Interference & Other Stories (12 page)

“He didn't wake up!” he shouted. “He didn't wake up!” And he scrambled to his left, walking on the padded kneeler, hand over hand along the back of the pew in front, climbing over knees and legs. In the side aisle he ran past three ushers standing against the wall holding the long-handled wicker collection baskets, past the dark mahogany confessionals, and into the vestibule where a round man with a red face, wearing a green plaid jacket, knelt down in front of the door and held out his arms to him.

“Hey, hey, take it easy, son,” the man said.

Marty dodged and twisted and got by him and ran the three blocks home. When he arrived, his mother was at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

“Where's Daddy?”

“He went to Aunt Elizabeth's, Pumpkin.”

“He's a liar!” said Marty. “He said bad dreams can never kill you, and Grandpa had a bad dream and he died!”

“Marty. Wait a minute. You don't know that for sure. Grandpa was very old.”

His mother was holding both his hands. Although her voice had been gentle, Marty looked in her eyes and thought he saw that she was angry. “I'm sorry I called Daddy a liar,” he said.

“It's all right, Pumpkin. You're confused.”

He thought about what his father had told him and remembered the dream he'd had that night. He and his father were underneath the bleachers at a baseball game. They were looking for something in the weeds and mud. He could see the sunny field and the players through the legs of the people in the stands. There were paper cups and red-and-white popcorn boxes on the ground. “Look there,” said Marty's father, “by your foot.” It was a shiny nickel. Then the bleachers and all the people were falling down on them, very slowly and without any sound, and Marty heard himself shriek and woke sitting up in his bed.

“Suppose that Grandpa had a bad dream,” Marty said to his mother. He thought of how long it took his grandfather to get out of his black chair and steady himself with his two canes. “Like something was going to fall on him? Something big? Then maybe Grandpa was too slow, because he was too old, or too tired, so that he couldn't wake up in time. Mom?”

“I don't know, Pumpkin. I suppose.”

“But Daddy's not old,” said Marty.

 

On Wednesday night Marty overheard his parents talking. “Absolutely not,” his father said, “not after the display he put on at church on Sunday. He's to stay home from school and we'll ask Mrs. Mallon to come over for the day.” Soon afterward his mother came upstairs to tell him.

Thursday morning, the day of his grandfather's funeral, he stayed in bed. The house was quiet. But he heard the tea kettle whistle and the clink of Mrs. Mallon's spoon on her cup in the kitchen. Earlier his father had come upstairs to talk to him. “You know what we're going to do next Sunday?” he'd said. “Next Sunday you and I are going to get up early, get in the car, and drive to Philadelphia for a doubleheader against the Cubs. How about that?”

His father had stood in the doorway in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, wearing a brand-new pair of shoes.

But he doesn't dare tell it in the morning because nobody's ready for it; people are balancing paper cups of coffee between their knees while unwrapping their fast-food breakfasts, or they're rooting around in the cupboard looking for the pancake mix, or they're carefully measuring out spoonfuls of coffee while the water comes to a boil. Besides, if he told it in the morning, the dog would not want to go out, the cat would not want to come in, the rush-hour traffic on the bridges into the city would come to a halt, the little waves on the river would harden into something like frosting or stucco, birds would fall from the sky, and the nocturnal animals—raccoons, opossum, skunks—would stay awake to hear it. No way; he couldn't tell it in the morning.

Noontime seemed the perfect time, shadowless and relatively idle; but if Guy told the story then, the whole day would fall apart like two halves of a cantaloupe, the goopy seeds of everything that was going to happen ruined, exposed like film to the brilliant midday sun. Impossible. He couldn't bring himself to tell the story while the hour and minute hands, posed as if in prayer, pretended to be still, and he doubted anybody else could either.

Dusk is the time to tell a story, he thought. But then Guy noticed how for all the peace that seemed to accompany that delicious hour, it was plummeting into yesterday like an accelerating raindrop above a river and he couldn't bring himself to even begin. All the shops and businesses would remain open and the iron gates unlocked, people would sit immobilized on benches at bus-stops, chicks in their nests would grow desperate waiting for their parents, mice in the walls would crouch there in the first pangs of hunger, no bread would be cut, no plates passed across tables, no gossip about the day would transpire. Farmers coming in from the fields would stop with one foot in each of two plowed furrows, and the landscape outside the commuter train window would never change, nor the reflection of the faces equally available in the glass. On second thought, dusk would be a terrible time to tell the story.

It went without saying that he couldn't tell the story at night, partly because of certain episodes in the story itself, not to mention its themes, but also because walking around the whole day carrying a story you can't tell is wearying to the point of exhaustion, and Guy needed to sleep. Besides, it was a dark story, and at night the dark is too complete to augment with further darkness. The story would disappear, a shadow into shadow, ink into an inkwell, a panther deep into the jungle, a Black Maria idling, headlights off and far from any streetlamp. Unthinkable to tell the story at night. Out of the question.

Guy can only even try to tell the story if he starts in the split-second before first light, the moment before the roosters notice and kickstart the day, drowning him out with their habitual jubilation, along with the last bitter hissing cat brawl of the night, church bells, engines starting, barking dogs, and the first alarm clocks. It's the best Guy can do: “Once,” he manages to say at that exact right moment, but then another day, with neither memory nor forethought, with its trillion stories, breaks.

E
arly morning. Beside the interstate, westbound, on the way to my fathers house, two men stand on a wooden scaffold before a blank billboard. The billboard is new: the bottom a green enamel trellis, the sign space perfect white, not painted over, and with two flood lamps on long pipes that hook over the top. One of the men is quite fat so that the other appears to be tall and very thin. A motorist at this early hour, passing a mile a minute, might be put in mind of Laurel and Hardy. Then acres again of young corn. It is June.

The heavy man, the elder, wears a V-neck white T-shirt and soiled plaid pants. The T-shirt rides up, and nowhere do his shirt and trousers meet. When he bends to pick up a chart, the cleavage of his substantial rump is visible. He smokes a cigar and from time to time white ash falls and remains on the sill of his ponderous belly until he brushes it off. Now he blows smoke at the chart in his hand, tips back his Braves baseball cap, and slowly shakes his head.

Okay, we'll call him Ollie.

Therefore it is Stan who is now on one knee, stirring paint and staring at the multi-layered spatterings of who-knows-how-many previous jobs, the boards of the scaffold itself more beautiful than any sign he can remember. He would like to paint one billboard like this, no lines, no shapes, no words: colors, numberless rosettes of color upon color, suggesting depth, approaching without the facile trick of perspective the truly three-dimensional; a profusion of color that beckons to be entered, the illusion of infinite joy.

No matter what Stan's story is, it must be as grave and unjust, as fearfully aware of its own unwanted end, as anyone's; therefore, because it is morning and he is there, wearing bleached white overalls and a paper cap, he must be thinking this, regardless of what else is on his mind, as he stirs the paint and loses himself to the pasts alluring opalescence.

Ollie is different. He has disguised himself in fat, preferring to suggest that he is unacquainted with the fabulous. Behind his chart, behind his smoke, behind his flesh, what he is thinking would be obvious even to the passing motorists if they were not struggling to awaken or rehearsing conversations in their heads at 60 mph. Ollie's thought springs lightly, full of grace, freer than Stan's because he keeps it well-protected. He has a vision. Like Stan's, it is made of remembered and longed-for paint. Ollie believes in a painting in which every line is true. He has had more years to watch the scaffold thicken with chromatic history, and it doesn't gladden him as it once did. Let Stan believe there's something to be learned from beauty that merely happens by itself. That's what a young man is supposed to think. Old men know better, or at least know different, and are monstrous when they don't.

Ollie flicks a broken cylinder of white ash from his belly too late again, another hole burnt in his T-shirt, the price of concentration. The chart in his hand is the billboard in miniature, to scale, and colorless. The colors are named: Blue 3-1, Red 6-1-2, Yellow 2-1-4, etc. He knows what all these numbers mean, but the mixing is Stan's department.

Stan is a young man passing a familiar way, so Stan is, in a way, his son. There are just two of them, and it is early in the day. Okay then, Stan is Ollie's son.

Now it is just the beginning of morning rush hour. A trooper stations his car across the highway behind a billboard. “LET THE SUN SHINE,” it says. “WNOW,” it says. Stan and Ollie painted it a short time ago. The sun is a smudge through dark gray clouds. As the traffic increases, a helicopter clatters overhead. More people paying no attention pass. Each car says
wish
.

Stan has always liked to paint, but the assignments neither please nor challenge him. There is no green like this young corn in the sun, no blue like the distant mountains, no paint the color of his flesh. Though no one notices, he modifies the prescribed colors, heightening or deepening so that he must take extra care to keep his color scheme harmonious throughout; it is the only way he can maintain his interest. Ollie he cannot understand and wishes he sometimes had another partner, someone less trouble, lighter, not his father.

The background color, a shade of yellow, is ready.

Ollie hums to himself as he blocks the space, enlarging the sketch on the chart and writing in the numbers for Stan. For Ollie this is a fallback career, not what he wanted at all. He wanted to paint white lines. Growing up, he had wanted to be one of those unselfish, unacknowledged legislators, and he practiced day and night so that not a wave, not a ripple, not a wiggle ever marred the sureness of his beautiful boundaries. He painted parking lots and football fields, tennis courts and polo grounds, but he was never assigned a highway, not even a two-lane road. Those were the men whom he respected most—entrusted with peoples lives, they were an elite corps, champions of humanitarian accuracy. The examiners, however, had found him insufficiently concerned with where the roads were going, and it was true that he could not have told you where a single road originated, what it passed, or where it ended. What made Ollie bitter, what seemed most unfair, was that no one had ever told him he needed to know that, and although his greatest pleasure had been to lay down the razor-edged lines of a parking plaza or the boxes within boxes of a tennis court, his pride demanded he resign. So for twenty-five years he has been painting billboards.

Stan is worried. Stirring an extra splash of white into Green 11-7-2 with a narrow wooden paddle, he sees no future for himself in this. More and more billboards, owned by advertising firms, are given over to the lithographed campaigns of cigarette and soft-drink companies. Guy dunks a broom in paste and slaps it up there, three rolls for a twelve-footer, four for a sixteen. Done. A quarter of an hour for a cowboy and his cigarette, a co-ed and her cola. His father says that there will always be a market for the best and puts his hand, holding both a chart and an acrid dead cigar, on his shoulder. Stan knows it's hopeless, but its Ollie's dream and Ollie is his father and he loves him. In other words, he has come to feel that if he doesn't make the same mistakes his father made, he's guilty of betrayal. When Stan is angry he decides his father makes him feel this way deliberately, or at least halfway so, intending to make him feel guilty but convincing himself he is trying to be encouraging. At other times he knows full well his father is only Ollie, fat and aging, doing the best he can, and Stan feels better then, more patient with the few years they have left upon the scaffolding together, executing one sign or another, following instructions.

Traffic begins to thin to midmorning numbers. The trooper leaves his post across the highway, tires crunching gravel, a cloud of dust and exhaust blowing north. The wind is up, flapping Ollie's trousers and blowing Stan's paper cap far off into the matchless green and regular rows of corn.

No different from other people, these two have to be imagined or ignored. What are their aims, their shames, their hopes? Where, among the possible relations of fathers and sons, is the truth of their connection? A traveler, from this distance, at this speed, is allowed, encouraged, perhaps enjoined by charity to consider them and speculate. They are, after all, on a kind of stage:

 

OLLIE:

 

These few precepts in thy memory look

Thou character (they are not from a book

But from my life are most hard wrung

As from a handkerchief of tears). Along

Your voyage may they stead thee well

For they are all is given me to tell:

Eschew false choices, ever find the third

Thing left withheld, occult, unoffered.

Judge not other persons by your wants;