The Fool's Progress Page 10

  Back to the controls of my Dodge SuperHeap where Sollie the dog waits patiently, sitting in her place, gazing at the pink police ticket under the windshield wiper. Now what? I read the ticket. “Parking in space reserved for handicapped.” Thirty-five-dollar fine. Anger surges through my veins. Handicapped? Who are these so-called “handicapped”? Am I not handicapped? An emotional spastic, a psychic quadriplegic, a moral basket case? Are we not all handicapped in our various fatal pitiful ways? Why should they, that minority in wheelchairs (another major minority!), have special privileges merely because they’re cripples? If they can’t walk let them creep. If they can’t creep let them crawl. Are their arms only painted on? Time to fight back, I say. Time to launch our long-awaited countermovement, Henry H. Lightcap’s Christian Crusade Against Crybaby Communist Crips, and if they don’t like it we’ll pull their plugs.

  I tear up the ticket—rip it asunder (I love that word)—and drop the pieces in a handy trash can. HELP KEEP OUR CITY KLEEN. Climb into truck, back out and head for the Dirty Shame Saloon. Got to have one drink, only one, before I hit the open road.

  Crossing the bar. Read the welcoming sign above the Dirty Shame’s elk-antlered doorway: GET DRUNK, BE SOMEBODY. The comforts of alienation. A dark ill-lighted unclean place, stinking of stale beer and moldy floorboards, bourbon whiskey and archaeological vomit. I love this joint. The buxom lass behind the bar brings me a schooner of draft beer and my shooter of Wild Turkey. And a chargrilled Polish sausage for Solidarity. The basics. Keep that liver working, active, on its toes. Keep that pancreas slightly anxious. It’s true that man is the only animal that poisons himself with alcohol. It’s also true that man outlives every other animal on earth except elephants, tortoises and crocodiles. And women.

  I order another Polish sausage with onions and sauerkraut. Another beer. Solidarity Forever. Read the placards on the wall: MADD: MOTHERS AGAINST DRUNK DRIVERS, and next to it, DAMM: DRUNKS AGAINST MAD MOTHERS. There is a kind of order in the natural world. The laws of compensation continue to function. For every action a reaction, for every blow a counterblow, for every torn leaf a fresh bud, for every death a new life. The pulse of the springs of life cannot be suppressed. No matter how much iron and cement and asphalt and Astroturf and Du Pont fiberglass and driller’s mud and Hereford cowpies they pour upon the earth, the grass will overcome. Will come and over-come!

  But it may take a while.

  Should I phone Harrington? Arriaga? Lacey? Have one last round of drinks with my old cronies before ricocheting off, like shit off a shovel, into the pilgrim’s final journey, my Journey East?

  To rescue Brother Will.

  No, I guess I won’t. Would be too merry to endure. My heart could not bear it. Too much like a wake. I don’t even have the heart to say goodbye. Imagine instead that we’re coming back.

  Lurching into the men’s room for a final piss before departure, I read again, as I always do, the fresh new writing on the wall, vox populi, the voice of the people:

  When did the Irish learn to walk on their hind legs? When the English invented the wheelbarrow.

  Fuck the Queen.

  What’s the happiest five years of a Chicano’s life? Third grade.

  Gobachos eat shit.

  What do you get if you mate an African with a gorilla? A retarded gorilla.

  Honkies eat shit.

  Smells bad in here. I leave.

  Now what? Well, another beer, another shot, another sausage cannot hurt. Then I must go. Yes, I am living a pig’s life. This is not the way to live. But what then, as Tolstoy put it, is a man to do? What is, really, the good life? We’ll see. Back in the hills maybe I’ll figure it out. Got enough cash left for cheese and crackers, the siphon hose for gasoline, my arsenal for self-defense, my dying dog for companionship. How much wealth does a man need? The less the better if he’s a free man. Yes: our liberties we prize. Our rights we will maintain. Don’t tread on me. Liberty or Damnitall. Live free or die.

  A few strange faces drift in and out—carpenters, plasterers, operating engineers—but nobody I know or want to know. I pay the barmaid—her name is Carlita—and stagger outside into the dazzling glare of April Arizona. Into the truck, onto the street, past a new billboard—

  * * *

  Ya’ Know, God Really Cares

  * * *

  —and north toward the highway.

  I sing an old song:

  Jesus loves me, that I know,

  ’Cause the billboards tell me so.

  Headed for Will’s place, old Fort Llatikcuf as our Shawnee ancestors called it. Emphasis on final syllable. Three thousand four hundred ninety miles to go. About a thousand and two hundred leagues. (Big leagues.) Be of good cheer. Though it’s over the hill to the poorhouse, as Rilke wrote, we been there before.

  Henry lays back his head, both hands on the wheel, closes his eyes for a moment and howls for the hell of it, howls like a hound dog, like a coyote, like a wolf, as the wind screams past the open window at his side. His dog joins in, they howl together forlorn and furious, basso profundo molto doloroso, they put everything in and get everything out in one final farewell vulpine duet of defeat, despair, damnation, dejection, doom, death, dust, defiance—fraternity of the damned, the proud prolonged and primal hullabaloo of bottom dogs. Fat automobiles rush past on either side, their occupants staring at Henry and the dog. Neither cares.

  Henry rolls up his window and lights a cigar. He pulls a bottle of beer from the sixpack on the floor, twists off cap and takes a hearty swig. Sets bottle in bottle holder on dashboard, close to hand. Beyond the city limits he reaches the secondary highway that winds northeast over the mountains toward Oracle, Winkelman, Globe, Show Low, Gallup, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and points beyond. He smokes the cigar, drinks the beer and thinks, as the wind whistles through the rusty cracks in the floorboards, of comfort. Of joy. Of Comfort (built for speed) and Joy (built for comfort). And the Raunch House Bar. Now there was a pair. And a place.

  Solstice the dog, dying but content, stares straight ahead at the blue-gray road, the hot and lonesome asphalt trail. The gleam of hope shines in her leaky elderly stoic eyes.

  I stroke her lean backbone. “We’ll make it, Sollie. We’ll get there, never fear.”

  We roll ahead past Oracle Junction, then pause for a moment, pulling off the pavement. The rented beer is trickling through me, building up pressure. I walk away from the road through the thicket of broomplant lining the ditch, step over a sagging fence and take shelter from the sun in the shade of a mesquite tree. The tree is bright, brilliant, joyous with fresh green leaves. Joy of April. An old dirt road runs nearby, paralleling the highway. Garbage scattered about as usual. I unbutton my fly, pull out The Thing and am about to piss when I notice the baseball glove in the grass at my feet. A boy’s fielding glove, worn out, thrown away. I cannot resist the urge to pick it up, feel it, smell it. Long unoiled, dried out by the desert air, the leather is cracked, stiff, in poor condition. But not completely dead.

  Slipping it on my hand, smacking the palm, holding it under my nose, it still feels like horsehide and smells like a baseball glove. Like April and mud. Like West Virginia in the spring. Like the Allegheny Mountains. Like the game. Like baseball, and girls, and the heartbreaking joy of a new season.

  4

  April 1942:

  The Rites of Spring

  I

  The war? What war? Henry Lightcap, fifteen years old and lean as a willow sapling, had deeper things in mind. Henry loved the chant of the spring peepers, ten thousand tiny titillated frogs chanting in chorus from the pasture, down in the marshy bottoms by the crick, that music of moonlight and fearful desire, that plainsong, that Te Deum Laudamus, that Missa Solemnis deep as creation that filled the twilight evenings with a song as old (at least) as the carboniferous coal beds beneath his homeland. (Grandfather Lightcap had signed a broadform deed to the mineral rights in 1892 but nothing ever came of it. Or ever would, thought Paw.)

  Henry detested hi
gh school with a hatred keen as his knifeblade but loved getting on the bus behind Wilma Fetterman, watching as she climbed the high steps, her skirt riding high, his eyes fixed on the tendons behind her knees, the sweet virgin untouchable gloss of her forever inaccessible thighs. Henry, virgin himself, thought that he understood the mechanical principle of the human sexual connection but also believed, with the hopeless sorrow of youth, that he himself would never, never be capable of the act because—well, because his penis, when excited and erect, rose hard and rigid as bone against his belly button. There was no room in there, no space whatsoever, for a female of his own species. The thing could not be forced down to a horizontal approach, as he assumed was necessary, without breaking off like the joint of a cornstalk. He told no one of his deformity. Not even his mother. But though it was hopeless, he continued to love watching Wilma Fetterman climb the school-bus steps.

  He loved the lament of the mourning doves, echoing his own heartache, when they returned each spring from wherever they went in winter. He loved the soft green of the linwood trees, the bright green of the Osage orange against the morning sun. He loved the red-dog dirt road that meandered through the smoky hills beside the sulfur-colored creek, into and through the covered bridge and up the hollow that led, beyond the last split-rail fence, toward the barn, the forge, the pigpen, the wagon shed, the icehouse, the springhouse and the gray good gothic two-story clapboard farmhouse that remained, after a century, still the Lightcap family home.

  He loved his Berkshire pigs. He loved the beagle hounds that ran to meet him each evening. He loved—but intuitively not consciously—the sight of the family wash hanging from the line, the sound of his father’s ax in the woodyard as the old man split kindling for the kitchen stove. He even loved the arrogant whistling of his older brother, Will—hated rival—as Will brought the horses up from the half-plowed cornfield, the team harnessed but unhitched, traces dragging, chains jingling, over the stony lane to the barn.

  But most of all and above all and always in April Henry loved the sound of a hardball smacking into leather. The WHACK! of a fat bat connecting with ball. And better yet, when he was pitching, he loved the swish of air and grunt of batter lunging for and cleanly missing Henry’s fast one, low and outside, after he’s brushed the hitter back with two consecutive speedballs to the ear.

  He loved his brand-new Joe “Ducky” Medwick glove, personally autographed (at the Spalding factory) by Joe himself. He loved the feel and heft and fine-grained integrity of his sole uncracked Louisville Slugger, autographed by baseball’s one and only active .400 hitter, the great and immortal Ted Williams.

  Brother Will liked the game too, in his calm complacent way, but never lay awake at night dreaming about it, never dawdled away hours composing elaborate box scores of imaginary games in a fantasy league that existed only in the mind of Henry Lightcap.

  Henry had his reasons. He had a real team also. And real opponents. The Blacklick team was coming to Stump Creek for the first contest of the season.

  Henry and Will picked their lineup, writing names down on a ruled paper tablet. Henry would take over the mound, Will, as usual, handle the catching. Their little brother Paul could play right field where he’d be mostly out of the way, not in a position to do much harm. Their best player and one genuine athlete, the sharp-eyed clean-cut Eagle Scout Chuck Tait, would sparkplug the team at shortstop or take over first or relieve the pitcher, wherever needed. That made four players, the solid core of the Stump Creek nine. But where to find the other five? Stump Creek, West Virginia, population 120 (counting dogs and girls), clumped in a lump beside County Road 14, did not offer much talent.

  They brooded over the problem and decided the best they could do was have the Adams brothers, Clarence thirteen and Sonny twelve, play second and third base, and let the Fetterman boys, Junior (his baptized, Christian name) age thirteen and Elman age eleven, play the outfield. That Elman, says Will, he couldn’t hit a cow’s ass with a snow shovel. But we need him.

  We’re still one player short, Henry pointed out; we need somebody at first base. They thought about that for a while. Finally Will mentioned the name of Ginter.

  No, said Henry. Who else? Not Red Ginter. Who else we got? But Red, said Henry, Red’s seventeen. Yeah but he’s still in fourth grade. That was three years ago. Well that’s where he was last time he went to school. Blacklick would have a fit. We promised no players over sixteen. Besides…Besides what? Red won’t play. Ask him. Who else we got? He can’t play, says Henry. He’s big but he won’t move, he won’t run.

  He’ll catch the ball if you throw it to him. He’ll do for first base.

  Can’t hit the ball. Undercuts—swings his bat like it’s a golf club. Strikes out every time.

  Yeah but he takes a mighty powerful cut at the ball. Will smiled, his dark eyes musing. I saw him hit a ball four hundred feet on a line drive one time.

  I saw that. A fluke hit and anyway it went foul.

  He’s the only one we have left, Henry.

  Henry thought about it. What about Red’s little brother? Leroy? Maybe he could play.

  Christ, muttered Will, making a rotating motion with his forefinger close by his right ear. Leroy’s crazy as a moon-eyed calf. We don’t even want him around.

  They were silent for a minute, sitting there in the kitchen at the oilcloth-covered table, under the amber glow of the kerosene lamp, staring at their paper lineup of eight ball players, five of them children. Then it has to be Red, says Henry.

  II

  Swinging out from the school bus late in the afternoon, Henry and Will walked half a mile homeward up the red-dog road, under the trees, then cut off over the hill through the Big Woods toward the next cove on the south. Once called Crabapple Hollow, it became known as Hardscrabble when the Ginter family, coming from no one knew where, made it their family seat in the late 1800s, soon after the end of the War Between the States.

  They tramped through the ruins of Brent’s sawmill, abandoned half a century before, and struck a footpath leading down the steep side of the ridge toward the corn patches and pastures of Ginter’s farm. Halfway down they passed the tailings pile of a small coal mine, unworked for years. A dribble of sulfurous water leaked from the portal; decayed locust props, warped by the overburden, shored up the roof of the tunnel. There were many such workings in the area; in one of these old Jefferson Davis Ginter kept his distilling equipment.

  The farm buildings came in view, ramshackle structures with sagging roofbeams. The main house was a one-story slab shack with rusted tin roof; built by Ginter, it leaned for support against a much older but far steadier pine-log cabin. Ginter’s coon hounds, smelling the Lightcap brothers from afar, began to bay, tugging at their chains.

  The path to the back porch of the house—their goal—was wide enough for two but Henry let Will walk before him. Will was both bigger and older, a dark stolid solid fellow, broad at the shoulders and thick in the arms, built—as everyone agreed—like a brick shithouse. Even as a freshman he had played first-string tackle on the varsity football team at Shawnee High School.

  The back door stood wide open to the mellow April afternoon, revealing a dark interior. There was no screendoor. Ginter chickens wandered in and out of the house, pausing to shit on the doorstep, pecking at cockroaches, ticks, ants, June bugs, dead flies, fallen shirt buttons, crumbs of tobacco, whatever looked edible. A string of blue smoke from the kitchen stovepipe rose straight up in the still air.

  The four dogs chained beneath the porch barked with hoarse and passionate intensity as Will and Henry approached the house. From inside came voices—angry, outraged.

  They’re fightin’ again, says Henry. Maybe we should come back later.

  They’re always fightin’, Will says. Come on. He marched firmly forward. Then stopped at the sound of a shriek.

  There was an explosion of hens from the open doorway followed by a stub-tailed yellow dog, airborne, as if propelled by a mighty kick. The dog cleared the por
ch without touching the planks, landed running on the bare dirt of the yard—something pale and soft clamped in its jaws—and scuttled like a wounded rat toward the nearest outbuilding.

  Will hesitated; Henry stopped behind him.

  Old Jeff Ginter appeared in the doorway holding a pint Mason jar in one hand. He roared after the dog: You ever come back in here again you docktail misbegotten yellowback mutt I’ll fill your hinder end with birdshot so goldamn stiff you’ll be shittin’ B-Bs through your teeth for a month.

  And then the old man saw Will and Henry, two schoolboys in bright sport shirts and fresh blue jeans staring at him from fifty feet away across the beaten grassless dung-spotted yard. Ginter wore bib overalls, frayed at the knee, unpatched and unwashed; instead of a shirt he wore a long-sleeved union suit buttoned to the neck, once white but aged to a grayish blend of sweat, dust, woodsmoke and ashes. He was barefoot. He squinted at the boys through bloodshot eyes. What’re you two a-doin’ here?

  Will gazed calmly at Ginter, waiting for Henry to speak. Henry was pitcher, scorekeeper, self-appointed manager of the Stump Creek baseball team.

  Henry swallowed and said, We’re lookin’ for Red.

  What you want him for?

  We need him for the ball team, Mr. Ginter. We got a game with Blacklick Saturday.

  The old man swayed a little on the porch, took a languid sip from his pint, raised the jar to the light and checked the bead. He glowered at Henry. When’s this here game a-gonna be?

  Saturday, Henry said.