Heartland, p.24
Heartland, page 24
–It is indeed. It certainly is that. Thanks for saying it, Hughie.
He looked over at Campbell.
–Isn’t it, Red?
Red Campbell looked up fearfully.
–It is, Mr Begley, they heard him reply.
As Tony Begley gave Red’s little thatch of beard a sharp sudden tug.
–Ow! squealed Red, what the fuck!
As Begley went over to Big Barney and sat down beside him.
–I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Big Barney, but certain complaints regarding your behaviour have recently reached my ears.
–My behaviour? stuttered Barney.
–Yes, elaborated Begley – as regards my assistant, Tootsy Corrigan.
–I know nothing about Tootsy Corrigan, spat Barney sourly.
–Except that you were looking down her front, continued Begley, except that you happen to have been seen doing that. When she was only coming here for the purpose of delivering a message. I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you that, Barney.
Barney Grue lowered his head, with a dribble of saliva falling onto his whiskers.
Begley stared for a long time at the floor.
–I think these boots of mine need a polish. What do you think, Hughie?
–Maybe, Mr Begley. I don’t know.
–We should never have come here, sobbed Shorty McHale, I don’t care about my father’s dumb memory. All I only want is to go to America.
–I think I’ll get a brand new pair of loafers. Will I, Hughie?
–If that’s what you want, Mr Begley, yes.
–I’d prefer if you called me Tony. Will you?
–Yes, Tony – if that’s what you want.
–A brand-new pair of loafers, he went on, not these dumb fucking out-of-date things. You know something, Hughie, I’m a disgrace.
–Yes Tony.
–What – you think I am?
–No, Tony. I didn’t say that.
–Well, to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Seeing as I went and made the mistake of trusting that sumbitch fuck that you got tied up out there in that shed. Because I got better things to be doing that coming here. I got pressures, Hughie. Pressures, I got to tell you, that I don’t need. Pressures I could gladly be doing without. Pressures I thought I’d left behind me a long long time ago. You know what I’m saying here, Barney, do you?
–Yes, nodded Barney, I think I do.
–But then it’s always been like that, right from the start. I guess you didn’t know I spent time in a seminary. Four years, as a matter of fact. A spoiled priest, it used to be called.
He was walking around the pool table, circling it, abstractedly, as his fingers danced along the edge and he said:
–There were times, though, I got to tell you, when I really did enjoy it, I mean. But, in the end, however, I just couldn’t seem to cut it. That’s how I ended up in the factory, you see. That was all they said I was good for, to such an extent I started to believe it myself. People like Begley, they never finish anything. It’s a pity, all the same, about the shame it’ll bring on his mother.
He sat back on the crate and began poking at the heel of his shoe.
–So what would you have to say about that, Hughie?
–About the shoes, is it Tony?
–About me not being able to finish things, I mean.
–It’s wrong, Tony.
–Yes, it’s wrong, agreed Begley, as he added:
–And right now I’m going to show you how wrong it actually is. So let’s set up a nice little game of cards. One final round before skinning that old smoke-and-horses.
But before anyone could make a response, he signalled to Mervyn and a tray of drinks arrived within minutes. With the barman replying that it was his absolute pleasure, whistling a jaunty little tune as he crossed the floor.
–Nothing but the best for Mr Begley, announced the barman.
–Now isn’t that much better? said Begley, as the game proper got underway.
With his eyes still twinkling, as he looked over the rim of his cards.
–So what you reckon, Sonny mi amigo?
–We’re doing good, Mr Begley, it sure is real good to see you.
As every drop of colour drained from Begley’s face, and he rose to his feet, looking every inch a living corpse:
–THAT IS NOT MY FUCKING NAME!
He looked at everyone around the table.
–How many times do I have to say it? he demanded. Or can you tell me what the fuck is wrong with the people in this room? Tony, I told you – Tony, or didn’t you hear?
Then sat down quietly.
As, through the gap in the floorboards, I caught the narrow, upraised eye of Mervyn Walker – squinting surreptitiously as he lifted his head, pressing a cautionary forefinger as he did so, to his lips.
Chapter 31
Moonlight and Roses
As to whether, like Fr Conway has suggested, I’d actually misinterpreted, perhaps even imagined Mervyn Walker’s sly admonition on that occasion, to this very day I can’t, really, honestly, say.
And maybe part of the reason I’m leaving this little journal behind me is that, somewhere deep down, I’m hoping that in some small way it might be of some small benefit to anyone who happens to come upon it, particularly someone with a soul as punch-drunk and compromised as my own.
For, believe you me, I could have been doing with some direction what with the way things went in the years after Mervyn’s Bar.
The sad part is that, for the first year or so after having the good fortune to meet and move in with Angie, it had all really begun to seem as if at last I was actually going to be able to get it together.
But all of that, too, turned out to be a delusion.
Much of what happened in those days – directly after our break-up, I mean– is shrouded in a drunken haze. Something which I don’t mind a great deal, considering how painful it can be to remember it.
One particularly bad night, I recall, I’d gone and lost it completely – driving the flatbed all the way out to the One Tree Crossroads, and almost crashing the fucking thing twice on the way.
And then just sitting there, heaving down yet another gutful and laughing to myself with abandon, what with it being the first proper drink of good jungle that I’d had in months, treating myself to what Barney Grue might have described as ‘a good big motherfucking bellyful of electrisms!’
As I emptied that sucker right down to the bottom, cheering as I tossed the bottle out the window.
Because what did I care – about the whole fucking world, or anyone who lived in it.
Not so much as a rat’s ass did I give.
And it was then that I heard it, loud and clear – the lilting strains of a familiar, old-time waltz.
As the dashboard – I swear to God, and with no help from me at all – lit up suddenly, filling the cabin with a rainbow of lights, a riot of flickering, living neon.
And a warm, lush baritone gradually began enveloping the cab.
–Moonlight and roses, I heard the soft voice croon, so this is where you are, you little fucking snakeyed Judas!
You can imagine how I panicked when I realised what it was I’d just heard, as the mellow orchestration continued swelling out into the night.
And that was when I heard the tinkling of the bells.
And turned around to see his face against the window – placid, blank, with that waxy complexion you knew would never grow old.
–I’ve been looking for you, said Mr Bonny, yes. I’ve been looking for you everywhere, you mischievous little dogie.
I concealed my face – when I looked again, he was gone.
Whenever I got back to the dive I’d been living in, an old overgrown stone cottage at the edge of town, I was still badly shaken, and profoundly unnerved – consumed entirely by this sense of what I can only describe as an overwhelming … need.
For the warmth and security – yes, and privilege too, I won’t deny it – that I’d always experience when sleeping alongside Dawn.
And when I saw her before me that night, as in a vision, it was exactly the same as it had been the very first time we had been together.
After which she’d stood by the window of the Lodge, entirely naked apart from that long-billed airman’s cap she often wore, transfixed by an evening sky the colour of burnt copper, conversing with herself in that distant, disconnected way she had.
With those narrow shoulders tensing as she lifted the cigarette hesitantly to her lips, relaxing at last and releasing that fragile, nervous, short-lived laugh. And then continuing, taking rapid-fire, frantic drags, in pursuit of her fevered, recalcitrant thoughts.
Sometimes she’d be talking for close on two or three minutes without a break.
–Look away, Montgomery, because I know that you ain’t gonna like what you see. Why did you have to come here today – did you really think my father would make it in the industry? Once upon a time there was a new Gram Parsons who liked to bang his box up there in the hills. Look how the campfire plays orange among the stones, where his lady smiles in Dreamland and that electric cowboy sings her his tune – yeah, yet another song all got up in that special new kinda Ozark Mountain way – all for her, who in her damage had somehow believed him. Yep, you and me and Phaedra, we are gonna be away from all that as we make our new lives high up in the mountains in the Arkansas hills. And when I come down in the morning, you know what’s gonna happen? You gonna be sitting there waiting in the kitchen, sweet as any princess in your gingham and ruffles, as you lift your eyes towards me just as appealing and as beautiful as any God in His wisdom ever saw fit to bestow on one of His creatures. And you’re gonna be my one and only Rock Angel – because you and me, we are a chain that ain’t never gonna break apart. So, go down, Montgomery, and don’t you rise no mo’ – you hearing me, old Hannah? Haw, fuck you bitch!
At first I didn’t like it – those strange, disjointed outbursts of emotion. I guess the truth being that I felt completely out of my depth.
But after a while I used to long for her to do it, because it had started to sound, in its own strange way, kind of like some weird poetry or something.
–If we make it through December, she used to say, if we can somehow make it that far, Ray … and her voice would just sort of trail off.
Just as often, she’d sigh ruefully and softly whisper as she sat there by the window:
–There are times, you know, Ray, when I look out here, across the lakes of Glasson County, where the reeds are bending and you can hear the wind coming through the pines in what seems like a spatial, continental vastness, where I can almost feel it – sense my soul stirring right here inside of me. It’s almost like the very sound of the harmonica itself, the orchestration of the journey of the soul of the wayfaring stranger. And you know what it makes me think about? One of those Sunday mornings when it seems so lonesome it can feel like everybody they’re already dead and gone. The way the breeze when it fans and quivers the leaves it makes you feel mournful. Yeah, melancholy, Ray, because you feel like it’s the spirits whispering. Spirits that have been dead for oh so many long years.
It was just impossible to take your eyes off her as she stood there, motionless, with the long-billed cap cocked pertly on her head, and that tawny brown hair flouncing underneath in a jaunty ponytail.
As she smiled – O, what that did to me! – and came across to the bed and sat there beside me, leaning right over as she whispered into my ear:
–They call me a song thrush don’t they, Ray. But the truth is – and I want you and me to know this because I don’t want any misunderstandings between us – that the person you are beginning to fall in love with is a hawk. Like I say, I wouldn’t want you, in any way, to be misled about that. Because I like you, Ray. Knowing as I do that the two of us, in our separate ways, have endured bad pain.
–Pain that makes you feel numbed inside, she went on, and that you don’t want to share with anyone else. Not unless you sense they might understand – like you do, Ray. Because only the afflicted can heal the afflicted, she whispered.
And it was then that she gave me the facts about her father.
Or what she insisted were the facts.
And how he’d put her in the House of the Merciless Angels, as she called it.
Just like you, she smiled, just like you.
–There was one thing he got right, all the same, one piece of knowledge that he took from all o’ those Eastern do-it-yourself books that he read, Ray. And that was that this world we got here is rough and surly and will not mind drowning either man or woman, and will happily swallow your ship like a grain of dust. But I didn’t really learn that till my teenage years and watched the only two people I’d ever loved or cared about in the world break right there in front of me – like a pair of helpless china fucking dolls, taking all of their dreams and promises along with them. Even if, to be fair, it probably wasn’t their fault. Because I guess, like so many of their friends back then, in their way the two of them were, in their own deluded way, sincere. That’s where they say I get my music from – having grown up there, in that desert of loneliness. O she sings like an angel, they’ll tell you, listen to that distinctive mountain-minor twang, the spring purity of her haunting voice. If the angels were to elect a singer on earth, it could only be the magnificent little ‘Kit’ King, for no other can come close. Thrown back upon yourself alone, they’ll tell you, confined within the solitude of your own wounded being, that’s where it comes from, that high lonesome sound. From having to abide in those raw and hurting hollows of the heart. But what they’re not getting is this, and I want you to know it: that I’d just as soon wring an angel’s neck, if I thought it suited my purpose. Because I’m a little dogie too, you see, Ray – except that, to survive, I growed up to be a bird of prey. The ‘Dawn’ who takes no prisoners, you know what I’m saying?
Then she laughed and returned to the window, sparking up a rollie and tossing her head flagrantly as she aggressively released the smoke.
I’ve never heard singing like it, before or since.
–If we make it through December, she began to croon in that tremolo-infused soprano, got plans to be in a warmer town come Summertime …
When she was finished, she came over and told me that she wanted to do it. Because nobody can fuck like you, she murmured, nobody Ray. You’re the only one, Ray – the only one …
As a shudder of trepidation ran along my spine – for I could have sworn I’d seen a sly smirk at the corner of her mouth, a kind of strange, discomfiting half-smile.
But you don’t want to dwell on things like that.
–You’re the only one, Ray. You know you can believe me.
–Do it, she said, as she mounted me again.
–Harder.
–Many miles, I heard her groan, gleaming with sweat as she shivered high above me, and plunged her tongue deep inside my mouth and, kissing me so hard I could feel the metallic taste of blood.
–Daddy, she wept, daddy loved timber, that dirty old egg-sucking dog. I’ll tell you about psychedelic western, I’ll tell you about hillbilly opera. About motherfucking Phaedra riding into eternity along golden sand. I’ll tell you everything you want to know about it. Talking fucking crazy after all that junk, just laying there banging his beat-up old flat-top guitar, cursing the Man and the record contract he’d never sign. Yeah, that was the wonderland he’d promised us, and for which we had forsaken Serenity, Ohio. A shabby rundown so-called farm with a grassless, junk-littered yard, a cow, a few chickens and a couple of acres of fruit trees and two or three more of truck crops. When he’d take his rages, me and the rest of us, feral ragamuffins all, with tangled hair and our clothes just rags, we’d cower inside the weather-beaten house. How I remember those bare warped floors and boarded-up windows, and the enormous wood-fuel range, into which he’d shove all them fucking accursed logs that he’d chopped, as he cursed and spat, yeah just like them pieces of broke-up burning oak, as his Phaedra pleaded please don’t take another swing. But he sure as hell did. O Daddy, with all your dreams and promises. He whipped us for going. He whipped us for not going. He whipped us for lying. He whipped us for spending money. Now – fuck me, cracker, like it’s our very last day on earth. Screw me like you’re going to end my pain.
–Do it, fucker, you listening to me, Ray?
So I did.
Till I wept, with the result that for days and weeks after it, I couldn’t stop thinking about anything else. Sometimes, she’d just arrive out of nowhere and come walking right in, without saying a word.
And, just when I figured she couldn’t stun me anymore, the bouquet arrived.
Eighteen yellow roses, read the little card, a bloom for every time we did it, Ray.
P. S. Missing you like crazy, as ‘The Queen’, Patsy Cline, might say xxx
It was probably around then that my pattern of sleep began to be significantly disturbed – and there definitely had been a marked increase in my drinking.
So maybe my problem stems from then.
Could be that that’s when it all, in earnest, began.
Because one of the things I can remember is just arriving out at the waterhole, close by the One Tree Crossroads, where Jody and I used to fish in the summer – not having the faintest idea what time it was, or how I got there or where I had been drinking.
I don’t know how many glasses of whiskey I’d had, not to mention the half-drunk bottle of jungle in my jacket.
It was dawn.
–Dawn, I said, and started laughing.
And it was then I saw it – just a fleeting glimpse, like a white blur upon the surface of the water.
I can remember my blood suddenly turning to ice.
Because I could hear my name being spoken through the trees, and no matter how I might try to dismiss or make light of it, it still persisted.
–Ray, it said, I’ll be seeing you soon. We have so many things to talk about. I’m really looking forward to it.
And when I felt something touch me – so hastily, it was barely perceptible at all – I didn’t know where to turn, and felt sick.
