Dr. Riddel always sat at the end of the bar, usually surrounded by his most ardent, dissolute students. They talked philosophy, Riddel always being the stable voice of genius, regardless of the amount of Black Velvet he consumed, and the students and former students moving in and out of beery euphoria as ideas assumed the personification only drink can bestow.
After fleeing DeLathaway’s, I drove heedless of traffic lights down to the Black Heron listening to Dallas Levine sing, “Let Bygones by Bye-Bye-Bye Gones,” hardly a good song, but I sang along anyway. When I got out of the truck, I found the orange mallet in the back; Banks must have thrown it eighty yards. Too much handball for that man.
I found Riddel unusually alone at the end of the bar. As our eyes met and instantly shared the camaraderie available only to those people who meet after an evening of drinking in different places, I handed him the paper. It was a simple thesis entitled “Philosophy of Disappearance.” Riddel set the masterpiece in a beer ring on the bar.
“Is it true,” he said, ignoring the fact that our relationship and its rights and responsibilities, debits and credits, had been terminated by the delivery of the manuscript, “that you’re getting married?”
“Eventually. Where’d you hear that?”
“Dorothy came by earlier and made the announcement. Ah Larry, Larry I hate to see a lovely boy like you get married.”
“Don’t look. And besides don’t worry; if I ever do it, it won’t be to Dotty Everest.” Dotty Everest, criminy, the world is full of dangerous characters. “Now, sir, do you want to talk about my paper?”
“No.”
“Okay, then Riddel, it’s been nice. Philosophy is real good. But watch out for my paper.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s real heavy.” As I said that I noticed a smear of mustard on the cover sheet of the paper.
But I was an hour late for work, and my watch read five. I had one drink with Riddel, pretending in a way that this wasn’t all past tense already, and then left him there alone. If he hadn’t been so rich he would have been one of the greatest men in the Western World. He was one of the two geniuses I have ever known. It made me sad that here he was, the greatest man in the purple Black Heron, a man whose intelligence radiated like prepared uranium, enough to power a submarine, and it could no longer matter to me at all. He had been killed by his mother’s money (she owned controlling interest in the Rolling Doughnut Company), and would spend his life in that bar, warming passers-by to undeserved promise. I only mention this at all here because Riddel’s associate, a man named Darrel Teeth who was an ex-con (grand larceny) was to play a too integral part in a collision of miseries I was to have later.
When I got out to the power company where I was night-watchman, Eldon Robinson-Duff was there as I’d hoped he’d be. If I didn’t come by the apartment by eleven-thirty for my keys, my stalwart roommate carried the mail.
Our relationship was well founded in eighth grade metaphor: At midnight in the rain on a little runway in an uncharted portion of Mexico two men are having a fistfight on, under, and near a small weathered biplane. Though the fight is vigorous, the men are deliberate, slipping in the mud, each hauling the other up by the wet fur of his flight jacket and aiming each clear-fisted blow at the other’s chin, trying for the knock out. They are fighting to prevent the other from taking off in this the worst storm of the season, a post-hurricanal squall known as Esmeralda. The message, something about the Zimmerman Letter, must be delivered. The two now wrestle under the fuselage, black in the mire and the night. If one of them hadn’t shown up at the airstrip, the other would have flown up onto the mountains thinking forsaken thoughts about the absentee. As is, one has won and drags the other out of the way, and wipes the unconscious face clean, propping him against a Yucca tree. Then the victor starts the little plane and launches into the buffeting winds wiping his goggles, determinedly watching for the harrow teeth mountains that pass like a razor through the air fifteen feet from his balloon tires. The pilot, I am saying, would be Eldon or me; the mud-man on the ground waving his fist and swearing into zeppelin clouds would be the same.
Plus, we fished together, and were aficionados of a sort that way. Now Eldon was lying on the floor reading
The New Yorker
, flipping his ashes into the pages. Sometimes at our apartment friends would pick up
Popular Mechanics
or the
Welding Journal
, the only two magazines we took, and a cupful of ashes would slide out onto their laps. Eldon looked up at me; behind him the vast computer board of the plant flashed the two hundred blue A-OK lights.
“Have you been,” he asked, “seeing people socially?”
“Only the smallest tid-bits of it were social.”
“Well, since you’ve arrived in time to avoid being fired, I suppose I’ll go home and work.” He got off the floor after putting his cigarette out on an ad for a polar bear carved in glass. “Oh, Lenore dropped by.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, remember, your betrothed.”
“What did she say?”
“She was with Gary, the drugman.”
“Pharmacy student. Yeah, well, what did she say?”
“She was mildly curious about what you’re up to lately.”
“What’d you say?”
“I told her I was no go-between.”
“Shit, Eldon.”
“What was I supposed to say, Larry? Christ. That you’re conducting a noble experiment? That you have a dream?” He put on his red football helmet, and turned, showing a fist to me, simply, as a fact. “She’s your girl. People who are engaged are supposed to see each other occasionally. Keep company, you know?”
“I don’t know—I’m trying to do this thing right.”
“Right! Ha! You haven’t seen her for a month!”
“Twenty-two days, seven hours.”
He looked at me from the depths of his helmet. “I’m going home to work. Don’t forget that we were supposed to show the film tonight.”
Robinson-Duff was always going home to work on his book. His motto was simply, “If you want to read a good book, you have to write it.” After he left I strolled around the office for awhile, my head buzzing like a taut wire. This is a bun, I thought, I have a bun on. I wondered how much pharmacists earn. Outside the soundproof office, the two boilers, each as big as houses, roared. Every twenty minutes or so they would kick off and hum and tick for four or five minutes like an overheated car, and then start up again, gaining momentum, building to a stampeding blare. I thought about the girl I loved, Lenore.
We were supposed to become married when I finished the degree in late August, and had tentatively set October 12, Columbus Day, as the date. Did I add that she was perfect? Oh not in the conventional sense of that word, but ideally, perfect. Remembered names, played the piano delicately, became morally indignant once a week, was in her first year of medical school, alluded to her girlhood in tense situations, smelled wonderful at all times, read
all
of Zane Grey, and knew how to fish expertly. These things, I thought sometimes looking at her soft, intelligent face incredulously, put her beyond my comprehension. At first I thought she had been merely titillated by motoring about with a madman, frightening clerks, drinking warm vermouth from the bottle, and hiking along little-known streams in the Uintas angling uncannily for ancient trout.
Then one euphoric evening in the Commercial Club in Duchesne after a fishing trip, we became engaged. Immediately upon entering the place, I inadvertently sat on a runty sheep-shearer who was sleeping something off in one of the booths. He was so mad and disoriented and I was so embarrassed and surprised that we fought without even thinking about it, tipping over two bar stools in the sluggish melee. I was trying for a third or at least hoping to tip a table or break a bottle, when he swallowed his chewing tobacco, and the contest was over as he stumbled retching toward the back door. Then Lenore danced with her hero nine dances in a row to Lester Kind’s “Milktruck at Dawn,” a blues number, I guess. Everybody in the place was buying us drinks, and every once in a while someone would fake a retch and laughter would fill the room and the barkeep would bring over two more glasses. Naturally, after that as we crossed the gravel parking lot, when I paused long enough to look into the laughing eyes of Lenore, I proposed, and she jumped into my arms placing the most memorable embrace of my life around my bruised self.
I had had The Thought first that night, driving down out of the mountains scanning a dozen deer in the headlights, braking to a sideward careen, just short of the herd that stood curious as freshmen, then filed smooth as water over a fence, that I was not certain whether or not one marries that which is perfect. Seemed like openly asking for paradox to me. Also, one of the foremost considerations was a familiar quotation that floated about my mind in ready reach. My father had said it: “Marriage is compromise, Larry.” And without stretching a thing I can add that I was (and still am in a sense) for keeping the edge of non-compromise sharp, a blade, don’t you know it, that cuts both of the ways. Yes it does.
At eight by my watch, I checked the computer board, plugging in each room slide, reading temperatures in the spaces nearly a mile away, and making sure no one was in there stealing things. Then I logged the state computer board which was the easiest job, since each of the two hundred lights was always, unblinkingly blue, never orange. And as the alcohol rinsed my brain of any brain cells that weren’t tied down, I tried to be clever and cryptic and Scott Fitzgerald into the massive log book.
“Four o’clock and all is well, power is being sent and received all over the state. Each house veritably hums with it. We, again, are lighting the dark night of the soul. There are a million volts going out, but never the same volt twice. Amps for the lamps of Salina, Moab, Kanab, and St. George, not to mention Bear River. Cordially, F. Scott Boosinger.”
Mr. Proctor didn’t like me going on like that in the log, “Just the facts, eh Boosinger?” he’d say. “Just the times and temperatures. We really don’t want to know your every quirk. It isn’t a personal diary, you know.”
“Yes it is.” I’d say. The date was printed in light blue letters at the top of every page, and the lower third of every page was designated in crisp light red letters: Graveyard Shift. I wrote in the fat leatherbound book every day, rather, night; it
was
my personal diary. Besides it was always interesting to go back three weeks and read my entries and wonder what rapacious humor had possessed my body then. I put the coffee on to boil and sat back down at the log, turning backward.
February 14:
“How many people celebrate St. Valentine’s by the Rhine? Wine, that is. Yes and before work, and with better company than these two snoring boilers, which, according to all computer feedback here on the dotted board—and if you are interested—seem to be functioning adequately. Yes, we have no oranges. Did you hear about the guy who knew how to spell bananas, he just didn’t know when to stop? I am presently reading the ‘Hounds of Spring’ By A. C. Swinburne, and when after reading several stanzas aloud to the roar outside this door there was a deafening response, I knew that here is some good stuff. Cordially, Algernon Boosinger.”
January 1:
“There are no new years. Ponder that. Why in this factory of energy is the floor so cold? I’m sitting here writing this, wearing my only plaid scarf … what’s going on? Actually because of my perpetual optimistic outlook: seeing the world through rose-colored eye whites (because of staying up all night all year), and because of the beautiful ephemeral (look that one up!) young lady alluded to elsewhere in this ten-ton text (see Sept. 9, last), I do believe there are new years. But don’t jump to conclusions; they don’t start now on some dismal January first with the floor so cold I have to wear my shoes, oh no, they start every time love strikes. You know, nickels and diamonds, hearts and flour. Is that more or less often than every 365 days? By the way, the computer complex shows all systems go. Where was I? Oh yes, happy new year everybody. Graveyard shift recommends for your new year’s reading: Emerson, all of his essays. Cordially, Ralph Waldo Boosinger.
PS
: Please do not seize and drink any more of my bottles of Right Knight ginger ale from the communal fridge. I am not interested in the various coinage left in the drawer down there. I cannot drink it and it soothes me not.”
September 9:
“Dear Log: Keeping it clean in Muscatine here. Don’t rush around wishing me wild congratulations, raining gifts on my head, shaking my fevered hand just because I, tonight, as the first leaf of autumn gave up what photosynthetic ghost it had and fell quietly on my head, became engaged (I’m engaged!); it is enough that sometime in a future so distant from these rattling boilers as to be impeccably silent, ah sweet sweet silence, perfect things are going to transpire. No kidding! How can I continue not singing ‘CooCoorah-cha!’? How can this computer not blink in astonishment? Because all is well at the power plant, and I (watch out!), am at the helm. Toast: To Roses and graveyards! Cordially, Amory Boosinger.”
I stopped reading the stuff then as the room filled with rich steam, and I unplugged the wrecked coffee-pot. Those old entries in the log always left me in an inspired state of embarrassment, remorse, and hope. I had a cup of scalding coffee, and out into the boilers’ auditorium for fresh air where I bellowed the last part of Lincoln’s second inaugural. After three more cups of coffee, the first part of the post-croquet crapulence cure, I went down to the fridge, precisely to the vegetable drawer which had come to be known as my ginger ale cellar, and retrieved two bottles of Right Knight, the cheapest and most therapeutic ginger ale available in the NATO nations. It is all carbonation. I sat down in the office chair, opened a well-worn book to “Babylon Revisited” and sipped. By the time the lost Charlie Wales felt the poignancy of remorse descend again about locking his wife out in the snow and losing Honoria, his daughter, the serrated edge of Right Knight’s bubbletry had cut away a good portion of my hangover. I finished the story and heaved as always a huge sigh. I stood up and stretched. The cure was almost complete. Sweet ginger ale, a balm, a nectar, a salve, in an unsalvaged world. The mountains now were rising in the east, and a bit of salmon light edged their crests.