Fool on the Hill Read online

  Aurora scrambled eggs and went on about her date last night, while Walter’s mind pinwheeled back to the past. To his sons. Aurora had come along very late in the game, a surprise package of a birth, but earlier on Walter and Prudence had made two boys together.

  Ed, the eldest, was a straight arrow, more run-of-the-mill than his own father (Walter had watched him carefully for any signs of the occasional digression, but there had been none). He lived in Minnesota with a sedate Methodist wife and two children of his own, worked as a consultant for an insurance firm, and sent a card every Christmas, Mother’s, and Father’s Day.

  The other boy, Jesse, had come out of the womb only after a long and drawn-out delivery, screaming bloody murder. A world-beater from the very first. During the Vietnam War Jesse had been at Berkeley, marching in protest, getting arrested on an average of once a month. He had written home frequently about his exploits, sending newspaper clippings, and once his face had appeared briefly on a crowd on an evening newscast. Toward the end Walter had begun to suspect that Jesse had a boyfriend out there, as well. This had never been confirmed, but Walt had felt a touch of pride over it all the same—it would have been wonderfully unorthodox, though what Prudence might have thought . . .

  Four days before his graduation, Jesse had been struck and killed by a car just outside of campus. The driver had not been drunk, merely looking the wrong way at the wrong time, and to Walter that seemed the cruelest thing of all—that then should be nowhere to lay blame, no one to shake a fist at, except perhaps Fate. He had cried a long time over Jesse, in a way, he had to admit to himself, that he could never have cried over Ed. And he might have proved inconsolable if not for something that Aurora, barely five at the time, had done for him.

  She had stolen him a bouquet. Not just gathered it, but stolen it, crawling under fences and sneaking into private gardens all over town—and in one instance, according to her story, playing hide-and-seek with a very big Doberman Pinscher—to bring back a diverse collection of flowers: roses, marigolds, tulips, daffodils, peonies, others he couldn’t even name. She gave him the bouquet and told him all about how she had come by it, and told him he could stop being so sad now, everything would be all right. He still had every one of the flowers, pressed between the pages of a hardbound copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that lay in his bottom dresser drawer. He also still had the kernel of hope for her that had been born in him that day, for she’d had Jesse’s look in her eyes, dormant but there all the same, waiting to be brought to life.

  If only it hadn’t been for Brian Garroway.

  “—so Brian said—”

  Brian was Aurora’s steady boyfriend, had been since high school. To be brutally honest, he was her fiancé, in everything but name. All that remained was the buying of a ring and setting a date, a formality that would probably be taken care of by Thanksgiving break, Christmas at the latest. And then . . . then it would be too late.

  “—and Brian—”

  Walter was quite aware that to most parents, Brian would have seemed like perfect son-in-law material. He was a good fellow, clean-cut, about to graduate with a degree in Hotel Administration from one of the better universities in the country. Brian was also a born-again Christian, a steadfast believer who had no patience with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or pornography. Or world-beating. To see Brian marching in support of a liberal protest, Walt was convinced, would be a sure sign of a coming apocalypse. A nice kid, all things considered, one who would never break the rules, one who would marry, take his place as a productive member of society, raise a nice, average family, and never do anything noteworthy in his entire life.

  “—and we—”

  We. That was another thing about Brian: he seemed to be in love with the first person plural. We this and we that. If you let him, he’d do your talking (and even your thinking) for you. Walter feared this especially, that Brian would wear away to nothing, out of the best of intentions, whatever remained of that little girl who had once stolen him a bouquet.

  The marijuana high (actually more of a low) tinged all these thoughts with a deeper sense of paranoia and desperation than usual, and as Aurora set a steaming plate of scrambled eggs and bacon before him, smiling unsuspectingly, he resolved to talk openly with her before she was off to Cornell and beyond his reach. As she got her own plate of eggs and sat down at the table he caught her glance, held it, making it perfectly clear just from the look on his face that he had something of the utmost importance to say to her. Walter opened his mouth to speak, but his state betrayed him, and the words that came out were perhaps not the best:

  “If you ever were to decide you were a lesbian,” he told her in all seriousness, “I’d understand.”

  Because she did not, in fact, have any plans of becoming a lesbian, and because it wasn’t the sort of subject she thought about regularly, Aurora’s response to this was perhaps predictable: the one-word question “What?” either blurted out, stuttered, or spoken calmly. It took her a moment, though—as it might have taken many people a moment—for her ears to run a test and make sure they d heard correctly.

  “What?” she said, splitting the difference between blurting and calm speech.

  Walter looked at her across the table, his eyes red and watery—and not all of that was from the pot.

  “Daddy,” she said, her voice still uncertain how to compose itself, “Daddy, what’s wrong?”

  His tongue froze on him. He balled his hand into a fist and struck his thigh as one might strike a defective tape recorder, forcing himself to concentrate, and the words came out in a flood:

  “Jesse. I was just thinking about your brother Jesse, how he . . . how he had this smile, this special smile about him. One of the clippings he sent us during the War protests, I still have it, it shows these two policemen dragging him away after he screamed out that Lyndon Johnson was a pig. They were dragging him away to a special police bus, and one of the cops had just clubbed him, but he was smiling, smiling and shouting all the same, as if it were the greatest thing in the world. That smile, it was an I’m alive smile, I guess you’d call it, because he was alive . . . he . . . he . . .”

  The words faltered again, and Aurora shook her head, still struggling.

  “Daddy, I don’t—” she bit her lip. “Are you trying to say that Jesse was gay, or . . .”

  “No, no!” Walter burst out. “No! I mean, he might have been, you can always hope, but that’s not the point, the point is . . . the point . . . it was the smile, the smile! Jesse never tried to conform, he was different, different in a dozen ways, and that being different made him alive, made him smile. Ed, he smiles and laughs too, but never that way. Not everyone is meant to smile that way, maybe. Oh, but if you’ve got it in you, the potential, and you don’t . . . don’t . . .”

  He reached across the table and took one of Aurora’s hands, clasping it tightly.

  “I can remember,” he continued, “I can remember two years after Jesse died, and we took a trip to Minnesota for Ed’s wedding. At the reception all the bridesmaids were lined up like birds at one side of the hall, with these big yellow bonnets on their heads, and you got one of Jesse’s I’m alive smiles on your face and asked me what would happen if someone went and started knocking those girls’ hats off. And I . . . I would have let you do it, you know, let you try jumping up and knocking hats off. But your mother overheard, she was already upset over some of the relatives she’d had to talk to, she told you to behave and stop thinking things like that. When . . . when did you start listening to your mother, Aurora?”

  “Daddy, what . . .”

  “I just don’t want you to wake up thirty years from now,” he told her, squeezing her hand almost tightly enough to hurt, “and realize that your chance to have more of a life, your chance to smile the way Jesse smiled, all the time, has gone by. I don’t want you to feel that loss. Do you see? Do you understand?”

  III.

  “Don’t worry about the damage, Mr. Smith,” Brian G
arroway was saying. “The left headlight’s out, but the engine’s fine and we won’t be driving after dark. You can thank my younger brother for this, by the way. His sense of responsibility belongs in a Crackerjack box.”

  Brian carried Aurora’s bags to the back of his station wagon, which was parked in the Smith’s driveway. The wagon had a bumper sticker that said “JESUS IS MY BACKSEAT DRIVER.” It also had a pronounced dent in the left side of the front fender; the headlight was mortally wounded.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” Aurora asked her father in low voice, as Brian unlocked the back of the wagon. “I swear I thought you were having some kind of a nervous breakdown at breakfast.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Walter said. She studied him uncertainly, and noticed for the first time how very red his eyes were. A thought struck her, one which she dismissed immediately as ridiculous.

  “What would you say,” Walter went on, “if I offered to drive you?”

  “Drive me where, Daddy? You don’t mean to Ithaca, do you?”

  “The car’s in the garage,” said Walter. “Tank’s almost full. We could go a fair piece down the road before we even had to stop. And we could talk, just you and me, about anything you want. My ‘nervous breakdown,’ for instance.”

  “Daddy . . .”

  “I mean it. Back at breakfast I wasn’t too clear-headed, but I’m feeling better. I might like to rest a little bit more before we take off, but I will drive you. Really.”

  “But . . . well, what about Brian?”

  “Let him drive his own damn car,” Walter replied, and Aurora would have laughed at this if it were not for the fact that he was dead serious.

  “Daddy,” she said again, “Daddy, you’ve got to realize how silly this is.” Walter lowered his eyes, nodding.

  “It is pretty silly, isn’t it? Pretty damn silly, yes . . .” He looked up again. “But what do you say?”

  For the briefest instant—only an instant, mind you—Aurora considered accepting his offer, leting him drive her all the way to Ithaca if it was that important to him. And maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t only for his sake that she considered it.

  “Let’s go, Aurora!” Brian called, breaking the spell.

  “I love you, Daddy,” Aurora said, kissing Walter on the cheek. Then she was hurrying to the station wagon, pausing to yell back over her shoulder: “I’ll call as soon as we get there, all right? . . . I promise.”

  Walter nodded again, and had to fight hard to keep his fists from clenching. He felt worn out, beaten.

  “You take care now,” Walter said.

  Aurora opened her mouth to speak, but Brian Garroway said: “We’ll be fine, Mr. Smith. Don’t worry yourself.”

  The two climbed into the station wagon, slammed the doors. “Seat belts,” Brian said automatically, even as Aurora was reaching for hers. He turned on the engine, put the station wagon in reverse, and began to back gingerly down the driveway. Walter waved from the house and Aurora waved back . . . and as they approached the end of the driveway, she reached over to the steering wheel and honked the horn twice.

  “Cripes!” Brian said, startled. His nervous system did a few quick jumping jacks. “What’d you do that for?”

  “Just saying good-bye,” she told him.

  “Well please do it some other way. I’m in a very edgy mood about this car right now.”

  Aurora made no response to this and waved to her father one last time. Then the station wagon was moving down the road, leaving home and parents behind. There was silence in the car for the next few minutes.

  “This is going to be a good year,” Brian finally said. He smiled and squeezed her hand. “Maybe the best year so far.”

  “I hope so,” Aurora said. She smiled back, and Brian never even noticed how forced it looked. “I really hope so.”

  She suddenly wished very badly that she’d taken her father’s offer.

  IV.

  As for Walter Smith, his morning ended in prayer. Not the orthodox, “Lord we beseech thee” style of prayer, but something much closer to true conversation. Walter. had not been to church in some years—though Prudence still went regularly, and Brian Garroway frequently urged him to do the same—but he still retained a fair amount of faith; surely the world could not have become so wonderfully mixed-up without a guiding, jester’s hand.

  When the station wagon was out of sight, Walter sat down on his front porch and stared at the stretch of driveway where Brian had been parked.

  “Listen,” he began. “I need a really big favor, I think. . . .”

  . . . AND LADY CALLIOPE

  Day ran on into night again, and that evening, in Delaware, the most beautiful woman in the world left the capital city of Dover and walked north on U.S. 13. Her name was Calliope, and on the long road behind her she left a string of carefully broken hearts, like diamonds cut to a finer shape by a master lapidary.

  Cut to a finer shape . . . she too was finely shaped, custom-made in a sense. In the city she had just left there lived an out-of-work mechanic, a man of little ambition and even less courage. Shy but possessed of a depth of passion that was his one strength, this mechanic favored women with fiery red hair, milk-white skin, and silver eyes, women of medium height whom he could kiss without stretching or stooping; Calliope fit this description exactly, more exactly than might have been believed possible. Even for those whose fantasy lover was different, Calliope had a heart-catching edge to her, a perfect, irresistible something. That she walked tonight was a fact of her own choosing; no motorist, regardless of their hurry, would have denied Calliope a ride had she desired one. But she did choose to walk, wanting to be alone for a time, as she always did after an Exit.

  Back in Dover, the mechanic would soon return from a day’s wandering to find his lover Gone. Not gone, but Gone. Photographs of the two of them together now showed only one person, him; a jacket saturated with her scent now smelled only of must; their bed was made, as if never slept in. He would search for her frantically, and when he realized that she was truly lost forever, the Hurt would begin. Calliope had seduced him well; he would Hurt so badly that at first he would think he was going to die. But when death did not come, he would find himself being transformed by his Pain, and in the end for the sake of lost love he would be drawn into an act of great heroism, of consequence. Exactly how this was to come about and for what purpose Calliope could not have said . . . she knew only that it had something to do with a Story. As always. But she was not the Storyteller; she was part of the Tale.

  Calliope turned her thoughts ahead, to the next Meeting. This upcoming Love promised to be an important one, and more complicated than the last. She cleared her mind and walked, duffel bag slung over her shoulder, a tiny silver whistle hanging from a chain around her neck.

  There was no moon that night. Calliope traveled far, in darkness. By eleven forty-five she had reached the small town of Talbot’s Legacy, some twenty miles outside of Dover. The road was deserted, and she passed through the town’s center with no company except for the scant streetlamps that cast faint circles of light on the asphalt every thirty yards or so. And the wind, of course. The wind was always with her.

  The Turning began at exactly twelve o’clock.

  Far to the north, so many miles distant that no natural creature could have heard it from here, a set of tower chimes marked the passage of one day into another as the clock touched midnight. Calliope’s ears perked up at the sound.

  A moment later she walked beneath one of the streetlamps, and her hair was longer. Longer, and darker—it covered her ears, nearly touching her shoulders. And that was not the only thing different about her, though for a moment it was the most noticeable.

  Thirty-some paces in the shadows, and another streetlamp captured her. Her hair, black as the new moon, now hung halfway down her back. Her skin had taken on color, and her eyes were phasing from silver to dark brown.

  More paces, more changes. Calliope’s entire stature began
to change, becoming shorter, thinner; her skin continued to color, taking on a rich olive cast; her breasts grew smaller, more compact, but still perfectly proportioned; her nose widened.

  The entire metamorphosis took perhaps five minutes. When it was done, Calliope stopped under another streetlamp and looked at her reflection in a nearby storefront. It had been a long time since she had been Asian; she liked what she saw.

  “I’m on my way, George,” said Calliope, executing a graceful pirouette in the lamplight. “I’m on my way.”

  A SIDETRIP THROUGH HELL

  I.

  For Luther and Blackjack, New York City had become a memory left far behind. Led by the mongrel’s nose and the Heaven scent, they had been traveling for some days now, in a zigzagging but roughly northwesterly direction. This particular morning they had come upon a town, the name of which they never learned. They had passed through a residential area—rows of neat houses, each with its own well-kept yard and garage—and were now nearing its center. Blackjack was unusually calm after their stroll through the peaceful neighborhood—which had been mercifully free of petting children and hose-spraying old men—but Luther found himself growing suddenly tense. His anxiety took a quantum leap when he saw a white van cross through an intersection about two blocks ahead.

  “I can feel Raaq in this place,” Luther began to say. “Maybe we should—”

  “Oh, hell!”

  “What is it?” said Luther, thinking that Blackjack must have smelled danger too, or seen something.

  “Heat,” Blackjack told him. “Just caught a whiff of it. There’s a puss in heat around here. A street puss, if I’m lucky.” He looked at Luther hopefully. “It’s kind of tempting, you know. Would you mind if I just nipped off for a moment and . . .”

  “There’s danger here, Blackjack,” Luther replied. “Can’t you feel it? Raaq . . . Raaq’s somewhere close.”

  “Raaq,” the Manx repeated, unimpressed. “Well listen, Luther, isn’t Raaq only supposed to bother dogs? I mean, he’s your devil, not mine. So I don’t have anything to worry about. And if he does show up, I’ll hit him broadside while he’s concentrating on you and knock him senseless.” A poorly constructed chain of logic, but Blackjack was in a hurry to get laid now and didn’t want to waste time arguing ever nonsense.