Slow Learner (6 page)

The next morning Levine was awake at seven. He wandered around the campus for a while looking for a cup of coffee and after breakfast came to one of those spur-of-the-moment decisions which it is always fun to wonder about afterward. "Hey Rizzo," he said, shaking the sergeant. "Anybody comes looking for me, the general or the secretary of the army, tell them I'm busy, okay?" Rizzo muttered something which might have been obscene and went back to sleep.

Levine hitched a ride down to the pier on a battalion jeep and hung around for a while watching them bringing in bodies. Finally when one of the tugs had almost offloaded he sauntered down to the dock and climbed on board. No one, apparently, noticed him. There were half a dozen army personnel and as many civilians, sitting or standing, not talking; smoking or looking at the gray swamp which crawled by. They passed the pontoon bridge, which the engineers had almost completed, pushing past it into flotsam and between shattered trees. They chugged over Creole, past the top floors of the courthouse, toward the outlying farms that were still standing, which had not yet been searched. Occasionally a helicopter would chatter by overhead. The sun rose, weak through a thin overcast, heating the unstirred and reeking air over the swamp.

It was mostly this that Levine remembered afterward, the peculiar atmospheric effect of gray sun on gray swamp, the way the air felt and smelled. For ten hours they cruised around looking for dead. One they unhooked from a barbed wire fence. It hung there like a foolish balloon, a travesty; until they touched it and it popped, hissed and collapsed. They took them off roofs, out of trees, they found them floating or tangled in the debris of houses. Levine worked in silence like the others, the sun hot on his neck and face, the reek of the swamp and the corpses in his lungs, letting it all happen, now exactly unwilling to think about it nor quite unable; but realizing somehow that the situation did not require thought or rationalization. He was picking up stiffs. That was what he was doing. When the tug pulled in around six to offload bodies, Levine walked off as carelessly as he had climbed aboard. He hopped a deuce-and-a-half back to the quadrangle, sitting in back dirty and exhausted and sick at his own smell. He got clean clothing out of the truck, disregarding Picnic, who was almost finished with
Swamp Wench
and who had started to say something but had thought better of it, walked to the dormitory and stood under the shower for a long time, thinking it was like rain, summer and spring rain, all the times he had ever been rained on, and when he came out of the dormitory in a clean uniform he noticed it was dark again.

Back at the truck he dug the blue baseball cap out of his bag and put it on. "Going formal," Picnic said. "What's up?"

"Date," Levine said.

"Fine," Picnic said, "I like to see young people get together. It's real exciting."

Levine looked at him, dead serious. "No," he said. "No, I think 'sheer momentum' is better."

He went over to Rizzo's truck and swiped a pack of cigarettes and a De Nobili cigar from Rizzo, who was sleeping. As he was leaving the sergeant opened one eye. "Why it's good old reliable Nathan," he said. "Go to sleep, Rizzo," Levine said. He started walking, hands in his pockets, whistling, heading in the general direction of the bar he had been in the night before. There were no stars and the air felt like rain. He walked through the streetlit shadows of big ugly pines, listening to the voices of girls, the purr of cars, wondering what the hell he was doing here when he should be back at Roach, having a pretty good idea that when he got back to Roach he would start wondering what the hell he was doing there, and that maybe wherever he went from now on he would be wondering this. He had a momentary, ludicrous vision of himself, Lardass Levine the Wandering Jew, debating on weekday evenings in strange and nameless towns with other Wandering Jews the essential problems of identity -not of the self so much as an identity of place and what right you really had to be anyplace. He got to the bar and went inside and there was little Buttercup waiting for him.

"I got us a car," she smiled. He was aware all at once that she had a slight Rebel accent. "Hey," he said, "what y'all drinking?"

"Tom Collins," she said. Levine drank scotch. Her face got serious. "Is it bad out there?" she said. "Pretty bad," Levine said. She smiled again, brightly. "At least it didn't do anything to the college."

"It sure did something to Creole," Levine said.

"Well, Creole," she said. Levine looked at her.

"You mean better them than the college," he said.

"Why sure," she grinned. He tapped his fingers on the table. "Say'out'," he said.

"Oot," she said.

"Ah," said Levine. They drank and talked for a while, mostly on collegiate topics, until finally Levine expressed a desire to see what the bayou country looked like under a sky without stars. They left and he drove, toward the Gulf, the night muffled around them. She sat close to him, aroused, impatient, touching him. He was quiet until she indicated a dirt road which led into the swamp. "In here," she whispered, "there's a cabin."

"I was beginning to wonder," he said. Around them thousands of frogs chanted to themselves in an inexplicable set of chord changes, to the glory of certain ambiguous principles. Mangrove and moss closed in on them. They drove for a mile until they came to a dilapidated building, out in the boondocks of nowhere. It turned out there was a mattress inside. "It's not much," she said between breaths, "but it's home." She quivered against him in the dark. He found Rizzo's stogie and lit up; her face trembled in the light of the flame and there was in her eyes something that might have been a dismayed and delayed acknowledgement that what was hazarding this particular plowboy was deeper than any problem of seasonal change or doubtful fertility, precisely as he had recognized earlier that her capacity to give involved nothing over or above the list of enumerated wares: scissors, watches, knives, ribands, laces; and therefore he assumed toward her that same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex novels, or for the burned out but impotent good guy rancher in a western. He let her undress apart from him; until, standing there in nothing but T-shirt and baseball cap, puffing placidly on the stogie he heard her from the mattress, whimpering.

Around them frogs intoned a savage chorus, gradually it seemed to them — spasmodic as they were, blinded yet curiously aware of this as little more than an entwining of little fingers, a touching of beer mugs, a
McCall
's togetherness —working itself into a pedal bass for a virtuoso duet of small breathings, cries; he puffing occasionally at the cigar throughout the performance, the ball cap tilted carelessly, she evoking a casually protective feeling, a never totally violated Pasiphae; until at last, having subsided, assailed still by stupid frog cries they lay not touching. "In the midst of great death," Levine said, "the little death." And later, "Ha. It sounds like a caption in
Life
. In the midst of
Life
. We are in death. Oh god."

They drove back and at the truck Levine said, "See you around the quad." She smiled weakly. "Come on around and visit me when you get out," she said and drove away. Picnic and Baxter were playing blackjack under the headlights. "Hey Levine," Baxter said, "I got laid tonight."

"Ah," Levine said. "Congratulations."

The next day the lieutenant came around and said, "You can take that leave, Levine, if you want. Everything's set up now. You're just an extra body."

Levine shrugged. "All right," he said. It was raining. Back at the truck Picnic said, "Jesus Christ I hate rain."

"You and Hemingway," Rizzo said. "Funny, ain't it. T. S. Eliot likes rain."

Levine slung his bag over one shoulder. "Rain is pretty weird that way," he said. "It can stir dull roots; it can rip them up, wash them away. I will think of you boys as I bask in the sun down in N'Orleans, up here up to your ass in water."

"So go," Picnic said, "go already."

"By the way," Rizzo said, "Pierce wanted you yesterday but I gave him some crap about finding a part for the TCC. It took me a while though to figure out where it was you'd gone." "Christ, let me in on it," Levine said quietly. "I'm still trying to figure it out," Rizzo grinned. "See you guys," Levine said. He bummed a ride off a deuce-and-a-half that was heading back to Roach. A couple of miles out of town the PFC who was driving said, "Damn, it'll almost be a relief to get back."

"Back?" Levine said. "Oh, yeah, I guess so." He watched the windshield wipers pushing the rain away, listened to the rain slashing on the roof. After a while he fell asleep.

AT HALF past five in the afternoon Dennis Flange was still entertaining the garbage man. The garbage man's name was Rocco Squarcione, and around nine that morning, directly after finishing his route, he had arrived at the Flange residence with an orange peel still clinging to his dungaree shirt and a gallon of homemade muscatel dangling from a large fist speckled with coffee grounds. "Hey
sfacim
'," he bellowed from the living room. "I got wine. Come on down."

"Fine," Flange yelled back, deciding not to go to work after all. He called up Wasp and Winsome, Attorneys at Law, and got somebody's secretary. "Flange," he said: "no." She began to object. "Later," he said, hung up and sat with Rocco for the rest of the day drinking muscatel and listening to a $1,000 stereo outfit that Cindy had made him buy but which she had never used, to Flange's recollection, for anything but a place to put hors d'oeuvre dishes or cocktail trays. Cindy was Mrs. Flange and needless to say she did not dig this muscatel business. She did not dig Rocco Squarcione either. Or as a matter of fact any of her husband's friends. "You keep that weird crew down in the rumpus room," she would yell, brandishing a cocktail shaker. "You are a damned ASPCA, is what you are. I doubt if even they would take some of the animals you bring home." What Flange should have answered but didn't was something like, "Rocco Squarcione is not an animal, he is a garbage man with a fondness, among other things, for Vivaldi." It was Vivaldi they were listening to now, Sixth Concerto for Violin, subtitled
Il Piacere
, while Cindy stomped around upstairs. Flange got the impression she was throwing things. He wondered every once in a while what life would be like without a second story and how it was people managed to get along in ranch-style or split-level houses without running amok once a year or so. The Flange abode perched on a cliff overlooking the Sound. It had been built vaguely to resemble an English cottage back in the '20's by an Episcopal minister who ran bootleg stuff in from Canada on the side. It seemed everyone living on the north shore of Long Island at the time was engaged in some kind of smuggling, because there are all kinds of little spits and bays, necks and inlets which the Feds still have no idea exist. The minister must have taken a romantic attitude toward the whole business: the house rose in a big mossy tumulus out of the earth, its color that of one of the shaggier prehistoric beasts. Inside were priest-holes and concealed passageways and oddly angled rooms; and in the cellar, leading from the rumpus room, innumerable tunnels, which writhed away radically like the tentacles of a spastic octopus into dead ends, storm drains, abandoned sewers and occasionally a secret wine cellar. Dennis and Cindy Flange had lived in this curious moss-thatched, almost organic mound for the seven years of their marriage and in this time Flange at least had come to feel attached to the place by an umbilical cord woven of lichen and sedge, furze and gorse; he called it his womb with a view and in their now infrequent moments of tenderness he would sing Cindy the Noel Coward song, half as an attempt to recall the first few months they were together, half as a love song for the house:

"We'll be as happy and contented

As birds upon a tree,

High above the mountains and sea ..."

However Noel Coward songs often bear little relevance to reality — if Flange hadn't known this before he soon found it out - and if after seven years it turned out he was less a bird upon a tree than a mole within a burrow it was Cindy more than the house who was responsible. His analyst, a crazed and boozy wetback named Geronimo Diaz, had, of course, a great deal to say about this. For fifty minutes every week Flange would be screamed at over martinis about his mom. The fact that the money spent on these sessions could have bought every automobile, pedigreed dog and woman on the stretch of Park Avenue visible from the doctor's office window disturbed Flange less than the dim suspicion he was somehow being cheated: it may have been that he considered himself a legitimate child of his generation, and, Freud having been mother's milk for that generation, he felt he was learning nothing new. But he would occasionally be caught, nights when snow drove down out of Connecticut, across the Sound, to lash at the bedroom window and remind him that he was lying in the foetal position after all: he would be caught red-handed at Molemanship, which is less a behavior pattern than a state of mind in which one does not hear the snow at all, and the snorings of one's wife are as the drool and trickle of amniotic fluid somewhere outside the blankets, and even the secret cadences of one's pulse become mere echoes of the house's heartbeat.

Geronimo Diaz was clearly insane; but it was a wonderful, random sort of madness which conformed to no known model or pattern, an irresponsible plasma of delusion he floated in, utterly convinced, for example, that he was Paganini and had sold his soul to the devil. He kept a priceless Stradivarius in his desk, and to prove to Flange that this hallucination was fact he would saw away on the strings, producing horribly raucous noises, throw down the bow finally and say, "You see. Ever since I made that deal I haven't been able to play a note." And spend whole sessions reading aloud to himself out of random-number tables or the Ebbinghaus nonsense-syllable lists, ignoring everything that Flange would be trying to tell him. Those sessions were impossible: counterpointed against confessions of clumsy adolescent sex play would come this incessant "ZAP. MOG. FUD. NAF. VOB," and every once in a while the clink and gurgle of the martini shaker. But Flange went back again, he kept going back; realizing perhaps that if he were subjected for the rest of his life to nothing but the relentless rationality of that womb and that wife, he would never make it, and that Geronimo's lunacy was about all he had to keep him going. And the martinis were free.