Ray Read online

  Many pearls and a great store of corn were found.

  Tuscaloosa and all his family were dead. We turned the great tall Indian over. A soldier named Stellus had fired the buss straight through his chest from five lengths.

  Sometimes Charlie DeSoto read that passage to renew himself with his old perhaps ancestor. He got neither any special horror nor delight from it, but it reminded him of the adventurous perversity in himself that he cherished.

  Then he thought: What was the it that fellow was talking about he said he couldn’t take any more of?

  This was a friendly city, Tuscaloosa, though there were sirens to be heard most parts of the day and the state asylum across the way was full. On the streets you might see such as this: a small man wearing a football helmet, walking in front of a man in a black suit and white Panama hat, the larger man in black frequently striking the smaller one over the helmet with a broom handle. They were inseparable companions, and the man in black always tipped the clerk five dollars for a Coca-Cola at the Jiffy Mart.

  But we were talking about this time in the morning, 7:45. And here comes Mr. Wently by DeSoto’s house. This time DeSoto more than ever wanted to slay Mr. Wently. Wasn’t there an old bow and arrow in the house somewhere? The hatchet—where was it? Quick!

  The dog, Albert, from the lesbians’ house attacked. But Wently’s routine allowed him nothing but routine, and DeSoto’s rage allowed him nothing but passion. It is terribly, excruciatingly difficult to be at peace, thought DeSoto, when all our history is war. Look at that whining half-poodle, half-schnauzer Albert. Half-bred to sit at home, look elegant, and eat and fart. Half-bred to throw its vicious teeth into the unknown villain. Wently is killing everything.

  DeSoto called in to the soap factory to say he was sick, which was true. He was sick with thought. He lingered awhile, watching a few joggers pass his house—healthy, harmless, in love with the thought that health promised the whole thing—bigger breasts, penis, chest. Endurance. That’s it. If you can cut through it with peace and joy. If you can give health to those around you. But DeSoto didn’t feel like it just now.

  I want Wently, thought DeSoto. I want to purchase his death.

  Maybe there are worse guys than me, he said to himself. For example, the guy from Minnesota who hummed all the time. He seemed to be furnishing the score for every puny adventure of his life. Always the hum, tunes various, dense, thin, largo, allegro. A trip to the café would take him through a sonata. There was a tune for feeding his cat, another for his goldfish, another for watering the plants in his crummy color-clashing apartment. He had no radio or phonograph. His time with women was limited—by them. But on he hummed incessantly, arrogantly, until somebody broke his mouth at a graveside ceremony one afternoon. DeSoto played Ping-Pong with him once. The hum was infuriating. They were odd tunes, nothing familiar. This man’s game was mediocre, but it must be sung about. Every gesture must be styled by the hum, every blazing inconsequential adjustment had a song. Maybe he had been to too many movies, watched too much television. But the hum incensed Charlie DeSoto even more than Wently incensed him.

  He got out his French horn and played a few quick scales, then an inventive cadenza, to impress himself with his culture.

  The next morning there was Wently and there went Albert pretending to be at him again. DeSoto was sitting on his front steps reading the paper and Wently passed within three feet of him.

  “Hello, damn it,” said DeSoto.

  The old guy neither replied nor missed a stride. The cane clicked, the shoes, which were rubber-soled, flapped through the leaves on the sidewalk.

  DeSoto went to the soap factory, but he was in a state. The workers under him wondered what had happened. He drank on the job, cursed, was loud and impatient, lit and stomped out many cigars. A handsome young man of thirty-four, Charlie was beheld a despot of years. Usually a well-groomed and soft-spoken fellow, today he wore slovenly pants and shouted.

  His girlfriend, who was Eileen and was his secretary, almost called the doctor, who was me. But instead she locked the door to the office and faced Charlie.

  “I’ve got something temporarily that not even love will cure,” he said.

  The next afternoon he walked around the block to see where Wently lived. He had never known exactly. It was a tall green house with a splendid porch. Wently was rocking in a rocking chair, pushing himself with weak jolts of his cane. He was wearing the three-piece suit. He must have been a man of some means. Big oaks and an enormous magnolia comforted his yard. In a chair next to him rocked a younger man who held his face in his hands, as if in anguish. Wently, decided DeSoto, was also driving this fellow crackers. The two were not speaking. Wently was staring ahead serenely, fascinated only, it seemed, by himself and the system of his rocking—not even by the weather, which was medium blue and fine.

  DeSoto observed the grief of the younger man —Wently’s grandson? his nephew? Then he walked back home and inquired among the neighbors. It was Wently’s grandnephew. DeSoto had been in there right on it.

  At 7:40 the next morning DeSoto began his own walk around the block. He was wearing a headdress, cheap, from the K-Mart, and he carried his French horn with him. From thirty feet away, he saw Wently coming toward him on the walk. Should he? Yes. DeSoto played a chain of blats in the high register. Maybe Wently was deaf, but he was not blind.

  Anyhow, the old man just passed him.

  “Jesus!” cried DeSoto.

  A woman professor he knew was just leaving for work in her car, and she saw and heard it all. I’m making a donkey out of myself, thought DeSoto. For the rest of the day he could not eat, and he practiced self-abuse in all possible ways, sort of living in the toilet at the soap factory, moving from stall to stall so as not to invite the looks of the curious and their hellos and how-are-yous.

  In the night DeSoto studied gentle thoughts. He attempted to dream of his sweetheart and her delicate parts; of light pleasures he had known, such as reversing the clock an hour when daylight saving time was over; of healthy food; of morning light on the small green ears of corn in his patch last summer. He hummed the placid tune “Home on the Range” several times through. But sleep would not come. He poured himself a tomato juice and took five B-complex vitamin pills, which were supposed to be settlers. But eventually he found himself sitting furious and awake in a chair that faced the window to his backyard.

  He was there an hour, through some ten stale Lucky Strikes he had found in a drawer, when he saw the figure slough across the fence in the light of the moon. There was no doubting it was a man, a whole man. DeSoto watched him roll onto the earth and begin squirming on down the lawn. DeSoto was transfixed by the man’s progress. When he saw him reach the driveway, DeSoto stood up from his chair. He hurried out before the man could reach the next yard.

  “What’s with you, fellow?” demanded DeSoto.

  The man rolled toward him. DeSoto recognized his body, perhaps his face from their first encounter, the set of hair and forehead from their second. It was old Wently’s grandnephew. The neighbors said his name was Ned, a namesake of Wently, who was Edward. Ned was around thirty, but his face was haggard, his eyes heavy with bags and his mustache scraggly and askew, as if false and pasted on at a wrong angle. DeSoto had brought his flashlight.

  “I say, what’s going on?” he asked again, as Ned Wently blinked his eyes in the light.

  “I’m trespassing, señor. Better let me have it.”

  “What’s this señor?”

  “Aren’t you Spanish?”

  “It’s a lie,” DeSoto said. “Now answer my question.”

  “I finally let him have it,” the Wently fellow said. “He never knew what hit him. They took away my liquor, my dope and my piano, and they sent me to live with him. I’m interviewing for one dumb job after another. Got one tomorrow at the fucking soap factory. That hideous, fucking soap factory that’s screwing up the river?”

  DeSoto switched off the flashlight.

  “Let
him have it, did you? Never knew what hit him? Come see me. I’m a foreman at the factory.”

  The younger Wently did not respond. He crawled off the driveway and through a hole in the fence of the neighbor’s yard.

  “Why are you crawling?” Charlie called after him, to no use at all.

  DeSoto was early on the job, at 6:30. He had to open a lot of the doors himself and his only company for a while was the maintenance and sweeping crew. The fumes of the place were violently sweet and sour. He was hungry, horny, happy, and handsome, and he made up a chant to life and himself. I am Charlie, he sang. Hai hai, hai, hai hai, hai!

  Charlie DeSoto had had no sleep, but he was elated. He sat behind his aluminum desk, speculating on the gross points of the homicide. Let him have it would indicate a gun, or maybe poison. Truly, it could be anything when you put it together with Never knew what hit him. Ned would cover it. DeSoto would help him if he had to.

  Eileen arrived earlier than usual, and she was all worn out. The old DeSoto car, which she had bought just as a flirting joke to please Charlie— though the orange leather interior was nice—was smoking and stalled at traffic lights. And the driver’s door would not open because of some fault in the lock.

  She was confounded and thrown into a perilous dither by Charlie’s alterations. Moreover, she had cheated on DeSoto the previous night. The man was not nearly as handsome as DeSoto, but his desire for her was constant, soft, a genial tribute to the shrine of her body, and she recalled even the Bible said that was okay. She had allowed the man everything. Now nothing assuaged her guilt. Poor Charlie, poor Charlie, she muttered, sleepless and insane with contrition.

  She had to arrive early and make his appearance at the office comfortable. Also she was very erotic, and her satisfaction was not close. She had driven by Charlie’s house earlier in the morning. He was not there. The mystery was compelling a storm of expectation. Here was his car in his parking slot at the factory. She hurried in, her body showered but slick again with a new sweat of the day.

  She looked pretty and clean by the time the plant air conditioning had cooled her down. DeSoto responded to her chic wool skirt and satin blouse, and, as always, her dark trim ankles and sandals. She was about a quarter Lebanese and it seemed that all the best traits of that race had sprung up in Eileen suddenly.

  They were alone in the office.

  What happened behind the locked door was sacred to them both. It was a drunkenness of the bodies. DeSoto was charming and expert at his job, as was Eileen, and DeSoto could bear the fact that, minute after minute, Ned Wently did not appear for an interview with him. DeSoto had looked up a real job for him. It wasn’t a make-work job. Ned would have a small, quiet office near the truck docks, a supervisory position. Something higher than he should be hired at, really, but DeSoto would bring in the muscle to make it possible.

  As for DeSoto’s early morning, it was exalted by the absence of old Mr. Wently on the sidewalk at 7:45. The day was clear and merry without him. DeSoto met the loud bark of Albert with an understanding smile. He also saw the pet monkey come out of Lester’s house next door. DeSoto went over and took the morning paper out of its paws, speaking to the monkey, whose name was Amy, in monkey whispers, and taking the nice animal back to his own kitchen, where DeSoto made a huge breakfast. He peeled a banana and opened a can of sardines for Amy, put them on a plate with a napkin nearby.

  There was nothing about a death on the block in the newspaper.

  Now the office door was locked and DeSoto was near to entering Eileen, with her skirt around her blouse and the tops of her stockings close to her sex. Charlie adored this half-clothed demonstration of lust almost better than anything. There was a call in, however, that a Mr. Ned Wently was waiting outside to see him.

  Eileen stood off to the side. She shivered when Wently came in.

  He was garbed in a rough tweed suit. His hair and mustache were combed a little, but he still looked disoriented, worse in daylight. The bags under his eyes were dark. His shoulders were wide, but his legs were bowed and thin. The stain of some red sauce was on his neck.

  Wently looked at Eileen. His eyes lit up with the normal sex-crazy look of a man. But then he threw his weak gaze at DeSoto, and Eileen left the room.

  They sat down, DeSoto and Wently, the desk between them, and were quiet for a spell.

  “I’ve got something for you,” said DeSoto at last.

  “And I’ve got something for you,” said the younger Wently.

  He pulled out a small silverish .22 automatic pistol. DeSoto regarded it. It looked like the foetus of firearms.

  “You let him have it with this?”

  “I didn’t even have to after you scared the fuck out of him with the headdress and that horn. He already had a big cancer and heart disease. You took him to the edge, man. With peace and routine, he would’ve lived forever. So I never had to fire a shot. Just pointed it seriously.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Then all we needed was the ambulance.” Wently’s eyes were welling with tears. “Thing is, he loved me. He willed everything to me. I broke his heart when I pulled this thing on him.”

  Wently began openly weeping.

  “But he owed us one, my daddy and me. My daddy was swamped with debt and in precarious health when he was supporting us and my grand-uncle Edward. Edward didn’t always live in that big green house, you know. He’s sucked off the family with his goddamn routine and righteousness for years. Until he had his own stack of green and a place. Tell you what, man. These people, these peaceful people leave as many bodies behind as those big war copters in Nam, where I also had to go.”

  “Then you feel justified?” said DeSoto.

  “No!” Wently stared at DeSoto. Then he bent and put his face in his hands, as DeSoto had seen him doing on the porch of the Wently house. “I feel awful guilty. I put him in the ground.”

  “Come on. Get out of it,” DeSoto said.

  “You get out of it, DeSoto! Have you seen the crap spilling out of those pipes from this puking factory into the river? Where I used to fish when I was a little boy, there ain’t nothing but nasty white soap twenty feet down.”

  “Shoot me in the thigh,” DeSoto said. “If you shoot me in the thigh, I’ll get you a job,” said DeSoto.

  “I don’t need it. I got his will money.”

  “Then just shoot me in the thigh. I need some of the pain.”

  DeSoto put his foot on the desk. Wently shot off one low in his thigh.

  Wently went away with a new perspective.

  That was all by way of showing you how I come to know Charlie DeSoto and some others. Because I met DeSoto and Eileen in the emergency room. Nowadays, DeSoto fakes a limp, happily. The bullet is in there so deep and harmless and near the bone, cutting for it would be a shame.

  Eileen came by to see me by herself later. She was really something to grab, after you got through the usuals. But I liked Charlie and I had rules.

  This was all when I was thirty-three and divorced.

  II

  LAST year I won some awards for my papers at the conventions: “The Nervous Woman and Valium,” “Three Seraxes a Day for the Alcoholic,” “Satyriasis and Acute Depression.” But I quit flying the jets for anybody. Too many pilots around today, especially in the rich class. Some little eleven-year-old will crawl up in the cockpit with you and describe not only the whole panel but continue about your life and your girlfriends, know your astrology sign like the back of his hand, and scold you for lighting up a Kool at the point you’d like to light him up, open his door, and let him deal with the suck at twenty thousand feet.

  Ray even teaches a popular night class at the university now. It’s open to just about anybody except people I don’t like or think I won’t. People who work on foreign cars are good. I like botanists and geologists also. These men and women who run from five to twenty miles a day are pretty good sorts. And wrestlers, tennis players. But a category of worst is doctors’ children in revol
t. Give me an honest nigger any time of day. I’ll even read his essays.

  I got a little tight and flew right in the sun one afternoon for thirty minutes, and now old Ray has a little eye damage and is very selective about what he reads, which is very little. A man of medicine forgot to wear his sunglasses.

  The Hooches are healthier. They’ve even spruced up their place a bit, but nothing very severe. There’s not so much trash around the doors, and their yard looks better, maybe from the fact that their animals have multiplied and the stratum of dung over the grass is near solid. Mr. Hooch has a job and needs very little of the morphine now. I think he’s proud of himself as a gimpy tugboat first mate, and he can let his language go wild without worry because everybody else on the boat is bent in the mind too.

  “I was saying the other day, Doc, I was telling Poot Laird, ‘The large bird flies and roars because it has the span. The small bird creeps and misses because it hasn’t.’ That’s what I told Poot.”

  “That doesn’t sound half-bad,” I said. “What was Poot’s reaction?”

  “Nothing. He can’t talk. A cottonmouth bit him in the tongue when he was little. Only expression he’s got, is after a big supper and beer, he lifts a leg and—”

  “Poots,” I guessed.

  “But strange, like somebody mumbling.”

  Mrs. Hooch, Agnes, is happier to see less of Mr. Hooch and have more income. And what she has done with some of it is buy a cassette tape recorder that she uses to record her smaller children, unbeknownst to them, and play it back at supper time to prove to them how much of a dreadful curse they are. She makes them listen to it while they eat. She quit cigarettes, but she’s worse than ever. She buys twenty pulp magazines a month and answers all the happiness and sexual quizzes in them. She won a Sony TV by coming in third on a mass-murderer quiz in Oui magazine. On the TV she watches Home Box Office movies, which cause her untold anguish for not being slim, twenty-three, in a black dress and pearls, with a submachine gun in her hands, in an old fort on the Mediterranean. She bought clothes and combed her hair so she looks sort of like three decades away from something like that, and I could see Sister’s lovely genes in the woman somewhat. In fact, with three ten-milligram Valiums in her, Agnes Hooch is beguiling. Until she opens her mouth, and there are the missing teeth.