The Essential Ellison Part 12

It went that way all through the crowd as the once-again-chanting picketers moved slowly but methodically toward their cars. It was a handsomely executed tactical maneuver, a strategic withdrawal of cla.s.s and composure.

Once at the open car doors, they piled back against the black metal bugs, raising arms in an unmistakable Heil! and screamed, almost as one: "America always! To h.e.l.l with the poisoners! Kill the Jews!"

Pop, Pop! With timing vaguely reminiscent of a Keystone Kops imbroglio, they heaved themselves into the vehicles, and were roaring down the street, around the corner, before the approaching growlers of the police prowl cars (summoned on a major 415) were more than a faint whine approaching from the distance.

On the sidewalk in front of the theater, people-for no other release was left to them-burst into tears and cursing.

Some kind of battle had been fought here-and lost.

On the sidewalk, someone had clandestinely chalked the symbol. No one moved to scuff it out. None of the picketers had had the free time to do it; the obvious was obvious: someone in the queue had done it.

The subtlest, most effective poison.

Her apartment was an attempt to rea.s.sure her crippled spirit that possessions meant security, security meant permanence, and permanence meant the exclusion of sorrow and fear and darkness. She had thrust into every corner of the small one-bedroom apartment every convenience of modern technology, every possible knickknack and gimcrack of oddity, every utensil and luxury of the New World the rooms would hold. Here a 23" television set, its rabbit-ears askew against the wall...there a dehumidifier, busily purring at the silence...over there a set of Royal Doulton mugs, Pickwick figures cherubically smiling at their own ingenuousness...and a paint-by-the-numbers portrait of Was.h.i.+ngton astride a white stallion...a lemon gla.s.s vase overflowing with swizzle sticks from exotic restaurants...a stack of Life, Time, Look and Holiday magazines...a reclining lounge chair that vibrated...a stereo set with accompanying racks of alb.u.ms, mostly Offenbach and Richard Strauss...a hide-a-bed sofa with orange and brown throw pillows...a novelty bird whose long beak, when moistened, dipped the creature forward on its wire rack, submerging its face in a gla.s.s of water, then pulled it erect, to repeat the performance endlessly...

The jerky movement of the novelty bird in the room, a bad cartoon playing over and over, was intended as rea.s.surance of life still going on; yet it was a cheap, shadowy subst.i.tute, and instead of charming the two high school boys who had brought Lilian Goldbosch home, it unsettled them. It made them aware of the faint scent of decay and immolation here; a world within a world, a specie of creative precontinuum in which emotions had palpable ma.s.siveness, greater clarity.

The boys helped the still-shaken woman to the sofa, and sat her down heavily. Her face was not old, the lines were adornment rather than devastation, but there was a superimposition of pain on the tidy, even features. Cobwebs on marble. Her hair-so carefully tended and set every week by a professional: tipped, ratted, back-combed, pampered-was disheveled, limp, as though soaked with sweat. Moist stringlets hung down over one cheek. Her eyes, a light blue, altogether perceptive and lucid, were filmed by a milkiness that might have been tears, and might have been gelatinous anguish. Her mouth seemed moist, as though barely containing a wash of tormented sounds.

The years rolled back for Lilian Goldbosch. Once more she knew the sound of the enclosed van whose exhaust pipes led back into the prisoners' compartment, the awful keee-gl keee-gl keee-gl of the klaxon, rising above the frozen streets; frozen with fear of movement (if I stay quiet, they'll miss me, pa.s.s me by). The Doppler-impending approach of the van, its giant presence directly below the window, right at the curb, next to the face and the ears, and then its hissing pa.s.sage as it swept away, a moving vacuum cleaner of living things, swallowing whole families. With eyes white eggsh.e.l.ls in pale faces. And into the rear of that van, the exhaust whispering its sibilant tune of gas and monoxided forever. All this came back to Lilian Goldbosch as she shamefully spaded-over her memories of the past half hour. Those boys. Their armbands. Her fear. The crowd attacking. The way she had leaped at them. The madness. The fear.

The fear.

Again, the fear.

Burning, blazing through all of it: the fear!

That boy with his imperious blond good looks, the Aryan Superman: could he really know? Could he somehow, this American child, born between clean sheets, with his greatest terror a failing mark in school, could he somehow know what that hated black swastika meant to her, to whole generations, to races of individuals who had worn yellow Stars of David and the word Juden, to shattered spirits and captured hearts who stood on alien roads as Stukas dived, or walked in desolate resignation to already filling ma.s.s graves, or labored across nomanslands with sh.e.l.lbursts lighting the way? Could he know, or was this something else...a new thing, that merely looked like the old sickness, the fear?

For the first time in more years than she cared to remember-had it only been twenty years since all of it?-Lilian Goldbosch had a surge of desire. Not the gilded wastes she had subst.i.tuted for caring: not the pathological attention to hair in the latest frosted style, not the temporal acquisition of goods to fill empty rooms, not the television with it gray images, surrogates of life. A want. A need to know. A desire to find out.

Born of an old fear.

Was it the same...or something new?

She had to know. She was engulfed by desperation.

And with the desperation, a shocking realization that she could do something. What, she was not certain. But she had the sensation burning in her that if she could know this blond Gentile youth, could talk to him, this goy, could communicate with him, this stranger, she could find out the answers, know if the evil was coming again, or if it was just another lonely person, trapped within his skin.

"Will you boys do me a favor?" Lilian Goldbosch asked the two who had escorted her home. "Will you help me?"

At first they were confused, but as she talked, as she explained why she had to know, why it was important, they were drawn into a prospect of their times, and finally they nodded, a little hesitantly, the taller of the two saying, "I don't know if it'll do any good, but we'll try and find him for you."

Then they left. Down the stairs. While she went to wash the tears and streaked mascara from her young-old face.

Frank Amato was of Italian descent. He was a typical child of his times; transistorized, Sanforized, boss gear bomped groovy tuned-in on the music of the spheres, in a Continental belt-back slim-line hopsacking crease-resistant 14" tapered ineluctable reality that placed him in and of the teenage sub-culture.

Vietnam? Huh?

Voter registration in Alabama? Huh?

The ethical structure of the universe?

Huh?

Arch Lennon was a WASP. He had heard the term, but had never applied it to himself. He was a carbon-copy of Frank Amato. He lived day to day, Big Boy to Big Boy, track meet to track meet, and if there were sounds that went boomp in the night they were probably the old man getting up to haul another pop-top out of the Kelvinator.

Military junta? Huh?

Limited nuclear retaliation? Huh?

The infinitesimal dispensation of h.o.m.o sapiens in the disinterested cosmos?

Huh?

Standing down on the sidewalk outside Lilian Goldbosch's apartment, staring at each other.

"That was a smart move."

"Well, what the h.e.l.l was I supposed to say? Fer chrissakes, she had aholda my arm, I thought she was gonna bust it. That old lady's nuts."

"So why'd you promise her? Where the h.e.l.l we gonna find that guy?"

"How should I know? I gave my word."

"Big deal."

"Maybe not to you, but I gave it just the same."

"So we try and find that kid, right?"

"Uh..."

"What I thought. I gotta do all the brain work again. Jeezus, man, you are such a nit."

"D'jou get the license number of any of those cars?"

"Don't be a clown. No, I din't get the number. And even if I did, what'd we do with it?"

"DMV, wouldn't they tell us who it was registered to?"

"Sure. We're gonna walk into the Motor Vehicle Department, just like James Bond, a couple of guys our age, and we're gonna say, Hey who owns this VW. Sure, I can picture it real good. You're a nit,"

"So that's that,"

"I wish,"

"You got something else?"

"Maybe, One of those VWs had a sticker on the winds.h.i.+eld, It was an emblem, Pulaski Vocational High School,"

"So one of those guys goes to Pulaski, You know how many inmates they got over there? Maybe a million,"

"It's a start."

"You're serious about this,"

"Yeah, I'm serious about it,"

"How come?"

"I dunno, she asked, an' I gave her my word. She's an old lady, it won't hurt anything to look a while."

"Hey, Frank?"

"What?"

"What's this all about?"

"I dunno, but those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were lousy, an' I gave my word."

"Okay; I'll help, But I gotta get home now, my folks oughta be back by now, and we can't do anything till tomorrow anyhow,"

"Stay loose. See ya."

"See ya. Don't get in any trouble, double-oh-seven."

"Stick it,"

They didn't know which one they would find, or even if they would recognize him when they did find him. But one of the wearers of the swastika attended Pulaski Vocational, and Pulaski Vocational went all year round, Summer, winter, night and day, it turned out students who knew more about carburetors, cha.s.sis dynamometers, metal lathes and printed circuitry than they did about THE CANTERBURY TALES, scoria and pumice, the theory of vectors and the fact that Crispus Attucks, a Negro, was the first American to fall in the Revolutionary War. It was a great gray stone Coventry of a school, where young boys went in unmarked, and emerged some years later all punched and coded to fit into the System, with fringe benefits and an approximate date of death IBM'd by the group insurance company.

Chances were good the boy-whichever boy it turned out to be-was still attending cla.s.ses, even though it was summer, and Arch and Frank were free. So they waited, and they watched, And finally, they found one of them, An acne-speckled, pudgy-hipped specimen in a baggy orange velour pullover.

He came out of the school, and Arch recognized him.

"There, the pear-shaped one, in the orange."

They followed him into the parking lot. The car he unlocked was a Monza, a late model. If they watched for the VW they would have missed him.

"Hey!" Frank came up behind him. The pudgy turned.

He had beady little eyes, like a marmoset. The face was fleshy, with many small inflamed areas where he had shaved and the skin had broken out. There was a wasted look about him, as though he had been used up, and cast away. Even to Arch and Frank, the look of intense intelligence was missing from the pudgy's expression.

"Who're you guys?"

Arch did not like him. For a nameless reason, he did not like him. "Friends of a friend of yours."

Pudgy looked wary. He dumped his books into the back seat, not turning from them. He was getting set to jump inside the car and slam the door, and lock it, and pullout in a hurry. Pudgy was scared.

"Who's that, what friend?"

Frank moved slightly, to the side. It was almost a pavane, the maneuvering: Pudgy angled himself, his hand went toward the back of the front seat; Arch slid around the edge of the door. Frank's hand came up onto the roof of the car, near Pudgy's head. Pudgy's eyes got milky, fear bubbled up behind him, the taint was in his bloodstream.

"A tall kid, blond hair, you know," Frank said, his voice was deeper, a trifle threatening, "he was with you the other night at the movie, remember?"

Pudgy's right cheek tic'd. He knew what was happening. These were Jews. He made his move.

Arch slammed the door. It caught Pudgy at the forearm. He howled. Arch reached across and grabbed him by the ear. Frank sank a fist into Pudgy's stomach. The air whooshed out of Pudgy and left him flat, very flat, a cardboard cutout that they bundled into the front seat of the Monza, one on either side of him. They started the car, and rolled out of the parking lot. They would take him someplace. Someplace else. Pudgy would tell them who the blond Aryan had been, what his name was, where he could be found.

If they could pump enough air into him to produce sound.

Victor. Rohrer. Victor Rohrer. Blond, tall, solid, with no extra flesh on his body, muscles very firm and tight, as though packed from the factory in plastic. Victor Rohrer. A face hewn from lignum vitae, from marble. Eyes chipped gray ice frost from lapis lazuli and allowed to die, harden into leaden cadaverousness. A body languorous, soft, downy-covered, with barely visible blond hairs, each one a sensor, a feeler of atmospheres and temperatures, each one a cilium, seeing and smelling and knowing the tenor of the situation. A Cardiff Giant, not even remotely, human, something cold and breathing, defying Mendelian theories, defying heredity, a creature from another island universe. Muscled and wired and gray eyes that had sometime never been blue with life. Lips thinned in expectation of silence. Victor. Rohrer. A creation of self, brought forth from its own mind for a need to exist.

Victor Rohrer, organizer of men.

Victor Rohrer, who had never known childhood.

Victor Rohrer, repository of frozen secrets.

Victor Rohrer, wearer of swastikas.

Patron of days and nights; singer of silent songs; visionary of clouds and nothingness; avatar of magics and unspoken credos; celebrant of terrors in nights of endless murmurings; architect of orderly destructions; Victor Rohrer.

"Who are you? Get away from me."

"We want you to talk to somebody."

"Punk filth!"

"Don't make me flatten you, wise guy."

"Don't try it; I don't like hurting people."

"There's one of the great laughs of our generation."

"Come on, Rohrer, get your a.s.s in gear; somebody's waiting for you."

"I said: get away from me."

"We aren't goons, Rohrer, don't make us belt you around a little."

"It would take two of you?"

"If it had to."

"That isn't very sportsmanlike."

"Somewhichway, friend, you don't make us feel very sporty. Move it, or s'help me I'll lay this alongside your head."