Barbara Irvin? Try another?
Rule
Rule
BOB
Bob sits on his sofa and behind him is this great big painting, and the
lighting in the room is such that he almost looks like part of it. It is a
seascape, with a lurking, hazy mountain looming in the distance, gray skies,
and steep, deep blue-shadowed waves. I tell him it is beautiful -- a
sea of my dreams.
"You know what mountain that is?" Bob says, "That's Tamalpias. That's the
potato patch as I remember it. I never did put my boat in the painting."
Don't, I think to tell him. This way it's like having the sea in your home.
"I don't know anything about color," Bob says, "and you'd think I would
have just gone down and taken a class in it wouldn't you? But no, I just go
on painting as if I knew how. I couldn't tell you what indigo blue is if I
saw it."
Like feeling bad because you can't talk about playing a piano, but can only
play one.
Three topics will come up from Bob's side during the visit. I know,
because they always do; World War II and his two dreams -- sailing his own
boat from Tahiti to Bora Bora, and sailing the five stormy capes alone. He
has owned several sailboats capable of doing either, but has never to my
knowledge sailed any of them far enough to sea to lose sight of land. He
prefers the dream, I think. The strait between Tahiti and Bora Bora as he
saw it in the Navy when he was nineteen. And in his dream, he is still
nineteen, not seventy-nine, and the wind is a crisp hard blue and so is the
sea.
We talk of heroes, and I tell him that although men may do terrifically
brave things sometimes, to be acclaimed a hero the right guy has to be
watching -- a politician who needs a hero for his own purposes.
"The guys I took to shore were the heroes," Bob says. "Those guys knew
they were never going home, because they were experienced. So they kept
pushing 'em out there. They were using them until they were used up. Here
I was with my little landing craft, delivering them, a sailor boy who got to
go back and eat Navy food every night, and those guys, even when they were
on the ship, got C-rations. They'd just boil a big pot of water and dump in
the cans, and fish 'em out with tongs and throw 'em to them to juggle from
hand to hand until they cooled enough to get 'em open. One time I was
walking by the officer's mess, and there was this big platter of fresh
fruit, and this guy says to me; 'What is that in there? Is that fresh
fruit?' his eyes bugging out, 'I haven't seen fresh fruit in two years!' and
I got the whole platter and took it up and said 'hold out your helmets, and
dumped the whole platter into them. 'Don't tell where you got them,' I
said. God, I felt sorry for those guys.
"When I got them to shore one time, we hit coral, and there was still a way
to go to the beach, and they didn't go straight in, they always fanned out
on each side, and they were going Bloop! Bloop! Some of 'em shot, but
others falling into holes between the coral and not coming up because they
had so much equipment on. And I thought why don't I take a line and take it
to shore, so they'd have a guide, because I could see that if they just went
straight, they wouldn't have hit so many holes. But I didn't. I could have
maybe saved some guys..."
A while later, Bob asks Lou if it's okay if he and I go down to look at
boats.
"Don't buy one!" she says loudly from the kitchen. We go to get our coats
and Bob calls out "We're leaving now," and doesn't get an answer. He calls
"Lou? Lou?" until he does.
The boat he has chosen to show me is short, and stubby, and decrepit, with a
cabin of weird shape so it looks bull-necked.
"Isn't this the ugliest boat you ever saw?" Bob says wonderingly, delighted
with it. "But look at these fittings here! This thing's built to go around
the world!"
"I really like the tiller," I say.
"Isn't that great?" Bob says. "It's a LOG!"
And it is. Somebody sometime debarked a four-inch diameter log like you'd
use in your fireplace, and whittled it down on one end so it would fit into
the tiller-bracket. There has to be a story there, and I wonder what it is.
Bob pulls the boat closer to the dock and I hold it while he bends over the
foot rail like a pool player reaching for an awkward shot to get at the
engine cover, deep in the cockpit. Apparently, it's okay to dismantle
someone else's boat as long as you keep one foot on the dock.
"Look at that!" Bob says, pointing to the rusted propeller shaft. "That's
bigger than those shafts usually are. And that's a diesel in there!"
It's shadowed so by the overhang that for all I know it might be a windup
motor powered by clock springs.
We stand admiring the boat for a few minutes. The rudder can be seen three
feet under the surface of the gray, clear water. It sticks out obscenely
from
under the boat's transom, packed solid with fantasy mushrooms and crabs
and anemones and star fish and snails and other icky stuff, all layered into
a
fat spongy sleeve of weeds.
"She's got some grass on her," Bob says. "You know, you could get this one
for two hundred dollars."
I agree you probably could. I reach over to push the companionway hatch
back to see inside. It delaminates in my hand. I wipe my palm on my pants.
We take a look at another one, at a Marina where Bob nonchalantly climbs
around the keyed gate barrier and unlatches it for me from inside.
"With boats it's always been an aesthetics thing for me," Bob says, and
leads me to a brown-painted twenty-footer with a shear like a swaybacked
horse. A Disney cartoon of a boat -- a counterfeit antique. It's got a
bowsprit and a dolphin-striker chain. I can see Bob riding astraddle of
it through heavy seas, hanging onto a saddle horn and yelling yahoo.
When we get back, Bob's neighbor comes over. "I knew you weren't gonna get
out to the garage sales today," he says, "so I got you some stuff."
It turns out to be three cardboard boxes full of parts of obscure
appliances, including two three inch square blocks of aluminum with eight
inch steel pipes threaded into them. We both stare at them dumfounded for a
few seconds.
But the real treasure is the five quarts of nails, some in coffee
cans, some in little cardboard boxes, and a big bunch in a bucket with a
split seam. We wheelbarrow them over to Bob's house and put them in front
of his old Toyota camper.
"I don't want this stuff," Bob whispers. "But I don't want to hurt his
feelings."
He opens his garage door. His ten year old Ford sedan is in there, packed
in solid by a lot of stuff you could name if you put your mind to it, and a
lot of other stuff you couldn't. With the car in there, you have to sidle
past,
sucking in your gut to get by the side view mirror, hoping any cuts you get
from the protruding metal stabbers behind you won't be too deep.
After Lou's birthday dinner with their son Jan and his pretty wife Kitty
(who flirts outrageously with me) and their daughter Ellen, who doesn't,
since she's eleven and already past that stupendous, self confident,
world-is-my-oyster place of seven or eight and is now well into the
confusion of growing up a bit, we drive home, Lou backseating it from the
front. Bob gets out and opens the garage door again, and disappears into
that dark tunnel, keeping well to the side, and when the light comes on I
see why. He's stored pipes and rods and boards a foot high underneath the
car too. And then I see at least forty ropes silhouetted there holding fan
belts, and picture frames, and T-squares, hanging from the garage ceiling
like stalactites, and he's got to fit that car very carefully into that
car-shaped space, or he'll be trapped inside. (Bob's body hanging on a
rust-crusted dusty drill press while ambulance guys wonder how to get him
out for the funeral, and Lou saying chirpily while batting her eyelashes at
them; "I knew it would come to this.")
It's like he'd driven his car into custard, which hardened, and now he's got
to drive it into this space that's like the outline of things thrown through
walls in animated cartoons.
But the house inside is relatively uncluttered, except for the tiny room
Bob uses for his studio. "You wouldn't believe it looking at it," Bob
says, "But everything in here is very well organized."
His latest painting is on the easel; an Indian on horseback, the horse
splashing through a stream, while the Indian twists backward to check on
distant riders, his yellow-boy Winchester swinging in his hand a la Charlie
Russell. Looking around I see that Bob still paints horses and sailboats
and deserts and deserted seas, and more horses, and one nude young girl.
"Who's that?" I ask, indicating it.
"That's Lou," Bob says. "I finally got her to pose for me."
"Right," I say, "And about time, too."
Lou is short and stocky, with bright blue eyes and a snub nose, and always
has been. The girl in the painting is fashion-model lanky.
"I used to be considered a good pretty-girl artist," Bob says.
I look closer at the girl's face. It is lovely.
We drink instant coffee at the kitchen table with Lou. Bob says, "I saw a
sea shell in Mozambique I'd never seen one like it before. It looked like
it came from somewhere a long way from anywhere..."
"No we didn't," Lou says. "Don't you remember? We saw it in Port Au Prince.
That was in that restaurant where we got the bad clams and that big waiter
came and told us we'd better get back to the bus or we'd miss the nut
festival on the other side of the island."
Lou asks me again about my bypass operation. "How many did they do?"
"Four," I say, wondering why it's germane at all. What is it? Some kind of
contest?
"My niece had one. We saw her in Tallahassee when we went to visit Alice,
but she wasn't there, so we went on to Connecticut and visited with George
and Thelma, but they go to bed so early, and George had been sick with
cancer, so we hardly talked at all. But Betty said he was getting worse."
"Oh," I say.
"You didn't tell us about Ann's funeral," she twitters.
I tell them that she had one, and that I'd have liked to just do without it,
but there was her family to consider, and that it was a good thing she
didn't look like herself lying in that open casket surrounded by satin and
stuff she'd never laid against before. "If it had looked like her I would
have probably marched up there and told her, 'Look Ann, you've made
your point. Now get up out of there and come back home where you
belong.'"
Lou laughs cheerfully.
"I want to be cremated," Bob says. And after Lou goes to bed he says; "If
anything happened to Lou, I don't think I'd marry again. I'd just want to
be alone."
"Lou! Lou!" his plaintive voice echoes in my mind through a house now full
to the brim with cardboard boxes and defunct machinery, including two
incomprehensible aluminum blocks with half inch steel pipes threaded into
them, the whole house now nothing but Bob-shaped tunnels.
- end -
wanda
> I liked your critique of another story. Here's one of mine. Have at it.
>
> Rule
I just wanted to say that I very much enjoyed this story. I like the
style of your writing. Do you have more posted somewhere?
wanda
Rule
wanda <xenoc...@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:6f95f001.0305...@posting.google.com...
Thank you, wanda. I haven't posted much save various rants to the
newgroups, but they don't count...
I did ask for feedback on the "poem" (doggerel?) below, and got a nice
reminder of the difference between "whose" and "who's", which I'd
boneheadedly confused, but no further comment.
-----------------------------
Who was Dillinger, you say?
Rule Rattray
Why he's the guy whose knowing grin looked out at us
from dotted page surrounded thus
with fawning cops who sweat to serve the small town rage
of small town jails for small town wage.
"I'll shake this off," he seemed to say.
"You'll hear from me another day."
He wrote to Mr. Ford to say "Whenever I'm in need of flight
I try to steal a Ford coupe' to travel swiftly through the night
and thumb my nose at Mr. J. in bullet-peppered getaway.
In tiny banks in tiny towns, he'd swagger forth and do the deed
"Place the money here, my friends, I'll give it back to those in need,
And if those needy folks are sellin' rotgut booze and fallen women,
so much the better," John would say, "They need the money just as much
As stuffed-shirt bankers, grubbing such."
A rolling stone who rolled across
the Midwest landscape gathering moss
And burghers reading tabloid sheets
within their secret hearts would weep
"I've done it right, why can't I be
as free upon the land as he?
"If I could only stretch and shuck
these stifling chains and
run amuck across the plains
and sleep in bide-a-wee motels
with lazy-drawling southern belles..."
He's Public Enemy Number One, declared the soft-necked martinet
And set upon his noble quest to rid the world of freedom's guest
And so they found a seedy lass, and bribed her with a freedom pass
And money too, so she could feed a habit that was much in need
They bushwacked him, this cheerful man who
though he'd shot a cop or two,
Had smiled that knowing smile of his
That told us all of outlaw bliss.
Just once to do a deed that sings
And tells the world that moneyed things
Don't matter in the scheme of things
Don't matter in the scheme of things
-- end --
I wrote the above for a writing class. Some of the kids there didn't know
who Dillinger was, which surprised me, although they were so young it
probably shouldn't have. It was my attempt to tell them.
Rule