“No.” I said at last. “I’m not … “
“Dad!” He seized my arms. “Oh, God! God!”
“Don’t!” I said. “Not me!”
“Then who?” he pleaded and crushed his head against my chest. “What’s going on? Christ!”
“Please.” I broke his grip. “They’re waiting!”
He fell back. “I don’t understand,” he said, the tears flowing.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
He lurched forward. I raised my hand swiftly. “No. Don’t.”
“Will you,” he mourned, “be here … after?”
“Yes,” I said, agonized. “No. I don’t know.”
“At least watch,” he said.
I was silent.
“Please,” he said.
At last I nodded and saw color in his face.
“What’s going on?” he asked again, bewildered.
They say that drowning victims’ lives flash through their heads. Here, with William Clark Henderson frozen in the processional, my thoughts, sunk in revelations, sought answers, found none.
Were there families worldwide with similar thoughts, plans, dreams locked in mirror-image flesh? Was there a genetic plot to seize the future? Would a day dawn when these unseen, unrecognized fathers, brothers, nephews, cousins rose as rulers? Or was this just God’s ghost and spirit, his Providence, his unfathomable Will? Were we all identical seeds hurled forth in wide broadcasts so as not to collide?
Were we then in some broad and incalculable fashion, brother to wolves, birds, and antelope, all inked, spotted, colored the same, year on year and generation on generation back as far as minds could see? To what purpose? To economize on genes and chromosomes?
Why? Would the faces of this Family, grown apart, vanish by 2001? Or would the replicas increase to envelop all cousined flesh? Or was it just a miracle of mere existence, misunderstood by two stunned fools shouting across blind generations on a summer’s graduation day?
All this, all this exploded light dark, light dark across my gaze.
“What’s going on?” the other me repeated.
For the line of young men and women was almost gone, quitting a scene where two idiots raved with two similar voices.
I said something, quietly, which he could not hear. When this is done, I thought, I must tear up the pictures, burn the notes. To continue this way, with old annuals, lost faces: madness! Trash it all, I thought. Now.
The young man’s mouth trembled. I read his lips.
“What did you just say?” he asked.
“Nothing changes,” I whispered.
Then, louder:
“Nothing changes!”
I waited to hear Kipling’s words to that song of great sadness: “Lord God of old, be with us yet. Lest we forget.”
Lest we forget.
When I saw the diploma go into the hands of William Clark Henderson—
I backed off, weeping, and ran.
That Old Dog Lying In The Dust
They say that Mexicali has changed. They say it has many people and more lights and the nights are not so long there anymore and the days are better.
But I will not go see.
For I remember Mexicali when it was small and alone and like an old dog lying out in the dust in the middle of the road. And if you drove up and honked it just lay there and twitched its tail and smiled with its rusty brown eyes.
But most of all I remember a lost-and-gone one-ring Mexican circus.
In the late summer of 1945, with the war ending beyond the world somewhere, and tires and gas rationed, a friend called to ask if I would like to ramble down past the Salton Sea to Calexico.
We headed south in a beat-up Model A which steamed and seeped brown rust-water when we stopped in the late hot afternoon to skinny-dip in the cool irrigation canals that make the desert green along the Mexican border. That night we drove across into Mexico and ate cold watermelon in one of those palm-fringed outdoor stands where whole families gather happy and loud and spitting black seeds.
We strolled the unlit border town, barefoot, treading the soft brown talcum dust of its unpaved summer roads.
The warm dust blew us around a corner. The little one-ring Mexican circus lay there: an old tent full of moth holes and half-sewn wounds, propped up from within by an ancient set of dinosaur bones.
Two bands played.
One was a Victrola which hissed “La Cucaracha” from two black funeral horns buried high in the trees.
The second band was mortal flesh. It consisted of a bass-drummer who slammed his drum as if killing his wife, a tuba player sunk and crushed in brass coils, a trumpeter with a pint of sour saliva in his horn, and a trap-drummer whose effervescent palsy enabled him to gunshot everyone: musicians quick or musicians dead. Their mouth-to-mouth breathing brought forth “La Raspa.”
To both calamities, my friend and I crossed the warm night-wind street, a thousand crickets frolicking at our pants cuffs.
The ticket-seller raved into his wet microphone. Volcanoes of clowns, camels, trapeze acrobats waited just inside to fall upon us! Think!
We thought. In a mob of young, old, well-dressed, poor, we hustled to buy tickets. At the entrance a tiny lady with great white piano-teeth fried tacos and tore tickets. Under her faded shawl, starlight spangled. I knew that soon she would shed her moth wings to become a butterfly, eh? She saw my face guess this. She laughed. She tore a taco in half, handed it to me, laughed again.
Pretending nonchalance, I ate my ticket.
Inside was a single ring around which were tiered three hundred slat-board seats cleverly built to kill the spines of plain meadow-beast folk like us. Down circling the ring stood two dozen rickety tables and chairs where sat the town aristocrats in their licorice-dark suits with black ties. There also sat their proper wives and uncomfortable children, all meticulous, all quiet as behooves the owners of the town cigar store, the town store that sells liquor, or the best car mechanic in Mexicali.
The show was to start at eight p.m. or as soon as the tent was full; by rare luck, the tent was full by eight-thirty. The extravaganzas lit their fuses. A whistle shrieked. The musicians, outside, flung down their instruments and ran.
They reappeared, some in coveralls to haul rope, others as clowns to bounce across the ring.
The ticket-seller lurched in, bringing with him the Victrola which he banged onto a band platform near the ring. In a great shower of sparks and minor explosions, he plugged it in, looked around, shrugged, spun a record, poised the needle. We could have either a live band or live acrobats and trapeze artists. We chose the latter.
The huge circus began—small.
Now a sword-swallower choked on a sword, sprayed kerosene in a gout of flame, and wandered out to applause from five small girls.
Three clowns knocked each other across the ring and bounded off to aching silence.
Then, thank God, the little woman leaped into the ring.
I knew those spangles. I sat up swiftly. I knew those vast teeth, those quick brown eyes.
It was the taco-seller!
But now she was—
The beer-keg juggler!
She rolled flat on her back. She shouted. The sword-swallower tossed a red-white-green keg. She caught it deftly with her white ballet-slippered feet. She spun it, as a John Philip Sousa record beat hell out of the tent canvas with a big brass swatter. The tiny lady kicked the whirling keg twenty feet up. By the time it fell to crush her, she was gone, running.
“Hey! Andale! Vamanos! Ah!”
Out beyond in the dusting night I could see the colossal grand parade corseting itself together, girding its gouty loins. A small mob of men was leaning against what looked like an irritable camel out by the watermelon stands. I thought I heard the camel curse. I knew I saw its lips move with obscene belches. Were they or were they not slipping a stomach belt on the beast? Did it have multiple hernias?
But now one of the sweating rope-haulers jumped on the bandstand, crammed a red fez on his head, mouthed the trombone in a great wail. A new record trumpeted like a herd of elephants.
The great parade dusted in, led and followed by ten million crickets who had nothing else to do.
First in the parade was a donkey led by a fourteen-year-old boy in blue overalls with an Arabian Nights turban over his eyes. Then six dogs ran in, barking. I suspected that the dogs, like the crickets, had gotten tired of the nearest street corner and came every night to volunteer their services.
There they were, anyway, dashing about, watching from the corners of their eyes to see if we saw them. We did. That drove them wild. They cavorted and yipped and danced until their tongues hung out their mouths like bright red ties.
This, for the first time, stirred the audience. As one, we burst into shouts and applause. The dogs went mad. They bit their tails on the way out.
Next came an old horse with a champanzee on his back, picking his nose and showing results to all. More applause from the children.
And then, the grandest part of the sultan’s vast parade.
The camel.
It was a high-society camel.
Which is to say that while it was patched at the seams, needled and glued together with bits of yellow thread and old hemp, with floppy turrets, torn flanks, and bleeding gums, it nevertheless had one of those looks which say, I smell bad but you smell worse. That mask of utter disdain which only rich old women and dying dromedaries share.
My heart leaped.
Riding on the back of this beast, in charge of tinsel, was the tiny woman who had taken tickets, sold tacos, juggled beer kegs, and was now—
Queen of Sheba.
Flashing her lighthouse-smile to all, she waved a salute as she rode between the coming-and-going tides
