Tough Guys Don't Dance Read online

  Yes, among all the hollows of the Truro woods to choose, I had nonetheless concealed my stash close to the stubble of my garden-size plot. That had to be the worst place to keep one’s private store. Any hunter blundering through on the same trail (as they did a few times a year) might recognize the character of the agriculture practiced there, and so devote a little effort to examining the environs. I kept only an inch of soil and some much tamped-down moss over the rock that closed the burrow where I stowed the footlocker.

  Yet this particular site was important to me. I wanted the product kept near its home. In prison, where the food we ate had been shipped to us out of the entrails of the largest food corporations in America, there was never a bite that did not come out of a plastic wrapping, cardboard package, or can. Taking into account the trip from the farm to the processing factory, and from there to us, I figure most of the food must have voyaged, on average, two thousand miles. So I saw a panacea to the world’s ills: Let no one look to sup on food grown farther away from his home than the distance he can carry it on his back in a day’s walk. An interesting idea. I soon ceased to look for ways to implement it. But it left me fierce about respecting the origins of my marijuana. Like wine that mellows in the shade of the vineyard where it grew, so would my Mary Jane be stored close to the earth out of which it sprouted.

  I felt one good full dread, therefore, at shifting the stash, and it was close to the fear with which I had awakened this morning. Truth, I needed to leave everything as it was. Nonetheless, I took the turn off the highway to the country road that (by way of a crossroad or two) would lead eventually to my sandy lane in the middle of the forest. Driving slowly, I began to realize how much I had been calling upon gifts of balance through this day. How else account for one’s aplomb—everything considered!—during the dialogue with Alvin Luther? After all, where had the tattoo come from?

  At that moment I was obliged to pull the car over. Where had the tattoo come from? This thought might as well have come upon me for the first time. With no warning, I was near to being as ill as the dog.

  I can tell you that by the time I was able to move forward again, it was with the absurd caution a poor driver brings to his wheel after a missed collision. I crawled.

  That way I passed through the back roads of Truro on this chill afternoon—would the sun never appear again?—and I studied the lichen on tree trunks as if their yellow spores had much to tell me, and stared at blue mailboxes on the road as though they were security itself, even halted by a green-bronze sign at a crossroads to read the raised metal letters commemorating a local boy who died in an old war. I passed many a hedge in front of many a gray-shingled salt-box whose white crushed-shell walks were still offering their whiff of the sea. In the woods, the wind was strong on this afternoon, and whenever I stopped the car, a murmur came to me like a high surf washing over treetops. Then I was out of the woods again and drove up and down abrupt little hills and passed by moors and quaking bogs and kettle bowls. I came to a well I recognized by the side of the road, and stopped and peered into its bottom where a green moss I knew would gleam back at me. Soon I was in the woods again, and the paved road was gone. Now I had to drive in low gear down the sandy lane, scratching first one side of the Porsche, then the other, on thickets and briars, but the hump in the middle was so high that I did not dare to ride the ruts.

  Then I was not certain I would get through. Rivulets crossed the road, and in several places I had to ford shallow pools where the trees grew together overhead and formed a tunnel of leaves. On sunless afternoons I had always liked to drive through the mournful, modest lay of these Truro hills and woods. Provincetown, even in winter, could seem active as a mining town in comparison with such sparse offerings. Up on any of these modest summits, if there was a high wind like today, one could watch the seawater in the distance thrash through a millrace of light and whitecaps, while the color of the ponds in the hollows remained a dark and dirty bronze. All the palette of the woods seemed to accommodate itself between. I liked the dull green of the dune grass and the pale gold of the weeds, and in that late autumn panorama when the beef’s blood and burnt orange are out of the leaves, the colors came down to gray and green and brown, but with what a play between! My eye used to find a dance of hues still left here between the field grays and the dove gray, the lilac gray and the smoke gray, the bracken brown and the acorn brown, fox brown and dun, mouse gray and meadowlark gray, and the bottle green of the moss, and sphagnum moss and fir green, holly green and seawater green at the horizon. My eye used to dart from lichen on a tree to heather in a field, in and out of the pond weeds and red maples (no longer red but wet-bark brown) and the scent of pitch pine and twist of scrub oak were in the still of the forest with the wind in the leaves overhead coming again in the high sound of the surf: “All that has lived clamors to live again” was the sound of the surf.

  So I parked my car where I could look from the pond to the sea and tried to calm myself with these soft and wistful colors, but my heart was pounding now. I drove on until I came to my trail off this sand road, and there I stopped and got out of the car and tried to recover that immaculate sense of being alone which these woods had given me before. But I could not. People had been here in the last few days.

  As soon as I stepped onto my trail, half hidden by shrubs from the road, this sense became more keen. I did not halt to look for traces, but doubtless some could be found. There are subtleties to a stale presence that only the woods can reflect, and as I walked the hundred steps from the road to my stashing box, I was sweating again in the way I had before on that hot September afternoon when the advance of the hurricane hung over us all.

  I went by the marijuana field and its stubble had been beaten to the ground by rain. Some shame at the haste with which I had cut the stems this September left me now as uneasy as one feels on encountering an ill-used friend, and so I came to a stop as if to pay my respects, and indeed my little plot had the air of a cemetery ground. Yet I could hardly pause, a panic was too much on me, and therefore I hurried farther down the trail past the clearing and in and out of thicket and stunted pine, and there, another few steps along, was the most curious tree of all. A dwarf pine poked up from the crest of a small sandy ridge that had pushed through the loam of these woods, a fearfully twisted little force of a tree, its roots clinging to the uncertain rise, its limbs all contorted together on one side and trammeled down before the wind like a man kneeling, only, at the last, to thrust up his arms to the sky in prayer. That was my tree, and at the foot of it, under the roots, was a small cave not large enough to hold a bear cub, and my door to this burrow was a rock with its moss many times raised and patted back into place. Now I saw it was much disturbed, the edges as raw as a dirty bandage pushed up on end by the swelling of the wound. I removed the stone and felt into the hole in front of the footlocker, my fingers scraping and searching into this soft loam like field mice at the edge of food, and I felt something—it could be flesh or hair or some moist sponge—I didn’t know what, but my hands, fiercer than myself, cleared the debris to pull forward a plastic garbage bag through which I poked and saw enough at once to give one frightful moan, pure as the vertigo of a long fall itself. I was looking at the back of a head. The color of its hair, despite all the stains of earth, was blonde. Then I tried to see the face, but when to my horror the head rolled in the bag without resistance—severed!—I knew I could not go on to search the features, no, I pushed back the bag and then the rock with hardly an attempt to replace the moss, and flew from those woods to my car, driving down the humpbacked road with speed to compensate for the caution with which I came in. And it was only after I was back in my house and deep in a chair trying to calm my shivering with bourbon neat that the realization came over me in all the burning woe of one wall of flame falling upon another that I did not even know whether it was the head of Patty Lareine or Jessica Pond lying in that grave. Of course, I also did not know whether I should be afraid of myself, or of another
, and that, so soon as night was on me and I tried to sleep, became a terror to pass beyond all notions of measure.

  THREE

  The voices came to me at dawn. I listened to Hell-Town in the hour between waking and sleep.

  “Oh, Tim,” the voices said, “you’ve burned your candle by both ends: the balls and the brain, prick and tongue, your bunghole and your mouth. Is any tallow left in your wick? As if the wicked could tell.”

  They said, “Oh, Tim, don’t lick the thighs of whores. You come too fast tasting the old sperm whale. Give to us the dying salts. Give us back the scum of all who lost. Goodbye, sweet friend, I curse your house. I curse your house.”

  Let me speak of the little I could comprehend. Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. Waking from nightmares and sleeping in terror, I climbed at last onto one conclusion. Assuming I was no part of this deed—and how could I be certain of that?—I still had to ask: Who was? It must be someone who knew my marijuana patch. That spoke directly of my wife—unless it was her hair I touched in the burrow. So I had my conclusion: I must go back to the woods and look again. As fixed in my memory, however, as the flash of light that is followed by the thunder of pain when your shoulder is pulled out of its socket, was the remembered glimpse of that dirtied blonde hair. I knew I could not go back. I was a jelly. I preferred to molder in the last suppurations of cowardice.

  Is it evident why I do not care to describe my night? Nor why each logical step cost so much? Now I understood how the laboratory rat develops psychosis in a maze. There are shocks at too many of the turnings. What if Jessica was there? Would I know then that I had done it?

  On the other hand—and I could have driven a hundred miles in the time it took me to go back to this alternative—if Pond and Pangborn had returned to Boston, or were by now even back in Santa Barbara, or back wherever their fling would chuck them—then it had to be Patty’s head. That brought on a wholly unmanageable sorrow. Sorrow, and a surge of nasty vindication—which was only choked off by the onset of a new fear. Who could have killed Patty but Mr. Black? If that was true, how safe was I?

  Do you feel a hint uncool around strange black dudes? Try such a thought in the night when you have come to the conclusion that the dude may be looking for you. Every wave that slapped on the shore, every gull that stirred, was an invader: I could hear windows raised and doors forced.

  It was degrading. I had never seen myself as a hero. My father—with the best will in the world—had taken care of that. But I had usually been able to picture myself as not wholly unmacho. I could stand up for my friends; I could close a wound and keep the festering to myself. I tried to hold my own. Yet now, each time my mind was clear enough to bring forth a new thought, panic soiled me. I was like a puppy in a strange house. I began to fear my friends.

  It had to be someone who knew where I kept my marijuana. That much was demanded by logic. In the false dawn, therefore, I realized that as I met my friends on the street in the day or two to come, I would distrust the look in every eye. I was like a man plummeting down a slippery slope who finds a little horn of ice to grasp, but so soon as he embraces it, the projection breaks loose. I saw that if I could not decide the first question, which was: Put it!—Was I the killer?—then I could not stop the slide, and madness would wait at the rim.

  As dawn came up, however, and I had to listen to the solicitations of Hell-Town—why did these voices always call most loudly between waking and sleep, as if waking and sleep were a century apart?—I became aware at last of the chirks and cronks of the gulls, their gabble loud enough to chase the larvae of the night. But saying “larvae” now offered the minuscule pleasure that one word from Latin had come back in the midst of all this. You larvae, you ghosts! They taught Latin well at Exeter.

  I clung to this thought. In prison, when one was at odds with another convict, and fear became as heavy as the leaden breath of eternity itself, then the smallest pleasure to reach your heart in such a state was, I learned, as valuable as a rope cast down into the abyss. Concentrate on the pleasure, whatever it was, and you could lash yourself to the edge. So, in this hour, I tried to embrace matters that were far away, and thought of Exeter and Latin, and by such means proceeded—not so much to calm myself as—to insulate the dread, and thereby manage to keep thinking about the little furnished room in a boardinghouse west of Tenth Avenue on Forty-fifth Street where my father now lived at the age of seventy. By the aid of such concentration I could see again the piece of paper he had tacked above his mirror and read again the words he had printed carefully on the paper. They said INTER FAECES ET URINAM NASCIMUR and beneath this, my father, with a flourish, had inscribed the name of the author: St. Odon of Cluny. My father’s nickname (which I like to present in this context) still remained Big Mac in defiance of all McDonald hamburgers.

  “Well, what do you want with that?” I said to Big Mac the first time I saw the note on the mirror.

  “It’s a reminder,” my father replied.

  “You never told me you knew Latin.”

  “Parochial school,” he said. “They tried to teach us. Some of the droppings stuck.”

  “And how did you get this?”

  “From a priest I know. Father Steve. He’s usually in trouble with the Cardinal,” remarked Big Mac in an agreeable tone, as if that were the first virtue to ask of a priest.

  Well, I knew enough Latin to translate. “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur”—“Between shit and piss are we born.” Even culture came to Big Mac at the edge of a longshoreman’s hook.

  But now the phone was ringing on the table by my bed, and I was ready to expect that it was my father. We had not called each other in a good while, yet I was sure it would be his voice. I had the faculty to be thinking of a friend even as he or she was picking up the phone to give me a call; this happened often enough not to surprise me any longer. On this morning, however, I took it as a sign.

  “Hello, Tim?”

  “Well, Dougy,” I said. “Let us speak of the devil.”

  “Yeah,” he said. That told me how hung-over he was. His “yeah” could offer you the devastated landscapes of the brain after sixty years of drinking. (This is, of course, on the assumption he did a little boozing when he was ten.)

  “Tim,” he said, “I’m in Hyannis.”

  “What are you doing on the Cape? I thought you hate to travel.”

  “I been here three days. Frankie Freeload retired up here. Did I tell you?”

  “No,” I said. “How is he?”

  “He passed away. I been at his wake.”

  For my father, the death of an old friend would prove as awesome as a cliff by the side of your house crumbling into the sea.

  “Well,” I said, “why don’t you come over to Provincetown?”

  “I’ve been thinking of that.”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “I can rent one,” he said.

  “No, I’ll drive down and pick you up.”

  There was a long pause, but I could not tell if he were thinking of himself or of me. Then he said, “Let’s wait a day or so. There’s some loose ends here with the widow.”

  “All right,” I said, “you come when you’re ready.” I thought I had offered no sign of my miserable condition, but Big Mac asked, “Are you all right?”

  “My wife isn’t here. She took off. That’s okay.”

  There was a long pause. He said, “Yeah. I’ll see you.” And he hung up.

  He had, however, given me some of the means to rise from my bed and go about the day.

  Speak of hangovers, I was like a man on the edge of an epileptic attack. If I watched each move and never stubbed my toe or took a misstep, if I did not turn my head too suddenly, nor make any motion not prepared in advance, then I might be able to carry myself through the hours without a seizure. Here, it was not the convulsions of my body but the caterwaulings of the witches that I kept away by the singularity of my thoughts, which is to sa
y I only allowed myself to think of particular matters and no others.

  Since my immediate problems were as untouchable as a raw wound—even my tattoo began to throb if my mind cast a glance in its direction—so in compensation I discovered that to reminisce about my father was, on this morning, a palliative. I did not have to think pleasant thoughts, I could even dwell on old pains, but they were virtually agreeable to contemplate so long as they adhered to the past, old regrets serving as counterbalance to keep me from slipping back to where I was now.

  For instance, I thought again of Meeks Wardley Hilby III. There had been a month in my life down in Tampa when I literally awakened each morning with the problem set before me: How were Patty and I to murder him successfully? Still that recollection caused no pain now. Indeed, it aided my concentration for two good reasons which served me like panniers carried on either side for balance. One was that I most certainly did not kill Wardley, even came to discover that there was no very determined assassin in me—not the worst thought to have on this morning! The other was that I was not thinking at this point of Mr. Hilby as I knew him in Tampa with Patty, but on the contrary, was remembering our curious bond at Exeter, and that had much to do with my father, indeed it brought back the best day I suppose I ever spent with Big Mac.

  Meeks Wardley Hilby III, it may as well be repeated, was the only inmate I knew in prison who had also been in my class at Exeter. What always impressed me most about such a connection was the fact that we were also both kicked out of school on the same morning a month before graduation. Prior to that, I hardly knew him. Hilby had been a wimp and I had been a fair jock. He had gone to Exeter for four years like his father Meeks before him, and I put in one fall and spring as a Post Graduate on athletic scholarship after senior year at high school in Long Island. (My mother wanted me to go on to Harvard.) I had been trying to bring my promise as a Wide Receiver to an Exeter team that could not pass. (Have you ever seen Eastern prep schools play football?) We walked together out of the Headmaster’s Office the day we got the boot, and Meeks Wardley Hilby III was crying. The scuffed satin on the lapels of his dinner jacket and the heliotrope bow tie were like a costume to wear to one’s execution. I was sad. Even now, recalling the moment, I can feel the sadness in my limbs. I had been caught smoking marijuana (which was no small matter twenty years ago). The Headmaster was truly shocked—and Hilby’s case was worse. It was hard to believe, considering how slack he looked, but he had attempted to rape a town girl he took out on a petting date. I didn’t hear about it then. Nobody concerned wished to speak (and the girl’s parents were soon bought off) but Hilby gave me the story eleven years later. In prison, there was all the time to tell one’s tale.