The Heaven of Mercury Read online

  He was a literate man and his favorite poet was Wordsworth. He’d read “Intimations of Immortality” and had a sense of how as he’d grown up from a child he’d moved further and further away from his spiritual self, his spiritual origins, and he sensed that most people experienced the same thing, a slow uncoupling, like someone stepping out of the rocket for a nice space walk, secure in knowing the life cord kept them connected, however tenuously, to the ship. And then one day they realized that the floating cord was only that, attached to nothing but their own ass, and that they were at best more like a moon held detached but distantly in tow to its planet. A body of pale memories of when they were part of the world.

  Because he was a newspaper man by trade, a morning radio announcer by choice and local popularity, he kept up with the news. In addition to local items, the Mercury Comet printed any bit of interesting science news Finus got through press releases from the government and private labs. His latest fascination was the scientists’ recent belief that there were other planets in other solar systems capable of supporting earthly life. There was water and oxygen. There were clouds and sunsets, seasons, the cycles of storms. Gave new meaning to the phrase “another world.” Now they were trying to explore Mars, to see if there’d once been some form of life there, preserved cryogenically beneath frozen oceans in evidence of God knows what. One of the scientists said, Take a good look at Mars, it’s what the earth will look like one day. It had all made Finus reflective. He’d been on the air now with his morning show for twenty-five years. Was it not possible that some of his earlier shows had made their way to antennae on other worlds, through far-flung space travelers just passing through, or via some slip between or among dimensions that diminished time and space? If anything, radio waves would be the medium to slip through. Whether the antennae be metallic rods for electronic receivers or some delicate, antlike, cephalic appendage among a people for whom radio waves were the primary means of communication, he wished he’d come across as a little more intelligent. But at least if they heard his show they’d have to recognize that he was representative of a friendly race, kind and considerate of one another, willing to spend time in resisting the isolation of the human soul.

  He felt the power move through him as he put on the first record, listened to its familiar bars, cleared his throat, and spoke into the microphone as if into the ear of an old friend nearly deaf—close, and loud enough to be heard, but not too loud, in his deep rich baritone twang, -Good morning Mercury and surrounding environs, thinking, Who knows how broad an environ may be? For if radio waves were not a manifestation of a Creator’s presence in the universe he didn’t know what was, and if there be a God well then his environ is Everything is it not? He felt the frequency run in his veins from the tips of his toes and fingers to the top of his head, vibrating the horny cartilage in his throat, -Good morning in the a.m. to y’all, each and ever one of you, and it’s a beautiful morning, and he played his old 45 of “The Star Spangled Banner” and looked at the notes he’d scribbled on his pad: those who were born, those who had died, those who were winning at bridge these days, and those who had traveled and come home. There was a cancer-screening vehicle coming through for the outlying rural areas. He’d note that the garden club would be planting a tree downtown and that the Mercury Heritage Library had gotten in a large shipment of new books thanks to a grant from the Selena Grimes Foundation. He’d talk a little about what the almanac said as compared to the way things turned out to be, and chat with himself about the possibility of global warming, about the national debate over Social Security and medical care, and offer some words of wisdom for the millions of baby boomers already showing signs of being perplexed with a generation of youth who were making the impetuous sixties seem quaint and tame. Finus would put the world into perspective. There wasn’t anything better for that than good conversation. It was how everything that happened in the world got filtered down into ponder-able reality, considered and thereby experienced by all. It was important to understand you were a part of the world, and of everything that happened in it. After the president had addressed the State of the Union and gone on to bed and dreamed about being a naked child standing onstage having forgotten the words to “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” after an astronaut had walked in space and come back and touched down and gone home and made love to his wife in passionate exhilaration and mortal fear, after a serial killer had murdered some innocent stranger and slipped back into rational life and gotten his hair cut and had a meal with his friends and maybe even gone to church on Sunday, was the experience soon any more his or hers than it was everyone’s who’d heard about it, imagined it, envisioned it, and mulled it over in his or her mind? It didn’t necessarily seem so to Finus, for whom all experience now seemed to have been filtered through his own blood and bones. He’d lived through eighty-nine revolutions around the sun. Long enough for the residual energy of millions of years to have mingled with and charged his own as if his body was a rechargeable cell.

  But it would all become particulate, and slough away as dust adrift on the earth. The world would spin on, and toss and mix such dust as had been him and Albert Schweitzer and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the poor souls of the Dust Bowl depression and the dead frozen Russians in Siberia, and poor Midfield who’d died the day before. And Birdie Urquhart, too, with whom he would visit nearly every day, sometimes for an early coffee before his show, when she would part the little curtains at the kitchen table, It’s candlelight, soon be time for Finus Bates to go in to work. Even Birdie would be more a part of him than ever before, now that she was gone. Everyone would be filtered through the eyes, skin, and lungs of the living, into the very fiber and sap of the trees, mingling and mixing and some finally slipping back out into what was not emptiness after all, but was the vast, articulate space between beautiful worlds.

  Cephalantus Accidentalis

  LATE MORNING, SECOND day of a July Methodist youth retreat to a wide and lazy stretch of the Chunky River, 1917, young Finus Bates felt the effects of a little shine he and the other boys had sneaked off to consume the evening before. He rushed from the campsite down a trail and slipped inside the thick-leaved cover of a buttonbush beside a tiny clearing. Hadn’t been there long, voided but still too shaky to leave, when he heard voices come along the path, and through the slivers of space between the whorled, elliptical buttonbush leaves he saw two girls, Avis Crossweatherly and Birdie Wells.

  Finus went absolutely still. Birdie was soaking wet because (he would find out later) she’d slipped on the bank and fallen into the river fully clothed. Avis looked up into the air, then all around. Finus squatted under the dense, low cover of the shrub, pants around his ankles, ass cooling in a low breeze. Avis straightened and said, -My Lord, what is that smell?

  -Something died, Birdie said.

  Finus quietly began to scoop sandy soil and dead leaves between his legs over his sick scat.

  But just after she’d made her comment, Birdie had peeled off the last of her wet undergarments and stood naked and pearly white in the light-threaded shade from the taller trees and this is what Finus looked up again to see. She had that shape and look all around of the actresses and models of the day, just fleshy enough to make a man think of reproduction. And that which had seemed merely ordinary inside her clothing now took on a baroque sensuality Finus could not have imagined in the abstract, much less in the reality of chattery Birdie Wells. Ample in the hip yet augmented in protruding carnality of bone, pelvic jut like a smooth white plow, a sweet little benaveled pooch, and shoulder blades beautifully awkward as the small futile wings of a hatchling. He gazed through the leaf lattice at the immaculate cradled shading of her visible ribs, smooth and defined of faint bone shadow, and the delicate scoop from which her long slim neck rose into an oval face made beautiful in this light and unself-conscious nakedness. A plum-shaped mouth, her sad and impish pale blue eyes. Not the face of a girl given to governing herself without considerable chaperon
age and whackity discipline across the open palms—at least that was the way Finus imagined it.

  Her dark brown hair curled about her ears in a bob, fleeting red hues in the slim rays of sun that slipped in and fell upon it. Compared to Avis Crossweatherly’s hard angularity, Birdie seemed like a regressive dream. Finus felt himself go curved and firm as a summer squash. He watched, his heart heavy with the grief of longing, as Avis approached Birdie with a white bath towel. But something struck Birdie at that moment. She turned away from Avis and did a naked cartwheel, her legs and low, scanty pubis flicking through the dappled light, the motion quick and graceful as a child’s, the child she still was in ways he would never see again, and she landed upright with a look of surprise and conquest on her face, little breasts aquiver. They were hardly more pronounced than little halves of peaches, he’d never seen a delicate color brown like the brown aureole around her nipples.

  Upon landing she gave a little yelp of surprise, and then laughed out loud, spreading her arms for imaginary applause. Birdie’s face seemed so free of all self-consciousness and open, in a way he’d never seen before, to all the possibilities of her beauty. And never before that moment had he really understood beauty, or been able to look beneath or beyond the masks women wore over their beauty like veils—not just makeup, but the masks of conventional behavior and attitude, of modesty, of keen privacy, and of coy lust. He never really considered Birdie to be “beautiful” in the conventional sense, but he’d felt some kind of discreet and inarticulate longing for her, which he’d vaguely imagined had something to do with their kindred spirits. And then Avis stepped up to Birdie with the towel and began to buff her down, vigorous rubbing with the towel all over her shoulders, her back, and then gently under her breasts and between her legs. They were giggling. Some sound almost escaped him, some sort of muffled carp, and he closed his eyes then and thought he’d actually made no sound but maybe he had, since before he could detect her approach the leaves of his hideaway rustled and he opened his eyes to see a pair of hands parting the branches.

  It was Avis. Her long, kangaroo face peered at him with no more emotion in her eyes than the animal she was often compared to. For a long moment, they stared at one another. My God! All the requisite proprieties between him and this girl vanished in that instant, as if a mischievous god had tossed some sort of magical clarifying dust in their eyes. Finus’s horrified humiliation was brief, for the look of cool, detached appraisal in Avis’s eyes—the gaze of an animal one realizes has no interest after all in eating one at that moment—both calmed and created a sort of detachment in him. He thought, Maybe she’ll stop paying so much attention to me now, stop embarrassing me with her flirtation when everyone knows I’m not interested in her. But she stared at him so long, her look penetrated him so precisely, that he understood this wouldn’t happen. She knew exactly what he had seen, as if through his own eyes. Her eyes, at that moment, were on his waggling member, which in spite of discovery still asserted itself. Avis Crossweatherly’s eyes went back to Finus’s own, and he sensed that she knew exactly what had happened inside him, beyond pure sexual infatuation, that he’d been imprinted with something beyond a simple, lustful fantasy. Years later, he would understand that she knew he’d been struck with an image of the ideal form as surely as if Birdie Wells had been a bathing goddess there in the wood, and she—plain Avis Crossweatherly—the goddess’s attendant maid.

  -What is it, Avis? Birdie had called out then.

  -Nothing, Avis said, and the leaves closed up again as she turned back to the glade. -Something dead, like you thought.

  He would remember all this keenly years later, when he learned how Avis subtly worked on Birdie to accept the insistent but unwanted courting of Earl Urquhart, how Avis spoke so glowingly of Earl to Birdie’s parents, how Avis even hinted to Birdie that if Earl were to shift his affections to her, she would feel like the luckiest girl alive. But by then he figured it didn’t matter. He came to believe, in the late evening of his life, that it was all finally unavoidable. As fates will be.

  Self-Reliance

  HE’D CONFRONTED Birdie in a manner of speaking, about her imminent marriage, at the Potato Ball, spring of 1918. It was held at the old country club, now defunct and returned to pastures but for the lodge-style clubhouse. Men were a little scarce, most boys off to war. The stars and moon were out, the skylights open beneath the eaves of the hall, and the soft light spilled in upon them. They’d turned down the gas lamps. Finus had cut in on Earl, who let him so he could go smoke with some boys out back nipping raisin jack.

  -You’re speaking to me again now? Birdie said, teasing him.

  He said nothing, gave a grim smile. They danced, and Finus said, -So you are going to marry Earl for certain. And she said, looking at him with that gap-toothed lighthearted frankness she had, -Well I reckon—it’s all set. I wish they could do it all without me, though.

  Finus said, -Are you sure you don’t just want to run off with me?

  She stood still and stared at him, astonished. It wasn’t all astonishment, though. He thought he could see in her eyes that she might really consider doing such a thing if he was serious. He’d caught hold, for the moment, of some loose line in her that would attach itself to stray wildness. And then, he couldn’t explain this at all, something in him had panicked at the whole idea, of how much his life would change if he did that. Some current of reticence went down through his hands and into her bare shoulders. And Birdie sensed it, he could tell in an instant that she did, and before he could quell it as the momentary rationality of a sensible man that would always, of course, buck away from the acquiescence of love, it was over, she was knocking him on the arm and turning away.

  -Here’s your sweetheart, she said, and Finus saw Avis Crossweatherly headed his way across the floor, her eyes pinning him to the spot. She came up and stood before him in a pale blue skirt and navy cashmere sweater.

  -Dance with a girl? she said.

  He smiled weakly, and took her hand.

  A MONTH LATER, the night before Earl was set to marry Birdie, Finus got drunk at a card game in Earl’s honor at Marie Suskin’s whorehouse on 9th Street. The drunker he got, the less he felt like honoring Earl, so when he got Earl down a hundred dollars at stud he demanded that Earl go double or nothing and put up his fiancée as collateral. Earl, who never drank but had a temper, didn’t really like to gamble, knew Finus had long been sweet on Birdie, accepted and lost—three kings to Finus’s full house. Earl threw his cards down and they fought. Finus was bigger, knocked Earl down with a roundhouse and went outside, climbed into his old Model T. He meant to go out to Earl’s house, where Birdie was staying with her mother until the wedding there the next day. He would get her out onto the porch, and tell her that he loved her and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, and ask her to marry him, instead. They could move to some other town, if she wished, even to the Gulf coast, live in his father’s beach house, he’d work out of Mobile. He would tell her he was serious even though he was drunk. He would tell her he’d call on her later in the week, and then he would leave.

  He carried a pearl-handled .32 revolver in his pocket, his father’s pistol, with which he meant to shoot Earl’s father, old Junius Urquhart, if he stood in the way. The Urquharts lived out past southside, beyond the highway, out the Junction Road. Finus roared across the highway hardly checking for traffic, fishtailed in the gravel on the other side, and then while trying to light a cigarette on down the road he slipped a wheel into the ditch, ramped into a thicket of sapling pines, and flew from the car through the old fabric roof like a circus performer on a vault. His head banged hard on the ground and he lay insensible for a while with a broad knot swelling up through the gash in his forehead.

  A couple of his friends had followed him some five minutes behind. When they saw the lights of Finus’s car in the stand of pine saplings they went in and found Finus lying a few feet away on the ground, bleeding from the ear and the bump on his head, a burni
ng cigarette stuck to his bottom lip, and so they at first thought him conscious, smoking beside his crashed car, which would have been just like Finus. They sat down in a ragged circle around him for a minute before they realized he was out, and about that time Finus opened his eyes anyway and asked where they all were.

  -In a little set of pines just off the ditch, Curly Ammons said.

  Finus noted the cigarette still in his mouth, spat it and asked for another. He lit up, pushed himself off the ground, touched the bloody knot on his head, and walked over to look at the car.

  -I don’t imagine it’ll start again, not now, he said.

  -Not likely, Bill said. -We can tow it in. I got a piece of cable.

  -All right, Finus said. -Take it to Papa’s house. And he started walking.

  -Better not go on out there, now, Curly called. -Old man Urquhart is waiting on you. One of Earl’s buddies called him on the telephone at Marie’s.

  Finus gave a wave and kept on. Shoot him and his goddamn telephone too, he said to himself, righteous in the drunken certainty that Earl and Birdie’s was a marriage illegitimate in the highest moral sense. Contrary to natural law. There was a moon and he could follow the road easy. He smoked the rest of the fresh cigarette, and when he’d finished it he picked up his pace. He kept to one of the well-packed ruts. In the bright moonlight he could see the Urquhart house where it sat low in a grove of old oaks that seemed to guard the sprawling house like hulking gnomes. He walked into their shadows as the dogs started up. Old Junius’s rabbit dogs, beagles. They shot out toward Finus as if unleashed.