“I don’t know,” I said miserably. My shirt was eating my skin with fire.
“Ten,” he said, puckering sadly his rubbery mouth. “Let’s get down to business,” he said. He taught social science. “Give me the members of Truman’s cabinet. Remember the magic mnemonic phrase, st. wapnical.”
“State,” I said, “Dean Acheson,” and then I could remember no more. “But truly,” I called, “tell me, Mr. Phillips, you’re his friend. Is it possible? Where can the spirits go?”
“T,” he said, “Thanatos. Thanatos the death-demon carries off the dead. Two and three, Billy boy, easy out, easy out.” He adroitly sidestepped and stooped and snatched it up in his webbing on the short hop. He braced, pivoted in slow motion, and lobbed it over. It was a volley ball and behind me all the mountaintops began to shout. I strained to bat it back over the net but my wrists were chained with ice and brass. The ball grew eyes and a mane of hair like the corn-silk that flows from the bursting ear. Deifendorf’s face moved so close I could smell the tallow on his breath. He was holding his hands so a little lozenge-shaped crevice was formed between the balls of his palms. “What they like, you see,” he said, “is to have you in there. No matter who they are, that’s all they like, you in there working back and forth.”
“It seems so brutal,” I said.
“It’s disgusting,” he agreed. “But there it is. Back and forth, back and forth; nothing else, Peter-kissing, hugging, pretty words-it doesn’t touch them. You have to do it.” He took a pencil into his mouth and showed me how, bending his face into the conjunction of his palms with the pencil stick ing, eraser first, from his tartarish teeth. For this moment of tender attention a whole hushed world seemed conjured in the area of his breathing. Then he straightened up, and broke his palms apart, and stroked the two fatnesses of his left palm. “If there’s too much fat here,” he said, “along the inside of the thighs, you’re blocked-you understand?”
“I think so,” I said, furious to scratch my itching arms, where the red shirt was shredding.
“So don’t laugh off the lean pieces,” Deifendorf admonished me, and the dense seriousness of his face repelled me, for I knew it won my father. “You take a skinny kid like Gloria Davis, or one of these big rangy types like Mrs. Hummel-I mean, when a piece like that takes you, you don’t feel so lost. Hey, Peter?”
“What? What?”
“Wanna know how to tell if they’re passionate?”
“Yes, I do. I really do.”
He stroked the ball of his thumb lovingly. “Right in here. The mound of Venus. The more there is, the more they are.”
“The more they are what?”
“Don’t be dumb.” He punched me in the ribs so that I gasped. “And another thing. Why doncha get some pants without a yellow stain on the fly?”
He laughed and behind me I could hear all the Caucasus laughing and snapping their towels and flipping their silvery genitals.
Now the town came to visit me, daubed with Indian paint and vague-faced from idle weeping. “You remember us,” I said. “How we used to walk up the pike beside the trolley cars, me always hurrying a little to keep up?”
“Remember?” He touched his cheek in confusion, so that dabs of wet clay rubbed off on his fingertips. “There are so many…”
“Caldwell,” I said. “George and Peter. He taught at the high school and when the war was over he was Uncle Sam and led the parade down from the fire hall down the pike, where the trolley tracks used to be.”
“There was somebody,” he said, his eyelids trembling in a sleep-walker’s concentration, “a stout man…”
“No, a tall man.”
“You all imagine,” he said with sudden vexation, “if you’re here for a year or two, that I…that I…there are thousands. There have been thousands, there will be thousands…First, the People. Then the Welsh, the Quakers, the Germans from the Tulpehocken Valley…and all think that I should remember them. In fact,” he said, “my memory is poor.” And with this confession his face was brightened by a quick smile that, creasing so counter to the earth-colored markings of paint on his face, made me love him for a second even in his weakness. “And the older I get,” he went on, “the more they stretch me, the streets up Shale Hill, the new development toward Alton, the more…I don’t know. The less things seem to matter.”
“He was in the Lions,” I prompted. “But they never made him president. He was on the committee to get a borough park. He was always doing good deeds. He loved to walk up and down the alleys and used to spend a lot of time hang ing around Hummel’s Garage, on the corner there.”
His eyes were closed and, following the pattern of his lids, his whole face seemed membranous and distended, flickering with fine veins but rapt as a death-mask is rapt. The daubs of paint glistened where they had not dried. “When did they straighten Hummel’s Alley?” he murmured to himself. “There had been a woodworking shop there, and that man blinded by gas in the trenches in that little shack, and now I see a man coming into the alley. His coat pocket is full of old pens that don’t write…”
“That’s my father!” I cried.
He shook his head crossly and let his lids slowly lift. “No,” he told me, “it’s nobody. It’s the shadow of a tree.” He grinned and took from his pocket a winged maple seed, which he expertly split with his thumbnail and glued to his nose, as we used to when children, so it made a little green rhinoceros horn there. The effect, in combination with the ochre paint, was suddenly malevolent, and he stared at me for the first time directly, his eyes as black as oil or loam. “You see,” he pronounced distinctly, “you moved away. You shouldn’t have moved away.”
“It wasn’t my fault, my mother-”
The bell rang. It was time for lunch, but no food was brought me. I sat opposite Johnny Dedman and there were two others with us. Johnny dealt us cards. Since I could not pick mine up, he flashed each one in my face, and I saw that they were not ordinary cards. Each of them had instead of central pips a murky photograph.
A ♦: woman, white, not young, sitting on a chair smil ing, naked, legs spread.
J ♠: female white and male Negro performing that act of mutual adoration vulgarly known as a 69.
10 ♣: four persons, in rectangular arrangement, female-male alternately, one Negro, three white, performing cunnilingus and fellatio alternately, blurred by the necessary considerable reduction under cheap engraving process, so some details were not as clear as I avidly wished. To cover my confusion I coolly asked, “Where did you get these?”
“Cigar store in Alton,” Johnny said. “You have to know the man.”
“Are there really fifty-two different ones? It seems fantastic.”
“All except this one,” he said, and showed me the Ace of Spades. It was simply the Ace of Spades.
“How disappointing.”
“But if you look at it upside down,” he said; and it was an apple with a thick black stem. I didn’t understand. I begged, “Let me see the other cards.”
Johnny looked at me with his wise look, his fuzzy cheeks lightly aflame. “Not so fast, my little teacher’s son,” he said. “You have to pay. I paid.”
“I have no money. Last night we had to stay at a hotel and my father had to give the man a check.”
“You have a dollar. You held out on the old bastard. You have a dollar in your wallet in your hip pocket.”
“But I can’t reach it; my arms are fastened.”
“All right then,” he said. “Buy your own cards, you little flute.” And he put his in the pocket of his shirt, which was forest-green, of a beautifully coarse weave, with the collar turned up so its edge rubbed the nape of his wet-combed hair.