Читать книгу The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis - Michael Pritchett - Страница 9

Bill Lewis was, that moment, saying something to someone, and looked up to find the dim, surprised faces of his class. He was at the chalk-board with the chalk in hand, the squealing tip having slid down in a crooked line, like its author was interrupted by a seizure. Richard, in the back row, had his hand up with a question. The room was full of maps. And globes. The silence, impatient, had undertones of anguish. The faces were those of lovely young women, interrupted here and there by the duller male. “Are you all right?” Joaney asked. She was quite plainly big, pregnant, hugely ready to give birth. Her hard, thrusting belly crowded the desk.

He stepped back and looked. It wasn’t his handwriting exactly, but he had clearly written it. His hands didn’t seem familiar.

“Mr. Lewis, you want me to get the nurse?” Joaney asked. “You’re sort of white.”

He felt a little sick, full in the bladder, trembly as if for want of food. It seemed this scene kept happening, or had happened before. The roll was open on the desk: Pete, Jeff, Chris, Bethany, Joaney, Rebekah, Natalie, Skyler, Tremaine, Richard, etc. It was all pretty American. Maps looked back at him from all sides. Maps accused him and confronted him. It was all his fault, but what was? One boy was black. One girl was Asian. Richard was still waiting and Lewis happened to glance at his last name, Mercutio. “Richard, your last name is really Mercutio?” he asked. Laughter pressed him and held him in one place. “Your question was?”

“Were they queers?” Richard asked.

“It’s like they loved each other,” Joaney said. “The way they sound in their letters.”

“It doesn’t mean they were queers,” Skyler, his one Asian girl, said.

“Oh yes it does,” Richard said.

Lewis felt himself starting a bad sweat, shirt soaked through to his jacket, cold rivulets running on his skin. “Finish reading the chapter,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Then down the hallway, long and empty and lined with steel lockers, and he turned in at the door marked boys with bumpy green glass in the door, a room lit by transom windows. Cool, tiled sanctuary with pissoirs on the wall, floor done in squares of yellow Italian marble. He turned his wedding band on his finger. To wash his hands, he twisted a handle, which produced water. Someone else came in, wearing a tag that said “Hildebrandt, Psychology,” a balding guy with glasses, whom Lewis seemed to recall liking. And not being liked in return. The guy urinated with a heavy long sound and Lewis bumped out of that dripping place with the writing crammed into the mortar lines between tiles.

Looking for a window, he went up a stairway and gazed out on a little village, a church steeple, some small houses and brick storefronts. And, moving briskly by, curious vehicles with no visible means of locomotion. His ring was burning, so he teased and moved it with his thumb. It could be anyplace, Virginia, St. Louis, Georgia, Washington. He tried to breeze back in casually, but his class wasn’t having it. “Well, did you make it?” Joaney asked.

“His pants are dry,” Skyler said. “Close call, though, definitely.”

Sometimes he wasn’t sure what to do for his kids. He learned their names and then simply stayed with them, stuck it out for as long as required. They had a restless wish to go, to be gone, to keep going. Joaney had a special power in the room, and was its queen. “Are we doing anything today?” she asked. The last thing he could remember . . . He gazed hastily at his arms. There’d been cuts, slashes. He touched his breast-bone and temple. He was thirty-five. No, he was forty-five. As a boy, he’d leapt into the air and landed, saying, “If the world turns, then why did I come down in the same place?” But no, wrong again. The explorer Lewis did that, not him. He felt a heartsickness, a homesickness, like during that terrible winter, when he was freezing and starving on a barbaric, desolate coast. Except he hadn’t. That was that other Lewis again. By the light in the windows, it was just now September. Hugely with child, Joaney blinked at him. “What was I saying?” he asked her.

“You were saying how Jefferson sent him because he couldn’t find anyone actually qualified who’d be stupid enough to go,” she said.

“Jefferson had half-white bastards all over the place,” Richard said.

“Tom’s wife had died. It totally crushed him,” Lewis said. “I’m not sure we can understand it now. Your heart was a crypt by the time you were thirty-five, already full up with dead parents and spouses and children and siblings.” Only Joaney and T, for Tremaine, nodded their heads. Lewis saw that he’d written the names of several of Lewis’s hopeless conquests on the board, “girls of the neighborhood” he’d tried to court and marry.

“What about Sacagawea?” Joaney asked.

“Her name meant ‘bird-woman’ in Hidatsa, the tribe that stole her away from her family,” he said. “In Shoshoni, it meant ‘boat-launcher.’ Like Helen, she’d apparently launched a lot of boats.”

At eye level, when he turned, was suddenly a map of North America, and some wag had pasted a little arrow pointing to his town: you are here. Good to know. He was right where the Kanza or Kaw met the Missouri, smack in Osage territory.

So where were the native faces? He couldn’t find even one. And the fierce eyes looking back warned him to be careful of what he wanted to know, how badly he needed to find out.

“Why’d he do it?” Joaney asked.

Skyler had jewels sparkling in the side of her nose, and both earlobes, and an eyebrow. Under the clock was a very good copy of Clark’s map of the Missouri, its course and tributaries. Mozart suddenly started to play, but it was hollow, false and tinny. Richard dug hastily into his bag and brought up a little device. Lewis snatched it, and faces turned eagerly to see what sport he’d make of Richard. He shook the thing. He pressed its numbered face, making it squawk and object like a parrot. “Jesus, take it easy!” Richard said, grabbing it.

Joaney’s eyes, like the Mona Lisa’s, followed him everywhere, head turning on the long, elegant stalk of her neck. “The Bible, if one counts all the begats in Genesis, dates creation at 4004 b.c.,” he said. “That’s the kind of pre-Darwinian era Lewis lived in. The world was still young. Everything was fairly new, from the Republic on down. Even if you’d made bad mistakes, it wasn’t too late to fix them. The trouble was, somebody was going to rush past you and grab up everything good, if you didn’t hurry.”

“Just answer the question,” T, for Tremaine, demanded, his only black kid.

This must’ve been what Jefferson meant when he said, “History will not be kind to us.” T asked the question as a command, but now his lip slightly quivered, as if his whole being trembled before the answer.

“He was way in debt,” Richard said.

“He drank like a fish. He ate opium pills like they were TicTacs,” Skyler said.

Lewis was dizzy, and dropped suddenly into the chair he’d apparently placed there for the purpose. He might be sick. His color, he assumed, was not good. “What can I offer except facts?” he said. “Born the same year as the Boston Tea Party, at age five he lost his father, who caught pneumonia one night in the rain, dodging a British patrol. Not much education. Passenger pigeons are extinct now, but their migrations once blotted out the sun. The family motto was Omne solum forti patria est, which means ‘It is best to die for one’s country.’ Or it might mean ‘To a brave man, all earth is his country.’ On his mother’s side, the motto was Force and counsel, but they were Welsh. Jefferson called Lewis’s grandfather the most sensible man he ever knew. Lewis shot a bull at full charge at age nine. He was head of a household at thirteen, with two thousand acres and twenty-eight slaves. He learned herbal medicine from his mom.”

For some reason, Bill now got out his wallet, taking out the first item, a likeness of himself on a card with a bunch of numbers. “Everyone was related to everyone else. For example, Sergeant Floyd, the only one who died, was Clark’s cousin. Lewis was related to Jefferson. The Randolphs, Hearsts, and Lewises all intermixed bloodlines too often, and it was blamed for the many suicides in the family. Robert Penn Warren wrote a poem about Lilburne Lewis, who chopped up one of his slaves with an ax, then killed himself. Is this helping?” he asked. “Is this what you want to know?”

They nodded, waiting for more. Just in time, the bell rang. He didn’t think he could stand, so he simply sat smiling and nodding as they filed out. “Don’t forget the field trip!” he said.

Alone, with his picture in his hand, he knew he hadn’t really answered their questions, not the big ones anyway. He felt that familiar lightness in his throat, craving for the cigarette, which he hated and loved and wanted and needed. It kept something down that was trying to bubble up in him, riot in him. The cigarette held it at the bottom of his throat.

He felt as alive as ever in his life, sitting there, but must’ve gotten up too quickly, because he saw darkness, then met the floor with a painless crash, thinking, Oh, a header! A face plant, a canvas nap.

Bill was helped up the steps and in the front door with Emily’s arm around him, having left the ER after a CAT scan for his head, a butterfly bandage for his brow. Emily’d left her BD (behavior-disordered) and LD (learning-disabled) kids with another teacher for a while, to care for him.

He couldn’t do the wraparound staircase to get upstairs and gingerly explored his way to the couch, getting onto it like it might tip or go shooting away. She heated chicken soup, with its slight tang of tin can, and brought a bag of frozen peas and a throw. He ate, with her watching him in alarm. He balanced the peas on his head and looked out at her from underneath.

“Maybe I should cancel this float trip. It’s just two days away,” she said.

“No, no. I plan to be floating the river, one way or another,” he said. “Don’t spoil it.”

“What if it’s a brain tumor?” she asked.

“Don’t you need to get back to work?” he asked.

She used to be an actress, strictly amateur, and they’d met because he used to write little melodramas for the local playhouse. But they gave it up years ago, when she gave birth to Henry, and they decided to get married because they were “in love” as Emily always liked to say it, with both words in quotes. At some point, she’d stopped saying it.

“When Henry gets home, tell him there’s a sandwich in the fridge, and that he’s to eat all of it, and drink all the milk,” she said, going to the hall mirror and pulling on her hair, giving it a few warning tugs. And out the door she went, back to face the kid who was making her life a living hell that week, old what-was-his-name? Dennis, that was it. Recently, he’d dived down a laundry chute, trying to kill himself on the concrete floor below, but instead got stuck and ripped flesh off both arms.

As soon as he heard her pull away, he got up, balancing the peas on his head, got his cigarettes from the drawer, Camels, with the matchbook tucked in the cellophane wrapper, and went grimly out to the sunporch and closed the door, holding his frozen-pea hat with one hand, sitting in the porch swing. As he lit the first one, his hand shook because he needed it. Smoke blew back in his eyes and smarted and caused tears. He pulled at the smoke, drawing it, that suction of lip and tongue, how it caused the tip to come to life, burn, a supersonic stream of air passing backward through the dried, treated, shredded, compressed, rolled tobacco, its nicotine released as a vaporized cool blue jetstream. And nothing leftover but ash. He used a soda can for an ashtray since Emily refused to buy one. Drawing on the cigarette was like sucking at the straw of life, taking it in, tasting it, mulling it around, getting soothed by it, using it up, then blowing it out, that moment just a memory now.

It was about tobacco, this story he was trying to tell. The Virginians needed land for their cash crop, and lots of it, because tobacco sucked all the nutrients out of the soil and gave back nothing. You had to have all the land you could grab. And no matter how much you had, it probably wasn’t half enough to make it in tobacco. The expedition carried 130 rolls of pigtail tobacco as a trade item. When they got west of the Rockies, the tribes had never seen tobacco before, but turned on to it, gradually.

Didn’t seem that long ago. But when Jefferson offered a bounty to anyone willing to try for the Pacific, he offered it in pounds, one thousand British sterling pounds, not dollars.

Lewis and Clark weren’t even the first ones. In 1793, when Lewis was just nineteen, a guy—a British subject—made it all the way. And on a rock overlooking the Pacific, he wrote, “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety three.” An English sea-captain saw the message and sailed all the way around the Cape of Good Hope up to Boston, his story finding its way back to Jefferson. Which’d scared Tom to death, that Britain might try to snatch up all that land.

Henry came in at 3:20 and looked down on Bill where he lay on the couch, whistled at his injury, then got his sandwich and came back to keep him company. While Bill watched, Henry disassembled the sandwich, tearing crusts off the bread, breaking it into hunks, ripping the bologna into strips, folding the cheese into little squares, then working on each pile, meat, then cheese, then bread. Policing his meals was now their side occupation after Henry had fainted at school. Bill was less shocked by it than Emily, but he himself had been a very anxious, worried, neurotic kid. So he tried to be patient with the eating business, having grown up in a time when adults didn’t know what to do with a nervous boy.

Back then, you had the good sense to hide anything different about you, and to pretend to be unfazed by what happened to you, regardless. You just tried to have a place in things, even if your place was terrible, on the bench, last in the pecking order.

The explorer Lewis had written letters to his mom from the army, saying he loved it, that they had “mountains of beef and oceans of whiskey” and he felt able to share it with the “heartiest fellow in camp.” His mom probably cried when she read it, because it showed he was an oddball, with difficulty making friends, and so grateful just to belong. But soon he was in fights. He was offering to kill people at dawn, and being court-martialed (acquitted) for dueling, then getting transferred elsewhere.

Bill didn’t want Henry’s boyhood to be like that, broken on the bitter rock of experience, because those boys never grew up but just got older, and many didn’t even do that. They went to pieces before everyone’s eyes, on the five o’clock news.

Bill also wanted to know and be close to his son, but Henry always sat down about a foot farther away than seemed necessary.

“So what were you thinking about,” Henry asked, “when it happened?”

“What, are you my shrink now, Hen? Is that the sort of stuff your shrink asks you? Stuff like that?”

“I guess. Pretty much.”

He shifted the peas to see Henry better. “I guess just the usual things, to answer your question. Lewis and Clark. Lewis’s suicide.”

“Oh, uh-huh.” He nodded. “Why’d he do that?”

“He owed a fair sum of money. He couldn’t find a good woman. It ran in his family. You pretty much take your pick.”

“How much money?”

“Only about six hundred bucks. Which was not that much, even by their standards. So it’s a mystery.”

“Why didn’t Clark loan him the money?” Henry asked, chewing with great concentration. Bill had a suspicion he counted his chews, and swallowed when he got to a certain number.

“It wasn’t so much the amount. He’d written checks with the War Department’s checkbook, and they suddenly refused to pay, left him holding the bag.”

“Why?” He was cross-legged on the floor and now pulled one knee up into a single-lotus and went on working the sandwich.

“I dunno, Hen. He’d come home to a different world. Jefferson wasn’t president anymore. Maybe they wanted to shut down anyone from the romantic old world so as to usher in the tougher, harder modern world.”

“Typical,” Henry said.

Bill shrugged. “I think it all follows from something the Spanish called the primary right of conquest. Your rights derived from your ability to attain them, by whatever means at your disposal. The ends justified the means.”

He was talking from under his crown of peas. “Anyway, Lewis’s main job on the expedition was to keep a document of the trip, but he had trouble with it and stopped four times, once for eleven whole months.”

“What was wrong?” Henry asked. He was working on the milk now, a swallow at a time.

“He suffered from a tendency. Sensible depressions of the mind,” Bill said. “Say, would you reach me that other pillow, old buddy, old pal?”

“Sure.” Anything to lay off that milk a minute. It was very odd. As a kid, Bill had eaten whatever was put in front of him. His dad used to challenge him to eat seven hot dogs or nine pieces of chicken, and he always did it, and never puked after. He’d eat his food and his dad’s, too. But then, his dad had sort of eaten vicariously through Bill, because of his severe ulcers.

“How’d he do it?” Henry asked.

“Shot himself. Once in the head, then the chest. When that didn’t work, he cut himself, sort of head to foot, with a straight razor.”

“I couldn’t cut myself,” Henry said. “I might be able to hang myself, though.”

“Henry, old boy, I hope you never have to work it out,” Bill said.

His son made him feel interesting. He was the kind of kid who wouldn’t want you to think you were boring, who wanted the people he met to feel good about themselves. Bill even felt guilty sometimes, having a son and liking it, too, like it was something he didn’t deserve.

Similarly, Jefferson and Lewis had almost been father and son, working alone together a lot in the president’s house. Lewis even delivered Tom’s first state-of-the-union address to Congress. Lewis always showed great presence of mind when in physical danger, people said. Others said less flattering things: that he was bowlegged, stiff, graceless, and awkward, that he reminded you of Napoleon. And Lewis did, in fact, sign “Citizen” in some of his letters, after the French custom of the time.

“There are always the murder theories, of course,” he said. “He was slightly mixed up with a traitor named Aaron Burr and his daughter Theodosia. Lewis even predicted his own death to her, in a letter.”

“But you don’t think it was murder,” Henry said, nodding. Henry worried about him, Bill knew, and seemed to know when he was down and wondering about the point to things. Much as he tried, Bill had difficulty reciprocating. It was just hard for him to picture what Henry—a modern boy—thought about during a given day. Public school had not changed, was still filled with threat, profanity, violence, obscenity and in-your-face sexuality. But in his own schooldays, it’d never occurred to him to borrow a gun from home. Now, if you had trouble at school you just killed everyone, staged your own massacre. Nobody understood it, but this harmless-looking thing, a public school, was actually driving some people insane. In the privacy of their minds, some kids were made nuts by it. And adults had little control over it, that shadow-world called adolescence.

Henry was an inch from triumph over the glass of milk. The color was leaving his face as he worked.

“We have a reliable account from people at the inn, what he said, what he did, the order of events,” Lewis said. “He said he wanted to rob his enemies of the pleasure.”

The blood gradually came back to Henry’s face, but it was clearly taking all of his will to beat this thing. He carried his plate and glass away, and pretty soon Lewis heard him above his head, in the bathroom. He strained to hear if Henry was getting rid of the food, their other fear, but couldn’t hear a thing in that old plaster-walled house, soundproof as a vault. You could commit murder in any room.

Bill stayed on the couch, thinking. It was supposed to be this big secret. When Tom asked for the money from Congress, he lied and said they wanted to explore the Mississippi. He didn’t want the Spanish or British to guess the truth, that he was about to grab up the whole thing, sea to shining sea.

It was a suicide mission. When Tom gave his instructions to Lewis, he didn’t say “when you elude the dangers and reach the Pacific.” Oh, no. He said “should you elude the dangers, & etc., etc.” He wasn’t sure they’d even come back.

He must have fallen asleep. Emily’s voice suddenly woke him. “Lewis, what is this?” she asked. His eyes popped open. On the floor was a sizable, long shipping box. “Please don’t tell me that’s what I think it is.”

“It’s not. I swear.”

“Because it looks to me like the UPS man just left a gun at my house.”

In fact, that was what it was, or at least a replica of one.

“You promised me, Bill. You said we would never ever keep a gun,” she said.

“It’s not. It’s just a replica of one that Lewis carried,” he said. “It won’t fire. You’d need powder and patches and ammo.”

“It doesn’t feel like any replica. It’s heavy, just like a fucking gun,” she said.

She went upstairs to take off her work clothes, and he sat up, a little dizzy from so much sleep. As he tore away the strapping tape, Henry and Emily appeared in the doorway, then moved into the room and sat on the sofa before him and the box. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not addressed to Pandora.”

“I’d like to see it, please,” she said.

He ripped away plastic and Styrofoam, exposing a solid maple case, flipping the antiqued-brass latches and prying up the lid. It was astonishing, pretty, as it lay in its custom red-velvet rest, solid walnut stock, octagonal barrel, polished brass flintlock mechanism and ramrod, a bead of real gold as the front sight.

“Okay, so it’s a gun,” she said.

“It’s just for show,” he said, lifting it out, hefting it. “Here, Henry, you want to hold it?”

“Now, why would he need to hold it?” she asked, then looked at Henry. “Do you want to hold it?”

“Yeah, give it here,” Henry said, and knelt down to take it. “Wow, are they always this heavy?” He put it to his shoulder correctly and aimed, closing one eye, squeezing the trigger. As he did, Lewis got a sudden gut-wrenching shock to his nerves that it might somehow fire, and Emily saw his expression.

“Just a replica, huh? Give it back to your dad, Henry,” she said.

They sat over the gun for a moment. It was interesting how there seemed to be four people in the room now, like the gun was someone. And even after he’d wrestled the gun upstairs to his office and thrust it harmlessly away, into a closet, it still felt like somebody was there.

They weren’t talkative during dinner. When he did speak, Bill had the sense the gun was listening, and knew they were aware of it, feared it. Which was strange because, as a kid, Bill often handled guns and never feared them. It was people you had to watch out for, what they suddenly did to you or said to you when no one was looking.

Emily was trapped, he knew, between respecting his book research and looking out for Henry. Women could be their own worst enemies in this regard, taking any male endeavor more seriously than their own.

After dinner, Bill went to his office under the stairs as usual, to sit and ponder.

The thing was, Lewis was supposedly helping found a new order of man in the New World, and was an agent of the Enlightenment. He called the expedition Voyage of Discovery, and his party members the Corps of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery. It was strictly scientific. On the other hand, the money came from the War Department. Which meant they’d use military hierarchy and army discipline, with flogging for most offenses, and shooting for desertion.

He invited Clark, his favorite ex-commander, who’d taken early retirement due to health problems. Clark was at home doing not very much and probably wondering if he was finished, done for, washed up at thirty-four. Then came Lewis’s letter, which said, Hey, pal? How’s it going? Howzabout joining me on this crazy mission we’re unlikely to ever return from?

Clark’s affirmative reply went out in the next day’s mail.

Lewis had waited ’til the last minute to invite him, so either he was sure of Clark’s reply or he didn’t have anyone else to ask.

What was Lewis told to prepare for in the West? Woolly mammoths and giant sloths, cannibalism and polygamy, a light-skinned race of “Welsh Indians,” a mountain of pure salt and the ten Lost Tribes of Israel. They asked him to study suicide among the savages. For instance, did they ever do it from heartbreak in love? While he was at it, he was supposed to find an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean and, if it wasn’t too much trouble, the Northwest Passage.

Bill was in bed early, with Emily already there, but not asleep. They lay there—together but not touching, not talking but conscious. Then she gradually left him and he was awake in the house, and so was It. Meaning his oldest adversary, Depression. That siege engine of mental illness.

Creeping in through his teens, twenties, and thirties, now it was always over him. And sometimes the illness set down so hard, he thought seriously about doing it, that it might be best for everyone if he did, and saved them from a prolonged, drawn-out crash and burn. He and Emily were newly married the last time it hit hard, and had a tiny baby. Naturally, she’d wanted him to shake it off and pull through, but she’d also needed to look out for Henry. Bill lost his college-teaching job along the way, and now they got by on two secondary-ed salaries, hers from a special-ed position. They’d probably never ever retire.

And while Lewis the insomniac lay awake, maundering all of this, he knew that Lewis the explorer was lying in his grave in Tennessee and not worrying about a single thing. Not the least thing.