Louis Quenon can make you feel better than you had any right to expect. You’ll hear it said he’s trouble in the long run. You’ll hear it said he’ll drink a week and disappear for two. They’ll tell you he’s a Feejee Indian from Africa. They’ll call him a breed, oily customer, quack, boomer, con man, crook. Someone will get around to telling you he was bom in a canebrake on the Guadalupe ten miles below Duck Pond, and a lot of other fairy tales. His wife, Lily, will tell you he’s irresponsible and doesn’t care what becomes of her in this life or the next. “You morons!” she yells at us. We’ll be sitting there with him in Lucky’s, drinking beer or sweet wine, listening. Lily will come in, a hard, narrow-hipped, bony woman of fifty. She’ll start in swinging her big red purse, knocking glasses and pitchers to the floor. Louis looks at her as you might look at a waxwing mindlessly hurting itself against a plate-glass window. “Useless old drunks!” she yells. “Stupid retards!” We all scatter to the dark corners of the bar, except for Louis, and wait for the storm to blow over. Louis takes his time. He has the patience of a mountain, whatever else they might say. He lights up a cigarette. He arranges his lighter and tobacco pouch on the table neatly before him. He asks Leonard, the bartender, who’s winning the ball game. He tilts his chair back. He looks up at the TV set as if at the blue sky. His smile has never had any meanness in it. He looks at Lily. Her anger, which was a solid brick wall coming in, is now like a flimsy membrane thinning out and getting weaker, yielding to a stretching force in the air. Louis will pat the table, rub his stomach, or stick a wood match in his ear for wax, and Lily’s temper will come to heel, snap, and it’s gone. Louis beams. He takes her by the wrist, easy, and she sits down, shaking her head at her own bad manners, but feeling a whole lot better. Louis makes a sign to Leonard, and everyone in the bar resumes his conversation and drinking. The incident is forgotten. Someone will usually dump a load of quarters in the jukebox, and everything is back to normal.
Now, this is what you won’t hear: Louis Quenon was a real medic in the U.S. Army. He saw action in Sicily and North Africa. He got to know the local herb doctors and practitioners of antique medicine. They showed him things they usually never showed to outsiders. They warned him against surgery directed against the major organs, indecision, and a generally unrecognized plague they called, in a half-joking way, “glitter-blindness.” He ran across a cell of modem Pythagoreans who claimed the universe was nothing more than an idea about tight bundles of woven lines. He who masters the art of line-bundling geometry, they said, will see the Weaver’s Hand. When he returned to the States, Louis refused a scholarship to a big midwestern university that he had won in an open competition. In his letter turning down the offer, he said, “Dear Dean, This is to let you know that I’ve had second thoughts after reading through your catalog and that you are probably barking up the wrong tree over there in Madison.”
His tribal name is Then-He-Sees-It, but he is only a fraction Assiniboin. His great-uncle, Willard Quenon, was a medicine man and they say that’s where his talent comes from. But Louis says no to all of that, insisting that what he knows comes from a marabout he got acquainted with in Marrakech, and from the Sicilian herb specialists. What his Indian uncle Willard knew worked pretty well among the Tribe, but Louis said it wasn’t very effective with white people. For the white man’s diseases, you’ve got to go to the roots of the old white world and find the ancient remedies.
He cured me of a delicate constitution with a snail-water recipe that is still widely used in southern Europe by rural people. That’s how I met Louis. We were at the bar, in Lucky’s, accidentally sitting next to each other. He’s a big, heavy man with a wide Indian face, but his hair is blond and he has a full beard that scratches against his chest. Our eyes met in the mirror behind the bottles. “How long have you had these fainting spells?” he asked me. Right off, my heart did its butterfly imitation and the barroom tilted.
“How did you know about that?” I said, short of breath.
“You write this down,” he said.
I started to slide off my stool, but Louis touched my arm and that stopped me. I borrowed a pencil from Leonard and wrote down what Louis said on a paper napkin. Here’s what put me back on my feet:
“A fourth bushel of good garden snails,” he said. “Put them in a deep clay pot and lay some mint on top of them along with some balm and fennel to clean them. Let them stand all night like that with a colander over them so they can’t creep out. In the morning wipe them one by one with a clean cloth and then bruise the snails, shells and all, into a fine mortar. Mix this mortar into six quarts of red cow’s milk and set it on a medium fire, stirring all the while until it is thick as cream. Have a big pot ready. Lay a double handful of mint, half as much pennyroyal, ale hoof, and hyssop, then pour in the mixture. After two hours on a high flame stir it up, or else it will scum on top. When it cools off some, but before the pot gets comfortable to the touch, put it into as many Mason jars of any size as the mixture will fill. Put three ounces of white sugar candy in the bottom of each jar to kill the taste.”
I had a hard time admitting to myself that I wanted to find those ingredients, and a lot harder time actually finding them. But I did, and right away, after the first quart or so, I began to take on color. In six months’ time I’d gained thirty pounds. My lungs began to take in more air than they’d ever been able to, and my heart felt like a big fist opening and closing. I moved out of my small room above Lucky’s and rented a little three-room house outside of town and put in a big garden where I could grow the hard-to-find herbs along with a good vari-ety of greens. I felt like a healthy man of forty-five, and I’d been on a railroad pension for several years.
There’s always a table or booth at Lucky’s with a crowd of us believers trading stories. The younger customers, of course, think we’re a bunch of senile old fools. They think Louis is a common type of gyppo artist, although he’s never asked one of us for money, help, or goods. No one ever asks him why he offers to pass on a cure to ailing folks, because the question won’t come up. You’ll be sitting there, telling stories, adding a few frills here and an outright he there, held in place by a common denominator of unswerving belief:
“You remember that black spot on my neck? Well, it got big and began to spread out like a stain. When it was as big as a dollar, I went to Louis. He gave me this yellow paste that smelled like antelope musk and in a week it went back to normal.”
“I couldn’t put any weight on my right leg. Louis said the big vein was shutting down. He gave me a blue unguent. Now I can dance all night.”
“I was growing what I took to be a sixth finger.”
“My left ear had a bell in it.”
“I’d wake up every other night hollering for my brother, who drowned when he was only three.”
“The wife thought the lead slipped out of my pencil fifteen years ago.”
“My eyes were turning into bone.”
“I’d sit down to grunt and nothing would come out but this nasty blue twine. I’d have to cut it off and hope for better luck tomorrow.”
Here’s another one. They took Moley Gleeson to the county hospital in a taxi. Moley had the room next to mine on the second floor above Lucky’s. This was about a month before I moved out. I’d heard him blubber. I went into his room and found him sitting on the john, shaking with a chill and biting his hands. His eyes were quick and scared. There was a lake of slick brown blood on the floor and a terrible stink they’d never be able to scrub out. At the hospital they said it was cancer, a big one impossible to get at. They gave him sleeping pills and morphine and said it was only a matter of a few days now. A bunch of us would go up and visit with him. He’d forget who you were and once began to call himself Robert Dickinson. “I don’t know this Moley Gleeson. In the hospital with cancer? That’s too bad. That’s a real shame.” It was as if his mind were trading places with someone named Robert Dickinson and in that way freeing itself from the bad business of being Moley Gleeson. We figured it was the drugs that were doing this to him.
We went over to Louis’s house and asked him if there was anything he could do for Moley. We didn’t think there was, seeing as how the doctors themselves said that his cancer was out of reach, but Louis dipped into his big doeskin medicine bag, took out some fine orange, brown, and green powders, and went into the bathroom with them. When he came out, he said, “Let’s go see Moley.”
The nurse who brought us to Moley’s room wasn’t too happy to see us again. “Now, don’t you boys tire out Mr. Gleeson. He’s got about as much strength as a squashed cat.” Louis closed the door behind us and tried to lock it, but there was no way to do that from the inside. There were four or five of us in the room with him. Louis went to the window and looked skeptically at the light coming in. He adjusted the blinds, dimming the air. Moley was lying there, half-asleep. His eyes, when they opened, were covered with that glazed look of fear and loneliness the dying usually have. Louis looked at us with a strange expression in his eyes, as if we were familiar and new to him at the same time. We didn’t know what to make of it, and so we kept ourselves at a respectable distance, figuring it was his show anyway. He bent his big shaggy head down to Moley and whispered something in his ear. We couldn’t make out what it was, but it took a long time, like a priest’s last rites, so it was probably more than just “How ya doing, Moley?”
Louis pulled the sheet off Moley and then opened up his hospital gown. Moley looked like hell. There were bruises up and down his side and his arms were swollen up from the injections. His skin was soft and mushy-looking. He looked like a big wingless moth. He looked like he would come apart in your hands if you tugged at him. Louis rolled up his sleeves. He began to open and close his hands. His eyes were shut tight. Then he opened his hands wide. His hands began to stretch and taper out. They became long and narrow as snakes. They started to move toward Moley’s underbelly and when they reached the pasty-white skin they didn’t stop. His hands slid into Moley. Past the wrists. Up to the forearms. Moley’s eyes were popped wide now, his mouth was ajar. I could see his tongue clicking around in there. Out of his mouth, from deep inside, I could hear a clacking, hammering sound, like wood on stone. The sweat was boiling out of Louis’s forehead. He was searching around for something inside Moley, the way you’d feel the bottom of a swampy slough for something you’d dropped there. Then all at once the nurse comes busting into the room. She saw what was going on and began to holler for help. Louis was dragging something up. His forearms were dark red and the room smelled—a thin, sharp smell like arsenic smoke, comparable to what you’d expect just downwind of a smelter. What’s coming out of Moley looks like an oblong head of lettuce. It’s dark purple, nearly black, and wriggling like a speared eel. It was coming out of Moley’s belly, just at the left of his navel and under the heart. If the thing had a head, then what I saw in it might have been eyes— dull and ugly, three of them in a row, looking around at the world of hospital rooms. The hammering sound that was coming out of Moley’s throat had quit and Moley was grunting low and strong, with a kind of hard pleasure, like a woman giving easy birth.
A doctor came into the room. He hollered at Louis and then grabbed him by the beard. Another doctor came in and began to punch Louis in the back. But Louis hung on to the black lettuce eel, which, by the looks of it, was halfway out. The doctors were grinding their teeth and spitting curses at Louis and the nurse was running in and out of the room screaming for the cops. A young intern came in then with a steel chair in his hands. “Leave it to the Marines,” he said. He took a baseball swing at Louis’s head that landed with a gong. Louis staggered away from the blow but he didn’t let loose of the thing in Moley’s belly. The young intern swung the chair again and this time it dropped Louis to one knee. He lost his grip on the lettuce eel and it slipped back with a dark murmur into Moley to clack away at whatever was left of his innards. Moley sighed and went back to sleep, calling himself Robert Dickinson and telling us it was too bad about that poor bastard Moley Gleeson, whoever the hell he was. There was no mark or anything unusual at all on his belly. The blubbering nurse closed up Moley’s gown and pulled his sheet up to his chin, and Moley, a kind of dying amusement in his old black eyes, caught her trembling hands to steady her.
The police came in then and carried Louis off to jail. Three days later, Moley died.
Any prosecutor in the state would have had a hard time convincing a jury to lock up Louis Quenon because he had entered the insides of a dying man with his bare hands in order to prowl around in there for dangerous lettuce eels, and so, after holding Louis for a while, they decided to let him go, fining him twenty dollars for disorderly conduct.
They say that while he was in the pokey, Louis cured the police chief’s wife of her insomnia by having the chief cut the ears off a live wild rabbit and strap them, still warm, to her temples before turning in at night. They say it cured more than her insomnia, though, and she began to want more in bed than her husband, who was almost sixty years old, could deliver. This made the chief think poorly of Louis, and the word was put out that Louis had better keep his nose clean while in the city limits.
Louis got the blues after that episode. He’d come into Lucky’s, but his smile was thin and far away and not meant for any of us who sat at his table. He didn’t have any new stories to tell. We went ahead and asked him, “What’s troubling you, Louis?” He’d take a deep lungful of air and let it sigh out. “You don’t seem like yourself, Louis,” He’d shake his head as if to unseat a fly and raise his beer to his Ups. “Does it have to do with Moley?” we asked. “Or being in jail? Are you worried about the chief?” But he’d just look puzzled as if he didn’t have the first idea of what we were talking about. Finally, after about a week of this, he said, “Step away.” We did what he wanted because of our respect for him, and no one tried to figure out why he said it.
It was about this time that Louis took a sales job with a farm implement company. Louis was well liked by the business people and could get work whenever he wanted it. Most people in the selling business knew that Louis had the power to move merchandise. They’d put him on straight commissions and he’d earn enough in three or four months to last him and Lily the year. I saw him one hot July afternoon driving a big Farmall down the middle of the main drag leading a parade. He was wearing a wide-brim straw hat and sunglasses and I could tell by his color that he’d been drinking for a while. There was a troop of horsemen behind him, and behind them there was the high school marching band. A small crowd had gathered along the sidewalks to watch the parade, which was being held to celebrate the invention of the internal combustion engine. Behind the high school band there was a float that was supposed to illustrate the theme of the parade. It was a ten-foot-tall piston made out of silvered cardboard. Two girls in bathing suits were cranking the piston up and down. A three-year-old boy on top was dressed up like a spark plug. I saw Lily, narrower than ever, in the crowd of onlookers. She was walking slowly, so as to not get ahead of Louis’s tractor. Her face was as colorless as skim milk. She was carrying her big red purse, but she wasn’t holding it like a weapon. I could see by the look in her eyes that she was worried. I knew Lily didn’t have any use for me or for any of us from Lucky’s, but I caught up with her and touched her elbow anyway. “All of us over at Lucky’s are pretty worried about Louis,” I said.
“You have reason to be,” she said without taking offense or getting that look of total disgust she reserved for Louis’s friends.
“What’s troubling him, Mrs. Quenon?” I asked.
She looked at me then and the old contempt came back into her eyes for a second. “Dreams,” she said.
She told me that Louis was having dreams he couldn’t figure out. They’d started up when he was in jail and they got worse after they let him out. The dreams didn’t scare him any, but he was having trouble reading them. He wrote to a man in Morocco, but all his letters had been returned unopened. Every night for a week he’d called an old friend of his named Art One Pipe who lived in the far northeast comer of the state. One Pipe told Louis that he was well known for his patience and not to act like a teenage girl with acne when he needed his best quality most. One Pipe drove the three hundred miles to see him and to help him work things out. “All they did was drink bourbon and puke,” Lily said.
The word began to go around that Louis was in a bad way. He’d quit his job after he’d made a couple of thousand dollars and had gone on a two-week tear, dropping most of it. Those of us who understood that Louis was the indispensable center of our circle as well as the spokes of the wheel that held it together, decided that something had to be done. I was elected to go to his house and make a plea, reminding him how important every one of us felt him to be. Lily let me in. She had an abandoned look on her face as if she didn’t care what might happen next because the worst had already come about.
I found Louis in bed with a bottle of Canadian whiskey. He was naked and covered with a sheet. The room smelled fiercely of the rancid oil only a sick body can produce. He saw me and smiled a little. He tried to sit up. I helped him and fixed the pillows behind his head. He took the bottle of whiskey by the neck and poured some of it into his glass. He handed me the glass and took a drink himself directly out of the bottle. He had that same faraway look. I started to say something because I felt the time had come for me to say what I had come here to say, but he held up his hand to stop me. “Step away,” he said.
I sat there for a full minute, not knowing what to do. Then I finished my drink and stood up. “Okay, Louis,” I said. “But I’ll come back a little later on, if that’s all right with you.”
Louis shook his head, frowning at my failure to understand him. “Me, I mean,” he said. “I’m a step away. I think I always have been.”
I guess I just had a blank look on my face. It seemed to exasperate him.
“The farther upstream you go,” he said slowly, as if he didn’t trust my ability to understand simple English, “the meaner becomes the terrain. I’m tangled up in some high brush country, and it’s beginning to look like there’s a real chance I won’t be able to go any farther or even find my way back.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Sometimes these dreams say, ‘Yes.’ Sometimes they say, ‘No.’ Sometimes they say, ‘You are ninety percent stone, and should spend the rest of your time selling tractors and making Lily happy and quit tampering with what you are not going to be able to figure out.’” He grunted at the humor of such a possibility.
“Do they ever tell you to go down to the yards and lay your head on a rail?” I mumbled into my empty glass.
Louis looked at me, his eyes sharp and mean. He hadn’t had his hair cut for some time and it hung down over his ears, damp and oily-looking. He scratched his beard and chest. Then he grinned. I could see that his gums were nearly white and his teeth looked bad, too. “Maybe so,” he said. Then he threw off his sheet and swung out of bed. “Hell,” he said. “Let’s go down to that place on the comer and hear some music.”
That place on the comer, the closest bar to Louis’s house, was a mean little cowboy bar called the Bar-None. The Bar-None was a long, narrow hole-in-the-wall with no elbowroom, no light, and no way to keep out of trouble. I thought it was the poorest idea Louis could have come up with but decided to string along, hoping that maybe we wouldn’t get that far. Louis had to walk slow, with me holding his arm, because he’d been lying in bed for nearly a week with nothing but whiskey for food and feeling bad about everything. But by the time we got to the Bar-None, the fresh air and exercise had perked him up. “Why don’t we go on down to Lucky’s?” I suggested. It was only another four blocks.
“No,” he said. “Too far. Too many leeches.”
I can only say that I was knocked flat. It was the first truly unkind words I’d ever heard from Louis Quenon. I looked at him and he didn’t try to avoid my eyes, but there was still too much distance in his face for it to mean anything to me.
We went in. There was the usual crowd of rough trade you never see anywhere except in places like the Bar-None. We took two stools toward the dark end of the bar. The jukebox was turned up loud and thumping. The lights were flickering—bad wiring. A fight was getting under way someplace in back. Louis ordered the first round of drinks. The cowboy next to me knocked my arm off the bar with his elbow. He didn’t say he was sorry. He looked at me and then at Louis and then went on with his conversation. He was talking in an enterprising way to a nearly unconscious hawklike woman. A bloody face pushed itself between me and Louis and whispered hoarsely for a bottle of gin to go. Someone was trying to waltz with an Indian woman who hated the idea. She had dropped something on the floor, but the hardleg she was with wouldn’t let her stop long enough to pick it up. I decided to keep my eyes on the few square inches of bar in front of me until Louis figured he’d had enough of this place.
Someone came in by mistake. It was a woman and her husband. They had a dog on a leash. They stood in the doorway, squinting through the smoke haze and hammering roar. The woman said something to the man and they turned to leave. Something stopped them. Their dog, a gray poodle with a red ribbon on its neck, had gotten loose. Someone had scooped it up and set it on the bar. It skittered along, dodging glasses and hands, looking for a place to get down. The woman was trying to make her way toward it. “Banjo!” she yelled. “Banjo!” And pretty soon everyone in the place was yelling, “Banjo! Banjo!” and laughing crazy. Banjo was trembling, and even though you could tell he didn’t want to antagonize anyone, his lips began to curl back over his teeth in spite of himself, and he growled. This made everybody at the bar laugh all the harder. A cowboy with a long mortician’s face stuck a Polish sausage into Banjo’s mouth. The bar-tender snapped the bar rag at him and said, “Off, mutt.” The strain was too much for Banjo. He peed. The pee rolled down against the face of a garage mechanic who had passed out on the bar. The woman next to the passed-out garage mechanic woke him up by tickling his throat with her fingernail. “You’re laying in a puddle of poodle piss,” she said, straight-faced. Those at the bar who heard it passed it down. “He’s laying in a puddle of poodle piss,” they said. Pretty soon nearly everyone in the place was saying it. For a minute there you couldn’t hear yourself think. The garage mechanic began to realize that he was the butt of a joke of some kind. He wiped his face on his sleeve and looked at the trembling dog. He took the Polish sausage out of its mouth. Banjo tried to bark but only managed a humiliating whine. The mechanic grabbed the dog’s leash and jerked it up into the air. The woman who had been trying to retrieve her dog broke into tears. She made a kind of high-pitched yelping sound that cut through the general racket. The mechanic held the dog over the bar by its leash. He looked at it as you might look at a wriggling fish on a line, trying to decide if it’s a keeper or not. The dog’s hind legs were digging frantically at the air. Then the mechanic began to twirl the dog in big lazy circles, letting the leash out to its full length. Everybody near them had to duck as the dog went by. The woman who owned the dog was screaming, “No! No! Please!” Her husband was still in the doorway, his hand on his forehead. Someone had put a country tune on the jukebox about a man and his hound. “Me and my hound, we go round and around.” The woman had made her way to the mechanic. She began to punch him in the face. She didn’t know how to punch, though. It looked like she was knocking at a door shyly, hoping that no one was home. The mechanic laughed and twirled the dog all the harder. Then his face went vicious and he gave the leash one more hard swing and let it go. The dog helicoptered through the air and landed somewhere in the dark rear of the bar. The woman was still putting her balled-up little fists in the mechanic’s face. He grabbed her by the coat and lifted her off the floor. Then he set her down on the bar. Someone handed her a glass of beer. Her husband was still in the doorway, his hand on his forehead.
Louis sat through it all as if it were a partway interesting movie he was watching on the TV set above the bar. He took his whiskey neat and sipped it. Someone said, “This dog here is suffering.” An old cowboy with the face of a child had picked up Banjo. The dog was having a convulsion. Louis slipped off his stool and went over to the old cowboy. “Look here,” said the cowboy. “He needs a vet, real quick.”
Louis took the dog from the arms of the old cowboy. He brought it over to the bar and laid it down on its side. He felt along the dog’s spine and the back of its neck. He ran his fingers along the rib cage. The dog was jerking and its hind legs were trying to get traction. Louis opened the dog’s jaws and put his fingers into its throat. The woman, who was still sitting on the bar holding the glass of beer they gave her, yelled, “What is he doing! What are his qualifications!” Her husband was still in the doorway. He raised his hand as if to get someone’s permission to speak. Louis pressed his ear against the dog. He straightened up then and looked at the woman down the bar.
“Your doggie is dead, ma’am,” he said.
She heard him. “No!” she yelled. “Look, he’s still moving his legs! Here, Banjo! Here, my darling!”
Louis pushed the dog aside to the man next to him and he in turn pushed it aside, and so on, until the dog finally got to the woman. She picked it up and held it close to her face. She began to speak to it in baby talk. Banjo began to wag his tail.
“No use,” Louis said. “That dog is dead.”
Banjo got to his feet and began to dance up and down, trying to lick the woman’s tear-streaked face. A man and a woman were trading Sunday punches next to the men’s room. The woman would take a punch, then grin and spit at the man. Then the man would take a punch from the woman and he would also grin and spit. It was some sort of contest. They were both heavyweights, two hundred pounds or more.
“No use,” Louis said again. “No use in carrying on like that. The doggie is dead.”
The garage mechanic helped the woman down from the bar and she and her poodle made their way back to the man in the doorway. The little dog was barking happily and jumping up and down against the woman’s legs.
“It’s dead,” Louis said. “They shouldn’t fool themselves like that. It only makes it harder.”
Louis left town for a couple of months. No one knew where he went. When he came back, Art One Pipe was with him. One Pipe had brought most of his belongings. Louis put him up in a spare room. Lily, by that time, had had enough. One Pipe was the last straw, and she moved out, taking a room in the George A. Custer Hotel, uptown.
Louis had changed. He’d lost a lot of weight and he looked ten years older. I never realized how tall he was. When he was filled out, you didn’t notice his height so much. But now he was skin on bone and had taken off his beard. His hair was cropped short. We’d see him, now and then, walking uptown, his clothes flapping on him like there wasn’t anything inside them. His big round face looked sunken in and his shoulder blades poked up against his shirt like broken-off wings. He must have been close to seven feet tall, and it looked as though he had all he could do just to keep standing upright, like a narrow reed that had outgrown its ability to keep itself straight. He never came into Lucky’s, and those of us who once counted on his being around gave him up for lost. No one came right out and said it, but it was in the air every time two or more of us would sit down together. Then the stories began to come in.
Louis had begun to stop people in the street to tell them what they didn’t want to hear. He would block their way and point a finger in their faces, like a crazy prophet, drunk on his own visions. “Your baby will likely be torn up pretty bad in a baler,” he told a woman, who fainted dead away on the spot. “The day after you have the family photograph taken, happiness will fly out of your window forever,” he told a young pair of newlyweds. “In the little sealed-off rooms behind your eyes there is a coiled-up animal itching to drill holes in your ability to figure things out,” he said to Nestor Claig, the high school principal and supposedly the smartest man in town. Sometimes he’d act as if he were listening to people’s deepest thoughts. He’d cock an ear at them, squint, then put his big hand on their shoulders. “No, never do that twice,” he whispered into the long hair of a beautiful young woman. “The corrected promise is all you can hope for,” he said to a tired-looking man of fifty. And to a bank vice president, he said, “Her mind, you know, is shot through with tidy lies. Leave her before she drags you under.”
Someone called the police and they threatened to lock him up again for disturbing the peace. The chief went to Lily with a plan to have Louis put away in the state mental hospital. But Lily didn’t want any part of the chief’s plan. “He keeps this up, Lily,” said the chief, “and we won’t need you to sign any papers. I’ll get the court to put him away.”
“Do what you want,” Lily said. “Just don’t ask me to do your job for you.”
Then one day Lily showed up at Lucky’s with a gentleman friend. He was over seventy and wore a fine silk suit. He carried a black cane and had a little white mustache. Lily had a proud look on her face. Her eyes dared anyone to say something. No one paid them any attention except when they moved their hands or opened their mouths to speak. Lily didn’t care. She talked in a loud, relaxed voice about the big savings-and-loan company her gentleman friend used to work for as chief accountant. He didn’t seem to mind her bragging him up. He’d sit with one hand in his lap and his other hand on a glass of sweet port, a real gentleman. He had a calm, distant gaze on his face that seemed to reach all the way back to Minneapolis, where he’d spent his best years. His name was Roland Towne. He lived in the room across from Lily’s in the George A. Custer.
This went on for a while. Then Louis caught sight of them together, on the sidewalk, heading for Lucky’s. He trailed them to the door but he didn’t follow them inside. We could see him in the doorway, silhouetted against the light, like a staring pile of bones. Lily ignored him. Roland Towne ignored everything. Leonard would get a worried look on his face every time Lily and Roland came in trailed by Louis. “This is coming to a head,” he whispered to me.
He was right. You could see that Louis was becoming agitated. He began to pace up and down in front of Lucky’s, biting his fingernails and scratching his beard, which he’d begun to let grow again. He was still skinny, though, as if he’d given up the idea of eating proper food. One evening he came into Lucky’s with Art One Pipe. Lily and Roland weren’t there. “I’m going to tell you people something you probably don’t want to hear,” he said, to all of us. Art One Pipe shook his head. “Hell, Louis,” he said. “It’s better you just kept quiet.”
Louis ignored him. “I was in the Badlands. Don’t ask me how I got there. It was a dream. There had been a terrible drought. I hadn’t sold a tractor in over a month. A custom cutting crew brought their combines in from Kansas, took one look at the dead, empty land, and got mean drunk for a week. And then, all at once, I was up north, in the Badlands, alone. What am I doing here? I said to myself. I met a woman who called herself Mrs. Tree. She was big and fat. She didn’t know what I was doing there either. She lived in a mud-wall cabin. She said that she was responsible for the weather. She’d been sick. The wind had blown something bad into her ear. She couldn’t remember things. Like the patterns of her stones. She had to line up some stones, big round ones that she had to shove with her shoulder. Every day she had to line them up in a different pattern just so the weather would stay normal. But the bad thing that had been blown into her ear made her forget the patterns.”
Louis took a swallow of beer. One Pipe was staring into his whiskey glass. He had a slightly disgusted look on his face. Louis paid him no attention. “So I told her,” Louis continued. “I said, ‘I can fix up your memory with a little bit of this tea here.’ I made her some and she drank it down. Her eyes lit up. ‘That’s real good,’ she said. T almost remember everything now.’ ‘Almost?’ I said. ‘There is one more thing,’ she said. She took off her dress and laid down in the dirt. ‘You have got to be my husband for a little while.’ There was a dangerous look in her black eyes, but at the moment she only seemed flirtatious and coy to me. So I piled on her and we were getting to it before long like a husband and wife.”
“Take it easy, Louis,” Leonard said. “There’s mixed company here.”
“Filthy lunatic,” said an elderly prim woman in a flaming-red wig.
Louis ignored these protests. “But just as I reached the point of no return, I felt myself starting to shrink. At the same time, I got groggy and weak. Something was pulling me in, a powerful suction that had started to fold me in half, backward, at the hips. I mean to tell you that it came from her, that I was being sucked up into her, like the reverse of being bom. Everything went black and warm and I could hear her heart thudding over me someplace like a rhythmic thunder. I moved upward, sort of swimming, sort of flying, in the pitch-black dark. Then there was something in front of me. A big, hard-shelled bug of some kind, like a sow bug, only it was half as big as me. It blocked my path. ‘Kill it,’ said Mrs. Tree. I was real surprised that I was able to hear her voice. It was like she was behind me someplace, talking through a culvert. I picked the sow bug up in my hands and killed it easy enough, but it took a while and it stank something terrible. Then I felt myself falling. Down down down I went until I hit something soft and warm. Pressure like I never felt before pressed me from all sides. I was being squeezed down smaller and smaller. I wanted to cry out, but there was no air to be had. Then the light hit me again like the blast of an atomic bomb. I was out in the open air flat on the mud floor of her hut, covered with blood and crying. She had given birth to me. I was her baby.”
“Will someone please call the police?” said the prim woman in the red wig.
“When I was myself again,” Louis said, unbothered by the interruption, “Mrs. Tree said, ‘Thank you. You killed the thing that had gotten into my ear. I feel a lot better. I remember everything now.’ We crossed over to where her stones were kept and she shoved them around with her shoulders until they formed a pattern of X’s, circles, and stars. It was a lot of hard work and it took a long time. When she was done, she went into her mud hut and laid down to sleep. Pretty soon a big black cloud comes boiling out of Canada. ‘Going to hail,’ I said. Mrs. Tree pokes her head out of her hut and gives me a funny look. ‘Be quiet, you,’ she said. ‘I got to sleep. The weather is back to normal now.’ And sure enough, the white stuff starts jumping all around us, hail, big and lumpy. But something’s wrong with it. It isn’t exactly hail. After it hits the ground, it moves around and tries to sit up. I bend down to get a closer look. It’s the figure of a man. Millions of them. They are all pasty white and naked as day one. They can’t be alive, but they are. Half-alive anyway, and cold to the touch, cold as the hail I thought they were. You’d pick one of them up in your hand and he’d turn over and look at you with those sad icy-white eyes. There was no real energy in them. They seemed to be carved out of soft white soap. They didn’t have any mouths to speak of, and they didn’t have any assholes. You can’t get the medicine into them and you can’t get the poison out. They would just turn over and look at you with those miserable dead-cold icy-white eyes. They had little frosty mustaches and each one of them was holding on to a little glass of that sweet port. They made you want to puke. All they can do is think about how it used to be back in Minneapolis a hundred and ten years ago. I hollered into Mrs. Tree’s hut that it would be better to have the drought, but it was too late, she was dead to the world of ordinary people.”
He told this story as a daily routine. The details of Louis’s dream would change, but it always ended with the little ice-cold men falling out of the cloud. I believed it was a real dream and that he’d just doctored it up a little so that it seemed to be especially about Roland Towne. Then one day, he told it while Lily and Roland were in the bar. Leonard looked like he expected trouble. The rest of us went on with business as usual. When Louis finished with the story, he stared directly at Roland. Roland nodded to him, amiable, and took a sip of his port. Lily was red as a turnip, having been insulted by the off-color dream and its outrageous ending. She had her big red purse with her, ready for action.
Louis had something with him. It was a moth-eaten blanket with wheels and thunderbirds stitched on it. He walked over to the table where Lily and Roland were sitting. He took something out of a pouch he was carrying and sprinkled it in the air over Roland’s head. Then he unfolded the blanket and tossed it on top of Roland so that the old man was completely covered by it. Lily’s jaw dropped. She gave Louis a thud on the back with her purse. Louis mumbled a little hocus-pocus in a foreign language. Roland didn’t move. You could see his outline under the blanket. He was a cool old man. He let Louis ramble on. I saw the shape of his glass slide up the blanket as he raised it to his lips and then back down as he returned it to the table. He was drinking his sweet port as if nothing at all peculiar was happening. Louis took the blanket off with a big swooping yank. Roland’s white hair was mussed a little but he looked serene as ever if not slightly bored. He nodded to Louis, still amiable, and took another sip of his wine, his mind nine hundred and fifty miles dead east. Some people are like that. Something inside of them is solid as rock even though their exteriors seem frail and delicate. I had to give old Roland credit. Louis gave him too much credit, though. He stumbled backward, swallowing hard, as if Roland had leveled a Smith & Wesson.38 at his nose. I don’t know for sure, but I think Louis had tried to make the old accountant disappear. It didn’t work.
Louis got desperate after that. He got an old Model T ignition coil from the junkyard and began to give himself strong electrical shocks with Art One Pipe’s reluctant help. These shocks were supposed to rejuvenate something that had gone dormant inside of him. When winter came, he stood for an hour in a blizzard without any clothes on, singing magical songs into the north wind. In the spring, he went on a diet of berries, bark, and roots. He slept in the skin of a grizzly killed eighty years ago by an Indian’s arrow. The Indian had broken some kind of spiritual law by killing the grizzly and the skin was said to be inhabited by an angry spirit. Louis wanted to strike a deal with this dark spirit.
The dreams he had while sleeping in that skin led him to do things to himself that were painful and dangerous. He stuck long pins into his feet. He swallowed ordinary garden dirt, worms and all. He nearly blinded himself in the left eye with some kind of caustic. He dunked himself into the June rapids of the Sweetroot River and was swept downstream a mile before he could beach himself.
He learned new songs and sayings all the way from Alaska. He made a telephone call to North Africa and talked for an hour to a hostile bureaucrat who wouldn’t give him the information he wanted. He rode freight trains to the West Coast and drank salt-water out of the Pacific Ocean where two great currents met in a war of waves, and when he came back he set fire to everything he owned except his medicine bag and his house.
He was thrown in jail again, let out, thrown back in again, forced to spend a couple of months in the state mental hospital, let out, and so on, in a battle between the authorities and Louis’s ever-widening circle of desperate actions.
The town formed a committee to deal with the problem. He visited the committee meetings in white skins and paint on his face. He would sit in the back row, by himself, staring at the members of the committee without comment. One by one the committee members found strange-looking figures carved out of wood stuck into their front lawns. The chairman of the committee found a necklace of dead mice hung on his mailbox. But the committee members, all hardheaded businessmen, scoffed at Louis’s mumbo-jumbo. Once Louis brought his moth-eaten blanket to the committee meeting, threw some of that green dust into the air, sang something in a falsetto voice, waved the blanket, but if it was meant to make the committee disappear into thin air, it didn’t work. A couple of the members, though, came down with the flu shortly after that.
Art One Pipe had long since gotten fed up with Louis and had left town. Lily filed for a divorce. She got it quick and without any catches. She married Roland Towne a few days later and they went back to Minneapolis, forever.
Louis moved into an old mineshaft on a hill just south of town and was rarely seen anymore. People began to think of him as a harmless old hermit. They liked it that way. So long as he stayed up in his cave brooding, everybody was happy. Everybody got the idea that Louis had found his proper place in the world. “That crazy old hermit” is what you’d hear, always said with a kind of relief. And then all the old stories would take on a comic element. There had always been something awe-inspiring about Louis, but now people would chuckle and shake their heads remembering the funny side of his antics. Only a few of us remembered how it really was. Even some who had been given a cure for one thing or another would now tell you how most disease was really ninety percent in your head, anyway. “One cure is as good as the next if you believe in it, for the mind is the true healer.” Or, put another way: “If you think you’re sick, then by God you are sick, or soon will be.” One old fool who Louis had raised up out of a hospital bed argued, “It wasn’t my heart that was bad, it was my attitude.” A husband who had promised to give Louis a two-year-old Cadillac if he could help his wife said, “Hell, she wore that cancer like a glove. When she decided to take it off because she wasn’t getting any mileage off it anymore, off it came.” Louis got the Cadillac, but it had piston slap and the transmission was balky.
After hearing this sort of talk one afternoon in Lucky’s, I jumped up and yelled, “You’re all ingrates and liars!” I danced a little old man’s war dance, holding a chair out in front of me like a weapon or a dance partner. “Look at me!” I said. “I had one foot in the grave all the way up to the hip before Louis came along!”
But no one pays much attention to a white-haired seventy-year-old man doing a war dance with a chair. A few of them chuckled, and Leonard turned up the TV so that the baseball game would drown out my little commotion. An Indian woman named Nan Person came over to my table and sat down. She was about sixty years old, tall and angular. She had a fine long jaw but not many teeth in it. Her leathery hands were beautiful—slender and calm.
“They only feel betrayed,” she said.
“What?” I was still a little hot. I stared at her and she didn’t look away. “You don’t make sense,” I said.
“They are mad at him for going crazy,” she said. “They feel like fools, having put their faith in a crazy man. Now they are proving to themselves that nothing ever happened to them.”
That made me laugh. I touched Nan Person’s hand. “One thing is sure,” I said. “Nothing will ever happen to them again.”
She laughed too, and I picked up her fine hand and kissed it.
But another thing did happen to them. It was a Sunday afternoon, maybe as much as a year later. A few of us were sitting around having some muscatel. Nan Person, who had moved in with me, was holding my hand under the table. A love affair so late in life is an undreamed-of thing. But there it was, full-blown and real. A gift from nowhere for no good reason, but taken with gratitude and no questions asked. We never discussed it, Nan and me. It was there, in our eyes, a crazy thing that made us sweet and giddy.
Something was in the air that day. I saw Nan shiver slightly, with that nervousness you feel before an important event. It was quiet. The quiet was inside of you and outside of you. I didn’t know I was holding my breath until I got dizzy. A few others were glancing at the doors every now and then. Leonard was sitting at the end of the bar where he kept the 12-gauge shotgun, pretending to read the newspaper. The TV set was on. A bullnecked preacher was hollering to beat hell into ten microphones. The sound was turned off, but the address of where you could send your money was being flashed across the bottom of the screen. Bullneck wasn’t taking any chances.
I excused myself form the table to get a little air. The street was empty. It had rained hard earlier that day and everything was still wet and clean-looking. I was thinking how fine and permanent everything is in spite of all the individual comings and goings and the hoopla that goes with it, when a big hand touched me on the shoulder. It was Louis.
“Must have been the Apple of Peru,” he said as if resuming a conversation we might have been having two or three years ago. I looked at him. He looked good. He was filled out and he had gotten himself a clean suit of ordinary clothes that almost fit. His hair was plastered down and his beard had been combed. My eyes must have been watery because he also seemed blurred around the edges, like an old photo that had seen too much sunlight. “Also known,” he went on, “as the angel’s trumpet, stinkweed, night-shade, and Jamestown weed. You may have heard the bastardized version, which is most popular in this neck of the woods. Jimson weed. That’s what it must have been.”
I figured he meant for me to ask him what he was talking about, so I did.
“I grew some,” he said, “up on that hill, among a lot of other things. I sang a number of serious lamentations, and I needed helpers. But living up there in that mineshaft aggravated my piles, and my gonads had begun to produce severe and regular aches. Apple of Peru is a good helper for such troubles.”
I wiped the blur out of my eyes. He came into focus for a second; then his edges got threadbare again. “Have you come back down?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything. He stroked his beard and looked up and down the street as if it were the first time he’d been on it. He seemed to be vibrating like a tuning fork. I don’t mean he was trembling as if he had the shakes after a killer binge. I just mean you couldn’t concentrate on his edges. “Let’s go have a drink,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it.”
There was a general shamefaced welcoming commotion inside. Tables were shoved together and pitchers of beer were ordered. Leonard brought over a fresh bottle of Louis’s favorite whiskey. Louis poured himself a generous shot. He stared at the glass for a minute. We waited. Then he pushed it slowly away. “I’d better not,” he said, and everyone murmured something in an understanding way, since it was pretty clear that Louis had been dry for quite a while.
“Apple of Peru,” he said. “That, and the fact that there’s a big deposit of pitchblende in that hill. It wasn’t hard to figure out what happened. At first, anyway. Then...”
You could hear everyone suck air as Louis picked up the shot glass and sipped at it. “What the hell,” he said. “Spirits for the spirit, what’s the harm?”
We didn’t ask him what he was talking about. But Nan heard something in his tone of voice, a change, that made her dig her long, slender fingers into my leg. She leaned on me and her lanky body suddenly felt frail.
“Apple of Peru,” Louis said again. “It has a characteristic way of getting down into your marrow. It probably had some pitchblende in it, too. I got real sick. But I got... healthy, too. Healthy in a way I’d never been.”
He looked too tall all of a sudden. It was as if he were sitting on a pillow, giving him a few extra inches of height. A humming swarm of small white moths flew out of his left ear. I blinked and looked around to see if anyone else had seen them, but no one looked amazed. I took a long drink of wine.
“Leeches,” Louis said, looking directly at me. He was smiling a little, as though we were sharing a private joke. A few people took offense at the remark and left the table, but they were the ones who had scoffed loudest at the memory of Louis’s cures.
“Fever moved into me like a weather front,” Louis said, resuming his story. “I went into a coma, I think. I was way back in that mineshaft, wrapped in a tarp. I think I was unconscious for two or three days. It’s dark way back in a stope, darker than any night in the woods, and when I woke up... I would see a glow. It was coming from me, from my bones, from my blood, greenish-white, like I’d swallowed a quart of radium.”
A round of throat clearing passed through Lucky’s. No one was willing to swallow this part of his story. Some chair legs scraped the floor as the doubters got ready to depart.
“I was crazy for a while. I would run around the hillside, hollering and throwing myself down, flailing and kicking at imaginary beings. You could probably hear me all the way in town on a clear night. Once I tried to bite the moon, which had hooked itself onto my shoulder like a big cocklebur. It was trying to turn itself into a pair of wings. Owl wings. These were dreams and they were not dreams.”
Louis got up and went to the front windows of the bar. He pulled down the shades. He then turned off the overhead lights. That made it pretty dark inside. At first you couldn’t see anything except the blue glow of the TV set, where the bullneck preacher was now crying like a child, his thick, ham-pink face straining under a perfectly timed emotion, since the service was about over. He bit his lip and blinked back tears.
“I’m crouched down behind the bar, I think,” Louis said. “Or maybe I’m behind the jukebox. I’ll give your eyes another minute to get used to the dark, then I’ll come out. Then you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
It was a long minute. The preacher had finished weeping and was now smiling up at the sky, where heavenly approval fell on him in the form of swiftly moving spotlights. Then someone slammed a glass down. I guess I was looking in the wrong place. I turned to the left and then to the right. Nan caught my face in her long hand and aimed it straight ahead.
The white moths I had seen swarming out of his ear had now formed themselves into the shape of a skeleton. The jaws of the skull opened. “Pitchblende,” it said.
“Turn on the lights!” someone begged. A chair was knocked over. Someone bumped into someone else and cursed. Nan stood up, dragging me out of my chair. The glowing bones drifted toward us. But now their shape changed. They weren’t bones piled on bones anymore. It was a circle of moths.
“I’m dreaming on my feet,” Louis said, but his voice wasn’t coming from anywhere near the moths.
Nan jerked me to one side as the moths came closer, but it was too late to avoid them. We were in them, passing through them. It was like passing through an electrical portal of some kind that took you from one place to another. I felt the hair on my head move.
Nan and I were running, hand in hand, over chairs and tables, over the bar, over brick walls and alleys and parked cars until we were nowhere near Lucky’s or town but in a big, grassy, sunblown field, not scared but eager, not escaping but finding.
We were young. I saw how beautiful she had been, and I felt my own young strength as we loped across that meadow, kicking the heads off dandelions, the bees thick and busy, the cottonwoods at the meadow’s end leaning pleasureful-ly against the perfumed breeze. “Keep going!” I yelled. “Don’t stop!”
Leonard raised the shades and switched on the lights. I sipped my muscatel, Nan sipped hers. Louis raised his glass of whiskey and squinted at it. “Whew,” he said softly.
“Louis,” said some old man with rheumy eyes. “I got this numbness in my foot...”
“No more cures,” Louis said. “The world has gone stale. Not the world of trees and rocks and animals, but the world that men have made. We hate it so bad we are itching to blow it up. I didn’t go up on that mountain to figure out some new cures. It’s useless to get rid of cancer in a man who can’t tell the difference between the urge to grin and the urge to spit.”
The baseball game came on and Leonard turned up the sound. Attention drifted gradually from Louis to the television set.
“Let’s take a walk,” Louis said to Nan and me. “There’s more to tell.”
Outside, Louis said in a dreamy way, “I was bom with a caul, you know. My mother wouldn’t have anything to do with me for a month. She figured it meant I could see and converse with ghosts. She was superstitious.” He laughed. We laughed too, but we weren’t too sure of what it was we found funny.
We walked up Main Street. The air was thin and cool for midsummer. Out of the comer of my eye I saw Nan shiver. I wondered if she had dreamed of a perfect meadow, felt her strong young legs pounding the grass as the pollen-heavy bees bounced off our bare arms.
“I’m not here,” Louis said.
Nan grunted, as if her suspicions had been borne out.
“I’m in that shaft,” Louis said. “I’m in that tarp. I could already be dead. Maybe dead for weeks.”
Nan let some air hiss out between her teeth.
I felt light as a moonwalker. It seemed that I might float off if a good breeze came up. Some Sunday strollers were out. Louis nodded to them and they nodded back. Louis’s nod seemed to say, Let’s let bygones be bygones.
I was tingling all over. The atoms of my skin and the atoms of the air were mingling. The sidewalk felt like it was paved with marshmallow. Nan squeezed my arm until it hurt. She nodded at Louis, meaning for me to take a good look.
Although his edges were blurrier than ever, he looked good. I was proud, as I always had been, to be his friend. I was thinking, Isn’t it nice that things never really end and what appears to be finished often fools you and more often than not comes back to start all over again with only minor changes for the sake of variety. Louis turned and smiled at me. It was a smile that could make you feel that you’d finally gotten the point after years and years of pretending there wasn’t one.
We walked to the far end of Main Street, where the town ends. Then Nan and I, on our own now, turned and drifted slowly back.