Tours of the Black Clock Read online

  7

  MARC DID NOT GO to Samson the next day either, or the next. He continued sailing with old Zeno back to the island, hiding on deck and never stepping ashore. Zeno put him to work collecting the fares; it also became his job to yell at passengers who leaned too far over the side, and lie to them about things in the river. It might be alligators one week and piranha the next. The old man filled Marc in on how to operate the boat through the sophistication of the currents. Sometimes, on the trip over, the fog would clear enough for a moment so that Marc could see the whole of the island as he’d never seen it. Beyond the island, beyond the interminable river in which the island rested, he might almost have believed he saw the river’s other side; in the distance a red train crossed on its tracks high above the water. The dust out over the plains were the herds of short-haired silver buffalo that had begun appearing out of nowhere at the turn of the century’s final decade. “You don’t eat one of those,” Zeno said, “however hungry you are. Light you up like a city boulevard.” Past the end of the island was the old rubble of a small shelter that had been built on wooden pillars out over the river; it was charred black from a fire that had taken place before Marc was born. The boy believed he could still see the smoke of the inferno. It was something nobody, including his mother, talked about. Know anything about that fire? he asked the old man. “Not something I talk about,” the old man muttered.

  T.O.T.B.C.—2

  8

  AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS MARC said to the old man one night, I’m not getting to Samson very quickly this way. “Don’t say it like it’s my fault,” Zeno snapped back, “I’m not stopping you.” Well, the boy said after thinking about it a moment, I don’t have a ticket for the bus. “I’ll give you the money for the ticket,” said Zeno, “you can leave tomorrow. I’m not stopping you.” You don’t have any money, the boy said, those fares don’t add up to anything, how do you get by with charging them four-bits anyway? What kind of business is that? “It’s my business, that’s what kind,” the old man answered, “the fares don’t mean puckey. Pocket money. I get my main cut from Judy on the island, a percentage of her take. I bring her the tourists and she provides a place for them to be brought. Don’t worry about my business.” He pulled a canvas sack from beneath his mattress. He pulled from it some ratty old bills and a lot of loose change. The boy turned away. He built a fire in the stove and lit the gaslamp, not looking at Zeno who stood with the money in his gnarly hands, affronting the boy with it. Marc’s head was light and pounding from the final trip back—the liquor of the passengers and the fumes of the boat’s motor. What about you? he muttered finally, still not looking at Zeno who by this time had dropped the money to his side. “Hell I got along forty years without you, punk,” said Zeno. The two of them sat and had a drink together, and at last the boathouse began to warm though it never lost its dampness. The fire burned down and the boy fed and stoked it again, and when it burned down again, before they slept, Marc said, A couple more days. Then I’m gone. The old man nodded and muttered back, “Sure. You can leave tomorrow if you want.” When Marc was sure Zeno was asleep he added, You fucking cheat at cards anyway. Closing his eyes he heard, “Sure, leave tomorrow. I’m not stopping you.”

  9

  A COUPLE MORE DAYS and Marc still hadn’t left. It wasn’t long after that, on an afternoon when the sun broke glancingly through the fog, that the old man plopped with a thump down on a fruit crate near the side of the boat; thirty or forty quarters fell through his fingers and skipped across the puddles of the deck. Marc instinctively knelt to retrieve them, and only when he looked almost casually at old Zeno did he see a face that was as white as his own hair. A fat man with a hat and camera said, “Is he OK?” and began picking up quarters. Marc shook Zeno’s shoulder and said, Hey. When Zeno didn’t respond the boy said, Old man? He still didn’t respond. Oh Jesus, the boy exclaimed, torn between attending to Zeno and steering the boat, which was now beginning to veer wildly off course. Other passengers were looking around in confusion. Finally the old man’s breathing resumed, his head lifted and he peered around, but he still didn’t move and everything he said was jumbled and without sense. When the boat reached shore he couldn’t feel his legs. Marc took Zeno into the boathouse and put him on the mattress. He canceled the rest of the day’s schedule. He got into a fight with the fat man in the hat and camera over the quarters he’d pocketed. “Shouldn’t have to pay to come back anyway,” the man protested, “people should have the right to go back where they came from.” Not on my river, said Marc.

  Zeno was back out on the boat the next day for a couple of trips over, but his legs still weren’t right and things said to him had to be repeated. Then he collapsed on the rail and almost fell in the water. For the next several days the business didn’t run at all. Judy came over to see where everyone had gone. “You could have let me known,” she said. Not on that island, the boy answered back. The two discussed getting a doctor while Zeno lay on the mattress listening. “Forget doctors,” he croaked, in one of his more lucid moments.

  Marc woke that night when the light of the gaslamp was only a point and the sound of Zeno’s voice in the dark was only a scrape of life against death. “I set it on fire,” Marc heard him, “are you listening? That house on the pillars out over the river, forty years ago. …” There was a pause; in the dark Marc, from his side of the boathouse, could feel the old man struggling. He began to say, Don’t struggle; but the old man said first, “Say nothing and listen. I … are you listening? The hand that set it on fire was my own and now I have to tell someone. Because a man died, see. A man burnt up. City man, some kind of gangster or private eye … your mother knows. He came looking for her. He waited in that house over the river, and at night when he slept I set it on fire. Never quite knew why I did it. So I have his ashes on my soul now, now I have to tell someone because your mother’s knowing isn’t enough. She’ll die with the secret the same way she hasn’t spoken to me since it happened, it’s not a secret that should be died with. …” Marc heard him gasp. He tried to keep the old man talking, if only to reel him back from whatever he was sinking into. Old man, called Marc. Nothing. Old man?

  10

  IT WAS OBVIOUS AND appropriate that the old man should be given to the river; Marc wasn’t about to let him hang in a tree for a week. So in the middle of the night he took Zeno into the river and bound him with rope to the bottom of the boat. He cried as he did this. The next day, wearing the blue coat with the dirty gold buttons, he opened up business; his first decision was to raise the fare to a dollar each way. As weeks and then months passed, he came to forget about Zeno tied to the bottom of the boat, except for those odd moments when his bones rattled in the currents of the river; the passengers would look curiously to their feet at the sound. But the new captain was certainly mindful of the old man that first trip across the river when the fog closed in and there was nothing but a world of water and vapor, leaving him to ask himself, Where in the universe am I? Which he might just as well have asked all those years his boat was only a floating chinatown. And that he asked it now without ever having asked it before was what made this moment the first lapse in a life of innocence.

  11

  THROUGH THIS LAPSE STREAMED a hundred wanton nights, the first of which brought a slightly boyish blonde with straight short hair and glasses who worked in a bank three hundred miles away. She came to Davenhall Island looking for just such a moment when someone might leak his life into hers. She was on the last boat of the day. She had a wallet of androgynous men. He’d been anchored twenty minutes at the island and was lying on deck waiting the two or three hours until the passengers’ return when the dark sense of her form fell across his eyelids. Since there was no sun it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a shadow. He opened his eyes and looked at her. She was poised like a kitten who’d just seen her first bird and felt her first predatory instinct. “You can go on sleeping if you want,” she said to him. Thanks, he said, and dozed for a bit until he r
ealized the boat was moving and opened his eyes and saw she was still there, the anchor cut loose and the island about sixty feet away and drifting. She took off her shirt. “You can go on sleeping,” she said again. She took off the rest of her clothes and then her glasses; she knelt for a moment, unsure. He got up from his place and went over to her. He wrapped his hands around her head and pulled her face up to his; as she groped for something to hold she fell back on the deck. Sprawled on her hands and knees in the middle of that moment when land was nowhere in sight she tried to rise when he plunged himself into her. As she pounded their small wooden planet with her fists, Zeno’s bones beneath them clattered in response. After that the accomplices were endless. There was at least one every couple of weeks, secretaries and teachers, roaming housewives, beachgirls and therapists and communists, orientals looking for lost uncles, community representatives and necklace saleswomen, photographers, film editors, South American beauty contest runners-up. Pretty ones, plain ones, goofy ones, neurotics, polemicists. For a while he was seeing one constantly, a tough little Italian from Samson on a motorcycle. She was five feet one with wild brown hair and starlet legs and a low voice. She lived with her folks and refused to spend the night with him; later he learned she was sixteen. On the deck of the boat, sheathed in fog and cut loose from shore, they stripped and lay across his blue coat; he took her into his mouth and drank her. They dropped into the black river where they couldn’t see each other at all and he entered whatever part of her his fingers could find. After three months she met a magazine writer one day on the trip back from the island and put him on the back of her motorcycle and took him down the highway to show her mother and father. For some time after his wild little Italian girl left he was alone, then it all started again, with girls he sometimes thought he remembered from before. He couldn’t think of a way to ask tactfully if they’d met and they were always too shy for him to be sure. He was sure he hadn’t met Kelly and Cyrise; they worked in a casino in a resort town two borders away. Kelly was a plump strawberry blonde with lipstick so wet the fog seemed to streak red when it wafted past her mouth. At the dock when she gave him her dollar he could tell she’d already been drinking; her laugh held a drenched gurgle somewhere in its middle and she had a hard time keeping her balance. Cyrise was a melancholy blackhaired Iranian so voluptuously beautiful the other tourists followed her onto the island talking to her past her friend which only seemed to make Kelly drunker as she contemplated everything she would drink at Greek Judy’s in order to stand all the attention Cyrise received. By the time the two women returned at nightfall Kelly was having trouble getting on the boat. The trip back to shore sobered her a bit, but when the women reached mainland they wound up in the boat-house having a drink with their strange captain. The gas-lamp burned low and the three played cards. Eventually Kelly spilled out naked onto the mattress halfconscious as Cyrise lowered herself onto him with almost willful compliance, riding him while he filled his hands with her spectacular chest. She rode after almost an hour to her morose ecstasy; but not his. She captained and abandoned him, and removed herself to the mattress. Kelly babbled in the deep corner of the gaslamp shadows. I’m not done, he said to Cyrise, erect; she shrugged and looked at her friend, cocked her head a moment and nodded at Kelly slithering across the floor. He took Kelly’s plump pink body and rolled it over on its front and opened it up and mounted it. Kelly sort of gawked in surprise at the ravishment behind her. “I’ll hold her down for you,” said Cyrise, taking her friend by the wrists. After a while Kelly started to cry out; it was difficult to tell what she was trying to say. She thrashed beneath him against the mattress while Cyrise held her fast to the floor; at some point someone kicked over the bottle of brandy. “She’ll forgive me later,” Cyrise explained, “we’ll talk about what a beast you were, and comfort each other.” When she said this he looked at her face in the light and felt himself fall into the deep Persian heat of her eyes, and everything emptied out of him and for a moment he’d forgotten that it wasn’t her into whom he emptied it. He stumbled off to the other wall and could only admire in terror how she’d fucked him and left the hot white consequences of it in some other body than her own. Later that night in the dark he woke to see Kelly crashing around the boat-house in confusion, opening the door and disappearing outside. A moment later Cyrise went after her. He didn’t remember later if he heard them come back. He was aware however that he had just enough of a shred of innocence left to feel guilt-stricken about having cheated at cards. The next morning the casino girls were gone, the night’s only evidence the empty brandy bottle rolling on its side.

  12

  FIFTEEN YEARS PASSED. DARKNESS was all over his life now. It flooded in through a secret tunnel that began in Vienna and ended in one of the aortae of his heart. Every day through the years he sailed the boat back and forth to his home. He never stepped ashore or went into town. That he had directed his innocence toward the leaving of his home, and that his fate had become to spend his life on this river between home and irrevocable escape, transporting tourists, now stranded him in the country of self-betrayal. He became the muttering depraved rivermonk of Davenhall, his white mane and beard and the crazy blast of his green eyes adding age to his appearance by the epoch; the white hair on his arms grew like fur. After a while he didn’t have the girls anymore. If one came to him as he lay on the deck of his boat waiting for the tourists’ return, he sent her away. He’d simply raise anchor and drift off to that moment in the fog that had first terrified him when he was innocent but which he now called home or, if he couldn’t recall the word, hell. Sometimes to pass the time, he sailed the river along the island’s shore over to the western tip where he could see the old black and white machine still unmanned and burping out ice into the steaming dirt. He never ventured farther out into the open expanse of the river itself; somewhat like the ancients he was afraid of what was at the end. In truth he came to recognize he was afraid of venturing beyond the edge of his life altogether. He asked himself why he’d never been a tourist, then asked himself why he’d never been anything but a tourist. His blue coat lost its buttons one by one, not at cards but invisibly, when he wasn’t looking. It was as though something was telling him that though he might suppose he was gambling nothing, in fact he was gambling all the time and poorly, just as everyone gambled everything in every moment; and he was losing. One by one the buttons disappeared. He dropped obscenities into the river one by one that the skeleton bound to the boat’s bottom might hear them. He almost imagined the old man reaching up over the edge of the boat and clasping him by the ankle. He almost imagined he might look down and see the fingers locked to his foot. Once, earlier on, while sailing along the island, he saw his mother. Her hair was completely gray now. She walked along the banks of Davenhall silently looking at him. She looked as though she understood he wanted an explanation but she couldn’t give it. He couldn’t bring himself to call her. He would have asked how she was, and if they’d spoken long enough he would have asked who she was. She walked and he glided along in tandem silence, and in the light the small white scar at the corner of her mouth sparkled like a diamond in her tooth. It made him a little heartbroken. She finally stopped in the sand and, slowly, almost fearfully, raised her hand and gave him a little wave. A little wave goodbye. He waved back. Then she turned with her arms folded in that determined way, and walked away, and he didn’t see her again after that. He sat on the deck of the boat and sobbed. The next time he thought of her was when he heard from Greek Judy that she was sick. “You should come see her,” Judy called from shore. Tormented and racked with guilt, he nonetheless could not bring himself to step on the island; at the edge of his boat he stared at its shore as though it was the chasm beyond the edge of a cliff. Judy left him howling in the fog. In this moment amidst the fog he howled at the world of his mother and dropped into the black river where nothing could be seen, and groped for something or someone to enter where nothing would be entered. The next time he saw Judy, his
mother had recovered; but though he was relieved, his guilt wasn’t mitigated until much later, when everything was mitigated, the hymen of feeling worn away like innocence. One night he thought the feeling had returned when he lay on the mattress in the boathouse and something rumbled up from inside him: something’s happening to me now, he said to himself with awesome hope; but the rumbling wasn’t in him at all, rather it was the shorthaired silver buffalo sweeping across the dusty lot in front of his house where the buses parked in the day. He wrested himself from the mattress just in time to see the last of the animals disappear in the night. With this he lost all hope for the feeling. He lost it through the rest of his youth. He lost it into the years that he passed as a young man, on into the years when he neared the point he couldn’t even call himself young, at least not young in any sense he’d ever understood it. He lost it right up until the day he saw her on the boat, in a blue dress; on that day he rediscovered not the hope of feeling life, but life itself. This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.

  13

  HE HAD NO DESIGNS on her. He might have liked to put his hands on her hair and pull her gently into his chest, but he wasn’t likely to do even this. She was probably not more than fifteen years old; she could have been born the night he assumed this post on the river. At this time he’d taken on an appearance that frightened these girls; she wasn’t frightened. She stood alone watching into the water, the wet deck of the boat a dark mirror in which her blue dress shone. The ends of her hair stuck to the rail as she leaned across it; he touched her shoulder tentatively. I wouldn’t like you to fall in, he suggested to her. She looked at him as though he’d said something strong and startling. I used to lie to people, he went on, that the river was full of alligators. Piranha sometimes. She laughed, And they believed you? On this river, he smiled, they believe everything. He said, Have you come far? and she seemed to think about it a bit, smiling at whatever she was thinking, and only nodded. She turned back to the water and the conversation seemed over; he settled his gaze back onto the island before him. He felt oddly moved and forsaken until he heard her say, And you? Have you come far? The water was lapping over the edge of the boat; he wasn’t paying attention to his speed, and the other passengers were glaring at him. He said, I’ve sailed fifteen years between two points less than a mile from each other. The fog came in. They were swallowed up to the blithe indifference of tourists studying their itineraries. Only the girl looked around; she said, I always feel a little lost when I can’t see the stars. The hair on her arms stood on end in the chill but she didn’t appear to notice. I don’t think, he said, I’ve ever seen the stars from this boat: maybe a patch of them. Do you know the stars? he asked. Yes, she said, I know them. Are you an astronomer? he said; they both laughed. The boat continued and the fog fell behind them and the island was there then. In the last few minutes he almost could think of nothing else to say until he said, perhaps more seriously than he meant to, But why have you come here? It was something he’d never asked anyone on his boat; but then she was the first person who, in that moment when the rest of the earth disappeared, noticed. And for a second it was almost as though she hadn’t heard him; and he wasn’t about to repeat it. The island approached and he brushed past her to dock the boat, when she answered, To bury something. She stepped ashore and he called out, to her alone among all the others, Boat leaves in two and a half hours.