Collected Stories Page 25

  He found Oliver seated on the edge of his cot senselessly rubbing the sole of a bare foot. He wore only a pair of shorts and his sweating body radiated a warmth that struck the visitor like a powerful spotlight. The appearance of the boy had not been falsely reported. At his first swift glance the minister’s mind shot back to an obsession of his childhood when he had gone all of one summer daily to the zoo to look at a golden panther. The animal was supposed to be particularly savage and a sign on its cage had admonished visitors to keep their distance. But the look in the animal’s eyes was so radiant with innocence that the child, who was very timid and harassed by reasonless anxieties, had found a mysterious comfort in meeting their gaze and had come to see them staring benignly out of the darkness when his own eyes were closed before sleeping. Then he would cry himself to sleep for pity of the animal’s imprisonment and an unfathomable longing that moved through all of his body.

  But one night he dreamed of the panther in a shameful way. The immense clear eyes had appeared to him in a forest and he had thought, if I lie down very quietly the panther will come near me and I am not afraid of him because of our long communions through the bars. He took off his clothes before lying down in the forest. A chill wind began to stir and he felt himself shivering. Then a little fear started in his nerves. He began to doubt his security with the panther and he was afraid to open his eyes again, but he reached out and slowly and noiselessly as possible gathered some leaves about his shuddering nudity and lay under them in a tightly curled position trying to breathe as softly as possible and hoping that now the panther would not discover him. But the chill little wind grew stronger and the leaves blew away. Then all at once he was warm in spite of the windy darkness about him and he realized that the warmth was that of the golden panther coming near him. It was no longer any use trying to conceal himself and it was too late to make an attempt at flight, and so with a sigh the dreamer uncurled his body from its tight position and lay outstretched and spread-eagled in an attitude of absolute trust and submission. Something began to stroke him and presently because of its liquid heat he realized that it was the tongue of the beast bathing him as such animals bathe their young, starting at his feet but progressing slowly up the length of his legs until the narcotic touch arrived at his loins, and then the dream had taken the shameful turn and he had awakened burning with shame beneath the damp and aching initial of Eros.

  He had visited the golden panther only once after that and had found himself unable to meet the radiant scrutiny of the beast without mortification. And so the idyl had ended, or had seemed to end. But here was the look of the golden panther again, the innocence in the danger, an exact parallel so unmistakably clear that the minister knew it and felt the childish instinct to curl into a protective circle and cover his body with leaves.

  Instead, he reached into his pocket and took out a box of tablets.

  The very clear gaze of the boy was now fixed on him, but neither of them had spoken and the guard had closed the door of the cell and withdrawn to his station at the end of the corridor, which was out of their sight.

  “What is that?” asked the boy.

  “Barbital tablets. I am not very well,” the minister whispered.

  “What is the matter with you?”

  “A little functional trouble of the heart.”

  He had put the tablet on his tongue, but the tongue was utterly dry. He could not swallow.

  “Water?” he whispered.

  Oliver got up and went to the tap. He filled an enamelled tin cup with tepid water and handed it to his caller.

  “What have you come here for?” he asked the young man.

  “Just for a talk.”

  “I have got nothing to say but the deal is rigged.”

  “Then let me read something to you?”

  “What’s something?”

  “The twenty-first Psalm.”

  “I told them I didn’t want no chaplain in here.”

  “I am not the chaplain, I am just—”

  “Just what?”

  “A stranger with sympathy for the misunderstood.”

  Oliver shrugged and went on rubbing the sole of his foot. The minister sighed and coughed.

  “Are you prepared,” he whispered.

  “I’m not prepared for the hot seat, if that’s what you mean. But the seat is prepared for me, so what is the difference?”

  “I am talking about Eternity,” said the minister. “This world of ours, this transitory existence, is just a threshold to something Immense beyond.”

  “Bull,” said Oliver.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because you are face to face with the last adventure!”

  This answer had shot from his tongue with a sort of exultant power. He was embarrassed by the boy’s steady look. He turned away from it as he finally had from the golden panther’s the last time he had gone to him.

  “Ha-ha!” said Oliver.

  “I’m only trying to help you realize—”

  Oliver cut in.

  “I was a boxer. I lost my arm. Why was that?”

  “Because you persisted in error.”

  “Bull,” said Oliver. “I was not the driver of the car. I yelled at the son of a bitch, slow down, you fucker. Then came the crash. A boxer, my arm comes off. Explain that to me.”

  “It gave you the chance of a lifetime.”

  “A chance for what?”

  “To grow your spiritual arms and reach for God.” He leaned toward Oliver and gripped the prisoner’s knees. “Don’t think of me as a man, but as a connection!”

  “Huh?”

  “A wire that is plugged in your heart and charged with a message from God.”

  The curiously ambient look of the condemned youth was fixed on his visitor’s face for several seconds.

  Then he said, “Wet that towel.”

  “What towel?”

  “The one that is over the chair you’re sitting in.”

  “It’s not very clean.”

  “I guess it is clean enough to use on Ollie.”

  “What do you want to do with it?”

  “Rub the sweat off my back.”

  The minister dampened the crumpled and stiffened cloth and handed it to the boy.

  “You do it for me.”

  “Do what?” “Rub the sweat off my back.”

  He rolled on his stomach with a long-drawn sigh, an exhalation that brought again to his frightened visitor’s mind the golden panther of fifteen years ago. The rubbing went on for a minute.

  “Do I smell?” asked Oliver.

  “No. Why?”

  “I am clean,” said the boy. “I took a bath after breakfast.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have always been careful to keep myself clean. I was a very clean fighter—and a very clean whore!”

  He said, “Ha-ha! Did you know that I was a whore?”

  “No,” said the other.

  “Well, that’s what I was all right. That was my second profession.”

  The rubbing continued for another minute, during which an invisible drummer had seemed to the minister to be advancing from the end of the corridor to the door of the cell and then to come through the bars and stand directly above them.

  It was his heartbeat. Now it was becoming irregular and his breath whistled. He dropped the towel and dug in his white shirt pocket for the box of sedatives, but when he removed it he found that the cardboard was pulpy with sweat and the tablets had oozed together in a white paste.

  “Go on,” said Oliver. “It feels good.”

  He arched his body and pulled his shorts further down. The narrow and sculptural flanks of the youth were exposed.

  “Now,” said Oliver softly, “rub with your hands.”

  The Lutheran sprang from the cot.

  “No!”

  “Don’t be a fool. There’s a door at the end of the hall. It makes a noise when anybody comes in it.”


  The minister retreated.

  The boy reached out and caught him by the wrist.

  “You see that pile of letters on the shelf? They’re bills from people I owe. Not money, but feelings. For three whole years I went all over the country stirring up feelings without feeling nothing myself. Now that’s all changed and I have feelings, too. I am lonely and bottled up the same as you are. I know your type. Everything is artistic or else it’s religious, but that’s all a bunch of bullshit and I don’t buy it. All that you need’s to be given a push on the head!”

  He moved toward the man as if he would give him the push.

  The caller cried out. The guard came running to let him out of the cell. He had to be lifted and half carried down the corridor and before he had reached the end of it, he started to retch as if his whole insides were being torn out.

  Oliver heard him.

  “Maybe he‘ll come back tonight,” the doomed boy thought. But he didn’t come back and then Oliver died with all his debts unpaid. However, he died with a good deal more dignity than he had given his jailors to expect of him.

  During the last few hours his attention returned to the letters. He read them over and over, whispering them aloud. And when the warden came to conduct him to the death chamber, he said, “I would like to take these here along with me.” He carried them into the death chamber with him as a child takes a doll or a toy into a dentist’s office to give the protection of the familiar and loved.

  The letters were resting companionably in the fork of his thighs when he sat down in the chair. At the last moment a guard reached out to remove them. But Oliver’s thighs closed on them in a desperate vise that could not have been easily broken. The warden gave a signal to let them remain. Then the moment came, the atmosphere hummed and darkened. Bolts from across the frontiers of the unknown, the practically named and employed but illimitably mysterious power that first invested a static infinitude of space with heat and brilliance and motion, were channeled through Oliver’s nerve cells for an instant and then shot back across those immense frontiers, having claimed and withdrawn whatever was theirs in the boy whose lost right arm had been known as “lightning in leather.”

  The body, unclaimed after death, was turned over to a medical college to be used in a classroom laboratory. The men who performed the dissection were somewhat abashed by the body under their knives. It seemed intended for some more august purpose, to stand in a gallery of antique sculpture, touched only by light through stillness and contemplation, for it had the nobility of some broken Apollo that no one was likely to carve so purely again.

  But death has never been much in the way of completion.

  1945 (Published 1948)

  The Interval

  Gretchen had allowed a fellow teacher at the Iowa City grade school to talk her into taking a summer trip to California in the friend’s old Ford and the trip had been a disappointment all the way around, so that by the first week of August she felt that she had thrown her vacation away. Gretchen was a submissive German type of girl and her friend had made all the plans and arrangements for the trip but it turned out that Gretchen had to pay more than her share of the expenses. Whenever they stopped for gas the girlfriend’s pocketbook was inconveniently located at the moment, it was under a pile of luggage on the back seat, and the same thing held true when they started off in the mornings. The girlfriend, Augusta, would hop in the Ford sedan first and would have a terrible time getting the engine to turn over, so she would holler out to Gretchen, “Honey you settle with the man for the cabin and I’ll square it with you later.” But it was always later, later, and poor Gretchen who had been brought up to respect even small coins was made wretched by the continual depletions of her year’s savings which had been converted into traveler’s checks in twenty-five and ten dollar denominations. It turned out that Augusta had not saved much for the trip. She had apparently expected to take it on a shoestring, and one not even on her own shoe. So by the time they got to the West Coast, Gretchen and Augusta were still on speaking terms, but just barely, and it was creditable more to Gretchen’s German patience than to anything Augusta said or did to give her companion some pleasure out of the trip. In fact when they arrived in Hollywood and started taking those tours of the stars’ palatial residences, poor Gretchen was so dispirited that all the houses looked alike to her. She kept saying to herself. This is where dear little Shirley or beautiful Gloria lives, and she would try to pump up her enthusiasm about it, but it was just another big house, imposing as a prosperous funeral parlor, and even the glimpse of a white-coated domestic who presumably helped a star off with her wraps and brought her breakfast up on a silver service, could not lift Gretchen’s heart with more than the most perfunctory of thrills. Augusta did not allow this unresponsive condition to pass without comment. “Honey,” she said, “you depress me. Perk up, smile, say something! You act like there’s just been a death in the family, honey!” She only intensified Gretchen’s gloom in this way, making her girlfriend feel a social burden in spite of the fact that it was continually she who engaged and paid for the guide while Augusta was outside taking a look at the weather. And every time they went out on one of those tours, to Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, the girlfriend Augusta would give her short, piercing glances that made Gretchen blush, and follow it up with some little critical comment such as, “Honey, have you ever tried an astringent lotion on your throat at night?” It made Gretchen feel that she was literally falling to pieces, though actually she was not quite twenty-seven, a healthy girl, with a solid, durable figure.

  Gretchen had begun to plot ways of escaping from Augusta, some of them quite dramatic, such as secretly packing and slipping away at midnight. But Augusta was a skillful manipulator of many strings. Whenever it had come to the point when Gretchen might actually have executed some such plan, Augusta would suddenly turn on a great deal of charm, she would bubble with enthusiasm for some new plan, she would remember the name and address of some young professor at Southern Cal whom she was certain that Gretchen would adore, and Gretchen would hopefully wait around for this to fizzle out also. She had just about come to the end of the rope with Augusta when they finally made the move to Laguna Beach. “Honey, we’re going to hobnob with the stars,” she screamed at Gretchen when she came in one night from a round of The Strip with a newly-annexed boyfriend whom Gretchen had not even been introduced to. Gretchen had been interrupted in the middle of secretly packing up for about the fourth time, but if Augusta noticed, she pretended not to. “Carl knows Cary Grant and the crowd he runs around with, honey, it’s all arranged! We’re driving up to Laguna tomorrow morning! Isn’t it dreamy? I can’t believe it is true!” So off they went to Laguna. Now Gretchen had always somewhat prided herself, in private, on having a really nice figure and she hoped that this advantage would turn the tables a little. However it didn’t seem to work out that way. They got to Laguna Beach all prepared for a plunge into glamor but one of those vague upsets of plans had occurred, the wonderful beach house that somebody said Carl could use had just burned down or blown up and been washed out by the tide. Anyway there was no place to go but another small tourist cabin with twin beds touching each other. And the first thing Augusta did when they got there was yell at Gretchen, “Honey, you pay the first week and 111 pay the second!” And before Gretchen could deliver the answer she had framed in her mind, Augusta had dashed off to pick up Carl at a club.

  It was only Augusta who made the plunge into glamor, for her newly-acquired sweetheart, who was named Carl Zerbst, had somehow come into the possession of a convertible Buick roadster which was all scarlet and chromium, it was the brightest thing possible to imagine, and had six horns each of which made a different musical sound. Some days he had this car and some days he didn’t, and when he had it, he and Augusta would be in hysterically gay spirits and when he didn’t have it, when somebody named Sam had it, a person who was vaguely much older and vaguely pretty terrible in some way, he and Augusta would look as if
the whole domestic and foreign situation had gone to pieces. However it made no difference to Gretchen whether they had it or not because she never got in it. There was always some excuse why she could not come along, but someone was going to come down from L.A. pretty soon. Carl had invited him down for Gretchen’s sake. But there was a limit to what Gretchen could take in the way of such vague reassurances. Whenever the four-wheeled phenomenon flashed by, she got a lump in her throat, even got one when she heard the distant music of its horns, not because she really cared to be in it. She had begun to think it was hideous, it struck her like a blow in the face when she saw it. But she was miserably lonesome, not only in the little tourist cabin but on the beach. The lump stayed in her throat all the time, and when she had to speak to Augusta about something, during the infrequent times that they were in the tourist cabin together, she would have such a choking sensation words wouldn’t come out. As for the advantage of her nice figure, even this seemed to be totally discounted. The first time she got into her new bathing-suit, Augusta gave her one of those critical glances and said to her, “Honey, you have been sitting down too much this year. Your hips are spreading.” This may not have been true but it completed the ruin of Gretchen’s faith in herself. She felt herself heavy and awkward. She blushed when people glanced at her on the beach. On the beach she was as lonely as she was in the tourist cabin. Nothing and no place was any good for her now, and Augusta was evidently having the time of her life with the boy named Carl and his several movie connections.

  So that was about the way things stood when Jimmie entered the picture at Laguna.

  Jimmie was one of those somewhat talented boys who, from the age of fifteen on, are perpetually right on the verge of accomplishing something of a glamorous nature, getting a part in a hit show or going into the movies or on the air, but it was always just on the verge and not over. His friends’ belief and enthusiasm were sustained for quite a while on such an airy diet but it began to wear out. The eagerness died gradually out of their voices when they said, Jimmie has talent, just got a letter from Jimmie on the West Coast and, what do you know, he is going to be signed to play opposite Hedy Lamarr in her next picture. But time enough had passed for him to arrive somewhere, to have made a dozen pictures with great stars, but he hadn’t arrived anywhere but Laguna Beach and you’d have to look quickly and closely to discern his prettily boyish features in one of the crowd scene appearances he had made on the screen.