God of Speed Read online

  Yes, yes, I laughed. I’ve packed your scarf.

  And I want you to contact me … any which way. Telephone from Timbuktu. Cablegram from Cairo.

  I’ll find a way, I said.

  And do come back in one piece. Because I don’t want to be picking up the pieces.

  What it meant to be a couple: it was like being breathed upon. It meant that later in the day, among the thousands of well-wishers seeing me off from Floyd Bennett Field, it was Kate, at home in Connecticut by then, who was more present to me than anyone else. It meant that she was with me as I flew, because I knew that all was right with us, and that I would be flying in a vast circle just to see her again.

  I stood proudly by my plane, the so eloquently named New York World’s Fair, 1939. The press asked me many questions. It is nonsense, the idea of “news”, Jack. But oh, to be a hero.

  VERY MANAGEABLE CONTROLS

  I KNOW I am awake because my head is nodding rhythmically; I am agreeing with all the wondrous notions that have ever been put to me or are slowly dawning on me or will one day arrive. Another way of putting this is that here I am, merrily merrily merrily merrily, in the heartfelt embrace of inert splendor.

  It is so very good to breathe. Unhindered by the obstacles. A Mormon brings a glass of water and holds it to my lips. I take the glass and drink, a great gulp. Then a second. I place the glass on the bedside table while he packs away the medicine tin. The red cross will now disappear from view for a while.

  I sit up for some time in the half-dark, in the silence, listening to the universe vibrate. I hope I can find it within me to tell Jack everything that happened.

  It certainly may be possible. And tomorrow we will fly.

  But I shouldn’t be getting ahead of myself. It’s Saturday night, not Sunday morning. A long while yet before I’m sitting in the cockpit. I need to come back to where I am, so as not to get too excited or confused.

  To where this single bedside lamp illuminates the entire room. Heavy drapes, taped tight over the windows, block out all possibility of exterior light entering. But even in the gloom I can see just what a stylish suite it is. Abundance of space. An antique desk, unused on the far side of the room. Framed prints of fox-hunting scenes on the walls. I think it is foxes, it is hard to make out from here. On the far side of this bed, along the wall, a bank of file boxes, ten wide and five high, neatly stacked and labeled by date: my memos, which come with me wherever I go. Perhaps I will show Jack my memos. Some, at any rate. Wouldn’t want to drown the man. Enough so that he gets an idea of just how much I have to deal with.

  I’m trying my best to imagine how a newcomer might see me. I am naked as always, propped up on pillows, beneath a single white sheet. No doubt my eyes are sunk deep in the shadow cast by the lamp, but that is just the way lamps are. Perhaps, yes, my body is like a gnarled twig on this grand expanse of bed, the sheet barely altering in its undulations as it flows across my unassuming thighs, my bare muscle-less arms covered with scarring, the scars following the blue translucent veins beneath this lamp-white skin. Perhaps. But it is all irrelevant.

  I know I’ve lost some weight in fifteen years. I know I’m a little unkempt. Really nothing that a haircut and a touch of sunlight wouldn’t fix. Well, I’m getting there! I will have to explain to Jack that the medicine situation is not half as bad as it looks to one inexperienced in the ways of syringes. I’m not going to hide it from him, of course, or send him out from the room each time. He’s a decorated war hero, for God’s sake, and he didn’t get those medals for being squeamish.

  No, all that will look after itself. I must simply begin to remember the things I have to talk about. Beyond that I have no cause for anxiety. Let me see. I will have to thank him for helping get my pilot’s license renewal rushed through from the States. There’s something nice and practical: a little thankyou.

  I will have to get it all in sequence, everything I’m going to tell him. I’m searching for a starting point but my mind keeps jumping forward; I can’t stop thinking about tomorrow. The Hawker Siddeley is an elegant plane with very manageable controls. Nothing too much for an old man, I said, earlier. (Jack put himself in this category, too!)

  But that was earlier. Where was I just now?

  I was thinking about Katie, her elegant shoulders, her grand green eyes, about the morning of my departure from Floyd Bennett Field, and the lost, lamented luxury of waking in the arms of a lover. But I have the feeling that would be skipping forward somewhat, and no way at all to give Jack the picture. I need to go back, while I’m lying here smoothly, while the obstacles are not in a hindering mood, I need to go back to the beginning.

  The maid is in the kitchen, where the oat-and-molasses cookies bake. I’m way out the back, over the hedge, among the butterflies.

  It is summer in Texas. I am everything there is.

  In the soft soil of the morning glory patch I am lying with my tin toys mottled by the sun and the swaying of the leaves. I am outside myself with happiness. I’m drifting in the shadows of my glade, beyond my locked-awayness here I can see how the sun exposes everything; fifteen feet away I can see the butterflies hovering over the dandelions. Not anybody in the world knows I am here. Further away there’s the house, then there’s Houston, then the whole of Texas, then other parts of the world. I’ve seen them in my atlas.

  Mother said Father would be home soon. But Father loved to be away, all those years of building the business. (What Mother loved was to sniff his collars for distant traces of perfume. She could smell a perfume molecule at a hundred yards.) I, too, longed to be away, though mostly I had to fight to be alone, even out the back among the butterflies.

  Because eventually dusk would come. And with it the bath-time rituals, the pleasure peppered with anxiety, the rough shock of the towel-drying, the running of her fingers through my hair. And every night, for as long as I can remember, the inspecting of the testicles. I would stand, dry now, still pink and warm from the bath. She would bend down, lean in close, and take each testicle gently, one at a time, in her delicate fingers, looking for telltale lumps. She would take her time, her head tilted, like a doctor with a stethoscope, and very gently, almost imperceptibly, prod and massage those tiny globes. Then she would pat me down with talc and help me into my pajamas.

  Oh, how diligent she was. She viewed my stool before I flushed. Or no, perhaps I won’t tell Jack that part. We’ll see what happens. Perhaps I will.

  Also, sometimes it is very pleasant to mix up two hundred milligrams of Valium and Librium in a single shot. Then you blend softness with stamina, and distance is immense, and it is easier to think comfortably.

  Father says, Sonny, what are you reading there?

  I’m looking, Papa, I say. I’m looking at the world.

  Where was I, Jack? This was last week, I mean the week before the butterflies. In the parlor with the atlas, such blueprints of promise, and every page a world.

  AIRPLANES IN HEAVEN

  THEN EVERYTHING STARTED to fly. I have been trying to catch my breath ever since. I have attempted to remain steadfast, for the most part, in the face of both glory and catastrophe.

  My first accident was with Dudley when our billy-cart flipped down the steep drive at the end of the street. I had imagined, sitting on that wooden tray, holding tight to the leather reins while Dudley held tight around my waist, only rapid acceleration and the possibility of rising up on two wheels as we turned hard onto the road, hollering with joy. I had imagined that the propulsion afforded by the steepness of the driveway might last us several streets. (I was only seven years old.) I had not imagined the terror of our ignominious end, of our becoming unintentionally airborne as our bodies continued blithely on their way when the billy-cart overturned. I ran home crying to Mother, in need of her comfort and at the same time terrified of trouble.

  I don’t know if speed was the desire for danger or if already I simply needed to slip from my mother’s embrace; what’s clear is that she liked the air very
still and the curtains drawn, while I liked the wind in my hair and no curtains at all. Sixty years later, of course, I worry that I’ve become my mother, on that score at least. Except that I’d have no interest in picking the gravel from a small boy’s bloodied knees, God bless her anxious heart.

  At twelve I invented a motorized bicycle by welding to the frame a two-cylinder Triton motor, connecting the drive shaft to the chain and removing the pedals. They put my photo in the Houston paper. See, I had broken the bonds of childhood already. Danger or no, what I wanted was speed. When the tiny Triton built up revs, I flew. At times I was so excited it was an effort to remember to breathe. On Yoakum Boulevard the whole bike shuddered the faster I took it and my wrist muscles quivered as I wrestled the handlebars, and suddenly I gasped and heaved for air. The idea of a boundary should in no small way have been comforting but it was always seamlessness that interested me. I could hallucinate myself into wind.

  It all made it hard to relate to the other children. There was so little one had in common. But Dudley was my friend at least, and I thought he would be forever.

  At Camp Teedyuskung, by the fire. Away from Mother, the world was in fact not as menacing as one had been led to believe. The Pocono Mountains all around you, a glorious dark presence. You burst with such love for Dudley … how the hell to express it? There is so much fear that goes unnamed. When the night owl hoots and the embers crackle and the songs die down, there is a sleep down deep beneath the blood. You wake up smiling so broadly from that kind! You know you’ll never get to where you’ve just been, except in such exhausted sleep again, and none of it matters, no knowledge, no body, not the passage of life itself, since the fact alone of it has been so exquisite.

  Do you think there’ll be airplanes in heaven, Jack? Should I ask him a question like that?

  These days I drift more and more, even hours after an injection. I wonder, in fact, could I give it up? It would surprise them all. On the other hand, I could inject an Empirin and think about it for a while. Since every act is merely a rearrangement of all the other acts that have gone before and will come after, then whether I continue or give up would amount, in effect, to the same event. And also, I’m an old man now. My vertebrae are fused. There’s not a great deal left, of bravery. Because we were brave boys, back then. We were Teedyuskung Braves. Oh for that war whoop now, the tremulous terror of fleeing, the hysteria of games, the softness of Pennsylvania in summer, where the swallows reeled with pleasure.

  At Dan Beard’s Outdoor School at Camp Teedyuskung I swam one summer’s day in a creek whose water was at first so cold my balls ached and my scrotum was tight with contracted pores. We swung out from a rope hanging from a tree branch and dropped like pencils into the murky brown. Later this would be called a Tarzan rope because the century—and I helped create it—would open itself to cinema like a woman on her wedding night. But in 1917 we called it a tree swing. Dudley lay on a boulder, soaking up its radiant heat. I floated in the shallow water in a shaft of sunlight, sifting my fingers through the mud by the shore. The reeds seemed far away. The current bent the stalks. Low to the water, a dragonfly plotted out the odd angularities of its course like a draftsman charting constellations. The dark water was a bowl of night. A horsefly bit me on the shoulder; I wrote proudly of the welt to Mother.

  Who one week later yanked me from the camp. I was devastated. There was only one week to go before I received my Buckskin Man badge. I could pitch a tent. I had mastered the canoe. I knew all the knots. I could start a fire without matches. I had cooked my own bacon and flapjacks.

  For five weeks at Camp Teedyuskung I had become friendly with the world and all its forces, and now Mother came to take it all away. It wasn’t because of the welt after all; she’d heard of the polio sweeping across the land. I cried and cried in the back seat of the car. The windows were so high and far away. Misery in the leather. You’ll see Dudley soon enough back home, she cooed, missing the point entirely.

  You don’t understand. Mother, you don’t understand. He will be a Buckskin Man and I’ll still be a Boy. He will have the badge and I will not.

  I had something. I had something going. It was mine. We called it Scoutcraft. I knew the names of all the birds.

  I KNEW THE NAMES OF

  ALL THE BIRDS

  I KNEW SO many things, Jack. And for so long. And now? I can barely keep it all straight. Which thing came first? Since there’s no first on a circle. Only the ecstasy, before it all starts to go too fast. Scoutcraft? Carole Lombard knew how to build a mean fire. She arrived one summer afternoon in 1940, disguised, riding a motorcycle, and took me away. Twelve years earlier we’d had a brief affair after she had auditioned for Hell’s Angels. I was not one for revisiting situations, but Carole made everything easy, and I never felt she wanted anything in return. She yelled up at me from the street; preoccupied with a script, I was taken by surprise. I looked out the window. A red scarf bunched around her neck and chin, its tails flung behind her. Her hair trailed out from the sides of an open helmet. I could barely recognize her behind the aviator’s goggles she wore—goggles which, in fact, I had given her—but I had no trouble recognizing her husky strong voice.

  Howard! Howard!

  I walked out to the porch.

  Come for a ride!

  I did not feel comfortable entrusting myself to a woman, but she handled the machine (an Indian) superbly. I leaned into the corners and held her around the waist, though I can’t say I could feel the contours of her belly beneath the bulk of her leather jacket.

  The glorious mess that she called her bedroom was huge, and hung with silks. The bed itself seemed enormous, too; colored draperies of gauze and chiffon were nailed to the beams on the ceiling and I felt I had entered a harem girl’s retreat. She flung her clothes off. The goggles left pressure lines in a wide horizontal eight around her eyes, the sign of infinity. I had only taken my shoes off. I was always embarrassed by my body—the damned length of the thing, its obstinate elongatedness—and never entirely comfortable with being naked in daylight, diaphanous hangings or a long, handsome cock notwithstanding. She climbed onto the bed beside me and dragged off my trousers. She took me in her mouth. I swept her hair aside and watched. She looked like a raccoon, with her white eye patches. The absurdity of Carole Lombard carrying on her face the mathematical symbol for infinity, of its moving backwards and forwards in a narrow field of depth in front of my pelvis as she bobbed on my prick, in-out, in-out, was made all the more poignant in that moment of understanding that Carole was no more infinite than any of us.

  Symbols notwithstanding.

  Afterwards I dozed or caught my breath and she left the room for a short while. Soon she came back, leaned in across the bed, took my hand and said, Come. She dragged me across the cool stone floors and out across the back patio. She lived in a hacienda with a deep high-walled backyard that afforded complete privacy. The disheveled verdure and spillage of jasmine and vines down the side walls suggested that one might be in a decaying Bolivian estate seventy years earlier. In the center of the yard stood a bathtub, claw-footed and apparently unconnected to any plumbing. Beneath it was a small fire. By now it was dusk and a pink sky streaked with blue-tinged clouds curved above us, emptying its celestial beneficence over all of Hollywood. The fire was neat and well constructed and reminded me of those I had been taught to build at Camp Teedyuskung.

  Naked, her breasts jangling slightly, Carole dragged a garden hose over to the bathtub and started topping it up. I leaned smiling against a pillar. Venus with hose.

  You hold this, she motioned. I’ll do the fire.

  The water gurgled into the tub. Carole moved onto the patio and leaned down to a soda crate full of kindling twigs. All my attention focused on the curve of her buttocks and the way the dark swathe of her sex was like an irresistible shadow—one was powerless but to be drawn to it, to fall toward it like a parachutist, like a magnetized ion—where the lines at the center of the W met. When she stood up I imag
ined slipping my hand between her legs, at that point of join, and my fingers into that dark hot wet web of space.

  She walked back to me now with her small bundle nestled in her arms. Twigs made tiny dimples on her breasts. She crouched down and tended to the fire. She looked up and flicked my testicles, gently, languidly, as if to test their specific gravity.

  You look nice from down here.

  I flinched and involuntarily covered myself with my hands.

  Get in, she said.

  We lowered ourselves into the water.

  It’s a little cold, I said.

  The fire will warm it, she said. It’ll only get better.

  Indeed I could feel the warmth radiating through the enamel floor of the tub and into my buttocks. We sank into that water and looked at each other. She smiled and blew a spluttering of bubbles, like the wake from a propeller. My nose and ears rested just above the water line. Far below me, like the distant pops of redwoods exploding in a forest fire, twigs crackled as they burned.

  Carole Lombard’s backyard was the cornucopia and Lombard naked in it the very Flesh of the Fruit. There is a certain time of year when the jacaranda blooms. Then when dusk descends and colors are leached from the atmosphere, the final color that remains in any given backyard is that astonishing mauve, the jacaranda’s resistance to annihilation. But in the bathtub that dusk, it was the blue of Carole Lombard’s eyes that held fast against the coming of the night.

  In the end her features fuzzed; her eyes were a darker darkness than her face. But until our backsides got too hot it was a lush long time of drifting.

  STATISTICS ARE VERY HELPFUL

  OUT IN THE workshop that Father had had built for me, I put together my own wireless, a Zeigler crystal set. I was a member of the Radio Relay League, and I communicated with the other operators around the world. Jack, I spent happy years out there as an eleven-, twelve-and thirteen-year-old; the whole of Houston, surrounding me, was sweet; the very air was sweet. You organize everything inside your head, you track it and chart it. Statistics are very helpful. Tables and graphs make a lot of sense. You begin to see patterns emerging.