A Burned-Over District by Charles Hibbard
Chapter 5
Mildred’s only book club met every other Friday, and we had agreed to get together even though it was still Christmas break. It was one of those obnoxious years when New Year’s Day falls on a Sunday, which meant that school started the morning after, and everyone who had traveled for the holidays was already back in town, except of course for Janet Blythe, who was on a more extensive trip.
We met at Dale Twombly’s house this time. Dale lived on a shaded corner two streets away from the main drag, far enough that the roar of the endless caravan of semis through the town was muted by a few intervening rows of trees and hedges. The house had been built back in the early ‘50s as a motel in the old style, consisting of four small, detached guest cabins, with a fifth for the office, the whole thing forming an L-shaped ensemble extending in two directions from the corner. Dale had blown into town from Elko, Nevada, on his Harley around the turn of the millennium, purchased the rundown old place, and proceeded to combine the five cabins into a single elongated but spacious house. His bedroom was at one end and a guest suite at the other, with living room, dining room, and kitchen in between. He’d added a sort of tower to the new roof over his bedroom, accessed by a spiral staircase, and to that sanctuary he would retire to grade the hundreds of compositions to which the English teacher falls prey. The tower also had a nice widow’s walk, which caught plenty of morning sun and from which you could gaze eastward over the tranquil valley sprinkled with distant cows like raisins on a green salad.
None of this would have been particularly remarkable in the self-reliant milieu of Mildred if not for the fact that Dale Twombly had only one flesh and blood arm. He was revered by the kids at the high school, partly because of his prosthetic replacement, which was made of some gleaming, advanced titanium alloy and terminated in a devilishly complex gripping apparatus, but mainly because he had lost the original arm, not to mention the structural integrity of his ribs, in a spectacular motorcycle crash while leaping over a row of a dozen or so junked cars at a Nevada county fair.
The devastating Myrtle Bench was already seated on Dale’s couch, gripping the stem of a glass of red wine and leaning forward shyly with her forearms resting on her blue-jeaned thighs when Lu and Albert and I arrived. “Hi,” she whispered. Book club meetings always featured a potluck dinner, and tradition dictated that Dale, as tonight’s host, should provide the main entree. Leaving Lu and Albert to try to get something out of Myrtle, I took our contribution of pasta and white bean soup out to the kitchen, which occupied the whole of one of the original cabins and was equipped with all the latest in culinary technology. Dale was putting the finishing touches on his homemade butternut squash ravioli, crimping the edges of the delectable little pillows with a fluted pastry wheel attachment that snapped directly onto the end of his prosthetic arm. His graying ponytail was tucked out of the way inside the collar of his turtleneck. Without pausing in his fluting, he nodded toward an open bottle of chianti and said “Have you posted your observations on the website yet?”
“Et tu, Brute?” I said, putting the soup kettle down on the counter and pouring myself a glass of the wine. “Matt sent me the URL, but I haven’t looked at it yet. You’re not going with his alien invasion trip, are you?” I was trying to be cool, but I was shocked that Matt had already managed to soften even such a hard head as Dale Twombly’s.
“To be honest, Simon, I don’t know. Those lights were pretty damn weird. What’s your take on them?”
“Meteors.” I tilted his glass of chianti to his lips like a surgical nurse so he wouldn’t have to break his crimping rhythm.
He nodded appreciatively, but said, “No way, dude. I’ve seen plenty of shooting stars, and none of them ever did anything like that.”
“Well, it might be a little hard to explain the way they moved,” I admitted, “but it still seems a lot more likely than tourists from Andromeda.”
“I’d call it about 50-50.” Dale added the last of the ravioli to their companions in a stainless steel bowl and then took another sip of wine before turning to lift the lid and glance into the enormous caldron of water that was steaming on his commercial-size stove. “You want to be rational, of course, but I always try to ask myself if I’m just taking the easy way out, letting myself be boxed in by conventional thinking. In other words, is there another way to look at this?” He leaned back against the counter sipping the wine, his comfortable paunch straining at a not entirely fresh black turtleneck.
Well, Dale is a Wiccan, I thought cynically, resigning myself to the loss of another potential ally. I supposed that meant he was bound to be more open to unorthodox explanations. In any case his position in this controversy, as founder and guiding light of UFOny, was highly equivocal. I could have brought that up, but I restrained myself. We went out to join the ladies.
Lu and Myrtle had their heads together whispering about something when Dale and I arrived in the living room. Of course, Myrtle always whispered – if it hadn’t been for her riveting appearance, I would have worried about her ability to function in a high school classroom – but Lu is not generally a whisperer, and the two of them glanced at me a little guiltily as I walked in. I’m freaking out, I thought. Even Albert was staring at me with exaggerated innocence.
The party soon swelled further with the arrival of Margaret Quitclaim, on the arm of Don Swayzee. Harold Clare was right behind them, ducking languidly to clear the doorframe, although he was only five feet four.
“Who’s here?” asked Margaret, stripping a puffy down jacket off her narrow frame and dropping it imperiously into Don Swayzee’s waiting hands. She stared at a corner of the ceiling and nodded as Harold Clare listed the attendees, not overlooking Albert. As a consequence of a severe infection contracted while traveling up one of the tributaries of the Blue Nile in a pirogue, Margaret was legally blind. This stroke of fate had not dampened her enthusiasm for life, although she had retired from her position as a professor of classics at Cal State Chico once it became clear that she would no longer be able to read for more than a few minutes at a time, large print, at close range, and under an intense light. She had subsequently moved to Mildred to live near her son, who ran a small business extracting healing elixirs from various spiny desert plants and shipping them to the credulous natural food communities on the coast.
Harold helped her find a spot on Dale’s couch while I got her a glass of the chianti. “And where’s Matt?” she said.
“I guess he’s busy updating his alien-spotting network,” said Don Swayzee.
“Good for him!” An energetic person herself, Margaret applauded any kind of human activity and frowned only on passivity. The book club had been one of her first projects, as soon as she’d taken the sleepy measure of Mildred, and she continued to dominate it, to all the members’ satisfaction, with her spark and erudition. She’d first bullied us into trying Proust, on a 10-pages-per-day program, and it had required all of her iron will, along with the best culinary efforts of the entire group, to keep the rest of us engaged for more than a year, especially the Cowboys. I suspected they’d stayed with it only in order to get their bi-weekly dose of Myrtle Bench. It was on their behalf that Margaret had relented and pushed the somewhat more hard-driving Iliad for our next selection. The rest of us had surrendered meekly.
While we tucked away the various food offerings at Dale’s long table, the talk was not about Homer but about the Christmas Eve lights, and the town’s reaction to them. Margaret listened patiently as the various camps argued their points of view, but then forcefully advanced the position that what the lights actually were was of little importance, even if it could be determined. What mattered was their mythical and folkloric significance and their role in arousing Mildred from its habitual sleepwalk and redirecting the focus of the town’s inhabitants from mere material concerns to the great mysteries of existence: Are we alone? Is there more to life and the universe than surface phenomena? Is there an Agency that watches over our little lives, even if
“What bothers me is that we don’t seem to have advanced that far since Homer,” I protested mildly, glancing at Lu. “We’re still looking for supernatural explanations for anything we don’t understand.”
Margaret shook her head. “Advanced? That’s a pretty loaded word. Who says the Greeks were wrong? There are certainly lots of things that science can’t explain, especially all the twists and turns that people’s lives take. The Greeks assumed it was the gods poking their deathless fingers into things. Nowadays we assume there’s a natural explanation for everything. But maybe there isn’t.” Lu stuck out her tongue at me.
Margaret, to her credit, was also a good listener, with a real interest in other people’s opinions. She quietly explored the contents of her dinner plate with discreet dabs of her index finger and ate sparingly while the rest of the party disputed. I watched her turning her head this way and that as the arguments criss-crossed the table, but kept my mouth shut. If the meteor theory was too pedestrian for the likes of Dale Twombly and even Lu, what would Margaret make of it? I didn’t think I wanted to find out. Her sightless gaze had a disconcerting directness due to the curious transparency of her left pupil, which seemed to lead deep into her skull. Whenever she looked my way, I couldn’t help wondering just how blind she really was.
The choice of the Iliad had indeed been an inspired one, as nearly everyone had found its relentless action and brimming similes a welcome change of pace from Proust’s meandering and braided streams of clauses. The Cowboys, in particular, had resonated to all the spearing, slashing, marauding, chariot-driving, and solid old-fashioned killing. My own enthusiasm, although not my interest, was less marked, partly because of my squeamishness, previously mentioned, around the subject of death and partly because our study of the epic coincided with Mervyn’s rapid decline and Janet Blythe’s move into hospice. While those two melancholy progressions loomed ever larger in my world view, Margaret was driving us once a week through all the Homerian carnage: eyeballs bouncing like hailstones in the dust, brains exploding through ears and noses, entrails slithering out onto the earth that feeds us all, armless trunks rolling around like logs in clashing bronze bark, countless nipples skewered and tongues severed by gleaming bronze, slippery red-black livers flashing in the Dardan sun. And always, the hateful darkness swirling across yet another pair of eyes. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Margaret would gloat, drawing our attention to a spear thrust through somebody’s buttocks to pierce his hapless bladder, and we all had to laugh at her zest for this mayhem. “Homer’s audiences must have enjoyed all this violence, because he treats it all so lovingly. Apparently some things never change.”
But for me those images echoed unhappily as Janet lost her beautiful hair to chemotherapy and the hateful red curtain dropped over Mervyn’s eyes. For me, every scurrying dry leaf and evaporating cloud, every weathered old stump, for god’s sake, had become a reminder of Time the Merciless Destroyer, and the sight of a scrub jay carrying off its bloody headless lunch turned me philosophical and even emotional. I found myself taking an unhealthy interest in the details of the corpses that littered the highway around Mildred, the smashed hawks with their fanned-out tail feathers waving ignominiously in the wash of passing cars, crushed ground squirrels, half-flayed deer. Occasionally I would even feel a strange compulsion to pull over and walk back to try to unravel the anatomy of some particularly scrambled victim, with visions of gutted Trojan warriors dancing in my head. I’m not a crybaby, but I’ve always had trouble with the idea of any serious breach of my personal corporal boundaries. It’s not so much the pain, which is really unimaginable anyway, as the disassembly that bothers me. I’m the guy you’ll find standing for long minutes in a bookstore, reading about the effects of World War I artillery bombardments on human flesh, or histories of torture, creepily fascinated by the descriptions of flaying, disemboweling, fingernail-pulling, drawing and quartering, dismemberment by teams of prancing horses, tendons stretched like rubber bands out of the ends of fingers and rolled up on poles. Humanity does seem to have a taste for this sort of entertainment. It’s hard to find a culture, at least an ancient one, that didn’t practice some form of torture, and I read it all, trying to imagine what my emotions would be as I watched some skilled Renaissance craftsman peel off my skin – starting at the neck, down over my chest with a sucking sound like pulling up old shelf paper, work it carefully over the tricky genital pouch, and then on down along the thighs and calves, the little pop as it separated from the last toe – and finally hang up the veiny, translucent garment to dry, so that later it could be neatly folded and Fed-Exed to my grieving mother.
I couldn’t discuss any of this with Lu, who was impatient with my morbid tendencies and never troubled herself with such imaginings, although I would sometimes hear her clucking over some particularly vile story in the day-old Los Angeles Times that made its way to Mildred. Soft-hearted though she was, her position was that God would never give you something you couldn’t handle; and anyway there was the afterlife. I supposed it was true that whatever you were handed in the way of torture, you just had to deal with it. But what would you feel as you watched your body being taken apart, as the inevitable darkness gathered? That feeling was what I kept trying to touch, as though connecting to it would open some conduit of secrets.
I found the more or less neutral forum of the book club a good place to bring up these concerns, casually of course. After the shambles of the dinner had been removed to the kitchen, we found comfortable chairs in Dale Twombly’s living room and sat around sipping coffee or a little more wine. “Homer never really tries to describe what these guys must be thinking about while their livers are being filleted,” I complained, to get the conversation off the Christmas Eve lights and onto the Iliad, which in my opinion brought up far more interesting questions. “The hateful mist just comes swirling down their eyes, and off they go to the underworld. It’s all sort of vague and almost a relief, especially when the descriptions of all that physical violence are so detailed and vivid.”
“I can tell you that you don’t feel much at the time,” Dale Twombly said. “In my case, it was kind of a surprise to see my arm hanging there like hamburger, and I knew I should be feeling something about it, but I really didn’t, except I was kind of anxious. There wasn’t even much pain right then.”
We all listened to Dale respectfully, as a person who had been there. Don Swayzee drew in his breath and pushed his cowboy hat back on his forehead as if he had something to add, but remained silent.
“Yes, that’s very interesting,” said Margaret, fixing Dale with her disturbing gaze. “I suppose Homer would have talked to people who’d been in combat, in battles, so he would have known what Dale is telling us.”
“I don’t know why you’re getting so bent out of shape anyway, Houba,” said Don Swayzee finally, with his habitual twist of lip. “We all get something. It doesn’t matter much whether it’s a spear in the guts or stomach cancer. One’s a little faster, that’s all. That might even be better.”
“Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither,” intoned Dale Twombly.
“Achilles,” Myrtle Bench said in her tiniest voice. We all stared at her. “Even Achilles had to die. He reminded that guy.”
“Lycaon, that’s right,” Margaret rescued Myrtle from her excruciating shyness. “ ‘Come friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so? Even for me, death and the strong force of fate are waiting.’ Even Achilles, the greatest hero of a heroic age.” I felt chastened by their matter-of-fact approach, as though all these people were healthier than I was, and my being creeped out by the idea of
Lu said, “Maybe death wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, anyway. The Greeks did believe in an afterlife of some kind, didn’t they?”
“Actually, it was sort of the worst thing that could happen, as far as the Greeks were concerned,” Margaret said. “When Odysseus visits Achilles in the underworld, he tries to tell him how glorious his name is among the living and how great it is that he’s lording it over all the dead, that he shouldn’t grieve about dying. Achilles basically says No, I’d rather be alive and swabbing latrines up there, than a king down here. The Greek underworld was a very dark, melancholy place, and the dead were shadows of their living selves. The shades of the dead people couldn’t even talk to Odysseus until he livened them up a little by giving them some blood to drink. It’s not a happy picture.”
“I like it as poetry,” Lu said, a little disapprovingly, “but I think there are better ways to look at life and death. That’s so bleak. There’s nothing to hope for.”
“Yes, it’s kind of a gloomy view,” said Margaret. “But it’s exhilarating too, isn’t it? We can’t escape, but we’re lucky to be alive now, and that’s why we have to live as though every day were our last.” She leaned back contentedly on the couch.
“But what about the way you lived your life,” Lu said. “Even Achilles had to die, and the heroes and the villains all ended up in the same place. What was the point of trying to live a good life?”
“Glory,” said Margaret. ”If you did something glorious, you’d be sung about after your death, forever.”
We all contemplated this. Personally, I didn’t find it exhilarating at all. First you get a spear up your bladder, which I was sure would hurt no matter what Dale Twombly said, and then you go down to a sort of poorly lit subway station where the train never comes and you’re surrounded for eternity by nebulous, squeaking has-beens.
“How the hell did we get on this subject?” Dale Twombly asked, plaintively. “Can’t we go back to the cosmic lights? This is depressing the hell out of me.” Indeed, only Margaret herself seemed enthusiastic about the taste of this particular draught. Even the Cowboys, though they were trying to project a manly stoicism, appeared sobered by the ancients’ unrelenting vision. Lu, confident that she had a better answer but wisely restraining herself from launching into missionary mode, was cultivating a nonjudgmental expression, while Myrtle Bench stared noncommittally at Dale’s polished hardwood floor. I tried to pretend I’d had nothing to do with the siding we’d gone off onto.
“How about the gods,” said Margaret. “I think we should spend some time talking about their role in the fighting, their relation to fate, and so on.”
“What I’d like to know,” Harold Clare said, “is why they’re always having sex with mortals. I was looking at the genealogical charts in the back of the book, and it seems like half these people are the product of hanky panky with some deity or other. Nobody would really believe that, right? I mean, were there women around in Homer’s time who claimed to have gotten it on with Zeus?”
Dale Twombly said, “Aren’t there always a few people around who seem to have an extra shot of juice, compared to the rest of us? We don’t believe in the Greek gods any more, so we just call it genius or charisma or whatever. Rock stars, movie stars, Einstein, Mozart, a few athletes who seem almost superhuman. But if you believed in the gods, you could imagine that people like that were part god.”
“Do we know anybody in Mildred who fits that description?” Margaret always enjoyed messing with our heads.
“Matt Matawan,” said Lu without hesitation. Don Swayzee snorted, but Lu defended her choice. “Well, he’s sort of bigger than life, he’s very good-looking, and he’s certainly full of energy and enthusiasm.” I looked at her, unexpectedly feeling the burrowing worm of jealousy.
“And he’s got half of the Eastern Sierra believing that emissaries from Saturn have landed,” I said. “That’s charisma.”
“Shit,” said Don Swayzee, “if he’s descended from Zeus, I’m Barack Hoo-sane Obama.”
“Well, what about those celebrities,” Margaret insisted. “Can we explain the power they have over people? You could almost believe there’s a dollop of divine DNA in there somewhere.”
The conversation deteriorated into a sort of Oscar Committee meeting, everybody proposing and puffing their own candidates for partial divinity, with selections ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Lady Gaga. As a result, it was time to do the dishes before we ever got to Achilles whacking Hector and dragging him around Troy by his heels, let alone the funeral games for Patroclus. The Cowboys helped Margaret into her down parka and escorted her out into the cold night. Dale Twombly, who enjoyed demonstrating his remarkable ability to perform feats with his prosthesis that the rest of us couldn’t have accomplished even with our own flesh and blood arms, protested that he didn’t need any help with the cleaning up. But I wasn’t about to give up the chance to hang around his kitchen watching Myrtle Bench wield her deathless dish towel. I hadn’t brought it up, but I secretly thought if there was anyone in Mildred who was half goddess, it was Myrtle. The only other serious local candidate for demigod status I could think of was Mervyn. Unlike Achilles, however, Mervyn had been dealt a long and uneventful life instead of glory, and I thought the poets were probably not going to sing his name down the ages.