Dead Babies, page 7
15 Meandered Up America
The Americans constituted a ‘triad’, a ‘troy’ which meant, more or less, that they got to fuck and bugger one another indiscriminately. It was their habit, too, to rope in another personage to form a ‘rectangle’, or another couple to make up the full ‘star’. And are we to believe that sexual excursions outside the group were censured? On the contrary, they were encouraged, applauded as adding further ‘imaginative declensions’ to normal activity. The threesome had flourished for two years and showed lively signs of continuing to do so.
Their story went something like this.
Skip’s father, Philboyd B. Marshall, Jr, a horrible human being, used to run a hot, dirty garage on the outskirts of Tara, Tennessee. Philboyd had done so many appalling and traumatic things to his son that anyone who heard about them spontaneously congratulated Skip on his apparent sanity. Philboyd had once raped him, for instance – not (we hasten to add) in a libidinous spirit, but because he had caught Skip emptying the latrine with a shovel rather than with his bare hands, as Philboyd had requested, this being itself a punishment for an earlier mischief. ‘Kitch you at that kind of non-sense again, boy, and you’re in real trouble.’
Father-and-son relations worsened. What with the gas-station not doing so good these days, the way all the guys were moving out of Tara and all the niggers moving in, the fact that a man couldn’t take a beer at Kramer’s without getting jostled by the longhairs . . . Philboyd’s life became a depressing series of grousing sessions, drunk bends and violence jags. The old mechanic died a little every time a Rican or a Jew pulled into his forecourts, expecting gas what’s more; every time he saw the boogies come across the railway line, seemingly unharmed; every time the sun went down over the Coke sign back of the house, causing his evenings to be dimmed by a premature vault of shadow. When Skip became physically unable to take more of his motiveless beatings, Philboyd bought from the knackers a three-legged mule, which he installed in an enclosure and went out to visit torments on twice-daily with kitchen knives, meathooks, branding-irons. This helped some, but not for long. The animal fell down dead on him two months later.
And so then of course some Vanderbilters get along from Nashville and Skip starts to hang out with them. They’re all between twenty and thirty and Skip hasn’t seen seventeen yet, but he has this peculiar facility with older boys. For Skip is what used to be called a ‘slag’: he’ll do anything; there’s nothing he won’t do. ‘Skip, see if you can dive from the cooling-tower into that tank right there.’ ‘Every time.’ ‘Skip, take the shit buckets down to the trash heap, willya.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ ‘Skip, go steal us some beers from Kramer’s, O.K.?’ ‘Right on,’ ‘Skip, eat that slug.’ ‘No sweat.’ Certain menial sexual chores fell also to the lanky boy, which he performed with care and avidity. As a student once remarked, ‘Skip’d rim a snake so long as someone held its head.’ There were lots of drugs, too.
One day Philboyd motored past the Kampsite in his dumptruck – saw Skip lying on the grass with a crew of whores and hippie fags. To his hopelessness and grief, Philboyd could not act immediately; time was – when there’d have been enough tubby little rednecks like himself still living in Tara – they could have pitched right in there and whomped up a storm. This reflection saddened him further. As it was, on Skip’s return that night Philboyd clubbed his son round the kitchen with a frypan for three-quarters of an hour. ‘Ah, let the boy be, Philb,’ came Mrs Marshall’s sickly voice from the adjacent bedroom, ‘trying to get some rest in here.’ ‘Shut the fuck up,’ replied Philboyd, who had in any case decided to take his wife’s advice, being too old and fat to go on. ‘Skip, next time I see you with those qeeahs again,’ he panted, ‘I’m goan bust your head.’
And, to be sure, the next time he saw Skip with those queers again Philboyd attempted to keep his promise. He could hardly believe his good fortune. There was Skip with a solitary student, drinking beers in a down-town penny arcade. Philboyd slapped open the door and strode over to them eagerly unhitching his belt. ‘This is it, son. I’m gonna kill your ass.’ Without reaching any kind of decision, Skip rose, made a circling motion with his right fist and then offered it up to Philboyd’s chin at high velocity. Philboyd seemed to stay perfectly still for at least two or three seconds, his face frozen in unbelieving disappointment, before being snatched up into the air and cannonaded against the wall, down which he easily slid to collect in a fat puddle on the floor. With slow-motion fear his son scooped him up and straightened him against a fruit-machine. ‘Dad . . . ?’ Skip’s hands were shrugged off. ‘Ah, let me be, son.’ Philboyd stumbled home, hair mattted with sawdust, blood and beer, and dejectedly hosepiped his wife to death.
Seemed like Skip’s life had fallen apart all around him. Ma was dead. Philboyd had a manslaughter charge to face. Marshall Mekanix was closed down. The authorities didn’t appear to give a shit what he did. And he had always hated Tara anyhow.
Skip found employment in the automobile plant on the far apron of the second cloverleaf off the third spaghetti junction along the subsidiary expressway running westerly out of Nashville, Tennessee. He worked sixteen hours a day, without ambition and without boredom, taking off in borrowed cars at weekends for St Louis, Memphis, Oklahoma, ’Pulco, Mexico City, where he participated in various nihilistic debauches, scrogging and getting scrogged, taking large quantities of mescalin and cocaine, the roller of middle-aged cowboys, the occasional witness of optimum sex tortures and genital mutilation profiles, a blank figure in the tumescent, heat-hazed carscape, silent, unreflecting and alone.
After two years of punching out automobile steering-column shroud toggles Skip threw everything he owned into a beat-up ’75 Plymouth, meandered up America just rolling like a stone nobody throwed – and Omaha, and Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City – until he hung an impulsive right off the interstate thruway and idled towards the fine town of Prescott, Arizona. Half way there he killed a bottle of panegoric and blacked out in a rest-stop; he awoke a buckled mess at the bottom of the roadside ditch, his car and money gone, his nose, ankle and five ribs broken, his left pinkie missing, a portion of his right ear bitten off, and a bad hangover. It took him forty-eight hours to regain the road.
‘The first time we saw Skip? – enough to make a maggot gag. Roxeanne and I are out researching locations in Arizona for an existential Western I never got together, we’re making for the nearest town to pick up some food, come around the bend in the Chev, and there’s this sort of twitching heap by the side of the road. We slow up. Never in my life seen a human being nearer the state of nature. We pull over. Clothes half ripped off, face a pool of blood, body broken, random. I still have the photographs.’
‘Mar was cool but I was shaken up. Kept thinking, uh-oh Popeye, some Trogs have been having fun, let’s get out of here before they have some more, but Marvell said we’d better get him to somewhere and he was right. I put a blanket down for him in back and we like shovelled him in? We thought he might go stiff on us right there but then he started to groan and struggle, even saying things – like “I’m all fucked up . . . I’m all fucked up”. Marvell gunned it into Prescott, see what they could do there, said we could go on to Phoenix if his condition necessitated it. Bastards in Prescott casualty said they couldn’t even take his fucking temperature without State Reg. – and this guy doesn’t have anything, no I.D., no cash. He was like nobody. So it was L.A., not knowing whether we’d have a stiff in back when we got there. L.A. they kind of roped him together again but they still wouldn’t take him in. So we had to.’
‘I got some medic friends along. No problem. Skip was delirious for days, wriggling around in bed, moaning about his father and beercans and stuff. When he came to he didn’t appear to have any recollection of what had happened to him or of anything before it – found myself in there explaining that we were on the planet Earth, spherical body revolving round the sun – the sun? big fire in the sky? Most of it returned to him, though the stuff about his father comes and goes. It was strange, you know? Like bringing a new human being to life, like creating something. You feel strong things then. And, Christ, if you’d seen the way that guy responded to affection. Made you sick to think what his life had been.’
‘He used to tell these postively prehistoric stories about his father? Some animal. Skip’s eyes would practically come out of his head when we told him about our parents – you know, mine are all house-on-the-hill and Marvell’s used to be very heavily Yiddisher – that they were rich, affectionate, indulgent. Totally alien to his thought-style. He was kind of relieved when we told him they were all divorced now and that we only saw them for cash. Marvell explained to him about control, about how you don’t need parents for much or for long, that you phase them out soon. If only Skip could have.’
‘Right. I don’t think he thinks about his earlier life at all now. The father’s still around, however. The authorities forwarded us a letter when we put Skip on Californian Reg. just before we came out here. Shit, what a document. I’ll show it to you. We never handed it on to Skip. It would wreck his head to be taken back to those days again. Want to see someone go really wild? – ask Skip about his father. I don’t recommend it. Anyway, so it goes. It was no sweat for us; we had the cash and the space, he helps around the apartment, helps me on projects, fixes the car . . . He’s happy.’
‘We’re like his mother and father as well as his lovers.’
‘Yeah, and he’s . . . Let’s just say he does things for us.’
16 A Heavy Fire of Eyes
Whitehead had just drained his first glass of Pouilly Fumé, had just turned down Celia’s disdainful offer of a piece of crispbread topped with smoked salmon and, alas, butter, had just agreed with Roxeanne that Capricorns seldom got along with Leos (a proposition that Andy, a self-elected representative of the latter sign, began to pooh-pooh), when a ghastly bark sprang from between his lips, bringing all conversation to a halt.
In a tone of mock-heroic formality Keith begged the picnic’s pardon, and the conversation cautiously resumed, what time awful quickenings started to occur inside his stomach. It hissed, whooped, spat – Keith whistled popular tunes in an attempt to drown its loud awakening; he was moreover obliged to squirm about on the blankets in order to contain the balloon of air that romped friskily round his colon. As the picnickers began actually to raise their voices to make themselves heard, little Keith decided that he wouldn’t wait to see what his metabolism was going to pull on him next. Hardly caring what sort of spectacle he made of himself, he slipped some paper napkins into his pocket, stood up, and looked quickly about him.
‘Saw some interesting – I’ve got to go, to see . . .’
No one stirred as Keith took his leave, as he trotted down the hill under a heavy fire of eyes.
Whitehead picked his way through the outskirts of the spinney, wading through not particularly long grass, his trousers creaking in alarm every time he lifted a foot to clear a log, his high-heels wobbling and bending on each ant-mound and tuft of grass. He walked a tormented half-mile, becoming ever easier-to-please as regards possible sites, but only after he had twice been brought to a kneeling position by the wedge of pain that rocketed from his coccyx to his perineum did he turn and stare back through the tent of nervous leaves. First removing his boots, then his trousers (which required him to lie on the ground and wriggle out of them like a snake shedding its skin), Keith crept in between two dense bramble-bushes and melted backwards against a severed trunk. A tight-chested grunt was followed by a moan of ecstasy.
‘Hi.’
Emerging silently from the trees Skip had come to a halt about five yards away. He now closed that distance and unelongated himself into a crouch, his knees almost touching little Keith’s. A grass stem remained motionless in the corner of his mouth as he said,
‘You like threes, Keith?’
Whitehead would have answered if he could.
‘Threes,’ Skip ponderously repeated, ‘You and two guys. You and a guy and a girl.’
When his voice did appear Keith was, retrospectively, most impressed by its performance. It did not gurgle or whimper, neither did it jump octaves or turn into a corky burp of adrenalin all things Keith couldn’t have blamed it for doing. In fact, it sounded urbane, detached, almost bored.
‘Well, you know, Skip, I haven’t really got strong views on the subject, although of course I try to be tolerant about that kind of thing.’
‘Mm-hm. You like getting head?’
‘. . . Sorry?’
‘Head. Getting blown. Getting sucked off.’
‘Oh! Well, not mad about it. But again of course it’s all part of the basic . . . Yes, I’m for it, on the whole.’
‘Mm-hm. You like to be fucked?’
‘. . . Well, as I say, it’s not one of the things one customarily . . . but you naturally try to keep an open . . .’
‘Mm-hm.’ Skip swayed languidly on his haunches. ‘Mm-hm.’
‘Look – Skip – I don’t want to seem abrupt but do you think we could finish this chat another time?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Another time. I am on the toilet here.’
‘Sure you are,’ Skip said reassuringly. But then he rolled his eyes. But then Skip rolled his eyes so that his pupils disappeared upwards, revealing two sacs of glistening blood at the base of either socket. ‘Oh, sure, man. Another time.’
17 Some Bush
‘I must say, Roxeanne,’ Celia observed briskly, ‘you have got the most marvellous breasts.’
‘But they’re so awfully big,’ said Roxeanne. ‘I think Diana’s are so pretty? Really the perfect size.’
At this Diana curled her lip slightly, as if to suggest that she had heard that line before. Celia resumed.
‘Yes, Diana’s are pretty too. But yours are so enormous and so marvellously . . . solid. Look at mine. Yours seem to point upwards. They don’t sag in the least.’
Roxeanne shrugged, corroborating this. ‘Well,’ she said happily. ‘– Hey, Quentin, is it cool if I take off my pants?’
As the afternoon sun had intensified, had seemed indeed to bear down on them with an invidious strength, Diana and Roxeanne had spent a lot of time – Diana shrewdly, Roxeanne vaguely – wondering which of them would be the first to remove her top. In almost any other company Diana would have had few reservations about taking the lead: her breasts, as Celia had pointed out, may not have been large but they were pretty; they covered a fetchingly disproportionate area of her chest, were smoothly rounded, and rose to neat orange nipples which were soon tinted and hardened by the wind’s gentle ministry. Diana was, nevertheless, banking on Roxeanne’s being a good deal more punctured than they looked under her smock and had even assumed that she must, in the nature of things, be wearing a quarter- or half-brassière beneath it. As it was – having both muttered something about wanting to get a tan – the girls bared their treasures simultaneously. Except Marvell, who gazed on with complacence, and Giles, who was apparently unconscious, the fearsome glory of Roxeanne’s breasts filled everyone present with utter consternation. They seemed to shoot upwards out of her collar-bones (forming a ledge off which, had it occurred to her to do so, she could have not inconveniently dined), U-turned over symmetrical cup-cake nipples, and repaired to the commodious launching-pad of her rib-cage without marking this junction by so much as a crease. Diana had looked at the vast tenement then back at her own diminutive cups with scarcely concealed incredulity, and only on the appearance of Celia’s breasts – depressing items that flatly splayed in the direction of her armpits – did she begin to regain her equanimity.
‘I beg your pardon, Roxeanne,’ said Quentin, ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’
‘If I take off my pants?’
‘Ah, a common ambiguity when colonials are of the company. Now, do you refer to your trousers or to your panties? Which?’
‘How about both?’
Quentin glanced at his wife. ‘. . . Well, old Oofie is in Kuwait, so far as I know. As long as you don’t mind the odd wayfarer or rustic?’ He laughed, holding out his hands. ‘By all means.’
Laughing also, Roxeanne said, ‘They’re very welcome,’ lay back, hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans and eased her seemingly infinite legs out of them. Her (anyway otiose) panties followed. ‘O.K.,’ she concluded, ‘no smart-ass remarks about natural redheads.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Quentin sincerely.
Diana stared hard at Andy as he rolled over, propped his head up on his palms for a few seconds, his face perhaps six inches from Roxeanne’s alabaster midriff, and reassumed his original position. ‘Christ,’ he mused softly. ‘Some bush.’
18 Oh No
Oh no, surely they can’t all be at it already, can they?
Whitehead posed this question to himself while emerging from the spinney and beginning to make his way up the incline towards the picnickers, all by now in varying stages of déshabillé. From his vantage, the sections of bare, mottled flesh lost their outlines in the dusty summer air; as he traipsed towards them their bodies seemed to shimmer and merge, to resolve and separate, to flow together and then to cease. Twenty yards away, quite suddenly, they regained their distinctness, becoming again immobile and discrete. Whitehead slowed with relief.
Then – more – he came to a halt, still unnoticed by the nine further up the slope, and sank, without emphasis and without any sense of irony, to his knees, a tubby supplicant of the warming wind. The keen anxiety he always felt on approaching any group of people now quietly allied itself to a deeper, more settled foreboding. Keith had once, when tranquillized, told a friendly dietician that he hadn’t minded discovering that he was small, fat and ugly half as much as he had minded discovering that he would always be those things, that all of it could never change now. Would it ever – just a bit? Although Whitehead didn’t consider himself a highly-‘sexed’ person – his masturbatory career, for instance, he had come to regard as an increasingly disturbing and ghostly adventure – he felt it highly likely that if he failed to have a definite sexual experience this weekend he would make some sort of attempt to kill himself. It was not release he craved, far less pleasure, merely a token withdrawal of the insult of ugliness. Little Keith picked up a blade of grass and twirled it in his fingers. The action returned blood and self-consciousness to his features, steadying him somewhat. He smiled furtively as he recalled the incident with Skip. Christ. There really wasn’t anything people wouldn’t do any more. Being, so far as he could ascertain, a heterosexual, Whitehead had found the approach dramatically unsexy, but it was quite flattering all the same, and it went to show that a lot was in the air. The weekend would, in any case, be unlike any other.
