John Gardner - The King's Indian - Stories and Tales

I watch him as he studies the stippled wall, the arch-frets yawing above us like the beams of a ship thrown upside-down. He glances at me, looks uncomfortable, puts on his hat. He toes out as he walks through the double glass door ahead of me, his hat as flat on his ridiculous head as an Indian’s. I smile, let out a sigh. He pauses, waiting, while I lock the door. There’s a scent in the air, delicate, elusive, and after a moment I place it, a smell like firecrackers. The Art Building, I remember. But the Art Building’s more than a mile from here. Something else, then. Some fire in a vacant lot — dry weeds, old leaves. A larger, more usual apocalypse; another fall. Nearly all the cars are gone now from the parking lot. Marilyn Fish — pretty blonde in a fiery red coat — sits grinding on her starter. The motor catches, takes off like an explosion, and I wave to her. She smiles. I hear rumors about her. I mainly attribute them to jealousy and spite. She’s active in social work, politics, the schools. But also, of course, she’s a beautiful woman, and her husband travels a good deal in his work. One of these days she’ll come into my office late at night and say …

“Lovely day,” says Grewy.

Autumn trees flaming, white clouds, blue sky; as usual in southern Illinois at this time of the year. Marilyn switches on her signal light, pauses — the motor roars — and, knowing no Dante, she turns left. “Praise God for his many gifts,” I say. Lead me not into temptation, I think. So hour by hour I harmlessly recapitulate the fall. Dr. Grewy gets into his Cadillac, stares sadly through the window. I unlock the chain on my bicycle and meditate on khiseth and Marilyn Fish.

4

The front page, naturally, is filled with news about the latest bombing. Speculation is that it must have been an art student who planted, as they call it, the explosive device. The art students at the university have long hair and peculiar clothes. They live in shanties, with Negro neighbors, or they erect buckminster-fuller domes in people’s woods, without permission. They smoke pot, drop acid (if that’s still the expression), and engage in what the police call orgies. Also, they have keys to the Art Building. I study the pictures. Helmeted policemen guarding the rubble and smoke from a crowd of anesthetized bystanders. A girl with long hair and an Indian headband displaying the tattered and charred remains of what may once have been her paintings. She stares into the camera with gloomy indifference, like one who has happened into newspictures all her life. A policeman points with his nightstick to writing on a partly demolished wall: OFF AID! SHUT DOWN THE V NAM STUDY CENTER. It is not known whether the sign is recent.

I look again at the girl with the ruined paintings. I remember old war photographs. Starvation, despair, black smoke in the distance, charred trunks of trees like skeletal hands clutching nothing. I think again of Marilyn Fish’s smile in the parking lot, the strange gray eyes alive with zeal and accomplishment. I shake my head.

The waitress refills my coffee cup, and as I glance up, nodding thanks, I see Levelsmacher standing at the door, looking in. I look down again quickly, but he’s seen that I’ve seen him, and he isn’t free to pretend otherwise. I feel him coming over to me, jingling coins in his trousers pocket. I would rather converse with a weaving, dusty-eyed snake. As he reaches the table I look up, meet his heavy-lidded eyes. I’m struck by how wrinkled, even withered he is at forty. He seems unaware of it himself.

“Reverend Pick!” He hits me on the shoulder.

“Hello there!” I always make a point of addressing him as there. He makes a point of pretending I mean no offense.

“Meeting somebody?” he says. He makes it an insinuation.

“No no. Have a seat.”

He swings a chair out, though he does not want to sit with me (Hypocrite Hippy, they say he calls me). He throws a leg over, pulls at the knees to preserve the press, and sits. His suitcoat is yellowish brown. “That’s really something. Man!” He thumps my paper with his index finger and grins irritably, as if to say, if I had my way … There is no smile in his tiny brown eyes. His mouth jerks. A tic. I have a theory that all his smiles are lies, attempts to sell real estate, and the tic is his last touch of honesty.

“The people of this town are getting God damned tired of these guitar-playing crazies. Take my word for it, Gene.” He calls me Gene at the end of every sentence. It’s a memory device. I smile and take his word for it. The waitress comes. He asks for coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich, and he gives her a quick seductive wink. The tic gets revenge. He looks down. Then he looks at me up-from-under and grins. “You been getting any, Gene?”

I sigh, smile, and shake my head. He smiles, exactly imitates my headshake. He has been getting some, of course. He thinks of himself as supremely free, liberated by Christ. All is forgiven. Nothing is unforgiveable. Love God with all your heart and soul and be kind to your neighbor’s wife. (His own wife plays ignorant.) I glance away from him, remembering dowdy, fat Carol Ann Watson, his first, or the first I learned of. She sat in my office, comfortable but prim, plump knees together, her hands on her purse. “Reverend Pick, I’m having an affair,” she said, “and the thing that makes me feel guilty is I feel no guilt about it.” “Maybe you should try having two,” I said. And we laughed, because it was all right, though perhaps a little stupid. Good for her ego, at least. It was not all right on Levelsmacher’s side, or not all right with me, anyway. I catch myself and struggle once more to think better of him. He uses the church as a power base, it seems to me. Communion as contacts. But perhaps I’m mistaken. There’s no man on earth, I tell myself, who doesn’t feel remorse from time to time, and doesn’t occasionally feel compassion. The sandwich comes. He talks as he eats. I pretend to listen, sipping my coffee, but in fact I pay no attention to him. The restaurant is full, families having Sunday dinner out. A great hum, the clink of silverware, screech of children. His talk veers between women and the bombings, as if, without his knowing it, his heart discerns some connection between them. All at once I rivet my gaze to my cup. He speaks, leaning forward, talking intimately past cheese, about Marilyn Fish. I’m startled — amazed — at the intensity of my emotion.

As soon as he pauses, I glance at my watch and abruptly get up. “Good heavens! Excuse me!” I look again at my watch.

“Late for something?” He appears surprised, distressed.

“If my head weren’t screwed on—” I say, and laugh. The laugh sounds hollow, a giveaway. I wave, excuse myself again, and take my check to the counter.

Outside, where sunlight explodes all around me, I pause, remembering that look of distress. Headlights, windshields on fire with sunlight stare at me, waiting to hear some opinion. The birds on the telephone wires are silent. A pigeon lights on the McDonald’s sign, half a block away. 6 billion sold. A policeman stands watching through the Kroger store window, his fist on his hip, beside his gun.

5

When I hear her voice in the vestibule, I realize I’ve been thinking about her a good deal this past three days. I’m not ashamed, by any means, but I’m bothered by it. Who isn’t childish enough to wish that Eden could remain forever pure? My feelings about Marilyn were innocent, once. We worked together on social projects — I got her appointed to the Community Conservation Board — we joked, told long stories when she happened to drop in and had half an hour to throw away. I cared about her, as the saying goes, and cared equally about her husband, her children. No, precision: I admired her hips and breasts, her walk; but there was a line I did not cross or admit the existence of. At the sound of her voice I’d think, Ah, Marilyn! and I’d go out to meet her. That is not how it is with me this moment. Poisoned by Levelsmacher’s leer, bits of cheese at the corner of his mouth. My chest is sick with secretiveness.