Читать книгу The Last Fair Deal Going Down - David Rhodes - Страница 9

Chapter III

EACH MORNING ON HIS WAY TO THE DEPOT LUKE SLEDGE bought one pint of whiskey. On Saturday he bought two. He drank half a bottle in the morning and half in the afternoon and threw the empty into a trash barrel in the parking lot that was our front yard. He was not a drunk and I never saw my father without control of himself. However, he was mildly intoxicated constantly, and so appeared to have no vices . . . the cells of his body gulped whiskey like a tree drinking water out of the ground, pulling it up into its roots and sending it out into the farthest, highest leaves. Even the smell soaked into his brain and disappeared. Few people ever knew that he drank. There was only one way to know — the eyes. Father had told me that. “Look,” he’d say. “Look at the eyes,” and he’d point to his eyes. “There, Reuben, a thin layer of film, like glass — and that’s the difference. Without it you can’t see right.” But I wasn’t sure about that. “A dust storm, for example,” he said. “Who can see a dust storm better, a man standing inside it or a man standing behind a window?”

Father had learned somewhere how to engrave. He sat behind his desk in the depot with his burins and copper plates and carved intricate designs — lines and curves that intersected and went parallel, tangents, parabolas, hyperbolas, squares, three-dimensional cones and hexagons. Paul once found an engraving of a dollar bill in a drawer cluttered with dirty paper and rusty bolts. The detail was perfect. But Father never printed any of his engravings. “The ink spoils it,” he said. “The colors are never right and always smear and make the lines fuzzy. It’s best to throw the plate away after you make it. As soon as you print it it becomes something not like it was. And the lines in the plate get ruined.” One summer Father attempted to teach me how to engrave, but I kept wanting to touch the plate with my fingers to feel the lines because it was difficult to see them at all unless you tipped the plate at just the right angle from the light. But Father was critical of this. “That leaves fingerprints and makes for a messy job,” he would say, and finally gave up teaching me altogether after he apprehended me introducing different colored inks into our engraving studio.

Paul quit high school in his junior year and taught himself to become an auto mechanic. After a couple of years he had our front yard littered with the engines, frames, seats, and bumpers of dead automobiles that he meticulously resurrected and transplanted into living automobiles. At first, the people’s resentment still being what it was after John Charles’s death, he was unable to get work. But slowly, a few at a time — those who couldn’t get a distributor or a transmission fixed anywhere else except by specialists in Chicago — they began to come, pulling their injured cars up in front of the house for Paul to fix. Father once told him that if he would start a garage away from home, business would be better. But Paul wouldn’t do that. “If they want their cars fixed they have to come here . . . this is where I live,” he said. And they did come, but only when there was no other choice, and then only apologetically. “I’ve got some trouble here with my car,” they’d say, “I wouldn’t come but Mac’s Garage don’t do work on fluid drives, and I need the car to get to the plant and back.” Many of them wouldn’t come to the door but sat in their automobiles in the front yard and honked until Paul came outside. “Those son-of-a-bitches,” Walt would scream, “I’ll go out there and shove their fuckin’ heads down those horns.” But Paul would get up and say that it was O.K. — that they only did that because they couldn’t do nothing else. The money Paul made fixing cars he put in a cupboard in the kitchen and whenever anyone needed some money that’s where he got it.

Will was like Father in one way: if you knew either of them well it was impossible to imagine him without a central understanding permeating your conception of him in such a way as to be inseparable from him — like trying to imagine life in Europe in 1943 without considering the war. Will was handsome. He stood over six feet two inches tall, had a face of long, well-balanced lines, high cheekbones, and hazel eyes. He walked like an athlete on the sides of the balls of his feet and spoke in a deep, rich voice that was not at all monotone. At a very young age he had artfully combined the experience of our ostracism with the late forties’ and fifties’ fascination with the idea of the tragic hero to his own advantage and there was no woman in Des Moines that he did not consider as his prey, and few that did not have a similar image of themselves reserved at least for those dark hours when their husbands had gone to sleep, and they, still unsatiated and restless, lay staring up to the ceiling, watching fantasies.

I can remember watching Will (then sixteen) gather his clothes about him late at night, slip out the door and make his way carefully between the wrecks in the front yard with long shadows lying under the tires and in the ditch, over to the bed of Mrs. Griffin who had a light showing in her attic that I could make out from the porch. Later then, only when the air was heavy, I could hear a long, winding, tiny screaming. Just as it was beginning to be light, I’d watch him leave through the front door and run back down the street and into the yard, running as though he knew someone were watching. But he couldn’t have. Soon then he did not do it anymore.

Mr. Griffin came over to the house one night and knocked on the front door. He had returned from a sale, still in his suit. We were eating dinner together as we frequently still did and Father told Paul it was probably for him. Paul walked across the room and opened the screen door. Mr. Griffin immediately jumped inside the kitchen and looked quickly over at Will, saying: “I’ve got some trouble with my car,” the projection of his voice shaking around in the cupboards. “What seems to be the problem?” asked Paul as our visitor moved toward the center of the room, his progression looking like a thousand pages of drawings in the Looney Tune Production Studio flipped over by the thumb of a janitor. “It’s my carburetor . . . my carburetor needs fixing.” Walt coughed and Griffin turned toward the table. “And you keep that boy of yours away from my place,” he yelled at Father. “Just what boy are you talking about, Mr. Griffin?” asked Father, putting a cigarette out in his coffee cup and fingering his fork with his other hand. “That one,” said Griffin and pointed a large, hairy finger at Will. “Well, now,” said Father, “that boy’s only sixteen; doesn’t seem to me that he could be doing you much harm.” I could see Walt out of the corner of my eye sliding his chair back toward the shotgun leaning against the wall. Griffin’s face turned the color of an October tomato, rotten, and he shook his fist at Father and said, “If I catch him anywhere near my house, I’ll kill him.” Then he bolted from the room. Walt began to laugh. “And so he was gone,” he said.

“I don’t want to see it happen again,” said Father to Will. “You’ve got to stop this. You’re too young anyway.”

“Too young?” jeered Will. “You mean old man Griffin’s too old, don’t you?”

“If I’d meant that, I’d’ve said it. You can’t understand anything yet — can’t see behind the act. Of course you’re old enough to grow a stiff prick and go around jabbing it into wherever it will fit; but too young to see behind that, behind where the ugly colors of emotions are. You’re too young because you don’t see that, and later, when you do, won’t want it anyway.”

“What’s wrong with using what was given to you when you were born?”

“Nothing,” yelled Father, “nothing was given to you. You just got what you have — nobody gave it to you. You just got it, and now that you’ve got it you’re in the same boat as everyone else. The kind of life you’re talking about will drive you mad; then you and Griffin can start a club.”

“And you had seven kids.”

“That’s different. Marriage is different. It’s why there is such a thing.”

“Like John’s.”

“John Charles was an idiot. I knew it from when he was little. He was too stupid to see that everything he would do was damned before he did it.”

“We aren’t vegetables.”

“No, and knowing that should teach you. Like a warning.”

These arguments between Father and Will were frequent. Nellie always left the room as soon as she could see them starting, but I always stayed — stayed and listened and tried to understand why Father hated Will as much as he did.

Father never convinced Will, but maybe he wasn’t trying to. By the time he was twenty Will had been three times ordered into court on charges of statutory rape and unlawful and lascivious actions, all of which were dismissed due to lack of substantiating evidence. Will was careful in that he never took advantage of anyone (except once), but would put himself in the position of being taken advantage of and ride along on the wave of emotion that he had festered until he grew tired of its personality and got off, leaving behind him empty accusations aimed at the ineffable part of Will that was empty itself, and there was never anything done to make that emptiness unlawful.

Father never argued with Walt. No one argued with Walt that knew him. In a half sentence of pointed words he was able to synthesize, capsulize, and ignoblize your premise, many times unknown to yourself, in such a way as to leave you nothing to do but walk away. (Only Nellie, she could laugh.) And any argument he couldn’t reduce to an absurd axiom would invoke the single response, “So what?” which was more damaging than all the rest. The steel trap of his mind took in thousands of mutilated, twisted, jumbled words, and like a machine in a junkyard that takes bent cars and smashes them into small steel cubes, fed out motionless propositions laid bare by the removal of all extraneous and colored words.

Walt was understandably the best street fighter in Des Moines and was afraid of nothing. Many times I had seen him standing out in the street in front of a tavern meticulously tearing apart some man with quick jabs and stompings. His object was one-fold, never cluttered with anger, revenge, jealousy, or envy: he was out to win, to reduce his opponent to a lifeless form on the cement, and his hate was of such a general kind that it never obstructed his view of the quickest and easiest method of achieving this end. He was not malicious though he was seldom in fights that he hadn’t provoked. Labor unions hired him during striking periods to stand in front of the factories and shops as a deterrent to scab labor, but his loyalty was never assured and he often fought with the picketers themselves. It was impossible to avoid Walt if he decided he wanted to fight with you because he had a way of looking at you and seeing just that part of you that was sensitive to the touch and then begin jabbing away at it. I do not mean to imply that this is difficult with most people because what is most suspect in them is usually surrounded by walls of protective clues standing out like street signs on the corner, and there are names for those things. But several are able to remain elusive to everyone — but Walt, who could dig up the most obscure, forgotten, seemingly insignificant characteristics, thus lighting a fire under his opponent. There was one way for the good people of Des Moines to protect themselves from Walt:

After dinner, Will and Paul and I were in the kitchen with Nellie when we heard shouts coming up the road in front. “What’s that?” said Nellie, but no one answered because the rest of us knew what it was. Will and I carried two kitchen chairs outside and Paul picked up a towing chain by the side of the house. Walt was backing up the asphalt road, holding a tire iron in one hand and a metal barrel-rung in the other. Around him circled five or six men from the Rooster Tavern trying to find a knife-blade opening between the revolutions of the tire iron and Walt.

“Son-of-a-bitches,” Walt was saying with as much emphasis as a long-distance operator at three o’clock in the morning. One of the men came too close, made a mistake and Walt caught him in the face with the barrel-rung and he fell screaming to the side of the road. “Son-of-a-bitches,” Walt said. Will and I started jabbing at three of them with our chairs. Paul was swinging the tow chain around his head but he should have known that it was too awkward to control and one of the men caught it with an ax handle and Paul backed up against Walt when we heard Father’s twelve gauge go off behind us. The five men turned around to see Nellie standing in the front yard with the gun leveled in front of her screaming that she would blow their heads off if they didn’t leave. They picked up the man Walt had hit with the barrel-rung and walked back down toward town cursing Walt and all of us in general. “Son-of-a-bitches,” said Walt and threw his weapons into the ditch. “Thanks,” he said.

“That’s the third time this year,” said Paul.

“That many?” said Walt.

“What are you trying to prove? Someone else might have been hurt. Yourself, maybe.”

“So what,” said Walt, and Paul walked silently back to the house with us. Father was standing in the kitchen and told Walt that one of these days he would be killed.

“Everything I know, I learned from watching you,” said Walt, and I knew he was right.

Walt was hired by a lobbying group to bomb a construction site at the edge of town in order that the city council’s judgment concerning further road construction would be assured in favor of construction companies. Although this is the only bombing I knew Walt to be responsible for, he was responsible for many more. But he was never discovered and never would be discovered because without passion, abnormality, or perversion his actions left no messy red threads hanging about the ragged sweater of the explosion. Of them all Walt was the greatest threat to me when I was young. I loved him even more than Nellie. I followed him downtown and he’d take me in the bars with him and no one would say anything about me being too young. The blind hate I felt for the good people of Des Moines was glorified when I saw Walt backing up into the front yard swinging a piece of metal he had picked up somewhere and saying, “Son-of-a-bitches,” which I picked up as a battle cry and ran screaming out of the house dragging Paul and Will with me to help.

Walt was offered a full scholarship from the Philosophy Department at the State University of Iowa after Nellie had painstakingly arranged a secret interview between the head of the department and unsuspecting Walt in the Rooster Tavern, where he, the department head, somehow discovered that Walt knew something about whatever it was that his department had to do with, though there must have been more to it than that. Walt wrote back:

Dear Sir(s):

Drop dead,

regretfully,

walter Sledge

When Will became so old as to begin worrying about reaching thirty he was different than before. He never laughed. His involvements became more elaborate and frequent; his attitude was no longer youthful: he looked tired and was taking some kind of a drug. He rarely looked at you in the eyes, and when he did you were forced to look away. Whenever he talked to one of us he seemed like he was trying to explain something that he didn’t know anything about. The telephone rang all hours of the day and he was caught up in trying to regulate his doings so that he was leaving out the back door as a young (they were all young, then), frightened girl diffidently stepped up on the front steps to knock on the door.

“Is Will here?” asked a tiny voice.

“I’m sorry, but he’s not here,” said Paul. “Can I take a message?”

“He’s not here?” she asked again.

“No. I’m sorry. Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee? Pretty cold out there.”

“Oh . . . no . . . no . . .” (They never came in if Will wasn’t home.) “. . . If he comes back . . . do you know where he went?”

“ Well, no. He’s kind of hard to keep track of,” and Paul laughed. He was a horrible actor.

“Tell him Marsha was here . . . ,” she said, looking around Paul into the kitchen, hoping to see Will — hoping that Paul had been lying.

“Sure . . . Okay. I’ll tell him Marsha was here. Do you want him to call you?”

“No . . . I mean I want to see him — but to call me if he can’t come. But I want to see him.”

“Sure. Okay. I’ll tell him.” And she stayed standing on the steps.

“Sure you don’t want to come in?” asked Paul.

“No . . . I’m going. Tell Will that Marsha was here.” And she’d go away, walking out through the junkyard that was our front yard.

An hour later the phone would ring and Nellie, thinking of Paul, would answer it. “Hello.”

“Is Will there?” a voice too demanding to be real would ask.

“No. He’s not here right now.”

“Who’s this?”

“Nellie.”

“Nellie who?”

“Nellie Sledge, his sister.”

“Oh.”

“Can I take a message?”

“Yes. Tell him Meg called and wants to see him.”

“All right.”

“Tell him to come over tonight if he can.”

“All right.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“No . . . sorry.”

“Well, tell him Meg called.”

“All right.”

“Uh . . . do you know me . . . I mean has he mentioned me, or that I might call?”

“Well, he was in such a hurry that . . .”

“Tell him I called, will you?”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

During these years Father was leaving early and staying late at the depot, working even on weekends, especially. When Will came home (usually with a nervous girl in modern clean clothes whose eyes you could never see clearly because she never took them away from Will), he’d shrug his shoulders and go into his bedroom.

One morning three cars drove into the front yard. Walt and Paul and Nellie and I could hear someone shouting: “Will . . . Will Sledge . . . Will Sledge,” who as usual wasn’t at home.

“Son-of-a-bitches,” said Walt. Paul and I went outside. Walt came behind us and Nellie stood looking from the doorway out at Mr. Edgeway standing in the snow still shouting, “Will Sledge . . .” at the top of his lungs. The sheriff and a couple of city policemen were with him, along with a carload of neighborly reinforcements, because of Walt. Standing near the back fender of Edgeway’s car was a young girl staring down at her feet that were shuffling along in the snow partially hidden from her eyes by a pregnancy. “Will Sledge . . . ,” Edgeway kept yelling, and before he decided to address Paul, Paul had noticed the girl. Paul’s expression passed through two extremes and finally came to rest in an attitude of indifference before he burst into laughter, gradually. “Where’s Will?” yelled Edgeway, but Paul was laughing louder then and that laughter was ringing off the windshields and banging off the car doors in the front yard. And Paul kept laughing; I stood looking at him, not believing . . . and he kept laughing; even after Edgeway’s face burned us all as witches and screamed, “Damn you . . . Damn you, Sledges,” turned around, jerked his thumb toward the car and the girl got into the back seat still looking down at her feet, got in his car, and drove out of the yard, leaving his five neighbors and the two policemen and the sheriff to look at each other and listen to Paul’s laughter and get in their cars and drive down the road. I couldn’t understand that then — not from Paul — Will maybe, or Walt, but not Paul.

But during those chaotic times a plan was percolating within Will’s mind, and as its design trickled down onto the surface of his originally instant consciousness Will took on a larger dimension, his life expanded into an area so immense that the colors of his most bizarre dreams could not fill it. And because he was unable to see to the extremities of his plan it became his dictator, holding the boundaries of him well within it, and the longer he kept his plan hidden in the conceptual stage (it was a long time) the more it twisted and coiled those boundaries closer to him, like constricting the mainspring of a stopwatch. This plan, he once told me, would save him and be like a personal monument. I had never heard Will talk like that before, was a little glad I hadn’t, and because I was accustomed to not taking Will seriously (perhaps I should say this was a “practice” of mine) I continued along in my fool’s paradise, not believing he was capable of more than the at best erratic moments of his life.

Will saw a woman stepping off a bus downtown and followed her to a department store where she bought a half-dozen silver plastic buttons. He thought her to be about twenty-seven, her body unusually firm and voice contemplative and rich. At a shoe repair shop she picked up a pair of fixed shoes, and waited for the 4:15 Middletown bus. Passing quickly by her and capturing a seat two sections back, Will noticed that her hair, which was held around close to her head with a white band, was healthy, showing no signs of color manipulations or extensive shaping processes. He got off the bus and slipped quietly into a small grocery store where he watched her enter a stone house, number 413 High Street, across from the Mercy Hospital, nearly. Under the pretense of compiling a “residential information survey” he learned from the owner of the store that she was Cedar Stern, twenty-eight years old, divorced now for four years, few if any friends, and an inhabitant of the number 413 stone house for four years — presently a saleswoman in Bridewell Greenery. He learned that Cedar Stern occasionally took in boarders — mostly medical students — who rented a small room on the second floor to the back of the house . . . with a private entrance and bathroom . . . and that the room was presently unoccupied, though it had been so for some time and the store owner thought that she had perhaps decided against renting it out. Will’s happiness was difficult to contain and he quickly told the grocer that he was late for an important meeting, and buying a newspaper hurried out of the store.

Cedar Stern had not advertised the upstairs room, and Will needed it. None of the houses beside her or across from her were even remotely satisfactory. Somehow he needed to get the room — which was not advertised, perhaps not available — and he couldn’t talk to Cedar Stern himself, or let her see him. It was too early for that. Will had no male friends and he couldn’t ask one of his female friends to get the room for him because of the complications that might arise out of someone knowing where he lived; furthermore, the only people he knew Cedar Stern rented to were medical students, presumably male. On one hand she might refuse to rent to a woman and after denying one person find it easier to deny another, even a male: on the other hand she might agree to rent to a woman but then feel more inclined to pay personal calls to her roomer, so breaking the sanctity of the private entrance and bath arrangement. Both of these possibilities were of course unfavorable to Will.

“You want me to what?” I asked.

“To rent a room for me,” Will said.

“Rent it yourself.”

“I can’t do that . . . I don’t want anyone to know I live there.”

“Get someone else. Get one of those girls that used to come over here all the time.”

“I can’t trust anyone but you. Besides you look sort of like you might be a medical student.”

“What!” I said, feeling somehow insulted.

“Well, maybe not,” he added, ingenuously, but still to my relief. “But more so than Walt or Paul — who wouldn’t do it anyway.”

“Get Nellie.”

“I don’t want a girl to do it. I told you that.” He hadn’t told me that, of course, but I felt that in a way he might have said it, or at least he thought he had, or maybe it had just slipped his mind.

“Why do you want this room?”

“I just want it. It’s going to save my youth and stand as a personal monument to my stature.”

“Bullshit!” I was sixteen then and not yet properly educated into accepting “bullshit” for something else.

“I want that room, Reuben. If you won’t do it I’ll get someone else.” He was serious.

“Okay, where is it?”

“On High Street, now listen: she hasn’t advertised this room . . .”

“She?”

“Never mind that. What you do . . .”

So that evening I walked up to Cedar Stern’s house and knocked. I felt pretty ridiculous in the blue sport coat that Will had gotten somewhere because he thought medical students wore them when they weren’t in white coats. I told him I didn’t think they did but he was sure he knew more about medical students than I did and I didn’t know enough one way or another to disagree with him — so I wore it.

“Yes,” she said. I was momentarily paralyzed about the throat.

“. . . Hello . . . I’m . . . Sorry to bother you . . . But . . . My name is . . .” The sound of my own voice finally caught up to me and as I listened to it I was able to organize what I was supposed to say into sentences. “My name is John Barnes. I’m a medical student at Drake University. This is my first year here and I have been given a job as an orderly in the Mercy Hospital as part of my tuition expenses. I don’t have a car and I was told that you sometimes rent out a room. I really would appreciate it, Mrs. Stern.”

“I thought that I wouldn’t rent anymore because the last boys I had here were so noisy.” I was staring at her, thinking about Will. “. . . parties and friends coming in at all hours.” I was sure I had it by then. The rest was rhetorical — we both knew that.

“I’m not like that, Mrs. Stern. Not at all. You won’t even know that I’m here.”

“I don’t know. The stove upstairs doesn’t work too well and I don’t have time to get anyone in to look at it . . .”

“I know a lot about stoves and mechanical things. My father used to be a do-it-yourself man around our neighborhood.”

“It’s not very warm in the winter. And there’s no storm windows for that room.”

“That won’t bother me. I find most rooms too warm.” A large dog with a motley nose was barking at the lower area of my legs, until he saw an orange cat hurry across the hallway. Cedar Stern, in pursuit of the two, called back over her shoulder between shouts of “no . . . Bad dog . . . Duchess, NO . . .” that I could have the room. She separated the animals by picking up the cat (Felix) and came back to accept twenty-five dollars for the first month. I told her that I would leave each month’s rent in her mailbox and that I would be no bother at all — that in fact she wouldn’t see me at all. And she didn’t.

Will was overjoyed. I gave him the key and he drove to a root beer stand and bought me a root beer and a pork tender-loin with onion rings. He made me promise not to tell anyone about that room and I didn’t tell anyone, except Nellie, and then not until two or three years later — when it didn’t make any difference.

The following morning Will waited in the grocery store until Cedar Stern had locked her front door, walked down the sidewalk, and boarded a bus. He bought two large bags of food, three cartons of cigarettes, two cases of beer, and two boxes of various and curious items from the nearest hardware store.

There was a small yard in back of the house and a hedge of mulberry running around three sides, open to the sidewalk except for three lowgrowing maples, a small porch in front, and a larger one in back with a stairway to his room. He called the telephone company and had a telephone installed. With a putty knife he removed the putty and caulking compound from a basement window in back of the house. He took the glass out and put it carefully on the grass; then slid down into the basement, from where he gained approach to the entire house. With some fresh meat he made friends with the Great Dane and installed intricately hidden microphones in every room of the house, running the wires down into the basement, up between the walls, through tiny holes in the bathroom wall and into his amplifier equipment . . . complete with an individual, sure-tone channel for each microphone, a set of headphones, and a tape recorder. He disconnected the telephone in his room and wired it into the cable of the downstairs phone so that it acted like an extension, only didn’t ring. Cedar Stern’s bedroom and bathroom were both upstairs and separated from him by a single wall, through which he drilled two thin holes, one into her bathroom and the other into her bedroom . . . into these holes he placed hollow tubes on the ends of which were glass crystals cut in a pattern that revealed, when looked through, not a narrow tunnel of vision, but a view of the entire room. With the aid of several camera lenses he was able to see through these tubes by looking into a low-power telescope set on a tripod in front of the overstuffed chair next to the table. From this place he could also manipulate his amplifier and telephone.

Two and three times a week Will followed Cedar Stern to the Bridewell Greenery and spent the day in an adjacent public park. The customers were by and large ladies of fifty or sixty years wearing hats, with late model automobiles. Cedar occasionally ate lunch alone in the park, but always took the 4:30 bus and went home, except once a week, when she went to the grocery store. She seemed not overly friendly with either the owner of the nursery, Mrs. Bridewell, or the other saleslady, Mrs. Ondell. After a month, Will gave up going to the nursery altogether.

To Will’s unexpected fascination he found a large stack of old letters and newspaper clippings in the bottom drawer of Cedar’s bureau. With these, and the help of letters from and to her father and sister in Burlington, which he opened by holding above a boiling pan of water, reading and replacing back in the mail box, he was able to compose a skeletal outline of her past. This he arranged and wrote in a notebook. Born, 1927, on a farm outside What Cheer, Iowa. 1933, pet robin died from an accidental overdose of table salt. 1939, spanked by father for negligence toward younger sister — afterwards it was decided that Cedar was too old. Starred in two high school plays; The Cherry Orchard, the other unknown. Broke high school track record in girl’s 50 yard dash, time, 6.02 seconds. Enrolled in Iowa State Teachers’ College, Mt. Vernon, Iowa, 1947, majoring in Botany. President of Audubon Club in 1948. Remained in college two years — grade point, 3.14. July 14, 1950, at age of twenty-two-and-a-half married an ex-Marine and insurance broker. They had no children (assumed by their doctors to be her husband’s fault). Divorced, 1951, husband claimed mental cruelty, not verified. Charges of homosexuality withdrawn by Cedar. Ex-husband returned to Marines and was stationed in Korea. Moved to High Street and began collecting animals, fish, and plants. Mother died in 1952, cause of death attributed to unknown reasons. Younger sister married in 1953, presently with two children, living on a farm.

Will traveled to What Cheer and searched for Cedar’s childhood in the barns and fields and white house outlined with intricately carved panels of wood set along the porch and hanging from the roof: latticework. He imagined how these things would be to a child — how they would be even if they were not noticed. He sat in the rooms of the house and imagined how it must have been, with clocks and davenports and human smells. He smoked opium to help him imagine. In a high-school building — dormant then, a rezoning leftover — he surrounded himself with Cedar’s class pictures, old photographs of her standing with her physical education instructor in the gymnasium; he visualized parking lots, gum wrappers, and small throngs of teenagers where buttonweeds and marijuana (left over from the rope industry of the War) grew. He tried to wedge together those fragments of recorded facts into a continuously coherent, rounded spiral . . . a feeling for the young Cedar Stern that was at once intelligible and self-contained — nothing untouched — no part of Cedar’s youth would escape him. He experienced her high-school years, walked up the stairs to the bathroom with her, helped her comb her hair in the girls’ room, read the messages written on the metal stalls surrounding the toilets, looked out into the parking lot from the typing room and wondered if Larry Murphy would ask her to the game, screamed obscenities at the enemy basketball players in the sweating gymnasium, accepted a trophy for record time in the one-hundred-yard dash, hated study halls and hall monitors, hesitantly tried on the masks of sentimentality, brutality, indifference, tolerance, rebellion, sainthood, and blind faith to see the effect they made on her environment — keeping those masks that were pleasurable and discarding the rest, riotously acclaiming her womanhood while secretly resenting it, finding her mother’s religion finally inadequate and untrue, discovering that the adults around her were constantly telling her lies about the nature of the way things really were — believing that her generation would finally right the wrong and rock the world in a magnificent apocalypse in which she was to be the principal mover — bringing mankind once more into the divine order of nature. Will helped Cedar write poetry about young women with hair blowing in the winds, and running along lakes and in snowstorms, and of love; helped her buy clothes, lived on potato chips and soda in a land with no middle ground — everything was ecstatic or drab, waited in a car behind the liquor store while some old man from downtown that one of the boys had commissioned to buy sloe gin was signing away another section of his Blue Book for the price of a six-pack of beer, found that the ideas her teachers were occasionally talking about were fascinating and repugnant, was attracted to debauchery, unsure what it was but in every frantic action believing that she was moving toward it in some mystical, religious way . . . afraid of scorn from her friends, but desiring it secretly more than anything.

Will stayed in What Cheer for three weeks and then returned to Des Moines, satisfied. His image of Cedar Stern had a beginning. Safely, he could now begin his total construction of Cedar, complete to the last detail. Babyhood did not interest him. What came before the adolescence was irrelevant to Will because he was only concerned with Cedar as a woman, specifically with the kind of woman she was in contrast to the kind of woman she pictured herself to be; therefore, her earlier years — those spannings of time when her most frightening nightmares could at best only make generalizations about what insanity might be like — were of no concern to him. In his notebook he wrote:

Today I have seen the beginning of a pattern, a living obsession, a metaphysic. And like all patterns in their earlier stages it is impossible to know the precise nature of that pattern. I have before me (within me) a collection of seemingly unrelated symbols, like the numbers 3.14 that on first observation might appear sporadic or merely coincidental without the awareness that the series π is in actuality an infinitely repeating series just as definite as the series .3333. . . . I shall painstakingly continue to uncover the other numbers of the series until I arrive at the common repeating series 142857142857142857 . . . and so arrive at the simple fraction 22/7. The mistake of the morons I have known is anticipated in their belief that the chaotic actions of a young girl (and a woman, though less pronounced) are indeed chaotic. They have failed to see that every woman is held together by a central series, an obsession or metaphysic that orders that chaos. There are no ambiguities in a woman. They are simple . . . prevented by their partial awareness of themselves and by the man-oriented world to contain any discrepancies. “Women are infinitely shallow.” It is only our greedy acceptance of the unexplainable that renders them complex. It would be banal to attempt to possess a young girl in that her pattern, or obsession, has not been fully developed. They, the girls, will eventually grow out around any estimation of them because that estimation will always be incomplete. A young girl cannot conceive of what it means to be permanently deranged . . . is not aware that anything internal to herself stands between her and the good life. I will come to know Cedar Stern’s obsession better than she does herself. I will possess her. She will cease to live but through me. My lungs will breathe air into her body. I will know love.