Evening Performance Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY GEORGE GARRETT

  Short Fiction

  KING OF THE MOUNTAIN

  IN THE BRIAR PATCH

  COLD GROUND WAS MY BED LAST NIGHT

  A WREATH FOR GARIBALDI

  THE MAGIC STRIPTEASE

  TO RECOLLECT A CLOUD OF GHOSTS

  Novels

  THE FINISHED MAN

  WHICH ONES ARE THE ENEMY?

  DO, LORD, REMEMBER ME

  DEATH OF THE FOX

  THE SUCCESSION

  Poetry

  THE REVEREND GHOST

  THE SLEEPING GYPSY

  ABRAHAM’S KNIFE

  FOR A BITTER SEASON

  WELCOME TO THE MEDICINE SHOW

  LUCK’S SHINING CHILD

  THE COLLECTED POEMS OF GEORGE GARRETT

  Plays

  SIR SLOB AND THE PRINCESS

  ENCHANTED GROUND

  Biography

  JAMES JONES

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Garrett, George P., 1929–

  An evening performance.

  I. Title.

  PS3557.A72E9 1985 813′.54

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5105-4

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-1504

  COPYRIGHT © 1985 BY GEORGE GARRETT

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  v3.1

  This book, representing work done during all of my adult life, is dedicated, first of all, to my wife, Susan, who has fully shared that life with me. And to our children—William, George, and Alice. And to my farflung blood kin and true friends, in praise and thanksgiving for those among them who are alive, in honor and memory of those who are dead.

  What child is this wounded and smiling armed with a new shiny knife and flowers for an early grave who wears my face for his own?

  “Familiar Riddle”

  Trouth is put doun, resoun is holden fable;

  Vertu hath now no dominacioun;

  Pitee exiled, no man is merciable.

  Thrugh coveitise is blent discrecioun

  The world hath mad a permutacion

  Fro right to wrong, fro truth to fikilnesse,

  That al is lost for lak of stedfastnesse.

  CHAUCER

  –“Lak of Stedfastnesse”

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE: An Evening Performance

  I. From KING OF THE MOUNTAIN King of the Mountain

  What’s the Purpose of the Bayonet?

  The Strong Man

  September Morn

  The Rarer Thing

  The Sleeping Beauty

  The Witness

  Don’t Take No for an Answer

  The Rivals

  II. From IN THE BRIAR PATCH A Game of Catch

  The Gun and the Hat

  Thus the Early Gods

  Lion

  Time of Bitter Children

  The Test

  The Victim

  Good-bye, Good-bye, Be Always Kind and True

  III. From COLD GROUND WAS MY BED LAST NIGHT The Old Army Game

  Farmer in the Dell

  My Picture Left in Scotland

  Love Is a Cold Kingdom

  Unmapped Country

  More Geese than Swans

  Texarkana Was a Crazy Town

  IV. From A WREATH FOR GARIBALDI A Wreath for Garibaldi

  Pretty Birdie

  Bread from Stones

  Wounded Soldier

  The Last of the Spanish Blood

  V. NEW AND UNCOLLECTED Song of a Drowning Sailor

  Sweeter than the Flesh of Birds

  The Insects Are Winning

  I. The Moth

  II. At Least They’ll Have Candlelight

  Last of the Old Buffalo Hunters

  What’s the Matter with Mary Jane?

  A Record as Long as Your Arm

  EPILOGUE: Noise of Strangers

  PREFACE

  This gathering is meant to be a representative selection (no more and no less) of short stories, old and new, previously published in book form or so far uncollected, covering roughly thirty years of time during which, among other things, I have been writing and publishing short fiction. It does not claim to be collected or even close to complete. Without counting, I would guess that a little less than half of my published stories are here. I have hopes that there will be newer and maybe better ones before I am done.

  By and large I have left these stories alone, just as they were and are, with only a lick and a promise of revision where I felt that something, large or small, did the story an injustice and needed to be fixed. I probably wouldn’t write some of them nowadays. And, as I have changed and the world has changed all around me, I might not be able to write some of them anymore. Stories, like poems I think, even the slightest and most light-hearted of them, are gifts. I took them gratefully at the time and I stand by them one and all now, though with a full awareness that many are less than they might be, and none, not one, is as good as it ought to be. But all are as good as they can be or, anyway, the best that I can make them. I know their flaws and limits well enough, and I hope to do better and differently in the future. Meantime, this is what I have and who I am.

  Although a few of these stories first found a place in national, commercial magazines, most of them were at home in literary magazines and quarterlies. That seems appropriate to me; for, as writer, I, too, have mostly been at home in literary magazines and quarterlies. No apologies for that. It was and is my pride to have played the game in that league. Not many people know these stories, so I am pleased that they are here granted a sort of a second chance, a replay not quite instant, but soon enough in a lifetime. Still, all pride and arrogance to the contrary, I have to confess (gladly) that there are a few readers and writers who have been faithful and encouraging to me from first to now; and I thank them kindly and deeply for that. We are never nearly as alone and lonesome as we sometimes like to imagine that we are. “We are,” as John Berryman wrote in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, “on each other’s hands who care.”

  Sir Robert Carey, a cousin to Queen Elizabeth and a wonderfully vital man whom I came to know a little while writing two novels set in his own times, wrote one of the very few autobiographies of that period. He began it, as was the ancient custom, with a short prayer. From which I would like to borrow a line to end this prefatory note; for in a sense this gathering of stories is a different kind of autobiography. Here is what he, a very old man rehearsing his own story, wrote: “Though my weakness be such and my memory so short, as I have not the abilities to express them as I ought to do, yet, Lord, be pleased to accept of this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.…”

  George Garrett

  Charlottesville, Virginia

  AN EVENING PERFORMANCE

  Let brotherly love continue.

  Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

  HEBREWS 13: 1–2

  AN EVENING PERFORMANCE

  FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, maybe a month or so, there she stood, a plump woman in a sequined one-piece bathing suit, poised on a stylized tower which rose into the very clouds, like Jacob’s dreamy ladder, with here and there around it a few birds in tense swift V’s, and below, far, far below, there was a tub, flaming and terrible, into which she was surely going to plunge. Beneath in fiery letters was printed: ONE OF THE FABULOUS WONDERS OF MODERN TIMES/STELLA THE HIGH DIVER/SHE DIVES ONE HUNDRED FEET/INTO A FLAMING CAULDRON.

  These posters had appeared mysteriously one Monday morning, and they were everywhere, on
store windows, on the sides of buildings, on telephone and light poles, tacked to green trees; and you can believe they caused a stir. The children on the way to school (for it was just the beginning of the school year) bunched around them in excited clusters—staring at her buxom magnificence, wondering at her daring—and buzzed about it all day long like a hive of disturbed bees. By midmorning grumbling adults were ripping the posters down from windows and buildings, and a couple of policemen went up and down the main street and some of the side streets, taking them off telephone and light poles. But there were so many! And it was such a mystery. Lurid and unsettling as a blast of trumpets, they had come nevertheless in the night as silently as snow.

  It would be later, much later, that the night counterman at the Paradise Diner on the outskirts of town, beyond the last glare of filling stations and the winking motels and the brilliant inanity of used-car lots—where, no matter how carnival-colorful with flags and whirligigs, no matter how brightly lit, the rows of cars stood lonesome like sad wooden horses from some carousel set out to graze—it would be later when he would remember that the man, the angry little man with the limp, had stopped there for coffee that same night that the posters had appeared.

  In spite of all effort, a few of the posters remained, tantalizing in their vague promise of a future marvel, teased by the wind and the weather, faded by the still summer-savage sun and the first needling rains of autumn, the red letters blurring and dribbling away, fuzzy now as if they had been written by a shaking finger in something perishable like blood. Talked about for a while—and there were those who swore they remembered seeing such a thing and certainly those who had heard of it, a subject of some debate and even a little sermonizing in certain of the more fundamentalist churches where amusement is, by definition, nearly equivalent to vice—the promise faded with the posters. There were few who hoped that Stella would ever dive there, fewer still who believed in her coming. It seemed, after all, only another joke of some kind, pointless, mirthless, and in a strange way deeply distressing.

  Then one evening in late October with the weather now as cool and gray as wash water the truck came and parked in the field by the old Fairgrounds. At first it was nothing to take much notice of, merely a big, battered truck and pretty soon an Army surplus squad tent, sprouting (sagging in a most unmilitary, careless way) like a khaki mushroom beside it.

  And there were people.

  There were three of them. There was the man, gimpy (his left leg might have been wooden), his face puckered and fierce and jowly and quizzical like a Boston bulldog, his eyes glazed and almost lightless like the little button eyes of a doll; fierce and tired he seemed, spoke in mutters, showing from time to time a ruined mouth with teeth all awry and at all angles like an old fence; and sometimes around the town, shopping for groceries at the Supermarket, once taking a load of dirty clothes to the Washeteria, buying cigarettes and aspirins and comic books at the drugstore, and busily sorting out bolts and nuts and screws and clamps and brackets at the hardware store (for what?), he talked to himself, a harsh, steady, and indecipherable monotone. There was the little girl, a frail thing made entirely of glazed china with altogether unlikely eyes and hair as bright as new pennies, like a shower of money, richly brushed and shining and worn long to her waist. She wore white always, starched and ironed and fabulously clean; and the women had to wonder how her mother (?)—the woman anyhow—living in a sagging tent and a worn-out truck managed that. The little girl was heard to answer to the name of Angel and did not play with the other children who sometimes, after school, gathered in shrill clots around the tent and the truck to stare until the terrible man came out, limping, waving a pick handle, and chased them away.

  The woman was an equal curiosity. She was short, broad-shouldered, wide-hipped, huge-handed, sturdy as a man. Her hair, dyed redder than you’d care to believe, was cut in a short bowl. She appeared to be in early middle age, though she might easily have been old—she wore such savage makeup, wild, accented, slanted eyes, a mouth of flame, and always two perfectly round spots of red like dying roses on her high cheekbones. Still, she had a smile that was a glory and she smiled often. She was not heard to speak to anyone and when she was talked to she smiled and stared, uncomprehending. It was not long before everyone knew she was a mute; it was proved when she was seen to communicate with the man, her hands as swift as wings and not a word.

  The truth came out like a jack-in-the-box in a week or so. One fine morning the man had unloaded an enormous pile of boards and pipes beside the truck, and by noon he had erected in the center of the field what seemed to be the beginnings of a good-size drilling derrick.

  “For oil?” That was the joke around town before a few prominent men and a policeman went out there in cars, parked at the edge of the field, and walked to where he was working. He paid them no mind at all as they straggled toward him, and, as they drew near, they could see that he was sweat-soaked and working at his task with an unbecoming fury, all in hasty, jerky gestures like a comedian in a silent movie. He did not stop his work until they spoke to him.

  “What are you trying to do here?” the policeman said.

  The man spat and put his heavy wrench on the ground.

  “What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” he said and someone giggled. “I’m putting up the tower.”

  “What kind of a tower?”

  “The tower for Stella,” the man said, sighing between his teeth. “How can she dive without a tower? That’s logic, ain’t it?”

  “Oh,” the policeman said. “You got to have a license to put on any kind of a exhibition around here.”

  The lame man lowered his head, seemed to shrink and sag like a slowly deflating balloon, and muttered to himself. Finally he raised his head and looked at them, and they could see the tears glisten in his eyes.

  “How much do the license cost?” he said.

  “Twenty-five dollars.”

  “We don’t have to do the dive,” the man said. “We got a lots of tricks. I can put up just a little bit of a trapeze and Angel can do things that would make your eyes pop out of your head. If worse come to worst we don’t have to build nothing at all. If I have to I can stand on the back end of the truck and swallow swords and fire and Angel and Stella can dance.”

  “Any kind of exhibition costs twenty-five dollars for the license.”

  The man shrugged and hung his head again.

  “Don’t you have the money?”

  He shook his head, but still would not look at them.

  “Well, what the hell?” the policeman said. “You better take that tower down and get on out of town. We got a law—”

  “Wait a minute,” a merchant said. “You aim to sell tickets, don’t you?”

  The man nodded.

  “If you put on the high dive, I reckon you may get as many as a thousand to see it, counting kids and all. What kind of a price do you charge?”

  When the man looked up again, he had his ruined smile for them all. “Two bits a head,” he said. “We got a roll of tickets printed up and everything.”

  The merchant made a hasty calculation. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll get your license for you and you cut me in for half of what you take.”

  “Half?” the man said. “Half is too much. That’s a dirty shame. It ain’t hardly worth it for half. Besides, the high dive is dangerous.”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “All right,” the man said. “I can’t do nothing but take it.”

  “Tell you what else I’ll do,” the merchant said. “I got a nigger boy helps me down to the store. I’ll send him to help you put that tower up. How soon can you put on the show?”

  “Tomorrow evening if the weather’s good.”

  While they were standing there talking the woman had come across the field from the tent and stood holding the hand of the little girl, smiling her wonderful smile. She seemed to have not the least notion of what was going on, but as they w
alked away they saw that she had turned on the man, unsmiling, and as he shook and shook his head, her hands flashed at him like the wings of a wild bird in a cage.

  All that day the tower grew and by noon of the next day it was finished. It stood not nearly so tall as the cloud- and bird-troubled structure on the posters, but menacingly high, a rickety skeleton that swayed a little in the light breeze. All the way to the top there was rope ladder and on the top a small platform with an extended plank for a diving board. At the foot of the tower the lame man had created a large wooden and canvas tank into which he and the woman and the Negro who worked for the merchant poured buckets of water, drawn from a public spigot, all afternoon, until it was filled about to the depth of a tall man. There was a large GI can of gasoline nearby. The lame man rigged up a string of colored lights and two large searchlights intended to focus on the diver at the top. He set up a card table at the corner where the main road turned into the Fairgrounds. He put up a few of the posters on the poles and the side of the truck, and by midafternoon everything was ready.

  Then the weather turned. The wind came from the north, steady, and with it a thin rain like cold needles. The tower moved with the wind and shone with wet. The woman and the little girl stayed in the tent. The lame man stood at the card table, with a newspaper on his head to keep off the rain, waiting for the first customers to arrive.

  Just at dark the merchant arrived. There was a good crowd, equal at least to their expectation, gathered in a ring around the tower, standing in raincoats and underneath umbrellas, silently waiting.

  “Well,” the merchant said, “it looks like we did all right irregardless of the weather.”

  “Yeah,” the man replied. “Except she don’t want to do it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean it’s too risky at a time like this.”

  “You should have thought of that before,” the merchant said. “If you don’t go through with it now, no telling what might happen.”