“In the back.” He sucked; his cheek, cut in shaving this morning, wrinkled. The blood of his cut seemed very dark.
“You ought to have it looked at. That’s simple.”
“I don’t know which one it is. All of ‘em probably. I ought to have.every tooth in my head yanked. Slap a plate in there. Go to one of these butchers in Alton that pulls ‘em out and puts ‘em in the same day. They push ‘em right into your bloody gums.”
“Is that really what they do?”
“Sure. They’re sadists, Peter. Mongoloid sadists.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
The heater, thawed by our run down the hill, came on; brown air baked by rusty pipes breathed onto my ankles. Each morning, this event had the tone of a rescue. Now that a margin of comfort had been promised, I turned on the radio. The little dial, thermometer-shaped, glowed wan orange. When the tubes warmed, cracked and jagged nighttime voices sang in the bright blue morning. My scalp tingled and tightened; the voices, negroid and hillbilly, seemed to pick their way along the tune over obstacles that made their voices skip, lift, and stagger; and this jagged terrain seemed my country. It was the U.S.A. the songs conveyed: mountains of pine, oceans of cotton, tan western immensities haunted by disembodied voices cracked by love invaded the Buick’s stale space. A commercial delivered with an unctuous irony spoke soothingly of the cities, where I hoped my life would take me, and then a song came like a choo-choo, clicking, irresistible, carrying the singer like a hobo on top of its momentum, and my father and I seemed ourselves irresistible, rolling up and down through the irregularities of our suffering land, warm in the midst of much cold. In those days the radio carried me into my future, where I was strong: my closets were full of beautiful clothes and my skin as smooth as milk as I painted, to the tune of great wealth and fame, pictures heavenly and cool, like those of Vermeer. That Vermeer himself had been obscure and poor I knew. But I reasoned that he had lived in backward times. That my own times were not backward I knew from reading magazines. True, in all of Alton County only my mother and I seemed to know about Vermeer; but in the great cities there must be thousands who knew, all of them rich. Vases and burnished furniture stood upright around me. On a stiff tablecloth a loaf of sugary bread lay sequined with pointillist dabs of light. Beyond the parapet of my balcony a high city of constant sun named New York glimmered in its million windows. My white walls accepted a soft breeze scented with chalk and whole cloves. In the doorway a woman stood, shadow-mirrored by the polished tiles, and watched me; her lower lip was slightly heavy and slack, like the lower lip of the girl in the blue turban in The Hague. Among these images which the radio songs rapidly brushed in for me the one blank space was the canvas I was so beautifully, debonairly, and preciously covering. I could not visualize my work; but its featureless radiance made the center of everything as I carried my father in the tail of a comet through the expectant space of our singing nation.
After the tiny town of Galilee, gathered, no bigger than Firetown, around the Seven-Mile Tavern and the cinder-block structure of Potteiger’s Store, the road like a cat flattening its ears went into a straightaway where my father always speeded. Passing the model barn and outbuildings of the Clover Leaf Dairy, where conveyor belts removed the cows’ dung, the road then knifed between two high gashed embankments of eroding red earth. Here a hitchhiker waited beside a little pile of stones. As we rose toward him I noticed, his silhouette being printed sharply on the slope of clay, that his shoes were too big, and protruded oddly behind his heels.
My father slammed on the brakes so suddenly it seemed he recognized the man. The hitchhiker ran after our car, his shoes flapping. He wore a faded brown suit whose pattern of vertical chalkstripes seemed incongruously smart. He clutched to his chest as if for warmth a paper bundle tightly tied with butcher’s cord.
My father leaned across me, rolled open my window, and shouted, “We’re not going all the way into Alton, just to the bottom of Coughdrop Hill!”
The hitchhiker drooped at our door. His pink eyelids blinked. A dirty green scarf was tied around his neck, keeping his upturned coat lapels pressed against his throat. He was older than his lean figure glimpsed at a distance suggested. Some force of misery or weather had scrubbed his white face down to the veins; broken bits of purple had hatched on his cheeks like infant snakes. Something dainty in his swollen lips made me wonder if he were a fairy. I had once been approached by a shuffling derelict while waiting for my father in front of the Alton Public Library and his few mumbled words before I fled had scored me. I felt, as long as my love of girls remained unconsummated, open on that side-a three-walled room any burglar could enter. An unreasoning hate of the hitchhiker suffused me. The window my father had opened to him admitted cold air that made my ears ache.
As usual, my father’s apologetic courtesy had snagged the very progress it sought to smooth. The hitchhiker was be wildered. We waited for his brains to thaw enough to absorb what my father had said. “We’re not going all the way into Alton,” my father called again, and in impatience leaned so far over that his huge head was in front of my face. As he squinted, a net of brown wrinkles leaped up behind his eye.
The hitchhiker leaned in toward my father and I felt absurdly pinched between their fumbling old faces. And all the while the musical choo-choo was clicking forward on the radio; I yearned to board it.
“How far?” the hitchhiker asked. His lips hardly moved.
His hair was lank and sparse on top and so long uncut it bunched in feathery tufts above his ears.
“Four miles, get in,” my father said, suddenly decisive. He pushed at my door and said to me, “Move over, Peter. Let the gentleman up front by the heater.”
“I’ll get in back,” the hitchhiker said, and my hate of him ebbed a little. He did have some vestige of decent manners. But in getting into the back seat, he did not lift his fingers from the sill of my window until with the other arm, awkwardly pinching the bundle against his side, he had worked open the back door. As if we were, my selfless father and my innocent self, a treacherous black animal he was capturing. Once safe in the cavity behind us, he sighed and said, in one of those small ichorous voices that seems always to be retracting in mid-sentence, “What a fucking day. Freeze your sucking balls off.”
My father let out the clutch and did a shocking thing: turning his head to talk to the stranger, he turned off my radio. The musical choo-choo with all its freight of dreaming dropped over a cliff. The copious purity of my future shrank to the meager confusion of my present. “Just as long as it doesn’t snow,” my father said. “That’s all the hell I care about. Every morning I pray: ‘Dear Lord, no snow.’ “
Unseen behind me the hitchhiker was snuffling and liquidly enlarging like some primeval monster coming to life again out of a glacier. “How about you, boy?” he said, and through the hairs on my neck I could feel him hunch forward. “You don’t mind the snow, do ya?”
“The poor kid,” my father said, “he never gets a chance to go sledding any more. We took him out of the town where he loved to be and stuck him in the sticks.”
“I bet he likes the snow real good,” the hitchhiker said. “I bet he likes it fine.” Snow seemed to mean something else to him; he certainly was a fairy. I was more angered than frightened; my father was with me.
He, too, seemed disturbed by our guest’s obsession. “How about it, Peter?” he asked me. “Does it still mean a lot to you?”
“No,” I said.
The hitchhiker snorted moistly. My father called back to him, “Where’ve you come from, mister?”