For my friend Craig Sanderson
When I run, like now, I head down Court Street because of its grassy boulevard. I turn west on Prairie so that I approach the University Park fountain bronze dancing girls with the sun behind them, a vast and holy prism of spray breathing out toward me. Then I face the dark welling up in the north, orange setting sun to my left, and do intervals, fast and slow, two miles uphill to Patterson Springs, the old chautauqua ground.
I’ve been battling depression this whole summer. It’s the price I pay in middle life for living lies and harboring secrets. I’ve waged the battle with daydreams (I conjure, for instance, Skidmore, waving as he drives by, 1963, in the old Ford Victoria his dad had saved for him). When daydreams don’t work, I lapse into the mindless, subvocal recitation of memorized prayers, or I surrender to music. Mainly, though, I’ve learned to depend on the faddish but nevertheless helpful practice of running six miles a day, rain or shine.
In running, I set my mind to the rhythm of my stride and think of things positive and hopeful. I remember, for instance, Ann Hollander, in church nearly twenty years ago (Father Casey in the pulpit lecturing in gravelly Irish on the topic of fund-raising for the new school)—Ann sat in the stained-glass shadows of her father, his mind on God and democracy, her eyes trained on the statue of the Virgin, his shoulders slouched toughly forward, her back straight, her body new and lovely beneath a pretty cotton dress. This was a sweet, sweet girl—she’d slip away through moonlit backyards to love the neighbor boy, she’d dance through dry shadows, across the driveways of sleeping doctors, lawyers, dentists, through the sleeping flowers of their sleeping wives (I’d see her coming, through speckles of light). Through dry grass and cicadas buzzing she came.
My best memories are from this neighborhood, and the exhaustion from running seems cleansing, but even so, the fear and regret, the wrenching isolation of secrets, they stalk me, and sometimes they prevail over me like the lightning in a hot summer thunderstorm once prevailed over the large belfry crucifix here at St. Paul’s, our neighborhood parish.
My friends suggest I marry again, or seek absolution. When I pass this church, I always think of that. Absolution—they’re on to something there. In 1957, jerking off was the moral equivalent of murder in the dim light of the confessional. Casey’s voice, from behind the plastic mesh screen, made the whole empty church vibrate with his priestly authority. Absolution was grudgingly granted to frightened children whose mistakes were limited to the scale of childhood and whose problems were gloriously solvable—even then none of us ever felt completely forgiven.
I think sometimes of form: raise the knees higher and the speed increases, lengthen the stride to heel-toe and feel the therapy in the hamstring.
I remember 1957 as a clean, well-mothered time, and I wonder sometimes what went wrong later. I remember that year as one long baseball summer—textures of wood and leather, grass stains in cotton; the science of raking the infield dry and raking it wet, waiting for the dew to evaporate, learning to spit and other initiations—watching clouds billow up and get black, checking the sun for lunchtime. Establishing a reputation: good arm, good glove, good power to right; vaulting the fence, good form.
That was years before the nights of parking spots like Black River Road and the Hanging Tree, time-honored lovers’ lanes deep in the hills left when the glacier melted. I guess I love this day, red and waning; I guess I love this town, falling down. After the fire at St. Paul’s we attended mass for what seemed like years in a forest of gray, towering scaffolding inside the church. These old houses, I know them like familiar faces. These streets, I know where they lead. (Skidmore goes by again—he wants to stop, offer me condolences on my poems, show me his latest metafiction, razz me about my knee.) This town and I have deep, dark confidentialities. I twisted my knee in the steering wheel, 1962, in a glen on the Black River Road while missing basketball practice on an earnest, determined mission to discover what made Carol Canfield tick. Even now I think of 1962 as the long vibrato whine of a car horn echoing through the glacier hills on a cold autumn evening. No regrets. They told me she became a nurse in later life.
I’d left the car to pee and when I got back she wasn’t wearing anything. She just sat there, the girl of my dreams, smiling, enjoying my embarrassment—her, a tall feisty senior cheerleader—me, a tangled-up, over-anxious second-string forward, Dad’s car. Until the day he died, my dad thought I hurt the knee going to the hoop.
J. Richard Peck Hollander, rest his soul, was president of the draft board, and he told my dad no twisted knee nor allegation of color blindness would defer this doctor’s son from his duty.
“If doctors’ sons don’t serve, then why should anyone else?” he asked, my question precisely, but my dad was insulted—of course I would serve. I went and talked to them myself. I asked, “How is this thing in Asia a threat to our security?”
J. Richard said, “You won’t wonder that when the communists come up Scott Street and rape your sister.”
“But these guys, they don’t even have a boat. How they going to get to central Illinois? How they going to get past the Pennsylvania National Guard, the Indianapolis police department?” Forget it. I was drafted.
One afternoon right after I got back, I climbed those steps at St. Paul’s and caught Casey just at the end of confessions when no one else was there. He opened the little window and waited. I could see his dim shadow, his profile, waiting. I could see the Roman collar and the ceremonial stole. I tried to think how to begin. I was trying to separate sins from duty. He waited several minutes, neither of us saying anything. Finally, he slid the window closed.
I note my knee almost twenty years later—in recent years the ankle has twisted several times. Maybe, after the steering wheel thing, the alignment never got quite right again, hip to toe. No regrets. I turned the ankle pretty bad in basic training; then I broke it pretty good in Vietnam in a fall off a personnel carrier when the dumb shit driving it drove through a small mine crater at forty miles an hour. A lot of guys were hurt more than me.
I’ve learned from experience that it takes me a mile and a quarter to break a sweat in reasonable weather, eighty degrees or less. I can feel myself operate, or I can disengage my mind from it, closing around the usual daydreams or some comfortable mantra. Tell you this: I’d never remarry.
I’ve known people who develop a cold view of things. They find their passion in a few close friends and come to expect nothing from the larger world—except blockage and thwartment, puzzlement and consternation. Close to the ground they huddle. Instinctively they limit themselves, away from wind, experience, people, other natural currents. For them the world is an animation viewed through windows, a home movie run at too slow a speed, existential HBO, silent life except for the clicking projector and the occasional comment from the dark. But I know the world is too complicated to relate to on a part-time basis—we spring from it, we’re part of it, it’s inside us, any separation from it is artificial and doomed. I know what Skidmore means when he says he’s sorry he missed the war. Ann Hollander became an example of those insulated people. She became Sister Ann Rene Hollander, even more deeply conditioned to guilt than I am, shrouded under starch, living in the dark linoleum cloister of the most conservative order of monastic housewives of Christ that J. Richard Peck Hollander could find in a new age.
You hear rumors of those who see auras, ghostly hues like halos around people, suggesting their character and destiny. Sister Ann Rene claimed to see a violet aura over the body of her dead father, J. Richard, gaunt like Lincoln, resting on the coroner’s slab. Ann dressed him for the grave in the quiet back room of the Waddington Funeral Home down the street. She wrote notes to him and put them in his casket. That’s where I got the idea.
Patterson Springs is my halfway point, a place of solitude these days. It’s familiar to me from when I was little—I used to play there, and later Skidmore and I would camp there. I rejoice at the wonderful existence of this forest. I take it personally. I marvel at the patience of these oaks. You imagine their roots, reaching down, holding tight. They are my reward for making it this far—the rich fragrance of hickory, white oak, their rotting leaves and cracking acorns, renewal of sprouts.
The old chautauqua ground is located where a deep-running network of pure-water springs suddenly wells up out of the earth. The pioneer Virgil Patterson built his place among these oaks and so honored the blessing of cold, pure water that he built a shrine, now dank and moss-covered, back in the trees where the water presents with a deep rippling sound coming straight up out of the black loam.
The hush of the wind here, blended with the windy brushing sound of my footfalls in bent grass, momentarily absolves me from, rids me of, my depression, even though I know this absolution is nothing but the arrival of my second wind, the sudden alignment of energy, circulation, and chemistry that produces a moment of strength and optimism. I’ve learned from experience it arrives at three and one-half miles, deep in this forest on the path that leads to the fresh-water springs and, beyond that, the chautauqua ground. During this fleeting moment I can hallucinate God and Peace, I can envision my own reincarnation, I can summon a sense of relative innocence and well-being. In this moment I realize that this moment is the whole reason I’m running.
As I come across the flat here, the trees arch high above me and through them I see the navy-blue sky. I’m running in the last light. By fall I’ll have to start earlier or change the route; scrub bushes and abrupt gullies occupy this tract without pattern. But now as I run I can see the burr oak, sixty meters to my right across the flat. Struck by lightning one night in July of 1959, its top is shattered and its trunk is split but it still lives. Its arms reach wide and have old men’s elbows, and at the ends the limbs suddenly plunge upward into the sky.
Several years ago I got the idea to bury a time capsule under the burr oak. It was a strange notion, I admit, and I thought about it a long time, years, before I actually went through with it, this summer. It was a project that occupied me for several weeks. Already a bed of weeds, dense and yellow, obscures the spot.
Roger. Lost a hand in Vietnam. And I remember him squinting through smoke and green beer, St. Patrick’s Day, Pat’s Pub, Charlottesville, 1974, complaining about his life and prying into mine. Twelve years ago. Even though Roger has always worked hard at pissing me off, I keep him as a friend because he’s the only person I can talk to who has been ambushed and knows how it feels. Sometimes I have to find him and talk about being ambushed, or just talk about anything, knowing he’s been ambushed, too. I watch his pulse beat a rhythm in his neck—he’s alive and I can see that; therefore we both are.
“How’ve you been?” he’s asking me. He knows I’m in the middle of a divorce, that my wife took the kids and headed south to be a potter, rolled the VW bus outside of Oklahoma City and sent me the bill.
“Fine.”
Up at the bar there’s a St. Patrick’s Day party going on. We talk louder to get above it.
“Good,” he says. “That’s good.” He moves his beer mug between us with his hook. I call it a hook. Really it’s more like a steel clamp.
“What’s good?” I say.
He stares at me. “Actually,” he says after a while, “I hear you’re bonkers.”
“Then why’d you ask how I am?”
He doesn’t answer me, leans back in his chair.
I say to him, “Do I ask, ‘So, how’s your hand?’”
We’re both laughing, but we’re pissed.
“So, how’ve you been?” I ask him after a while.
“Great,” he says. Roger says he remembers a marine who could drink more than anyone he’s ever seen, says he heard the guy recently barged into a newspaper office in Anderson, Indiana, and held the whole place hostage at shotgun point until he started crying and gave up.
“I know how he felt,” Roger says to me. “I was in a hardware store buying some wire. The clerk, an old guy, was showing me where it was, and we walked by this bin with big wrenches in it. For no reason it hit me that I could kill this old guy, I could smash this guy’s skull. I pictured myself doing it. I knew what it would look like. I got out of there.”
I recognize that feeling. It makes my stomach roll to hear Roger give it words. It comes from knowing how close death can be, an old ambush lesson. I tell Roger that J. Richard Peck Hollander died, president of the draft board back when we were ushered out of town in the dead of night on a Greyhound bus, the modern equivalent of marching off to war. Roger says he’s sorry to hear it, he really is.
He says his dad was a veteran of Guadalcanal, and now every year veterans of Guadalcanal come to some great hotel in Dallas or Denver and have a reunion. He says even the Japanese come. “Now goddamn it, Wilbur, I’m telling you that is proof positive that the world has gone completely crazy.” His beer spills. Quietly he mops at it.
He says he’ll miss J. Richard at our reunion, when we get in the mood to have one.
“Forget it,” I say.
“Forget what?” he says, and we laugh.
“What a pitiful son of a bitch you are,” he says to me at the end of the laughing, and we laugh again, guzzle a little green beer, and toast the party at the bar. “The worst is over,” he says after a while, and then we say nothing, watch the party.
“Gotta girl?” I say. He looks down, keeps looking down. I try to think of something hilarious to say. Can’t.
“C’mon,” I tell him. “You’re a great-looking guy. There’s somebody out there for… goddamn it, don’t hold that thing up. That’s not the reason… that thing’s sexy…”
Roger laughs, there’s relief in the air. “Seriously,” I tell him, “you gotta find some other excuse, not that. Women love a good war wound. Signals a hero.”
He’s retreating. He’s being cordial, but he wants no part of that talk. He’ll be out the door in another few seconds. Fast, I try to tell him our conversations never turn out the way I hope they will but I can never think of how to improve them. I tell him I want to be real close friends, confidants, and tell him some of these terrible secrets and shit that give me the clangs when I’m trying to sleep. He’s sliding his chair back—he’s angling for his jacket on the back of it. He doesn’t want that stuff. I think of maybe grabbing him to try to keep him there. His face flushes up in the cheeks—his eyes water. He’s afraid, he doesn’t know what might be said or if he can handle it, he’s running. He doesn’t want all that warm friendship and frank talk.
And, getting up to leave, he says, “Wilbur, you know what you need? You need a sophisticated shrink.”
And I knew this woman, Erica—my wife. For many years we lived alone together and had children whom she wanted to consider gifts from her to me. Whether she has night terrors like mine, I wouldn’t know. For me, marriage is under the burr oak, and fatherhood. With them I buried this poster I had of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima—I had framed it with the caption “The Baby Boom.” It hung in our various rented living rooms, later our various rented bathrooms.
That’s us, Ann, Skidmore, Roger, Erica—the baby boom. It took us until about 1958 to realize what was happening. For a long time in the fifties we thought we were in the clear because we’d managed to dodge polio.
At this point, I complete a mile loop through the Patterson Springs acreage and am back on the road headed south. I already know I won’t sleep well this evening, with Roger and Erica and Skidmore haunting me, with guilt scratching at me inside my chest and stomach. I think I miss my kids. I can see, perhaps a mile ahead, the first lights of the University Park, and I focus right on them, set it to automatic, and move through the dark down the asphalt at 60 percent. I can hear the wind in the drying corn husks in the fields on both sides of me. I try to take my mind into the hush of the drying corn.
Tomorrow we shall die. Or at least we could if we didn’t already, not that dying is the enemy necessarily. I guess I didn’t like the bomb tests much, the ones on TV in the early fifties, Sunday mornings. Right after mass you got to come home and watch while they showed in slow motion what the hydrogen bomb would do to your house if it was made of straw, if it was made of sticks, and if it was made of brick. It blew harder than the big bad wolf, you figured out, age five.
The time capsule was made from an old and very large footlocker I got at a garage sale. I mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow after I dug the hole, set the footlocker in a foot of wet concrete and pushed it down in it. I had chicken wire in the concrete for reinforcement. I filled the locker with all the stuff, closed it, folded the chicken wire over the top of it, and then poured in the rest of the concrete. I waited a couple of days to be sure there were no cracks. In a few years I’ll check on it again. Two thousand years hence, some other life form will bulldoze it up, crack it open, and put it in a museum. Or maybe, a monument to my terror and secrets, it will remain there in the dark for all time, undisturbed, unrevealed, unconfessed, steeping inside the drawn-out ravages of the long haul. Or maybe the doom I’ve been taught to expect will occur, and that odd rock will hurtle through space as one of the fragments, holding together even though the brick houses did not. Or maybe it too will be emulsified—but at least I tried.
So, what else did I bury? Old newspaper clippings I’d kept in a space behind a false wall in the house I grew up in—a picture of Jackie on the car trunk and Clint Hill jumping aboard, somebody’s shoe sticking straight up from the back seat, speaking of ambushes; a picture of Musial, speaking of hero worship, standing on second after his three-thousandth hit; a picture of Laika, the Russian space dog, in a space suit—poor furry little corpse may still be in orbit for all I know; a picture of J. Richard Peck Hollander and his daughter Ann getting a trophy for winning the Kaskaskia Father-Daughter golf tournament; a clipping from the newspaper about the destruction by fire of St. Paul’s, struck by lightning—I still remember how high the flames soared, and the helpless flitting through the trees of the red lights of the local volunteers, running and shouting in their red helmets and yellow raincoats, neighborhood dogs howling in the red shower of sparks.
I also buried a photograph of my dad, a doctor, giving TB tests at school, his hands on someone’s little white arm. I buried a portable TV, believe it or not—every time capsule should have one. I buried my chess set, from back in the days when I could concentrate, my Selective Service card which I won’t be needing anymore, my dad’s twelve-gauge automatic (broken into its two principal parts) and a box of shells. I buried some poems I never want to see again; two defunct suicide notes, 1969 and 1974; a dozen eggs in the Styrofoam egg holder (seemed funny at the time); a fading photo of Roger when he was in high school, shooting me the bird, taken in one of those K Mart foto-booths—he’s using the doomed hand; drawings rendered by my boy, of a boat, bike, house with yellow sun. I buried all my Vietnam photographs, the friends living and dead, toasting the camera with Miller’s High Life in steel cans, standing next to dark green helicopters whose motors I can hear the thump of this moment; and a plain old white towel—unbelievable story, but I ran a marathon in Louisville several years ago and the route went past the convent, and wouldn’t you know, the nuns all came down to watch, and, I swear this happened, there she was, doing what marathon watchers do, holding out drinks and towels for the runners—I took the towel, Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus—Jesus, I loved that girl.
Maybe it wasn’t her, I don’t know. Never in one million years would I discuss my life with a shrink.
I buried my briefcase from when I was working, without even checking what was in it. I buried the sad letters my mother received from my dad during Korea—he never got over that one either, and damn sure never went to any conventions—and the manic letters my mother received from me in Vietnam. Naturally I buried the explanatory letters from the VA about the defoliants. Buried in the ground forever.
Sometimes I try to neutralize my thoughts by reciting poems to myself, like “Fern Hill.” I feel that people pass through me, through my life, and through their own, like water, like different temperatures of water mixing.
Lately I’ve been thinking that maybe by burying my past, my lies and secrets and the enormous collection of mundanities and froth I’ve amassed, maybe instead of escaping from these things, I’ve preserved them. I guess it was only meant to be ritual anyway—there is no real-life absolution for the frightened and faithless, no grace, no way at all to explain it, or find relief, or to get away.
I also buried my ball glove and my bat, leather and wood all cracked from years of playing in the dew followed by years of no play at all. And, of course, I buried the series of pictures I’d taken of the wonderful center bronze-and-dancing nymphet of the University Park fountain—here she comes now.
When I was working, I would come over to the park at noon to eat. I was unhappy and sleepless, this was 1972 or so, and I couldn’t understand anything that was happening to me, so there’s no wonder I fell in love with a statue. It reduced the number of variables in love remarkably. Whoever the sculptor was, he loved this one, too. While the others, all of them dancing arm in arm in the center of the falling water, seemed blurred, this one was smiling like stars and like children smile, staring down into Fountain Circle through cascades and spray and attentive pigeons setting their wings to land. Her eyes would always seem to be looking at me. She was perpetually a little girl, as, face it, I’m perpetually a little boy—I never have wanted any of this shit about being grown-up. I’d gladly play an afternoon of Indian ball on one of the overgrown-in-weeds ball diamonds in the park or at the school. I have no illusions about getting ahead. I’d rather have it the way it was: a dancing nymphet forgetting the world, coming across the dark green lawns, and why? To love the neighbor boy, happy and fun.
But Erica had always been nice to me, and we’d had days happy and fun, be sure of that. When the life went out of it, however, it went all the way out and all of it went. You know about marriage, sometimes, especially among children of my generation, whose notion that “happiness must happen today for tomorrow we shall die” is tatooed to the back wall of their brain. How she rolled the bus without hurting anybody, I’ll never know.
This would be called the homestretch. I’m now in the neighborhood of my boyhood again, and every front porch along here has had me under it and I’ve climbed every maple and chestnut, been in the attic of every garage, buried birds and cats in Ball jars and shoe boxes, and secret concoctions in plastic bowls, all along the alleyway. In crannies in the old foundations of all these houses, perhaps there are still notes and secret pocketknives. In this dark, I feel the presence of my past on either side of me—I sense the ghosts of the neighbors long gone and the neighborhood dogs, good companions then and two generations gone by now, the low voices of moms and dads in yard chairs who later grew old and withdrew inside—I see their amber lights in the windows now, and sometimes their shadows moving; I sense the echoes of the wheeting and tooting of little kids, parading down the sidewalk on roller skates and pulling wagons full of kids littler yet, or hiding in the bushes and laughing loud.
An ambush takes about one minute sometimes. The people on both sides of you get killed. They go down like a bale of hay, then maybe they roll around, dead but still terrified. Sometimes the bodies get hit so many times they start to dissolve. The air is electric with the ripping, the snapping, ripping sound of automatic weapons and rounds popping everywhere, and everybody firing wild, branches falling out of the trees. Adrenalin makes you think you can’t die—you feel your nerves and blood jump the thin line between your hand and the plastic rifle stock and your actual being goes right down into the weapon to do its business. There’s boys yelling and branches falling and the air is black and hot, and there’s the ripping, the ripping sound, the cushioned ripping of people and air around you, it’s all the same, forget it. Then it’s over. You aren’t finished—“ambush interruptus,” Roger calls it. You’re pumped up but there’s nothing left to shoot at and it’s over to the extent anything like that ever gets over.
I had a daughter born with an open spine. I got a letter from the VA that explained that a bunch of government lawyers had proven in a court of government law that the defoliants aren’t why. There were some good doctors in Chicago, and we got her there early. But I don’t know. The past is never quite gone, it seems. Steeps inside, for the long haul. I buried, as I said, the VA letters, and my peace-sign belt buckle and my green, nylon-mesh jungle boots. I buried Skidmore’s letters, including a fairly recent one:
Dear Wilbur,
I read some of the poems you sent me, and I want you to know they are the most worthless, pitiable utterances I’ve ever known to be authored by an adult. I get embarrassed just thinking about them. They’re abstract and escapist and have very little to do with you. All I want to know about is your pain, Wilbur, and if you can’t write about it, then hang it up. I’m telling you pain is all that motivates and everything you write should be an extended paraphrase of the word “Ouch.” Stop mulling over abstractions and keep running, is my advice. If it hurts, run faster.
Here’s my latest effort at metafiction—“Wilbur Gray Falls in Love with an Idea”—and who knows, you might see a little of yourself in it! I know it’s contrived and shitty, so don’t send comments. I think I agree with Roger (down here we call him Lefty): You’re a real downer. I know it’s been rough, but like Lefty says, the worst is over. You know what you need? You need Carol Canfield. Maybe you could catch her between husbands, take a hot bath with her, get her to give you a back rub, hit the road. You need to hit the road, Wilbur. That town will make you nuts. Keep in touch.
Your pal,
Skidmore
It would be nice, I think, to be a little boy again and to see my parents in patio chairs in shadows on the lawn, my mom talking in low tones about the choir, smiling and hoping for the best, my dad just spotting me now and rising up, arm extended, the hand reaching to touch mine. I imagine sometimes that I would talk with them better, given another chance, knowing what I know, discuss for instance Oedipus and why my own dad wouldn’t do anything to get me out of what I went through if he was really my dad, and why his didn’t either. But Dad and Mom were never any better at talking than I am, and maybe it wouldn’t work. I had music, the Stones, the Doors, Joe Cocker; my parents had phrases representing what they believed, and prayers to speak aloud in church in unison with the community of the faithful. They had their war and childhood, I had mine.
The grass boulevard along Court Street here, it’s a blessing to the knees. I see the gables on my house in the distance. The job I had, back when I had it, was quite interesting. I was hired by the culture to have and carry a briefcase, wear a dark three-piece suit, and have my hair razor-cut, to rush up and down the street (briefcase in hand), across the mall, to occupy the sidewalks, to have an office and use the phone energetically, carry a busy calendar of meetings and to participate in those meetings to the fullest, to state the obvious emphatically and as often as possible, and in as many ways, all in an effort to give the illusion of quality, productivity, upward movement, the rightness and nonfutility of democratic life in a guns-and-butter economy, action and activity, creativity and motion, motivation and, of course, obedience, go, go, go. I would buy a paper and read the editorials. I would catch the news and read Time magazine. I would watch the market, even daydream of buying stocks. I would think of good ideas and route them up the organization. I would make wind and then piss into it.
The lines in my forehead get deeper, I brood without control sometimes, sleepless, like a child in tears, and like all the hardhanded workers, smug patriots, and ordinary men on the street I’ve known in my life, for whom money, work, women, and the church are all there is and whose hearts these crazy days are breaking.
I have a new pair of running shoes. They cost sixty dollars because of the wing-shaped stripe they have on the side. They are my Sunday best. Hard to believe, but Skidmore and I were camping in the old chautauqua ground the night the burr oak was split by lightning. You could smell the ozone and the heat even after the rain.