother—a little green man from Mongo. The children on the bus wave their arms behind the glass, but Edward pays no attention to them, or to their now muted screams. With dignity he comes up the front walk, book bag over his shoulder, lunch box in his hand.

  “I didn’t eat my pickle,” he tells his mother. “It was a dill pickle.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Helga says. “I thought I put in a sweet pickle. I must have got the jars mixed up.”

  The bus departs with its lively cargo. “I don’t like that driver,” Edward says. “He won’t make them shut up. It’s enough to break your eardrums. Mrs. Bailey is better because she lets them talk in a normal voice, but they can’t yell all the time.”

  Edward is bright. Soon he will be skipping grades and taking advanced courses taught by university faculty. George looks at him now, his expression pure and serene.

  “Hello, Aaron,” Edward says, now that the business of the pickle and the bus have been dealt with.

  “Hi, Ed,” Aaron says.

  Edward turns to his father. “Billy Davis got his foot caught under the merry-go-round and nearly broke it, so they took it away.”

  “The foot?” George says, his eyes wide in mock wonder.

  Edward laughs. “No, the stupid merry-go-round.” Smiling, he shakes his head resignedly.

  “Well, that’s what you get for a vague antecedent,” George says.

  “All our antecedents are vague,” Helga says, “but we’re here.”

  In the fresh sunlight, mist steams from the gray clapboards of the old house. Aaron watches this young family standing in its own place. With a surge of possibility he wonders if he might somehow write George’s dissertation for him. For a moment it seems perfectly possible: George will show him his notes, his drafts, tell him the central idea, and Aaron will sit down and write the damned thing. Sure.

  “I guess I’d better be going,” he says. In the back of his mind a wisp of memory bothers him, but he decides it is merely guilt because he isn’t working.

  “Oh, don’t go, Aaron! Helga says. There’s plenty more beer.”

  “It’ll keep,” he says. “Anyway, the motorcycle doesn’t run too good on beer. It thinks it does, but afterwards it has nightmares about running up the sides of trees.”

  “Stay a little longer. It’s only three-thirty or so.”

  Why does she want him to stay so badly? They have their perfect triangle. Why a fourth? He looks at George, whose humorous serenity concerning his loved child has changed. Darkness has crossed his face again, his mouth has fallen, his eyes stare at some non-place in the middle of the grass. As if she knows what to do in this case, Helga takes Edward, a hand lightly on his shoulder, into the house. George stares on, not seeming to notice their departure.

  “Hey,” Aaron says. He stands firmly on the sod, feeling strong, capable, even generous. A whisper in his innards scoffs at this self-estimation, but faintly. He examines his unhappy friend, daring to look for anything, however dark.

  “I think,” George says carefully, “that I may be going off my nut, and I don’t like it, Aaron.” His eyes are still unfocused. “I mean I can’t shake it. It’s like my head’s in a vice and all the assholes of the world are turning the goddam handle. We haven’t learned lesson number one. Maybe we don’t even know what it is. But we’re killing the world, Aaron. We know what we’re doing and we keep right on doing it. That’s psychotic, man, and I think I’ve caught it and what’s the use? How can you not think about something? Christ! Nerve gas, radioactive wastes that have to be kept refrigerated for eight generations or else, not to mention being located in earthquake zones. Television fucking outright lies, brain rot, money worship, rivers in hell that catch on fire. Or forget all that, don’t think about it and just listen to our great leaders off the record talking about kikes and niggers, man, or go down to gasoline alley to get your oil changed and hear the same murderous arrogant shit. What the hell? And meanwhile it’s one holy war after another. And the whole stinking race is born of rape. Screw fuck bang jab nail hump shag score—we’ve got our metaphors, Aaron, don’t we? Oh Christ, I know you know all this and I’m sorry.”

  “So why bother finishing your dissertation?”

  “Oh, that. I don’t mean that. I don’t know, maybe so. But everything is dying so what does anything matter?”

  “I don’t know, George. I’ve never understood how we ever began to cope with the idea of death. No other animal seems to be cursed with that bit of knowledge.”

  “But, Aaron! We’re deliberately killing ourselves!”

  “I am the asphalt; let me work.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get your dissertation done and then worry about all that.”

  “Shit,” George says, weakly, as though he’s out of breath.

  “It’s pretty around here, anyway,” Aaron says.

  George looks around at the tall pine and maple trees, the green lawn, the smooth hayfield backed by pine woods—all fresh and gleaming after the wind and rain.

  “That only makes it worse!” he says.

  So every time Edward comes home from school, that probably makes it worse, and every time George makes love to his warm green wife, that probably makes it worse. And George won’t finish his dissertation so he’ll have to sell his house and move away from all this pretty stuff that makes it worse.

  “I used to think I could do something about it,” George says. “I was involved, man. You know all that. But now I know better, Aaron. They’re all a bunch of murderers. The murderers always take over in the end. On both sides. I’m telling you, Aaron, I think I hate the whole fucking human race!’” His v
oice breaks, tries to seem angry, but what happens is really a sob.

  Evidently those wondering, wonder-filled blue eyes have been betrayed too often, because they are now glassy with tears. Aaron puts his hands on George’s thin shoulders. As for himself, he feels healthier and morally inferior—a condition he seems to remember having been in most of his life. But now he realizes that for his own stability he must get back to his desk and his notebook. Back there is where he has to be. The hair of Harold Roux—something about Harold’s hair makes his own scalp prickle about the ears. Whatever the discovery is, it’s probably not pleasant, but it is a discovery, not one of the items on George’s list of boring known stupidities, and it is back there at his desk.

  George says wearily, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “In any case, I think it would be dumb to go off your nut,” Aaron says, squeezing George’s thin drooping shoulders, shaking him until his neck stiffens a little. George looks up with a hopeless smile.

  “Thanks for the advice, anyway,” George says.

  After Aaron has wheeled his motorcycle out of the barn and George has rolled the big door shut, Aaron remembers the call from Mark Rasmussen’s mother.

  “You know Mark Rasmussen, don’t you?” he asks.

  “Mark! Yes!” As George’s face clears with pleasure, his blue eyes open again to wonder and care.

  “He seems to have disappeared again—at least out of his parents’ ken. His mother called me this morning, me having been his adviser last year. Not that he ever asked me for any advice.”

  “Damn him!” George says excitedly. “He’s brilliant, but he’s lazy! He ought to have his ass kicked around the block. Anyway, I think I can find out where he is. Yes, I think I know someone who’ll know.”

  “Give me a call if you do. His mother was off her nut, I’ll tell you that. But we ought to ask Mark if he wants to be found. I mean, in between kicking his ass around the block. After all, he’s ‘of age,’ as they say.”