The Divers and Other Mysteries of Seattle Page 2

  This was when the horses got back to me. Same story. Won big, played bigger, owed money, they came after me. But this time I fooled them. Before we even got close to them threatening to do bad things to Sarah and my kid, I died. Cancer, big time. And fast. Whoo! Hardly had time to think about it before I was gone.

  I’d been up here, or out here, or wherever I am for who knows how long when I ran into my first-born. Still as ding-y as he was down on Earth, or back on Earth, or out there, or wherever it is. Looked a helluva lot healthier though. We didn’t have a lot to talk about because we didn’t have a lot in common except for Sarah. And that reminded me—I’d forgotten to tell her something. I’d been so involved with dying toward the end, this other thing just slipped my mind.

  But how to get in touch with her? I couldn’t just go up to her and start talking as if I’d never left. Hell, it’d kill her. Give her a heart attack. I tried talking to her in her sleep, but her snores drove me away. Lying beside her in life, I’d put cigarette filters in my ears, go to sleep that way. But in death I couldn’t even pick one up. And I wasn’t sure I even had ears—no mirrors up here. Out here. Wherever.

  So I had to look for someone else. Found my wife’s cousin, but she had her own problems—her husband and his paramour, to use an old-fashioned word—and I didn’t want to burden her. Actually, I hadn’t known anything about all that until I went looking for Janie and just slipped into her mind. That was how I began to think about it: just slipping into a person’s thoughts. Before that thing with Janie, I had never been able to do that. Of course, I had never tried.

  What a mess—Janie’s mind, I mean. It was everywhere, and going a mile a minute. Well, that’s not so fast anymore. Let’s put it this way: it was going a hell of a lot faster than it took me to die, and I went quicker than you could blink. Poor Janie. Well, I had my own troubles and I got out of her head just as soon as I could.

  Just for a moment I checked my number two son, but his skull was so thick I didn’t think I could get through it to his brain. Speaking figuratively.

  I did sneak into one of my sister-in-law’s dreams, but, spotting me, she said, “I never liked you.” I tried to argue with her, to tell her that her personal likes and dislikes were immaterial now, so to speak, but she ignored me, preferring to concentrate on the exhilaration of a Ferris wheel ride she had enjoyed as a little girl. In fact, she was a little girl in her dream and she was sitting with her father whom I had known, of course, through Sarah. He saw me too, and glared at me, and I figured, “Well, that’s that,” and took off to look for someone else.

  I was trying to remember how long Sarah’s father had been dead when I fell into the head of someone I didn’t know. That was how it felt, like I’d stumbled and, before I could get my balance, found myself in a young woman’s thoughts. And what thoughts! Jeez! I never would have guessed a human being was capable of bringing such things to herself, much less a human being who was only thirty-two years old (how did I know that?) and so pretty and refined-looking (how did I know that? It was dark) that I would have been proud to…to what? I was trying to figure out what she might have meant to me had I been alive too, and at the same time I was crawling out of her mind—that’s how it was, as if I was crawling through the jungle of her thoughts and pictures—when she saw me and started shouting, “Wait! Wait! Not yet!” and I felt myself pulled more deeply into this tangle of sensations and images and curse words and this animal need and then there was an explosion of light and then there was nothing at all. In the distance I could hear what I thought was crying, or maybe it was laughter, but I couldn’t see anything and anyway the sound was far away and I was exhausted.

  I finally found a niece, I think she was, or maybe she was one of Sarah’s more distant cousins, who was receptive and didn’t want anything in return for doing me this favor. I remember now that she was the one who liked cats. She had four or five from which she’d had the teeth and claws removed. Her husband used to say that the bones were next. Anyway, she was in a trance or something—meditation, I think—when I located her, and I told her I’d left some money in the lining of my favorite sports jacket. I’d sewn it in there because of the people I owed it to: I didn’t want them to get it if they found me. Would she please let Sarah know that the money was there? It wasn’t much, maybe a couple hundred, but you never knew, she might need it someday.

  Well, she did as I asked her to, even letting Sarah know that she’d heard from me. But there was a minor problem: Sarah’d given the jacket to her brother. I’d always liked Lewis because he had such a good heart. A very kind man. And he was the same now—he didn’t try to claim the money as his, although he needed it a lot more than Sarah did (how did I know these things?). I tried to get a message to her that, you know, she should give a little of it to him, but in such a way as it didn’t look like charity. Actually, for a moment I thought I did kind of influence her, again through her niece, but she put my suggestion out of her mind and kept all the money for herself. She had never liked Lewis’ wife who had been a little too…well, let’s just say that her heels weren’t entirely round, but they were pretty well scuffed. But all that was before she married the baby brother.

  Anyway, I wanted you to know all this so you could get some idea of just how persistent is the power of love. It just doesn’t let you go, even if you would want it to. That’s something I think you should know and think about and maybe act on before it’s time to take the dirt nap.

  The Power of Love (II)

  Lewis

  Sarah and I were the youngest. Actually I was the youngest and Sarah was next to me. I had four sisters and no brothers. We were all born in Poland and spent our earliest years there on a farm in a village that is no more. Our father had already gone to America when the war began. This was the First World War.

  Unfortunately for us, our village was in a kind of noman’s-land between the Germans and the Russians. First the Germans came and took our cows and horses. Then the Russians came and took our chickens. Then the Germans took our grain. Then the Russians took all the food they could find in our house. Then the Germans took all the food we had hidden. The girls, not only my sisters, but all the girls in the village, shaved their heads to make themselves ugly so they wouldn’t be raped. My mother shaved her head too. Both armies did this—stole whatever they could, raped whomever they could, finally left us to starve.

  I was very sick when my mother finally decided to leave. I had a fever that would not break and my mother expected me to die at any time. So she and my sisters left me. I don’t remember them leaving. I was in a fever and I must have been sleeping or in delirium. I think I remember Sarah crying and kissing me, and my mother slapping her and pulling her away.

  I don’t know how long it was before I woke. I was sweating but I was very cold. The blanket they had left me was thin, like a filament, like a piece of tissue paper, and I curled up as tightly as I could and returned to sleep.

  It was dark when I went back to sleep but it was light when I woke up again. I was very, very hungry, but very, very weak. At first I couldn’t walk and I just sat on the side of the bed. I wasn’t thinking anything, I just sat there. Then I tried to walk again, and I could, but slowly. I was feeble like an old man, although I was only eleven years old.

  I searched the house for food but couldn’t find any. If any was left after the Germans and the Russians, my family had taken it with them. I felt weak again and returned to my bed and returned again to sleep.

  I was awakened by my bubbi. I was not frightened although I knew she had died when I was five or six. Maybe I was in delirium again, I don’t know. Without speaking, she told me to get up and follow her. We went into the kitchen and she pointed to the highest shelf in the cupboard. Then she went away. She disappeared. I did not look for her because I knew she was dead. I found a stool and set it in front of the cupboard and climbed up on it. On the highest shelf, pushed to the back so even a grown man wouldn’t have been able to see it, was a loaf o
f bread so old that mold covered it. I was so hungry that I did not bother to scrape the mold off, but bit into the crust even before I climbed down off the stool. It was hard but I bit through it. I ate some of the bread and then went back to bed. By now, night had come again.

  I woke up just before dawn when the sky is gray regardless of how the day will turn out. I was clutching the bread to my chest. I ate some more before getting up from the bed. Then I dressed. I stuffed the bread in my shirt and started out. I did not know where to go, but I walked away from where the sun was coming up.

  After several days the bread was gone and I was growing weak again. I tried to beg food from peasants but they had none to give. They were starving themselves. One morning some German soldiers found me as I slept beside the road. After determining that I was not a girl, they directed me to a place where they said I could get food. It was not far, they said. After a half-day’s walk, I found it. It was what they called a camp for displaced persons. Now we call such people refugees. I was a refugee.

  It was only two or three days before I discovered my mother and my sisters. There were in the part of the camp that housed women and children; I had been put in the men’s section. One evening I was sitting with some other orphans, staring over the wire at the women to see what we could, when I saw them: first Rose, my oldest sister, then Esther. They saw me, too. At first we just stared at each other. I could not believe it was them, but also I knew it was them. They waved but I did not wave back. When I saw my mother rushing over to join them, I stood up and turned my back to them and walked into the hut where my bedding was. I did not come out again that day.

  But the next day when I went outside they were all standing just on the other side of the wire: my mother, Rose, Minnie, Esther, and Sarah. My mother pointed at me and two soldiers came through a gate I hadn’t noticed and came over to me. “Your mother wants you,” the one closer to me said. “You’re a lucky boy,” he said as we walked toward the women’s section. His large hand was on my arm above my elbow so I couldn’t break loose and run.

  That was how I was reunited with my mother and my sisters. Eventually we went to America, but before we could go we were required to suffer even more than we had. Typhus broke out in our camp, and while Minnie and Rose and I and our mother did not catch it, Esther and Sarah did. Esther lost her hair and her teeth, Sarah her hair. Sarah’s hair grew back, as did Esther’s, but Esther’s teeth did not grow back.

  Typhus was followed by influenza but somehow we survived it, though all of us got sick. It was 1920 before we left Europe, and good riddance. When I think of what would have happened to us if we had stayed—I do not think of it, and I try not to think of what happened to those who did stay.

  In Chicago in America I saw my father again. He was not as large as I had remembered him, but he was still powerful and looked healthy. He was happy to see us. He had made some money and would make more, although he would lose most of it when Prohibition ended.

  In Chicago my sisters let their hair grow long and shiny, but my mother continued to cut hers short. She did not trust the Cossacks not to follow her to Chicago. Eventually she would see Death in a dream and she would not leave her bed again except to use the toilet. She died two years after this visitation.

  When the Second World War began I was not drafted because I was too old and I had flat feet. Three years later I was not too old and the Army doctor ignored my feet. In the meantime I had married. I was aware of Lillian’s reputation, but I did not care. After all, I had made love to many women, and had learned better than to expect an adult woman, especially in wartime, to remain untouched. Also I was very attracted to Lillian and loved sleeping with her.

  I was a farrier both before and after the war and worked for the movie studios, keeping the horses shod and healthy, so they could make western movies. When there was not a western in production, I did not work, unless you care to call writing poetry in Yiddish work. Certainly Lillian did not, and during my periods of unemployment life with her was almost unbearable. We have not had a happy time together. Perhaps if my sisters had been more forgiving of Lillian’s reputation she would not have turned into the harpy she became.

  Sarah was the worst, I think because she loved me most. It was her love for me that I counted on most in my life. So when she asked me to return the checked jacket she had given me, the one that had been Saul’s, I did not object. It made me look like a racetrack tout anyway. She had not realized the jacket had such sentimental value for her, she said, until after she gave it away. How could I refuse? It was only when I read Saul’s story that I learned there was money in it. Now Sarah is gone too, as are my other sisters, so there is nobody here for me to discuss this with. Soon enough, though, I will see her again, and then we will talk about all that passed between us.

  Les Galloway

  In 1980, out of money, I took a break from graduate school and went back into the army. I thought I would be stationed in Hawaii but found myself at Fort Baker, on the Sausalito side of San Francisco Bay, and living in the Bachelor Officers Quarters at Presidio. Evenings, I would take a book and walk out to one of the restaurants off post for a cup of coffee. It was important to get away from the army at least once a day if I could.

  The first time I saw Les Galloway was in the International House of Pancakes, the IHOP, on Lombard. I was sipping coffee over a book and I heard two people talking about writing. One, a twentyish, black-haired waitress, was saying how much she loved to write, that she wrote every day in her journal and she wrote poetry too. Her writing meant everything to her, she said. She was telling this to an older man dressed in a windbreaker and work pants and seated in a booth at an angle to mine. A manuscript was spread out on the table in front of him.

  The man said he did not write poetry. He wrote fiction, although he had written a teleplay on Mark Twain once that had been produced. He started talking craft and authors to her but she withdrew, saying again how much her own writing meant to her. Continuing to eavesdrop, I understood that the man knew what he was talking about and he seemed to have a lot more experience than I had. When the waitress left I thought about going over and introducing myself to him, but I was unable to think of something to say beyond the introduction and so I let the moment pass.

  A couple of weeks later I saw him again, this time in the cafeteria at Presidio. In those days the army ran the cafeteria, but Presidio was an open post and the cafeteria was open to civilians. Les was a small man with thin white hair and his right leg was shorter than his left. He used a cane as he walked into the building and he carried a brown paper shopping bag in his other hand. He set the bag down at a vacant table and then got himself a cup of tea and an English muffin and returned to his table with his tray. From his bag he extracted a papaya and a lime. He glanced around the room but did not see me watching him. At least his eyes did not stop at mine. He cut the papaya into halves with a serrated butter knife and then he cut the lime into halves. He scraped the seeds out of the papaya and placed them on a paper napkin on his tray and folded the napkin over them. Then he squeezed lime juice onto the yellow fruit. I would later learn that this was habitually his lunch. Tea or maybe coffee and maybe a muffin, but always a papaya with lime or occasionally a scoop of vanilla ice cream which he would buy at whatever restaurant he was in. He always carried the papaya and the lime in the bag with him, regardless of what restaurant he went into, and in the bag also were manuscripts he was working on and a few books, though all I ever saw him read in a restaurant, other than a manuscript, was the newspaper.

  When he was almost finished with the papaya I walked over to his table and introduced myself. I told him I’d seen him talking with the waitress at the IHOP but he didn’t remember her or what he had said to her. Still, he was friendly and when I asked if I might sit down with him, he agreed readily.

  I told him that I also wrote. When I said this his eyes lost their quizzicality and fixed themselves on me. He mentioned some things about craft and technique and
I commented on what he said and he thought about what I had said and commented back. And so we began to trust each other.

  He said he had written a novel that he had not been able to place with a publisher. It was titled The Forty Fathom Bank. It was too short for a book, editors said, and too long for a story. One journal in the Pacific Northwest had accepted it, then bumped it for a story by Joyce Carol Oates. The editor said if Les could reduce it from one hundred pages to six the magazine would publish it. Les refused and decided that he could not stand Joyce Carol Oates’ writing.

  He did not like Henry Miller either, did not like him personally. Once, in the Fifties, Les was in a jazz bar when Henry Miller and his wife came in. There were a couple of empty chairs at Les’ table and Miller asked if they could sit there. After the set, they talked about this and that and then about writing and Les said something witty, catching Miller by surprise. Miller turned to his wife and said, “Isn’t it amazing what you can find in some of these places?” Les never forgave him that, that arrogance that placed him at a station below Miller’s own, and he had not read any of Miller’s work since.

  He did like Dreiser’s work and he liked Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and said she had really known Paris whereas Hemingway had not, though how he could know who had known what, he did not say. He liked Jean Rhys’ writing. I had not read her and he said he would lend me a couple of her books. We agreed to meet the next Saturday and exchange manuscripts.

  We met again at the Presidio cafeteria. I handed over a manuscript copy of my novel, The Negligence of Death, and he gave me a copy of The Forty Fathom Bank and a book by Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight. He settled in to eating his papaya while I read the first paragraphs of his manuscript. I could see it was something I would want to pay attention to and I set it aside, telling Les I would read it later in my room. He had been watching me as he ate and after I said this he relaxed and said he would read my book later too, when he was alone.