|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A full harvest moon struggled above the mountains, pine trees in a silhouette on the jagged horizon. Crickets, languid with frost, stopped sawing long enough to observe four teenagers dressed for the harvest ball with pants rolled up to bare knees, in shirts with collars, wearing skinny ties, fishing about in a murky brown slough alongside White Rock road. The water had the texture of coffee into which cigarette butts had been steeped in a warm sun.
It was Biff who found the gallon bottle, a soggy green and red “Coke-Syrup” label still clinging to its side. We laughed with joy as he fished it out, holding the jug high to the moon. We were in possession of Jesse’s Sizemore’s famous Dandelion Wine. The wine was as black as the oil in pan of my old car. In the moonlight, an inch of sediment in the bottom was the color of sour milk. The sediment immediately recombined with the wine. Jesse’s recipe had earned an underground kind of fame in the valley. Life spread out before us like the bountiful harvest of the valley. Tonight the wine and the dance, tomorrow the hunt.
Then we tasted the wine. The wine tasted like an oil whose viscosity had burned out a hundred thousand miles ago. It tasted like a morning mouth when you are 75 years old, and have nothing to do but write your memoirs and chew on the rags of your own condition. It tasted like a reserve of bile long held. It tasted like the corruption of the soil in graveyards, a reserve of ruminant from the stomachs of cows, the breath of a slaughterhouse.
One by one we took great draughts of Coca-Cola to chase that wine into our wretched guts. I woozily turned the Ford back toward the little lake side resort five miles from town where the girls were clustered in the cone-roofed dance pavilion in full skirts like so many parachute shaped seeds of the dandelion.
Sometimes it is easy to be a man, we thought collectively. We rolled into a grove of Cottonwoods that surrounded the dance pavilion in a cloud of dust. We arrived like the Chinese. We were reeling. And we were the cat’s walk, the dog’s paws, and rock and roll was just on the horizon.
Our classmates were openly jealous of our brotherhood of the wine. We were magnanimous, inviting those we trusted out to the Ford for a pull. Periodically, between dances, we sophisticates staggered out of the steamy dance pavilion for deeper draughts of the waste-oil wine which Max had dourly dubbed, between gagging and retching.
Willy, of the long blocked horse teeth, Biff of the football knee, Max timid as a cloud, was as drunk as I. We sat in the front seat of the Ford watching swarms of hard-wing bugs swarm around the yellow lights. We drank with abandon. My head swam with nausea by the time I located Cheryl for a dance. Given the restraint of the church, chaperones vigilant as inquisitors, and the time and place-before Kennedy and King, Vietnam and the Stones–our courtships were touchingly innocent. We stood around under the leafy Cottonwoods in a preening pod, leering.
Blond Cheryl, looking like cotton candy in a pink chiffon dress blushed to the top of her lake water blue eyes as I led her onto the hardwood floor. The eight-piece band played Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White. Cheryl gazed at me in open astonishment when I tried to dance, using her for support. I observed from that high numb vista of alcohol that her teeth resembled those of Willy. Her mouth was a separate thing, but she held me close to her body. All breasts and legs and the press of a vulva as fleeting as promise. As I looked smugly down at Cheryl her face, in the light of the colored paper lanterns, was snapping with rhythms of indignation. I had been drinking alcohol! She was humiliated to be seen with me, let alone to be seen dancing with me. It was unthinkable that a Mormon girl headed for a virginal temple marriage would ever marry me, let alone trade lips with a man whose lips had been thus sullied with drink. But in the same tirade she asked me if I would take her home in the Ford. Alone. And then she suddenly tore the gold chain and ring from her neck and hurled it in my face.
She humiliated me, and left me in the middle of the dance floor amidst the circling couples, after she’d slapped my face and squealed something that I couldn’t discern. I acquitted myself by solemnly marching straight toward Betty Rainard, the God Ugliest girl in the valley and proposed a dance. She refused, so I staggered out into the cool night air under the withering stare of the lemon faced chaperons. I managed to straighten myself when I walked past the Sheriff’s car. The ground was rocking under me, but the Sheriff didn't seem to notice.
The moon was higher; it glowed like the intense eye of a tawny cat. I could hear owls conversing in the Cottonwoods, a strange, haunting kind of calling. I thought of my mother, sitting in the drab loneliness of the parlor, reading by lamp. My father’s hands made the chair upon which she rocked. I could see her sharp, pursed mouth as she read the Bible, interspersing that silent session with occasional anecdotes from the Reader’s Digest. I knew she was lost, and I was lost, but for love, I felt nothing.
I fell behind the wheel of the Ford, found the quarter-full gallon bottle of wine and took another long drink, fighting the convulsive recoil of my stomach. We had learned to strain the sediments between our teeth. Then I took another drink, a killer, and I saw my mother sitting beside the glowing green eye of the Philco, turning the knob through the static in a sad, gray bewilderment.
“Goddamn, this stuff's nasty!” Max bellowed. “He must have shit in it!” Max passed the bottle back to Willy who eyed it miserably, a bottle of flat, warm Coke in his hand.
“He did,” Willy mumbled, lifting the jug, taking false swallows. The sediment had mixed so thoroughly the wine looked like gray paint. His face was white.
“Hey, Willy boy,” Biff cruelly taunted, “why don’t you drink it instead of blowing bubbles? Look Andy, he ain’t even drinkin’.”
“No, he’s drowning. Look at that stupid ass.” Willy had fallen out of the car and had crawled crab-like toward the water. He stood up unsteadily and ripped off his shirt.
“Ain’t no reason,” I heard him say. “She don’t love me. I’m gonna go out there an’ jus’ keep walkin’ ‘til I can’t swim.”
“Oh, Christ,” Biff said. “Willy is such a pain in the ass. He’s still cryin’ ‘cause Bob Waverly stole his sweetheart. Women, ugh!”
“Thassright,” I said.
“Hoooo!” Willy shouted, walking into the desultory little wavelets that lapped at the beach. And then he began to run, garroaring and laughing out into the shallows.
“Look at lover boy,” Max mumbled.
“‘Spect we’d better save him?”
“Hell no.” We debated, while Willy caterwauled in the water, shouting something about how chicken we were. That got Biff where he lived. He peeled off his shirt and ran into Lake Moroni. I dove into the water a scant five yards behind him fully dressed. I swam for what seemed like a long year. The water was brutal between the legs. I surfaced, coughing and yelling. I could see the shine of Willy’s horse teeth in the moonlight.
After a loud contest of strength, ball grabbing and taunting we came together in a circle, treading water, and drunkenly plotted the theft of one of the motorboats. We swam to the pier and moored ourselves for a moment. Our teeth were chattering, and we quickly talked ourselves out of the crime and back into the relative warmth of the cool air. The band inside the Pavilion was doing a stultified Chubby Checker in three quarter time, and rumors of war were in the air. Lyndon Johnson had announced the first major troop commitment that night, and the band played on.
Cheryl was standing on the wooden steps, and I could see she was crying. I had come from Lake Moroni like a shivering apparition. She saw me advance into the yellow light, wet and coughing. I had misplaced my shoes, and was hobbling over a conspiracy of broken glass. The first cut made me stop and an enormous revulsion swept over me. Every droning sermon on the Word of Wisdom replayed itself in the stuttering frames of Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet. I could see Cheryl’s mouth moving, but could not hear her words. I wanted to lie down on the beach under the weight of my burden.
Cheryl looked at me as if I was a Leper. Her hair wrinkled in the humidity of righteousness. I stood up, swaying, and returned her stare with vehemence. She saw something in my eyes, something of my future, my past, and then she ran back up the steps, her starched petticoats sounding like cracking ice.
Willy and Roger collared me just before I caught up with her. They wrestled me back into the car, and I calmed down as we drank more of the wine. Then it occurred to us that it was only proper to find Jesse and thank him for his gift of the grape, or flower. The bottle was almost empty. I drove as fast as the Ford would chug, a flat, 35 miles an hour. The wind whistled through the wing windows, chilling us in our sopping clothes. On the empty road the great masses of stars overhead were a dusty bowl of light. I decided it was time to play my trump card.
“Look in the glove compartment,” I said. Roger peered at me dubiously, and then extracted the can of Copenhagen.
“Whooeee! Whatcha got there?”
“Chewin’ tabac,” I said nonchalantly. It was a coup from the Idaho Billiards.
“Wow, gimmee some,” Willy said. They took a big dip, placing it under their lower lips in imitation of the men in the Idaho Billiards and every other rancher in the valley. They passed the can to me. I glowed in their admiration. I was nearly 16 years old, handsome, confident, and wise with wine. This was life edged with exaltation. Cheryl would forgive me, and someday I would have her after I got out of the Navy, get married if things developed, move to Salt Lake City, get a good job, and raise a couple of kids. Rub it up against you like a cat, love her, get married, have a good life . . . those great geese don’t have a chance tomorrow, get two of the big, beautiful bastards, make my mother proud of me . . .
I chewed the tobacco like two sticks of Double Mint, and then I accidentally swallowed a great gobbet of the volatile brown juice. It hit my stomach like acid dropped into water. I felt as if I had been drinking the brackish water from the roadside sloughs full of old beer and oil cans and dead carp. I was falling. Falling into Lake Moroni. And then the left front tire blew. I lurched the car to a stop, and fell out of the door, heaving with sickness. I crawled into the middle of U.S. highway 30. Truckers loathe that path of twisting emptiness that leads them through the valley to Kemmerer and Rock Springs and Laramie and the dreadful, dreaded east.
I lay on the pavement, suicidal, my body lengthwise on the white divider stripes, laid out, ready for the coffin. At least two cars hurtled past me on either side. The sound of the approaching tires was hypnotic, a comfort. I swung my body perpendicular to the oncoming lane. As a car’s headlights would find me brakes were crushed. I heard cursing, and then another voice urging me to stand up and charge an oncoming pair of headlights.
Roger and Willy, sick and scared, finally roused themselves enough to haul me out of danger. I was throwing up bits of the lining of my stomach, oil and beach-wrack, Coca-Cola and wine. Then Willy crawled into the stinking wet borrow-pit and passed out. It took Max and Biff and I over an hour to jack the car up. I stopped every few minutes to retch so convulsively that I would also momentarily pass out. The spare tire was flat. It was hopeless. We stripped off the dead rubber and made our way laterally back to highway in a shower of sparks from the steel rim.
Chastened, but far from sober, we made it back to town, and agreed to meet at Willy’s house at four in the morning. An hour away. I entered the house of my father in what I imagined to be stealth. She was waiting for me.
“A fine time for you,” she said from the parlor.
“Uhh, flat tire.”
“Indeed? Come in here please.” I reluctantly let myself be seen between the half-closed doors to the parlor.
“Dear Heavenly Father, what’s happened to you?”
“It was a flat tire.”
“You look as if you've been in a fight. Have you been fighting again?” I saw her nostrils quiver, white commas of indignation. “Why, I do believe you’ve been drinking.”
“No Ma’am.” My head was spinning.
“Andrew Lattimore. For the shame of it! If your father could see you know he would thrash you to within an inch of your life.”
“Bullshit,” I said. Her face went to the pallor of death. It was the first time I had ever cursed in her presence.
“I, please . . .”
“I gotta hunt tomorrow, gotta provide for the family,” I mumbled, wheeled, and ran for the bathroom, my grisly, vomit streaked hand over my mouth. I vowed on the Word of Wisdom as sincerely as I had ever done anything. It is, however, in the notion of men, that alcohol is a religion, no matter the consequence. One of the lesser sins, as I reminisce. God is no longer an abstract to me. Evil is no longer an abstract. They are real, and as palpable as the closed air I now breath.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted
Main Table of
Contents