Mama's Boy Read online

  “What is the street address of hell?” he asked.

  He waited, as if someone might be foolish enough to answer such a question.

  “I’ll tell you what it is, although you already know it! Hell is right here in Lemon Grove! You—you brought it in with you! I can smell it on you!”

  The shocked congregation looked at one another. Josiah’s voice quelled their mumbling confusion.

  “This could not be true, you say! We are God’s beloved, you say! You ask, has Reverend Josiah Comfort lost touch with reality? Is that what you are thinking? Of course that is what you are thinking!”

  He waited until the congregation regained its composure.

  “Hell, my dear brothers and sisters, my fellow sinners, is possibility,” he said. “You—and me—are all inheritors of possibility. One step this way, one step that way, and you are in it, up to your neck!

  “The white worm curled about the cherry’s stone—this is what possibility brings. The worm thrives at the core of flesh! Death, dear friends, inhabits life! I say to you destruction lives at the core of great accomplishment! And eternal life is present in the core of what must decay!”

  Gus thought: The shithouse rule.

  Josiah began to read again from his prepared text and Gus stopped listening. He drifted into a reverie of the previous night, almost believing that it was all a dream, a sexual nightmare, and that none of it had actually happened.

  The last few months of his life took on a dreamlike feel. The radar squadron—did it exist? Did Milk River exist? Flora and FDR—were they his parents or did he belong in some nonlegal but binding way to Orson and Marva Gunlocke? Why was he named Gus? How odd was it to think of your baby as Gus! Who in their family was Gus? None of his uncles, great uncles, or grandfathers was named Gus. Who was he named after? Why wasn’t he Henry or Roger or Paul? Those were popular names among his high school classmates. What was wrong with Larry, Jeff, or Walt?

  Gus, still unaware of the increasing pitch and power of Josiah’s sermon, looked at Marva. She seemed possessed. Her eyes were wide and her lips trembled. He touched her hand but she didn’t seem to notice. “I am going to topple,” she said quietly. Gus looked around him. The congregation, on their feet now, swayed like reeds in a punishing gale. It was an undulating sway—to the right then to the left then back to the right—a swaying governed by the rhythm of Josiah’s driving sermon. Some of them swayed too far and lost their balance, and the pews and aisles began to fill up with toppled worshippers.

  Marva caught Gus’s shirtsleeve, ripping a stitch at the shoulder seam. Then she lost her grip and she sank to the floor next to his feet, her face twisting helplessly in a fit of ecstasy as her body twitched.

  Her hat rolled away. Gus went after it and saved it from being crushed by another toppler, a large woman in enough blue gingham to equip a small boat with sailcloth.

  Marva gabbled as she had gabbled in the sofa bed the night before. He wanted to cover her mouth with his hand, thinking that her gabbling was a coded confession of forbidden acts that everyone, even the toppled, could hear and decipher.

  Then something happened. Gus was rocked by a tidal wave of sorrow. He was sorry for Marva, sorry for the Mainstay flock—most of whom were poor people looking for their weekly topple that somehow sustained them through their dreary lives. He felt sorry for Josiah, who, every week, had to bring forth the spirit that made them topple. He felt sorry for burned-out Becka, beleaguered mother of the dreadful Corky.

  And he felt sorry for himself for having stumbled into their world. Sorry—and fearful—that he might not break free of it, and that if he did, sorry for the wreckage he’d leave behind.

  He helped Marva to her feet and she leaned weakly against him. He felt moved to do something for her, some final gesture before he left for Los Angeles, a gesture that would make her feel her fantasies had some basis.

  “I feel strange, Marva,” he said.

  “You do? Then let it come on, Orson! Don’t you fight it!”

  Gus stepped out into the aisle and toppled, careful not to hit the floor too hard. He heard Marva chortle and clap her hands. Gus faked a herky-jerky convulsion embellished by twitches of his arms and legs. He let his eyes roll back, let spittle form on his lips.

  “Jesus God Almighty!” Marva said. “My unbelieving husband done toppled!”

  Gus heard Josiah’s passionate exhortations rise above the gabbling crowd. He watched through slit eyelids the swaying of those who had yet to topple. He heard their gabble and gabbled a little himself. When he felt he’d been down long enough to please Marva, he decided to get up.

  But he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t bend at the knees and his arms wouldn’t bend at the elbows. He felt nailed to the floor. His eyes fluttered shut and stayed shut and he couldn’t reopen them. He took in huge sobbing lungfuls of air but that did not end his paralysis. Somewhere above him Marva said, “Let it work itself out, Orson, you stop fighting it. Do you no good to fight it.”

  He made himself relax by taking slow, easy breaths. As he relaxed he felt himself sink through the tabernacle floor. He was still afraid, but his fear now was manageable. He sank through the concrete floor of the basement, and then into the interior dark of the earth, and he kept sinking until he was suspended in watery green light.

  His fear was replaced by curiosity, the curiosity replaced by expectation. What he expected was not clear to him until he saw that the green light he was suspended in was the ocean, and on the floor of the ocean, half a mile away, was a sunken ship. He walked toward it until he could see its markings.

  “The Fisk,” he said.

  He entered the old Liberty ship by the torpedo hole that sent her down. In the engine room, sitting on a ruptured steam pipe, was Orson Gunlocke.

  “You come a long way for this, son,” he said.

  Much of Orson had been blown away by the torpedo blast. Shredded flesh like white seaweed undulated from his exposed bones. Half his head had been shorn neatly off on a vertical axis as if by a table saw. Small fish came and went, taking what they wanted of what was left of him. What hair he had looked like it was still on fire.

  “Why am I here?” Gus said to the empty bones.

  “You tell me,” Orson said.

  “You’re my father.”

  “Maybe you’ve come to claim your inheritance.”

  “I’m responsible for your death.”

  “How do you figure that, boy?”

  “You had a safe job in a defense plant. They weren’t going to draft you. You joined the navy because of me.”

  “You’re half right, but that aint the whole story.”

  “Flora wanted you to marry her even before you knocked her up. But you were already thinking of marrying Marva. After you found out about me you enlisted.”

  “You got that plumb wrong, son. Your mama would never give up her rich dentist and her La Jolla house. No way.”

  “She admitted that. I didn’t believe her.”

  “Believe her, kid. I was born to be poor. Look at Marva. What’d I give her except a hard time?”

  “She never said that. She loved you.”

  “She’s crazy, maybe you noticed. You put the blocks to her, didn’t you? Banged her like you meant it. You must be a bit off the beam yourself. Looks like you got a little of me in you, boy. Maybe more than a little.”

  “You’re not mad at me?”

  “The dead don’t get mad.”

  “And you’ve been dead a long time.”

  “No, only since this morning. We got torpedoed ten minutes before breakfast.”

  “That was in 1944.”

  “This is 1944.”

  “No, it’s 1957. I was five in 1944.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? It’s always 1944. Time stopped for me right here. It’ll stop for you some day. If that doesn’t kill you, nothing will.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Work it out boy. It comes up on you fast. You only get a
short time to figure it out.”

  Someone touched Gus’s eyes and they opened. It was Josiah, leaning down. “Get up,” he said.

  Gus sat up, movement in his arms and legs restored. He got to his feet with Josiah’s help. “What happened?” he said.

  “You toppled, son,” Josiah said.

  “He toppled like he was meant to topple!” Marva said.

  “He flat double toppled!” someone added.

  A crowd gathered around him as if he’d done something unusual. As if they hadn’t seen such a toppler as Gus. Their voices came to him like a single voice:

  The young unbelieving agnostic flat toppled!

  Boy howdy! The stranger dropped like a rock!

  He bears the weight of a momentous guilt.

  For doing WHAT we may never know or want to.

  I surely would like to learn the truth of it.

  Must be a deadly thing to put him down like that.

  But that was a healing topple if I ever seen one!

  I wonder though if this boy made the grade.

  Corky, leaning against his mother, smiled his yawning rodent smile. “I seen way better topples than that,” he said.

  Gus and Marva left the church. In the car Marva said, “What did it feel like, what did you see?”

  “I was under a mile of water,” Gus said, shifting into second gear.

  “A mile of water!” Marva said.

  “But I could breathe and walk. I walked to the Fisk.”

  Marva turned white.

  “Yes,” Gus said. “I saw him. I mean, in the dream.”

  “Was no dream,” she said, her unsteady voice somber.

  “He was blown apart, but could talk. How could that not be a dream?”

  “It was a visitation.”

  “Whatever,” Gus said.

  Gus was not happy with himself. He’d toppled like any other ignorant member of the flock. You had to believe what they believed to succumb to toppling, and he didn’t, or at least had no opinion one way or the other. He’d toppled deliberately, to please Marva. But then his topple became genuine. He felt he’d been conned as he once had been on the Mission Beach pier, losing two dollars in five minutes to a blind shell game artist.

  “I told him I was responsible for his death,” Gus said.

  “You told who?”

  “Orson.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  “You don’t know?”

  She squirmed in her seat. She looked out at the passing scenery as if it interested her. She fidgeted. She sat on her hands to keep them still. She bit her lip. “ ’Course I don’t know,” she said.

  “He worked for my mother, the dentist’s wife, in La Jolla. She fell for him and he knocked her up. When he found out about me a couple of years later he joined the navy. Orson’s my father. Because of me he’s at the bottom of the ocean feeding the fishes. I killed him, more or less.”

  She gave Gus a narrow look then offered him a riddle: “How can a man be his own father by another mother then cause him, more or less, to die at sea? Answer me that and I’ll give you a dollar!”

  “Not possible,” Gus said.

  “So quit your nonsense, Orson! I never could abide your fool notions!”

  “You didn’t know about the dentist’s wife?”

  Marva sneered. The corner of her lip rose, exposing a long eyetooth. Her nostrils flared and quivered. “That fat old harlot!” she said. “I knew about her! When you couldn’t find regular work, she took you on for four dollars a day. After two years of trimming her hedge you wanted to be shut of her. You wanted to go back to Oklahoma but there was nothing there for you. When the war came you got the job at the airplane plant for eleven dollars a day.”

  “Why do you think Orson went to war when he had a safe defense plant job?” Gus said. “Was that one of his fool notions?”

  “It always grieves me to think about that.”

  “He wanted to get away from all three of us. The dentist’s wife is my mother, and Orson is my father. And you are a certified nutcase.”

  Marva seemed not to have heard Gus. She said, “Oh, you should have seen you topple, Orson! You went down like you’d been knocked on the head!”

  Gus touched the back of his head, feeling for lumps. He’d rather believe he’d been sapped from behind by an overzealous parishioner.

  “Things are going to go back like they was,” she said. “You going down like that was a sure sign that things are changing for the better.”

  Marva told the story she wanted to hear. She amended or deleted the parts that threatened the outcome: “We’ll gas up the car and go to Mexico,” she said. “We’ll get married again in Tijuana, like before. There’s a Justice catty-corner from the Fronton Palace where they play that High Lie game. That’s where we got hitched the first time for two dollars. Then we’ll drive down the coast to that big hotel at Rosa Rito Beach. We’ll sell that motorbike of yours, maybe get a hundred dollars for it. That will pay for our honeymoon. It’ll be like it was before, those Mexican boys in white jackets bringing us pork chops and Coca-Colas in that balcony room that looks out on the ocean. We’ll have us a child this time. I’m not too old to bear. The seed I have in me now should take. We’ll name him August, after your great granddaddy who fought in the Civil War. We’re getting our second chance, Orson! What more could a normal human being want?”

  It was not a question Gus felt qualified to answer. He pulled the sputtering Ford into her driveway, set the brake, and shut off the engine.

  Marva got out and went into the house. Gus sat there for a while, listening to the hot engine tick.

  He thought: Wasn’t Gus a nickname for August? If she had a child and named him August wouldn’t the child be called Gus? Would that child somehow be him? He felt a weakness come over him stemming from a collapse in his ability to think things out in an orderly way.

  He laid his forehead on the steering wheel.

  He thought: I can’t allow such ideas to put down roots.

  21

  Gus didn’t follow her into the house. He got out of the car and went directly to the Goldstar. He switched on the ignition and stood on the crank. Marva came out of the house on the run, the baleful whites of her eyes bright with madness, her lips compressed into a thin bloodless line. She had an eight-inch kitchen knife in one hand and a claw hammer in the other. Gus jumped on the crank again and the engine caught once and died. He pulled out the choke. He rocked the bike side to side to shake out possible air locks in the gas line.

  “No you don’t!” Marva yelled. “No sir!”

  The Goldstar was cold; it was reluctant. It didn’t want to start. Gus slapped the gas tank. “I’ve got to go, Marva,” he said. “I can’t be AWOL.”

  “You aint in the navy anymore, Orson! Get that out of your head! You come home to me best way you could! Home is here, Orson! The war is over and done with! God gave you and me a second chance. Can’t nothin be done about that! Or do you think you can gainsay the Lord? Listen to me, Orson, you ran off to war for some fool notion but you are back now and you are going to stay back!”

  Gus pushed the choke back in and stood on the crank again. The engine caught. It grumbled as if aroused from sleep then gave a throaty cough and roared. Gus toed the gear lever into first and eased out the clutch. Marva trying to deliver a blow snagged the back of his shirt with the hammer’s claw. She ripped it down to his waist. He lost his balance and stuck out a leg to keep the bike on its wheels. The bike carved a dirt-spraying circle around her yard. Marva walked through the spray swinging the hammer at him. It glanced off the back of his head. The world went instantaneously green. He thought he was back in deep water, on his way to visit Orson Gunlocke again at the bottom of the Pacific, but he shook off the effects of the blow and gunned the engine.

  “Topple!” she screamed. “Topple him Jesus!”

  Gus ran another circle around the yard trying to keep the bike on its wheels. Marva closed in on him and stuck him twice
with her kitchen knife, high on the shoulder and down on the arm. Gus held the bike upright by keeping one foot in the dirt. He straightened the wheel and gunned it. The bike leaped out into the street.

  Marva threw the hammer at him. The hammer sailed past his head and came to rest across the street. A man who had come out of his house to pick up his Sunday paper, did a clubfoot tap dance to avoid the spinning hammer. “Crazy goddamn bitch!” he yelled, then carried his paper back to the safety of his front porch.

  “I’m done toppling!” Gus yelled over his shoulder. He stood the Goldstar on its rear tire and almost lost it again. He slowed down, then looked back to see if she was still after him. She was in the street, hopping on one foot and then the other, waving her bloody knife.

  Gus headed north at high speed as if pursued by the Furies. He roared through National City then slowed as he passed the Naval Station on Harbor Drive. He took Pacific Highway to La Jolla Boulevard then turned into the street he grew up on, Spindrift Drive.

  The house was damp and cold from the recent rains. He turned on the furnace and went into the master bedroom. He peeled off the remnants of his bloody shirt and checked out the cuts on his back and arm. She hadn’t put her weight to the knife. Either she’d lost her grip or a remnant of sanity made her soften her thrusts. But she had a strong grip, strong as a man’s. Gus concluded that the halfhearted stab was a consequence of sanity temporarily diluting her madness.

  The bleeding had stopped. He wet a washcloth and mopped up coagulated blood around the cuts. He found a bottle of iodine in the medicine chest along with a roll of gauze and adhesive tape. He cleaned the cuts with soap and water then swabbed them with iodine. Her knife might have been clean but there was a good chance it was not. Marva Gunlocke did not keep a spotless kitchen.

  Gus taped bandages over the cleaned cuts then touched the tender spot at the back of his head. No blood there, just a small lump. He found an ice pack, filled it with ice cubes from the fridge and went into the living room. He turned on the TV, then found an unopened bottle of brandy in the liquor cabinet. He cut the seal with his thumbnail, unscrewed the cap, filled a tumbler to the brim.