Some men might have settled for less. I set my heart on a coal-black tux, as glossy and satiny-looking as a long-playing record. A blue suit may be classy in an understated way, but the man who squires Marsha ought to part the shabby sea of festive hoi polloi like Moses. Not that I put her to the expense of made-to-measure evening dress – after all, one ought not to forget who one is or who is footing the bill – but I did lay hands on a slightly used rental item, the last occupant of which had been built along similar lines to me. Peering at myself in Kramer’s mirror, clad in the habiliments of Hollywood, I thought I detected a marked resemblance to the youthful Orson Welles and was sold on the spot. A tuck here, the stitching eased there, and Kramer assured me it would fit like a glove. All alterations guaranteed to be completed in two days.
However, this morning’s journey to the tailor’s proved to be unexpectedly dangerous. I’ll remember to avoid buses in future. Rubacek ought to have driven me but didn’t. He had to keep to the apartment to prepare his surprise – a place for me to work, to write. Naturally I thought he was refusing because he was unwilling to interrupt the transports of composition. For the past two days he has kept hard at his ratty manuscript for as long as eighteen hours at a stretch, scrawling page after page with concentrated fury before lapsing into a recuperative trance in which he bemusedly produces telegraphic noises by clicking his pen against his front teeth. Waking in the middle of the night I discover light leaking into my bedroom through the seams of my badly hung door and know that Rubacek is at his station, tapping out his cryptic code. An SOS to the Muse: Rubacek at work.
Now I am supposedly at work too, seated here at this unsteady table, Venus Velvet HB in hand and a few creased sheets of yellow scrap paper spread out before me. I suppose I ought not to have dug these pages out of the jewellery box where they have lain untroubled and untroubling all this time. I had a feeling of vague apprehension when I sorted them out from the diplomas, degrees, and confirmation and baptismal certificates. But I thought it would be easier to show these to Rubacek than to fill pages at his command. Stanley expects to see something at the end of the day, and these stark black sentences are capable of persuading him I’m writing, keeping the fell lion of depression at bay by brandishing words as if they were a whip, a chair.
I haven’t yet brought myself to read any of it. I remind myself that I was crazy when I wrote these pages, that it was these pages I held in my hand when I came out of the dark room and said to Victoria, “I’ve failed him. I’m afraid. I want a doctor.”
Maybe it’s the difficulties with my heart that have sapped my will to resist Rubacek. Maybe I want to be looked after. This afternoon I hurried home from the bus stop, frightened, hoping only that I would find him at home so I would not be alone. He was here. He’d made everything ready for me. This card table was in place in the living room, chair facing the window. He had borrowed it from McMurtry, with whom he is apparently on good terms, even though Stanley inhabits the enemy’s camp. On the table were sharpened pencils and pads of paper, yellow and white. He’d even scraped the ice from the window so I would have an unimpeded view of the snow-burdened boughs of the spruces and the sparrows scattered among the green needles.
“She’s all set, Ed,” he said.
So here I sit on a collapsible chair, unable to write, or even to read what is in front of me. I know, however, that it is the epigraph of my crazy manuscript printed in huge, spidery, insane-looking letters that can’t be ignored: The concluding words of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
If I’d a’ knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a’ tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
So far that’s as much as I’ve been able to bring myself to read. I just sit here patiently, because doing so keeps Stanley from harassing me. From here I can see him sprawled all over the kitchen table. It took me a while to place where I’d seen that odd, contorted posture before, that gawky attitude he assumes when writing. And then I remembered. Elementary school. Memories of row upon row of little kids, cheeks almost touching notebooks, eyes cast in a sidelong squint that follows bunched, crabbed fingers driving a pencil between pale-blue lines. That’s the way Rubacek writes, like a child. One shoulder thrust up, legs nervously jigging under table.
I only wish I’d had as much time to study Bill Sadler as I’ve had to study Rubacek. I find Sadler more interesting. But this morning all I was granted was a glimpse or two from a bus window. I spotted him when the driver parked at the stop in front of the Army & Navy to wait for transfers. I had impatiently cast a glance over my shoulder to see if buses number seven and number nine were rolling up behind us when Bill caught my eye as he placidly plodded through a confused crowd of people scuttling about on the sidewalk, hurrying to catch buses.
Unlike the old days, he wasn’t toting a placard but wearing a sandwich board of thick plywood over the kind of dark car-coat immigrants prefer as winter wear. The wind was gusting and the board, which hung to his knees, acted as a sail. Every few moments he locked his knees and jittered along, leaning back against the blast. The board blanketing his chest had a Bible text painted in red: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour”: I Peter 5:8.
Above the board his face was a little thinner than I remembered it, the cheeks a trifle hollowed, mouth pinched, and skin mottled pink and blue by the terrible cold. He walked on through the crowds with a kind of hopeless doggedness, walked unseeing past the store windows filled with bankruptcy trash and impossible, failed fashions.
I gave up my seat to get a look at whatever was written on the plank on his back. The crowd on the sidewalk had thrust Sadler over to the curb and so close to the bus that from my angle, from where I was standing, I could only see the top of his head bobbing along, hair neatly trimmed, the teeth marks of a wet comb frozen in his hair.
I decided to get off the bus, to speak to him. I groped forward against the current of boarding passengers, muttering as I did, “Excuse me. Please. Excuse me.” I popped up on tiptoes to follow the bobbing head, shoved ruthlessly past those who showed no inclination to give way.
All passengers boarded, the bus suddenly started with a jerk. I snatched the overhead bar to keep from crashing backward. At precisely the moment I threw up my arm two things happened. Bill Sadler swerved away from the curb, and I felt a mild pinch of pain in my chest. The sign on his back said: “And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?” Revelations 13:4.
There was a strange tickling all down the inside of my arm and a sense of fullness, of mild discomfort, in my chest. I cast my eyes over the bus for an unoccupied seat. There were none. I decided on the spot that there would be no more bus rides for Ed. I’m not about to die lying in melted snow and gum wrappers in the aisle of a bus, supine at the feet of strangers.
I wonder what Bill would think if he knew I’d read his counsel, seen his message? I believe he is only warning us all out of a sense of duty, not out of love. He expects nothing to come of it. That’s obvious in the way he joylessly trudges.
What would it be like to carry in one’s head Bill Sadler’s particular visions? Visions of scarlet priapic devils, of dragons with green leathern scales and curled, cumbersome claws. But maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe for Bill the dragon is simply sin. I don’t know. Still, I think he senses the ether pregnant with blood and blazing brimstone ready to rain down on our heads. What would it be like to be under conviction, to be slain by the spirit, to be sober and vigilant, to leave messages?
Bill and I leaving messages. Because I’m sure that in these pages I wrote in the bad time, in that dusky room, there was some kind of message, either to myself, or to Victoria, or to both of us. It’s just that I don’t remember what it was. But it is here, before me, ready to witness if I allow it.
I begin at the beginning with a surprise, the name of an old friend.
Sam Waters swung down off his horse and looped the reins around the hitching post. Then, as he did in all inhabited places, all civilized places, he unbuttoned his canvas duster and tucked its long skirts behind his holsters to give himself free play with his Colts. He took this precaution even though the street was empty on a November morning, or almost so. A farmer in baggy pants anchored by galluses was loading a wagon in front of a dry-goods store. His woman held the team of mules, her eyes following Sam from under a limp sunbonnet the way they might have followed a tumbleweed blown down the street.
The street was empty, lonely-empty in the way of a Kansas railhead town in late autumn, when the saloon pianos don’t tinkle and the Texas trail hands are nothing more than a bad memory of broken glass, shot-up signs, and blood in the sawdust on bar floors. Even the whores had thinned their ranks, climbing back on trains bound for Chicago toting pigskin portmanteaus bursting with feminine fripperies that were part of their stock in trade. They travelled their wares like Eastern drummers, chasing business. In the white clapboard houses of Chicago in the slow times of early afternoon when the wind keened off the Lake and the fresh snow in the streets below their windows was turning grey with chimney soot, the girls would discuss who smelled worse, the cowboys who drove the cattle or the meatpackers who slaughtered them.
Sam Waters shivered and hunched his shoulders in that deserted street. A cold wind smelling faintly of snow and dust was blowing off the northern plain.
His belly was near as empty as that Kansas street, and now he saw there was no grub to be had here. At the far end of the prospect he had been able to read the sign as plainly as if it had been his hand in front of his face. EATS, it had declared in huge letters outlined in gilt. But now he made out a smaller, clumsily printed sign propped in the window. Closed For The Duration and Repairs, it said. Sam took the duration to mean the absence of wranglers from the Nueces country who were willing to pay a silver dollar for cornpone, coffee, steak, and pan gravy made by somebody other than a trail cookie called Bones or One-Eyed Jack. In fact, directly under EATS the owner boasted, WOMAN IN THE KITCHEN, CHANGE AS GOOD AS A REST, BOYS.
This is it, then. This is Sam Waters’s first appearance. One thing at least is cleared up. Three years after I had written this I sat down to write again in that other bad time shortly after Victoria left me. And Sam had sprung on to the page without hesitation, without my taking thought. I had described it to myself as a case of automatic handwriting. That was how it felt, I felt something had taken possession of me. I didn’t realize I was writing about a man I knew. Sam Waters hadn’t been obliterated by electricity, by shock treatment. He had just gone deeper into me, into hiding.
What I am reading has to be the final copy. There are no alterations, no scratchings out, nothing added. The drafts which I scribbled in solitude, day after day, are gone, destroyed. I can only guess what was in them, for what I finally arrived at has the appearance of being willed, of being strait-jacketed into a familiar pattern. This is the cherished western of my childhood, homage to the cold-eyed hero. And despite the ironic winks to myself in the prose, I must have followed Sam Waters without hesitation when he turned away from the hash house and crossed the street to the Diamond Saloon.
When Sam leaned into the swinging doors of the saloon he did so sideways, leading with his left shoulder. Ever since he had taken a slug in Wichita strolling into a bar, shoulders square to the door, he had preferred to pare down the size of the target he presented whenever he eased himself into any place where rotgut and gunpowder were mixed.
There wasn’t much doing in the Diamond Saloon at that hour. Not a single riding boot was propped on the brass rail of the fifty-foot bar. Only three people were there: a barkeep with a face the colour of old ashes who glanced up from wiping out a shot glass; a fancy lady in a low-bodiced dress worked with jet beads who was dealing a hand of solitaire on to green baize; and a barfly pushing dirt around with a broom in hope of earning his first drink of the day.
Sam walked to the bar. His spurs sounded loud as church-bells in the hollow quiet.
“What’s your pleasure, mister?”
“Beer.”
The bartender drew it. “You look like you come a ways.”
“Far enough.”
“That’ll be a nickel to oblige. Some pays before service. I seen you warn’t sich, though.”
Sam fished in his waistcoat, put the coin carefully on the countertop. Out of the corner of his eye he was watching the barfly sidling up to him. You never knew. He might be laying for you. He might be somebody’s brother.
“Darn’d if I hain’t done,” the juicehead informed the barkeep.
“Corners too?”
“I allow so.”
Sam watched the man beside him as his drink was poured out. Younger than Sam expected, not above thirty-five, he was got up in a long grey coat, broken shoes, and pants stiff with mud. Under a week of ginger stubble his skin was the colour of buttermilk. He had bad teeth. When he smiled he looked like the keyboard of an old whorehouse piano.
The drunk had trouble getting the first one of the day to his mouth. If it had been a glass of cream instead of whisky he’d have been lapping butter when he got it to his lips. But he got a bit noisily down, licked his wrist clean of slops and turned to Sam. “A fambly weakness,” he explained. “Pop was jest sich as me. Always a-havin’ tremors and visions when he went to a-drinkin’. Often I rec’lect how he’d scare up the Angel of Death when in a parlous state.”
Waters nodded and looked in his glass. His neighbour gave off a thin, tired stench.
“Oh,” he said, “I know what you’re a-thinkin’: You’re a-thinkin’ I hain’t fittin’ for conversation. You’re a-thinkin’ you’d like as soon shake hands with a hog as me.” The man leaned closer and said confidentially, “I warn’t always as you see me now, pore and pitiful. I warn’t always a-smashed to flinders. It was the war between the States done me down. I come here to Kansas in Territory days afore the War. Even then every kind of fool was set on a-killin’ one t’other. Jayhawkers and Kickapoo Rangers and Doniphan Tigers a-murderin’ and a-burnin’: Missouri men a-shootin’ fools so’s they could keep a-holt their niggers, and John Brown a-murderin’ Pottawatomi innocents to make them lose a-holt their niggers. Sure as God made little green apples they was jest a-gittin’ primed for the big blow-out, and I seed it so from the beginnin’. Jest ast me.”
Sam did not oblige him by asking.
“And then it come, jest as I knowed she would,” he continued. “Well, sir, a frien’ of mine writes me a letter to Kansas. He was a-raisin’ a regiment fur Jeff Davis and the Good Ole Cause. This frien’, he had his heart a-set on a plume and bein’ a Colonel. ‘The South needs her sons in her hour of travail,’ he writes, ‘and I call on you to join with the Flower of Chivalry and scotch the Serpent of Tyranny.’ And I done so ’cuz I was right partial to that man and never could stand agin what he wanted. So I a-joined and me and a passel of other fools marched arter him and he was kilt at Vicksburg a-ridin’ back ’n forth in the enemy fire, his hair a-blowin’ ever’ which way, a-wavin’ his sword and a-singin’ out, ‘Give Us Liberty or Give Us Death’ and Death obliged and fetched him off his horse, a Yankee minie ball plumb dead centre in the head, and he was done in and stretched out cold and white as alabarster.”
“If he’s botherin’ you,” said the bartender to Sam, “give him a shove with your boot.”
“I was a-took captive at Vicksburg,” said the barfly, “and my health and spirits was a-broke in a Yankee jail and this here is my fate.” His hand steady now, he finished off his drink and pushed it toward the barman in a way that suggested he expected it filled again.
“Don’t go shovin’ at me. You had your drink.”
“This territory has a-changed,” said the barfly. “It went civilized and nat’ral good manners went by the by. And me as dry as a powder horn.”
“Fill it up,” said Sam, putting money down.
“Thanks aplenty.” The man thrust his face closer to Sam’s, covered his mouth with a grimy hand and whispered, “That one back there,” he said, motioning with his head to the woman dealing cards, “is a dollar. But I kin rec’mend better. There’s a high yaller girl I know’ll do it fur two bits. I’ll take you ’long to her direckly fur a nickel, mister.”
“Obliged, but I’ll pass,” said Sam, draining his glass and turning to the door.
“I know this here town,” the man called out after him, “I know this here territory. You want sump’n, a woman, or any sich thing, jest ast fur me. Ever’body a-knows me. I kin scare up a good time. Ever’body knows me. Jest ast arter Huck Finn.”