Truants Read online

  truants

  By the same author

  Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The News of the World

  For my Mother and Father,

  Verna Mertz Carlson and Edwin Carlson

  … and other parents,

  Bernice and George Craig

  How many chins will you have?

  What color will your hair be?

  LOUISA HOLZ

  Our only hope is to make it to the highway.

  KEVIN McCARTHY

  in The Body Snatchers

  Contents

  *************

  1. First, A Pure Vision

  2. Gordon and Elizabeth Elder

  3. The Arizona State Fair

  4. Raymond Steele, Mike Rawlins

  5. Electrocution as a Way of Life

  6. The Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls

  7. The Nightlife

  8. Final Morning

  9. To the Fair

  10. A Dead Bear

  11. Same as 10, Only Worse

  12. Ring Holz Defies Death

  13. The Death Car Stories

  14. Goodbye, Ring Holz

  15. Railroad Travel

  16. Fixtures

  17. The Word Home

  18. The Blue Mesa Boarding Home

  19. A German Story

  20. The Rewards of Prayer

  21. Nights

  22. The Bedridden

  23. The Crawling Eye

  24. The Beating Heart

  25. Gifts

  26. Organic Brain Disease

  27. Raul and Theresa

  28. After Chili

  29. Herbert Hoover

  30. Las Vegas, Nevada

  31. North

  32. Lessons

  33. The Night

  34. George Clare and Sons

  35. West Across the Salt Flats

  36. Rowena’s Home

  37. Absolution

  38. Looking for Ponies

  39. Will Clare

  40. Back to stones

  Copyright

  1

  *******

  First, a pure vision

  First, a pure vision: cut from the night sky like a white coin, a girl rides a trapeze in a spotlight. Her silver circus suit sheds its sequins like falling radiation visible for a second in the extreme light, and gone, sprinkling down through the Arizona dark two hundred feet into the mouths of the crowd. Her image is so bright it puts out the moon. She is connected to the earth, the state fairgrounds, this way: her trapeze hangs from a motorcycle above her; the motorcycle rides on grooved tires along a stout inclined wire that reaches steeply back thirty-five degrees to the wooden platform, fifty feet from where I stand. She sits, still as silver, holding the trapeze, her hands out on the bar, her ankles and knees, symmetries together, her bottom white to the crowd.

  Then, a pure sound: a nine-decibel roar, dragon speech, blasts continually from the motorcycle. It coats the whole picture with the raw edge of mayhem, impending catastrophe, accident. The noise is of a magnitude reminiscent of mishaps in rocketry. It flattens our hair and bends our ears; it holds us here like a press, pushing us to earth while the girl draws us upward.

  The sight and sound are transcendent, compelling; they call us away from the Arizona State Fair into the realm of high art, high risk, high hopes. They have certainly calmed this mob; they rush me in a new way.

  Safely below in the night and the noise on a little platform of his own, stands the third member of this dangerous attraction, Mr. C. B. Borkanida, an international electrician of Japanese ancestry, who manually swivels the huge damaged light-shell along the wire, following the girl as she ascends under the motorcycle, creating the vision. It is this vision which is impressed indelibly in my memory. The spotlight makes a girl in a crumbling carnival costume, who is scared into stasis, appear to be the princess of us all, and it is a compelling effect.

  It compelled me to come out of my barn where I shoveled manure for one hundred and forty prize cattle. It compelled me at twelve, four, eight, and midnight when I’d hear the black rasp of Ring Holz’s black frame motorcycle. Ring Holz would crank, choke, and race that motorcycle with singular animosity while an announcer whispered through static all over the fairgrounds: “Ladies and Gentlemen! In the Horticultural Square, the Arizona State Fair proudly presents Ring Holz and his International Death-Defying Motorcycle Ride!” Then Ring would raise one hand from the handlebars to wave cheerlessly; he had to wring the accelerator with the other to keep the machine from inhaling a belch and dying; and a girl in a stiff, soiled silver bathing suit would appear by his side in the motorcycle thunder. She would nod and take her place on the bar beneath the vibrating homemade junkmobile. The drum-roll was recorded; it didn’t matter. Ring would bear down in earnest and the motorcycle and the attached trapeze would ascend along the broad black wire.

  At least twice a day the cycle would die while Ring was waving at the assemblage in Horticultural Square, and the girl would grimly hold the bar while the bike slid slowly back to the starting platform where Ring would jump around on the starter until gas caught, and, shuddering, they’d reascend.

  At the top, he’d stop and wave at the crowd, and then, because he was expected to, I guess, he would stand on his bald head on the seat of the machine. He still had to twist the accelerator to keep the thing alive, and as he did, a roiling, humid mist of unburnt petroleum fell among the spectators. The girl never moved. She sat, as I’ve said, still as any precious metal, and she compelled me to quit the shoveling to come take a look.

  Days, I’d stand in the flat, sharp shadow of the barn leaning on my shovel, watching that girl turn gray in the exhaust. Nights, which I preferred. I’d stand just out of the yellow square of light that fell from the barn door, watching her in the perfection which night allows.

  The citizens at the fair filed past me into the barn to show their children what cattle were. They all repeated the same wisecracks about the cows and the cowshit. All one hundred and forty cattle in the barn looked exactly alike, except for Hippo, a Charolais bull, who received more attention than the cows, not because he was male, but because of his close resemblance to the kind of monsters which threaten metropolitan centers in old movies. Actually, he just looked like a mutant, dehorned, white rhinoceros. The crowd milled through, while outside in the sky the girl on the bar sucked the deadly motorcycle smoke.

  It was there, leaning on a shovel in the Arizona evening, an atmosphere redolent of exhaust, cowshit, popcorn, and occasionally marijuana, as I watched a man stand on his head on a motorcycle seat waving at the multitudes, that I realized that though there were millions of girls in the same world in which I was a boy, there were really only two kinds. One kind strolls past, their breasts unencumbered and lilting with their stride, within reach, the kind you’d like to roll upon suddenly in a tight urgent embrace meant to alleviate glandular distress. The other kind are the ones you could look at forever as they sit on trapezes in the thundering distance, trailing their ankles in wind indifferently, ignorant of you. And I realized that the second kind of girl, a kind of disembodied figure—a vision—was the most intriguing.

  This is only a digression in that it does not speak of the decisions incipient in my head at the time, the decisions to run away from the Noble Canyon Home, to distinguish myself from Steele and his felonious attitude, to hop a train, to find my father.

  Among the many lies I might tell, I do not want to picture the state fair days that summer as being unconfused in a massive way. They are plainly impossible to sort out, interpret. I have enough trouble understanding one thing at a time, let alone the way it leads to another. But the vision of that girl is central; somehow that silver circle and its terminal descent became the catalyst for my flight—it compell
ed me to write the future more than Steele and Rawlins, more than the dead bear, even more than the letter from my father could have ever compelled me.

  And even after I’d decided to run, it was with the plaguing anxiety that I had broken my only egg rather than put it in one basket.

  2

  *********

  Gordon and Elizabeth Elder

  Let me tell you what I could have done. Let me point out the impossibilities.

  I could have relaxed, taken a deep breath, and played with the cards I was dealt, instead of asking to draw three, tipping over the table, throwing my chair and my few chips out the window. As it were. Excuse me. I could have sanely kept my summer job at the Arizona State Fair, cleaning the cowbarn, until September when I would have returned to my senior year in school at the Noble Canyon Home where I was a resident, where I was incarcerated. It might have been a good idea, since I would have had an entire year free of my friend Steele’s malevolent influence and dire tutelage. Steele was getting out, graduating, in one month and he had applied for another state job which was a sure thing. I could have tried to locate my father by using the phone book, the yellow pages, or a private detective instead of acting beserkly, and in the first person, which for me at the time was the same thing.

  I could have.

  Except: 1. Steele was going to assassinate me. 2. Ring Holz was going to assassinate his daughter. 3. I had a ride.

  Besides, let me ask you a question: Have you ever been so completely, fundamentally misunderstood that you felt completely and fundamentally alone, I mean so radically alone that you felt alone even in your own body? The question is better put: Have you ever committed mildly felonious acts in your own home in order to discourage your father from entertaining a series of unreluctant divorcees, and have him respond—over a two year period—with nothing, then reproof, then silence, then legal action? Have you ever been put in the state facilities for the ungovernable? Don’t answer. At the charged age of twelve?

  I had not planned an extended life as a criminal. I had, I admit, designed a short interval of disruptive activities in our north Phoenix home which were meant as corrective. What a word.

  I want to get this all correct.

  My mother, Elizabeth Gary Elder, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in June of 1940. Her father, Grant Gary, was killed in an automobile accident in the Philippines while serving with the Marines there in 1944. At the age of five, at the war’s end, my mother was already a serious person, older than her years. My grandmother never remarried, and instead turned her energies toward raising and educating my mother. This was in Minneapolis. My mother, as a result, became a very careful, literate, and as I said, serious young woman. She was a promise in every one of her teacher’s lives.

  In 1961, my grandmother lost her mind and began soon after to smell strong. She cared for herself with less than her usual enthusiasm, drooled, and took up swearing; but what affected my mother most was my grandmother’s refusal (inability) to recognize her own daughter. Finally the odor and the heartache grew to be too much to bear, and my mother committed my grandmother to Wheatland, a nursing care facility.

  Somewhat distraught, my mother agreed to make a trip to Arizona with two of her girlfriends from school, “for her own good.” They left shortly after her graduation from the University of Minnesota, where she had taken a degree in linguistics and art history, and where her grade-point average was three point nine.

  The rest is about me.

  In the only impulsive act of her young life (she was barely twenty-two), she dated and fell in love with an extremely handsome young lifeguard at their hotel, and upon returning to Minneapolis and a summer job at the museum, she found herself alone with me, pregnant.

  Gordon Elder, son of a baker from Bakersfield, California, was nineteen when he married my mother. He was a lucky, pretty boy who had migrated originally to Arizona as a model for Goldwater’s department stores. He appeared in their live shows and in several of their catalogues. He is on the cover of the Fall 1960 catalogue, wearing chocolate corduroy slacks and an expensive gold plaid shirt, leading a burro into what appears to be the Grand Canyon. It was fortunate for my father that he learned he could trade on his good looks, because (given his decision not to work for a living) it saved him from a life as a professional bowler for which he had previously been preparing. That all models want to act is the axiom which dictated his move into acting as an avocation, and that children need attention may have been the one that alienated us. I’m not sure about that. I have every reason to believe that he was a sincere person and not a dirty rotten bastard. He could not help his gleaned charm and his shiny hair, neither of which I inherited.

  So, nearly seventeen years ago, in March, I was born at Phoenix Baptist Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, to these two children. I was not a Baptist, and I have not been baptized, exactly. At that time, my father had extended a summer job in a real estate office (which he’d managed to obtain through a connection) into a career he was a natural at, but had little affection for. We lived one year in the tragic Harvard Court on East Van Buren, and then we moved into a modest, but well-placed house on the lowest gradient north of Camelback Mountain. We could see where the rich lived from our yard.

  My mother, of whom I have this record, two distinct memories, and one photograph, was killed in a freak accident in the Phoenix Museum where she worked. A weld snapped on a four-ton stabile and she was crushed. I was four. Since then, they have reconstructed the sculpture and repainted it; I have been to see it only once. You can see it in the terrace, green and gray, entitled Morning Flight.

  From my mother I inherited a doggedness known only at times as determination, and her library of fiction and art books. The latter I relinquished when I was banished from my own house, as you shall soon see.

  After my mother’s death, my father, who had loved her I guess, started what I later came to see and consider as questionable behavior. And I began, in a sense, asking the questions.

  For example, when I was just ten, my father changed his name from Elder to Ardor to further his stage career. I didn’t mind this terribly at the time (even though it left me alone with a name), because I understood that Edgar Allen Poe’s father had been an actor given to that form of behavior. At the time, however, I hadn’t fully understood how Edgar had ended up.

  The trouble commenced, as I’ve hinted, when, inflamed by the nine hundred novels I chose to read instead of going to school, I attempted to keep dad on my version of the straight and narrow.

  Why?

  I’ll take questions later.

  He was selling bungalows all morning and rehearsing and playing in various theaters in the afternoons and evenings. His associates at the time, girls, actresses, would many times arrive at our door before him to be met by my “Glad to meet you.” And then the “My mother should be home at any minute.” It was a routine, and it achieved routine success, especially with the younger and more vulnerable women.

  I remember one of these young women. She was obviously working hard at perfecting a Sandra Dee sense of self, and her eyes spooned widely on the fragile edge of diet pills.

  When I indicated that my mother would be home soon, the girl said, “I thought your mother was …”

  “At the market?” I held the ruse, straight out of “The Open Window.”

  “Dead.”

  “Dead!” I laughed, as her pupils spread. Then Mrs. Magan walked into the yard, looking for her son. It was not planned. I had no idea this coincidence might unmoor my visitor. She left, but not before it was abundantly clear that she had nearly had a stroke and should go somewhere very fast and change her knickers. That’s my father’s word, knickers. He’s affected in a small way, sometimes; being in the theater does that to people.

  Anyway, that trick worked only on the vulnerable. For the others, I did the rest: salad dressing in the bed, lipstick messages everywhere (you should have seen me buying that lipstick!), short sheets, and finally the fires. They were
small fires really, arsonettes, engineered to keep occupants of our house alert late at night and out of bed.

  My father talked to me about these activities. He closed his talks, which were primarily pleas, with what I considered a rhetorical question: What am I going to do with you? I was eleven and hopeful and even as he reasoned with me, I was cooking up new remedies for his lifestyle. I did not think he would do anything with me, except take me down to the theater from time to time to see him in Barefoot in the Park, which he looked already too old for, or some other entertainment from the stage.

  I didn’t mind it there. I did some of my best acting in the theater. Sitting by his most recent acquisition in the dark, I would lean to her sympathetically and offer extended descriptions of my father’s contagious diseases, memorized from the thickest book in our house: Alper’s Medical Encyclopedia. Twice I inked lesions onto my own arms to flash in her face in the near dark. It was theater, wasn’t it?

  No. My father considered it mayhem. I was eleven and blind to his growing despair. I was lost in my reading and word games all day long, playing anagrams, writing ads and bumper sticker slogans, reciting sections of the dictionary aloud as if it were German (then French), playing a game I called “synonyms” while looking in the mirror. When my father found out about school (I had called the school, and speaking in an accent, told them poor Collin Elder had Black Lung disease complicated by amnesia), it was too much. He was ready to have a life of his own.

  So, the answer to what am I going to do with you became: divorce. I was driven in a Chevy stationwagon, with which I have since become too familiar, to the Home. The Noble Canyon Home for Wayward Girls. Even when I arrived four years ago there were more boys than girls, but they refused or forgot to change the name. Wayward: another lovely word.

  You’ve driven by the place. It lies west of the highway like a compound, a mission-style kennel, the fences looking new all the time. The desert flat and the mountains spaced oddly, perfectly, looking like a hundred breasts come to peek at the wayward and incarcerated teenagers of America, etcetera. The final jungle of the desert rages aridly right outside the fences, summer-fall-winter-spring, changing only subtly the way smoke disappears, green as sand in March, as bone in August. And always the black mountain, a crumbling pseudo-volcanic wayward irregularity spilling its black self from cliffs to boulders into black alluvial fans, in fact, into the very sand that sifted through the chain-link fences, black. There is no real canyon to speak of, yet this is the Noble Canyon. Things are misnamed in this world; expect it. As you drive by the place, you will see the signs along the Noble Canyon Highway, and this is the truth: DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS IN THIS AREA.