At the Jim Bridger: Stories Page 8

  We’d sit, eat, fish some more, talk, and late late we’d drive back, the dawn light gray across the huge tidal plain, smoking Dutch Masters until I was queasy and quiet, dreaming about my money, however I would make it.

  Usually this dream was interrupted by my actual boss, Mr. Leeland Rakkerts, shaking my shoulder as I stood sleeping on my broom in the parking lot of the hot and bothered San Jacinto Resort Motel, saying, “Boy! Hey! Boy! You can take your zombie fits home or get on the stick here.” I’d give him the wide-eyed nod and continue sweeping, pushing a thousand pounds of scraggly gravel into a conical pile and hauling it in my wheelbarrow way out back into the thick tropical weeds at the edge of the bayou and dumping it there like a body. It wasn’t a crisp twenty-dollar bill he’d given me, but it was a valuable bit of advice for a seventeen-year-old, and I tried to take it as such.

  Those Saturdays after we’d been to the Gulf beat in my skull like a drum, the Texas sun a thick pressure on my bare back as I moved through the heavy humid air skimming and vacuuming the pool, rearranging the pool furniture though it was never, ever moved because no one ever used the pool. People hadn’t come to the San Jacinto Resort Motel to swim. Then standing in the slim shade behind the office, trembling under a sheen of sweat, I would suck on a tall bottle of CocaCola as if on the very nectar of life, and by midafternoon as I trimmed the hedges along the walks and raked and swept, the day would come back to me, a pure pleasure, my lime-green Plymouth Fury III parked in the shady side of Alfredo’s American Cafe, standing like a promise of every sweet thing life could offer.

  These were the days when my brother, Garrett, was coming home on weekends, dropped at our curb by the maroon Rice University van after a week in the research dorms, where young geniuses from all over the world lived in bare little cubicles, the kind of thing somebody with an I.Q. of 250 apparently loves. I had been to Garrett’s room on campus and it was perfect for him. There was a kind of pad in one corner surrounded by a little bank of his clothing and the strip of butcher paper running the length of the floor, covered with numbers and letters and tracked thoroughly with the faint gray intersecting grid of sneaker prints. His window looked out onto the pretty green grass quad.

  It was the quietest building I have ever been in, and I was almost convinced that Garrett might be the only inmate, but when we left to go down to the cafeteria for a sandwich, I saw the other geniuses in their rooms, lying on their stomachs like kids drawing with crayons on a rainy day Then I realized that they were kids and it was a rainy day and they were working with crayons; the only difference was that they were drawing formulas for how many muons could dance on a quark.

  Downstairs there were a whole slug of the little people in the dining hall sitting around in the plastic chairs, swinging their feet back and forth six inches off the floor, ignoring their trays of tuna-fish sandwiches and tomato soup, staring this way and then that as the idea storms in their brains swept through. You could almost see they were thinking by how their hair stood m fierce clusters.

  There was one adult present, a guy in a blue sweater vest who went from table to table urging the children to eat: Finish that sandwich, drink your milk, go ahead, use your spoon, try the soup, it’s good for you. I noticed he was careful to register and gather any of the random jottings the children committed while they sat around doodling in spilled milk. I guess he was a member of the faculty. It would be a shame for some nine-year-old to write the key to universal field theory in peanut butter and jelly and then eat the thing.

  “So,” I said as we sat down, “Garrett. How’s it going?”

  Garrett looked at me, his trance interrupted, and as it melted away and he saw me and the platters of cafeteria food before us, he smiled. There he was, my little brother, a sleepy-looking kid with a spray of freckles up and over his nose like the crab nebula, and two enthusiastic front teeth that would be keeping his mouth open for decades. “Reed,” he said. “How’s it going? I love that. I’ve always liked your acute sense of narrative. So linear and right for you.” His smile, which took a moment and some force to assemble, was ancient, beneficent, as if he both envied and pitied me for something, and he shook his head softly. “But things here aren’t going, kid.” He poked a finger into the white bread of his tuna sandwich and studied the indentation like a man finding a footprint on the moon. “Things here are. This is it. Things…” He started again. “Things aren’t bad, really. It’s kind of a floating circle. That’s close. Things aren’t going; they float in the circle. Right?”

  We were both staring at the sandwich; I think I might have been waiting for it to float, but only for a second. I understood what he was saying. Things existed. I’m not that dumb. Things, whatever they might be, and that was a topic I didn’t even want to open, had essence, not process. That’s simple; that doesn’t take a genius to decipher. “Great,” I said. And then I said what you say to your little brother when he sits there pale and distracted and four years ahead of you in school, “Why don’t you eat some of that, and I’ll take you out and show you my car.”

  It wasn’t as bad a visit as I’m making it sound. We were brothers; we loved each other. We didn’t have to say it. The dining room got me a little until I realized I should stop worrying about these children and whether or not they were happy. Happiness wasn’t an issue. The place was clean; the food was fresh. Happiness, in that cafeteria, was simply beside the point.

  On the way out, Garrett introduced me to his friend Donna Li, a ten-year-old from New Orleans, whom he said was into programming. She was a tall girl with shiny hair and a ready smile, eating alone by the window. This was 1966 and I was certain she was involved somehow in television. You didn’t hear the word computer every other sentence back then. When she stood to shake my hand, I had no idea of what to say to her and it came out, “I hope your programming is floating in the circle.”

  “It is,” she said.

  “She’s written her own language,” Garrett assured me, “and now she’s on the applications.”

  It was my turn to speak again and already I couldn’t touch bottom, so I said, “We’re going out to see my car. Do you want to see my car?”

  Imagine me in the parking lot then with these two little kids. On the way out I’d told Garrett about my job at the motel and that Jeff Shreckenbah and I had been hanging out and fishing on the weekends and that Jeff’s dad raced stock cars, and for the first time all day Garrett’s face filled with a kind of wonder, as if this were news from another world, which I guess it was. There was a misty rain with a faint petrochemical smell in it, and we approached my car as if it were a sleeping Brontosaurus. They were both entranced and moved toward it carefully, finally putting their little hands on the wet fender in unison. “This is your car,” Garrett said, and I wasn’t sure if it was the your or the car that had him in awe.

  I couldn’t figure out what floats in the circle or even where the circle was, but I could rattle my keys and start that Plymouth Fury III and listen to the steady sound of the engine, which I did for them now. They both backed away appreciatively.

  “It’s a large car,” Donna Li said.

  “Reed,” Garrett said to me. “This is really something. And what’s that smell?”

  I cocked my head, smelling it, too, a big smell, budging the petrocarbons away, a live, salty smell, and then I remembered: I’d left half a bucket of bait shrimp in the trunk, where they’d been ripening for three days since my last trip to Galveston with Jeff.

  “That’s rain in the bayou, Garrett.”

  “Something organic,” Donna Li said, moving toward the rear of the vehicle.

  “Here, guys,” I said, handing Garrett the bag of candy, sardine tins, and peanut-butter-and-cheese packs I’d brought him. I considered for half a second showing him the pile of rotting crustaceans; it would have been cool and he was my brother. But I didn’t want to give the geniuses the wrong first impression of the Plymouth.

  “Good luck with your programming,” I told Donna Li,
shaking her hand. “And Garrett, be kind to your rocketry.”

  Garrett smiled at that again and said to Donna, “He’s my brother.”

  And she added, “And he owns the largest car in Texas.”

  I felt bad driving my stinking car away from the two young people, but it was that or fess up. I could see them standing in my rearview mirror for a long time. First they watched me, then they looked up, both of them for a long time. They were geniuses looking into the rain; I counted on their being able to find a way out of it.

  EVIL EYE ALLEN

  JANEY MORROW WAS A GIRL who possessed unparalleled beauty, a beauty that stood out like a beacon, the kind of beacon that warns ships of danger, a powerful thing that, though it is intended to serve some greater purpose, inevitably draws attention to itself. I haven’t said that very well, but I tried to go that route because even to try to set out her features would be ridiculous. She was beautiful in a transcendent, unconventional way, and with such vitality and force that you knew—I did—not to look at her, her chinbone, the dark hair of her eyebrows as they flared, the arch of her mouth, any of it, because to look into or upon or near her bright, brooding, large-eyed face would seize you with a gravity you couldn’t even begin to understand or contend with, and you would be unable to look away, even as the bell rang ending your trigonometry class. And as the eleventh-grade students zipped their backpacks and rose to leave, you would be bound and frozen there to stare at Janey Morrow’s perfect, hyperperfect, superperfect face.

  There was a relief in all of this in that even at seventeen I knew she wasn’t a girl I was going to have to talk to, ever. I could see her, sense the glow of her aura, but I would never talk to her. It was okay with me. She was in my trigonometry class and I was able to hear Mr. Trachtenberg say her name three or four times every class period, for she was unparalleled also in her understanding of trigonometry.

  I was having some trouble in trigonometry even before the real trouble that I will get to by and by, and I needed trigonometry to get into Dickinson College, which was my modest dream. I had heard of a writer there, a woman who actually let her students write stories and then talked to the students about this work, and that is what I wanted to do. To get into Dickinson I needed to pass trigonometry and I needed thousands of dollars. I started assisting Evil Eye Allen to solve the latter, but the power of his evil eye did something to assist me in the former as well.

  My close friend Evil Eye Allen instructed me on more than one occasion as we reclined on the football bleachers that when I finally arrived at the story of his name, I must tell it truly yet with some delicacy. “Delicacy is absolutely underrated, Rick,” he told me. “Delicacy is a kind of care the real truth requires.” We were old friends by then, seventeen, everyone else having given us up as strange, me already known as a guy with notebooks, and Evil Eye, who never recovered from giving himself that name and never wanted to. It made me smile and remember his credo: Posture is message. Part of the reason he was considered too odd for friends was the way he had of posting his body when we sat or walked. He’d look straight up when he spoke to you or answer questions in class with his chin on his chest and his hand on the top of his head. “They’ll remember your body,” he said to me, “and then what you said. It’s pivotal to use the body.” He walked sideways or drifted backward. His hands were always in the air.

  I remember his head, which bore his own self-administered haircut, a close, uneven job that made him look like someone in radical recovery, turning slowly, rolling like a machine part and clicking into place, focused right on me there high above the football field. “When you write the story of my name,” Evil Eye Allen said to me, his voice now an airy whisper, “write the story truly but with delicacy. You’re capable of that; you were there and you know me, and we’ve got to think of Janey. See what I mean?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “That would be the wrong answer,” he said, folding up and realigning himself along the bench. “Leave nothing out. Put everything in the story; put all about Evil Eye and his assistant, but don’t change the names. And put in Janey Morrow’s election speech.” His hand rose into the sky as if lifted by a string. “Word for word.”

  His name, of course, was not Evil Eye. His real name was Gary, and it would be great to start with something like He was always a strange kid, but that isn’t true. He grew up two houses down from me and we were friends from day one, that is before we went to school, and he was a regular kid, better at chess than I, worse at poker, better at baseball, as good with football, liked by his teachers, my parents, girls. By the time we entered high school, he could have gone with any girl he wanted; he was real and kind and he had something else, an actor’s magnetism and what 1 called poise.

  “Poise,” he’d say. “Please. Poise is never looking at your hands. I’m a bit beyond that. I’m using my body for something I don’t even understand.”

  And so he got this reputation for being different, but it was an enviable different, something we would have imitated if we could have gotten ahold of it. Sometimes it was his elegant walk, sometimes the way his head seemed to be doing different work than his body, sometimes his mouth opening as he listened or offered you a quick smile. Here I was, a teenager, trying to walk straight, not collapse over my new size-twelve feet, and keep my shirt tucked in, and walking with me was this person who embodied grace, a person like I’ve never seen since, who used every step he took to do two if not three things. “Why do we go up the stairs?” he said to me one day that first year at Orkney High.

  “Because we have language arts in 202,” I told him, lugging my books up behind him.

  “Rick. Oh, Rick. This would be the wrong answer,” he said, a phrase I knew by heart. “We are communicating.”

  “Are we going up to language arts?” I asked.

  “If that happens,” he said, “so be it. But we are moving upward to say something to the ages.” His right hand was clamped on the top of his head and his left under his chin, his hands free because he had given his books to me. “I’m glad you’re here to see this.” It’s what he said later that year when he went a week without closing his mouth and when he went two days, school days, without speaking. That time he told me, “You don’t need to talk. It’s a luxury. Listen to me right now; I’m enjoying this, but I don’t need to do it.”

  In February of that year, a certain girl came into Evil Eye’s sights, a girl everyone else had already seen in that she was the most beautiful girl on dry land anywhere, a girl who was so popular and confident and finished, she seemed already above it all, a girl renowned for her snobbery and style, who every good soul in our school knew^ not to greet because there would be no greeting in return. She was self-contained, sealed shut with her abundant talents, and moving on a straight, graceful line through high school like a first-class car on the express rail. Her name was Janey Morrow. Evil Eye Allen was astounded at her carriage, her posture, her every manner, and he made it his mission to cross into her perimeter. Those are his words, not mine.

  He began speaking to her. It was a picture: my tall friend standing on one leg or leaning his forehead against the wall by her locker as she did everything she could with her shoulder, books, and hands to let him know he should go away now.

  “She has never once looked at me, made eye contact, or spoken in a complete sentence,” he told me after the first week. “I don’t mean even once, and it has been nine days. Is that magnificent or what?” He brought his hands up in a ball, squeezing his fists together and then springing them open. “She is there. She is together. We’re not going to see something like this again.” Now he took my shirt in both of his gigantic hands and whispered along the side of my face, “I’m going to get to her. Evil Eye Allen is going to humanize this angel.”

  In trigonometry, my teacher, Mr. Trachtenberg, bathed Miss Morrow, as he called her, in the soft fostering light of his appreciation. He assumed a stark hostility toward me. I needed a B; it said so in my college ap
plication. Trachtenberg had heard that I was Evil Eye Allen’s assistant, and he was a man who was going to single-handedly use trigonometry to turn around the foolishness that was eroding the decade.

  He discovered my alter ego as a result of our first flyer. We had produced a red-and black announcement that offered the services of:

  Evil Eye Allen and his able assistant, Igor, for Parties of Every Kind and Magnitude including Wedding Receptions, Bar Mitzvahs, Fertility Rites, Seances, Exorcisms, Arbor Day Festivities, Presidents’ Day Celebrations, and Any Occasion Where Something Strange and the Presence of Mysterious Objects Would Make a Worthy Contribution and Amplify the Pleasure of Your Friends. “Beware the Power of the Evil Eye.” Reasonable Rates.

  Mr. Trachtenberg peeled one of these bold goodies off his classroom floor and was not amused to read what appeared to him to be a handbill from the devil. Mr. Trachtenberg’s Christianity was famous. His religious zeal protruded from every axiom he scratched on the blackboard. “It is mathematics,” he’d say, “which will finally defeat Satan.” Last year a kid named Kenny Albright had quipped, “Well then, Mr. T., which is better against the devil, a crucifix or the quadratic equation?” Mr. Trachtenberg stopped at the board, frozen for ten complete seconds it was said, and then he turned, his black eyebrows already crashing together over his flashing eyes, and he whispered through his gnashing teeth, “Neither is going to save you, Mr. Albright.” Kenny Albright, who was a sophomore about to be sixteen, started crying. He transferred into consumer math.

  What Evil Eye hadn’t told me, his able assistant, was that Mr. Trachtenberg’s first name was Igor. And Mr. Trachten-berg made it clear, very clear, that there was room for only one Igor in fourth-period trigonometry. “Is this amusing, Mr. Wesson?” he asked me, waving the flyer before the class. “This, this appeal to the puerile, the ungodly, the evil? Is it?” He wasn’t really asking, and he had the class’s attention. Everyone was waiting to see if I was going to cry. I needed trig; consumer math wasn’t going to get me into college. “I haven’t seen the mark of the beast in your work. It’s been haphazard and a bit tentative but not flagitious or depraved. Are you depraved, Mr. Wesson? Or is it Igor? Do you think in the hot center of your logical mind, Mr. Igor Wesson, that it would be a good idea for the impotent ant to mock the iron heel of my boot?”