Charles said nothing, waiting for the telegraph clerk to return.
“I feel so sick,” said Vera. “You might as well know: I am afraid I am pregnant.”
Where had she gone wrong? She had to have turned away, lost the path, because everything was wrong, day after day, just wrong enough for her to notice, for her not to be able to ignore it: nothing looked familiar. Charles had become like some strange pagan statue, a totem pole, and she had stared at him, couldn’t take her eyes off him, honestly, while landscapes and skies and crowds swirled around them, out of focus, smeared with rich colors. She had appealed to him and he had responded in his strange pagan way. And now there was this.
They went outside. It was warmer now, and the wind had shifted enough to take the stockyard stink out of it. They walked toward the jailhouse.
“The cat,” Charles said, “is out of the bag now.”
“Well, no, not quite,” said Vera.
Charles couldn’t help but laugh.
“Not a laughing matter,” said Vera, smiling in spite of herself.
“Oh, but it is!” shouted Charles. “We have been given one of the biggest and greatest cues the world’s stage can offer!”
Vera suddenly stopped smiling but said nothing.
“What do you think is going to happen?” she asked Charles.
“No idea! I’m just an actor! Do you know what’s going to happen?”
Vera said nothing and remained neither smiling nor frowning, finding a neutrality naturally easy to come by and hold lightly.
“I don’t think you can honestly say you do,” said Charles. “Neither of us knows a damn thing. Nobody does. I’m very excited, though, in spite of myself.”
“I think your mother will come after me if she finds out. Your brothers and sister too. Maybe they’ve gotten used to the idea that you can’t be trusted to live in the center of things.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I.”
“I really don’t. Not a clue.”
“NEITHER DO I!”
“‘At the center of things’?”
“I’m sorry.”
“At any rate, the cat and the bag I was talking about are Daisy and the slammer. I am pretty sure if I bail her now, I will mess things up for more than one party, and our. how shall I say. our ‘effectiveness’ will be compromised to the point of—”
“We never had anything remotely like effectiveness. The only question is, do we let her sit here in this jail now?”
“We are assuming that she does not want to sit here in this jail now.”
Vera began to speak but stopped herself.
“And are we assuming, as we use those specific terms, that you will seek an abortion?”
Again Vera began to speak but stopped herself.
Outside the jail, she stopped and said she wouldn’t go in. When Charles insisted, citing Daisy’s almost certain despair — no matter what her intentions might be over the long haul toward a promised end — she thumped him repeatedly on his arms and chest and cried no no no no no. Because he’d been hit, twice now, violently, he looked, he supposed, like a little boy and she apologized, going through exaggerated motions of calming herself that in some way calmed her, minimally. She tried to describe what had happened to her when she’d visited Daisy earlier, the suspicion that she was slipping away from herself, that she had always been in danger of slipping away, and the fear that if she were to take Daisy’s place and be arrested and jailed just as Daisy had been, incarceration would rip every joint from its socket. “I wouldn’t be insane, but I would be alone. I wouldn’t have any arms or legs.”
“I am familiar with the condition,” Charles said.
“Of course you are,” she sighed. “What are you not familiar with?”
And he gestured at the jailhouse, the hotel, the land empty of everything but the stunted trunks of second-growth popple, to the horizon, to the sky.
They bailed a silent Daisy, for whom a car was waiting at the curb.
Vera peered in and confirmed that it was Townley.
“Odd couple indeed,” said Charles. “Their ways are strange to me.”
And so they got high and traveled deeper into what had been the southernmost reaches of a white pine forest that had circled the globe, the aboriginal inhabitants of which had believed their doctors could fly over mountains and trees, to heaven and to helclass="underline" the three-tiered world. Charles, thinking that he might soon die, maybe in the next town, or the next time he got on a train, along the way somewhere, middle of nowhere, that his soul might drift out like smoke from the ponderous rocking car — which, he fantasized, would seem to be going only just fast enough to make possible the drift of smoke out an open window, as if the night, the darkness, were viscous. Vera snored lightly next to him, her face half muffled by a pillow. His eyes were closed but he was wide-awake. They had been musing, talking of the farmers they had seen, coming and going in their wagons, standing next to fences or in front of stores, talking so quietly you had to strain to hear them. He had wanted to align himself, somehow, with them, but as he rehearsed these scenes in anxious dopey idleness, he realized he could do no such thing. They had spent long years working with their hands, with black dirt and animals, with rotting vegetables and stinking guts and blue skies and howling blizzards. An even more stark difference: they were businessmen. The second they could be done with the guts and the dirt and the bad weather, they would be. He, on the other hand, was some kind of sliding entity, no fixed residence, no fixed character even, or so he mused, blaming himself obscurely for some psychological crime he could not grasp, but which had become some kind of gigantic thinking, moving thing in the wake of Father’s death. Perhaps one or two of the farmers secretly believed themselves to be that way too, some kind of double agent, an odd mingling of forces that could only, as to their nature and origin, be guessed at, the man only nominally “himself,” the person others took him to be, the source of wildest heartbreak and unbearable sorrow if one day he should become what he was afraid he was. If he and the giant were to become one. It was also possible he did not know himself and did not want to know himself, satisfied with the binding of his responsibilities and the way they shaped and filled him in. He had nothing like that, and he suspected it was what Vera wanted most from him. He had struggled free of them, his responsibilities, every one of them, in an eye-rolling panic he only just barely managed to conceal from the people around him, to find himself now able only to manufacture facsimiles, each one less and less convincing, arriving at last at the feeble conclusion that it was his duty to strike a blow for cheated working people, with some hideous spectacular act of violence. Oh yes, there were tyrants everywhere, left and right, and he was sick of them all. He returned again and again to the image of the Marble Man, Swanson, in San Francisco. There was a man he could kill. The only thing that had kept him from becoming a tyrant himself was the wheel of pain and relief, pain and morphine, that he found himself on. If I were strong, he told himself, I would surely be a monster. Vera, he thought. She had worked. She had spent her childhood negotiating a terrifying responsibility, nerve-wracked, a little more exhausted each day, a little more sick each day, a little more blind and deaf and dumb, and of course it had made her mad, of course it had made her crazy. What was she to do with her intelligence, her dreams, her heart, her mind? She’d had no recourse, she lived in a prison, and when she saw how she might be free, she let her mind go. The bitter but bracing wind of the present moment snatched it like a bonnet and it shot away over the trees. She looked up, first in dismay, then in delight, and raced after it. He loved her dearly. He leaned over to her and whispered that he wished never to leave her. I’ll teach you French and we will have a child together: surely you are free to go now, wherever you want to go, even if I cannot.