The Hair of Harold Roux (31 page)

“Goodbye, sir, and thank you.”

“Goodbye.”

“Good luck in college, Robert.”

“Thanks,” Robert answered with a smile that acknowledged their moments of understanding.

Then he was left alone with Mary, standing next to the raffish, oily Indian Pony. She had removed her church-going hat, but still wore her fancy church dress. She was pretty and immensely valuable, but in these clothes she seemed not to belong to him. Nylon stockings, slip, garter belt, panties, bra —those feminine things, official as badges, had an erotic effect upon him that felt puerile, as though she were an object to strip. It was not the way he wanted her; he wanted her light and free, companionable, riding behind him on his motorcycle, not a victim but part of a mutual joy. She looked at him as if he were a wonder, with the half-smile of love, and kissed him awkwardly as he stood there in the limbo before going. His hands came around her automatically and he felt the strap that ran across her back, with its hooks he would undo like Houdini when the time came.

Her joy in him seemed to take too many things for granted—either that or he couldn’t understand it at all. In a way it was nice that she thought they sinned when they petted, but again that was not what he really wanted. He was depressed by the hopeless task of changing her. No, of course it was not hopeless. It was a dangerous and terrible responsibility because he would have to create an alternate world for Mary: ceremonies, rituals to contain and control all the dark
powers of her past. He kissed her and said he would see her Monday evening; then, with the sense of emotion postponed, he mounted his Indian Pony and rode away, feeling relief in the sudden wind caused by his speed. He rode one block north in celebration of his lie to her, then turned east back toward the university. Out of the small city, on the highway again, he wondered why he had had to come along and complicate Mary Tolliver’s life. She should marry a nice Catholic boy and have many bambinos. Then her father, that gaunt, tragic stalk of a man, would at least not have been betrayed by both of his children. It was the man’s clenched face Allard retained most vividly from the Mass, the yellowed face weeping for a wife who had died horribly and young.

He pushed the old motorcycle up to the limit he had decided was the very edge of danger. Stone walls, trees, farms, hills, rushed at their varying speeds backward into his past. So we don’t understand, he thought as his hard body cleaved the wind. Never mind; we are compelled to use those powers we have the power to use.

Aaron gets up from his desk and walks through his house, going nowhere, knowing that he will only turn around at a wall or the end of a hallway and come back to his study. But in the kitchen he sees his crash helmet on the shelf. Now what? he asks himself as he puts on his helmet and wind-breaker. It would be safer right now if he left the motorcycle alone, entirely alone. But, in the garage, the Honda starts at the first kick and he is off, gravel flying, relaxed, boring on through the heavy pressure of the air. Soon he is on a narrow country road, leaning into curves, taking the curves with no movement of his handlebars. The engine hums beneath him, air whistles past his ears, the globe turns below him. He seems to know where he is going, yet he is not prepared to name that destination. The time is not now. There must be a corridor through these beautiful trees, a different voice speaking.

M
y name is Allard Benson, and I here confess that I have been in love with a certain kind of machine for most of my life. Love is love, and is not cured by the disapproval of love’s object. I disapprove of all machines. Filthy, dangerous, what they do is remove us from our true lives, speed us loose from what we would be content to be—walking animals upon the slow and beautiful earth. But we are cursed with presumption, and never rest from creating false new worlds.

My first two-wheeled machine, which I possessed at the age of four, was a strange sort of bike with pedals on the front axle—a tricycle-like thing with only one wheel on the back. Remember that I don’t use the word “love” lightly; even though I find the word impossible to define, neither can I define in any logical way my continuing relationship with machines that have caused me to break bones and lose skin. It’s not reasonable at all. In airplanes, for instance, which have been proven as safe as our general lives, safer than the bathroom, the basement or the bed, I’m in anxiety, as nervous as a cat—that animal who, like me, feels control to be safety in a world of dangers that must be deftly avoided. Who controls those great silver monsters? But then one’s control over a two-wheeled vehicle is pretty nominal at best, and when that modicum of control decides to disappear, nothing could be less visible. I once rolled a measured hundred feet down East Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena—an unforgettable
experience in non-control. One second I was riding, and the next I was six to eight feet in the air, watching my motorcycle’s taillight pass beneath me. A rather classic wing-ding. Both the headlight and the taillight were broken in that accident. I tucked (a witness later told me that I resembled an oversized basketball). In that accident I lost some skin, blood, and the position of one kneecap, but not this weird and continuing fascination.

It is not for me to analyze this fascination. What I will do is remember one warm spring night when this love ran true, a night of no particular significance except that I have never forgotten it.

I was twenty-one, an undergraduate who hadn’t the slightest idea what he wanted to do in life except that someday it must change into meaning—become heroic, dedicated, disciplined by style. I was on the GI Bill, drifting from one school to another and finding them more or less the same. At the time I was at the University of New Hampshire; next year I’d be at the University of Chicago. An aimless time, remembered without much nostalgia at all. There were girls to whom, I’m afraid, I could be attentive and then turn cruelly indifferent. I was writing my first novel, but hadn’t yet come to believe it might be publishable, so even that possibility of a future seemed as unrealistic as any other daydream.

My motorcycle was an ancient Indian Pony, 1937 model, a two-cylinder four-stroke with a small frame, for its time, but quite heavy compared to modern motorcycles. It had the old, wide, longhorn handlebars, and the saddle was farther back and lower than modern ones, so that you had the feeling of being down in, of driving a beast whose knobs and dials rose up around you. The clutch was foot-operated and the gearshift was manual—a knob on a stick, as in a car. Your left hand controlled the accelerator, and your right, the spark. Anyone who rides a motorcycle now will understand how archaic this arrangement was.

My main problem was tires. These were clincher rims, and this kind of tire was extremely scarce. My rear tire was
smooth but the casing was fairly healthy; my front tire was just plain weary and sick. It may have been on the wheel for more than ten years. The rubber was so tacky my fingers would stick to it and come away with a kissing noise, and every few miles the tire would lean sideways somehow, so that it actually rubbed against the fork. When this happened I’d stop, get off, and kick it back into shape again. Needless to say, I hadn’t driven the motorcycle very fast.

But this warm evening a friend came into my dormitory room and said that he’d heard two guys saying that a dealer in Sanford, Maine, had two of these tires, and they were going up to buy them. At the moment, however, they were in a poker game, so I’d have a head start. It was a Friday night. I’d thought of going home for the weekend only because I hadn’t been home for months and knew my parents would feel the world more in order if they could lay their eyes on me once in a while. Not that they were insistent at all; their child, though in their eyes in inevitable ways still a child, was a veteran who had been on the other side of the world in the aftermath of a great war. Within ten minutes I’d strapped my gear on the Indian Pony and taken off for Sanford.

It was one of those evenings when the air is so balmy, so benevolent, especially after a New Hampshire winter, that one feels perhaps the human metabolism evolved correctly for this planet after all. And yet this benevolence of nature usually presages some violent reminder—a “weather breeder,” it’s called. Huge altocumulus clouds rose up along the horizon against the warm blue, and in the distance what looked like a continuation of clear sky would flash pink, all in ominous silence, and that deceptive blue would turn out to be the vast canyon side of another cloud.

I had thirty miles to go, with stops to reshape my front tire. I wasn’t at all sure that the dealer in Sanford would sell me the tires—if he really had them—or if my sick tire would get me there in the first place. I had enough money to buy the tires, but very little more.

So I headed for Dover, five miles away, past the new
green of the maples alongside the blacktop road, then to Rochester, nine more miles, and then into Maine, being very attentive to my front tire, riding carefully, with a brittle, nervous attention to bumps in the road. Sixteen miles on Maine 202, and I came into Sanford just at dusk. Before I’d even stopped to ask for directions, there was the place—a small shop attached to the owner’s house. He was there in his shop, even at this hour, and yes, he did have the tires. He even helped me change the front one, a terrible job which took us over an hour. The old tire came apart along the bead when we pried it off. We marveled. “Must have been going on habit,” the dealer said. He was a young man, skinny, a motorcycle lover. He charged me nothing for helping me change the tire.

And since everything here is true, I have to say that the two poker players did turn up, before I left, just as we were roping the other new tire over my saddlebags. They were disappointed, but knew of no collusion. “First come, first served,” said the skinny mechanic. And then I was off, the new front tire crisp and solid. It was ten o’clock, and I was headed for my home in Leah, New Hampshire, about a hundred miles away, all on winding blacktop roads, through valleys and wild places, through towns that would soon be going dark, heat lightning and the balmy spring night. The danger of my machine had suddenly lessened a degree, so I could play with a little speed, lean like a flier into the long turns and let the earth tilt. I don’t remember sound except for the hiss of the wind, and even that was gentle, controllable by a movement of my left wrist.

I passed through the country towns of Northwood, Epsom, Gossville, Chichester, and then on the heights above Concord I came upon a scene in the road that worked perversely toward that night’s pleasure—I don’t know how. Several people stood in the road, and a policeman swung a red flashlight. I’d slowed down, and was directed on past. But not before I’d seen beneath the weak headlights of an old car—a Hudson Terraplane with pre-Sealed Beam headlights—an old
woman, flat on her back on the road as if laid out for her funeral. Her hair and face were gray as stone, and her hat, a round black thing, sat as solid as a pot beside her head. Then I had passed, on down the long hill into Concord, across the treacherous bridge over the Merrimack River. That was a bridge to make any rider shudder; if you fell on the metal gridwork of its roadway it would shred you like a carrot on a cheese grater.

In Concord I stopped at the all-night diner for coffee and a hamburger. No, I had a fried egg sandwich, which reveals itself into memory because of the big black grains in the pepper shaker; I see them scattered across the white.

In Penacook I found an all-night gas station and filled my tank. The old man who ran it at night turned out to be another motorcycle lover, who told me how he rode belt-driven Indians in 1926, on roads that were mostly gravel. “How far you riding tonight?” he asked. It was past midnight. “Leah,” I said, conscious of envy. “That’s a long ride. Hope the rain don’t catch you,” he said. Still those thunderheads moved along the horizon, flashing with no sound. I did have an army poncho in my duffel bag, but that wouldn’t help much. “You got a chance,” he said, and I kicked down the starter, set the spark to its smoothest rumble and went on north.

In Boscawen, by the big white church, I bore left, following Route
4
into the hills below Kearsarge, through Salisbury and Salisbury Heights—towns of a few old houses, dark now. Few cars were out. Then Andover and Potter Place, small settlements along what was mostly woods, with the branches of the trees flicking, mile after mile, over my head. The emptiness of the woods is always close on a motorcycle, because if you slow or stop you are alone and naked, already in the dark and part of it. Not like in a car, which is a room. Only your speed and the wavery hole your headlight cuts ahead of you gives some slight edge of independence from the night. It’s risky; the trees seem to reach toward you as you pass.

Between South Danbury and Danbury a car followed me
for several miles, and with this audience I was more conscious of my graceful lean into the curves, what a daring figure I must seem as I pierced the darkness. At that age everything is referential; all lights are eyes. Perhaps a lovely girl drove that car, and measured the breadth of my shoulders. But at Danbury the car turned off toward Bristol, to the east, and I was alone again, at speed. Grafton, Canaan, Enfield, the long, curving descent into Mascoma by the lake, then the long hills above Leah.

Sometime in the morning I pulled up, stiffened by the wind but still hearing its rhythms in my ears, at the Welkum Diner in Leah, no more than a few blocks from my home. Home was a place I didn’t especially want to be—a destination too much like a starting place, unworthy of my journey. As I had a cup of coffee in the diner, my Indian Pony waited upon its kickstand at the curb. Dark red, oily and warm, it had freed for me all those deserted miles, and carried me across a whole state. I didn’t want to stop, but I had nowhere else to go that night.

And of course I thought then that my real life hadn’t yet begun—if there ever was to be such a beginning. GI Bill bum that I was, I wasn’t sure at all, then. But there is that one spring night my Indian Pony, imperfect yet faithful, carried me past certain borders I cannot forget—small triumphs and real dangers. If all the going of one’s life could reverberate like that down through the years.