"You don't like bein' bit?" he said, with a nasty little grin. "Oh I like to get naked an' have 'em at me. Gets me goin'."
Perhaps he hoped he'd repulse me with this, and I'd leave, but I was not about to be so easily removed. I simply stared at him.
"Do you have any more of them cigars?"
I had indeed come prepared. Not only did I have cigars, I had gin, and, by way of more intellectual seduction, a small pamphlet on madhouses from my collection. Many years before Luman had spent some months incarcerated in Utica, an institution in upstate New York. A century later (so Marietta told me) he was still obsessed with the business of how a sane man might be thought mad, and a madman put in charge of Congress. I dug first for the cigar, as he'd requested it.
"Here," I said.
"Is it Cuban?"
"Of course."
"Toss it to me."
"Dwight can bring it."
"No. Toss it."
I gently lobbed the cigar in his direction. It fell a foot shy of the threshold. He bent down and picked it up, rolling it between his fingers and sniffing it.
"This is nice," he said appreciatively. "You keep a humidor?"
"Yes. In this humidity-"
"Got to, got to," he said, his tone distinctly warming. "Well then," he said, "you'd better get your sorry ass in here."
"It's all right if Dwight carries me in?"
"As long as he leaves," Luman said. Then to Dwight: "No offense. But this is between my half-brother and me."
"I understand," said Dwight, and picking me up out of my wheelchair carried me to the door, which Luman now hauled open. A wave of stinking heat hit me; like the stench of a pigpen in high summer.
"I like it rank," Luman said by way of explanation. "It reminds me of the old country."
I didn't reply to him; I was too-I don't know quite what the word is-astonished, perhaps appalled by the state of the interior.
"Sit him down on the ol' crib there," Luman said, pointing to a peculiar bed-cum-coffin set dose to the hearth. Worse than the crib itself-which looked more like an instrument of torture than a place of repose-was the fact that the hearth was far from cold: a large, smoky fire was burning there. It was little wonder Luman was sweating so profusely.
"Will this be all right?" Dwight said to me, plainly concerned for my well-being.
"I'll be fine," I said. "I could do with losing the weight."
"That you could," Luman said. "You need to get fightin' fit. We all do."
He had lit a match, and with the care of a true connoisseur, was slowly coaxing his cigar to life. "My," he said, "this is nice. I surely do appreciate a good bribe, brother. It's a sign o' good breedin', when a man knows how to offer a good bribe."
"Speaking of which…" I said. "Dwight. The gin."
Dwight set the bottle of gin on the table, which was as thickly strewn with detritus as every other inch of Luman's hellhole.
"Well that's mighty kind of you," Luman said.
"And this-"
"My, my, the presents jus' keep comin', don't they?" I gave him the book. "What's this now?" He looked at the cover. "Oh, this is interesting brother." He flipped through the book, which was amply illustrated. "I wonder if there's a picture of my li'l ol' crib."
"This came from an asylum?" I said, looking down at the bed on which Dwight had set me.
"It sure did. I was chained up in that for two hundred and fifty-five nights."
"Inside it?"
"Inside it."
He came over to where I sat and tugged the filthy blanket out from under me, so I could better see the cruel narrow box in which he had been put. The restraints were still in place.
"Why do you keep it?" I asked him.
"As a reminder," he said, meeting my gaze head-on for the first time since I'd entered. "I can't ever let myself forget, 'cause the moment I forget then I've as good as forgiven them that did it to me, and I ain't never going to do that."
"But-"
"I know what you're going to say: they're all dead. And so they are. But that don't mean I can't still get my day with 'em, when the Lord calls us all to judgment. I'm going to be sniffin' after 'em like the mad dog they said I was. I'm going to have their souls, and there ain't no saint in Heaven's goin' to stop me." His volume and vehemence had steadily escalated through this speech; when it was done I said nothing for a moment or two, so as to let him calm down. Then I said:
"Seems to me you've got reason to keep the crib."
He grunted by way of reply. Then he went over to the table and sat on the chair beside it. "Don't you wonder sometimes…?" he began.
"Wonder what?"
"Why one of us gets put in a madhouse an' another gets to be a cripple an' another gets to go 'round the world fuckin' every beautiful woman he sets his eyes on."
This last, of course, was Galilee; or at least the Galilee of family myth: the wanderer, pursuing his unattainable dreams from ocean to ocean.
"Well don't you wonder?" Luman said again.
"Now and again."
"See, things ain't fair. That's why people go crazy. That's why they get guns and kill their kids. Or end up in chains.
Things ain't fair!" He was beginning to shout again.
"If I may say…"
"Say what the fuck you like!" he replied, "I want to hear, brother."
"… we're luckier than most."
"How'd you reckon that?"
"We're a special family. We've got… you've got talents most people would kill to have…"
"Sure I can fuck a woman then make her forget I ever laid a finger on her. Sure I can listen in on one snake's sayin' to another. Sure I got a Momma who used to be one of the all time great ladies and a Poppa who knew Jesus. So what? They still put me in chains. And I still thought I deserved it, 'cause in my heart I thought I was a worthless sonofabitch." His voice dropped to a whisper. "An' that ain't really changed."
This silenced me utterly. Not just the flow of images (Luman listening to snakes? My father as a confidante of Christ?) but the sheer desperation in Luman's voice.
"We ain't none of us what we should've been, brother," he said. "We ain't none of us done a thing worth callin' important, an' now it's all over, and we ain't never goin' to have that chance."
"So let me write about why."
"Oh… I knew we'd get back to that sooner or later," Luman replied. "There ain't no use in writin' no book, brother. It's just goin' to make us look like losers. 'Cept Galilee, of course. He'll look fine an' fancy an' I'll look like a fuckwit."
"I'm not here to beg," I said. "If you don't want to help me then I'll just go back to Mama-"
"If you can find her."
"-I'D find her. And I'll just ask her to have Marietta show me the sights instead of you."
"She doesn't trust Marietta," Luman said, getting up and crossing to crouch in front of the fire. "She trusts me because I've stayed here. I've been loyal." His lip curled.
"Loyal like a dog," he said. "Stayed in my kennel and guarded her little empire."
"Why do you stay out here?" I asked him. "There's so much room in the house."
"I hate the house. It's entirely too civilized. I find I can't catch my breath in there."
"Is that why you don't want to help me? You don't want to go in the house?"
"Oh, shit," he said, apparently resigned to this torment, "if I have to I have to. I'll take you up, if you want to go that badly."
"Up where?"
"To the dome, of course. But once I've done that, buddy, you're on your own. I ain't staying with you. Not in that place."
I began to see that one of the curses of the Barbarossa family is self-pity. There's Luman in his Smoke House, plotting his revenge against dead men; me in my library, determined that life had done me a terrible disservice; Zabrina in her own loneliness, fat with candy. Even Galilee-out there under a limitless sky-writing me melancholy letters about the aimlessness of his life. It was pathetic. We, who were the blessed fruit of such an extraordinary tree. How did we all end up bemoaning the fact of living, instead of finding purpose in that fact? We didn't deserve what we'd been given: our glamours, our skills, our visions. We'd frittered them all away while we bemoaned our lot.