Don DeLillo - Americana

men with all sorts of insane technical data. Owney Pine finally put one of his fat white arms around the boy's head, muffling him in jest and holding him that way for a minute or so, a quality of mutual affection informing the little scene as the man quietly jostled and bumped, barely aware of the struggling boy, who, at an overgrown fifteen or sixteen, could not have been easy to hold.

"Plan to be here awhile?" Glenn said.

"A few days maybe. My camera seems interested in this place."

"Are you one of those people from the mass media?" Owney said, still keeping Bud from wriggling out.

"I'm an independent filmmaker. I'm scouting locales at the moment. How'd you like to be in the movies?"

"Sheee."

"You think about it," I said.

Bud cut in then with another question and Owney released him. We talked a bit longer. The young man eased down off the bandstand and headed toward us. He carried the guitar over his shoulder and dragged a knapsack along the ground behind him. He seemed a skinny broken kid in decomposing clothes, enormously happy about something. The others backed off slightly at his approach-an ethnologic retreat really, one that I sensed rather than actually witnessed.

"Hey, what's that? That an 8 or 16?"

"It's a Scoopíc 16. It's basically a news camera."

"I'm walking to California," he said.

He stood there, smiling, in ankle-high basketball sneakers. Glenn Yost said he and Bud had better be getting on home to have a look at the bloodworms. He said the boy dug up worms and sold them for bait. They were kept in large jars in the basement. He and Bud liked to look in on the worms every evening about sundown because that was the time the worms did most of their writhing and both father and son got a special kick out of seeing worms writhe, especially in masses. Glenn's left eye stuttered again. I couldn't be sure whether or not this was some local brand of double-reverse sophisticated humor. The boy's face was noncommittal and I thought they might be playing games with me, satirizing the outsider's conviction that smalltown life is a surrender to just such tiny deaths, worm-watching and Masonic handshakes. (Or were they trying to negate the serpent power of the longhair, distract him with worms while the townspeople put their torches to his guitar?) Owney Pine said he would tag along with them. The park lights came on.

"I started walking about three months ago," the young man said. "I started out from Washington, D.C., so it'll be almost a coast-to-coast walk. I've been trying to do it in a straight line, D.C. to Frisco, but I've strayed a little south. There's plenty of time to adjust, I guess."

"About two thousand miles. I'm Dave Bell. What's your name?"

"Richard Spector. Sometimes I have trouble remembering it. It seems so long ago that it meant anything."

He sat next to me, feet up on the bench and knees high as he huddled against his own legs. He was very frail and his hair covered much of his face. He looked directly at me when he spoke but with no implication of challenge in his eyes, no sense of ideologies about to clash, and I felt he had whittled these things out of his way, settling down to a position defined only by the length of each footsore day.

"People have been taking good care of me," he said. "They feed me and sometimes give me places to sleep. At first I get a lot of strange what-is-it looks. But when I tell them I'm walking to California, they get all caught up in the craziness of the thing. People are real great if you can get them off details and onto something crazy. They've really been taking tremendous care of me. I brought along all the savings I had, about seven hundred dollars in cash and traveler's checks, and in three months I've had to spend only about a hundred and fifty dollars for food and for sleeping in hotels whenever it was too cold at night for outdoor-type sleeping and I couldn't find anywhere else to stay."

"I don't want to sound discouraging, Richard, but you look awfully tired and run-down."

"You should have seen me before I left."

We both laughed and then he asked if he could handle the camera. I removed the lens hood for him and he took the camera and stood up, putting his eye to the rubber eyecup and then slowly covering the park in a virtuoso 36o-degree pan. I heard a car come to an abrupt stop and I turned and saw first a young woman's face at the window on the passenger side, and then the head and shoulders of a man about my age rising over the car's roof from the other side as he looked in our direction. Apparently satisfied that he had been right in stopping, he returned to the driver's seat, threw the car into reverse and quickly parked, tires marking the pavement. He got out, again looking our way, closing the door with a certain disdainful elan, and then came through the park entrance, looking now, it was clear, not at Richard or at me-a considerable relief-but at the camera in Richard's hands. The girl followed, quite slowly, a lissome blonde of twenty-five or so, in her quiet prime, pretty and tarrying and yet to be hurt, not at all in love. Richard extended the camera to me. The man's eyes followed it right into my hands.

"Does that thing put out a sync pulse?"

"That's right," I said.

"Sound," he said.

"That's right."

"I'm Austin Wakely. The lady is Carol Deming. I saw that thing from the car and I said let me get a closer look. What kind of action are you into?"

"Under the underground," I said.

"But with sound."

"Some sound. Here and there."

"I'm an actor," he said.

"He's studying to be an actor," Carol said.

I introduced myself, told them where I was from and asked them to join me on the bench. I realized Richard Spector was gone. Then I saw him sitting once more on the edge of the bandstand.

"I'm studying with Drotty," Austin said.

"Who's he?"

"He's originally from Minneapolis. He worked with Guthrie there. But he's a very freeform individual and it became more and more untenable for him to try and function in a structured environment. That's why he came over to McCompex. That's the new institute five miles east of here. You haven't heard of it back East yet but you will. The full name is the McDowd Communication Arts Complex. The regular session ends next month. I'm staying on for the summer session. Before I came out to McCompex I worked at a variety of odd jobs around the country. I'm originally from Washington, state of."

Carol was sitting between us.

"It's a question of who I am and what I want to be," Austin said. "I have to relate to something. Drotty is nonsocietal. I've learned a lot from him. He's a homosexual of course. They all are. He has his tensions and anxieties and he smokes a great deal. They all do. But Drotty has taught me something and it's this. Societal pressure is fierce but you've always got the option to repattern. Acting is love. What was it Nazimova said?"

I moved my leg slightly, the slimmest fraction of an inch, and Carol and I were touching. She sat absolutely still as Austin continued to speak. I moved again and we were touching now thigh to knee. The occasion was one of infinite subtlety. She may not have noticed the scant pressure of my leg; she may have noticed but thought nothing of it; or she may have known all along what I was doing. I edged my arm toward hers. Austin kept talking. Now our forearms were touching, the faintest inshore breeze of our bare flesh barely in contact, flesh resting on points of almost invisible silver hair. Still she was motionless, no sign either way. I waited several minutes. Then I moved my right hand across my lap and let it rest above my right knee. Carol was looking straight ahead. I was extremely nervous. The next few seconds would tell whether or not she knew and how she saw fit to respond to the knowledge. I did not want to be disappointed. It was important that she give me the right sign. I let my hand slide very slowly into the crease formed by our two legs. I let it rest there. We were both looking straight ahead. Then I felt a slight pressure from her thigh, a slight and pleasant heat on the tips of my fingers, the slightest suggestion of shifting weight, a muscle tensing, her body not moving and yet expressing movement, finding a new balance, shifting inside itself, shifting toward me. I returned the pressure and then moved several inches away. Austin kept talking and I began to relax. Carol and I looked straight ahead. It was my first ego-moment since New York.