Visions of Gerard Read online

  “It’s only two A M, give him a chance to start—”

  “I’ve had to come from a long way and a lot of snowy country to want that much heat, Emil.”

  “I’m made of water!” complains the stagehand who keeps going to the toilet.

  “Well, I like to gamble, like a drink once in a while,” big Emil glancing at his king of heart face-card and adjusting it over the hole card, which now, surreptitiously, in the middle of his sentence, he raises a corner of, to see the spade smooth black of a 10 of spades, winking inside himself to think, “but I never could drink like that and put it away like that—hell George Daslin and me and Henry O’Hara one time drink I dunno how much beer out of a barrel, in Lawrence and then had whisky and a cardgame just like this I guess 9 in the morning, whoo, it took ten years offa my life—”

  “I wouldnt tell you if I knew,” says O’Brien now looking at his hole-card with the same sly up-corner, saying to himself, so that the others can almost read it in the imprint of the smoke before the lamp, “ten of diamonds.”

  Old Conductor Jim Sagely the railroad man, holding his ace of clubs in one hand, thoughtfully raises the jack of same underneath and purses his New England farmer lips.

  “Sagely,” says Bull, slyly, small blue eyes thru reddened eyelid puffs watching, raising flask for a slug soon as he’s finished his speech, a simp, “if I had a barrel a beans and I had a store, I’d hire you to count the bad ones and lay the good ones aside, that’s how sly your dollar is.”

  “What are you, a Scotchman? A sneaky character you must be, with that false hat—bet it’s got hinges on it. I aint no guy that lets his whisky bottle interfere with the waybills, or throws a switch and throws the crummy over before it’s crossed the points.”

  “A lame, improfitable, infantile turn of talk if ever I heard one, your crummies—You? You’re too miserly for my cardgame—it’s midnight in my little life—what’s your key?—Took 80 dollars from me last night—that represents a lotta claprous calls from the crew clerk and a lotta locals in the freezing air for an old Canadian National boomer like me.”

  “Boomer? You? You cahd shahp! Pool shahk!—First time I win some real money in my life and they’s complainin in the sides and up the back—”

  “Le phantome de l’opéra,” provides sepulchrally looking-over his shoulder, Manuel, looking to the eerie shrouds backstage deeper—

  “Ne-mind the phantoms and drink your drink—You gave me a start, damn you!” says my father quietly chuckling.

  “No complainin, Sage, I’m passin king of hearts Emil Pop here with his wife and kiddies just born, bang,” throwing Emil a king of clubs face card, and everybody eying it. “And Charles the hammer, bang, a queen of spades, two kings and two queens showing and where’s the marital bed, bang, a jack of spades for the conductor, and bang” (for himself) “same of hearts.”

  “The game thickens.”

  “I bet and raise the ante.”

  “At this stage, nobody cares.”

  “And on this stage. A new ace wont do you no good—old Sage could use it.”

  “Sevens—aint got no use for em, even when I got seven in the hole, my unlucky number, nine’s my lucky number by God.”

  “Another seven—talkin of the devil—pair a kings high.”

  “There he is, Bull Baloon with a girl for his jack. Who’s gonna win the rainbow pot?”

  “Let me look and think.” Emil, high, with pair of kings, pretends innocent worry. Charley O’Brien has nothing further to examine beyond his showing queens, but a mentioned forlorn seven.

  “It’s a dream, lads, it’s a dream,” utters Bull up-ending a lofty big pull on his swiggins, bloodshot returning the cap, spitting over his shoulder at the two spittoons in the corner. Sagely has a jack under and a jack on top, and nobody knows, but no advantage his, yet, till the last thrust of fate-cards, from the hands of the dealer, Bull. Emil leans over to rub his thigh in the night of the world forgetting his family, lost in the eye to eye the game of men in America; nights long ago after Langford battered Johnson; smoke in Butte saloons; Denver backrooms, games; lost heroes of America; Chicago, Seattle; vaudeville redbrick alleys and forgotten cundoms under isolated signs in the highway night of Roadster Twenties; long jaws of bo’s riding the boxcar from outside North Platte, to clear t’Ogallah, mispronounced, sad, spindle legged waiters in the summermoth night, by lights; America, sweaty, poker games, Negroes on the sidewalk in Baltimore, history, nostalgic with afternoon and man, midnight and weariness, dawn and O’Shea running to catch his train, Old Bull Baloon examining his useless King hole-card, half deciding to full decide to leave the game because even if he gets another King he’s got no ace to ace-high Emil.

  The others stay; Bull deals, lost in the dream. “Ten dont do you no good, Emilio, lessn you got another underneath,” dealing Emil a ten of clubs. Deals Charley a seven, making a pair of 7’s on the top. “You better have a queen underneath,” which Charley doesnt have, stripped bare and queenless, turning up a 10 apologetically. “Another pair of Sevens!” dealing Sagely a 7 of hearts. “If he has another 7 underneath,” opines the rednosed dealer from Butte Montana, “he’s got his own deck a cards hidden in back of his ear inside that curly hair, yass. Which, would a left me with the Ace of Jokers,” dealing himself, for the hell of it, the final fifth card tho he’s out, the Ace of Spades, Death. “Gentlemen,” seeing he’s inadvertently emptied his flask without realizing it in the heat of what he was doing, “is there any beer in the house? No beer?”

  “We got some left, yeh Bull, in the box there.”

  And Emil rakes in the pot, cigar in teeth, big body tensed forward in chair to affairs of the night, as goldpots strew the blue beginnings with incense of aurora and dawn creaks up to crack and boom over the black sad earth now irrevocably Gerard was, enfleshed, sacrificed and given over to, O moanin shame.

  “I’m the one shoulda got that spade,” comments Emil in the alley, as they urinate.

  Bull, pointing up the dawn sky: “More ill fated than in all your dreams you’d a bitterly hoped her to be.”

  Then they get drunk—It happens all of a sudden, on the spur of nothing but a cry—“Slup a slug, son!”—The high white mists of Spring morn over the redbrick roofs of downtown Lowell make them dizzily glad, they go (Manuel in the middle bawling) staggering down the alley—In two cars and the ridiculous motorcycle they go careering thru the mists and over the bridge.

  “Where’s that Irish club?—Where’s that dog with the pipe in his mouth and the blue eyes who sits by the stove in the—”

  “You mean Bob Donnelly, if he aint asleep now with his arms around his milky wife I’d bet and be damned and be called Tarzan if he wasnt still up and jawin his Jew’s harp somewhere the other side a town—”

  “And Murphy! Where are the river boys?”

  “Never mind! It’s a mystery!”

  “Be Jesus Christ it makes me feel good, they lit the furnace in my damp cellar.”

  “All the blowers of hell’ll send it thru the vents and veins and you’ll come out with a true face at last.”

  They rave and scream as the wind ventilates them across the bridge, they’re looking for the Polish Club that’s supposed to open 24 hours a day, down on Lakeview—“That place with the chairs in front.”

  “Ah who needs a ga dam club—come down by the carnival grounds and piss in the bushes.”

  “Suits me fine, termagant.”

  “Manuel, what you doin, you almost got us to the end of our holes.”

  “They been swallowin a long time!”

  “Then why not swallow more, lover.”

  “With my wife in hell everything suits me.”

  “You got eyes like a dead potatobug—wake up and watch the road!”

  “Eat the damn road!” says Manuel who’d as soon the road ate him so
they’d be where they were going sooner.

  Irrelevent conversations meanwhile rage in the cars, driven respectively by Sagely and O’Brien, Old Bull Baloon in his red-eye cups now reconstructing adventures of six decades with the invention of sixty—They all spill out on the field at Lakeview Avenue, across from the mills, on the river, just as the blazing red sun kisses and peeps over the window roofs of all Centerville—

  My father reels about from snort to snort, the earth morning under him—

  My father with straw hat in big gnarled veiny hands, collar bursting out soft and unstylish over his coat lapels from folds of thick muscular neck, frown dark on his brow, hair curly, dark, crisp, nose bulbous, mouth grim but sentimental, kneeling on one knee, examining the sunrise with serious and exact and ponderous officialness, nodding slowly, “I’ll tell ya Bull, there aint never been a mystery of this world I didnt stand in awe of, when standing in front of it, or kneelin on one knee as I am now.” Strangely, rockily, the redness shows on the ridges of his face.

  His head is held slightly on one side, as I say a little like Gerard, but in this case, the father’s sadness is held inside a manly grace, or rather, a manly brace, the philosophicalness abides higher in the cranium here than it can in the recentness-film of the angel child—Experience has made a man of Emil, and you may take man and weigh him on the scales with his weight in goldshit on the other pan, the measurement may come out, legible—If so, write me a letter—I see no reason for Man—But his value, I buy—Dawns white with drunkness I’ve had myself with my boys and after that were boys—And there’ll be more—Brothers that were saints that died on me, that too’s happened a million times in a million repetitudes and reincarnation in Samsara’s sorrow parade—More wine! fewer dead potato bugs! Roll me down the road in a barrel, if I’m lying—(and I’ve been rolled in a barrel down the road, an I’m a liar)—Jesus Child,—But birth and tender years which we take to be actual happeningness in the phenomena of this self belief that something seems to happen, called existence, hath made of Emil’s son Gerard instead of a weighable debatable man, a tender-born and angel of tender years—Emil’s lips pressed together to make the whole face storm, Breton, hot, worried, Emil, leaning his big arms on thick unbreakable knees, thick thighs, he brushes the cigar smoke from the pants of his thigh, he fixes his face in the rising sun (priests are anointing and intoning a quartermile away), he looks like some Medieval wallguard waiting for the Jesus Child, nodding, “I’ll be gol danged . . . aint it a strange world, Bull—here we are, by the side of a river, two men—once upon a time we had a notion we were romeos and gave up our little suspenders and our Saturday night nickelodeons and made googoo eyes at the girls at basketball games and hit hero homeruns and then developed these big endless holes to thrown our money in—money? And all of it!—Like throwing ten dollar bills and flowers in the gad dam ocean, Bull—”

  “Expand upon the theme,” says Bull passing the bottle.

  “No I’m through—an ocean, Caesar never had it so good I’m tellin you.”

  Meaningless, they grow solemn and serious.

  “It’s a hell of a world—debts, wives, woman—scissors, meat, do you blame her?”

  “Why hell no?”

  “Ha?”

  “Hell No!”

  “In the winter, kiddies—a purple shame, an American shame, a durn Babe Ruth homerun of a shame—Youth gone wild, hung upsidedown—”

  “Tarzan—”

  “Emil, the world is happy!”

  “You damn right.”

  “My best, MY children, I’m not promising anything—”

  “End, but hole hat or no hole hat and happy sandholes of infantile or not, I predict it, seaweave breezes once in a while, sand most a the time, hot unhappy painful burning sand and right in his throat, and makes his wet yes water more”—(slup, a slug)—“Let the women wash it, I’m through, I’m the culprit officer, O offi sair, sir, but take me away not now, some other time Offi Sair Charley,” as Emil and Charley dance and gesture Cop-and-Innocent Arrest on the red haunted banksides of 8 A M Lowell in the mud and molten snow—Harsh laughter, lighting of cigars, holding of them between fingers outstretched stiff drunk, the fragrance of the Cuban smoke, the Cuban quality of men, mixed with alcohol so many percent by volume and name your Infinity—Slapping of laugh-hands, Whoos!, and “Take me away peaceably, I wanta play one more game of poker!”—Pulling up of thigh pants, clearing of throats, ah-hums and hem-haws, popping of eye-bulge doubts, starings into the blank to wait for further time—

  “O where’s that Donnelly!”

  “Well then goddamit let’s go to him!”

  Off they vow in their Immense vehicles—

  “Oh call it a day!”

  “And why?“

  And when they do find Donnelly it’s only for him to sit there saying “Emil you could have ended up your days cryin in that corner—calling for more drinks—but you had to buy a store, and hire yourself out, and count your every blarney.”

  “Aright with me, Ole Be-larney.”

  “And you hankered and pankled and popped to discover—”

  “I did.”

  “And you—are you sure this is a mixture of what did you say?” and later to the other old Irishmen of the corner, in the store, the bloody store, he, Donnelly, says, “Emil Duluoz—a perfect person,” and they believe him.

  But by that time we’ve all got big headaches—And our Manuel-wives’ll have a scream at us—And it’s only stored in bottles, tho you might think in furnaces of ire in Diablo Bottoms—“The trouble with you, Duluoz,” pronounces Bull on our porch, the which even Gerard in his bed can heart, at 10 A M—

  “What?”

  “You’re just too eager to hear for me to tell you what’s wrong with you, so you can change and rectify—God made misers, and misers made God, and I’m suited.”

  They bump rolling heads together in the amazingness of this—

  “Tst-tst,” says my mother peeking from the kitchen, “it’s looks like your father is drunk this morning”—“Who’s that, that big pile? He’s swallowed all his glasses and his barrels in his nose, it looks like!—They want some break fast—I’ll warm up last night’s good ragout d’boulette” (pork meatball stew with onions and carrots and potatoes, exquisite, Old Bull Baloon never had a better meal since the time in Wyoming the fry-cook said to him at dawn “I got some nice homefrieds for ya this morning, Bull”—

  O pitiful, lovable, soon-to-be-departed earth,—) That’ll do.

  “And time bids be gone”—

  It might be pepper for a cold feast, but I always did say that the fact that men are, is more interesting than anything they might do—’tis only a poor action on a part stage and the scenery (the fakery) can be seen to shift and jello, in the backdrops, the stagehands are clumsy, the designer clumsy, and thine eye quick—Inadequate settings, poorly paid carpenters—You wake up in the middle of the night and look at the horizon sneaking swiftly back into place, and you think ‘O God, it’s all the same thing’—That there is a world, that, rather, there seems to be a world, is hugely more interesting than what tiddly diddly well might happen in it, like Nirvana in an ant-heap or an ant-heap in Nirvana, one—

  Bless my soul, death is the only decent subject, since it marks the end of illusion and delusion—Death is the other side of the same coin, we call now, Life—The appearance of sweet Gerard’s flower face, followed by its disappearance, alas, only a contour-maker and shadow-selector could prove it, that in all the perfect snow any such person or thing ever did arrive say Yea and go away—The whole world has no reality, it’s only imaginary, and what are we to do?—Nothing—nothing—nothing. Pray to be kind, wait to be patient, try to be fine. No use screamin. The Devil was a charming fool.

  In his last days Gerard had little to do but lay in bed and stare at the ceiling, and sometimes watc
h the cat. “Look Ti Jean, the little nut—look, he looks one way, he looks the other—Lookat the crazy face, what’s he thinkin?—Everytime he sees something what does he think?—Look, he’s goin in the other room. Why? What’s he thinkin that makes him go in the next room? Look, now he stops, he looks—he licks himself—there, he yawns—well, now he’s comin back—he’s crazy—O CRAZY KITIGI! Bring him!” and I’d bring him the little grey tiger cat and we’d biddle and fwiddle with his crazy nose and stroke his head and he’d set in purring and glad. “Look at him, a little crazy ball like that, a little white belly as soft and as smooth as a heart—God made kitties I guess for us—God sent his kitties everywhere—Take care of my kitigi when I’m gone,” he adds holding kitigi to his face and almost crying.

  “Where you goin?”

  No answer.

  “See? the little face, the little head, look, I could break his head by squeezing my hand—it’s only a little thing with no strength—God put these little things on earth to see if we want to hurt them—those who dont do it who can, are for his Heaven—those who see they can hurt, and do hurt, they’re not for his Heaven—See?”

  “Oui.”

  “Always be careful not to hurt anyone—never get mad if you can help it—I gave you a slap in the face the other day but I didnt know it when I did it”—

  (That’d been one of the last days when he felt good enough to get up and play with his erector set, a gray exciting morning for all-day work, gladly he’d at the break fast crumb-swept newspapers of the table begun to raise his first important girder when I importunately rushed up tho gleefully to join in the watching but knocked the whole thing over scattering screws and bolts all over and upsetting the delicate traps, inadvertently and with that eternal per durable mistakenness we all know, he slapped my face yelling “Décolle donc!” (Get away!) and must have instantly regretted it, no doubt that in a few minutes his remorse was greater than my disappointed regret—) We made up soon enough, head to head at the sad and final mortal window, holy Gerard and I, which gave credence now to his speech about kindness; and a speech it is, that down thru the imaginary eternities, is, and hath been, handed down by all spiritual heroes (of his like and calibre):—immeasurable kindness—“It’s in the words of the Lord’s Prayer—forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. Did you forgive me for hitting you?”