7

He lay in bed on his back in the muggy night heat, his hand under his head, smoking without ever touching the cigarette except to change it for a new one, the radio on the commode playing the American Airlines all-night concert, far away and tinny, interrupted once every hour for news, the same news over and over, the same voice: Albany. Tonight eight counties have been officially declared disaster areas. In his press conference this evening, Governor Harriman said—

There were flies in the room, the screens all shot. Beside the radio, a stack of paperback books, the loaded ash tray.

George Loomis lay perfectly still, as if tranquil. He was clean-shaven and combed, and the sheet was drawn over his bad foot, the good foot lying in the open, as though in this isolated mountain house he expected some visitor. But his mind was in a turmoil, struggling against thought.

“There are no disasters,” his grandfather had said, “God moves in strange ways.” But his mother was dying, so he’d gotten home from Korea on leave, shocked to find himself moved by her dying. He’d been young then, a romantic. Her face was sunken, and she drooled now, an effect of the stroke, and her ugliness made him see that she had been beautiful once and that he’d loved her. When she died his father said, “What shall we do?” and he had said nothing. Bury the dead. When she was embalmed, though, her face filled out and she wasn’t as bad as she’d been before, almost beautiful in the casket with its ridiculous window for the worms to look through. In carne corruptible incorruptionem He had not wept or wanted to, even at the graveside, but afterward he had gotten drunk, or rather sick, and had stood on a table at the Silver Slipper intoning Ovid:

Exitus auspicio gravior: nam nupta per herbas. …

For in those days there was still poetry. Still music, too. You would listen all night to the music your friendly American Airlines brought to you for your listening pleasure, and you would be pleased. Yet it was sound, even now; more comforting than silence. God bless you, friendly American Airlines. Into your hands I commend myself.

Then the memory flushed through him again, his headlights dipping over the crest of the hill as they’d done without harm ten thousand times, the incredible circus cart there in his road, straddling the crown, and again in his mind he hit the brakes with all his might and yanked at the wheel and heard the noise resounding like thunder through the glens. When that memory was over he saw Fred Judkins at his door again, nodding, sucking on the pipe, and after a minute the old man took off his hat. (But too late now to tell anyone, and no doubt too late from the beginning. An accident, one in an infinite chain.)

The American Airlines had chosen Scheherazade for him. He tried to listen, or rather he pretended to try to listen, consciously playing an empty role … no emptier, he thought, than others.

He ground out the last of his cigarettes and snapped out the light. In the darkness the music, like the heat, drew nearer, coming from all parts of the room at once. He rolled over on his stomach, the side of his head on his hand now, and closed his eyes. There had been birds circling above the back ravine. He’d been alarmed, seeing them, wondering who else might be seeing. Before that he’d been alarmed by the knock of the Watkins Man. But all this would pass.

(At the Dairy Queen in Slater there had been two young girls, strangers to him. One of them had smiled. She had long hair—both of them had long hair, one blonde, one dark, and they wore no lipstick. They were pretty, poised between child and woman, so pretty his heartbeat had quickened a little, and he’d imagined how they would look in those pictures you could buy in Japan, coarse rope cutting their wrists and breasts and thighs. The instant he thought it, his stomach went sour. They were young, pure: beautiful with innocence, yet corruptible. The one who smiled invited it. She was hungry for it. Serpentis dente.)

He twisted onto his back suddenly and sat up, soaking in sweat. “Please us,” he whispered. He could feel the memory of the accident coming over him, and he got up to look for a smokable butt in an ash tray, and some bourbon.