The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 5

  But this was precisely the sort of thing I wanted to do! As an illustration of worldly style the profounder for its negligent air, the scene could hardly have been improved upon. It thrilled me to my roots. I do not wish to labor this point about worldliness, but it is almost necessary to do so in order to present it on a scale at all commensurate with its importance to the yokel gaping at the casement ledge. Worldliness to a reared Calvinist is not a vague entity but a specifiable sin of a higher order. The privilege of predestination, of being one of the Elect, carried with it the command to “come out from among them and be separate.” It is only in the light of my long incarceration within that principle under conditions of immigrant inferiority that my drive to reverse the order and get out there and be one of them can be at all understood. A special pleasure adhered to the name on the mailbox of the house into which I was rubbering—Van Allstyne. This meant that the people were Dutch, so my profane relish of their mode entailed no disloyalty to the racial, but only the religious, half of my heritage. They were surrogates, my proxies in the ways of wickedness until I could be groomed for their assumption myself.

  But pauses in the day’s occupation were not always so exquisite. Late one afternoon, I saw my father leave the alley behind a bar and grill we serviced called the Hi Hat (the kind of “swank” place springing up everywhere since the repeal of Prohibition) and head down a gangway to the front door. “Where are you going?” I called.

  “Let’s get a sandwich. I’m parched.”

  Now my father could never get it through his head that the establishments from which we removed refuse were not the same as those to which he had once delivered ice. They had been saloons, in which the iceman was not only allowed but expected to plunk down a pinch of his profits at the bar with his own sort; these were cocktail lounges, frequented by people of the kind among whom I planned to find my portion later. He seemed to see no difference, but would sail into the latter as though he were welcome as the flowers in May, though emitting an air which cleared a generous path on either hand and assured him his choice of stools at the bar at any rate.

  “Plumber and his helper,” he ordered in the Hi Hat, into which I had followed him out of curiosity no less than thirst. It was a snuggery a step or two below street level, with a buttoned-leather interior reflected in a dusk of blue mirrors. In these could be also dimly discerned a cluster of white-collar onlookers far more curious than I, who now wished I hadn’t come.

  “A what?” the bartender asked.

  “Plumber and his helper. Shot and a bottle of beer. A boilermaker. And give the kid a Coke,” my father said, ordering no food whatsoever.

  The next five minutes were something to be got through. I drank my Coca-Cola with my head down, aware of faces wreathed in smiles. These people could slum for a moment on their home ground, how amusing! Hateful people, of whom I would soon be one! Let them wait and see.

  “Ain’tcha got no Heineken’s?” my father asked when given a bottle of domestic lager, and I longed to sink through the floor. I gulped down half my drink and stumbled out, hearing my father turn democratically to a woman in a cashmere coat and inquire the name of the pink liquid she was sipping. In the security of the truck I sat burning with shame till he reappeared. He sauntered blithely into the alley, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, unaware that he had broken every taboo in the social scale.

  Driving to the dump, he chuckled at the memory of the incident and shook his head. “Those people with their fancy drinks. Didn’t even know what a boilermaker was. Never heard of it.” He laughed without malice but rather a good-natured superiority, the reverse of my own view of those café folk as constituting a touchstone of which I must not fall short.

  My father’s spirits mounted as we neared the dump. The road took a long, swooping dip under a railroad viaduct down which he always loved to gather speed for the ascent beyond, pulling on the whistle cord as we flew. The whistle operated on the engine exhaust, emitting a series of ear-splitting blasts that cleared the way far better than a conventional horn. “Hold ’er, Newt, she’s a-rearin’!” my father shouted, as we sailed into the underpass. His face was lit with a smile rendered slightly maniacal by a missing front tooth—a foreshadowing of that derangement which, little though we dreamed it then, was soon to engulf him in actual fact. My mortification had worn off and I was glad to see him happy. His being the reverse of all I planned to cultivate in myself did not prevent my liking him. His elation, no doubt a more primitive version of my own at the Van Allstyne window, suggested the wild diversity of human make-ups. “She’s a headin’ for the stables, Newt!” I chimed ecstatically in, remembering the Chopin. Next came a trolley line, and I felt a thrill of pleasure at the pedestrians gaping from the sidewalks as we tore across the intersection, the truck wide open and the whistle shrieking like mad, and then at the sight of our reflection in the store windows with the name Mid-City Cartage streaming in retrograde, above the slogan I had opposed in vain: Sanitary Sanitation.

  We reached the dump at dusk. It was a mile or so of intermittently smoldering flats and pits along a highway near the city limits. It took no more than a touch of the poet to see in the palls of smoke and sluggish fires a dismally burning hell. I saw it as that region of the shades in which wandered forever the spirits of those who had in life buried their talents and thus been less than they might: the sin of stewardship. The gulls and other scavenging birds were harpies, wheeling over the noxious wastes while silhouetted against the colder fires of the western sky.

  It was a winter sunset, and we were early. None of the other trucks regularly converging here at evening to deposit their loads had yet arrived. “Let’s drop this one and get,” my father said, slamming off the highway with the same high spirits that he had shown all the way over. He swung the truck to the left, stopped, and backed with a jerk into the section where we were dumping those days. His gusto worried me. We were filling a pit from which gravel had once in the past been mined, and if the hazards of maneuvering on fairly open ground were bad enough, those of backing toward a precipice of swill will need no elucidating.

  “Easy,” I said, when he banged to a stop on the exact brink. I was outside the cabin now, guiding him back. “You’re right on the edge, Pa. Put the emergency on!”

  “Hold ’er, Newt!” he called from the wheel in the mood of our recent exchange.

  “Be sure the brake is on before you dump now.”

  He pulled up the emergency and then threw the lever that tilted the body and sent the day’s accumulation sliding out.

  The drop was not sheer where we were, the crater being more saucer- than cup-shaped, as well as by now nearly filled, but that far from eliminated the need for prudence. I watched anxiously till the truck was empty, and, once back on the front seat, felt a sense of relief when my father shifted into gear and shot forward as soon as the body had settled. We went only a foot or two and stopped. We felt the left rear wheel sink. “Damn,” my father said, stepping on the gas pedal. Accelerating only made the wheel spin more futilely, and presently it slued over till the right wheel was in the same trouble. I have spoken of the brink of the pit as though that were clearly definable, but actually it blurred into surrounding ground itself obscured under numerous disposals. It was in these marshy approaches that we were apparently foundering. They could be treacherous as a ditch of snow. My father began to rock the truck as one does in snow, shifting rapidly back and forth between reverse and first, to no avail. There was no traction.

  “Look,” I said, genuinely alarmed now, “let’s just wait for someone to pull us out. Put the brake on and leave her. There’ll be a truck along in a minute.”

  But my father was temperamentally incapable of just sitting and waiting. It was this trait that was responsible for the course matters now rapidly took. He sat for a minute or two with the motor running, and seeing no sign of a fresh arrival, began rocking again in search of a patch of solid ground. The rear wheels only sank deeper into their ruts.
Then suddenly the incessant back-and-forth motion underwent a change: we went back without going forward. Inch by inch the truck slithered down till the front wheels were also off high ground, the nose of the engine hood tipping at the same time ominously skyward. The list of the truck, which had been careening slowly on my father’s side, steepened abruptly, and garbage began coming in the window like water through the porthole of a sinking ship.

  “Jump!”

  This was advice on which I had begun to act before I heard it. My door in its now nearly horizontal position constituted a trap door which had to be flung upward. I opened it and leaped out, my father so close behind me that he landed on top of me, flinging us both to our hands and knees in filth. That seemed to have no bottom here, which was about a dozen feet from “shore” as one instinctively thought of it, at a point where the pit began to fall away rather steeply. The rule might have been supposed the same as that for quicksand, not to struggle, but one didn’t think of that. In our panic we scrambled and thrashed our way toward safety until, suddenly hitting a pocket more liquid than solid, we sank to our chests. In later years I was to read of a play which Samuel Beckett, the author of Waiting for Godot, promised his public, the sole action of which was to consist in philosophical exchanges between two characters buried to their chins in garbage cans. This was precisely the condition in which the following colloquy took place, save for the principals’ being engulfed in a valley of abomination rather than individual containers of it.

  “Think we’ll make it?”

  “Have to hold still, Pa. Wait till help comes.”

  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help,” my father quoted in a dramatic change of heart, at the same time scanning the horizon for trucks. We were at a distance below ground level at which only the tops of vehicles were visible to us, and these only dimly in the failing light. “He will save Israel, and that right early.”

  “Feel around for something solid. But easy.”

  We both did so, worming a foot at a time in a gingerly radius around us. We banked for salvation on the large amounts of scrap metal often mixed among the more perishable matter. Presently my father did touch something firm, a large box or crate, onto which he cautiously stepped. He was suddenly clear above his knees. After an exclamation of pious gratitude, he reached a hand toward me. “I think she’ll hold both of us. Easy now, boy,” he said, as I waded inch by inch across the six feet or so that separated us. I never got to him. Halfway there, my own foot encountered an obstruction, and I found myself standing on something metallic and flat, perhaps the side of a perambulator, or a bed-end. Thus we both had adequate support from which to witness what happened next.

  We had had to call to one another (and my father to the Lord) above the noise of the truck, the engine of which had all this time continued to run. Now it stopped, asphyxiated by refuse, and rolled over on its back. An overturned motor vehicle is an unnerving sight, in some ways more so than a demolished one. Its exposed wheels and underside make it resemble some monstrous but helpless beast, and it is this “helplessness,” paradoxically, that gives it for the moment the look of something other than mechanical. Our truck lay in this position for only a few seconds. Then it began to roll and tumble down the slope in the avalanche it had itself unloosed. The horror of this was followed instantly by a worse. The box on which my father stood was sucked away in the landslide—or perhaps I should say garbageslide—and he disappeared from view, singing the doxology.

  I stood on my own precarious pedestal aghast. “Pa!” I called, at the same time remaining carefully motionless lest even the physical exertion of speech dislodge my support and send me pitching in his wake. The truck had come to a stop some thirty feet below, on its side. Somewhere between me and it was my father. Vague local agitations suggested from time to time his whereabouts, and once I thought I saw a hand waving above the wastes, in salutation or farewell. I was about to call again when I heard a truck pull in, and frantically sent my shouts and gesticulations in that direction. Neither my cries nor my signals meant anything since the occupants of the truck could neither hear nor see me. But they were backing toward us. As I shot another look back into the pit, my father suddenly rose into view a dozen feet away, the song of praise again on his lips, and wearing, like a beret, one half a cantaloupe rind. I gestured toward deliverance, and we both stood motionless watching the rim of the pit. The helper got out to guide the driver back. He saw us, goggled at the sight, and hurried back to the truck for a rope. Within two minutes an end had been thrown to us, and we were being hauled to safety.

  The truck was another matter. Cartage crews always carried ropes and chains to get themselves and one another out of trouble, but one truck could never have pulled another out of that hole, obviously. My father spent the next days phoning excavation and construction companies with cranes and other power equipment, but the estimates for the salvage job he described were so frightful that he dropped this line of thinking and explored that of regarding the truck as lost, to see if the “extended coverage” on his fire insurance policy didn’t take care of it. It didn’t. A panic worse than that in the pit itself overcame him. He paced the house with his hands in his hair; he rolled his eyes to heaven—though protesting, once again, that no kind Providence dwelt there.

  Now occurred one of those grotesque ironies that are too strong for the delicate stomach of Art but in which reality abounds, as though life itself enjoys laughing down the aesthetic proprieties. Yet the resolution it brought was so obvious and simple that we all felt foolish for not having anticipated it. The dump fires themselves in their random course at last reached the truck; a well-oiled engine and a full gasoline tank assured a speedy incineration. One look from the edge of the abyss by the claim investigator, and my father as good as had his check—for full recovery.

  He lost no time in buying another truck, on which he had already set his eye. It was a Mack, sturdier and more up-to-date than its predecessor, of course glitteringly new. It was during my Christmas vacation that he got it, and I went along on the maiden voyage. My father was in the soundest spirits I could remember; the world once more made sense, and as for God, he moved in a mysterious way, etc. For a Christmas present he gave me a ten-dollar bill to buy some books I wanted. As for Moeke, nothing was too good. After our last call on Christmas Eve, he drew to a stop in front of a drugstore with an exceptionally fancy display of toiletries in the window.

  “What are you stopping here for?” I asked.

  “Get Ma a bottle of perfume. Not just anything, but the best, so come on and help me pick it out. I think she’d like perfume. She’s been dropping hints about that lately.”

  It was with these changes in my background that I took my first step into the world known within that background as, simply, “American people.”

  Archie Winkler was a member of my sophomore class who took me home for a drink one afternoon following some whispered aid I had given him in a biology quiz. His house was near the University and not far from the Van Allstynes’; a houseman in a white jacket opened the door for us as Archie searched his pockets for his key. The butler was slight and towheaded like Archie, who introduced him as Hewitt. That could have been his first name, such was the familiarity between them. We proceeded into the drawing room as a trio rather than a pair being ushered there by a servant, gaining its cavernous glories by way of a short flight of stairs over whose carpeted treads I dragged my toes in order to polish my shoes, of whose condition I had become at the last moment mindful.

  “Your mother keeps giving me this fudge about fifty not being too many for the party,” Hewitt said, sauntering between us with his hands in his pockets.

  “She’ll have to go,” murmured Archie, reading some mail he had acquired in the hall.

  This exchange gave me the feeling of breathing air very rare indeed, a sensation heightened by the Manet in whose shadow it was concluded. The canvas had that overly stunning, almost meretricious, quality o
f originals. The attention they call to themselves as such, to the oils laid on by a vanished hand, overcharge the aesthetic experience for the viewer, who oftener sees a fetish than a picture. It was what I saw in the Manet. Either way, it nearly threw the room out of balance, no mean feat among that quarter acre of Aubusson rugs, niched bronzes, and rosewood chairs upholstered in pink brocade.

  “You like it? I picked it up in France two years ago,” said a voice of such low register that I was surprised to see a woman at my elbow. She fastened her scrutiny upon the landscape a moment herself before transferring it to me, and saying, “I’m Mrs. Winkler,” as Archie from a distant bar called my name into the proceedings.

  Thus I had in the span of a few breaths encountered my first butler, my first original and my first globe-trotter—for the references to where she had acquired each object in the room of which she now took me on tour left no doubt of the scale on which Mrs. Winkler pursued her wanderings. You knew Mr. Winkler was dead; she had too much that air of fixed proprietorship that compensates widows left in plenty. Her Hebridean tweeds, Persian scarf, and Dresden teeth suggested one half of the couple seen smiling at ship’s rail in the advertisements illustrating the sunset years of those who have invested wisely, the investor himself in this case having been scissored out of the picture and fallen overboard.