The Book of Skulls (7 page)

“Not Eli,” I said. “Eli’s straight. Ned.”

Saybrook is flustered. She thinks I may be putting her on. She wants to say that she and my father hope I’m not fucking around with either of them, whichever one may be queer, but she’s much too well bred to tell me that. Instead she slides into neutral chitchat for the prescribed three minutes, gracefully breaks free, goes back to explain to my father the latest twist. I see the Steinfelds conferring in anguish with Eli, no doubt giving him hell for rooming with a snotty Gentile and warning him sternly to keep away from that little
faygeleh,
too, if it isn’t (
oy! veh!
) already too late. Ned and his mother are generation-gapping also, not far away. I pick up stray phrases: “The sisters are praying for you . . . transfer to Holy Cross . . . novena . . . rosary . . . your angel father . . . novitiate . . . Jesuit . . . Jesuit . . . Jesuit. . . .” To one side, alone, is Oliver. Watching. Smiling his Venusian smile. Just a visitor on Earth, he is, is Oliver, the man from the flying saucer.

I’d rate Oliver as the deepest mind of the group. He doesn’t know as much as Eli, he doesn’t give the same appearance of brilliance, but he has a more powerful intelligence, I’m sure. He’s also the strangest of us, because on the surface he appears so wholesome and normal, and he really isn’t. Eli has the quickest wits among us, and he’s also the most tormented, the most troubled. Ned poses as our weakling, our fairy, but don’t underestimate him: he knows what he wants all the time, and he sees that he gets it. And me? What’s there to say about me? Good old Joe College. The right family connections, the right fraternity, the right clubs. In June I graduate and begin to live happily ever after. An Air Force commission, yes, but no combat duty—it’s all arranged, our genes are deemed too good to waste—and then I find an appropriate Episcopalian debutante, certified virgin and belonging to one of the Hundred Families, and settle down to be a gentleman. Jesus! Thank God Eli’s Book of Skulls is nothing but superstitious crap. If I had to live forever I’d bore myself to death in twenty years.

15. Oliver

When I was sixteen I gave a great deal of thought to killing myself. Honestly. It wasn’t a pretense, a romantic adolescent drama, an expression of what Eli would call a willed persona. It was a genuine philosophical position, if I can use so impressive-sounding a term, which I arrived at logically and rigorously.

What led me to the contemplation of suicide was, above all, my father’s dying at thirty-six. That seemed like such an unbearable tragedy to me. Not that my father was in any way a special human being, except to me. He was just a Kansas farmer, after all. Up at five in the morning, in bed by nine at night. No education to speak of. All he read was the county newspaper, and sometimes the Bible, though most of that was over his head. But he worked hard all his short life. He was a good man, a dedicated man. It was his father’s land first, and my father worked it from the age of ten, with a few years out for the army; he brought in his crops, he retired his debt, he made a living, more or less, he even was able to buy forty acres more and think of expanding beyond that. Meanwhile he married, he gave pleasure to a woman, he sired children. He was a simple man—he would never have understood anything that’s happened in this country in the ten years since he died—but he was a decent man, in his way, and he had earned the right to a happy old age. Sitting on the porch, puffing his pipe, going hunting in the fall, letting his sons do the really back-breaking work, watching his grandchildren grow up. He didn’t get a happy old age. He didn’t even get a middle age. Cancer sprouted in his guts and he died fast, he died in agony but fast.

That started me thinking. If you can be cut off like that, if you must live under a sentence of death all your days and never know when it will be carried out, why live at all? Why give Death the satisfaction of coming to claim you when you’re least ready for it? Get out, get out early. Avoid the irony of being chopped down as punishment for having made something of your life.

My father’s goal in life, as I understood it, was to keep to the way of the Lord and pay off the mortgage on his land. He succeeded with the first and came pretty close with the second. My goal was more ambitious: to get an education, to rise above the dirt of the fields, to become a doctor, a scientist. Doesn’t that sound grand?
The Nobel Prize in Medicine to Dr. Oliver Marshall, who climbed out of the tobacco-chewing ignorance of the Corn Belt to become an inspiration for us all.
But did my goal differ in anything but degree from my father’s? What it boiled down to, for both of us, was a life of hard work, honest toil.

I couldn’t face it. Saving money, taking tests, applying for the scholarship, learning Latin and German, anatomy, physics, chemistry, biology, breaking my skull with labors tougher than anything my father had known—and then to die? To die at forty-five, or fifty-five, or sixty-five, or maybe, like my father, at thirty-six? Just when you’re ready to start to live, it’s time to go. Why bother to make the effort? Why submit to the irony? Look at President Kennedy: all that outlay of energy and skill to get himself into the White House, and then the bullet in his skull. Life is a waste. The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die. Me, with my ambitions, my drives, I was only setting myself up for a bigger downfall than most. Inasmuch as I would have to die eventually, I resolved to cheat Death by doing away with myself before I began forcing myself toward the inevitable sick joke that was waiting for me.

So I told myself, age sixteen. I made lists of possible ways to bug out. Cut my wrist? Turn on the gas? Plastic bag over my head? Rack up my car? Look for thin ice in January? I had fifty different plans. I arranged them in order of desirability. I rearranged them. I balanced quick painful deaths against slow easy ones. For half a year, maybe, I studied suicide the way Eli studies irregular verbs. Two of my grandparents died in those six months. My dog died. My older brother was killed in the war. My mother had her first bad heart attack, and the doctor privately told me she wouldn’t last another year, which was correct. All this should have reinforced my decision: get out, Oliver, get out, get out now, before life’s tragedies come even closer to you! You’ve got to die, just like the others, so why stall for time? Die now. Die now. Save yourself a load of trouble. Curiously, though, my interest in suicide rapidly waned, even though my philosophy didn’t really change. I stopped making lists of ways to kill myself. I started planning ahead, instead of assuming that I’d be gone within the next few months. I decided I would fight Death rather than surrender to him. I
would
go to college, I
would
become a scientist, I
would
learn all I could, and perhaps I’d push the border of Death’s country back a little. Now I know that I’ll never kill myself. I’m just not going to do it, ever. I’ll go on fighting to the end, and if Death comes to laugh in my face, why, I’ll laugh in his. And, after all, suppose the Book of Skulls is authentic! Suppose an escape from him really exists! The joke would have been on me, then, if I’d cut my wrists five years ago.

I must have driven four hundred miles already today, and it isn’t even noon yet. The roads here are great—wide, straight, empty. Amarillo is just ahead. And then Albuquerque. And then Phoenix. And then, at last, we start to find out a lot of things.

16. Eli

How strange the world looks here. Texas; New Mexico. A lunar landscape. Why did anyone ever want to settle in this kind of country? The broad brown plateaus, no grass, only twisted scrubby greasy gray-green plants. The bare purple mountains, jagged, sharp, rimming the harsh blue horizon like eroded teeth. I thought the mountains out west were bigger than these. Timothy, who’s been everywhere, says that the really big mountains are in Colorado, Utah, California; these are just hills, five or six thousand feet high. I was shaken by that. The biggest mountain east of the Mississippi is Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, something like sixty-seven hundred feet. I lost a bet about that when I was ten and never forgot it. The biggest mountain I had ever seen before this trip was Mount Washington, sixty-three hundred feet or so, New Hampshire, where my parents took me the one year we didn’t go to the Catskills. (I was betting on Mount Washington. I was wrong.) And here all around me are mountains the size of those, and they’re just hills. They probably don’t even have names. Mount Washington hung in the sky like a giant tree, about to fall and crush me. Of course, here the view is broader, the landscape is wide open; even a mountain is dwarfed by the immense perspective.

The air is crisp and cold. The sky is improbably blue and clear. This is apocalyptic country: I keep expecting to hear the crack of trumpet calls resounding out of the “hills.” Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth, through earth’s sepulchres it ringeth, all before the throne it bringeth. Yes. And death will be stupefied. We go thirty, forty miles between towns, seeing only jackrabbits, deer, squirrels. The towns themselves seem new: filling stations, a row of motels, small square aluminum houses that look as though they can be attached to an automobile and driven off to some other place. (Probably they can be.) On the other hand, we have passed two pueblos, six or seven hundred years old, and there will be more. The idea that there are actually Indians, live Indians, walking around all over the place, blows my Manhattanized mind. There were Indians galore in the technicolor movies I saw every Saturday afternoon for years on Seventy-third Street and Broadway, but I was never taken in, I knew with my cool small-boy wisdom that they were just Puerto Ricans or maybe Mexicans togged out in fancy feathers. Real Indians were nineteenth-century stuff, they had died out long ago, none of them left except on the nickel with the buffalo on the other side, and when did you last see one of those? (When did you last see a buffalo?) Indians were archaic, Indians were extinct, Indians, to me, were in a class with the mastodon, the tyrannosaurus, the Sumerians, the Carthaginians. But no, here I am in the Wild West for the first time in my life, and the flat-faced, leather-colored man who sold us our lunchtime beer in the grocery store was an Indian, and the roly-poly kid who filled our gas tank was an Indian, and those mud huts on the far side of the Rio Grande there are inhabited by Indians, even though I can see a forest of television aerials rising above the adobe rooftops. See the Indians, Dick! See the giant cactus plants! Look, Jane, look, the Indian drives a Volkswagen! Watch Ned cut the Indian off! Listen to the Indian honk his horn!

I think our commitment to this adventure has deepened since we reached the desert’s edge. Certainly mine has. That terrible day of doubt, while we were driving across Missouri, now seems as far in the past as the dinosaurs. I know now (how do I know? how can I say?) that what I have read in the Book of Skulls is real, and what we have come to find in the wastes of Arizona is real, and that if we persevere we will be granted that which we seek. Oliver knows it, too. A weird freaky intensity has surfaced in him these last few days. Oh, it was always there, that tendency toward monomania, but he did a better job of concealing it. Now, sitting behind the wheel ten or twelve hours a day, needing virtually to be forced to stop driving, he makes it altogether clear that nothing is more urgent for him than to reach our destination and submit himself to the disciplines of the Keepers of the Skulls. Even our two unbelievers are catching the faith. Ned oscillates between absolute acceptance and absolute rejection, as ever, and often holds both positions simultaneously; he mocks us, he needles us, and yet he studies maps and mileage charts as though he, too, is seized by impatience. Ned is the only man I know capable of attending a mass at sunrise and a black mass at midnight, all the while feeling no sense of incongruity, devoting himself with equal fervor to each rite. Timothy still remains aloof, a genial scoffer, protesting that he’s merely humoring his far-out roommates by undertaking this pilgrimage—but how much of that is just a front, a show of proper aristocratic coolness? More than a little, I suspect. Timothy has less reason than the rest of us to hunger after metaphysical life-extensions, because his own life as presently constituted offers him such an infinity of possibilities—his financial resources being what they are. But money isn’t everything, and you can do only so much in the standard threescore and ten, even if you’ve inherited Fort Knox. He’s tempted by the vision of the skullhouse, I believe. He’s tempted.

By the time we reach our goal, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, I think we’ll have drawn together into that cohesive four-sided unit that the Book of Skulls calls a Receptacle: that is, a group of candidates. Let’s hope so. It was last year, wasn’t it, that so much fuss was made over those midwestern students who carried out a suicide pact? Yes. A Receptacle can be considered to be the philosophical antithesis of a suicide pact. Both represent manifestations of alienation from present-day society. I reject your loathsome world entirely, says the member of a suicide pact; therefore I choose to die. I reject your loathsome world entirely, says the member of a Receptacle; therefore I choose never to die, in the hope that I will live to see better days.

17. Ned

Albuquerque. A dreary city, miles of suburbs, an endless string of gaudy motels along Route 66, a pathetic, schlocky, touristy Old Town down at the far end of things. If I have to have tourist-west, let me have Santa Fe, at least, with its adobe shops, its pretty hilltop streets, its few genuine remnants of the Spanish colonial past. But we aren’t going that way. Here we part from U.S. 66, finally, and roll southward on 85 and 25 almost to the Mexican border, down to Las Cruces, where we pick up Route 70 that shoots us toward Phoenix. How long have we been driving now? Two days, three, four? I’ve lost all track of time. I sit here hour after hour watching Oliver drive, and occasionally I do some of the driving myself, or Timothy does, and the wheels impinge on my soul, the carburetor fires in my gut, the interface between passenger and vehicle dissolves. We are all part of this snorting monster rolling westward. America lies sprawling, gassed, behind us. Chicago is only a memory now. St. Louis is only a bad dream. Joplin, Springfield, Tulsa, Amarillo—unreal, lacking in substance. A continent of pinched faces and small souls back there. Fifty million cases of severe menstrual cramps erupt to the east, and we couldn’t care less. A plague of premature ejaculation spreads through the great urban metropolises. All heterosexual males over the age of seventeen in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Tennessee have been smitten by an outbreak of hemorrhaging hemorrhoids, and Oliver drives on, giving no damns.

I like this part of the country. It’s open, uncluttered, vaguely Wagnerian, with a good campy westernness about it: you see the men in their string ties and ten-gallon hats, you see the Indians sleeping in the doorways, you see the sagebrush swarming up the hillsides, and you know it’s
right,
it’s all the way it’s supposed to be. I was here the summer I was eighteen, mostly in Santa Fe, bunking with an agreeable weather-beaten suntanned fortyish dealer in Indian artifacts. A member of the Homintern, he. A card-carrying official of the International Pervo-Devo Conspiracy. They say it takes one to tell one, but in his case it took no great amount of telling: he did the lisp thing, the accent thing, he was plainly a squaw. He taught me, among much else, how to drive a car. All during August I made his collecting rounds for him, visiting his suppliers; he buys old pots for five bucks, sells them to antiquity-minded tourists for fifty. Low overhead, quick turnover. I undertook solitary terrifying voyages, hardly knowing my clutch from my elbow, driving down to Bernalillo, up to Farmington, over to the Rio Puerco country, even making a vast expedition out to Hopi, going to all sorts of places where, in violation of local archaeological ordinances, the farmers raid unexcavated ruined pueblos and winkle out salable merchandise. Also I met a number of Indians, many of them (surprise!) gay. I remember fondly a certain groovy Navaho. And a swaggering buck from Taos who, once he was sure of my credentials, took me down into a kiva and initiated me into some of the tribal mysteries, giving me access to ethnographical data for which many scholars no doubt would sell their foreskins. A profound experience. A mind-blower. I mean to tell the world that it’s not just your asshole that gets broadened, when you’re gay.

Trouble with Oliver this afternoon. I was driving, rocketing down 25 somewhere between Belen and Socorro, feeling ballsy and light, for once the master of the car and not just something caught in the machinery. Half a mile ahead I spotted a figure, walking on our side of the road, evidently a hitchhiker. On impulse, I slowed. A hitcher, right: more than that, a hippie, the genuine 1967 article, long scruffy hair, sheepskin vest over bare chest, stars-and-stripes patch on the seat of his tie-dyed jeans, knapsack, no shoes. I suppose heading toward one of the desert communes, trudging alone from nowhere to nowhere. Well, in a sense we were heading toward a commune, too, and I felt we could accommodate him. I braked the car almost to a halt. He looked up, maybe flashing quickly on paranoia, saw
Easy Rider
once too often and was expecting a blast of good Amurrican gunfire, but the fear went out of his face when he saw we were kids. He grinned, gap-toothed, and I could almost hear the mumbled little courtesies, like I mean, wow, sure is cool of you to pick me up, man, like I mean, you know, it’s a long walk, the straights around here won’t help you nohow, man, when Oliver said, simply, “No.”

“No?”

“Keep on driving.”

“We’ve got room in the car,” I said.

“I don’t want to take the time.”

“Christ, Oliver, the guy’s harmless! And he gets maybe one car an hour out here. If you were in his position—”

“How do you know he’s harmless?” Oliver asked. By now the hippie was less than a hundred feet to the rear of where I’d stopped. “Maybe he’s part of Charles Manson’s family,” Oliver went on quietly. “Maybe his thing is knifing guys who sentimentalize hippies.”

“Oh, wow! How sick can you get, Oliver?”

“Start the car,” he said, in his ominous flat prairie voice, his tornado’s-a-comin’ voice, his out-of-this-town-by-nightfall-nigger voice. “I don’t like him. I can smell him from here. I don’t want him in the car.”

“I’m driving now,” I answered. “I’ll make the decisions about—”

“Start the car,” Timothy said.

“You, too?”

“Oliver doesn’t want him, Ned. You aren’t going to impose him on Oliver against his wishes, are you?”

“Jesus, Timothy—”

“Besides, it’s my car, and I don’t want him either. Put the foot on the gas, Ned.”

Out of the back came Eli’s voice, soft, perplexed. “Wait a second, guys, I think we have a moral issue to consider here. If Ned wants—”

“
Will you drive?
” Oliver said, in as close to a shout as I’ve ever heard from him. I glanced at him in my rear-view mirror. His face was red and sweat-beaded, and a vein stood out terrifyingly on his forehead. A manic face, a psychotic face. He might do anything. I couldn’t risk a blowup over one hitchhiking hippie. Shaking my head sadly, I put my foot to the accelerator, and, just as the hippie was reaching to open the door on Oliver’s side in back, we blasted off with a roar, leaving him standing alone and astonished in a cloud of exhaust fumes. To his credit, he didn’t shake his fist at us, he didn’t even spit at us, he just let his shoulders slump and went on walking. Maybe he was expecting a rip-off all the time. When I could no longer see the hippie, I looked at Oliver again. His face was more calm now; the vein had receded, the color had ebbed. But there was still a weird chilling fixity about it. Rigid eyes, a muscle flickering in his pretty-boy cheek. We were twenty miles down the highway before the electricity had stopped crackling in the car.

Finally I said, “Why’d you do that, Oliver?”

“Do what?”

“Force me to screw that hippie.”

“I want to get where I’m going,” Oliver said. “Have you seen me pick up any hitchhikers so far? Hitchhikers mean trouble. They mean delay. You would have taken him down some side road to his commune, an hour, two hours off the schedule.”

“I wouldn’t have. Besides, you complained about his smell. You worried about getting knifed. What was that all about, Oliver? Haven’t you picked up enough paranoid shit yourself on account of
your
long hair?”

“Perhaps I wasn’t thinking clearly,” said Oliver, who had never thought any other way but clearly in his life. “Perhaps I’m in such a rush to get a move on that I say things I don’t mean,” said Oliver, who never spoke except from a prepared script. “I don’t know. I just had this gut feeling that we shouldn’t pick him up,” said Oliver, who last gave way to a gut feeling when he was being toilet-trained. “I’m sorry I leaned on you, Ned,” said Oliver.

Ten minutes of silence later he said, “I think we ought to agree on one thing, though. From here to the end of the trip, no hitchhikers. Okay? No hitchhikers.”