“We’re very sorry, Mrs. Stark,” they told her.
She nodded.
“I am sorry as I can be,” the sheriff said. “A horrible accident.”
A deputy gathered, with meticulous reverence, the remains. All artifacts were now talismans, as sacrosanct as the body: a cracked watchband, a blackened key chain, a gleaming belt buckle. These they placed in a crisp manila envelope with Mittie’s name on it. Mittie they took to Saul Fletcher Morticians’ place of business.
And the sightseers, having seen until there were no more sights, went back to the fair satisfied. We went home and sat down in stunned silence.
There followed through the long evening a series of conferences. The sheriff, Gabe Booter, a tall, gaunt, loud-voiced man, came and interviewed us, first together, then individually. He asked if in our opinion Mittie had been an arsonist, or if he had smoked and been careless with matches, or an anarchist, or if there was a history of insanity in his family. Mrs. Thurston shone in these, to her, familiar surroundings. She summed up her anger at the sheriff’s insinuations by saying that she was positive the entire thing had been a dreadful accident and the town of Floren Park ought to be sued for leaving wires and cables around where someone could trip over them and drop a cigarette into an opened box of fireworks.
I went in Leila’s room and called Verl. Then I called Mama. I thought that if I could hear myself saying it had happened, by their believing it, I could believe it too.
Dr. Ferrell came to say he had seen the body and signed the papers; he kissed Leila and gave her some capsules. She put them down on the side table next to where she was sitting, leaning back in the corduroy armchair that had been most often Mittie’s. She didn’t seem to be listening, or to be listening to anything going on. There was just the methodical motion of her arm rising to her mouth with cigarette after cigarette.
Wolfstein brought, without asking her to acknowledge him, a glass of scotch. She would drink from the glass, hold the liquid in her mouth a long while, remember it was there, and swallow it. Several hours went by.
Mr. Saul Fletcher came in crepe soles along Mrs. Thurston’s plastic runners. Under his seersuckered arm, he pinched a black catalog book. Introductively clearing his throat, he whispered that there was the question of arrangements. Without looking at him, Leila spoke tiredly, “Maybe you’d like to put him in the display window and have ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’ piped in over the coffin.”
Her mother burst into tears, and Mr. Fletcher nodded at her supportively out of his twenty-three-years-in-the-same-location understanding of the irrational bereaved. Then he whispered that perhaps it would be better if he came back later. No one disagreed.
Most of the members of the theater company were there, clustered in the living room or on the front porch. There was nothing to be done, but everyone wanted to be there—as if there were a pelting storm outside and we huddled together for warmth and safety.
Leila rose; everyone stood up and stepped aside for her. She went to her room, closed the door, dialed the phone. I heard her ask for Portland, Oregon. Person to person. Bruno Stark.
We sat there. Downstairs, Maisie and Davy slept. Mrs. Thurston had put them to bed long before the rest of us had returned home. They had not seen what happened at the fair, nor had they asked about Mittie, and didn’t in days to come either, perhaps already knowing, perhaps not knowing how to know. I don’t know when Leila told them.
I felt hungry. I felt guilty for feeling hungry, but unwilling to accept the guilt and go surreptitiously to the refrigerator. So I left and walked downtown to the Streetcar Diner, where I ate a lot of food I couldn’t taste.
I wanted, if possible, to know exactly what I felt. The waiting in the living room had seemed, finally, inconclusive. Were we doing nothing because it was assumed inappropriate to do anything for some unspecified period? And were the others waiting in a way different from me? With some sureness of sorrow? I couldn’t tell.
But in downtown Floren Park, I found no visible evidence that would help define the meaning of the loss. No lights dimmed, shopshutters closed; no one stopped to ask, “Didn’t you know Mittie Stark?” It isn’t so much that there isn’t a gap in nature, I saw. There is rarely even a reference.
Walking back toward the road that leads up the climb to Leila’s, I passed a signpost on which was carved, CHAPEL OF ST. LUCY’S. I saw a small wooden church, hardly larger than a cabin, cloistered by trees on an incline away from the street. There was a single light on inside, white as the moon.
I began to feel a little tired and lay down on the dark slope. I looked up at the night sky. The stars had not changed either.
I had heard and discounted the noise twice before the yellow Triumph pulled to the curb. Verl got out and went up the path. The light in the church got brighter a second, then dimmed again. For some reason, I made no effort to call to Verl, even to raise my hand. That puzzled me. I had the strongest sensation of immobility. It wasn’t that I was too exhausted, or in need of solitude, or grieving. I wasn’t any of those things. What was strange was that I wasn’t anything—except that I couldn’t, didn’t want to, move.
Some time later, they came out. I turned my head on the grass to watch them. Leila had a white shawl on her head, lace. I was so surprised to see her wearing something like that, I didn’t wonder until afterward what she was doing in a Catholic church. I had thought she no longer believed in it. Verl was leaning down toward her talking softly, nodding his head, as they walked to his car and got in. After a while, they drove away.
Leila came back to Floren Park from Oregon six days after she left. Bruno Stark had wanted his son returned to him. So Mr. Fletcher’s morticians, apart from some long-distance phone calls, didn’t get to make any arrangements other than transportational, after all.
While she was away in Portland and then in Los Angeles, where she flew with Mr. Stark to settle matters about the house, I guess, and the insurance, we of the Red Lagoon Players carried on. That was Mrs. Thurston’s advice and self-directive—that we all should get organized, be productive, and carry on.
And so, under her counsel and exemplum, we did. It was by her motion, for example, that at our first emergency assemblage we changed the name of our company to “The Mittie Stark Memorial Players.” Joely voted against it; the Red Lagoon Players already was Mittie Stark, he said.
New posters were printed with a black border and with a brief threnody Mrs. Thurston had composed on Mittie’s tragic accident and his (prior to that) love of the Floren Park community, his work (which brought happiness to old and young alike), his family, and his friends.
“Devin,” she told me as I helped her fold sheets at the Laundromat, “we must realize that if we who are so intimately concerned appear to be close-mouthed or secretive regarding what happened to poor Mittie, others will think the Worst.”
“Ma’am?”
“Now, that is the way of the world. Yes, it is. People Will Talk. And what they will say will not be very nice for my Leila or her babies. I can just imagine what those young people down at the boarding house have already been conjecturing, after that strange and peculiar incident we were all subjected to at the dinner table the very night before Mittie passed away.”
“I don’t think anybody’s going around talking about Mittie,” I reassured her.
“Of course they are! Of course they are! And I’m sorry to be the one to have to say so, but you are a fool, Devin, if you think otherwise.”
Her annoyance with my innocence was such that she snapped my end of the sheet we were folding out of my hands. It fell to the floor, and she scooped it up into a washer, took a quarter from her clear plastic coin purse, and started it on a new cycle. We went back to our work. The dance of folding sheets with Mrs. Thurston was as brisk as a mazurka. Her partner had to memorize intricate forward and backward patterns synchronized in fixed sequence, through which even stubborn contour sheets were popped, snapped, and creased into a surface fit for a frictionless puck.
After another sheet, she decided to forgive me and go on. “Oh, I know by sad fortune that persons about whom you would never think such a thing are perfectly capable of destroying the gift of life. And I am the kind of individual, Devin, who is prepared to accept a truth that is flatly staring you in the face.” She looked down as if she saw her disgruntled sister, Nadine, on the linoleum floor. “But,” she continued, dismissing that image, “those are not the clear facts of this situation. Are they?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Should I have insisted that my papa did not fall, but deliberately propelled himself into the attachments of his tobacco machine?”
“No, ma’am,” I mumbled from behind the stack of laundry she had doweled up my arms.
“And, Devin, I am as sure as my own name that in their secret hearts, Bruno and Emily Stark are placing the entire blame for their loss on my Leila. That man has always disesteemed me. Though, naturally, there is only his own defensiveness behind it. However”—she resealed her box of Tide with a strip of masking tape—“we may as well acknowledge that Leila has left herself liable to all sorts, yes, all sorts, of conjectures. And my only prayer”—she emptied the lint tray into a waste basket—“my only prayer is that from now on she will understand the importance of watching your step.”
With that hope, she led me by the elbow out the door of the Laundromat. Sightless, my nose nestled in soft sheets, I followed her to the Red Bus.
Joely drove the old red schoolbus to the airport and returned with Leila. She stood, that hot, sluggish Saturday morning, on the top step of the porch, stood quietly, laden with presents, with recipes from Grandmother Strovokov, with appropriate clothes from Mrs. Stark, with appropriate toys for Maisie and Davy, who tugged at her appropriate dark brown suit and pulled her into the house.
I walked down to help Joely with the luggage. “How is she?” I asked him.
“She seems okay. I gather it was pretty rough. The mother sounds catatonic; I doubt she’s been much help. And Bruno seems to be laying a heavy trip on Leila. Jerk. She’s already blamed herself enough as it is. You know, she didn’t even know Bruno had written Mittie he was pulling the money out; I guess he was too scared to tell her, finally admit he’d failed—he’d see it that way. I would have told her if I’d thought he was keeping it from her.” He handed me her suitcase. “Poor kid.”
“What’s she going to do?”
“All she said was she wasn’t going to let Stark close Mittie’s place down. At least not this summer. She said she had a plan.”
Part of Leila’s plan was another present, one that led her mother to conclude that she was so far from grasping the principle of watching your step as to be liable to all sorts of conjectures. The present arrived that afternoon; it was a gift for Nathan Wolfstein, and the gift was Calhoun Grange. It took me a second to recall that Grange was the cowboy star whom Wolfstein had once identified from the magazines as his unknown son. Leila had taken home a son that had been lost. Now she had brought home a son that had been found.
“I had a friend who worked with him in L.A. That’s how I found him. And so here he is, Nate.”
The new father was standing by the kitchen table and looking as the mornings always left him—his high thin sheath of bathrobe pulled almost twice around, his hair lank wisps, his feet long and yellow, the toenails curved in. He sat down and frowned at his hand shaking ashes loose from his cigarette.
Grange stepped into the room like the sun coming up. He looked down at Wolfstein and grinned. Behind all his fringe of eyelashes and leather, I sought out Wolfsteinian similitudes, that irrefutable idiosyncracy, the shared strawberry mark on the left shoulder. I found none. They shared angularity; that was all. For the rest, Grange had a clean, bright glisten; Wolfstein was gray, opaque. Wolfstein was reserved, distant, unapproachable. Grange came straight at you with an amble, then hosed you down in affability while you were still trying to figure out the secret of his shuffle. He talked the way they taught him to talk in Over to Amarillo, and he seemed in general to have lost, if he had ever owned, any distinction between private and public “Grangedom.” Knowing that, you didn’t want to like him, but all of a sudden you did anyhow, the way you may not want to like John Philip Sousa, but your heart thumps when you stand close to a live band.
“Well, hi, Mr. Wolfstein. Leila tells me you and me should of met,” he beamed.
Wolfstein, however, was waterproofed against Calhoun’s hose of charm. He had faded since Leila left, browned out, as though a source of current had been cut in two, and the other half been transferred elsewhere by the power company. Now, presented with an old dramatic sawhorse, an Act V Recognition and Reconciliation Scene of the sort he had directed easily for twenty years, he couldn’t stage it, couldn’t see it. Even an impulse of embarrassment over his collapse gave up the struggle toward his brain and oozed back into the daze.
When Grange stuck out his brown-gold hand, Wolfstein shook it indifferently, then turned and poured himself out a drink of bourbon from the near-empty pint beside him. Grange looked quizzically at Leila for direction. Then, at her nod, he swung a chair around to Wolfstein’s side and saddled it.
“Well, you see, I got these couple of weeks off, and then I’ll be doing Cat, Brick’s part, you know, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—my first chance at doing something like that. On the road. And so Leila here”—he gave her his grin—“Leila runs into me and she says, Why don’t you just fly on out with me? It’s real pretty country, she says, and you can try Cat out on us, and meet, meet…folks, and all. And…”
He realized that Wolfstein was not listening, or at least not acknowledging him, so he leaned the chair back and gave us his grin instead. We soon were mesmerized by that rhythmic beacon of perfect teeth. All of us made fans of the flicker, we who were presumably theater people ourselves, but who had never met a star.
“And hell, Lord,” the star went on, “I don’t know why I do any of the fool things I end up doing, but if it feels good, why then I just take off with it. And here I am! Oh, man, is my agent gonna fry my ass.” He rolled a laugh like a cigarette, smoothly, and we all found ourselves laughing too, without knowing why, or at what.
“Well, if y’all ul excuse me, I guess maybe I oughtta clean up a little bit.” He stretched up, and up, and up, and swung a perfect leg over the chair back. “And just call me Cal,” he added. Fitzgerald and Maisie and Sabby Norah led his processional to the bathroom.
Yep, evuhbody sure did like Calhoun Grange. His brightness blew into our house, throwing up the black shades of mourning and luring us all outside. Eventually, even Mrs. Thurston had to lash herself to her principles and stuff reputation in her ears to resist him. She would not deny that he was quite engaging, she said, but, of course, that was all the more reason why he was liable to be connected with any tripping and falling Leila was conjectured to have done.
And everyone was quite happy to have Grange practice his play on us, and so we did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. No one had known whether, with Mittie gone, there would be any more plays. Sabby had told us Leila would think of something, but not even Sabby had predicted a movie star. Sabby was to be Little Mama, Leila was Maggie the Cat, and Mrs. Thurston agreed to portray Big Mama. Wolfstein had been right about her affinity with Tennessee Williams. She really got into the part.
“Nathan, according to my understanding, this woman has borne the burden of her sorrow with what I believe I would call dig-ni-ty. For she has to face the fact that it is not at all a spastic colon, as she and Big Daddy supposed, but cancer, which is going to kill him. And yet others are attempting to make a fool of her. Now, Nathan, is that your understanding also?”
“Yes, Amanda,” he would nod, “I think that’s a way of getting into it…”
And Wolfstein himself had gotten into the play, had charged what little current was left to him so that it could throw a focused beam on the stage, had generated the energy from some inexplicable storage cell in his frame of bones. Maybe it was because Grange was there; maybe he wanted to do it for him. Though if he had embraced Calhoun as his son in some private Ithaca, none of us knew it. They didn’t say. At rehearsals, they called each other “Nate” and “Cal” and were polite. I had pretty much decided that Wolfstein had made up the story just to be telling it, or that maybe he had always wanted a son and dreamed it, or that maybe there really was a script girl in his life and she made up the Calhoun Grange part out of her dreams. Leila believed it, but Grange seemed a lot more interested in her than in Nathan Wolfstein.
Through those weeks, our lives orbited around this visit from a star. And for his part, Calhoun apparently thought Floren Park “felt good”; at any rate, he took off with it. He appeared at a local rodeo and an Elks-for-Nixon barbeque picnic, had himself pasteled in the Plaza, signed autographs at the dance ball, allowed himself with perfect affability to be endlessly photographed and interviewed, ran up the biggest bill in memory at the biggest hotel, received with grace the grateful offerings of merchants—a fishing rod, a blue suede overcoat, a Tyrol hat, an authenticated totem pole, the memory of pleasures received, the tributes of fluttered hearts.
So after we sprayed the afternoon streets with posters announcing his coming, the Mittie Stark Memorial Players played to full houses each night of our run. As for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, no one seemed to pay much attention to it, except one night standing in the back of the theater, I watched Leila prowling the cave of Maggie’s bedroom for a while, and I felt a terror, like a shame, from a source I couldn’t define. She seemed to burn with an energy that could be either desire or grief. How did she really feel about Mittie’s death? She had never talked to me about it. And so I didn’t ask.
“That girl is one fine little actress,” Grange told us. “Let me tell you, she is something.”
But I had been Mrs. Thurston’s fool after all, for people were talking about Leila and Calhoun Grange. Lady Red made a “remark” to Marlin. Ashton, who had been rubbing around Grange like a black cat all week, made insipid jokes in the dressing room about cowboys easing into oiled saddles.
On Friday afternoon, I had to march in the street pantomime with Suzanne Steinitz, whom I rarely saw now that my desultory slide toward seduction by sneering with her at Broadway and Hollywood had languished. After I shot her with a cap pistol and she shot me and we passed out our last handbill, she said coyly, “Funeral meats and wedding feasts.”
“What?”
“Hamlet, stupid.” She smiled by arching her eyebrows. “Guess who I saw at the Valley Druggists yesterday. Our much-loved Mrs. Stark. She evoked quite a study from the pharmacist by handing him a prescription for enough birthcontrol pills to immunize the Rockettes for a year. Right after he offered her his condolences about her husband. There’s an Antigone for you.”
“Antigone?”
“Oh, forget it.”
But perhaps it was all a matter of envy with Suzanne, for she did not deceive me by pretending to be contemptuous of Calhoun Grange, even if his “Method” was wrong. Of course, she wasn’t as infatuated as Sabby Norah, who followed Calhoun around looking like Judy Garland mooning, “You Made Me Love You” to Clark Gable. Grange was as close as Sabby had come yet to the world she worshiped, and she was memorizing him like a poem.
The next day I tried to tell Verl what Suzanne had said about Leila, but he just grimaced in an annoyed way and muttered, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Devin, Leila hasn’t got the time to do all the stupid things you keep fantasizing about her in that pulpfiction brain of yours.”
“Well, who are you supposed to believe?” I asked him, annoyed myself. “I mean, do you think people just make things up? Because if it’s true, then Leila’s making a fool of Mittie. Of his memory.”
“So now you’re worried about poor Mittie’s memory? If I were you, I’d worry a little more about making a fool of yourself and a little less about Leila. You’re so obsessed with this imaginary sex life of Leila’s, I’m beginning to think you must be in love with her.”
“You’re the one with the pulp-fiction brain. Pop psychology too.”
“And lo, in conclusion, the Preacher sayeth unto you, t’aint nothing more foolish than faith. Walk me over to the bookstore. I want to buy you a copy of Emma; she thought she knew everything that was going on too.”
After that night’s performance, I sat in the Red Lagoon Bar to read the book, but when Marlin and Joely came in, I put it away and ordered a drink with them. Soon we heared a murmur wave through the room; it was followed by Calhoun Grange, who swung smoothly into our booth.
“Lord God,” he smiled. “I am really awful. I am really one rotten actor. Did you see that, when I just popped up and headed over to the window, cool as a bluejay, just clean forgot that Brick’s crippled and can’t move without those damn crutches!” He laughed, slapping the table. “Well, they can wire Paul Newman not to worry. Hey, now, come on,” he pulled Joely’s hand away from his pocket. “Let me get this round.”
Tourists stared at Grange (and therefore at us, who were incidentally in the frame) with a frank sense of possession. He was theirs, and they watched to see what he would do next, as openly as they might watch a bear or a baby, presuming he was as little bothered by self-consciousness as either of those. And, as a matter of fact, he appeared, by habit, artistry, or nature, really to be effortlessly unaware of his audience. Perhaps all the eyes had finally come to be just the camera’s, and the only shyness left was of solitude.
I watched the tourists watch him eating peanuts until finally I too saw it framed by a proscenium, the act taking on for me as well a kind of primitive magic and mystery. If you say an ordinary word over and over, sometimes it will lose its ordinary meaning and take on that kind of incantational significance.
“When are you going to have to leave us?” Marlin Owen asked him unselfishlessly, for his girlfriend, Margery, was one of the few nonsmitten women around.
“Oh, I guess I’ll head on down to Vegas Monday A.M. Did I tell you? My agent caught up with me yesterday, and you can just believe it that guy sure did rake my tail over the coals.”
He rolled one of his laughs, and it rippled into tourists’ smiles throughout the bar. “If he can’t get hold of me, sooner or later he just starts to piss in his pants. Well, you know, I was supposed to be seen putting in an appearance at this particular club with some contract broad a couple of days ago. That’s what this game’s about, being seen putting in an appearance. That’s what my agent keeps trying to impress on my head, he tells me. And so now she’s P.O.d, and so he hopped on the studio’s back about it and rode them around a while, and then they hopped on my agent’s back and rode him around. So naturally he spins on around and climbs up on me. Well, you know how it goes in that world.”
We didn’t, but we nodded anyhow. I was wondering how I could ask him about Wolfstein.
“Well,” Joely summed up for Floren Park, “it won’t be the same here without you.”
“Well, thank you. Hell, I think this is a nice little place. People are real friendly. And natural. I’ve been kind of enjoying myself and feeling pretty free. ’Course it was a crazy-ass thing to do, taking off like my agent says. I’m one dumb bastard. Lord knows what gets into me.”
He invited us to grin with him at the puzzling mystery of his own motivations. We did.
From a lingering waitress who took his smile like an unexpectedly large tip, Grange ordered another beer. She gave his empty can to a teenage girl standing beside the jukebox. The girl wrapped it in a napkin and put it in her cloth handbag. I noticed she had one of the handbills with, “Yours, Calhoun Grange,” sprawled across the front that Fitzgerald was selling in the lobby for five dollars.
He popped the can open and smoothly brimmed his glass. “But I tell you,” he said, “I really took to that Leila of yours.”
We did not know what he meant by “ours,” or more to the immediate point, “took to.” Sitting a bit more stiffly, I tried to look at once both comprehending and nonchalant.
“You know, she’s a pretty weird broad in a lot of ways. I mean, she’s not what you’d exactly call easy to figure. But pals, you can believe it, she is one fine woman. After losing her husband that way! Listen, she has got guts! Keeping the show going! ’Course I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. Yes, sir, I liked her right off the bat. So when she busts her way onto the set like that, good Lord, just right past the bosses, and tells me this guy working with her out in Colorado is my old man and I oughtta go meet him, I say, why hell, why not? See what I mean?”
We said yes and waited.
He noticed what we were waiting for, so maybe Suzanne Steinitz had underestimated his Method.
“’Course I never really figured I was going to actually run into my old man out here. Lord, that’s just a little too much to believe.
“Besides, my mom’s told me for fifteen years how he died from his liver in the V.A. hospital in San Diego. But, still, who knows, you know?”
We waited.
“Hell, Nate’s okay. But I could see that first morning there wasn’t anything between us. Tell you the truth, I can’t see much resemblance, can you?”
“But,” I asked, “is your mother the woman Wolfstein knew?”
“Well, yeah. I guess he knew her. I asked him and he said he did. Far as I could tell, he didn’t act like he ’specially wanted to go into it. And so what’s the point anyhow? Lots of people know lots of people.”
He finished his beer and we left. In front of the bar, he signed his name across the cast on a young boy’s arm and rumpled his hair. The parents beamed.
Outside in the parking lot, an old familiar strain slapped at us across the summer night. “Pile of dung! Sarcophagus! Junkshit! Junkshit! Junkshit! JUNKSHIT! JUNKSHIT!”
“Oh, no,” Joely said.
And indeed it was Spurgeon Debson howling in the moonlight as he rhythmically kicked in the headlights of an old black Chrysler. For whatever rolled from the assembly lines of Detroit violated and terrorized Debson’s soul as the unstoppable breeding of the Chinese does the John Birch Society.
“Hello, Spur, what’s going on?” Joely asked. You had to ask the regular questions, though the regular answers were never forthcoming.
Spur looked around, perhaps placed us as figures dim in some insignificant slot of his memory. He flipped the car’s hood open with a right uppercut that split the skin on his knuckles.
“There!” he slammed his bleeding hand into the engine. “THERE is the heart of America. That worthless package, metal DUNG! That WOMB of mediocrity!” He stared, infuriated, at the engine. “FASCIST!” he screamed at the carburetor.
“What’s eating that guy?” Calhoun wondered.
“The war in Vietnam,” I chose at random.
“Yeah, I guess I know what you mean,” Calhoun nodded. “It’s pretty hard for some folks to figure what’s right. Was he drafted?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “But if he were, I don’t much think he’d serve.”
That, in fact, I knew absolutely. No number of U.S. eagles chewing away at his entrails would ever make Spurgeon say yes to President Johnson.
“Where’d you get that car, Spur?” Marlin asked.
From the monologue that followed, whirred around us like chips of cuneiform scattered in the sands of Mesopotamia by a crazed archaeologist, we glued this story together. Spur had left the Starks’ home on the evening of July 3rd. After that useless scene with that cretinous madman living with Leila, he had advised himself to get the fuck out of this plastic-fucking middleclass pig hole in order to preserve his goddamn integrity. He had, therefore, split. The Chrysler, which he was now disemboweling with the jack, he had purchased for his last $120 (earned by the prostitution of bauble-vending to plastic cunts). He had bought it from a baboon whose baboonery consisted for one thing in his ever having owned the vehicle, and for another, in his selling such a metal coffin to a human being.
Spur then headed west to the desert, where he could fill his lungs with something clean for a change. Besides, he had a mission to perform in the City of Syphilis and Gonorrhea summed up as Los Angeles. With the help of certain cats and chicks who comprised the Anti-All Living Theatre of Topanga Canyon, he would produce his masterpiece, Napalm U.S.A., there on the steps of the Wilshire Boulevard branch of the Bank of America.
But like modern Eumenides, the locusts of General Motors had pursued him even down the pure flat stretches of the Mojave Desert. They gnawed holes in the radiator, they gobbled the rear axle off, threw a rod, sucked out the pistons. So in the dry noon dust, Spurgeon stood, his vision in overdrive, his Chrysler driven over into a sand rut. Elijah in a chariot with the wheels gone.
Did a single lousy church-going Babbittrabbit stop to help a poor one-armed son of a bitch?
NO.
And so alone, he himself pushed that Symbol of America, that iron heap of shit, 250 miles to the Half-Ass Garage, where they charged him the other arm and a half to half-ass fix it. Collect, he called the Living Theatre of Topanga Canyon and learned that it was dead, for certain of the cats and chicks no longer comprised it. Two had been busted for not sucking up. Two had damned themselves by going back to college.
So the apocalypse was postponed.
And why had he returned to Floren Park carrying that car strapped on his blistered back? Only to shove every jagged piece of Chrysler Inc. up the fat pink ass of the baboon who had sold it to him.
“Hell, that’s hard luck,” Grange said when, after what felt like forty-five minutes, Spur paused in his outburst. We were all still standing around the Chrysler watching him break off the windshield wipers.
“Hard luck? LUCK?” Spur rolled his prophet eyes over Calhoun. “There’s no luck, you dumb shitkicker. There’s EVIL. THERE IS TOTAL EVIL. Cheap, dirty, hairy evil, and it’s sitting with its white ass in big leather chairs, and it’s punching metal buttons with its big hairy fingers, and it’s running this fucking country. And if there’s a God, he’s the Chairman of the Board of Dow Chemical. He’s a S.S. fucking Pentagon Nazi five stars in his rear Admiral cocksucking Commander in Chief. I HATE GOD, and if I ever get my hands around his fat oily neck, I’ll pull out his jugular vein and choke the pig with it. I hate him now, and when I’m dead I’ll keep on hating him!”
“Hey, hold on there, buster,” Calhoun stretched his mouth to show just a flicker of perfect teeth. Perhaps a personal, a patriotic, or a religious affront that stirred him.
I imagined the movie, as Cal would push his chair slowly back from his table in the saloon, slowly stand and walk to the bar, place one boot on the rail, never taking his eyes off Spurgeon, never blinking, his gaze steady with the serenity of knowing that in his personhood resided perfect rightness.
“He’s nuts, Cal. He ought to be in an institution,” Joely told him.
“Oh,” Grange nodded slowly, kindly. It was a different movie if the man were crazy.
Uninterested in the world’s diagnosis, Spurgeon had reached that pitch in his panegyric when words are puny. Unzipping, he urinated on the hood of the Chrysler. The high, steaming arch of his contempt spewed out splashing the headlights.
We left him there. I walked back to the bar.