Whipple's Castle (13 page)

“Nothing's the matter with you,” Wood's calm voice said. “You're at an awkward age, that's all.”

“
Awkward!”
He couldn't help giving a bark of laughter that turned into a sob so tangible he felt for a moment he'd have to swallow it to get rid of it. Wood's handsome face was still kind, concerned. Oh no, he thought as Wood's face revealed too much, I'll just bawl. I can't stand it.

Wood drew his desk chair over and sat next to him, then put both hands firmly on his arm. “Horace?” All he could do was nod, his free hand over his eyes. But he was not in pain; as long as he could stay in Wood's room, no matter how much of a baby and a fool he acted, part of him rested.

“Listen, Horace. You know I don't lie, don't you?”

He nodded.

“Well, I'll tell you. Everybody goes through something like you're going through. I did. You're finding out a lot of things you can't explain. Nobody can explain them, but later on you'll just get used to them.”

“What am I finding out?” He thought of the banana-fingered woman outside his window, whose eyes were blue fire, her hair like rats' tails.

“Well, like how they treated Susie. I know how you feel about her, and I do too—”

“You do?” That was part of it, but they were not the ones who surrounded him at night and killed his rest, and looked at him, and breathed cellar cold into his ear.

“I think so,” Wood said. “I mean I think I know how you feel.”

“It was Gordon Ward. You said that.” Gordon Ward, laughing fit to bust, his eyes cruel green pieces of ice. “What did he do to her?”

“They”—Wood hesitated, and Horace shivered—”took advantage of her. They had her drink rum and Coke, and they got her drunk.”

Gordon Ward. Horace saw him in his tan, whipcord fingertip coat, laughing, swaying, standing above the friends who always followed him. No, lurching, really, from side to side in a smoothly graceful, jivey way. Red hair the color of oxblood shoe polish. When he walked, his shoulders moved from side to side—a swagger. The girls said he was very handsome but awfully fast, stuck-up, loud; they talked about him all the time. His father was president of the Leah Savings Bank. There were parties in his home with no adults present. You ought to see him conga, tango, jitterbug. Secret language: “Yousa moooongusha! Do she?” Knowing laughter. Big as a man. Red. “I came I saw I conquered!” Conga line down the third-floor hall at school, stopped by Mr. Skelton. “Come on, Mr. S., grab ahold!” Nerve. Did he or didn't he go out with Miss Dube, the new teacher? 1936 Plymouth convertible coupé. Trojans in the glove compartment. Case of beer in the rumble seat. Girl's panties in his jacket pocket. “Ooops!” Laughter. Stories, rumors. A fight in the locker room, Donald Ramsey with sudden blood all over his undershirt, lower lip like a grape. Giants and their anger frightening and remorseless.

And Susie Davis, so beautiful and fragile. How could she have resisted this power? Those hard eyes that chanced upon her, that cared no more about her than they would a cat on the road, or a snail on the sidewalk. Reducing her tender, immaculate body to their dirty use. A joke. Her kindness reduced to filth, having to do with excretions, ejaculations, liquids, oils, dirt. Laughter. The pink silk that covered her pulled down by whose red hands? “Don,” he heard in the locker room, “got slimy seconds! Bruce got dirty thirds!” Laughter. Laughter. Now Gordon Ward had gone into the service, out of Leah. Only his lieutenants, his inferiors, who were maybe even crueler and dirtier but not as strong, remained.

Yet they were not, and never had been, the ones who crept out of the shadows at night and held their fangs against the quivering skin of his back. Without Wood he would be at the mercy of the ones who lived in his own darkness. If all the human power for evil or for good left Leah, he would be alone with
them.
When Wood left…But then, he thought, it would be a long time before Wood left, and he wouldn't think of his going. Weeks and weeks before he would have to die into fright in a house—in a town—empty of his brother's justice.

One wall of David's room was nearly covered by
National Geo
graphic
maps, held there by thumbtacks. The largest was a Mercator projection of the world, and during the last year he had placed pins with colored heads at the points of German and Japanese advances. For the first half of 1942 he had been more than queasy about the war. America was losing. And he remembered thinking that this was not the way the United States of America and its allies could be treated. America never lost; it couldn't lose. Every lesson he had ever learned had been of victory, and even while knowing it was a foolish idea, he had felt that time should turn back to 1941, so that America's part of the war could start all over again. For a moment this had seemed not only plausible, but inevitable; but of course that moment, which was nearly despair, had passed immediately, and left him again with the sheer reality of upset presuppositions.

Then came rumors of torpedoes that wouldn't explode, of obsolete equipment that turned upon our own soldiers and sailors. And even in the news he began to see reticence, even falsifications of the true state of the war. Were the Russians really holding at Stalingrad? How could those bumbling giants who had frozen stiff at the sight of the little Finns have turned into what
Life
magazine called “A great fighting team”? “
MAGNIFICENT MEN AND WEAPONS GIVE RED ARMY AN UNCONQUERABLE WELL TO WIN
,”
Life
said.

And the landings in North Africa: “
U.S. TAKES OVER NORTH AFRICA
,” the headlines said. But some little things were wrong; there, for instance, was a photograph called “An American Landing Barge,” but the barge wasn't American. Anyone could see that. It was a British LCM. If David Whipple could see that so easily, who was in charge? Was everybody else blind? And if Rommel had been defeated at El Alamein, where was he now? David had no places to put his pins. He could look from the fudgy, gray news pictures over to the colored ads full of P-38s triumphantly strafing tanks, the pilots' faces ruddy and clean. Budweiser beer was responsible for our having Diesel engines. Baby Ruth candy bars gave our soldiers energy, and Lucky Strike Green had gone to war. Van Heusen shirts “for the man behind the man in khaki” were somehow helping. But how many ships had we lost at Midway, or the battle of Savo Island? He wanted to believe, but little things were wrong. He wanted to believe that he could believe.

Everything was in flux; even definitions, positions, the whole reality of this war. Last fall, before Pearl Harbor, after the Germans had begun to roll through Russia, his father said with glee, “Well, I guess old Adolf's going to get old Joe!” And now
Life
said that the only place the war was really being fought, the major battles, the real surge of masses of men and materials, was in “Mother Russia,” and that the Russian tanks were the best in the world, far superior to ours. Guadalcanal was small potatoes, and even in Africa only a small number of divisions were involved.

And now eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds were going to be drafted. Even Wood, who had lived with him in this house all his life, was being drafted into the war.

In Leah and the surrounding towns they had built tall platforms, towers manned constantly by men who watched for enemy planes, telephones handy. David would soon be sixteen, and even he would be eligible to take his turn on the Leah watch-tower.

He had ten .22 Long Rifle cartridges he had saved, and would not shoot, and he saw himself leaning across the sill of his bedroom window as the enemy soldiers crept out of the woods and across the lawn, his Winchester Model 62 pump deadly in his hands, dropping those alien bodies with precise shots to the neck. When those shells ran out, he still had his muzzle-loading shotgun and his under hammer percussion rifle—three deadly shots there—and his old .32 caliber Iver Johnson revolver, ten real, commercially loaded cartridges and eighty rounds of hand loaded black powder cartridges. When the American infantry counterattacked they would find David Whipple in charge, a company of dead Germans or Japs littering the lawn and driveway.

He picked up his .22 and aimed at a rose on his wallpaper. How could he miss? He could hit a squirrel in the head without even thinking to aim; he seemed merely to think the bullet out of the gun and into the heads of squirrels. They always fell dead—a twitch or two and the last electric pulse of the tail. How could he miss a target as big as a man?

A target as big as a man…For a moment he felt like the hunter in the magic forest, to whom all the game suddenly gave itself freely. Men! To be issued such a hunting license, and they were being given by the millions now. Just for a moment, and then he felt himself melting back into the tender child he knew was still inside him. He had done cruel things, but not so cruel as things he had seen his friends do. His little bullet would cause rupture and terrible pain, and terror, but he had always been a good shot, and if a squirrel tried to crawl away wounded, his second shot quieted him immediately. He skinned them and stretched their skins over a board, and his mother cooked them. Thus the having of them was more important than the killing—or almost more important. But men, who cried and were sick to death even without being shot; how would it be to add to that general misery? All the sick and the dead stank up the world, froze and thawed under the eyes of the living.

The only dead man he had ever seen outside of pictures was the Negro janitor of the grammar school, who lay quiet in his coffin in the Community Church among the heavy flowers and the red velvet—all this more official and respectable than his life among the brooms and cinder cans had ever seemed.

And there was his father, down in his wheelchair in the living room, turned sick, nearly insane by the sudden lurch of a car. As tender as gelatin, and he couldn't be put back together again. David could remember when his father was funny, when he was always running and jumping with the kind of lightness and energy David found in himself. A little bullet could end all this, all the world. One little bullet.

He put his rifle back into its rack with the shotgun and the Hilliard, where it rested black and gleaming, like a reptile returned to bask in its nest.

He would grow older, and lose his childishness—this painful shift between toy and weapon—and live in a different kind of world. It would be in the city, among intelligence and music, where death would be in its proper place, dignified and ceremonial. And the first step toward that life would be his attendance at Dexter-Benham next fall. Leah High School had always struck him as a minor league sort of place, essentially unserious, even mindless, where he kept his mouth shut and only wrote for one or two teachers. The others were jailers; they had to be. The tone of the place was set by kids who had no brains but a kind of animal style—like Gordon Ward, Donald Ramsey and their younger underlings. Graceful morons, whose only charms were confidence and strength.

The teachers came and went, sometimes staying, now, only for a few weeks. In algebra he had taken the same test three times already this year, because of new teachers. One got married, and another, a man, went into the service. The third was rumored to have gone out with a senior, and she probably wouldn't last very long, either. She wore broomstick pleats, had lipstick on her teeth, and smiled so wide you thought she'd bite you in her joy. Once she came up beside his desk, and as she leaned down over him to mark his paper she slid the soft inner part of her arm along his cheek, giving him a hard-on he had to pray would go down before the bell rang. There was something demeaning in this too, because he would never have her, and he didn't like her, and she was too old.

He took his meerschaum pipe from his desk and filled it with Rum and Maple tobacco. As he lit it, the worldly fumes of the aromatic stuff made his teeth ache to bite down upon the stem—a kind of pleasurable pain.

Someone knocked loudly on his door, and he knew by the self-conscious insistence of the knocking that it was Kate.

“Enter,” he said, and she opened the door.

“You busy, Davy?”

“No,” he said. She still didn't come in, but stood there in her saddle shoes and bobbysocks, her knees small below her skirt. Her sweater fell in graceful rounds. Even though she was his sister, he saw why she stole the brains of his friends.

“Come in,” he said, and motioned to his leather chair. “Want a butt?” He took an old pack of Chesterfields from his drawer.

“Yes,” she said, but he knew she had something else on her mind. She came in and flopped down in his chair, then took a cigarette and was still and careful as he lit it for her. She didn't smoke in her own room because her mother would smell it.

“Ah,” she said, letting the smoke dribble out in a thin line—an affectation of hers—as she shook her wheat-colored hair out from behind her head. Her nostrils seemed smaller and rounder than anyone else's. It seemed strange to remember, and yet he could, that he had seen her bawl and make ugly sounds. He had even caused her to make such noises.

“Have you ever gotten drunk, Davy?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“No, I mean it, now. Don't lie. Have you ever really been drunk?”

He could lie, and be quite convincing. He considered this, but then realized that he wished for more than any easy fantasy, that business of childhood. Kate was being very serious, for her, so he would be honest too.

“I tried, but I got sick before I really got drunk.”

“Where was this?”

“Mike Spinelli got a bottle of Schenley's from Keith Joubert. He got it from Billy Muldrow, I guess. Billy bought it for him. And some of us chipped in on it and we went up above the Spinellis' garage.”

“What was it like? What did it feel like?”

“I got a little dizzy. It felt kind of good for a while, and then all of a sudden I had to be sick.”