John Barth - Letters

“Tell Sy to start the timer,” Drew suddenly decided. “We’ll blow this one instead.” Tank-Top, to whom the order was directed, hesitated a moment, looking to Goatee for confirmation. They’d be blowing themselves up for nothing, I argued quickly: Ocean City traffic would merely be rerouted, and their self-demolition reported as a murderous accident by inept amateur terrorists. How this honky know so much? Goatee demanded angrily of Drew. Polly Lake backed up to stop the patrol car a few hundred feet away; went into her Fuddled Lady act with the irritated trooper, whom with relief I recognized. Again Drew urged immediate demolition. I pointed out that all the fishermen and many of the waiting motorists were black; exhorted them to retreat, regroup, replan: the red-necks wouldn’t spring their trap in full view of the state police on the other side of the draw, but would certainly make their move in the hour’s drive between the Choptank and the Chesapeake Bridge — which (I lied) was by now surely guarded by troopers alerted to the event.

“Get in the car, Todd,” Drew ordered me. “If we get it, you get it too.”

I considered. Trooper James Harris had sent Polly backing to her slot and now walked our way, shaking his head. Ignoring Drew’s threat, I saluted him by name, told him that these people had an important funeral to get to: could he get them around and off the bridge fast?

“Jesus H. Christ,” the young officer replied, and in three glances sized up ourselves, the hearse, and the still-empty space in the line it had pulled out of. “Come on, then, swing your ass around here. You with them, Mister Andrews?”

I shook my head. “Just fishing, Jimmy. Much obliged.” And I turned my back on all of them, not knowing whether they or my banging heart would let me regain the second lamppost.

They did, and here are five postscripts to the anecdote:

1. Both bridges still stand, across which so much traffic moves from Baltimore and Washington to the ocean that the state is constructing new ones beside the old to accommodate the flow: 90 % white, though the cities from which they stream are more than 50 % black. Had our quarter-hour drama occurred on a summer Sunday night, the Route 50 traffic would have been backed up for a dozen miles. I despise this saturation of our Eastern Shore enough to wish sometimes that all the bridges were blown; but I take at last the Tragic View of progress, as well as of insularity. These 1960’s have been a disaster; the 70’s will be another — but the 50’s don’t bear recollecting either, not to mention the 40’s, 30’s, 20’s, 10’s. History is a catenation of disasters, redeemable only (and imperfectly) by the Tragic View.

2. The young men in the hearse went home, revised their plans, and fetched in H. “Rap” Brown to liven up the movement’s oratory and focus the media on their grievances. Arson ensued. But so far from “burning Whitey down”—for any serious attempt at that they’d have been massacred — the incendiaries were Effectively Contained in the Second Ward. When alarmed black families then appealed to have the white volunteer fire department sent in to deal with the blazes, they were told, in effect: You brought that bastard to town; put out your own fires. And so the sufferers from the riots — and from the crudest second-person plural in the grammar books — were all black. But this is not news to you. Only the Tragic View will do, and it not very satisfactorily. Must one take the tragic view of the Tragic View?

3. Some while after, when Mr. Brown had been arrested and his venue changed, Goatee, Tank-Top, and possibly Sy the timer man blew themselves inadvertently sky-high, as follows: I had considered reporting to Jimmy Harris the contents and objectives of both the Pontiac hearse and the Chevrolet pickup; but though I believe profoundly in the institutions of justice under the law, I can manage at best no more than the Tragic View of their actual operation. Therefore on second thought I considered reporting neither. But while the bark of both the black militants and the red-neck vigilantes was worse than their bite, the former were a threat much more to property than to people, the latter vice versa, and one’s BLTVH sympathies are of course all with the hearse in this matter (even though, to complicate things, some of those red-necks are friends of mine: good-hearted, high-principled, even lovable people except where certain prejudices are touched. And at least one of those blacks happens to have been a hopeless sociopath. The Tragic View!).

Thus it was the Pontiac, not the Chevy, I’d intercepted and tried to reason with; thus it was the Chevy I reported, by telephone from Joe Reed’s office to the Easton state police barracks when Joe closed the draw. That evening I informed Drew that I’d done so, and that the red-necks in turn, if questioned, would surely identify the hearse, its occupants and intentions, as would I if interrogated under oath as a witness in the matter. Drew and company prudently thereupon changed vehicles and left town, resolved to dynamite any courthouse where their hero was to stand trial. But as in the field of cesarean sutures, for example, big-city expertise in the field of high-explosive terrorism is less readily available to us home folks: Sy’s timer (or something) misfired outside a little village across the Bay as the group — minus Drew, temporarily outcast for his connections with me — motored toward its first new target. The remains were unidentifiable, almost unlocatable. There was chortling among conservatives, tongue-tisking among us Stock Liberals.

“Goatee,” their leader, was, I then learned, Dorothy Miner’s son, Yvonne’s brother, Drew’s brother-in-law, whom Dorothy had toiled to put through high school and college: an easygoing youngster turned terrorist by his reading of history at a black branch campus of the state university. “Tank-Top,” whom I’d taken for vintage ghetto, turned out to be the child of third-generation-affluent New England educators; he had discovered his negritude as a twelfth-former at the Phillips Exeter Academy, become a militant at Magdalen College (Oxford), and exquisitely exchanged his natural Boston-Oxbridge accent and wardrobe for what we heard and saw above. His major passions in student days had been rugby and the novels of William Dean Howells.

4. My bait had been taken by a fair-size croaker, or hardhead, increasingly rare in these waters where once they abounded. A fellow fisherman had thoughtfully unwound my tackle from the lamppost and played him for me through the foregoing. Now he returned the gear to me and stood by with his companions for the reel-in. As sometimes happens in bridge fishing, where the game isn’t caught until it’s in the basket, my prize, well hooked and played, flipped itself free midway between river and roadway and splashed home.

“That a heart-buster now, ain’t it?” my colleague commiserated, and went back to his own lamppost.

5. But it wasn’t, as my survival to this sentence attests; no more than the Argonne Forest had been, or my evening in Captain Adams’s Floating Theatre, or any other mauvais quart d’heure of my life to this, including that mauvaisest just recounted. At the end of your Floating Opera story, 37-year-old Todd Andrews, his attempt at suicide-by-holocaust having fizzled, imagines he’ll probably go on living one day at a time, as he has thitherto; the cardiac report of the doctor you call Marvin Rose (now dead of — you guessed it) is of no interest to him. And the 54-year-old Todd Andrews who has been telling the story of his Dark Night of the Soul gives us no clue to that report, though his tone and attitude — not to mention the fact of his narrative — imply the fulfillment of his expectations. Now, as I left the bridge with Polly Lake, I realized that my heart had finally ratified my change of policy of some years past, when I’d ceased to pay for my Dorset Hotel room one night at a time and moved for the most part out to that cottage I’d bought from the Macks: i.e., that I was fated to no less than the normal life expectancy of male WASP Americans of my generation; that that old Damoclean diagnosis of bacterial endocarditis had been for me ever at least as much a spiritual need as a physical fact; and that just as the fact had gradually long since become irrelevant, the need had imperceptibly passed as well.