“She followed me in a car, without her boyfriend.” Newt giggled. “She was strung out, violently sick herself, but drove all the way over, couple hundred miles.”
“The love got me through, don’t you see, Mr. Ross? I was already in love with him, like a flash. It pulled me through the heroin, the withdrawal. I sat out there in that waiting room, sick as a dog. But there is a God, there is one.”
“Or love. Or both, sure,” said Ross. “He stuck you for being a Mormon, Newt?”
Newt still smiled at his father. He looked much older, used, but his grown-out hair was long, like a saint’s or our Lord’s, thought Ross. Now the spectacles gentled him and he seemed wise and traveled, much like his new poems.
“Pa, don’t you know me? I was Mormon, I was Jew, I was Christ, I was Socrates, I was John the Baptist, I was Hart Crane, Keats, Rimbaud. I was everything tragic. I’m still outcast, but I’m almost sane.”
His son giggled and it was not nervous or the giggle of a madman. It was just an American giggle, a man’s giggle—“What the hell is going on?”—full-blooded and wary.
“You love these boys? I suppose they’re helping you back to. . helping you as. .”
“Hell no, I don’t love them. I hate these bastards. It might not be all their fault, but they’re detestable vermin and utter shits, for the main part. I love, well, five. The rest. . What you find most often is they’ve been spoiled, not deprived. Like me. Nobody lasts long here. They try to love but it gets them in a few months. Dianne’s father lasted, but he’s the meanest, toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
Dianne assented, laughing again, about this paternal monster, just a solid fact. The laugh surely lit up that plain face nicely.
“Come eat with me in the big hall and I’ll show you something,” said Newt.
“Is this a bad question? What are you going to do? Stay here because you hate it?”
“No. I’ll do my best. But I’m in fair shape for a job up at Fayetteville. They’ve seen my new work and I guess they like post-insane poets at Arkansas. Actually, a lot of folks like you a lot when you straighten out a little. The world’s a lot better than I thought it was.”
Ross considered.
“Newt, do you believe in Christ?”
“Absolutely. Everything but the cross. That never had anything to do with my ‘antisocial’ activity. I’ll still holler for Jesus.”
“I love you, boy.”
“I know it. Last month I finally knew it. Didn’t take me forever, is all I can say.”
“Thanks for that.”
“There’s some repaying to do.”
“Already done. The new poems.”
Dianne wept a little for joy. This was greatly corny, but it was magnificent.
In the big hall, eating at the head table among the boys, Ross got a drop-jaws look at real “antisocial” manners. Guards were swarming everywhere, but the boys, some of them large and dangerous, nearly tore the place apart. They threw peas, meat, rolls, just to get primed. Two huge blacks jumped on each other jabbing away with plastic knives. A half grapefruit sailed right by the heads of Ross and Newt. It had been pegged with such velocity that it knocked down the great clock on the wall behind them. Whoever had done it, they never knew. He was eating mildly among them, slick, cool, anonymous, wildly innocent, successful. Right from that you could get the general tenor. Unbelievable. Newt and he were exiting when a stout boy about Newt’s height broke line and tackled him, then jumped up and kicked him with his huge black military-looking high-tops. Newt scrambled up, but was well hurt before the guards cornered the boy, who’d never stopped cursing violently, screaming, the whole time. With their truncheons the guards beat the shit out of the kid and kept it up when he was handcuffed and down, maybe unconscious. None of the other boys seemed to think it was unusual. They neither cheered nor booed.
Newt wanted him to sleep over so they could go fishing early the next day. He knew a place that was white perch and bass heaven. Dianne insisted, so he did.
They did fairly well on the fish, again in a pond so dark green and gorgeous you could forget the training school and human horror everywhere.
“I guess, like I heard anyway, you went to bodies of water because, well, because what?” Ross asked.
“Because in the South, I figured, the men who change the world mostly go fishing?” He laughed at his father with the fly rod in his hands, so sincere. “They want out of this goddamned place.”
Next morning he left them cheerfully, driving out, but then, as he neared the gate, he circled back — out on his own hook, cautious in the car with smoked windows. He had seen what he wanted, set it up, had found his nest. There was a place in the parking lot for officials and staff that the Riviera nestled into, uniform in the ranks of autos and pickups, as you might see in a big grocery lot. Behind his smoked window he was unseen. Sixty feet away was the entrance to a shop or snack bar. Anyway, a lot of the boys were gathered there, allowed to smoke.
Ross unsnapped the compartment and withdrew the Daisy. My, it had been months, years. Thin, tall, lumpy, sneering, bent, happy, morose, black, white, Indian. It didn’t matter. He rolled the window down just a tad, backing up so the barrel wasn’t outside the window.
He began popping the boys singly, aiming for the back of their necks and, if lucky, an ear. That was about the best pain he could inflict. A boy leapt up, howling, holding his wound. He got another right on the tit. Did he roar, drop his cigarette, stomp and threaten the others? Yes. He popped another in the back of the head, a hipster with tattooed arms mimicking sodomy. Many of them were questioning, protesting, searching the trees in the sky and other inmates.
Ross rolled up the window and watched them through the one-way glass.
That’s it, lads. Start asking some big questions like me, you little nits. You haven’t even started yet.
1993–1996: High Lonesome
Get Some Young
SINCE HE HAD RETURNED FROM KOREA HE AND HIS WIFE LIVED IN MUtual disregard, which turned three times a month into animal passion then diminished on the sharp incline to hatred, at last collecting in time into silent equal fatigue. His face was ordinarily rimmed with a short white beard and his lips frozen like those of a perch, such a face as you see in shut-ins and winos. But he did not drink much anymore, he simply often forgot his face as he did that of his wife in the blue house behind his store. He felt clever in his beard and believed that his true expressions were hidden.
Years ago when he was a leader of the Scouts he had cut way down on his drink. It seemed he could not lead the Scouts without going through their outings almost full drunk. He would get too angry at particular boys. Then in a hollow while they ran ahead planting pine trees one afternoon he was thrust by his upper bosom into heavy painful sobs. He could not stand them anymore and he quit the Scouts and the bonded whiskey at the same time. Now and then he would snatch a dram and return to such ecstasy as was painful and barbed with sorrow when it left.
This man Tuck last year stood behind the counter heedless of his forty-first birthday when two lazy white girls came in and raised their T-shirts then ran away. He worried they had mocked him in his own store and only in a smaller way was he certain he was still desirable and they could not help it, minxes. But at last he was more aggrieved over this than usual and he felt stuffed as with hot meat breaking forth unsewed at the seams. Yes girls, but through his life he had been stricken by young men too and became ruinously angry at them for teasing him with their existence. It was not clear whether he wished to ingest them or exterminate them or yet again, wear their bodies as a younger self, all former prospects delivered to him again. They would come in his life and then suddenly leave, would they, would they now? Particular Scouts, three of them, had seemed to know their own charms very well and worked him like a gasping servant in their behalf. Or so it had felt, mad wrath at the last, the whiskey put behind him.