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BIFF (with rising agitation): Hap, I’ve had twenty or thirty differ
ent kinds of jobs since I left home before the war, and it always turns out the same. I just realized it lately. In Nebraska when I herded cattle, and the Dakotas, and Arizona, and now in Texas. It’s why I came home now, I guess, because I realized it. This farm I work on, it’s spring there now, see? And they’ve got about fifteen new colts. There’s nothing more inspiring or — beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt. And it’s cool there now, see? Texas is cool now, and it’s spring. And whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly get the feeling, my God, I’m not gettin’ anywhere! What the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week! I’m thirty-four years old, I oughta be makin’ my future. That’s when I come running home. And now, I get here, and I don’t know what to do with myself. (After a pause.) I’ve always made a point of not wasting my life, and everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.
HAPPY: You’re a poet, you know that, Biff? You’re a — you’re an idealist!
BIFF: No, I’m mixed up very bad. Maybe I oughta get married. Maybe I oughta get stuck into something. Maybe that’s my trouble. I’m like a boy. I’m not married, I’m not in business, I just — I’m like a boy. Are you content, Hap? You’re a success, aren’t you? Are you content? HAPPY: Hell, no! .
“Is he all right,” she whispered. She lay like a tawny* question mark facing him, her eyes suddenly huge and dark and blinking slowly. Callisto ran a finger beneath the feathers at the base of the bird’s neck; caressed it gently. “He’s going to be well, I think. See: he hears his friends beginning to wake up.” The girl had heard the rain and the birds even before she was fully awake. Her name was Aubade: she was part French and part Annamese*, and she lived on her own curious and lonely planet, where the clouds and the odor of poincianas*, the bitterness of wine and the accidental fingers at the small of her back or feathery against her breasts came to her reduced inevitably to the terms of sound: of music which emerged at intervals from a howling darkness of discordancy*. .
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
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La Gritona. Such a funny name for such a lovely arroyo. But that's what they called the creek that ran behind the house. Though no one could say whether the woman had hollered from anger or pain. The natives only knew the arroyo one crossed on the way to San Antonio, and then once again on the way back, was called Woman Hollering, a name no one from these parts questioned, little less understood. Pues, alld de los indios, quién sabe-who knows, the townspeople shrugged, because it was of no concern to their lives how this trickle of water received its curious name. .
My mother danced all night and Roberta's was sick. That's why we were
taken to St. Bonny's. People want to put their arms around you when you
tell them you were in a shelter, but it really wasn't bad. No big long room
with one hundred beds like Bellevue. There were four to a room, and when
Roberta and me came, there was a shortage of state kids, so we were the
only ones assigned to 406 and could go from bed to bed if we wanted to.
And we wanted to, too. We changed beds every night and for the whole
four months we were there we never picked one out as our own permanent
bed. .
Twice already Marie had pointed out the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn, because the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn put her in mind of a haunted house—not a haunted house she had ever actually seen but the mythical one that sometimes appeared in her mind (with adjacent graveyard and cat on a fence) whenever she saw the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect etc. etc., and she wanted to make sure that, if the kids had a corresponding mythical haunted house that appeared in their minds whenever they saw the brilliance of the etc. etc., it would come up now, so that they could all experience it together, like friends, like college friends on a road trip, sans pot, ha ha ha!
But no. When she, a third time, said, “Wow, guys, check that out,” Abbie said, “O.K., Mom, we get it, it’s corn,” and Josh said, “Not now, Mom, I’m Leavening my Loaves,” which was fine with her; she had no problem with that, Noble Baker being preferable to Bra Stuffer, the game he’d asked for.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
The water refracted the sound of voices and laughter and
seemed to suspend it in midair. The Bunkers’ pool was on a
rise and he climbed some stairs to a terrace where twenty-five
or thirty men and women were drinking. The only person in
the water was Rusty Towers, who floated there on a rubber
raft. Oh, how bonny and lush were the banks of the Lucinda
River! Prosperous men and women gathered by the sapphirecolored waters while caterer’s men in white coats passed them
cold gin. Overhead a red de Haviland trainer was circling
around and around and around in the sky with something like
the glee of a child in a swing. Ned felt a passing affection for
the scene, a tenderness for the gathering, as if it was something
he might touch. In the distance he heard thunder. As soon as
Enid Bunker saw him she began to scream: “Oh, look who’s
here! What a marvelous surprise! When Lucinda said that you
couldn’t come I thought I’d die.” She made her way to him
through the crowd, and when they had finished kissing she led
him to the bar, a progress that was slowed by the fact that he
stopped to kiss eight or ten other women and shake the hands
of as many men.
I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.
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