Steven Millhauser - Edwin Mullhouse - The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954

Shortly after crossing the Kum River late in July the Reds made another full-scale attack on our new positions. Our tracer bullets mowed their ranks down like wheat … but they kept coming. Climbing over the dead bodies of their comrades the fanatical Red soldiers went for our lines!

Edwin also liked the more colorful series called Fighting Marines, in which the pictures were framed in a double line of red and blue. But he developed a veritable passion for Wings, not so much for the airplanes themselves as for their names: Sky Ray, Sea Hawk, Mustang, Thunderjet, Vampire, Invader. He also liked the colorful scenes behind or below the pictured planes: the purple water and the green land with wavy white lines below the PO-1W Lockheed, the pale orange sky and snowy mountaintops behind the Sea Hawk, and the dark orange and dark yellow sky over distant greenblack palm trees behind the P-4M Mercator. He enjoyed flipping, but Arnold Hasselstrom introduced him to a more exacting sport: standing at one end of the room and facing the bookcases, he grasped a card between his forefinger and middle finger, snapped his wrist, and sent it flying smoothly across the room into the base of a bookcase. Edwin practiced throwing cards for hours and soon was as expert as Arnold Hasselstrom; I myself refused to join them. Astounded by my aloofness, Edwin tried to lure me into enthusiasm by explaining the fine art of knocking down a leaner. “You gotta,” he said, in careful imitation of his latest friend, “hit’m ona bottom,” for if you hit it on the top your card bounced back and the fallen leaner might beat you anyway. An innocent pastime? Perhaps. And yet the sight of the two of them standing there side by side, grimly snapping their wrists, filled me with unease.

As if perpetually uncertain of his welcome, Arnold Hasselstrom was forever giving things to Edwin. He began Edwin’s card collection by giving him ten doubles, and he gave Edwin a small smooth boomerang-shaped stone with which he said he had killed a squirrel. But most of his gifts came from his grandmother’s bedroom closet, and these had to be hidden. The first such gift was a large brass bullet, which Arnold Hasselstrom held out to Edwin in the palm of his hand. He said it was for a rifle, and he warned Edwin not to drop it. After a sleepless night Edwin placed the gleaming cartridge in a sock-ball and hid the sock-ball at the back of the high shelf in his closet, behind a pile of old stuffed animals.

One day Edwin showed me a mysterious object that looked like a dice-box or a roll of pennies. A red cardboard tube some two inches long was attached to a brass base. It felt heavy, as if filled with sand. On the red cardboard, in black letters, were the words:

REMINGTON

6

Edwin asked me if I wanted one too. I asked him what it was. He said he didn’t know. According to the newspapers, the police found in Josephine Hasselstrom’s bedroom closet a 20-gauge shotgun, a.22 rifle, a.30–30 rifle, a dozen 20-gauge shotgun shells, six boxes of.22-caliber cartridges, six boxes of.30–30 caliber cartridges, and a “large” but unspecified number of.25- and.32-caliber cartridges.

Arnold Hasselstrom enjoyed not only giving things but also borrowing things: that too created a bond. Embarrassed by so many gifts, Edwin was only too happy to comply. Indeed he himself pressed Arnold to borrow three of his favorite comic books, hoping to share with his new friend the rare delights of his personal pleasure-garden, and forgetting that no garden was habitable by Arnold Hasselstrom that did not contain an abundant supply of guns, planes, tanks, and bombs. In the course of the next few weeks Arnold Hasselstrom borrowed occasional nickels from Edwin, which he forgot to pay back, a dark brown baseball bat that was too heavy for Edwin, a red-handled screwdriver from Dr. Mullhouse’s green tin toolkit, a baseball dartboard whose three wooden darts had metal points and red plastic feathers, and a boxed basketball game with levers and a pingpong ball, which he said he wanted to show his grandmother.

Despite their friendship, on the playground they instinctively avoided one another. Arnold Hasselstrom disliked Edwin’s friends, and his own acquaintances, some of them fifth- and sixth-graders, terrified Edwin. But Arnold Hasselstrom’s careful failure to notice Edwin in public did not prevent him altogether from acknowledging a relation. I am thinking of one morning in particular. Edwin and I were strolling along the playground, discussing the possibility of a story without people or animals. I claimed, and I still claim, that such a story would quickly become boring. Edwin disagreed. As he was arguing that, on the contrary, such a story would be fascinating because people are boring, suddenly he stepped into a shoulder. The stranger tottered, regained his balance, and sprang furiously at Edwin, pushing him up against the bricks and holding his throat with one hand while he held a fist curled under Edwin’s nose. A crowd began to gather. The attacker’s looks did not inspire confidence. He wore a short purple jacket with the collar turned up, and his thick curly brown hair spilled down over his forehead in a V. I was wondering whether I should try to explain to the stupid bully that it was only an accident, or whether I should run to the front in search of the policeman, when suddenly Arnold Hasselstrom came hurtling out of nowhere, grasped the bully’s neck from behind, jerked him away from Edwin, and without bothering to knock him down simply stood behind him and was in the process of strangling him to death when three older boys broke up the fight, holding Arnold Hasselstrom by both arms and one leg while he thrashed and writhed within a yard of his dazed antagonist, who stood bent over slightly, gasping for breath and holding his throat with one hand, as if he were trying to strangle himself. Edwin, unhurt, blinked in bewilderment.

One evening after dinner when I went over to Edwin’s I found him pacing up and down in his room. He seemed glad to see me. Before shutting the door he stood for a few moments listening to the sound of voices downstairs; then holding a finger to his lips he motioned toward the bed beneath the map of the United States. Together we pushed the bed against the door. Edwin paused, listening; at last he set up a folding chair, carried it into his closet, climbed onto it, and removed from the top shelf a light brown shoebox with a dark brown cover. He carried the shoebox over to his bed. Holding a finger to his lips, he removed the top. Inside were five or six old cowboy pistols and a crumpled leather holster. He took them out one by one and revealed at the bottom a pistol I had never seen before. It was smaller than the cowboy pistols; the metal was not a bright shiny silver but the color of lead. There was no hammer, and the odd-looking trigger had space only in front and not on both sides. The black grip on the handle said COLT; it showed a black horse standing on two legs and holding a spear or arrow in its front legs, another in its mouth. Cut into the barrel in small capital letters were the words:

COLT AUTOMATIC

CALIBRE 25

Beside it lay a dark metal rectangle shaped like the handle of the pistol but smaller; it contained several holes, through which flashes of brass were visible. The bottom of the handle, I then noticed, was open and hollow. I made a reaching motion but Edwin knocked away my hand. Without a word he piled in, one by one, the shining cowboy pistols, placed the old holster on top, put on the cover, and returned the box to its hiding place on the top shelf. Only after he had folded the chair and closed the closet door did he say, in a whisper: “He asked me to keep it for him. In case he needs it.”

THE DISINTEGRATION OF FRIENDSHIP is an instructive, and may be a delightful, subject for investigation. It was, therefore, with no small measure of interest that I watched the delicate structure tremble, crack, and fall. Edwin’s first mistake was to ask his new friend to teach him how to fight. He did not realize that it was precisely his difference from Arnold Hasselstrom that fascinated Arnold Hasselstrom, who for that matter was not unwilling to show him a few elementary boxing tricks; nor did Edwin realize that by attempting to resemble Arnold Hasselstrom he could inspire only contempt. For of course he was ridiculous as a boxer. He was also a wretched nuisance, forever challenging me to bouts of gentle pugilism. No sooner would I enter his room than he would leap from his bed and fall into an Edwinian boxing stance. Bending over, curling in his shoulders, and making a curious circular motion with his hands, he would approach me in a series of tiny cautious steps, all the while bobbing up and down on bending and unbending knees and moving his head about behind his circling hands; long before he was near enough to touch me he would begin to stick out his left hand and draw it in; and as he came closer he would unconsciously begin to straighten up until, standing before me, he was bending over backward with his head pulled back and a look of determination and worry on his face, as if he feared that I was about to punch him in the eye. Naturally I refused to participate in an activity that I found at once preposterous and repulsive. Arnold Hasselstrom, I suspect, was not amused. Edwin would have done better, in his eyes, to express indifference or even contempt for fighting.