Thirteen Phantasms (40 page)

•

There are those incidents from our past that years later seem to us to be the stuff of dreams: the wash of shooting stars seen through the rear window of the family car at night in the Utah desert; the mottled, multilegged sun star, as big as a cartwheel, inching across the sand in the shallows of a northern California bay; the whale’s eyeball floating in alcohol and encased in a glass fishing float in a junk store near the waterfront; the remembered but unrecoverable hollow sensation of new love. The stars vanish in an instant; the starfish slips away into deep water and is gone; the shop with its fishing float is a misty dream, torn down in some unnumbered year to make room for a hotel built of steel and smoked glass. Love evaporates into the passing years like dry ice; you don’t know where it’s gone. The mistake is to think that the details don’t signify—the flying saucer bars and camellia blooms, rainy autumn streets and lamplight through evening windows and colored lights playing across the waters of a fountain on a warm November evening.

All the collected pieces of our imagistic memory seem sometimes to be trivial knickknacks when seen against the roaring of passing time. But without those little water-paint sketches, awash in remembered color and detail, none of us, despite our airy dreams, amount to more than an impatient ghost wandering through the revolving years and into an increasingly strange and alien future.

•

I came to know the driver of the ice cream truck. We became acquaintances. He no longer sold ice cream; there was no living to be made at it. He had got a penny a Popsicle, he said, and he produced a slip of paper covered with numbers—elaborate calculations of the millions of Popsicles he’d have to sell over the years just to stay solvent. Taken altogether like that it was impossible. He had been new to the area then and hadn’t got established yet. All talk of money aside, he had grown tired of it, of the very idea of driving an ice cream truck—something that wouldn’t have seemed possible to me on the rainy evening of the flying saucer bar, but which I understand well enough now.

He had appeared on our front porch, I remember, when I was ten or eleven, selling wonderful tin toys door-to-door. My mother bought a rocket propelled by compressed air. It was painted with bright circus colors, complete with flames swirling around the cylindrical base of the thing. Looking competent and serious and very much like my ice cream man was a helmeted pilot painted into a bubblelike vehicle on the top of the rocket, which would pop off, like a second stage, when the rocket attained the stupendous height of thirty or forty feet. I immediately lost the bubble craft with its painted astronaut. It shot off, just like it was supposed to, and never came down. I have to suppose that it’s rusting in the branches of a tree somewhere, but I have a hazy memory of it simply shooting into the air and disappearing in a blink, hurtling up through the thin atmosphere toward deep space. Wasted money, my mother said.

Our third meeting was at the Palm Street Market, where I went to buy penny candy that was a nickel by then. I was thirteen, I suppose, or something near it, which would have made it early in the sixties. The clerk being busy, I had strayed over to the magazine shelves and found a copy of
Fate
, which I read for the saucer stories, and which, on that afternoon, was the excuse for my being close enough to the “men’s” magazines to thumb through a couple while the clerk had his back turned. I had the
Fate
open to the account of Captain Hooton’s discovery of an airship near Texarkana, and a copy of something called
Slick
or
Trick
or
Flick
propped open on the rack behind. I read the saucer article out of apologetic shame in between thumbing through the pages of photographs, as if my reading it would balance out the rest, but remembering nothing of what I read until, with a shock of horror that I can still recall as clearly as anything else in my life, I became aware that the ice cream man, the tin toy salesman, was standing behind me, reading over my shoulder.

What I read, very slowly and carefully as three fourths of my blood rose into my head, was Captain Hooton’s contempt for airship design: “There was no bell or bell rope about the ship that I could discover, like I should think every well-regulated air locomotive should have.” At the precise moment of my reading that sentence, the clerk’s voice whacked out of the silence: “Hey, kid!” was what he said. I’d heard it before. It was a weirdly effective phrase and had such a freezing effect on me that Captain Hooton’s bit of mechanical outrage has come along through the years with me uninvited, pegged into my memory by the manufactured shame of that single moment.

Both of us bought a copy of
Fate
. I
had to
, of course, although it cost me forty cents that I couldn’t afford. I remember the ice cream man winking broadly at me there on the sidewalk, and me being deadly certain that I had become as transparent as a ghost fish. Everyone on Earth had been on to my little game with the magazine. I couldn’t set foot in that market without a disguise for a solid five years. And then, blessedly, he was gone, off down the street, and me in the opposite direction. I stayed clear of the market for a couple of months and then discovered, passing on the sidewalk, that the witnessing clerk was gone, and that went a long way toward putting things right, although Captain Hooton, as I said, has stayed with me. In fact, I began from that day to think of the ice cream man as Captain Hooton, since I had no idea what his name was, and years later the name would prove strangely appropriate.

•

It was in the autumn, then, that I first met Jane on that November night in the plaza, and weeks later when I introduced her to him, to Captain Hooton. She said in her artistic way that he had a “good face,” although she didn’t mean to make any sort of moral judgment, and truthfully his face was almost inhumanly long and angular. She said this after the three of us had chatted for a moment and he had gone on his way. It was as if there were nothing much more she could say about him that made any difference at all, as if she were distracted.

I remember that it irritated me, although why it should have I don’t know, except that he had already begun to mean something, to signify, as if our chance meetings over the years, if I could pluck them out of time and arrange them just so, would make a pattern.

“He dresses pretty awful, doesn’t he?” That’s what she said after he’d gone along and she could think of nothing more to say about his face.

I hadn’t noticed, and I said so, being friendly about it.

“He’s smelly. What was that, do you think?”

“Tobacco, I guess. I don’t know. Pipe tobacco.” She wasn’t keen on tobacco, or liquor either. So I didn’t put too fine a point on it because I didn’t « want to set her off, to have to defend his smoking a pipe. It was true that his coat could have used a cleaning, but that hadn’t occurred to me, actually, until she mentioned it, wrinkling up her nose in that rabbit way of hers.

“I keep thinking that he’s got a fish in his pocket.”

I smiled at her, suddenly feeling as if I were betraying a friend.

“Well…” I said, trying to affect a dropping-the-subject tone.

She shuddered. “People get like that, especially old people. They forget to take baths and wash their hair.”

I shrugged, pretending to think that she was merely trying to be amusing.

“He’s not that old,” I said. But she immediately agreed. That was the problem, wasn’t it? You wouldn’t think. … She looked at my own hair very briefly and then set out down the sidewalk with me following and studying my shadow in the afternoon sun and keeping my hands away from my hair. It looked neat enough there in the shadow on the sidewalk, but I knew that shadows couldn’t be trusted, and I was another five minutes worrying about it before something else happened, it doesn’t matter what, and I forgot about my hair and my vanity.

Her own hair had a sort of flyaway look to it, but perfect, if you understand me, and it shone as if she’d given it the standard hundred strokes that morning. A dark-red ribbon held a random clutch of it behind her ear, and there was something in the ribbon and in the way she put her hand on my arm to call my attention to some house or other that made me think of anything but houses. She had a way of touching you, almost as if accidentally, like a cat sliding past your leg, rubbing against you, and arching just a little and then continuing on, having abandoned any interest in you. She stood too close, maybe, for comfort—although
comfort is
the wrong word because the sensation was almost ultimately comfortable—and all the while that we were standing there talking about the lines of the roof, I was conscious only of the static charge of her presence, her shoulder just grazing my arm, her hip brushing against my thigh, the heavy presence of her sex suddenly washing away whatever was on the surface of my mind and settling there musky and soft. There hasn’t been another man in history more indifferent to the lines of a roof.

•

In the downtown circular plaza each Christmas, there was an enormous Santa Claus built from wire and twisted paper, lit from within by a spiral of pin lights, and at Halloween, beneath overcast skies and pending rain, there were parades of schoolchildren dressed as witches and clowns and bed-sheet ghosts. Then in spring there was a May festival, with city dignitaries riding in convertible Edsels and waving to people sitting in lawn chairs along the boulevard. One year the parade was led by a tame ape followed by fezzed Shriners in Mr. Toad cars.

Twice during the two years that Jane studied art, while the town shrank for her and grew cramped, we watched the parade from a sidewalk table in front of Felix’s Cafe, laughing at the ape and smiling at the solemn drumming of the marching bands. The second year one of the little cars caught fire and the parade fizzled out and waited while a half-dozen capering Shiners beat the fire out with their jackets. It was easy to laugh then, at the ape and the Edsels and the tiny cars, except that even then I suspected that her laughter was half cynical. Mine wasn’t, and this difference between us troubled me.

In the summer there was a street fair, and the smoky aroma of sausages and beer and the sticky-sweet smell of cotton candy. We pushed through the milling crowds and sat for hours under an ancient tree in the plaza, watching the world revolve around us.

It seems now that I was always wary then that the world in its spinning might tumble me off, and there was something about the exposed roots of that tree that made you want to touch them, to sit among them just to see how immovable they were. But the world couldn’t spin half fast enough for her. You’d have thought that if she could get a dozen paintings out of that fountain, then there would be enough, even in a provincial little town like this one, to amuse her forever.

Captain Hooton always seemed to be turning up. One year he put on a Santa costume and wandered through the shops startling children. The following year at Halloween he appeared out of the doorway of a disused shop, wearing a fright wig and carrying an enormous flashlight like a lighthouse beacon, on the lens of which was glued a witch cut out of black construction paper. He climbed into a sycamore tree in front of Watson’s Drugs and shined the witch for a half hour onto the white stone facade of the bank, and then, refusing to come down unless he was made to, was finally led away by the police. Jane ought to have admired the trick with, the flashlight, but she had by then developed a permanent dislike for him because, I think, he didn’t seem to take her seriously, her or her paintings, and she took both of those things very seriously indeed, while pretending to care for almost nothing at all.

He ate pretty regularly for a time at Rudy’s counter, at the drugstore. It was a place where milk shakes were still served in enormous metal cylinders and where shopkeepers sat on red Naugahyde and ate hot turkey sandwiches and mashed potatoes and talked platitudes and weather and sports, squinting and nodding. Captain Hooton wasn’t much on conversation. He sat alone usually, smoking and wearing one of those caps that sports car enthusiasts wear, looking as if he were pondering something, breaking into silent laughter now and then as he watched the autumn rain fall and the red-brown sycamore leaves scattering along the street in the gusting breeze.

There was something awful about his skin—an odd color, perhaps, too pink and blue and never any hint of a beard, even in the afternoon.

A balding man from Fergy’s television repair referred to him jokingly as Doctor Loomis, apparently the name of an alien visitor in a cheap, old science-fiction thriller. I chatted with him three or four times when Jane wasn’t along, coming to think of him finally as a product of “the old school,” which, as Dickens said, is no school that ever existed on Earth.

There were more sightings of things in the sky—almost always at night, and almost always they were described in slightly ludicrous terms by astonished citizens, as if each of them had mugged up those old issues of
Fate
. The things were egg-shaped, wingless, smooth silver; they beamed people up through spiraling doors and motored them around the galaxy and then dropped them off again, in a vacant lot or behind an apartment complex or bowling alley and with an inexplicable lapse of memory. The
City News
was full of it.

Once, at the height of the sightings, men in uniforms came from the East and the sightings mysteriously stopped. Something landed in the upper reaches of my avocado tree one night and glowed there. Next morning I found a cardboard milk carton smelling of chemicals, the inside stained the green of a sunlit ocean, lying in the leaves and humus below. It had little wings fastened with silver duct tape. The bottom of it had been cut out and replaced with a carved square of pumice, a bored-out carburetor jet glued into the center of it.