Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

At twilight we checked into a motel near Barstow. The boys chased each other about the room and began wrestling. I stepped outside and waited until they’d wrestled themselves into a stupor.

Early the next morning I woke them and said, “Shower and pack. We’re going to the Grand Canyon. It’s ten miles deep and full of snakes and panthers.” They cheered. I left for the motel office. The sunlight was brassy, the air was cool. Big trucks running down the highway pulled at me. Get out in the energy. Go.

Behind the motel desk stood a woman about fifty, with a red loaf of hair, like body and blood mashed into her personal fashion statement. While figuring my bill she said, “Going home for the holidays?”

“I’m delivering my sons to their mother. We’re divorced, passing them back and forth. I’m doing it for the first time.” She looked up, startled. I was startled, too. I’d been babbling, as if I’d owed her a confession in exchange for what she offered in her hair. It got to me, bespeaking desire beyond consummation on this planet, bulging upward, packed and patted into shape, bursting with laborious and masturbatory satisfaction, like a bourgeois novel, the kind you live with for days or weeks, reading slowly, nourished by its erotic intimacies and the delicious anxieties of a plot, wishing it would never never end.

“I once drove my Labrador from Berkeley to Sacramento,” I said, “and gave it to a family that could take better care of it than I could. Then I had to sit by the side of the road for half an hour, until I could stop crying and drive.”

“You’re talking about a dog?”

“Yes. A Labrador retriever. Now I’m going to New York.”

“You’re going a funny way to New York.”

“We’ll stop at the Grand Canyon and have some fun. I’m taking a southern route to avoid bad weather.”

She stood very still, as my meaning sifted down and settled inside her like sediment in a wine bottle. I said again, “Bad weather.” Her head dipped, the red dome a second head, making a slow double bludgeon of assent. “But it’s better than none at all,” she said.

“That’s a fact.”

“It is,” she said. We smiled together. She was a nice lady. She had nice hair. I yearned to be within its fold. I yearned to be taken into her hair.

I returned to the room. The boys hadn’t showered. Their clothes were flung about everywhere. They sprawled on the beds, gleaming with violence that had ceased when they heard the key in the lock. Like my opponents in a rough game, evil half smiles on their faces, they waited for my move. I thought of strangling them, but nothing in me wanted to move. It was plain they didn’t give a shit about the Grand Canyon.

At a place called Truck Stop, I ate lunch. Truckers leaned toward each other, eating pills, coffee, and starch. They looked fat, vibrant, seething with bad health.

Checked into a motel in Manhattan, Kansas, and got the last room. Though it was midnight, people were still arriving. The highway was loud throughout the night. American refugees seek the road, the road.

Infinitely clear sky and prairie of Kansas. I felt vulnerable, easily seen, as in the eye of God.

A farmer came into the diner. He wore a baseball cap with a long bill. He was very tanned and dusty and moved ponderously with the pain of this long day. His hands were much bigger than the coffee cup in front of him. He stared at it. In his eyes, no ideas, just questions. “What’s this?” he asked. “A coffee cup,” he told himself. “What do you do with it?” he asked. He told himself, “Pick it up.” Between the first and second question, no words. No words even in the questions.

A young couple sat opposite of me. The woman was long and pale. Her husband was not as tall as she. His double-breasted suit and dark shiny tie were very ugly. He’d tried to dress impressively, perhaps for an official occasion. She wore a hand-knit gray sweater, setting off her lovely pale complexion. She could have improved her husband’s taste, but was maybe indifferent to it. He had thin, colorless hair and red-rimmed, obedient eyes. They flicked nervously in her direction, hoping for a command. He suggested a small-town bureaucrat whose every action is correct and never spontaneous, but he was in love with his wife and lived in agonizing confusion. He looked to her for sympathy. She offered none. She had what she wanted in life. It was this man, or such a man. She made him feel ashamed of himself, his need of her, specifically her.

New York. Mother’s apartment. Moritz visits, tells a story. One freezing morning everybody had to go outside and watch a man be hanged. He’d tried to escape the previous night. Beside Moritz stood a boy, the man’s brother. “His nose became red. It was so red,” said Moritz. “That’s what I remember.” Moritz’s eyes enlarge and his voice becomes urgent, as if it were happening again. His excitement isn’t that of a storyteller. He can recite passages from Manfred in Polish, but he isn’t literary. The experience is still too real to him. His memories are very dangerous. He fears another heart attack, but he tells about the camps. It should be remembered as he tells it. Freezing morning. The boy’s red nose.

Alone, you hear yourself chewing and swallowing. You sound like an animal. With company everyone eats, talk obscures the noises in your head, and nobody looks at what your mouth is doing, or listens to it. In this high blindness and deafness lives freedom. Would I think so if I hadn’t left her?

She screamed and broke objects. Nevertheless, I refused to kill her.

Jimmy phones me after midnight. He’s been living in Paris. I haven’t spoken to him for over a year, but I recognize his voice, and I recognize the bar, too, the only one in Berkeley Jimmy likes. I hear the din of a Friday-night crowd and a TV I imagine Jimmy standing in the phone booth, the folding door left open to let me know he doesn’t want to make conversation. He says he needs five hundred and seventy dollars for his rent, which is due tomorrow. He wasted a month trying to find an apartment in Berkeley, and he’ll lose it if he doesn’t come up with five hundred and seventy dollars. He’ll pay me back in a couple of days. I know he won’t. He never pays me back. He says,“I would go to your place, but I’m hitting on some bitch. I just met her. I can’t split.” What about tomorrow morning? Impossible. “I don’t know where I’ll be,” he says.

I get out of bed and put on my clothes. My hands tremble a little when I tie my shoelaces; I have to concentrate on the job like a kid who just learned how to do it. Then I drive across town to Brennan’s, being careful to stop at stop signs. At night cops get lonely and need to have a word with you.

Brennan’s is crowded and loud. I can’t spot Jimmy, though he’s the only black man in the room — if he’s there. He is. He’s waving to me from the bar. I must have been looking at him for a few seconds before I saw him, because he is laughing at me.

The woman on the stool beside him is wearing jeans and high heels. She’s blond, like all his others. When I walk up, Jimmy turns his back to her, takes my hand. He doesn’t introduce us. She looks away and begins watching the talk show on TV I slip Jimmy the check I’ve written. He doesn’t look at it as he folds it into his wallet and says, “Thanks, man. I’ll pay you back. Have a drink.” I tell him I’m not feeling good. I can’t stay. But he has ordered an Irish whiskey for me. It’s waiting on the bar beside his own.

He tells the guy next to him there’s a free stool at the end of the bar. Would he mind? The guy picks up his beer and leaves. I take his stool and Jimmy hugs me, laughing at this accomplishment. The blonde, on his other side, glances at me and then back to the TV as if she doesn’t expect to be introduced and is indifferent, anyway. I wonder if the Irish whiskey will be good for my flu. My hand trembles when I pick it up. I ask Jimmy how it was in Paris. He says,“Oh, man, you know. I get tired of them, even the finest ones.” The blonde, I suppose, is also fine. What lasts is him and me. This idea is at the margins of my mind, fever occupies the middle like a valley of fog. I know for sure Jimmy has flattering ways. He says, “Look, man, do you really want to do this?” He’s studying my glazed eyes. I think he’s concerned about my illness, and then realize he means the money. “Didn’t I?” I say, reaching into my shirt pocket before I remember that I gave him the check. Now I’m embarrassed. “Talk about something else, will you?” I say, though he wants me to ease the burden of gratitude. I get out of bed with fever to give him money … I don’t finish the thought. The blonde turns, looks at me with cold blue intelligent eyes, but I see better than she does. I see that the connection to Jimmy is her fate. He’s going to hurt her. She holds her martini as if she is invincible, and smokes her cigarette in a world-weary manner. I say, “I’m sick, man. Would I be here if I didn’t want to be?” The blonde half-laughs, more a cough than a laughing sound. She wants me to leave and shows it by putting down her martini and heading for the ladies’ room. Jimmy turns and watches. Her jeans are cut for trouble. The door shuts behind her and Jimmy says, “Her name is Gunnel. She’s bad.”