"On Wings of Song" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M.)

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General Roberta Donnelly, the Republican candidate for President, was going to be giving a major speech at a Fight Against Flight Rally in Minneapolis, according to the Star-Tribune, and Daniel and Eugene decided to go and hear her and even get her autograph if they could. They’d have a real adventure for a change instead of just going off into the Muellers’ attic or the Weinreb’s basement and acting one out. In any case they were getting too old for that sort of thing. Eugene was fifteen, Daniel fourteen (though of the two he seemed the older, being so much hairier everywhere it counted).

There was no way they could let their parents know what they were planning. Setting off for Des Moines on their own would have been gently discouraged and maybe eventually allowed, but Minneapolis was as unthinkable a destination as Peking or Las Vegas. Never mind that the reason for their going there was to see General Donnelly, as true-blue and red-blooded a motive as any undergoder could have asked for. For all right-thinking Iowans the Twin Cities were Sodom and Gomorrah (On the other hand, as right-thinking Minnesotans liked to point out, what had happened there would have happened in Iowa too, if only six percent more voters had swung the other way). It was scary — but also, for that very reason, exciting — to think of going across the border, and there comes a time in your life when you have to do something that is scary in this particular way. No one else would ever need to know about it, except Jerry Larsen, who had agreed to take over both their routes for the two afternoons they meant to be gone.

Having told their parents they were going camping and skillfully avoided saying where, they rode their bikes north as far as U.S.18, where they folded them up and hid them inside a storm culvert under the road. They struck luck with their very first ride, an empty semi returning to Albert Lea. It smelled of pigshit, even up in the cab with the driver, but that simply became the special smell of their adventure. They became so friendly talking with the driver that they considered changing their plans and asking him to say that they were all together, but that seemed an unnecessary complication. When they got to the border Eugene needed only to mention his father’s name to the Customs Inspector and they were across.

The unspoken understanding was that they were on their way to see the latest double-feature at the Star-Lite Drive-In outside of Albert Lea. Flying was far from being the only forbidden fruit available in Minnesota. Pornography was also an attraction, and — in the eyes of most Iowans — a much more real one. (It was chiefly on account of its ads for border drive-ins that the Star-Tribune was banned in neighboring Farm Belt states.) Eugene and Daniel were doubtless a little young to be sneaking across the border to the Star-Lite, but no one was about to make a fuss over Roy Mueller’s son, since both Roy himself and his older son Donald were such frequent visitors at this particular check-point. Sexual precocity has always been one of the prerogatives — if not indeed a solemn duty — of the ruling class.

From Albert Lea it was eighty miles due north to Minneapolis. They went in a Greyhound bus without even bothering to try and hitch. The fields you could see from the bus window seemed no different from equivalent fields in Iowa, and even when they hit the outskirts of the city it was distressingly like the outskirts of Des Moines — patches of ramshackle slums alternating with smaller well-secured stretches of suburban affluence, with the occasional shopping mall and service station saluting them with the giant letters of their names revolving on high poles. There was possibly a little more traffic than there would have been outside Des Moines, but that may have been on account of the rally. Everywhere you went — on lawns, in store windows, stuck to the sides of buildings, — were posters announcing the rally and urging the enactment of the Twenty-Eighth Amendment. It was hard to believe, when there were obviously so many million people behind it, that the Amendment could ever be defeated, but it had been, twice.

Downtown Minneapolis was an amazement of urbanity: its colossal buildings, its sumptuous stores, its swarming streets, the sheer noise, and then, beyond these ascertainable realities, the existence, surmised but wholly probable, of fairies swooping and darting through the glass-and-stone canyons, flitting above the trafficked streets, lighting in flocks on the carved facades of monolithic banks, then spiraling larklike into the azures of mid-afternoon, like a vastation of bright invisible locusts that fed not on the leaves of trees or on the potted flowers decorating the Mall but on the thoughts, the minds, the souls of all these calm pedestrians. If indeed they did. If indeed they were there at all.

The Rally was to be at eight o’clock, which gave them another good five hours to kill. Eugene suggested that they see a movie. Daniel was amenable but he didn’t want to be the one to suggest which one, since they both knew, from the ads that had been appearing for months in the Star-Tribune, what it would have to be. They asked the way to Hennepin Avenue, along which all the moviehouses clustered, and there on the marquee of the World, spelled out in electric letters big as table lamps, was the unacknowledged golden fleece of their questing (not General Donnelly, not for a moment): the last legendary musical of the great Betti Bailey, Gold-Diggers of 1984.

The movie had a considerable effect on Daniel, then and thereafter. Even if the movie hadn’t, the World would have, being so grand and grave, a temple fit for the most solemn initiations. They found seats at the front of the theater and waited while wild sourceless music swelled about them.

This, then, was what it was all about. This, when it issued from within you, was the liberating power that all other powers feared and wished to extirpate: song. It seemed to Daniel that he could feel the music in the most secret recesses of his body, an ethereal surgeon that would rip his soul free from its crippling flesh. He wanted to surrender himself to it utterly, to become a mere magnificence of resonating air. Yet at the same time he wanted to rush back to the usher with the handsome gold braid hat and ask him what this music was called so he could buy the cassette for himself and possess it forever. How terrible that each new rapture should be a farewell! That it could only exist by being taken from him!

Then the lights dimmed, motors parted the shimmering curtains on the stage, and the movie began. The very first sight of Betti Bailey extinguished every thought of the music’s ravishments. She was the spitting image of his mother — not as she was now but as he first had seen her: the fingernails, the bra-ed-up breasts and mane of hair, the crisp ellipses drawn above the eyes, the lips that seemed to have been freshly dipped in blood. He had forgotten the impact of that meeting, the embarrassment. The horror. He wished Eugene weren’t sitting by him, seeing this.

And yet you had to admit that she — Betti Bailey — was beautiful. In even, strangest of all, an ordinary way.

In the story she was a prostitute who worked in a special brothel in St. Louis that was only for policemen. She didn’t like being a prostitute though and dreamed of being a great singer. In her dreams she was a great singer, the kind that made the whole audience in the movie theater forget it was only shadows moving on a screen and applaud her along with the audiences of the dream. But in real life, in the brothel’s big red bathtub, for instance, or the one time she went walking through the ruins of a Botanical Garden with the interesting stranger (played by Jackson Florentine), her voice was all wobbly and rasping. People who listened couldn’t help cringing, even Jackson Florentine, who (it turned out) was a sex maniac being hunted by the police. By the time you found out he was already working at the brothel, since it was one of the few places people weren’t bothered about their I.D. He did a comic tap dance in black face with a chorus line of real life black cops, which led into the big production number of the show, “March of the Businessmen.” At the end of the movie the two lovers hooked into a flight apparatus and took off from their bodies for an even bigger production number, an aerial ballet representing their flight north to the icebergs of Baffin Island. The special effects were so good you couldn’t help but believe the dancers weren’t verily fairies, especially Betti Bailey, and it certainly added to one’s sense of its gospel truth to know that shortly after making Gold-Diggers Betti Bailey had done the same thing herself — hooked in and taken off, never to return. Her body was still curled up in a foetal ball in some L.A. hospital and God only knew where the rest of her was — burning up inside the sun or whirling around the rings of Saturn, anything was possible. It did seem a pity that she had never come back just long enough to make another movie like Gold-Diggers, at the end of which the police found the bodies of the lovers hooked up into the apparatus and machine-gunned them with the most vivid and painstaking cinematic detail. There wasn’t a dry eye in the theater when the lights came on again.

Daniel wanted to stay and hear the music that was starting up again. Eugene needed to go to the toilet. They agreed to meet in the lobby when the music was over. There was still plenty of time to get to the Donnelly Rally.

Coming on top of the movie the music no longer seemed so impressive, and Daniel decided that his time in Minneapolis was too precious to bother repeating any experience, however sublime. Eugene wasn’t in the lobby, so he went downstairs to the Men’s Room. Eugene wasn’t there either, unless he were inside the one locked stall. Daniel bent down to look under the door and saw not one pair but two pairs of shoes. He was shocked silly but at the same time a little gratified, as though he’d just scored a point for having seen another major sight of the big city. In Iowa people did not do such things, or if they did and were found out, they were sent away to prison. And rightly so, Daniel thought, making a hasty exit from the Men’s Room.

He wondered whether the same thing had been going on when Eugene had been down here. And if so, what he’d thought of it. And whether he dared to ask.

The problem never arose. Daniel waited five, ten, fifteen minutes in the lobby and still no sign of Eugene. He went up to the front of the theater as the credits for Gold-Diggers came on and stood in the flickering dark scanning the faces in the audience. Eugene was not there.

He didn’t know if something awful and typically urban had happened to his friend — a mugging, a rape — or if some whim had taken him and he’d gone off on his own. To do what? In any case there seemed no point in waiting around the World, where the usher was obviously becoming impatient with him.

On the theory that whatever had happened to Eugene he’d be sure to try and meet back up with Daniel there, he started walking to Gopher Stadium on the University of Minnesota campus, where the rally was to be held. For a block before he got to the pedestrian bridge across the Mississippi there were squadrons of students and older sorts handing out leaflets to whoever would take them. Some leaflets declared that a vote for Roberta Donnelly was a vote against the forces that were destroying America and told you how to get to the Rally. Other leaflets said that people had every right to do what they wanted, even if that meant killing themselves, and still others were downright peculiar, simple headlines without text that could be interpreted as neither for nor against any issue. As, for instance: I DON’T CARE IF THE SUN DON’T SHINE. Or: GIVE US FIVE MINUTES MORE. Just by looking at their faces as you approached them you couldn’t tell which were undergoders and which weren’t. Apparently there were sweet types and sour types on both sides.

The Mississippi was everything people said, a beautiful flat vastness that seemed to have swallowed the sky, with the city even more immense on either shore. Daniel stopped in the middle of the bridge and let his collection of colored leaflets flutter down one by one through that unthinkable space that was neither height nor depth. Houseboats and shops were moored on both sides of the river, and on three or four of them were naked people, men as well as women, tanning in the sun. Daniel was stirred, and disturbed. You could never fully understand any city of such extent and such variety: you could only look at it and be amazed, and look again and be terrified.

He was terrified now. For he knew that Eugene would not be at the rally. Eugene had made his break for it. Maybe that had been his intention from their starting out or maybe it was the movie that convinced him, since the moral of it (if you could say it had one) was: Give Me Liberty — Or Else! Long ago Eugene had confided that someday he meant to leave Iowa and learn to fly. Daniel had envied him his bravado without for a moment suspecting he could be so dumb as to go and do it like this. And so treacherous! Is that what a best friend was for — to betray?

The son of a bitch!

The sneaky little shit!

And yet. And even so. Hadn’t it been and wouldn’t it always be worth it — for just this one sight of the river and the memory of that song?

The answer pretty definitely was no, but it was hard to face the fact that he’d been so thoroughly and so needlessly fucked-over. There was no point in seeing General Donnelly, even as an alibi. There was nothing to be done but scoot back to Amesville and hope. He’d have till tomorrow to come up with some halfway likely story to tell the Muellers.

When Eugene’s mother stopped by, two evenings later, Daniel’s story was plain and unhelpful. Yes, they had camped out in the State Park, and no, he couldn’t imagine where Eugene could have gone to if he hadn’t come home. Daniel had ridden back to Amesville ahead of Eugene (for no very cogent reason) and that was the last he knew about him. She didn’t ask half the questions he’d been expecting, and she never called back. Two days later it became generally known that Eugene Mueller was missing. His bicycle was discovered in the culvert, where Daniel had left it. There were two schools of thought as to what had happened: one, that he was the victim of foul play; the other, that he’d run away. Both were common enough occurrences. Everyone wanted to know Daniel’s opinion, since he was the last person to have seen him. Daniel said that he hoped that he’d run away, violence being such a horrible alternative, though he couldn’t believe Eugene would have done something so momentous without dropping a hint. In a way his speculations were entirely sincere.

No one seemed at all suspicious, except possibly Milly, who gave him odd looks now and then and wouldn’t stop pestering him with questions that became increasingly personal and hard to answer, such as where, if Eugene had run away, would he have gone to? More and more Daniel felt as though he’d murdered his friend and concealed the body. He could understand what a convenience it was for Catholics to be able to go to confession.

Despite such feelings things soon went back to normal. Jerry Larsen took over Eugene’s paper route permanently, and Daniel developed an enthusiasm for baseball that gave him an exuse for being out of the house almost as much as his father.

In July there was a tornado that demolished a trailer court a mile outside of town. That same night, when the storm was over, the county sheriff appeared at the Weinreb’s front door with a warrant for Daniel’s arrest. Milly became hysterical and tried to phone Roy Mueller, but couldn’t get past his answering device. The sheriff insisted stonily that this had nothing to do with anyone but Daniel. He was being arrested for the sale and possession of obscene and seditious materials, which was a Class D felony. For misdemeanors there was a juvenile court, but for felonies Daniel was an adult in the eyes of the law.

He was taken to the police station, fingerprinted, photographed, and put in a cell. The whole process seemed quite natural and ordinary, as if all his life he’d been heading towards this moment. It was a large moment, certainly, and rather solemn, like graduating from high school, but it didn’t come as a surprise.

Daniel was as sure as his mother that Roy Mueller was behind his being arrested, but he also knew that he’d been caught dead to rights and that there’d be no wriggling out of it. He’d done what he’d been booked for. Of course, so had about ten other people, not even counting the customers. And what about Heinie Youngermann — were all his pay-offs down the drain? How could they try Daniel and not him?

He found out a week later when the trial was held. Every time the Weinreb’s lawyer would ask Daniel, on the witness stand, where his copies of the Star-Tribune had come from, or who else had delivered them, anything that would have involved naming other names, the opposing lawyer raised an objection, which the judge, Judge Cofflin, sustained. Simple as that. The jury found him guilty as charged and he was sentenced to eight months in the State Correction Facility at Spirit Lake. He could have got as much as five years, and their lawyer advised them against entering an appeal, since it was up to the same judge whether Daniel would be let off on probation when school started in the fall. They’d have been certain to lose the appeal in any case. Iowa and the rest of the Farm Belt weren’t called police states for nothing.

Sitting in the cell day after day and night after night with no one to talk to and nothing to read, Daniel had had a thousand imaginary conversations with Roy Mueller. So that by the time, late on the night before he was to be sent off to Spirit Lake, that Roy Mueller finally did get around to seeing him, he’d been through every possible combination of anger, anguish, dread, and mutual mistrust, and the actual confrontation was a little like the trial, something he had to go through and get over with.

Mueller stayed outside the locked cell. He was a substantial-looking man with a paunch, thick muscles and a friendly manner, even when he was being mean. With his own children he liked to think of himself as a kind of Solomon, stern but munificent, but his children (Daniel knew from Eugene) all lived in terror of him, even as they acted out their roles as his spoiled darlings.

“Well, Daniel, you’ve got yourself in a fair fix, haven’t you?”

Daniel nodded.

“It’s too bad, your being sent away like this, but maybe it will do you good. Build some moral fiber. Eh?”

Their eyes met. Mueller’s were beaming with pleasure, which he passed off as benevolence.

“I thought there might be something you’d want to tell me before you go. Your mother has been on the phone with me at least once a day since you got in trouble. I thought the least I could do for the poor woman was to come and talk to you.”

Daniel said what he’d made his mind up to, that he was guilty of selling the Star-Tribune and very sorry for it.

“I’m glad to hear you’re taking your medicine in the right spirit, Daniel, but that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for us to talk about. I want to know where my son is, and you’re the one who can tell me. Right, Daniel?”

“Honestly, Mr. Mueller, I don’t know where he is. If I knew I’d tell you. Believe me.”

“No hunches or theories?”

“He might—” Daniel had to clear his throat, which was dry and sticky with fear. “He might have gone to Minneapolis.”

“Why Minneapolis?”

“We… used to read about it. When we were delivering the Star-Tribune.”

Mueller brushed aside the implications of this — that his son had shared Daniel’s so-called crime, and that he’d known about it all along — with another toothy smile and a lifting and settling of his paunch.

“And it seemed like an exciting place to go, is that it?”

“Yes. But not… I mean, we never talked about leaving Amesville permanently. We just wanted to see it.”

“Well, what did you think when you saw it. Did it live up to your expectations?”

“I didn’t say—”

But there seemed no point in sparring just for the sake of delaying the inevitable. Daniel could see it went beyond suspicions: Mueller knew.

“We did go there, Mr. Mueller, but believe me, I didn’t have any idea that Eugene didn’t mean to come back with me. We went there to see Roberta Donnelly. She was giving a speech at Gopher Stadium. After he saw her we were heading right back here. Both of us.”

“You admit going there, that’s some progress. But I didn’t need you to tell me that, Daniel. I knew the night you set off, from Lloyd Wagner, who let the two of you across the border, which is a mistake that Lloyd has had reason to regret. But that’s another story. When there was no sight of you coming back after the Star-Lite’s last show, Lloyd realized he’d made a mistake and called me. It was a simple thing, from there, to have the Albert Lea police check out the bus station and the drivers. So you see, my lad, I need a little more information than just—” He parodied Daniel, making his eyes wide with false candor, and whispering: “—Minneapolis.”

“Truly, Mr. Mueller, I’ve told you all I know. We went to a movie together and at the end of it Eugene said he had to go to the bathroom. That was the last I saw of him.”

“What movie?”

“Gold-Diggers of 1984. At the World Theater. The tickets cost four dollars.”

“He disappeared and that was it? You didn’t look for him?”

“I waited around. And then, after a while, I went to the Rally, hoping to see him there. What else could I do? Minneapolis is huge. And also…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I figured he probably meant to get away from me. So he was probably deliberately hiding from me. But what I couldn’t understand then, and I still can’t, is why, if he knew he wasn’t coming back, why he had to involve me in it. I mean, I’m his best friend.”

“It’s not very logical, is it?”

“It’s not. So my theory — and I’ve had a lot of time to think about this — my theory is that the idea came to him while he was there, probably right during the movie. It was a movie that could have done that.”

“There’s only one thing wrong with your theory, Daniel.”

“Mr. Mueller, I’m telling you everything I know. Everything.”

“There’s one good reason why I don’t believe you.”

Daniel looked down at the toes of his shoes. None of his imaginary conversations with Mr. Mueller had gone as badly as this. He made his confession but it had done him no good. He’d run out of possible things to say.

“Don’t you want to know what that reason is?”

“What?”

“Because my son had the foresight to steal eight hundred and forty-five dollars from my desk before he went away. That doesn’t sound like a spur-of-the-moment decision, does it?”

“No.” Daniel shook his head vigorously. “Eugene wouldn’t do that. He just wouldn’t.”

“Well, he did. The money’s gone, and I scarcely think it was a coincidence that Eugene should decide to run away at the exact same time.”

Daniel couldn’t think what he thought. His expression of disbelief had been no more than the last remnant of his loyalty. Friends don’t involve their friends in crimes. Except, apparently, they do.

“Do you have any other suggestions, Daniel, as to where I can tell the police to look for my son?”

“No, Mr. Mueller. Honestly.”

“If any idea should come to you, you have only to ask to talk to Warden Shiel at Spirit Lake. Of course, you understand that if you are able to help us find Eugene you’ll be doing yourself a considerable favor when it comes time to discuss your parole. Judge Cofflin knows about this situation, and it was only at my repeated insistence that you weren’t indicted for first degree robbery as well.”

“Mr. Mueller, believe me, if I knew anything else at all, I’d tell you.”

Mueller looked at him with a look of leisurely, contented malice and turned to leave.

“Really!” Daniel insisted.

Mueller turned back to look at him a last time. From the way he stood there, smiling, Daniel knew that he believed him — but that he didn’t care. He’d got what he was after, a new victim, an adopted son.