Thirteen Phantasms (41 page)

•

It happened that Captain Hooton lived on Pine Street by that time, and so did I. I rented half of a little bungalow and took walks in the evening when I wasn’t with Jane. His house was deceptively large. From the street it seemed to be a narrow, gabled Victorian with a three-story turret in the right front corner, and with maybe a living room, parlor, and kitchen downstairs. Upstairs there might have been room for a pair of large bedrooms and a library midway up in the turret. There was a lot of split clinker brick mortared onto the front in an attempt to make the house look indefinably European, and shutters with shooting stars cut into them that had been added along the way. Old newspapers piled up regularly on the front porch and walk as if he were letting them ripen, and the brush-choked flower beds were so overgrown that none of the downstairs windows could have admitted any sunlight.

Jane seemed to see it as being a shame—the mess of weeds and brush, the cobbled-together house, the yellowing papers. Somehow I held out hope that it would strike her as—what?—original. Eccentric, maybe. At first I thought that they were too much alike in their eccentricities. I considered her root beer shoes and her costume jewelry and her very fashionable and practiced disregard for fashion and her perfectly disarranged hair, and it occurred to me that she was art, so to speak—artifice, theater. And although she talked about spontaneity, she was a marvel of regimentation and control, and never more so than when she was being spontaneous. The two of them couldn’t have been more unalike.

He was vaguely alarming, though. You couldn’t tell what he was thinking; his past and his future were misty and dim, giving you the sort of feeling you get on cheap haunted-house thrill rides at carnivals, where you’re never quite sure what colorful, grimacing thing will leap out at you from behind a plywood partition.

I could see the rear of his house from my backyard, and from there it appeared far larger. It ran back across the deep lot and was a wonder of dormers, gables, and lean-to closets, all of it overshadowed by walnut trees and trumpet flower vines on sagging trellises and arbors. Underneath was a sprawling basement, which at night glowed with lamplight through aboveground transom windows. The muted ring of small hammers and the hum of lathes sounded from the cellar at unwholesomely late hours.

The double doors of his garage were fastened with a rusted iron lock as big as a man’s hand, and he must have had a means by which to enter and leave the garage—and perhaps the house itself—without using any of the visible doors. I rarely saw him out and about. When I did, he sometimes seemed hardly to know me, as if distracted, his mind on mysteries.

Once, while I was out walking, I came across him spading up a strip of earth beneath his kitchen window, breaking the clods apart and pulling iron filings out of them with an enormous magnet. I recalled our distant meeting behind the ice cream truck, but by now he seemed to remember it only vaguely I took him to be the sort of eccentric genius too caught up in his own meanderings to pay any attention to the mundane world.

He’d started a winter garden there along the side of his house, and a dozen loose heads of red-leaf lettuce grew in the half-shade of the eaves. We chatted amiably enough, about the weather, about gardens. He gave me a sidewise squint and asked if f d seen any of the alleged “saucers” reported in the newspaper, and I said that I had, or at least that I had seen some saucer or another months ago. He nodded and frowned as if he’d rather hoped I hadn’t, as if the two of us might have sneered at the notion of it together.

A spotted butterfly hovered over the lettuce, alighting now and then and finally settling in “to eat the lettuce alive,” as he put it. He wouldn’t stand for it, he said, and very quietly he plucked up a wire-mesh flyswatter that hung from a nail on the side porch, and he flailed away at the butterfly until the head of lettuce it had rested on was shredded. He seemed to think it was funny, particularly so because the butterfly itself had got entirely away, had fluttered off at the first sign of trouble. It was a joke, an irony, a metaphor of something that I didn’t quite catch.

He gave me a paper sack full of black-eyed peas and disappeared into the house, asking after the “young lady” but not waiting for an answer, and then shoving back out through the door to tell me to return the sack when I was through with it, and then laughing and winking and closing the door, and winking again through the kitchen window so that
it
was impossible to say what, entirely, he meant by the display.

•

There wasn’t much I could have told him about the “young lady.” Much of what I might have said would already be a reminiscence. The thing that mattered, I suppose, was that she made me weak in the knees, but I couldn’t say so. And she was entirely without that clinging, dependent nature that
feeds
a man’s vanity at first but soon grows tiresome. Jane always talked as if she had places to go to, people to meet. There was something in the tone of her voice that made such talk sound like a warning, as if I weren’t invited along, or weren’t up to it, or were a momentary amusement, like the May parade, perhaps, and would have to suffice while she was stuck there in that little far-flung corner of the globe.

She wanted to travel to the Orient, to Paris. I wanted to travel, too. It turned out that her plans didn’t exclude me. I would go along—quit work and go, just like that, spontaneously, wearing a beret and a knapsack. And that’s just what I did, finally, although without the beret; I’m not the sort of a man who can wear a hat. I’m too likely to affect the carefree attitude and then regret the hat, or whatever it is I’m wearing, and then whatever it is I’m not wearing but should have. It’s a world of regrets, isn’t it? Jane didn’t think so. She hadn’t any regrets, and said so, and for a while I was foolish enough to admire her saying so. I don’t believe that Captain Hooton would have understood her saying such a thing, let alone have admired it.

I brought around his paper sack, right enough, two days later, and he took it from me solemnly, nodding and frowning. At once he blew it up like a balloon—inflated it until it was almost spherical—and then, waving a finger in order to show me, I suppose, that I hadn’t seen anything yet, he pulled a slip of silver ribbon out of his vest pocket, looped it around the bunched paper at the bottom, and tied it off. He lit a kitchen match with his fingernail and held it to the tails of the ribbon. Immediately the inflated sack began to glow and rocketed away through the curb trees like a blow-fish, the ribbons trailing streams of blue sparks. It angled skyward in a rush and vanished.

I must have looked astonished, thinking of the milk carton beneath my tree. He pretended to smoke his pipe with his ear. Then he sighted along the stem as if it were a periscope, and made whirring and clicking sorts of submarine noises with his tongue. Then waggling his shoulders as if generally loosening his joints, he blew softly across the reeking pipe bowl, dispersing the smoke and making a sound uncannily like Peruvian panpipes. He was full of tricks. He suddenly looked very old—certainly above seventy. His hair, which must have been a transplant, grew in patterns like hedgerows, and in the sunlight that shone between the racing clouds, his skin was almost translucent, as if he were a laminated see-through illustration in a modern encyclopedia.

•

And so one evening late I knocked on the cellar window next to his kitchen door, then stood back on the dewy lawn and waited for him. He was working down there, tinkering with something; I could see his head wagging over the bench.

In a moment he opened the door, having come upstairs. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see me skulking in the yard like that but waved me in impatiently as if he had been waiting for my arrival, maybe for years, and now Td finally come and there was no time to waste.

The cellar was impossibly vast, stretching away room after room, a sort of labyrinth of low-ceilinged, concrete-floored rooms. I couldn’t be certain of my bearings any longer, but it seemed that the rooms must have been dug beneath the driveway alongside his house as well as under the house itself—maybe under the house next door; and once I allowed for such a thing, it occurred to me that his cellars might as easily stretch beneath my own house. I remembered nights when I had been awakened by noises, by strange creaks and clanks and rattles of the sort that startle you awake, and you listen, your heart going like sixty, while you tell yourself that it’s the house “settling,” but you don’t believe it. And all this time it might have been him, muffled beneath the floor and perhaps a few feet of earth, tapping away at a workbench like a dwarf in his mine.

All of this filled my head when I stood on the edge of his stairs, breathing the musty cellar air. It was late, after all, and a couple of closets with lights casting the shadows of doorways and shelves might have accounted for the illusion of vast size. We wandered away through the clutter, with me in my astonishment only half-listening to him, and despite all the magical debris, what I remember most, like an inessential but vivid element in a dream, was his head ducking and ducking under low, rough-sawn ceiling joists that were almost black with age.

I have a confused recollection of partly built contrivances, some of them moving due to hidden, clockwork mechanisms, some of them sighing and gurgling, hooked up to water pipes curling out of the walls or to steam pipes running in copper arteries toward a boiler that I can’t remember seeing but could hear sighing and wheezing somewhere nearby. There were pendulums and delicate hydraulic gizmos, and on the corner of one bench a gyroscope spun in a little depression, motivated, apparently, by nothing at all. The walls were strewn with charts and drawings and shelves of books, and once, when we bent through a doorway and into a room inhabited by the hovering, slowly rotating hologram of a space vehicle, we surprised a family of mice at work on the remains of a stale sandwich. What
did
they make, I wonder, of the ghost of the spacecraft? Had they tried to inhabit it, to build a nest in it? Would it have mattered to them that they were inhabiting a dream?

What did I make of it?
Here’s Captain Hootons airship,
I remember thinking.
Where’s the bell rope?
But it wasn’t his airship, not exactly; the ship itself was in an adjacent room.

The whole thing was a certainty in an instant—the lights in the sky, the odd debris beneath the avocado tree, even the weird pallor of his see-through skin. It had all been his doing all these years. That’s no surprise, I suppose, when it’s taken altogether like this. When all the details are compressed, the patterns are clear.

He had come from somewhere and was going back again. With the lumber of mechanical trash spread interminably across bench tops, and the cluttered walls and the mice, and him with his pipe and hat, he seemed so settled in, so permanent. And yet the continual tinkering and the lights on at all hours made it clear that he was on the edge of leaving—maybe in a week, maybe in the morning, maybe right now; that’s what I thought as I stood there looking at the ship.

It was nearly spherical, with four curved appendages that were a hybrid of wings and legs and that held the craft up off the concrete floor. Circular hatches ringed the ship, each covered with lapped plates that looked as if they’d spiral open to expose a door or a glassed-over window. The metal of the thing was polished to the silver shine of a perfect mirror that stretched our reflections like taffy as I stood listening to him tell me how we were directly under the backyard, and how he would detonate a charge, and one foggy night the ship would sail up out of the ground in a rush of smoke and dirt and be gone, affording the city newspapers their last legitimate saucer story.

•

I didn’t tell Jane about it. There were a lot of things I couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her. I wanted some little world of my own, which was removed from the world we had together, but which, of course, could be implied now and then for effect, but never revealed lest it seem to her to be amusing. One day soon the papers would be full of it anyway—the noise in the night, the scattered sightings of the heaven-bound craft, the backyard crater. There would be something then in being the only one who knew.

And he no doubt wasn’t anxious that the spaceship became general knowledge. There was no law against it, strictly speaking, but if they’d jailed him for the trick with the flashlight and the paper witch, or rather for refusing to come down out of a tree, then who could say what they might do if they got wind of a flying saucer buried in a cellar?

Then there was the chance that I might be aboard. He was willing to take me along. We talked about it all that night, about the places I’d see and the people I’d meet—a completely different sort of crowd than Jane and I would run into in our European travels.

It was then, about two years after I’d met Jane, that I gave up the house on Pine Street and moved in with her. She was free of school at last and was in an expansive, generous mood, which I'il admit I took advantage of shamelessly, and when, in early July, she received money from home and bought a one-way ticket to Rome, I bought one, too, only mine was a round-trip ticket with a negotiable return date. That should have bothered her, my having doubts, but it didn’t. She didn’t remark on it at all. From the start it had been my business—another aspect of her modern attitude toward things, an attitude I could neither share nor condemn out loud.

•

The rest is inevitable. I returned and she didn’t. Captain Hooton was gone, and there was a crater with scorched grass around the perimeter of it in the backyard of his empty house. I might have gone along with him. But I didn’t, and what I get to keep is the memory of it all—the hologram, so to speak, of the ship and of faded desire, having given up the one for the already fading dream of the other.