“You got some on you?”
I hand him some typed sheets of paper. “Maybe I could listen to you jam.”
“Not now, you can’t, man. We blew the power in the house,” says the one who’s done most of the talking. “But we’ll read these and get back to you. You got the number on here, huh?”
“Yeah. Okay. Hope you get the power fixed.” I get the feeling they don’t really want me around, so I step off the porch.
“Me, too, dude.”
“Later.” I cruise. I never hear from them. My songwriting career ends.
I call home every couple of days. Cage thinks the phone’s bugged, so he won’t say much. Half the time, Mama sounds on the verge of tears. She keeps asking me what they did wrong. She believes what the doctors tell her, what they say at the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, that it’s not her fault, that it’s genetic, but that doesn’t alleviate the muddled guilt she feels. She says that Cage sleeps most of the time, drugged up. Though I don’t want to go up to Memphis and see Cage a broken shell of himself, I promise to catch the train at spring break.
Cage has the same haunted look in his eyes that he had at Christmas. He babbles on about the Order. The last traces of his famous sense of humor have vanished. He is anguished every waking moment and all his dreams are nightmares. He sits mute at the dinner table. There is little conversation among the rest of us.
“How are preparations going for the flower festival?” Dad breaks the silence, then looks my way and says, “Two years ago your mother started a flower festival at the cathedral. It’s beautiful. Thousands upon thousands of flowers.”
“It’s going to be more beautiful than ever this year.” Mama smiles. My high school girlfriends always remarked upon her full-on smile. A smile that says here I am, ready to help you, listen, understand, empathize. Used to bug me when I was in grade school. There she was around me all the time smiling. I wonder if it haunts Cage, gets twisted into something like the floating smile of the Cheshire cat in his tortured imagination.
“That sounds cool,” I say. “Flower power. The azaleas are starting to bloom in New Orleans now.”
Mama gushes, “Oh, I’ll bet it’s beautiful now.”
Cage says, “Do you think if you look at a flower, it weeps for you?”
We look at each other.
“What a poetic thought,” Mama says. “I’m always finding scraps of paper with his jottings. Many of them are just insightful.”
“I was very proud when you won the Sewanee poetry award,” Dad says.
“A thousand bucks,” I say. “I remember that and I was only twelve. I thought you were going to be a famous writer.”
“You might be still,” Mom says.
“I had to pay back dues at the KA house.” Cage laughs. For a split second the haunted look vanishes. “The treasurer went with me to pick up the check.”
Everybody laughs. Cage smiles for a second, then falls back into himself.
“Oh, it’s good to see you laugh again,” Mama says. “Must be the first time in a month. No, you laughed two weeks ago, Father David told me.”
Everyone looks at Cage for a second waiting for a response but he doesn’t see us. Dad looks at me and explains, “Father David is a hermit who has taken a vow of silence but his phone is always busy. Sometimes I can’t get through for hours. He has raised a whole lot of money for his leprosarium in Liberia and he calls our bookkeeper almost daily to check on his account.” Dad is trying to keep the humor going. He chuckles and Mom laughs. “He’s eighty-five. He longs to go back. Frankly I’m glad for him to go. I said, ‘Father, if you want to go back to Africa to die, it’s okay with me.’ ‘Die?’ He raised his staff in the air like John the Baptist. ‘I’m going back to serve!’”
Mama’s smiling. Cage is somewhere else.
“What’s the matter, Cage?” I ask.
He looks at his plate, shakes his head.
“What?” I reach across the table and take his hand.
Cage nods and returns the pressure on my hand. “When Father David leaves, they will come for me.”
“No one is coming for you, Cage.” I fight the urge to scream, Stop it! Just stop it! Snap out of it!
“You’re safe here,” Mama says.
“Here?” Dad says. “You’re safe anywhere, son. No one’s coming after you.”
Cage shakes his head. We finish the dinner in a hopeless silence.
1978
B
aton Rouge. Midnight. Ninety-two degrees, ninety-eight percent humidity. Cage, Nick, Rowan Patrick, and Tad Beauregard, squeezed in the cab of a pickup, slowly cased the back of a small hospital. Nick was the driver. He’d altered the license plate number with black tape. Cage, Rowan, and Tad were all wearing black jeans and black T-shirts and holding suede gloves and wire cutters. Nick parked in the shadow between two tall streetlamps. The boys in black piled out of the car and ran for a small chain-link cage enclosing a metal door. Following carefully choreographed maneuvers, they each clipped several feet of fence, one on top of the other, so a six-foot-tall slit appeared within seconds. Two of them slipped inside and picked up a 175-pound pressurized tank, leaning it forward quietly, until one boy had the front and the other strained to lift the rear. The third held the fence open and the two waddled out, then the three of them labored the tank twenty feet to the car. The tank made a huge bang as they slid it onto the bed of the truck.
“Let’s go,” Nick whispered through the truck window.
“One more,” Cage said.
“Fuck that. One’s enough.” Nick raised his eyebrows at Rowan Patrick, his best friend, a gangly redhead with a Roman nose, the son of a hard-drinking senator, the smartest guy at Louisiana Episcopal, whose word carried weight.
“One was the plan.” Rowan raised the gate of the pickup to shut it.
“Come on, Tad.” Cage ran back toward the fence.
Tad Beauregard, the tall son of a psychiatrist, was Cage’s best friend. This snatch was his idea, conceived while working part-time in the hospital. He shrugged his shoulders and ran after Cage. Rowan lowered the gate of the pickup and loped back to hold the fence open. Cage and Tad lugged the tank through. Rowan grabbed the middle, and Cage, carrying the rear, stumbled twice on the way to the pickup. They strained to lift it onto the bed. The two tanks colliding sounded like a car wreck. The door behind the fence swung open and an orderly yelled, “Hey, you!”
Rowan slammed the gate closed and climbed over the back. The orderly was through the fence, dashing across the lot. Cage and Tad rolled over the sides on top of the tanks. The orderly nearly grabbed the gate of the pickup as Nick peeled out with a screech of rubber. The orderly yelled, “Got your number, assholes!”
Cage sang, shouting, playing air guitar on one knee, “Thanks for the cure for the summertime blues.”
They took the tanks to Tad’s house outside the city in hilly oak woods near the levee. A sixties hacienda, photographed in
Architectural Digest
and
Southern Living
, it featured a two-bedroom apartment separated from the main house by a long covered walkway. This was where Tad and his brother Nelson lived. It was known among the drug-using half of Louisiana Episcopal as Party Central.
“Don’t worry. Henry and Virginia were sloshed at sunset,” Tad said after they banged a tank loudly, carrying it down a winding flight of brick stairs to the front door. Inside, the central air was almost icy. They set the tanks on the shag carpet of the living room. Tad cranked up the Alan Parsons Project on his B&O stereo. By one o’clock a dozen friends, mostly girls, had dropped by with eight-packs of Miller Lite and bottles of Bacardi. Everyone was taking turns inhaling from the tank, then bursting out laughing. Lenny, a big linebacker with a mean streak, came out of one of the bedrooms with his big-boned, heavy-breasted girlfriend, smiling and theatrically tucking in his shirt. Condor, an amateur ornithologist, was gliding around the room with his long arms outstretched at shoulder height, navigating through thick currents of cannabis smoke.
“Careful, don’t let your lips touch the valve. It’s so cold it will burn them.” Nick was stationed by the tank, assisting the process.
“. . . because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,” Cage was saying to a blonde called Buffy, who listened, enraptured, “desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
“You wrote that?” Buffy asked.
“Nah.” Cage smiled. “Jack Kerouac.”
She nodded slowly. “I’ve heard of him.”
Tad came out of the kitchenette with a garbage bag. He poked a hole in the bottom and attached the bag to the tank with rubber bands. Lenny was the first to try the bag. He kept his head in for about a minute, then hit his knees, laughing convulsively.
“Don’t stay in so long,” Nick said to Tommy, the one gay guy in their circle who was out of the closet. After about thirty seconds he tried to pull the sack off Tommy’s head but Tommy held on. Tad was gay, too, but none of his straight friends would know until after graduation. By the time Cage went manic on Nantucket eleven years later, Tommy would be dead of the plague, Tad would be an engineer in San Francisco, Lenny would be a real estate lawyer in Baton Rouge, Condor a high school science teacher in Atlanta, Buffy a child psychologist in San Antonio, and Rowan would be campaigning for the U.S. House of Representatives.
“They mix this stuff with eight parts oxygen,” Rowan was saying. “It’s too rich. He’s pushing the performance envelope.”
“Beyond design specifications.” Nick laughed. “Ninety seconds and counting. His ship is starting to burn.” Nick tore the bag from the tank.
Tommy collapsed on the rug. Rowan pulled the bag off his head. Tommy had a huge smile, his eyes closed, his head wobbling in circles. Lenny grabbed the tank and sucked straight from the valve until his lungs were full. Pulling away, he screamed, leaving a thin layer of his lips behind on the valve. He glanced down, smiled slyly, and pushed the tank over onto Tommy. Rowan caught it just before it crushed Tommy’s head. Lenny stumbled off, touching his lips with his fingertips. Raising the tank upright, Nick and Rowan looked at each other and said at the same time, “What a motherfucker.”
Rowan attached the bag back on the tank. “Just try it for thirty seconds.”
Nick stuck his head in. Breathing slowly, he felt as if he were in a deep-diving suit, dropping through a black sea. Rowan pulled the sack off his head. Nick was laughing harder than ever before, hearing only a loud ringing in his ears:
Nying . . . nying . . . nying . . . nying!
The ringing filled his head and he passed out. Rowan caught him and lowered him to the floor, shook his shoulders till he opened his eyes.
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it,” Cage was reciting to a pretty brunet named Laura, who was smiling, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She would end up a yoga teacher in Santa Fe. “. . . the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old . . .”
I
t’s a beautiful spring day, everything so green. I try to remember if this is the fifth or sixth time that I’ve driven Cage out to the hermitage on the grounds of a retreat center in the woods northeast of Memphis, St. Columba, named after the sixth-century Irish missionary, Colum, who brought Christianity to northern Scotland. It’s the only place he’ll let me drag him besides Dr. Fielding’s office, which is harder. Father David has lived here for six months, after thirty years in African missions. The monk has been Frank’s spiritual counselor since before he was ordained, when Frank was a deacon at the cathedral downtown in ’56. I didn’t know them then, but I can almost picture the two of them, Frank, about Cage’s age, in a black suit and collar, and Father David, a bear of a man in his mid-fifties in a long brown habit. Unusual men for their time, men called to serve in an age of dwindling faith. Squaresville.
Cage used to sit up so straight. Now he’s hunched over in his seat, staring at his hands.
“It was good to have Harper here for a week,” I say. “Don’t you miss him?”
“Yes,” Cage murmurs.
The green woods of St. Columba are scattered with stands of trees simply burning from their lowest branches to their peaks with pink and cream flames.
“Look at all the dogwood, Cage. It’s the first thing to bloom in the spring.”
Cage looks silently out the windshield.
“A folktale about the dogwood says that it was used to make the cross on which Christ was crucified,” I say. “The tree was stunted and the tips of its flowers stained red with his blood. The four large white petals are the shape of the cross and in the center the circlet of tiny yellow petals is a symbol of his crown.”
“I’m familiar with that,” Cage says woodenly.
The hermitage is a white colonial house that used to belong to an old woman who left three hundred acres to the diocese. On the other side of the property is the new conference center and all the little cabins for meditational retreats. I park in the sunshine. Father David is standing in the front door smiling. He has flowing white hair and a long white tunic over his stooped six-foot-six, broad-shouldered build. He resembles an Old Testament prophet. He holds a staff the size of a shepherd’s crook but without the hook.