The Last of the Savages (12 page)

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, “Will gets plenty of pussy.”

“Right. In his dreams.”

“Oh, man,” moaned Collins, “I had a wet one the other night”—and the conversation propitiously drifted away to safer subjects.

In Will’s absence I also spent time with Matson, who’d started a new club called the Auden Society to advance the appreciation of poetry on campus and to expose philistines everywhere. Through the club I met Isaac Mendel, who would eventually beat me out as valedictorian of our class. I had history and English wrapped up, but he was a math
and science whiz. There was something impressive about the way Mendel didn’t even try to conform to the sumptuary laws and Waspy etiquette of the school. He was a Jew from Brooklyn, and he didn’t care who knew it. He seemed almost to pity the rest of us slow-witted conformists; I was amazed when he brushed off my initial overtures, imagining myself to be condescending from a more advantageous social station. “Sure,” he said, “you talk to me now when your jock friends aren’t around.”

Fuck him, I thought. But a few weeks later when the lacrosse table began to lob taunts at him, sitting alone at the next table, I surprised myself by saying, “Hey, leave him alone, he’s a friend of mine.”

I held my breath; not quite believing I’d said it. But Bowman sized me up, then said: “Okay, amnesty for Mendel.”

Matson fell in beside me one afternoon as I was walking to the library. Tapping the ground with the tip of his umbrella, he said, “I talked to Dick last night. I told him about you, and he’s looking forward to meeting you.”

After a puzzled moment, I realized he was referring to the poet Richard Wilbur, whose reading the Auden Society was attending the following night in Amherst. Only later did it occur to me to wonder what he might possibly have “told” the poet about me—what was there to tell, really?—but I was briefly flushed with a warm sense of self-approbation, though if the majestically urbane Richard Wilbur had ever heard about me he gave no particular indication when he shook my tremulous hand after his reading. For my part I was struck dumb; it seemed incredible that high scholarship and fastidious craftsmanship could be combined with such grace and fluency and sheer charm.

“Look at this guy,” groused Mendel, standing beside me. “It’s like they asked Cary Grant to play a poet.” Wilbur embodied a sort of neoclassical idea of the poet which was then being called into question by the new hairy romanticism. Standing in his lustrous presence, sipping from a plastic glass of rosé and nibbling cheese which was neither presliced nor orange like the cheese of my youth—cheese which might just possibly
be foreign—it seemed hard to believe anyone would want to be authentic if they could be so
cultured.
In Matson you could see the aspiring version of this ideal. The poet was clearly acquainted with our leader, if not quite on such terms of intimacy as we’d been led to expect. As they conversed, I was astonished to see that, although Matson held his arms folded tightly across his chest, his hands were shaking.

Driving us back to school in his Volkswagen van, Matson regained his composure and regaled us with tales from the lives of the modern poets, emphasizing their minor eccentricities—Roethke’s love of plants, Auden’s shuffling up St. Mark’s Place in bedroom slippers. No career seemed so worthy that night as the vocation of poetry. Halsted kept saying over and over again that he was damn well going to be a poet, that was the job for him all right. But Mendel, who hadn’t had any of the wine, asked—If being a poet was so wonderful how come they all ended up drunk and crazy?

Muddy and bruised, I returned from lacrosse one day to find Will sitting on his bed looking as if he’d just materialized there briefly and might disappear at any moment, so pale and gaunt that he seemed like an apparition, although his eyes were if anything more startlingly blue than ever. A fresh pink scar zigzagged across his cheek. He smiled up at me serenely and all I could think of to say was “You’re back.”

“Either that or I’m astral projecting.”

“You sound like yourself,” I observed happily. “Who else would even know what that
means?
”

“What’s with the webbed stick, white man?”

I felt the heat rise to my face. “I’m, uh, on the team.”

“I
have
been gone a long time. What year is it?”

I changed the subject. “What the hell happened to you, anyway?”

“I don’t remember. They say I hit a truck.” He fixed his eyes on me and smiled puckishly. “Actually, it was a cement mixer.”

“A cement mixer?”

He laughed, evidently delighted that his peculiar obsession had been somehow validated by the accident. All he knew for certain was that he’d been at a juke joint in Memphis and that he’d started back for his
family’s house in the early morning hours. When he regained consciousness a week later five of his ribs were crushed and one of his lungs was collapsed from the impact of the steering wheel.

“Jesus,” I said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Actually I was dead,” Will said. “I came back.” He seemed perfectly serious.

“You mean you were
almost
dead.”

“No, I mean I
was
dead.”

I decided not to pursue this. The look in his eyes scared me. Not that it was frightening per se; he looked like he did when he was stoned, somehow widely diffused and narrowly focused at the same time, like a cat in repose.

We resumed our routine. But Will seemed different—older and otherworldly, as if he’d actually begun to inhabit one of the regions of higher consciousness to which he was always alluding. I struggled to return our friendship to its familiar footing, and to this end, one night after lights-out I asked him if he’d gotten any nooky over the summer.

After a long pause, he whispered across the darkness, “I finally lost my cherry.”

“Bull
shit
you did.” I sat up eagerly in my bed. I was thinking—It’s true then. It
does
change you. “With who?”

“You mean ‘whom.’ ”

“Come on, Will. With whom?”

“Would you give your left nut to sleep with Cheryl Dobbs?”

“You didn’t.”

“No, actually it was Lollie Baker.”

I was glad he couldn’t see me. I could’ve killed him in his bed.

“Her family came up to Ontario,” he whispered. “Everybody was out fishing and I stayed behind at the camp. I had some Panama Red I’d brought up from Memphis out to the woodshed. Lollie walked in on me, right after I lit up. So I offered her a hit …”

“What happened?” I said finally, trying to control my voice.

“Hey, I’m a gentleman.”

If a moment ago I hated him for what he had revealed, I was now furious at his sudden reticence. “Tell me,” I demanded.

“Hey, calm down. It was nice. It was great.”

I couldn’t believe this was all he had to say about the momentous event, but within minutes I could hear him breathing in sleep. It was not fair; for the first time I resented Will’s good fortune in this as in everything. Lollie was mine. If Cheryl was the remote dream of carnality, Lollie was the practical embodiment of my nocturnal yearning. With Lollie I had a concrete foundation on which to construct my fantasies—the memory of her flesh and a sense of possibility—which Will had suddenly taken away from me.

Or so I told myself. In fact my jealousy was far knottier than I was willing to admit, even to myself, at the time. Lying awake, listening to the last sad crickets of the Indian summer, I was in no way prepared to entertain the possibility that it wasn’t Will Savage I was jealous of, but Lollie Baker.

T
he leaves turned ruby and gold, then gathered themselves in fragrant heaps while I was filling out applications for college. Walking to the dining hall the morning of the first frost, with Will limping elegantly alongside me, I could see my breath and hear my steps on the crunchy turf. The chapel bells were ringing eight o’clock, the sound crisp and bright in the lucid air. I felt a flash of clairvoyant nostalgia, imagining my aging self hunched over a desk in some stuffy office.

“We’ll be gone from here before you know it,” I said to Will.

“Not soon enough,” he answered.

Booking hard for grades that fall, the last semester that would count toward college, I felt myself drifting away from Will. I wasn’t at all happy when our room became headquarters for a band of disciples who gathered to listen to Will’s records and talk about black music and Indian religion and Beat literature. This was the first incarnation of the entourage which became a feature of Will’s adult life. His very aloofness seemed to attract those who were less self-contained, and he did nothing to discourage these satellites. Incredibly, the chief disciple was Jack Stubblefield, who, under the influence of my roommate and the Zeitgeist, had quit football and grown out his hair.

“It’s dangerous to introduce new ideas to a guy like Stubblefield,” I complained one evening when we found ourselves, briefly, alone. “It’s like sending a balloon up into space—it’ll expand and explode in the void.”

“Stubblefield’s cool,” Will said, staring out the window over the snowy lawns. “It’s like starting with a blank slate.” And indeed he did have a certain vacancy that made him the perfect athlete as well as an exemplary follower.

Shortly before Thanksgiving Will proposed to lead an expedition to hear Buddy Guy and Junior Wells play at a coffeehouse in Boston. To nearly everyone’s surprise, permission was granted after Will secured Bubble Head Wilson, the music teacher, as chaperon. I was annoyed that I’d first heard about this adventure from Stubblefield, who asked me if I was going. And I was deep in the middle of two term papers. Toward the end of the week I had made enough progress on my papers to consider going. If Will had asked me to join him I might have, but when I mentioned I might not be able to go he said, “Whatever you feel like, man.”

I didn’t want our friendship to wither away. But neither did I want to become just another one of Will’s hangers-on. Let Stubblefield kiss Will’s ring and carry his water. And so I stayed.

Will and his disheveled band trooped into lunch on the Saturday after their concert, an air of jaded conspiracy emanating from their table. Back in our room, pride prevented me from asking any questions, but the campus was soon humming with wild rumors: Will had given everyone LSD … Will had gone backstage after the show to smoke dope with the performers … They’d all gone to the Combat Zone and gotten drunk … He’d picked up a girl at the coffeehouse and taken her back to their hotel … Will had incriminating photographs of Wilson in a strip joint that he threatened to release if the teacher didn’t keep quiet …

Wilson himself assured the headmaster that the outing was uneventful, but for weeks thereafter he seemed chagrined and dazed, and the trip became legend. Will’s own renegade luster was further burnished, if not his standing with school authorities. His influence on campus was
considered subversive. It was almost inevitable that the rumor of drug dealing would attach to him. Not long after the Boston outing Matson, in his role as housemaster, conducted a search of our room, and though, remarkably, no drugs were found, he did discover Will’s large stash of small bills. We’d just returned from dinner when our triumphant housemaster confronted us in the entry hall.

“The headmaster would like to see you immediately, Mr. Savage.” Will stared at Matson, unmoving, until the housemaster began to turn pink. “If you’d like I can summon security,” he said.

Will turned to me with a comradely look and said, “Can you believe what a dickhead this guy is?”

“It was not without difficulty that I convinced the headmaster you had nothing to do with your roommate’s activities,” Matson said to me after Will had turned and marched out. “But if you know anything about this matter I’d advise you to cooperate.”

“Will hasn’t done anything wrong,” I insisted, then turned and ran up the stairs. My own possessions were relatively unscathed, but Will’s were strewn across the room. I began to put things away as I waited for him to return. Twenty minutes later he came in and sat on the bed. He seemed unnaturally calm.

“Did you tell him where the money came from?” I demanded.

“I told him I wasn’t a drug dealer. That was all he needed to know.”

“You’ve got to tell them something.”

“I don’t see why. It’s my money.”

“They’ll kick you out for sure.”

“Do you think numbers running would be viewed more favorably than drug dealing?”

“Maybe, if it’s off campus.”

“And if it doesn’t involve any white people.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s almost always the point.”

“Get real, Will.”

I was furious at Matson, of course, but no less furious at Will for his refusal to defend himself. The discipline committee was scheduled to meet in two days. Will snored soundly that night, but I was unable to
sleep. In the light of morning, only one plan of rescue seemed feasible. I skipped breakfast to call Will’s father; if I got to him before the headmaster did I thought he might be able to devise an explanation for his son’s cash. I didn’t tell Will, since I was pretty certain he would be violently opposed to the plan.

“Well, where did he get the damn money,” Cordell asked, after I assured him that Will was no drug dealer. “I know he’s not the type to save up his allowance.”

“I’d rather not say, sir.”

“Patrick, if you want to save Will’s ass you better tell me everything.”

And so I explained the numbers operation, though I pretended not to know the identity of Will’s partner. I was relieved that Cordell sounded more incredulous than angry—if anything he seemed proud of his son’s enterprise. He made me promise not to tell Will, or anyone, that we had spoken.

Cordell flew up for the hearing that night. I was downstairs in the common room, pacing, when father and son walked in. Will was as sullen as his father was cheerful. “Well, Patrick,” said Mr. Savage, “we seem to have convinced them to keep Will on until he decides to do something truly heinous. I thought you might like to join us for a little off-campus celebration at the Inn? They used to serve a nice prime rib in my time.”